Religious Fervor and Demography

Jason Collins reviews Eric Kaufmann’s Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century.

To give a sense of the power of this higher fertility, the Old Order Amish in the United States have increased from 5,000 people in 1900 to almost a quarter of a million members. In the United Kingdom, Orthodox Jews make up 17 per cent of the Jewish population but three-quarters of Jewish births.

…Kaufmann’s case worries me more than tales of government deficits due to demographic change. Even if you assign a low probability to Kaufmann’s projections, it provides another strand to the case that low fertility in the secular West is not without costs.

The numbers cited about Orthodox Jews in the UK struck me as fishy, based on what I know about the U.S. Suppose that there are 80 non-Orthodox Jewish women and they each have one child (a really low fertility rate), for a total of 80 non-Orthodox Jewish births. Then suppose you have 20 Orthodox Jewish women, and they have to account for 3/4 of all Jewish births, which means that they need to give birth to 240 children, or an average of 12 children each. There are in fact several sub-groups within Orthodox Judaism, and there are some sects in which families of that size are common, but there is no way that the average family size of all Orthodox Jews is 12 children.

There is a larger objection that I have, which is that the high growth of the fervently religious starts from a low base. Assume that non-fervent women have one child each, and fervent women have ten children each. If you start with 999 non-fervent women for every fervent woman, it is going to take quite a few generations for the fervent to “inherit the earth.” Meanwhile, much else will change.

[UPDATE: In a comment, Megan McArdle points out that the arithmetic in the above example leads to the fervent reaching parity in 3 generations, and then soaring to dominance thereafter. But as she points out, the discrepancy in fertility between the fervent and non-fervent is not as wide as in the examle. And if nothing else, I can fall back on “much else will change.” By the end of this century, we could very well see dramatic changes in medical science, including reversal of aging and cloning.

Daniel Yergin on The Great Regulation

He writes,

Voters under 30 were either very small or not yet born when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989. They have no memory of communism—what it meant in terms of poverty, thwarted opportunity and political repression. Closer to home, few Americans recall the likes of the now-defunct Civil Aeronautics Board, which not only set the price of an airline ticket but regulated the size of the in-flight sandwiches. What millennials do know is what happened in 2008—and for many it serves as an indictment of the market system.

The people want regulation and they are getting it–good and hard, as Mencken would say. The result?

if you want lifetime employment, go into compliance.

Thanks to a reader for the pointer. I used to say that if you want to start an automobile company in this country you need a handful of engineers–and at least 1000 lawyers. Starting an independent medical practice is getting to that point.

There may be natural forces at work that cause industries to become dominated by a few large players. But there is also the unnatural force of regulation.

The Great Regulation

Guy Rolnik writes,

Looking at both intangible investments and political activities to explain the 20% rise in Tobin’s q in the U.S. since 1970, a new working paper by James Bessen from Boston University concludes that activity associated with increased Federal regulation is the most important explanatory factor, especially after 2000. In fact, spending on R&D and other intangibles has fallen relative to conventional assets since 2000.

Noting that operating margins for these firms have also risen since 1990 by over 2% in aggregate, Bessen’s study also found that variables associated with regulation and corporate campaign contributions account for about half of this increase.

Pointer from Mark Thoma. The article is a long interview with Bessen, interesting throughout. For example,

In 2011 a new patent law passed, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act. This patent law was essentially negotiated between a small number of large pharma companies and a small number of large tech companies.

…all of a sudden you have a whole lot of small businesses in every state in the country who are now upset about getting sued for patent infringement over these very ridiculous claims.

Once again, I wonder how much of the trend toward industry consolidation and loss of dynamism in the past twenty years is due to regulation and rent-seeking.

The Book Sounds Interesting

Erwin Dekker writes,

The rise of fascism posed an even greater threat to the values of the liberal bourgeois, and at the same time it demonstrated that socialism might not be inevitable after all. One of my book’s major themes is the transformation from the resigned, and at times fatalistic, study of the transformation of the older generation, to the more activist and combatant attitude of the younger generation. Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Peter Drucker as well as important intellectual currents in Vienna start to oppose, and defend the Habsburg civilization from its enemies.

I have seen many references to the article on Facebook and on blogs, including Mark Thoma’s link.

The book seems like it might be interesting, but the publishers are evidently worried that people might buy it, so they are charging a price that should deter that from happening.

Tocqueville, Nisbet, and Kling

Near the end of an Ezra Klein podcast, at about the one hour and twelve minute mark, when asked to name three books that have influenced him, Yuval Levin lists works by those three authors. He is careful to say that Specialization and Trade is not in the same class as the other two, but still. . .

My favorite part of the podcast begins just before the 18-minute mark, when Levin recites his view of how a typical Baby Boomer would have experienced the decades starting from the 1950s. I think his take is both accurate and interesting.

Klein’s response is also interesting. He says that what Levin has just presented is the white male view of history, and his generation is more attuned to women, ethnic minorities, and sexual minorities. I think as a representation of Klein’s generation, that, too, is spot on. I get the same take from my daughters.

Previous generations of young people were insufferable because they thought that they invented sex. Klein’s generation is insufferable because they think they invented social morality.

Google News Usurps Matt Drudge

Drudge is known for juxtaposing two headlines to make an ironic point. At the moment, Google News is showing me one headline about President Obama disputing as not jibing with reality Donald Trump’s dark characterization of the state of things during his acceptance speech. Higher up on Google News is a headline about the latest apparent terror attack in Munich.

People have pointed out to me that Trump came down strongly on the civilization vs. barbarism axis. My guess is that the Democrats will not end up trying to compete along that axis. I do not think that they help themselves by calling attention to the issue. In fact, no matter how much they may believe that facts and rationality are on their side, claiming that the problems of crime and terrorism are over-stated would be the most self-defeating way possible for the Democrats to call attention to those issues.

I expect that the Democrats will end up coming down strongly on the oppressor-oppressed axis. Generically, they will try to tie Mr. Trump to another headline I see on Google News, which is that ex-Klansman David Duke is seeking a Senate seat. Their message will be that “If you are an X, then a Trump Presidency will take away your rights,” where X will be alleged to include non-white, non-male, non-straight, non-Evangelical. . .

In other words, my prediction is that this election season we will see the three-axes model much in evidence, with Mr. Trump hitting the civilization-barbarism axis for all it’s worth and Mrs. Clinton hitting the oppressor-oppressed axis for all it’s worth.

Wither the Suburban Homeowner?

The American Interest has a special issue devoted to Plutocracy and Democracy. On Thursday, the Hudson Institute hosted a discussion featuring various speakers, including Tyler Cowen. I watched some of it from home.

Apart from Tyler, the speakers in the first hour were dreadful. When a poli sci professor starts telling me that the root cause of the Trump phenomenon is people resenting the Citizens United Supreme Court case, I think that it is more likely that the root cause of the Trump phenomenon is people resenting narrow intellectuals like this poli sci professor.

As for the magazine, on line I read the article by Walter Russell Mead, which I strongly recommend. (Be careful–you are only allowed to read one article unless you subscribe. Keep an extra web browser handy.) He draws an interesting parallel.

The contemporary crisis of the middle strata in American society is perhaps best compared to the long and painful decline of the family farm. The American dream we know in our time—a good job and a nice house in a decent suburb with good schools—is not the classic version. The dream that animated the mass of colonists, that drove the Revolution and that drew millions of immigrants to the United States during the first century of independence, was the dream of owning one’s own farm. Up until the 20th century, most Americans lived in rural communities.

What Mead goes on to sat is that the family-farmer dream came to be replaced by the suburban (and small town) homeowner dream. However, he raises the prospect that this latter dream may be in the process of fading out. I wish he had developed this idea further. Let me try:

In the three decades following World War II, the lifestyle that people aspired to, and often could achieve, involved ownership of a house with a yard and reliance for transportation on a family car. Nowadays, many young professionals do not aspire to that lifestyle, preferring to live in urban condos and apartments and to dispense with personal automobiles. Meanwhile, the postwar lifestyle has become harder to achieve for many people.

Mead refers to the threatened class of homeowners and homeowner-aspirants as Crabgrass Jacksonians.

Crabgrass Jacksonians do not trust the professional class anymore: not the journalists, not the professors, not the bureaucrats, not the career politicians. They believe that if these folks get more resources and power they will simply abuse them. Give the educators more money and the professors will go off on more weird and arcane theoretical tangents and the teachers’ unions will kick back and relax. In neither case will they spend more time helping your kids get ready for real life. Give the bureaucrats more power and they will impose more counterproductive regulations that throttle small business. Give the lawyers more power and they will raise prices and clog commerce with lawsuits and red tape. Give the politicians more time in office and more tax money to spend and they will continue stroking the fat cats while calling rhetorically for change.

Again, I recommend the entire essay.

Tyler Cowen on Brexit, Steven Pinker, and Joseph McCarthy

And also other topics. The link goes to a Twitter post with a video.

Judge for yourself, but to me it sounds like he is telling a PSST story. He says that, for better or worse, the UK spent the last twenty years working with a set of rules on trade in services with other European countries, and now that those rules have been cast into doubt by the Brexit vote, the British economy is in trouble. It is a very different take from that of those who think in GDP-factory terms.

Also, in my other post today, I mention an event on plutocracy co-sponsored by the Hudson Institute and The American Interest. Tyler Cowen makes remarks that have little or nothing to do with the article that he wrote for the event. Two of his more provocative opinions:

1. Steven Pinker may be wrong. Rather than mass violence following a benign trend, it could be cyclical. When there is a long peace, people become complacent, they allow bad leaders to take power and to run amok, and you get mass violence again. (Cowen argues that there are more countries now run by bad people than was the case a couple of decades ago)

2. Joseph McCarthy was not wrong. There were Soviet agents in influential positions. Regardless of what you think of that, the relevant point is that today Chinese and Russian plutocrats may have their tentacles in the U.S. and may be subtly causing the U.S. to be less of a liberal capitalist nation and more of a cronyist plutocracy.

The Depressing Election Year of 2016

Kevin Williamson writes,

the two presidential candidates Americans got most excited about were Donald Trump, a nationalist, and Bernie Sanders, a socialist. Between the two of them, they make a pretty good national socialist.

Jonah Goldberg says pretty much the same thing in this interview with Bill Kristol. I found the long interview worth a listen. One of Goldberg’s points is that he views support for Trump as a reaction to the discrepancy between what was promised and what was delivered by politicians, especially Republican politicians. After they were propelled to victory in the mid-term elections, they came across as losers. This opened the way for an outsider to come in and claim to be a winner.

My thoughts begin with a generalization about how different political persuasions view human nature:

–Conservatives tend to believe that we need traditional institutions and restraints to control the evil impulses that are in everyone.

–Progressives tend to believe that we just need the right leaders to bring out the good that is in everyone.

–Libertarians tend to believe that we just need smaller government to bring out the good that is in everyone.

It seems to me that news events over the past twelve months or so have put a strain on those who are inclined to view human nature as good. Racial conflict and terrorism tend to reinforce the conservative view that human nature is something that needs to be restrained.

Of course, progressives can continue to blame the racial conflict on bad leaders who are not sufficiently attuned to the oppression of black people. And they can blame terrorism on the invasion of Iraq.

And libertarians can blame the racial conflict on cruel laws and their vicious enforcement. Libertarians can blame terrorism on past American intervention.

I am finding myself drifting in a conservative direction. But I still try to keep in mind that when we seek out institutions to restrain evil impulses, we should not put all of our chips, or even very many of them, on government.