Category Archives: Politics

Martin Gurri update

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1. In a recent talk, he says,

The question has been posed at this conference whether we are witnessing the rise of authoritarian or fascist governments. Among the old democracies at least, I believe the opposite is closer to the truth. Democratic governments are terrified of the public’s unhappiness. They know that heroic actions are expected of them, but also that every initiative will be savaged and every failure amplified. Their behavior is the opposite of authoritarian. It’s a drift to dysfunction: to paralysis.

Look at the Republicans on Obamacare.

Other provocative passages:

Rhetorical aggression defines the political web. By embracing Trump in significant numbers, the public has signaled that it is willing to impose the untrammeled relations of social media on the fragile forms of American democracy.

Information, it turned out, has authority in proportion to its scarcity – the more there is, the less people believe.

I recommend the whole thing.

2. Read his account of the controversy over allowing a representative of a far-right German party to speak at the conference.

3. I continue to recommend The Revolt of the Public more often than any other book. But I also recommend my review of it. Near the end of my very long review, I wrote,

The dominant strategy of the outsiders is to focus on the negative, exposing and denouncing the failures, imperfections, and corruption of the insiders. On the left, this means heaping blame on the institutions of capitalism and free markets. On the right, this means heaping blame on the institutions of government. Neither side will propose, much less implement, an effective reform agenda.

I could have included academia and professional media as institutions disparaged by the outsider right.

Maybe a publisher would want to produce a print version of the book, with my review as an introduction.

Social media and polarization

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Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse M. Shapiro write,

If access to the Internet or social media use is a primary driver of political polarization among the U.S. electorate, we would expect to see greater changes in polarization among young adults (18–39) than among the old (65 and older). The data, however, tell a different story. The change in our index of political polarization in the past 20 years is twice as large for the old as for young adults, despite the older group using social media and obtaining political information online at substantially lower rates.

Interesting. Some possibilities:

1. Their constructed index of polarization may be more sensitive to picking up changes in the elderly than in young people.

2. Cable news may be the most polarizing medium these days, and old people probably watch more cable news.

3. We can look forward to a less polarized politics once the crotchety old people die off. (I don’t believe this.)

Speaking of crotchety, here comes another rant against politics on social media.

I grant that all forms of media can be sensationalist. The term “sensationalist” was first applied to newspapers.

But it seems to me that what we call social media cannot be anything but sensationalist. When it comes to political issues, the sensation that people cannot resist is anger validation. Cable news has provided that for years. I am willing to believe that cable news, rather than social media, is the biggest contributor to our anger validation addiction. (I never see cable news, except at the airport, which is not often.) But other media seem to have degenerated to the Cable News level. Using social media, the ordinary person tries to imitate the worst of the talking-heads smackdowns.

As I have said before, although I am “on” Twitter, I do not use it. The software echoes my blog posts to twitter in some fashion.

And as far as Facebook goes, I am about as thrilled to see politics there as I am at seeing it in pro football. The difference is that I had mostly tuned out pro football years ago, and I have only recently dialed back my time spent on Facebook.

Complex problems are best discussed in slow conversations. In a slow conversation, many people contribute. People think out loud. Contrary viewpoints are expressed, if not by representatives of those viewpoints, then by people making a sincere attempt to play devil’s advocate, not to paint other points of view as stupid or deranged.

Blogging for me is part of a slow conversation, not a rapid-fire reaction to the topic du jour. Most of my posts are riffs on other people’s thoughts.

When blogging first got going, there were “trackbacks” that encouraged thick conversations. That might have been the golden age of blogging. The trackback feature was killed by spammers, who polluted it. There was comment spam, too, but there are effective programs to filter it out. If somebody developed a filter for trackback spam, it was too late to save the trackback feature.

I might suggest that one format that has not been completely corrupted by the contemporary media environment is the book review. I think that people who write book reviews tend to to take their time thinking about what they are going to write. And writing about a book means writing about a topic that has a longer shelf life than what you find on cable news.

Post-election tech guilt

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The un-conference that I attended in San Francisco is over. I found it very stimulating. I am grateful to have been able attend. The format, which was very light on presentations and much heavier on discussions and informal conversation, was congenial to me.

This was my first opportunity to encounter the San Francisco tech scene. Many attendees displayed a combination of high energy and impressive intelligence. I found myself feeling captivated by their spirit and creativity. But this is also a time of collective self-doubt there, like a cloud hanging over.

Some thoughts:

1. One might roughly divide the attendees into capitalists and anti-capitalists. The capitalists are entrepreneurs and VC’s. The anti-capitalists are tech journalists, leaders of non-profits working in the tech field, or leftist heterodox economists. Of course, this is over-generalizing. For example, some in the non-profit sector fell into what I am calling the capitalist camp. But bear with me.

2. The anti-capitalists want the capitalists to feel badly about: (a) the wealth and power of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon; (b) the election of Donald Trump. The capitalists seemed ready to feel guilty about (b) but were not ready to join an assault on (a).

3. Some of the capitalists wanted to want to deal with their disappointment about the election by trying to connect with disaffected Americans in the heartland. They spoke with pride of taking Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to meet with people in the Midwest. They discussed ideas like having Stanford set up satellite campuses there or promoting economic development there.

4. The anti-capitalists were the ones who wanted to re-write the economic rules. Possibilities included breaking up the tech giants or nationalizing them or organizing the tech work force to make demands on them. The idea of government regulation did not come up so much, but perhaps that is because the anti-capitalists cannot picture themselves having infuence with Mr. Trump and a Republican Congress. I found the self-assured certainty of the anti-capitalists frightening. At one small breakout session that included a lot of what I am calling the anti-capitalist thinking, I introduced the expression “fantasy despot.” That term comes from Kenneth Minogue, but when I search for fantasy despot syndrome, I mostly come up with my own previous writing. I tried to explain that the desire to control the tech companies could be seen as a desire to take on the role of a despot. I doubt that I expressed this clearly, and the discussion passed over what I had to say. But my sense of the group dynamics reinforced my thinking. I had visions of a leader emerging reminiscent of Lenin.

5. I could not help but think that the dynamics of the conference would have been completely different had the the election swung the other way. If Ms. Clinton were in office, I think that the anti-capitalists would have been much less central. The anti-capitalists were given some pushback, but I think that with a different election result they would have been met with something close to dismissal.

6. As it is, I still would not bet on the anti-capitalists getting very far. But if they do, it could be as a consequence of the chance result of the election. And I, for one (and at this conference I did feel like the only one) do not buy the narrative that fake news and social media ads accounted for the election outcome. Perhaps the SF tech crowd over-estimates the extent that the world revolves around them. Or perhaps I am making the opposite mistake.

7. If the anti-capitalists do get some traction, my guess is that it will come from influencing the tech work force. I could see the social justice causes eating away at the entrepreneurial drive and eroding the elan of the tech bros. I can imagine this having a devastating effect on the famous Silicon Valley ecosystem. I estimate the probability of this as low. It depends on the extent to which tech grads coming out of college these days are susceptible to the leftist politics on campuses, and I have no basis for gauging that. Have a nice day.

8. For all of my concern with the anti-capitalists, I do take the view that the Internet did not turn out the way that many of us hoped for twenty years ago. See my previous posts Thoughts on Internet Censorship and Did the suits win the Internet?. For a deeper discussion, see Professor Fred Turner’s 15-minute video (he has a book on the topic as well). There was a breakout session on this topic, and it was enjoyable, but we spent a lot of time discussing the incorrect assumptions that we made twenty years ago and much less time coming up with possible explanations for how things turned out as they did.

9. I am rooting for the Internet giants to be disrupted, but by market forces, not by self-appointed activist reformers. Even if the market fails to disrupt the giants, I would rather live with them than see the anti-capitalists in charge.

Provocative sentences about information overload

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From James Williams, in an interview by Brian Gallagher.

What’s happened is, really rapidly, we’ve undergone this tectonic shift, this inversion between information and attention. Most of the systems that we have in society—whether it’s news, advertising, even our legal systems—still assume an environment of information scarcity. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it doesn’t necessarily protect freedom of attention. There wasn’t really anything obstructing people’s attention at the time it was written. Back in an information-scarce environment, the role of a newspaper was to bring you information—your problem was lacking it. Now it’s the opposite. We have too much.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Think of this as an environment that rewards the most clever spammers.

Sentences about autonomous vehicles

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Joshua Gans writes,

Consider, for a moment, the notion that human error could be completely eliminated by having autonomous vehicles. Would we need car airbags? Would we need seat belts? Would we need the car to be reinforced to withstand high impact collisions? Would we need crumple zones? I could go on. Would we need road barriers? Would we need steet lights? Now think about the costs of all of those things and you can see how they add up.

Today, we think that human driving is normal and autonomous vehicles are frightening. At some time in the future we will transition rapidly to the opposite point of view. Gans alludes to that in his conclusion.

Sentences lifted from the comments

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1. A commenter writes,

At the core of the problem is the reality that government and culture are both making American life a bit more complex and demanding an experience each year. We aren’t using expanded knowledge and technology to make our lives easier, but to have more and to do more.

If you can keep up, this is good. If you can’t, this breaks you down. The size of the group that can keep up gets just a bit smaller each year.

It should be possible for people to live a simple, dignified life if they want to, and government should facilitate that. But instead, we slowly ratchet up the complexity of every aspect of a normal life. The answers aren’t with strategies to help everyone live faster. It’s to allow some to live slower, the way they want to.

2. A different commenter writes,

As the firm grows, each employee’s self-interest is slightly more separated from the owner-entrepreneur. As the firm gets larger, the joint production of all employees is increasingly divergent from what the market requests. Instead, some of the employees’ joint production is used to create longer coffee breaks, more internet shopping, and more personal story-telling. Eventually this firm is no longer competitive in the market, because too much cost and effort is channeled into non-profitable activities.

…Therefore the employees’ individual pursuits of self-interest are constrained by the discipline of competing in the marketplace, and that’s why firms don’t continue to grow boundlessly.

Government bureaucracies are not constrained by the discipline of the market. They therefore grow largely to serve the needs of their employees.

Speaking for Yuval Levin

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Commenter Handle writes,

Levin’s point is focused specifically on the right, and he seems to be saying that Anton is both living in and perpetuating the right’s pessimism bubble. Anton said that American conservatism – especially as someone would have understood the implications of that label in the Reagan administration – is indeed on the verge of total defeat at the hands of the progressives. Levin says it is doing ok, and that no one need be alarmed, or conclude that special, drastic measures must be taken to shore up defenses.

That is not exactly what Levin is saying. I think that the best source is probably an essay that he wrote, called Conservatism in an Age of Alienation. Read the whole thing. A few excerpts:

The idea that ours is the decisive time of history’s reckoning is always attractive, but conservatives in particular should see that it is almost certainly wrong. We are called to enable a revival, not to mount a total revolution, and therefore to hold up the good before the rising generation rather than to tear down all we have inherited and treat it as unsalvageable.

…despair of America is not justified, and the case for why this moment in particular should be the moment to despair does not add up to much. It assigns to Progressives much more malice (and competence) than is warranted and credits them with far more than they have actually achieved, and it sells our society short. While we confront immense problems, America also has extraordinary strengths at its disposal and a deep reserve of moderation that has always served it well.

…Constitutional guardrails matter more than any specific policy preferences—because they will last longer, and because they will give shape and form to our political habits and our civic life and help us take the principles and self-evident truths underlying our politics seriously. A constructive conservative politics in the Trump years must therefore first and foremost be a politics of constitutional restoration.

That was written five months ago. More recently, in conversation, he says that the guardrails have been working. This has been frustrating for those of us who want to see Obamacare repealed and other policy shifts proportional to the drama of the Republican victory a year ago. There have been some changes of direction, for example at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Communications Commission, but in other areas there has been institutional inertia. Levin would argue that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Most important, the fact that President Trump has been checked at times by courts and by Congress helps to remind Progressives of the value of traditional institutions. Instead, if the President had trampled over these institutional barriers, that would have magnified support for a destructive “resistance” and for left-wing extremism in general.

Note: after I wrote this post, but before I scheduled it to appear, a commenter recommended the same essay, and Handle responded.

Free speech means not having to lie

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In a podcast with Russ Roberts, Megan McArdle says,

as you pull those things in, you create this climate of everyone feeling like they have to lie, in public. And, what’s interesting about reading the Soviet, those Soviet era things, is how many people–Orwell talks about this, lots of [?] talks about this. It’s the feeling that making you tell a lie is the point. That, there’s no, like, greater point of what you are saying except that they have undermined your character by forcing you to lie for the regime.

The overall topic of the conversation is the role that the Internet plays in free speech. On the one hand, the Internet enables you to express any point of view. On the other hand, it enables mobs to form to shame you, and to cost you your job. It is this latter capability that seems to have surged to the forefront recently. And ultimately it may make people willing to say things that they do not believe, because of fear of the mob.

Yoram Hazony on classical liberalism

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He writes,

Modern classical liberals, inheriting the rationalism of Hobbes and Locke, believe they can speak authoritatively to the political needs of every human society, everywhere. In his seminal work, “Liberalism” (1927), the great classical-liberal economist Ludwig von Mises thus advocates a “world super-state really deserving of the name,” which will arise if we “succeed in creating throughout the world . . . nothing less than unqualified, unconditional acceptance of liberalism. Liberal thinking must permeate all nations, liberal principles must pervade all political institutions.”

Hazony sees this as universalism, and he sees universalism as leading to the project of worldwide dominion and hence, for example, to the war in Iraq. He draws a line from Mises and Hayek 80 years ago to the neoconservatives of recent decades.

I found the essay to be odd. He writes,

Establishing democracy in Egypt or Iraq looks doable to classical liberals because they assume that human reason is everywhere the same, and that a commitment to individual liberties and free markets will arise rapidly once the benefits have been demonstrated and the impediments removed. Conservatives, on the other hand, see foreign civilizations as powerfully motivated—for bad reasons as well as good ones—to fight the dissolution of their way of life and the imposition of American values.

I have some differences with the folks that I think of as contemporary classical liberals. But I think I can speak for what they would say about the foregoing paragraph.

1. Democracy is not the same as classical liberalism, and majoritarian democracy can be antithetical to classical liberalism.

2. A classical liberal society is one with strong individual rights, including economic rights.

3. A classical liberal society is a universal good, but that does not imply that the American government should send people with guns to other countries to try to turn them into classical liberal societies. Even non-military intervention by our government is wrong. Our idea of universal is that just as we oppose American government officials trying to run our own lives, we oppose them trying to run the lives of people in other countries.

Hazony also writes,

Integrating millions of immigrants from the Middle East also looks easy to classical liberals, because they believe virtually everyone will quickly see the advantages of American (or European) ways and accept them upon arrival. Conservatives recognize that large-scale assimilation can happen only when both sides are highly motivated to see it through. When that motivation is weak or absent, conservatives see an unassimilated migration, resulting in chronic mutual hatred and violence, as a perfectly plausible outcome.

With this paragraph, I believe that he frames the debate about immmigration between classical liberals and conservatives correctly. On this blog, I have seen many commenters take the conservative position. And you know that elsewhere Bryan Caplan speaks for the classical liberal position. I hope that the classical liberals are correct, but I fear that the conservatives may be correct. Rather than eliminate immigration enforcement entirelyl, I would prefer to incrementally increase legal immigration and observe the results.

Overall, I believe that Hazony is correct that the right is divided about President Trump, and that classical liberals are not happy with his economic nationalism. However, I think that when he positions classical liberals as the foreign policy interventionists and conservatives as the non-interventionists, he gets it almost 180 degrees wrong.

After I first composed this post, but before it was scheduled to appear, Alberto Mingardi did a nice job of making the points that I wished to make. Mingardi writes,

Mises was actually criticising the international body of the time (the League of Nations), but expressed hope for “a frame of mind” that looks to see individual rights protected, not just within one’s country but also abroad. I agree that Mises’s use of the word ‘superstate’ is unfortunate, but it is clear that all he is pointing toward is a liberal sensibility that traverses national boundaries.

Good sentences

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from Michael Huemer.

We talk about society because we want to align ourselves with a chosen group, to signal that alignment to others, and to tell a story about who we are. There are AIDS activists because there are people who want to express sympathy for gays, to align themselves against conservatives, and thereby to express “who they are”. There are no nephritis activists, because there’s no salient group you align yourself with (kidney disease sufferers?) by advocating for nephritis research, there’s no group you thereby align yourself *against*, and you don’t tell any story about what kind of person you are.

One of the central problems for human society is attaining cooperation at large scale. It seems that one of the tools for getting a large group to cooperate is to identify and demonize an enemy. This certainly has to be one of the most troubling characteristics of human culture.