Category Archives: Three-Axes Model

Three Axes as Tribal Rallying Flags

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Scott Alexander has an essay post on tribalism. Read the whole thing. An excerpt:

in order to talk about tribes coherently, we need to talk about rallying flags. And that involves admitting that a lot of rallying flags are based on ideologies (which are sometimes wrong), holy books (which are always wrong), nationality (which we can’t define), race (which is racist), and works of art (which some people inconveniently want to enjoy just as normal art without any connotations).

What I call three axes are three rallying flags. Progressives rally around oppressor-oppressed, conservatives rally around civilization-barbarism, and libertarians rally around freedom-coercion. It is important to recognize that the actual belief systems are much more complex than that.

Three Axes to Explain Terrorism

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The front page of today’s WaPo has me thinking about this.

First, there is the story of the massacre of Christians on Easter in Pakistan.Along the libertarian freedom-vs.-coercion axis, the preferred explanation is blowback. That is intervention by western governments in foreign countries produces terrorism. However, it is difficult to see how this story applies here.

Next, there is a story of how terrorists met in prison in Belgium. You can see that the reporter has an urge to tell an oppressor-vs.-oppressed story of how prisoners from the oppressed class of Muslims turned into terrorists. But if you read all the way through, you see that the attempt does not really work. Still, seeing the headline, many progressives will jump to the conclusion that better treatment of prisoners is the solution to terrorism.

For me, the best explanation of terrorism lies along the conservative civilization-vs-barbarism axis. And I think that President Obama’s steadfast refusal to see Islamic terrorism along those lines is something that many Americans find frustrating and demoralizing.

Three Axes Explains Soda Taxes

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Catherine Rampell writes,

Why not just target the output, rather than some random subset of inputs? We could tax obesity if we wanted to. Or if we want to seem less punitive, we could award tax credits to obese people who lose weight. A tax directly pegged to reduced obesity would certainly be a much more efficient way to achieve the stated policy goal of reducing obesity.

Because taxing obesity would be “blaming the victim” from a progressive perspective. Taxing soda fits the narrative in which the obese are oppressed and soda manufacturers are the oppressors. Never mind about efficiency, tax incidence, and other economic concepts. A soda tax advances the oppressor-oppressed narrative, and therein lies its appeal.

My Political Fortune Cookie

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I got it from taking this quiz, which said that the conservative thinker who most fits my views is Russell Kirk.

You are a traditionalist conservative. You emphasize tradition, order, the moral imagination, and the “permanent things.” Although you are alert to the threat of big government, you are also critical of atomistic individualism, as you emphasize man’s spiritual and social nature. As such, you are skeptical of finding much common ground with libertarians.

I prefer to frame things in terms of my three-axes model. I am certainly not a progressive, because I cannot think of a single issue that I view through the lens of the oppressor-oppressed axis. To the extent that I come out libertarian on issues, it is not so much because I frame them in terms of the freedom-coercion axis. More often, it is because I believe that people over-estimate the effectiveness of the political process and under-estimate the effectiveness of the market process.

I admit to thinking often these days in terms of the civilization vs. barbarism axis. I am old enough to be entitled to that as a natural inclination. But how can one not? Are Islamic radicals not barbaric? Does this year’s Presidential election give one confidence that our civilized values are securely in place? Are our college campuses reinforcing our civilized values? Do we believe that if there is a radical direction taken in American politics, that we will be happy with how that turns out?

Guess the Axis

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David French writes,

I grew up in Kentucky, live in a rural county in Tennessee, and have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand. Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim.

Call it the civilization-vs.-barbarism hypothesis to explain the increase in labor immobility. Pointer from Mark Thoma, who I am sure looks at this from the standpoint of a different axis.

French is commenting on a piece by Kevin Williamson. More coverage here.

“It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces,” the NR roving correspondent writes. “[N]obody did this to them. They failed themselves.”

Also from the Monkey Cage Blog

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Lilliana Mason writes,

Partisan identities have become increasingly aligned with religious and racial identities. Republicans tend toward Christian and white identities, and Democrats tend toward non-religious and non-white identities. With these highly aligned identities, people tend to be more sensitive to threats from outsiders, reacting with higher levels of anger than those with cross-cutting identities.

Read the whole post. I wanted to excerpt all of it. My one quibble is that I wish that she had not only used Trump supporters as examples of what she is talking about. I think she is saying that people on the left also react angrily to the identity threats posed by those with differing political beliefs and cultural traits, but my guess is that many of the readers of the post will miss that.

I have been interested in the issue of tribalism in politics for quite some time. See, of course, The Three Languages of Politics.

A Very Sobering Sentence

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from Jonathan Haidt.

in the academy now, if truth conflicts with social justice, truth gets thrown under the bus.

Earlier in the interview, he says,

For many years now, there have been six sacred groups. You know, the big three are African-Americans, women and LGBT. That’s where most of the action is. Then there are three other groups…Latinos, Native Americans, and people with disabilities. So those are the six that have been there for a while. But now we have a seventh–Muslims. Something like 70 or 75 percent of America is now in a protected group. This is a disaster for social science because social science is really hard to begin with. And now you have to try to explain social problems without saying anything that casts any blame on any member of a protected group. And not just moral blame, but causal blame. None of these groups can have done anything that led to their victimization or marginalization.

Read the whole thing.

One Language of Politics?

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A piece in the UK Spectator says,

A senior editor of Nature, one of the leading academic journals, refused to consider it for review because she regards scientific research into the personalities of the long-term unemployed as ‘unethical’, and a sociology professor whom the publishers had asked to peer-review the book refused to do so on the grounds that any book linking benefit dependency to personality must be nonsense because personality is a ‘capitalist construct’.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. The controversial book argues that welfare claimants have personalities that make them difficult to employ. It’s fine if you prefer the oppressor-oppressed narrative to the civilization-barbarism narrative. But instead of shutting the other side down, you should be standing up for their rights to make their case.

What Books to Read?

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Diane Coyle asks,

What ten books would you absolutely want a young person to read – whatever their subject – to be well-rounded? The idea is a kind of summer reading list for someone about to go to university – what kind of broad mental hinterland should they have before arriving to start a social science degree?

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Of the ten she lists, I have read Hume, Kahneman, Camus, and Jacobs. I have strong impressions (possibly too shallow) of what is in Darwin, de Beauvoir, and Scott. I have no strong impression of the other three.

a. I have compiled these sorts of lists before. I think that perhaps more important than which books you put on the list is your thought process in assembling them.

b. There is nothing magic about the number 10.

c. Some of the books that would be in my list have yet to be written.

My first category might be called war and society.

1. Violence and Social Orders, by North, Weingast and Wallis. A very powerful political economy framework that I think works.

2. The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam, about the Vietnam War. It is an epic tale of government failure.

3. Alone, William Manchester’s second volume of his biography of Winston Churchill. If Vietnam was the costliest intervention mistake made by a western democracy in the 20th century, then the failure to heed Churchill’s warnings about Adolf Hitler was the costliest non-intervention mistake.

My second category might be called late 20th-century perspectives on 21st century technology and society.

4. The Diamond Age, a work of science fiction by Neal Stephenson, is longer and more confusing than I would like, but it offers a vision of the impact of technology on society that raises many of the important issues, particularly the class divergences that people are talking about today.

5. The Transparent Society, by David Brin. That also was a very farsighted book, about the issues of privacy and security that are being much discussed today. See my review.

6. The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil. He later updated and expanded his thinking in The Singularity is Near, but I think that the older version may be more interesting, because of the long list of predictions made in 1999 for 2009 and 2019 that we can now evaluate.

My third category might be called fictional insights into human nature and power over others.

7. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey. Don’t bother with the movie, even though it was voted Best Picture. For me, the book offers insights into the dynamics among people who feel entitled to power and people who are nervous about freedom.

8. Animal Farm, by George Orwell. Another book on the determination to exercise power.

9. Lord of the Flies, by William Fielding Golding. I see it as a story of reversion to barbarism.

I do not know how to categorize my next pick.

10. The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker. The book gives you a lot of modern European philosophy and a lot of evolutionary psychology.

My next category might be “dueling asymmetric insights.”

11. Moral Politics, by George Lakoff. Lakoff, a progressive, offers an interesting theory of the appeal of conservatism. Recommended for conservatives so that you can understand how progressives think of you.

12. The Vision of the Anointed, by Thomas Sowell. Sowell, a conservative, offers an interesting theory of the appeal of progressivism. Recommended for progressives so that you can understand how conservatives think of you.

Finally, I have my category of works yet to be written.

13. Readings on The Industrial Revolution. This would include timelines for growth rates, innovations, and trading patterns. It would include excerpts from various theories (Clark, North, McCloskey, etc.) of why the Industrial Revolution emerged at the time and place that it did.

14. Readings on the Great Depression. This would include a chronology of events, and it would include excerpts from various theories of why it started and why it persisted. It would include analyses of the political legacy of the Great Depression

15. A project that I am currently toying with (probability of attempting of about .2), on the challenge of trying to extricate yourself from political tribalism. A bit of Robin Hanson, a bit of the three-axes model, a bit of Martin Gurri. Possibly embedded in a work of fiction.

Steven Pinker on Utopian Ideologies

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Quoted at Fee.org

There are ideologies, such as those of militant religions, nationalism, Nazism, and Communism, that justify vast outlays of violence by a Utopian cost-benefit analysis: If your belief system holds out the hope of a world that will be infinitely good forever, how much violence are you entitled to perpetrate in pursuit of this infinitely perfect world?

…Moreover, imagine that there are people who hear about your scheme for a perfect world and just don’t get with the program. They might oppose you in bringing heaven to Earth. How evil are they? They’re the only thing standing in the way of an infinitely good world. Well, you do the math.

I think that it is the conservatives who are most willing to see extreme, utopian ideology as a threat can only be stopped by government leadership. Conservatives emphasize the barbarism in human nature and the need for institutions to protect civilization. Progressives are less worried about utopian ideology, because they tend to see humans as inherently good but held back by oppression. Libertarians see human nature as flawed, but they are reluctant to endorse strong government for protection. Instead, they believe that coercion in any form, including government, is more of a problem than a solution.

In fact, some conservatives fear that libertarianism is itself a utopian ideology. Remember Whitaker Chambers thinking that Ayn Rand’s subliminal message was “To a gas chamber–go!”