Category Archives: Politics

The clustering of the world

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Razib Khan writes,

Serbia has a much stronger affinity with Russia, Croatia is in Catholic Europe, while Slovenia seems more like Northern European nations than Croatia.

You have to go read the whole thing. He discusses a cultural map of the world, based on two scales: traditional values vs. secular/relational values; and survival values vs. self-expression values.

He then goes on to discuss the Peter Turchin, et al paper that I’ve seen referenced on several blogs. It’s the paper that develops an index of social complexity. I think of it as something like an IQ measure that operates at a cultural level.

What I am reading

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American Exceptionalism in a New Era. This is a conference volume from the Hoover Institute. John Cochrane was one of the participants in the conference, and I found about the book from his blog.

The conference was held in the fall of 2016, which means that the papers were prepared before the election, and perhaps even before it was clear that Donald Trump would be the nominee. Although there is a pattern of pessimism that runs through most of the essays, what strikes me is that the tone is less apocalyptic than what we are seeing from conservative intellectuals today. Victor Davis Hanson is one of the essayists, and although he plenty dour in his piece, he comes across to me as more sober and less strident than he does in his post-election writing.

If I am correct that conservative intellectuals are more anxious now than they were before the election, then I think that this may be justified. Whatever conservative gains might be made in the next year or two, the most important consequence could turn out to be the hardening of the hard left. For example, the WSJ has a story about the tax bill, pointing out that it has no bipartisan support, has many provisions that expire automatically, do that tax policy could be jerked in a very different direction in another few years.

I think that many conservative intellectuals believe, at least subliminally, that the Donald Trump wind will reap a very treacherous whirlwind.

Want to hear some dark views?

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1. Try Shane Greenstein.

Just talk to any parent. It is too easy for children’s curiosity to lead them to the sleazy online square, and every parent now worries whether a child has enough sense to handle a disingenuous text. What is a parent to do—keep them off YouTube for fear of much worse?

2. Try Chamath Palihapitiya. As The Verge reports,

Palihapitiya’s criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

I give Greenstein credit for speaking fervently about a topic that he correctly points out is one that we prefer to ignore. I am less inclined to be charitable toward Palihapitiya. Too many f-bombs and too much catering to smug lefties. Apparently, he decided quite a while ago that Facebook is not a good thing, but his views are only cool now. A year ago it became cool to knock social media, after Donald Trump managed to eke out an election victory. Even though it is by no means certain that social media played any role in the eking.

There is a bull market in paranoia these days. I am missing out on it. That is why my portfolio does not include any Bitcoin.

Tax non-reform

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Richard Rubin writes (WSJ),

a deduction the Senate created for so-called pass-through businesses such as partnerships and S corporations. That 23% deduction is fully available to owners of service businesses like law firms, but only if income is below $500,000 for a married couple.

The deduction then phases out over $100,000 in income, according to a complex formula, disappearing entirely once income reaches $624,000. Up to that point, each additional dollar of business income faces progressively steeper tax rates because the deduction and its benefit are shrinking rapidly as income goes up.

Conservative tax reform means lowering marginal tax rates. This requires eliminating deductions and reducing top tax rates. If that is not happening in this tax bill, then it is not conservative tax reform. I have not been following the tax bill at all. It sounds to me as though the support for it comes down to “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done.”

Russ Roberts on social control of sexual conduct

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Noting that Matt Lauer could be fired but Al Franken and John Conyers could not, he writes,

There’s an irony here. The government, which imposes regulations and other restrictions in a top-down way across the whole economy, has a strange degree of autonomy. The constraints on government tend to come from the bottom up, with limited effectiveness. The control is spread out over time and the process of competition among political parties is more like a cartel than a competitive market. The constraints on the private sector actors are top-down. The board of directors fires the CEO at will. There is much more command-and-control at NBC than there is in the oversight of Congress.

Read the whole essay. Russ does not offer any definitive answers on this topic du jour. I try very hard to resist du jour topics, but I may end up writing on this one.

Too much discipline on the left, too little on the right

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Check out my latest essay on Medium, Restoring Political Health, Left and Right.

People with a temperament that is high on openness and low on conscientiousness are inclined toward the left and tend to be curious, tolerant, and willing to explore the world with a commitment to intellectual honesty. People with a temperament that is low on openness and high on conscientiousness are inclined toward the right and tend to emphasize standards of decency, restraint, and good behavior. As shorthand, I will refer to these as the left and the right, respectively. We are plagued today by an authoritarian left and a badly-behaved right. Restoring health will require work on both sides.

The opening of the essay owes something to Jordan Peterson’s observations about psychology and politics (e.g., here or in his conversation with Jonathan Haidt), as well as to his use of metaphor. But the substance of the essay represents issues that have long concerned me. A dozen years ago, I had the insights that were the seeds of The Three Languages of Politics in an essay that I called Folk Beliefs Have Consequences.

Crowded and Unsanitary

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Glenn Reynolds writes,

It wasn’t until you crowded thousands, or tens of thousands of them, along with their animals, into small dense areas with poor sanitation that disease outbreaks took off. Instead of meeting dozens of new people per year, an urban dweller probably encountered hundreds per day. Diseases that would have affected only a few people at a time as they spread slowly across a continent (or just burned out for lack of new carriers) would now leap from person to person in a flash.

He is talking about the effect of urbanization on disease. But the point is to use this as a metaphor for social media’s effect on our mental life. He says that perhaps diseases of the mind are now spreading quickly. As with urbanization, the trick with social media will be to obtain the benefits and to contain the risks.

Possibly related: in the Peterson/Haidt discussion I referred to the other day, they talk about how the sense of disgust may have evolve to protect people from disease. We tend to feel an instinctive disgust toward groups with customs and manners that differ from our own. If you can overcome this instinct to feel disgust when you are around foreigners, then you can benefit from their ideas and culture. But you increase somewhat your risk of contracting disease. Peterson describes Adolf Hitler as operating on the theory that having Jews or Gypsies in a population was like having rats in a factory. He was so concerned about the disease that might be spread by such creatures that he wanted them eradicated.

VDH versus Yuval Levin

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Victor Davis Hanson writes,

And yet, warts and all, the Trump presidency on all fronts is all that now stands in the way of the completion of what was started in 2009.

We are no longer in the late 1950s era of liberal reform. It is now a postmodern world of intolerance and lockstep orthodoxy.

Etc. I prefer Levin’s view of the world, but I recognize that I could be wrong about that. It would be interesting to see a debate between the two viewpoints that is empirical rather than merely rhetorical.

Handle predicts a shakedown

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He writes,

That is, the capitalists will try to purchase respectability and pay off potential critics that could create real trouble for their businesses by buying ‘indulgences’ in the form of funding donations for certain prominent anti-capitalists, conspicuously and prominently towing the party line in public on the most important ideological commitments, and hiring the right number of the right people for cushy sinecures. If they show they are reliable allies instead of potential threats or rivals, and put enough money where their mouths are, and use their platforms, technological savvy, and expertise to help progressives win elections (e.g. Eric Schmidt wearing his “Staff” badge at Clinton campaign HQ), then in exchange, they will be left alone, and maybe even get some special treatment, favorable coverage, and promotion instead of demonization.

This strikes me as a very plausible scenario. Universities have pacified radicals in this way.

In the mid-1980’s, Freddie Mac made a number of bad loans on multifamily properties in poor neighborhoods. Some of them were cash-out refinances (someone from another company later confided in me that no other multifamily lender did cash-out refis), where the property owners took the money to spend on themselves, did zero maintenance on the properties, and then defaulted on the loans.

The agitation group ACORN saw this as an opportunity to go after Freddie. They organized demonstrations on the theme that Freddie was ruining the dwelling places of poor people. That was indeed one of the unintended consequences of the misguided lending practices, but what ACORN was really after was a big grant from Freddie that amounted to hush many paid to ACORN.

The thing about this shakedown tactic is that it is like paying ransom in a kidnapping. It relieves your problem, but it increases the chances that there will be other victims. In the case of a shakedown by activists, giving them hush money relieves our problem but it hands the group more resources to go and shake down the next corporate victim.