He writes,

So although the scandal revealed by last week’s arrests involves college admissions, it has touched a nerve not because of a widespread desire to get into Yale but because of a widespread perception that the people who go there think they can get away with anything. It isn’t aggravating because it’s a betrayal of the principles of meritocracy but because it is an example of the practice of it. That’s not a problem that can be addressed through more fair and open college admissions. It is a problem that would need to be addressed through more constraints on the behavior of American elites

Read the whole piece. I think that this is a point worth dwelling upon.

Levin sees today’s elites as un-moored from traditional institutional sources of accountability. I would put it this way:

–They don’t like working for a profit, which would enable consumers to hold them accountable. Instead, by working for government or in the non-profit sector, they can self-validate the worth of their jobs.

–They disdain traditional religions. Instead, they invent their own norms in relation to race, gender, the environment, etc. They proceed to punish as heretics those who fail to Keep up with these rapidly-evolving norms.

–They don’t belong to organizations in their local community. Instead, they live dissociated from their neighbors, if not walled off from them completely. Their spirit of generosity is limited to the use of other people’s money.

He writes,

I am concerned with the public’s temper rather than the policy trimmings of the elites. And the public never takes yes for an answer. Does anyone suppose that OWS protesters were satisfied with regulations ordained from the top of the political establishment? Or that Black Lives Matter militants have been mollified by police reforms, any more than Tea Partiers were by the sequester?

Protests triumph or peter out – but the public is never satisfied. I can’t think of a single instance of an insurgency disbanding because of policy concessions.

The post is nominally a response to Noah Smith’s critique, but it is a wide-ranging discourse on human nature and our current condition.

I would claim that the anti-war movement of my youth was able to take yes for an answer. That is, when the Vietnam War ended, the protest movement ended as well.

In fact, a standard view of the 1960’s and 1970’s is that over time the radicals and protesters became “co-opted” and joined the elites. Some people expect history to repeat itself. Gurri himself writes,

The generation of elites that was young when industrial giants roamed the earth is now failing, literally and physically. Its enjoyment of the large corner offices within the pyramid will soon go the way of all flesh. Many expressions of extreme political despair coming from the elites can be ascribed to a panic of mortality. Young people are displacing old. The latter have had their day. Of the young, an analyst should say as little as possible, other than to wish them the best of luck.

We have seen on the left a meme of “pass the baton” to the younger generation. Perhaps that is sometimes the right thing to do. But when I hear the strains of “Tomorrow belongs to me” coming from today’s smug anti-capitalist social justice activists, I believe that one must put up some resistance.

This post is scheduled to go up on the 39th anniversary of my marriage. If you want to aim to replicate some aspect of my life, I recommend the family aspect.

When it comes to small-scale society, my personal views are extremely conservative. I really believe that the old-fashioned stable marriage, with children and grandchildren and a close-knit family, is the way to go. I see the cultural-elite disrespect for that sort of family as sad and disturbing.

Almost all of my writing concerns large-scale society. When you ask about the role of government, I believe that the libertarian response is usually the best. I don’t lose any sleep trying to come up with ways for government to promote social conservatism.

I try to maintain separation between micro-morality and macro-morality. I recognize that in some ways the two realms collide. But I believe that keeping them conceptually separate helps to avoid a lot of the worst intellectual errors.

I believe that micro-morality matters more than macro-morality. I have total respect for friends who have political beliefs that differ from mine and who have maintained solid marriages. I feel a sense of distance and distrust toward men whose political beliefs I generally share but who have left behind their families for the younger woman.

My wife is one of the few people I have known who appear to me to live their lives constantly asking “What would a righteous person do in my situation?” These are the people that I think of when I hear the term tzadik, which is Hebrew for “righteous one.” My wife’s sister’s husband is another tzadik. I did not know him well, but a businessman and philanthropist who was killed in a traffic accident earlier this month came across to me (and to others) as another tzadik.

I don’t see myself as a tzadik to that degree. In the realm of micro-morality, I avoid doing bad, but I don’t go out of my way to do good. I would grade myself as B+.

According to Helen Fisher’s personality theory, my wife and I are not a good match, and indeed our friction points are the ones that Fisher would predict. But the combination of a tzadik and a B+ has held up quite well.

Russ Roberts writes,

But not everything that is important can be quantified. I worry that as economists, we too often are like the drunk at 1 am looking for his keys under the glare of a streetlight. You go over to help and when you fail to find the keys you ask the drunk if he’s sure if he lost them here. Oh no, he responds. I’m not sure where I lost them. But the light’s better here.

Roberts points out that some of the most painful social problems are associated with people feeling lonely and unloved, and economics does not have much to say about this.

Economists focus on the material well-being of a large-scale society. The ability of strangers to cooperate in the context of the market is probably our key insight.

But does cooperating with strangers provide emotional satisfaction and a feeling of being loved? Probably not. Personal interdependence satisfies human needs for closeness better than impersonal interdependence. But personal interdependence is a characteristic of small-scale society–the family, the tribal band, the village.

Our increased material wealth arises from more specialization, which means more impersonal interdependence. But people still need the comfort and status that come from personal interdependence. It seems to me that in our modern world there is a tendency for people reach out for substitutes for personal interdependence. Russ mentions opiods. I sometimes think that the increased intensity of political engagement is another substitute. It is an opiod of a different sort.

Stelios Michalopoulos and Melanie Meng Xue write,

Folklore is the collection of traditional beliefs, customs, myths, legends, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth. This vast expressive body of culture, studied by the corresponding discipline of folklore, has evaded the attention of economists. In this study we do four things that reveal the tremendous potential of this corpus for economists and political scientists interested in comparative development and culture.

I am tempted to say that culture = folkways + institutions. That is, one aspect of culture is bottom-up, informal, emergent folkways (or folklore). Another aspect, institutions, is culture that is hierarchically-influenced, formalized, and codified.

Following a painstaking effort to catalog folklore across subgroups, the authors write,

We demonstrate the predictive power of folklore-based measures of culture on current norms as reáected in modern surveys, concluding that folklore itself may be one of the vehicles via which culture is vertically transmitted across generations.

It seems interesting.