Category Archives: culture

Book Recommendation

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Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public is now available for pre-order. The release date is a few weeks away.

I raved about the first edition of the book. But this edition is bigger and much better. I contributed a brief forward to this edition, but that is not what makes it better. About 20 percent of the book is an entirely new final chapter that interprets recent events.

Because I wrote the forward, I receive an advanced copy. On page 87, he writes,

The fall of the mediators, all other things being equal, means the end of the regime’s ability to rule by persuasion.

This tightly-packed sentence makes a key point. “The fall of the mediators” means in this case the dispersion of power over information as we move from the broadcast era to the Internet era. Governments could mold the narrative with broadcast media. Governments could convey the impression that their authority was legitimate and respected. With the Internet, too much information leaks out about the failings of governments. Thus, they are unable to “rule by persuasion” and are increasingly reduced to relying on sheer force. As a provocative example, Gurri believes that the Chinese government now is more dependent on force than it would be without the Internet.

The book is a masterpiece, in my opinion.

Timothy Taylor on corporate social responsibility

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He writes,

It seems to me that many discussions of the “social responsibility” of firms do not pay sufficient attention to these gains from pleasing customers and paying workers and suppliers. Such gains should not be taken for granted.

I think that people place corporate wealth in a mental category that is used for natural resources, like water or minerals. If you control such resources, then you must be rich, and you must recognize an obligation to share them. When you think in terms of endowments of resources, you don’t think in terms of corporations creating wealth or competing just to survive.

Maybe I should expand on that thought. Meanwhile, read the rest of Taylor’s post.

Lilliana Mason watch

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1. Paul H. P. Hanel, Natalia Zarzeczna, and Geoffrey Haddock write,

We directly compared the variability across moderate-, left-, and right-wing groups. Our findings suggest that the values of more extreme (left-wing or right-wing) supporters are usually more heterogeneous than those with more moderate views. We replicated this finding for politics-related variables such as attitudes toward immigrants and trust in (inter)national institutions. We also found that country-level variables (income, religiosity, and parasite stress level) did not moderate the pattern of value variability. Overall, our results suggest that endorsing the same political ideology is not necessarily associated with sharing the same values, especially in the case of common citizens holding extreme political attitudes.

That is from the abstract. I could not find an ungated version of the actual paper. Depending on the exact nature of the analysis, this might confirm the view that polarization is more a matter of hating the other team than it is about substantive differences.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

In a separate post, he passes along a chart showing that hatred of each party has gone up four-fold since 1980. Stare at the chart. Right now, I don’t think there are nearly as many rabid Republicans or rabid Democrats as there are rabid anti-Democrats and rabid anti-Republicans.

Love them out of their cult?

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Here is a recent conversation between Dave Rubin and Eric Weinstein. You will find yourself agreeing with some of what they say and disagreeing with some of it.

I did not find Eric persuasive when he compared opening a border to immigrants to allowing a dinner guest to stay in your house forever. I don’t own the land where immigrants reside. They are not my guests to throw out.

I think that we lack the will to enforce immigration law because from an individualistic perspective it feels wrong to do so. When they work for what they get and obey other laws, it’s hard to feel good about throwing them out of the country.

Suppose that we do not think of land in this country as something that we as citizens own collectively. Instead, land is owned by individuals. An immigrant is going to pay rent to an individual landlord. Throwing out that immigrant means that the state breaks a voluntary contract between two individuals, the landlord and the tenant. There may be justifications for doing that, but I don’t think you arrive at those justifications through a metaphor of a guest over-staying.

Eric also said something that was counterintuitive when he said “We need to love them out of their cult.” He supported Bernie Sanders, but he thinks that Sanders has some bad economic ideas. Weinstein says that in general progressives have adopted some bad ideas, but they have good intentions. If we can love their intentions, then perhaps we can coax them away from their bad ideas.

This approach appeals to me. One of my favorite children’s fables is the one about the sun and the wind competing to get a man to take off his coat. The wind blows hard and cold, but that only makes the man pull his coat tighter. The sun bathes the man in warmth, and he removes his coat. I think there is a lesson there for those involved in political conflicts.

But I think that there are complicating factors. Most important, I worry that political anger is fueled by emotional needs, not good intentions. The anger comes from internal demons, a sort of bitterness (self-hatred?) that the individual projects outward.

Suppose that there is a spectrum of personal contentment. At one end of that spectrum there are people who are happy with their lives and comfortable in their skins. They feel gratitude. Many of the conservative and libertarian intellectuals that I regularly follow fit in this category. The folks I know at Reason, at National Review, or in the GMU economics department. At the other end of the spectrum are young men who are so frustrated and angry that they become serial killers.

The politics of anger falls somewhere in between. At the extremes, it might be close to the serial-killer end of the spectrum.

How does anger on the left compare with anger on the right? The following is very speculative.

Think of life contentment as normally distributed, with an upper tail of people who are very grateful and a lower tail of people who are very bitter. Now imagine graphing two distributions of life contentment, one for well-educated, articulate people on the political left and one for well-educated articulate people on the political right. My sense is that while the two distributions would overlap, the distribution of the people on the left would be shifted to the bitter side relative to the people on the right. Again, I am limiting this to the well-educated and articulate.

Getting back to Eric’s idea, my worry is that by the time someone has become bitter and has translated that bitterness into political activism, it is too late to love them out of it. Ideally, one could find a way to prevent or overcome such bitterness in the first place. Failing that, it is important to find a way to channel that bitterness toward areas where it is least destructive. Video games or something.

Haidt and Lukianoff talk their book

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You can watch yesterday’s AEI event.

1. Apparently the book is selling well. That is probably a good sign.

2. Is Haidt now a full-blown conservative? It sort of seems that way. Near the end, I thought I heard him talking about the fragility of our society in a way that suggested the civilization vs. barbarism axis. But maybe I think he has become conservative because I believe he ought to be conservative, given what he has observed. But my theory is that he’s afraid to come out of the closet, and that keeps him from admitting it, even to himself.

3. I used my question, at one hour and seventeen minutes in, to try to get them to admit that the right is not as closed-minded as the left. Haidt tried to parry that by saying that conservatives are starting to talk about themselves as victims, which means that they are joining victimhood culture. Moderator Jonathan Rauch brought up Sen. Lindsay Graham’s speech at the end of the Kavanaugh-Ford hearing as an example of that. To me, the most powerful line of Graham’s was “Boy, you guys want power. God, I hope you never get it.” That does not sound like victimhood to me.

Conservatives on campus and in the media are subject to antagonism and double standards. That is simply a fact. Left-wing students have gotten speakers disinvited. Right-wing students have not. Left-wing students have demanded protection from having to listen to opposing views. Right-wing students have not. Conservative professors, and even centrist professors, have to be very careful about expressing their beliefs. Meanwhile, there are departments and administrative offices that are garrisons for radical leftists. On the panel, Prof. Allison Stanger, who says that she, too, is no conservative, made an impassioned defense of free speech and intellectual rigor. But does she or anyone else hold the Gender Studies Department or the Office of Inclusion to the same standards she expects of her students?

4. Afterward, I thought of an even more obnoxious question. Haidt talked about the high rates of anxiety and increased rates of suicide among young people. I wanted to ask whether other trends are more favorable. The obnoxious way to put it would have been:

You know what p-hacking is. It’s when you search through a hundred relationships to find one or two that have “significant” p-values. Maybe there is something that we could call danger-hacking. We look through generational trends to find the ones that suggest danger. You brought up teenage anxiety and suicide rates. But other indicators look better. Homicide is down. Teenage pregnancy is down. I’ll bet that the most recent yearbooks of certain DC-area prep schools are not as bacchanalian as the ones from 35 years ago. Shouldn’t we stop danger-hacking and take a more holistic view of Gen Z or I-Gen, which might suggest that they are actually in pretty good shape?

Andrew Sullivan joins the IDW

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He writes,

My own brilliant conclusion: Group differences in IQ are indeed explicable through both environmental and genetic factors and we don’t yet know quite what the balance is.

Read the whole thing.

I think about this issue by using a computer metaphor, with the layers of hardware, operating system and application software. The hardware is our physical bodies. The operating system is our cognitive systems, as shaped by evolution and our individual genetics. The applications come from culture, by which I mean the norms, behaviors, and technology that we absorb from others.

If you think of cognitive ability or how the sexes relate, all three layers matter. But people on the extreme left argue as if the hardware and operating system don’t matter, and people on the extreme right argue as if the hardware and the operating system are all that matter. As Sullivan puts it,

Leftists tend to believe that all inequality is created; liberals tend to believe we can constantly improve the world in every generation, forever perfecting our societies. Rightists believe that human nature is utterly unchanging; conservatives tend to see the world as less plastic than liberals, and attempts to remake it wholesale dangerous and often counterproductive. I think of myself as moderately conservative. It’s both undeniable to me that much human progress has occurred, especially on race, gender, and sexual orientation; and yet I’m suspicious of the idea that our core nature can be remade or denied. I completely respect the role of liberals in countering this. It’s their role. I think the genius of the West lies in having all these strands in our politics competing with one another.

Again, read the whole thing. Sullivan makes a complaint, which I share, that on these issues the left tries to demonize and shut down conservatives. The more vehemently the left asserts its moral superiority, the more I doubt that moral superiority.

Mr. Sullivan, welcome to the Intellectual Dark Web.

GMU or IDW?

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Bryan Caplan lists ten cultural characteristics of his intellectual subculture. For example,

Appealing to your identity is a reason to discount what you say, not a reason to pay extra attention.

A few remarks;

1. If you took the ten characteristics out of context, they might describe the Intellectual Dark Web. But he says he is referring to GMU econ bloggers.

2. Although it refers to a “culture” of GMU econ bloggers in general, the links in his list pretty much all go to previous Bryan Caplan posts. Most bloggers are self-referential, but for Bryan it’s an art form.

3. His last item is “strategically appease mainstream thinkers,” which seems out of synch with the rest. The link goes to a post where he justifies paying taxes, and for me that post fails to provide clarification. Mainstream thought for the most part does not come with a threat of imprisonment behind it. For now, at least.

4. Just as a reminder, I am not on the faculty of GMU. I am nominally affiliated (no office, no salary) with Mercatus, which is at GMU. Once every couple of years or so I try to have lunch with some of the GMU econ bloggers.

Note: after I wrote this post but before it appeared, Tyler Cowen wrote a post in favor of taking identity into account. But I think Tyler missed the important difference between taking identity into account and having someone appeal to their identity. I agree with Bryan that the latter is a negative signal. Opening with “Speaking as a ____” is a bullying tactic.

Pascal Boyer looks like the winner

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You thought it was a contest between Hazony and Lukianoff-Haidt for which book I would read next. And by the time this post goes up, Fukuyama’s book will be out. For that matter, security guru Bruce Schneier’s provocatively-titled Click Here to Kill Everybody was on my radar even before a commenter mentioned it.

But then, fairly deep among Amazon’s recommendations, I find Minds Make Societies, by Pascal Boyer.

1. The introduction didn’t cause me to want to raise objections.

2. I have already told you that I think very highly of the concept of evolution as an interpretive framework.

So Boyer wins. That’s what I’m reading now. [UPDATE: Finished the book. A couple of the chapters did not succeed with me, but overall I found the book very stimulating and insightful. It will easily make my list of best books of the year.]

Here is a taste:

people find the authors of descriptive texts, for example, about a computer program or a hiking trip, more competent and knowledgeable if the texts include threat-related information.

The mechanism is this: We have evolved to detect threats. We have evolved to learn about threats from other people. Therefore, we have evolved to ascribe expertise to people who describe threats.

Hence, rumors and conspiracy theories. And of course, some small fraction of those will prove to be true, so we can’t completely throw away our evolutionary programming.

It occurs to me that this explains how Henny-Penny could make “The sky is falling!” go viral. Instead, if she had said, “I just saw a gorgeous rainbow with polka-dots,” no one would have believed her. The threatening story is taken as credible, and the benign story isn’t.

I used to think of Henny-Penny as a stupid bird with stupid friends, like Turkey-Lurkey. But after reading Boyer about the way we build coalitions on top of our evolutionary program for threat detection, I would say that Henny-Penny is an astute coalition builder. She shows aptitude as a journalist or politician, while Turkey-Lurkey displays an aptitude for signaling his value as a reliable follower.

Charles Chu on Vaclav Smil

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Chu writes,

Another interesting thing about Smil is that he has principles. In particular, you can tell he that he values intellectual honesty far more than he values fame or material wealth.

. . .the danger of getting paid for your ideas: It’s easy to sell out or self-censor because you’re afraid of (a) financial or (b) status pushback.

The essay covers several interesting issues. I think that every public intellectual has to have second thoughts about writing things that challenge the views of his or her audience. But it is important to be willing to do that. I think that this is one of Tyler Cowen’s strengths.

Lukianoff and Haidt compete for my reading time

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Their latest, The Coddling of the American Mind, was released the same day as Yoram Hazony’s book. Coddling is getting plenty of media buzz. This half-hour podcast is probably worth your time.

I might have thought that I would be more inclined to resist Hazony’s defense of nationalism and to defend L-H’s resistance to political correctness on campus. But it might turn out differently after I read the two books. Lukianoff and Haidt (L-H) write,

many parents, K-12 teachers, professors, and university administrators have been unknowingly teaching a generation of students to engage in the mental habits commonly seen in people who suffer from anxiety and depression.

I think that college administrators could make a difference. My fantasy of a courageous college administrator would be one who says:

1. If you don’t want to get up in the morning regretting the sex you had last night, then stay sober and say “no.” I would be surprised to find forcible rape on campus, but if you don’t feel safe, carry pepper spray.

2. If you engage in rioting, assault, or vandalism, then you deserve to be arrested and dealt with by the criminal justice system.

3. If you don’t like what someone says, then write an essay explaining what is wrong with it, and try to get other people interested in your essay.

I am not sure I will buy the L-H story. They want to draw an equivalence between right and left, and that is fair if you are talking about the propensity to be uncharitable to those who disagree. But my sense is that the depression/anxiety parallel to political demeanor is a better fit for the left than for the right.

Another problem I have with the psychological emphasis is that it might lead someone to think that if the parents, teachers, and professors could just realize that coddling has adverse psychological consequences, then they would take a different approach. Instead, I think that problem is more deep-seated. I see parents, teachers, and professors as having intellectual weaknesses (such as a lack of appreciation for evolution as a characteristic of markets and an influence on human behavior patterns) and character flaws (such as a lack of courage to talk to students as I would like) that are much harder to correct.

But this is all preliminary to reading the book. I need to give L-H a chance to change my mind.