Category Archives: Three-Axes Model

Yuval Levin on the Roots of Conservatism

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He writes,

Conservatives tend to see the human person as an incorrigible mass of contradictions: a fallen and imperfect being created in a divine image, a creature possessed of fundamental dignity and inalienable rights but prone to excess and to sin and ever in need of self-restraint and moral formation. This elevated yet gloomy conception of man, deeply informed by the peculiar, paradoxical wisdom of the West’s great religions, sets conservatives apart from libertarians and progressives alike, and sits at the core of most conservative thinking about society and politics.

Don’t worry, he does get to civilization vs. barbarism.

A failure to initiate the next generation of children into the ways of civilization would not only delay or derail innovation but also put into question the very continuity of that civilization. This is why conservatives rarely imagine that our society is on the verge of utopia and frequently (perhaps too frequently) imagine it is on the verge of a breakdown. And it is a crucial reason why conservatives care so deeply about culture.

Another excerpt:

An enormous portion of the conservative worldview becomes clearer when we see the importance this view places on cultural continuity as a function of generational transmission—on the inescapable responsibilities human procreation imposes on each generation. An enormous portion of the progressive worldview becomes clearer when we see the degree to which it is shaped by a desire to be liberated from these obligations—and from the implications of the basic facts and character of human procreation. Many of what we loosely call the “social issues” in our politics involve debates about whether such a liberation is possible or desirable—whether the word choice can be poured like an acid over traditional social arrangements, burning all links of obligation and duty and making responsibility merely optional.

And another:

Conservatives tend not to share in the progressive confidence in technical expertise, doubting that any group of experts could ever have enough knowledge to pull off the feats of management and administration that the Left expects government to achieve.

I have not yet excerpted the parts of the essay that I like the best.

Several of the comments on the essay, many of them critical, are also worth reading. I think that these criticisms reflect the way that many on the right feel that they were “burned” by George W. Bush, who as a candidate appeared to embody many of the intentions of what Levin calls reform conservatism.

1. On domestic policy, what the Bush Administration considered to be tactical concessions turned out to be strategic defeats. No Child Left Behind is a poster child for that. This leads to a question of whether reform conservatism is feasible in practice, or whether it is doomed to founder on progressivism’s “home field advantage” in Washington.

2. Although as a candidate Mr. Bush scorned nation-building, he and other conservatives undertook a costly nation-building exercise in Iraq. Many people do not trust reform conservatives to exercise sound judgment and humility in dealing with barbarism beyond our shores.

I think that if reform conservatives want to overcome the skepticism of others on the Right, they will have to acknowledge this baggage and address these two concerns.

Conservatarian Dilemmas 3: Israel

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This is my third and final post prompted by the dialogue between Nick Gillespie and Charles C.W. Cooke. The issue is foreign policy, and although they did not discuss Israel, I think that it is about that country that conservatives and libertarians get most confrontational–and uncharitable–with one another.

Conservatives want a strong national defense, and some libertarians (seemingly including Gillespie) are ok with that. However, conservatives often want to intervene in this barbarous world, and libertarians are against intervention.

One libertarian argument against interventionism is that the U.S. government that is our agent to perform such intervention is the same flawed, bumbling entity whose intervention in domestic affairs we fear. Cooke concedes that point. However, he does not regard it as a decisive argument against any and all intervention.

There are more than a few libertarians whose vehemence against Israel makes it difficult for me to picture them joining a conservatarian coalition. The most charitable interpretation that I can come up with for the libertarian antipathy toward Israel is the following:

American libertarians are anti-interventionist. Israel is a country that wants America to intervene in ways to protect its interests. America has sometimes (often?) done so. Without Israel there would be less American intervention, and because of that Israel deserves to be singled out for opprobrium.

The conservative view might be the following:

Israel’s and America’s interests generally align. Along the civilization vs. barbarism axis, Israel is far more civilized than its enemies. American intervention is constructive and appropriate.

Some libertarians and progressives blame Israel for the costly, counter-productive attempt to force democracy on Iraq. I think it is unfair to hold Israel responsible. While some Israelis, notably Natan Sharansky, indeed were keen on spreading democracy, his views were much more popular in the U.S. than in Israel. Faith in democracy as a solution to the problems in the Middle East is as American as apple pie. If anything, President Obama took that faith even farther than President Bush.

My own feelings about Israel are similar to those expressed by George Gilder in The Israel Test, which I wrote about a couple years ago. Gilder sees hostility to Israel as reflecting a dislike for dynamism and entrepreneurial success. Progressives can seem nostalgic for the socialist poverty that Israelis shared before the liberalizations that took place over the past 30 years or so.

For some American Christian conservatives, support for Israel has a religious basis that is off-putting to more secular people (and to many Jews). Otherwise, I think that American support for Israel among conservatives is based more on Israel’s circumstances than on its diplomacy or lobbying. If there were as many medieval fanatics surrounding Singapore or Switzerland, my guess is that the conservatives who see America as the Indispensable Nation would want us to be heavily involved in those areas as well.

Another possible argument for leaning against Israel is that one should do so in order to counter Jewish political pressure. However, my sense is that most Jews feel a stronger affinity to the cause of progressivism than to Israel’s government, particularly with a conservative at its head.

Yes, there are American Jews who advocate for the U.S. to pursue hawkish policies in the Middle East, but they are far outnumbered by other American Jews who loathe the hawks. My guess is that if Binyamin Netanyahu wanted to get into a popularity contest in America with Barack Obama, he would do better if American Jews were excluded from taking part in the poll.

Finally, I have to say that I have concluded that this is a topic on which people have a hard time disagreeing with one another charitably. If you (or I) want to voice an opinion on Israel in order to vent, then fine. But you (or I) should not expect that someone’s mind is going to change as a result. Instead, expect an uncharitable response.

While I expressed some of my views on Israel, they are beside the main point, and feel free to ignore them. The main point in this post is simply the observation that Israel profoundly divides conservatives from a significant group of libertarians. If you disagree with that, or you think that the divide is caused by something I have not mentioned, then by all means weigh in.

Conservatarian Dilemmas 2: Social Issues

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This is the second of three posts inspired in part by the dialogue between Nick Gillespie and Charles C.W. Cooke. The social issues that I have in mind are drugs, abortion, and gay marriage. Some thoughts.

From the civilization-barbarism perspective, one may oppose legalizing marijuana, abortion, and gay marriage to the extent that one believes that civilization depends on, or at least is enhanced by, restrictions against these. However, that is not Cooke’s conservatarian position. He instead favors allowing different communities to adopt different policies. My thoughts:

1. From the freedom-coercion perspective, I see Cooke as trying to argue for a (local) “freedom to coerce.” As a general rule, this is problematic. In fact, the controversy over Indiana’s religious freedom law (or “religious freedom” law, to those who oppose it) may be an illustration of the difficulties with this approach.

During the battle over civil rights, Barry Goldwater applied federalism to argue for states’ rights to impose Jim Crow laws. Milton Friedman argued that businesses should be allowed to engage in discrimination. Today, most Americans believe that Federal coercion to prevent racial discrimination is a good thing, and Cooke supports this consensus.

2. Some conservatives try to appeal to libertarians by arguing that progressive social policies are coercive. For example, a businessman who opposes abortion can be forced to pay for health insurance that in turn pays for abortions of employees. The libertarian counter is that the wrong involved here is not that the businessman is forced to pay for abortions but that he is forced to pay for health insurance.

3. Another conservative line is that without traditional family values, people will become degenerate and thus dependent on the government, leading to bigger government. Call this the David Brooks argument. My own view, as readers of this blog (particularly the posts under the category “Four forces watch”) know, is that bifurcated family patterns are unlikely to be altered by government action.

4. The elephant in the room here is religion and voters who are motivated by it. Just the other day, I saw a full-page ad in the Washington Post using biblical imagery to argue against legalization of gay marriage. There is a long tradition of conservative politicians (and, for that matter, progressive politicians) who are not themselves committed to religious beliefs wanting to appeal to voters who are.

5. Should a baker who is opposed to gay marriage have the right to refuse to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple? I think that the most appropriate libertarian answer is to say that the baker should have such a right. But it seems to me that if you open the door to a right to discriminate, then racists can use that door. On the other hand, if you say that government should be able to force a baker to do business with an unwanted customer, does that mean that government also should be able to force a customer to do business with an unwanted baker?

My preferred society would be one in which (a) there is sufficient market competition so that if you are discriminated against by x you can easily obtain what you want somewhere else. The government has to get involved only if discrimination is pervasive; and (b) religious values are enforced within religious organizations only. If you violate the beliefs of your religion, you can be excommunicated by that religion, but otherwise you should not suffer.

I do not think that this solves the conservatarian dilemma on social issues, but it’s my best shot.

Conservatarian Dilemmas 1: Immigration

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This is the first of a series of three posts, inspired by several things, but primarily by a dialogue between Nick Gillespie and Charles C.W. Cooke. I will be referring to the three-axis model, as described in my e-book The Three Languages of Politics.

The libertarian argument against immigration restrictions is that they restrict personal choice in a very fundamental way. Along the freedom-vs-coercion axis, immigration restrictions are prima facie coercive.

The conservative counter is that immigrants bring a culture of dependency and support for populist demagogues. Thus, unrestricted immigration, or even loose immigration, will end up undermining America’s commitment to liberty.

One libertarian rejoinder is to argue that, empirically, immigrants value liberty. [UPDATE: For an example, see this Cato paper.] A conservative rejoinder might be to point out that progressives are salivating at the prospect of seeing more immigrant voters, and this is not because progressives expect these voters to value liberty.

Another libertarian counter would be that restricting immigration in order to preserve liberty creates too much dissonance between ends and means. If you are for liberty, then you should be for liberty, period. Fight the battle against dependency and demagoguery by arguing against those phenomena, not by restricting the liberty of people to choose where they live.

I am inclined to go with this latter view. Also, I am not worried so much about how immigrants vote. If a libertarian society is to emerge, it is likely to result from exit rather than voice.

Housing Policy: A Civilized Approach

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Joe Gyourko writes,

They should begin by completely phasing out the FHA over some clearly defined period (for example, three to five years) and replacing it with a new subsidy program that would help the two types of households the agency is meant to serve. The new program would help prospective homebuyers amass a 10% down payment that would then allow them to obtain financing at market rates from private lenders. This could be done through a simple system in which qualified households pay into a special savings vehicle and receive some type of match from the government. These funds would accumulate on a tax-free basis until they were large enough to provide a 10% down payment on a home.

On the civilization vs. barbarism axis, this would encourage saving and responsible behavior. If you read the whole article, you will see reinforcement for this. Of course, along the oppressor-oppressed axis, the only thing holding back people from owning homes is oppression, so there is no need for requiring a down payment.

Of course, what matters here is a different axis entirely. The real estate lobby vs. everybody else. And from that perspective, Gyourko’s sensible proposal does not stand a chance. Another indication of the political impossibility of this approach is that it is one that I have long advocated.

Labor Policy and Implicit Bias

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Commenting on a book about behavioral considerations in public policy, Jason Collins writes,

The opening substantive chapter by Curtis Hardin and Mahzarin Banaji is on bias – and particularly implicit bias. Implicit biases are unconscious negative (or positive) attitudes towards a person or group. Most people who claim (and believe) they are not biased because they don’t show explicit bias will nevertheless have implicit bias that affects their actions.

I think that thinking in terms of the oppressor-oppressed axis is an example of implicit bias. For example, labor policies, such as the minimum wage, are based on an implicit bias that workers are oppressed. I was reminded of this by a recent Tyler Cowen post.

I am often struck by the conflict between one supposition and one fact. First, employers are supposed to be reaping some big surplus from hiring unskilled labor. Second, when a downturn comes, it is unskilled labor who are laid off.

The three-axes model would explain the supposition as a form of implicit bias.

Kevin Erdmann Revisits the Housing Boom

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He writes,

the commonly repeated anecdotes of janitors and checkout clerks being
handed $300,000 mortgages on a hope and a prayer do not appear to be representative. On net, all the new mortgages went to families with incomes around $45,000 and higher.

And elsewhere he writes,

growth in homeownership came from high income households and that households didn’t increase their debt payment/income ratios or their relative consumption of housing during the boom. The evidence against the standard narrative is even more stark when we look at dollar levels, because, despite frequent implications to the contrary, low income households don’t tend to take on nearly as much debt as high income households.

Consider two ratios:

1. Debt-to-income.

2. Debt-to-equity.

Many narratives of the financial crisis focus on debt-to-income ratios. The oppressor-oppressed narrative is that greedy lenders imposed inappropriately high debt-to-income ratios on innocent borrowers, who then could not meet their mortgage payments. The civilization-barbarism narratives stress the use of houses as ATMs and the forced expansion of lending toward irresponsible borrowers.

It seems to me that Erdmann is suggesting that debt-to-income ratios did not got out of line, or perhaps they only got out of line for high-income borrowers. He may be right, although I would suggest looking at the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data and not just the survey of consumer finances.

Ever since Bob Van Order explained the mortgage default option to me almost 30 years ago, I have viewed debt-to-equity as more important than debt-to-income. If we define sup-prime lending in terms of debt-to-income, then I am inclined not to attach much significance to the proportion of sub-prime loans. To me, the dangerous loans are the ones with low down payments. There is some overlap between those and loans with high debt-to-income ratios, but not enough overlap to equate the two.

Let’s take Erdmann’s analysis of debt and income as accurate. I see no reason to change my preferred narrative of mortgage lending and the housing boom. That is, there was a surge in lending with low down payments. I am pretty confident that the HMDA data support this. In addition, there was a surge of lending for non-owner-occupied homes (speculators).

Think of owner-occupants with low down payments and non-owner-occupants as the speculative component in the housing market. My narrative is that the speculative component soared during the housing boom. These speculators did very well until house prices started to level off late in 2006. Then what had been a virtuous cycle on the way up turned into a vicious cycle on the way down, and the speculative buyers got hammered.

Getting from that to a recession is the more difficult part for me, because I do not allow myself to use the words “aggregate demand.” Instead, to explain the recession I have to make a case that many patterns of specialization and trade became unsustainable, or were finally perceived as unsustainable, while new sustainable patterns were difficult to discover. I might argue that the surge in government economic intervention exacerbated the difficulty of discovering new patterns of sustainable specialization and trade. TARP and the stimulus were largely efforts at redistribution, and that gave people a bigger incentive to focus on grabbing some of the loot than on developing a sustainable new business. Of course, Keynesians will tell you that the problem is that the surge in government intervention should have been bigger and lasted longer.

Heritability, Left and Right

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Chris Dillow writes,

there’s no conflict between leftism and a belief in the heritability of ability. In this respect at least, the left has nothing to fear from science.

Suppose that one believes that intelligence is heritable and that intelligence affects economic status. To the extent that you believe those two things, you have to maintain a somewhat lower belief in the importance of effort in determining economic status. Accordingly, in scoring a policy of pure income redistribution, as Dillow points out, you have to give it additional philosophical points because the well-off are the beneficiaries of lucky inheritance. In addition, such a policy loses fewer economic-efficiency points, because taxes that discourage effort will not diminish total wealth as much as they would if wealth were entirely determined by effort.

So Dillow would appear to be correct. And in fact Gregory Clark, who is well known for his findings supporting heritability of economic status, says that his findings support income redistribution.

Why, then, is heritability of intelligence a problem for the left? I believe that the three-axes model can help provide the answer.

In the three-axes model, progressives want to squeeze every issue into an oppressor-oppressed narrative. To suggest that ethnic groups differ in average income for reasons other than oppression would be to weaken that narrative. So even if from a policy perspective a belief in heritability is tolerable, from a narrative perspective a book like The Bell Curve represents a huge threat.

My sense is that this produces a great deal of cognitive dissonance on the left. I have many friends on the left, and I do not know a single one who would instinctively deny the heritability of intelligence. On the other hand, they have been instructed to regard Murray and Herrnstein as vile racists.

Evidence that runs counter to the oppressor-oppressed axis narrative is difficult for people on the left to process. I think that, notwithstanding Dillow’s reasoning, the left is going to continue to be uncomfortable with the science of heritability of intelligence.

Finish this Sentence

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Peace will come to Syria, Iraq, Libya, and the rest of the Middle East when ______.

I define peace as a situation in which at least 99 percent of the people do not have to consider abandoning their homes for fear of violence.

Off the top of my head, I do not have an answer. But I find myself drawn more to the conservative civilization-barbarism axis than to the progressive oppressor-oppressed axis or to the libertarian freedom-coercion axis. Along those lines, you may wish to re-read Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick’s classic Dictatorships and Double Standards. Among many possible excerpts I might choose, there is this:

Although most governments in the world are, as they always have been, autocracies of one kind or another, no idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances.

She argued against this brand of wishful thinking. If you think that you have a reliable answer to my question, then ask yourself whether you are engaged in wishful thinking.

For example, I would give a low grade to anyone who thinks that the solution is to focus on empowering communities. In other words, community organizers are the solution to terrorism. When I read that, I did not know whether to laugh or cry. I am afraid that I could not come up with anything charitable to say.

If anything, libertarians tend to think more wishfully than progressives. My own wishful thought has been that violence would wane at some point because so many people would become fed up with it. [UPDATE: I am not entirely wrong about that.] I think that in fact more people are getting fed up with it, but they are not being provided with a reason to hope that the militants will be defeated.

I am not saying that the solution is to bomb the heck out of the Middle East. It may very well be that the most prudent thing to do is nothing. But the policy articulated by our leaders sounds like it came out of a class discussion in freshman sociology. I find it demoralizing. And I imagine that anyone who is on the front lines against the Islamic militants has to feel totally bereft.

Haidt, Capitalism, and Three-Axis Narratives

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Some further thoughts inspired by comments on this post.

1. I don’t think that progressives would be comfortable with a narrative that says that things used to be better. That is much more of a conservative trope. Also, as an aside, Karl Marx himself said that capitalism saved people from the idiocy of rural life.

2. Instead, I think that progressives have two complaints about capitalism. First, it creates winners and losers. This leads to the winners becoming oppressors and the losers becoming oppressed.

3. The other narrative of capitalism is that it is unorganized and unplanned. It requires oversight in order to correct market failures. I think that this narrative does not fit in with the language of oppressor-oppressed.

4. I think that Randazzo have the libertarian narrative for capitalism correct. It is consistent with freedom and its success demonstrates the virtues of a free society.

5. I think that one of the commenters on the post suggests a reasonable conservative narrative. However, I think that conservatives feel some ambivalence toward capitalism. It is a civilizing force primarily because it rewards effort, individual responsibility, and self-discipline. However, it is an anti-civilizing force to the extent that it promotes greed and elevates materialism over values that ought to be higher.