Category Archives: Politics

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?

Paul Romer vs. Perry Bacon, Jr.

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The latter wrote,

with Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford set to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week and new allegations coming out against Kavanaugh on Sunday, it’s worth noting that the biggest divide is not between men and women on these issues, but between Democrats and Republicans.

Romer writes,

The best one can say about this comparison is that it is careless. Its measure of the partisan divide suffers from an obvious upward bias relative to the measure of the gender gap because it excludes the responses of independents. Leaving out these centrists will automatically increase the difference between the two groups that remain. The effect is big because there are lots of independents. For this particular poll and in round numbers, 600 of the 1500 respondents do not provide a party affiliation.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I clicked through to the Huffpost poll, taken several days prior the hearing, which asked whether the allegation against Kavanaugh is credible.

Men answered it 28-34, with the 28 percent saying yes, and 34 percent saying no. The rest did not want to commit to an opinion.
With women, it was 25-23.

Among Democrats, it was 53-8.
Among Republicans, it was 4-60.
Among independents, it was 19-25.

But this isn’t the poll result that Romer uses to make his point. Instead he uses a question that asks generically about the importance of protecting the accused’s rights or the victim’s rights.

Among Democrats, it was 11-76
Among Republicans, it was 20-54.
Among independents, it was 14-53

This is a much smaller partisan gap to begin with. In every group, the majority stresses the victim’s rights.

To me, the poll result about the credibility of the accusation is the one that stands out. It just screams “motivated reasoning.” I’m sorry to have to disagree with Romer, but if you focus on that poll result, there can be no escaping the conclusion that partisanship is the main driver.

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.

Francis Fukuyama talks his book

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In Quillette, he writes,

In a wide variety of cases, a political leader has mobilized followers around the perception that the group’s dignity had been affronted, disparaged, or otherwise disregarded. This resentment engenders demands for public recognition of the dignity of the group in question. A humiliated group seeking restitution of its dignity carries far more emotional weight than people simply pursuing their economic advantage.

That seems to be the thesis of his new book, Identity.

In the podcast of Lilliana Mason and Ezra Klein, I recall them saying that the future in the U.S. might see a contest between a “social justice” party and its opposition. They mock the opposition (“who could be against social justice?”). But that is exactly the problem. When one side believes that it has complete moral superiority, then this deprives the other side of dignity. Win or lose, moral arrogance is a very divisive political force.

I have not decided whether to read Fukuyama’s book. Based on what I have seen so far, I do not see any new insights.

Did you two visit the same country?

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First, I read Anne Applebaum.

Hungary’s ruling party respects no restraints of any kind. It has gone much further than Law and Justice in politicizing the state media and destroying the private media, achieving the latter by issuing threats and blocking access to advertising.

Then I read David P. Goldman.

And then we have Viktor Orban, who has governed Hungary for eight years, long enough for the voters to get to know him, with an enormous popular majority. . . . Mr. Orban’s opponents claim that he has put his thumb on the scales by using state institutions to build media support for the government, but no one says that he has falsified votes or intimidated opponents. Opposition politics in Hungary is open and uninhibited.

The Hazony Question, of nationalism vs. transnationalism, is salient in both pieces. Applebaum’s piece speaks to the dangers of nationalism, with one group using the power of the state to deny status to other groups. Goldman’s piece speaks to the dangers of transnationalism, with unelected officials injecting themselves into internal affairs.

Alberto Mingardi on Hazony

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Mingardi offers more criticism of The Virtue of Nationalism.

I find Hazony’s view of European history troublesome. For one thing, saying that Hitler wasn’t a “nationalist” is, to use a euphemism, a far more controversial claim than he acknowledges. Let’s put it in this way: can you picture national socialism raising to power without Herder, Fitche, and all the other prophets of nationalism? I doubt it.

Indeed, one reading of Hitler’s vision is that he wanted to see Germany and Great Britain as cooperative hegemonic powers in a nationalist world order. It was Churchill who was the imperialist, in two senses of the term. First, he wanted to preserve the British empire. Second, Hazony uses the term imperialist to describe any philosophy that is based on a universalist ideology. For Churchill, that ideology was individual freedom and the values of Western Civilization.

What World War II does illustrate is that transnational institutions are not a solution to the problem of war. The League of Nations was helpless in the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, all of which took place in the run-up to the larger conflagration.

Since 1945, there have been numerous wars, in spite of (and in a few cases sanctioned by) the United Nations. Perhaps there are those who are willing to defend the UN by saying that things would have been worse without it. I do not claim the expertise to adjudicate that one.

Suppose we were to describe nationalism in terms of “negative liberty” or “the non-aggression principle” for national governments. Do whatever you want internally, as long as you don’t infringe on people outside your borders. This might be more reliably libertarian than a project of world government, even though it would leave some people imprisoned by their regimes.

Measuring violence

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John Arquilla writes,

I chose to search for what I call “big-kill” wars, during which a million or more die — soldiers and civilians. From 1800-1850, only the Napoleonic Wars surpassed the million-death mark.

. . .The troubling rise in big-kill wars in the first half of the 20th century was followed by an even more disturbing pattern in the second half: they doubled once again. There was nothing of the magnitude of World War II in sheer numbers of dead, but the million-mark in war deaths was steadily surmounted, mostly in societies in which such losses had staggering effects.

Pointer from Charles Chu (email newsletter). Steven Pinker can show a decline in violence by looking at the ratio of war deaths to total population. But is the increase in the denominator, not a decrease in the numerator, that is holding down that ratio.

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.

Yoram Hazony: my preliminary criticism

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So far, I have only finished the introduction to The Virtue of Nationalism. I think he fails Bryan Caplan’s ideological Turing Test. He says that the opposite of nationalism is imperialism. I don’t think his opponents would accept the imperialist label. It is like telling a secular leftist that your religion is leftism. Such analysis might have a grain of truth, but it is not a good approach for engaging in dialogue.

I think there are two versions of internationalism in the U.S.: the neocon version; and the Western Guilt version. They are usually opposed to one another.

The neocon version could plausibly viewed as imperialist. They see America as the indispensable nation, supporting the peace and prosperity of the world. The term Pax Americana is positive in the neocon view. (Although they are not card-carrying neocons, Findlay and O’Rourke in Power and Plenty, if I recall correctly, make a case that periods of trade expansion, peace, and prosperity historically have coincided with strong hegemonic power.)

The Western Guilt version sees America as the nation that needs to be cut down to size. Instead of telling other people how to behave, Americans ought to learn from other cultures. The neocons disparage this view, as when they refer to “Obama’s apology tours.” But whether you love or loathe the Western Guilt proponents, they would not recognize themselves as imperialists.

Indeed, the way that Hazony describes imperialism, almost any transnational proposal becomes an imperialist project. A libertarian idea for open borders. An environmentalist proposal to fight climate change. While there is plenty of room to argue that these ideas could only be implemented in the context of a global empire with a single ruler, establishing such an empire is not the objective of these specific initiatives.

In any case, I am not ready to accept Hazony’s either/or distinction between imperialism and nationalism. I would say that there are questions of jurisdiction. You know how when two businesses sign a contract, there might be a provision saying that any dispute will be decided in a particular state? If contracting were costless, every interaction between people could have such a provision. To put it another way, one can imagine in theory a world in which the jurisdiction for every interaction is chosen voluntarily. As it happens, but that is not possible in practice.

In the real world, for most interactions there is a presumption that jurisdiction is based on location. So within the U.S., you presume that if you go to court it will be an American court, not a French court. As I see it from this jurisdictional perspective, although nationalism is not something that was dreamed up by libertarians, it can be treated as a “libertarian realist” outcome.

Part of “libertarian realism” is my belief that the ultimate arbiter of jurisdictional disputes is force. As another illustration, think of crime families. If you’re in the Corleone family territory, the Godfather has jurisdiction.

There are a lot of cross-border interactions nowadays. So how do we settle ultimate jurisdictional disputes? It could be an international body–an international Supreme Court, if you will. Or it could be ultimately the strongest country interested in the dispute.

To be cynical, I can see why an Israeli, with the Palestinian conflict in mind, would not be an advocate of deferring to an international body. To be equally cynical, I can see why a professional Weberian bureaucrat or diplomat might advocate increased deference to international organizations. I would be surprised if one can make an over-arching, overwhelming theoretical argument in favor of one model over the other.

But that is all preliminary to reading the book.