Category Archives: Three-Axes Model

Campus Bias

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Daniel Little writes,

For anyone who cares about universities as places of learning for undergraduate students, Gross’s book is an encouraging one. He provides a clear and convincing explanation of the mechanisms through which a non-random distribution of political attitudes wind up in the population of university and college professors, and he provides strong evidence against the idea that universities and professors exercise discriminatory bias against newcomers who have different political identities. And finally, Gross’s analysis and my own experience suggests that professors generally conform to Weber’s ethic when it comes to proselytizing for one’s own convictions in the classroom: the function and duty of the professor is to help students think for themselves

Pointer from Mark Thoma. Not surprisingly, I disagree. One anecdote I tell is from the graduation of one of my daughters. The main graduation speaker mentioned that she had just seen in article saying that the population of the U.S. will be majority-minority by 2050. The students erupted into whooping and wild cheering.

To me, the demographic projections are facts rather than cause for joy or sorrow. But after four years of being told that white people are the oppressors and minorities are the oppressed, the students reacted automatically and emotionally. To me, it was the opposite behavior of someone who has been taught to think for themselves.

If liberal professors are not aware of political bias in their workplace, it is because, like fish, they are swimming in it. The indoctrination into the language of oppressor-oppressed is pervasive. If you don’t buy into the progessive mindset, then you feel about as comfortable on a liberal college campus as an atheist in a seminary.

Randazzo and Haidt on Economists, Left and Right

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In the EconJournalWatch symposium, they write,

There are two basic narratives about capitalism circulating in Western society today. One says that capitalism is exploitation (or at least is highly conducive to exploitation); the other says that capitalism is liberation. If you endorse the exploitation narrative, then you are more likely to see government as the main force that protects innocent victims. It protects them with a welfare state and with a regulatory state. But if you endorse the liberation narrative, then you’ll want government to step back as much as possible and let capitalism work its magic. You’ll want to shrink both the welfare state and the regulatory state.

This is somewhat congruent with the three-axis model. In my terminology, your basic economic narrative is oppressor-oppressed or freedom-coercion.

As they themselves admit, the narrative that they provide for economists on the left is not something they would recognize as characterizing their own views. It would fail Bryan Caplan’s ideological Turing test.

I believe that most economists on the left believe that there are incentive problems in markets and that technocrats can fix those problems. They do not think of markets as intrinsically about exploitation.

Randazzo and Haidt argue that economists’ moral views can predict their economic analysis.

our survey data shows that responses to moral propositions can be used to predict responses to empirical (positive) economic theory propositions. For example, how much importance an economist assigns to the moral foundation of “care” predicts views on whether austerity is good or bad for economic growth, whether a single-payer healthcare system would reduce national healthcare costs or not, whether minimum-wage laws benefit or harm workers, and whether or not national debt and deficits adversely affect economic growth.

Michael Shermer Scrambles the Axes

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You can listen to his talk at Cato.

In some respects, he sounds conservative. He seems to me to take a civilization vs. barbarism view of recent controversies regarding police, in that he believes that in a civilized society citizens must not threaten police. He insists that moral significance attaches to people as individuals, not as members of oppressed classes.

However, he breaks with conservatives in that he views religion as barbaric. He insists instead on science and reason. And in general, I think he would be happier earning the approval of progressives than earning that of conservatives. His main theme, that human beings are making moral progress (he speaks of a moral Flynn Effect), is one that sits more easily with progressives than with conservatives.

To the extent that he is libertarian, he sounds more like Rand than like Rothbard. He believes that the institution of the state is needed to keep individuals from using violence to solve disputes.

On economic issues, he offered thumbs-up for free trade and economic growth. But he said nothing about what I see as the most fundamental issue in economic philosophy today: how much can the emergent order of a little-regulated economy be improved by technocratic management? Clearly there are those who think that the answer is very much, while there are those of us who disagree. I suspect that Shermer is not on the libertarian side of this issue.

Jonathan Haidt, the n-word, and capitalism

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He writes,

there are two basic master narratives about capitalism that have been circulating in the West since the time of Adam Smith. One story is that capitalism (and business more generally) is exploitation, so we need a strong government to keep the greed and amorality of capitalists in check. The other story is that capitalism is liberation. People were mostly serfs and peasants until capitalism came along and freed people to keep the fruits of their own labor, so we need to keep government’s role to a minimum, given how prone it is to capture, corruption, and inefficiency.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Remember, the word “narrative” has been declared “out” for 2015 by the Washington Post arbiters of taste.

Still, I think that Haidt is onto something. In terms of the three-axis model, the exploitation story fits the oppressor-oppressed axis favored by progressives, and the liberation model fits the freedom-coercion axis favored by libertarians.

This leaves out the conservative axis of civilization-barbarism, and I think that conservativism is somewhat ambivalent on the issue of markets. Conservatives praise markets for rewarding the virtues of effort, patience, self-reliance. But conservatives dislike markets for undermining cultural traditions, putting the vulgar on par with the sublime, and lacking moral direction. Consider Charles Murray in Coming Apart (which I am re-reading):

For Benjamin Franklin, this meant that “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

It is a short leap for some conservatives to believe that markets unguided by conservative leadership take a nation on a path that makes it “more corrupt and more vicious.”

Tyler Cowen, Neocon

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He writes,

Without the current and past American security umbrella, for instance, I believe much of Asia would be a far less free place than it is today, starting but not ending with Taiwan and South Korea.

I give Tyler credit for raising this issue in a forum least likely to be sympathetic to it. This is Brink Lindsey’s growth forum hosted by Cato, where Brink is inviting contributions from the liberaltarian crowd.

I have to say that when looking at places like Russia, Hungary, or the Middle East, my appreciation for the civilization vs. barbarism axis tends to increase. On my list of books to sample (not necessarily read the whole thing) is Bret Stephens’ latest, where he argues that the U.S. should act as the world’s policeman. I wonder whether he explains how the U.S. could do that without also becoming the world’s social worker.

UPDATE: Here is how Stephens starts out:

Where do you fall on the spectrum between internationalists and neoisolationists? Ask yourself the following questions:

Does the United States have a vital interest in the outcome of the civil war in Syria, or in Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians, or in Saudi Arabia’s contest with Iran?

Should Americans take sides between China and Japan over which of them exercises sovereignty over the uninhabited Senkaku Islands? Similarly, should we care whether Ukraine or Russia controls Crimea?

Is America more secure or less secure for deploying military forces in hot spots such as the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea?

My views on these issues are mixed. On the Middle East, I see the Syrian civil war as barbarism vs. barbarism. Similarly, the contest between Saudi Arabia and Iran. On Israel and the Palestinians, I understand that many people explain the Palestianians’ barbaric behavior as being caused by oppression, but I see it more the other way around. They could end oppression by being less barbaric. And I believe that the U.S. ought to support civilization in that contest.

On the second issue, my memories of the Vietnam era are salient enough to make me wary of pushing conflict on the basis of domino theory. Uninhabited islands strike me as dominoes that can be allowed to fall. Note that Stephens in effect equates Crimea to uninhabited islands, which suggests that it, too, is a domino that should be allowed to fall. I do not think that caving in there means that next thing you know Putin will be at the gates of Paris.

I think we are more secure for deploying military forces in the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea. If you press me, I will tell you that I believe that the U.S. navy and air support are the true world government, and without world government we would have major war.

If you think that pacifism and non-interventionism are ways of preventing major war, you have company. But my concern is that those policies only work if there is someone else doing the work of the world’s policeman. Being Swiss seems fine now, but if the U.S. had not intervened in World War II, it might not have been so peachy. And ultimately not so peachy for the U.S., either.

UPDATE: I wrote the foregoing before yesterday’s massacre in Jerusalem. If I have my geography right, the attack took place far inside the 1967 borders. It is an area where young observant American Jews go to study. The sight of Palestinians celebrating cold-blooded murder is something that I cannot put out of my mind. Even the Germans did not celebrate when they murdered Jews.

The One-Axis Model of “Scott Alexander”

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It is thrive-survive. The left thinks in terms of what it will take to thrive, and the right thinks in terms of what it will take to survive.

What he is trying to do is explain why the two tribes believe what they do. My goal with the three-axis model is to explain why they communicate as they do. My objective differs a bit from Scott’s although they are close. I think that the tribes have nuanced reasons for believing what they believe, but when they are beating tribal drums, the signals fall along my three axes.

Anyway, here is a sentence from his post:

I despair of any theory that will tell me why school choice is a rightist rather than a leftist issue

Pointer from a commenter on Bryan Caplan’s post.

Suppose that both sides now believe that the left controls the public schools. Then I think it becomes easy to explain the partisan pattern. To put this another way, if most teachers and school boards were proponents of right-wing views, I think that a reversal on school choice would be highly probable.

In terms of Scott’s single-axis model, the fact that the left controls public schools may cause the left to deduce that public schools are the best hope for providing students with the tools that they need to thrive, and that taking students out of public schools only subjects them to inferior models. Conversely, the right may believe that public schools are ruining the character of young people, and the only way for society to survive is to make alternatives available to as many students as possible.

“Scott Alexander” on Political Tribalism

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He writes,

How did both major political tribes decide, within a month of the virus becoming widely known in the States, not only exactly what their position should be but what insults they should call the other tribe for not agreeing with their position?

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Of course, my answer to his question is in The Three Languages of Politics. What Alexander calls the “red tribe” narrative does indeed have a civilization-barbarism feel, and what he calls the h”blue tribe” narrative has an “oppressor-oppressed” feel.

Anyway, read the whole piece. Another excerpt:

Daily Kos or someone has a little label saying “supports liberal ideas”, but actually their incentive is to make liberals want to click on their pages and ads. If the quickest way to do that is by writing story after satisfying story of how dumb Republicans are, and what wonderful taste they have for being members of the Blue Tribe instead of evil mutants, then they’ll do that even if the effect on the entire system is to make Republicans hate them and by extension everything they stand for.

Note that on the issue of a quarantine of countries where Ebola has broken out, the three-axes model might predict that if Ebola had broken out among Jews in Israel instead of in West Africa, there might well have been a reversal in which tribe favored quarantine. The “conservative germophobia” theory would predict otherwise.

Teenagers in the Court System

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Jan Hoffman’s post

What none did, however, was exercise his constitutional rights. It was not clear whether the youths even understood them.

Therefore none had a lawyer at his side. None left, though all were free to do so, and none remained silent. Some 37 percent made full confessions, and 31 percent made incriminating statements.

These were among the observations in a recent study of 57 videotaped interrogations of teenagers, ages 13 to 17, from 17 police departments around the country. The research, published in Law and Human Behavior, adds to accumulating evidence that teenagers are psychologically vulnerable at the gateway to the criminal justice system. Youths, some researchers say, merit special protections.

reminded me of a personal experience when I sat on a jury.

At a cognitive level, the video of the detective and the defendant showed an incriminating confession, obtained by the book, without threats, intimidation, or promises. At an emotional level, it showed a teenage boy, in an awful mess, with no adult there to help him. He was polite, and almost endearing. The majority of jurors had children, and the main effect of the video was to trigger our Parent Reflex. In our particular courtroom drama, the role that many of us chose was that of the defendant’s Surrogate Parents.

It was a traumatic experience, and we let a guilty young person off. Go back and read my whole essay.