Monthly Archives: November 2016

Jonathan Haidt on the State of Politics

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Self-recommending. Pointer from Tyler Cowen. An excerpt:

I’m a fan of the political scientist Karen Stenner, who divides the groups on the right into three: The laissez-faire conservatives or libertarians who believe in maximum freedom, including economic freedom and small governance; the Burkean conservatives, who fear chaos, disruption, and disorder — these are many of the conservative intellectuals who have largely opposed Trump.

And then there are the authoritarians, who are people who are not necessarily racist but have a strong sense of moral order, and when they perceive that things are coming apart and that there’s a decrease in moral order, they become racist — hostile to alien groups including blacks, gay people, Mexicans, etc. This is the core audience that Trump has spoken to.

That’s not to say that most people who voted for him are authoritarians, but I think this is the core group that provides the passion that got him through the primaries.

But perhaps the key idea is this:

We haven’t talked about social media, but I really believe it’s one of our biggest problems. So long as we are all immersed in a constant stream of unbelievable outrages perpetrated by the other side, I don’t see how we can ever trust each other and work together again.

It’s not just social media. The mainstream media also deal in a “constant stream of unbelievable outrages.” The double standards are glaring. Elizabeth Warren attacks Wall Street, and she is called a brave progressive. Donald Trump attacks Wall Street, and he is called anti-semitic. If the Pope were to say that capitalism needs to be softened by religious beliefs, then the media would report that he “gets it.” Steve Bannon says pretty much the same thing, and supposedly he is a white nationalist.

Related: Scott Alexander writes,

There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he’s “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up. It’s a catastrophic distraction from the dozens of other undeniable problems with Trump that could have convinced voters to abandon him. That it came to dominate the election cycle should be considered a horrifying indictment of our political discourse, in the same way that it would be a horrifying indictment of our political discourse if the entire Republican campaign had been based around the theory that Hillary Clinton was a secret Satanist. Yes, calling Romney a racist was crying wolf. But you are still crying wolf.

Tyler Cowen thinks that Alexander is naive. I think not. The fact that real rape happens does not make false accusations of rape helpful. And the fact that real oppression happens does not make false accusations about it helpful.

If minorities come under attack under President Trump, then I will rally to their defense. But the wave of post-election rallies strikes me as more counterproductive and divisive than healing or inclusive. If what you want is a peaceful, inclusive society, then you should model peaceful, inclusive rhetoric and avoid contrived outrage.

The Best Writing on the Presidential Transition

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is by David Halberstam, in The Best and the Brightest. Of course, it is about the Kennedy transition of 1960-1961. As the book opens, President Kennedy is meeting with Robert Lovett to discuss candidates for important offices, such as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.

Note that the first sentence of the book is “A cold day in December.” By today’s standards, Kennedy must have spent the month of November in “disarray.”

Halberstam explains that two party icons who might have offered independent thinking, Adlai Stevenson and Chester Bowles, were passed over for Secretary of State. One important reason is that during the nomination contest, Stevenson and Bowles had failed to live up to Kennedy’s standards of loyalty. Those standards evidently were met by Kennedy’s choice for Attorney General–his brother.

Kennedy selected for his key foreign policy team Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and McGeorge Bundy, all of whom were wedded to orthodox views. They also had no independent political base to detract from their loyalty to Kennedy. Their legacy is the Vietnam War.

On the Trump transition, I ran across this WaPo piece by Eliot Cohen.

The president-elect is surrounding himself with mediocrities whose chief qualification seems to be unquestioning loyalty…By all accounts, his ignorance, and that of his entourage, about the executive branch is fathomless.

Recall that before the election I wrote

On the Republican side the best and the brightest are NeverTrumpers, and I don’t see Mr. Trump reaching across those burned bridges.

Cohen is certainly not repairing those bridges (he is close to declaring them beyond repair). If his strong words are based on a single interaction he had with someone on the Trump team, then shame on him. On the other hand, if Cohen has accumulated a plural of anecdotes, then he is delivering a fair warning.

[UPDATE: Yuval Levin writes,

I respect Cohen, certainly share his concerns about Trump, and can understand his worries here. But I think his piece is unfair in some important respects, and ultimately unpersuasive

I should add that I also find the piece a bit strange, in this respect: my guess is that Cohen could reach a lot of his friends among conservative foreign policy wonks with a more private medium, such as email. What was the purpose in going public in the Post? As Levin puts it,

if Trump’s team concludes that every frank private conversation they have with anyone outside their circle will end up in the newspapers, they will be even less likely to reach beyond that circle in recruiting talent, and the country will pay for it.

Thanks to a commenter for pointing to Levin’s post, which I had somehow missed.
]

I do not know Eliot Cohen. However, it happens that his daughter was in my class when I taught AP statistics in 2001-2002. That was my first full year of high school teaching, and I was not yet competent at explaining concepts. After several months, I realized that what the students were getting from me was just a general indication of what they were supposed to know. Most of the students who were actually learning the subject were getting their instruction from Eliot Cohen’s daughter.

The Best Post-Election Piece So Far

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From Joshua Mitchell.

“Globalization” and “identity politics” are a remarkable configuration of ideas, which have sustained America, and much of the rest of the world, since 1989. With a historical eye—dating back to the formal acceptance of the state-system with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648—we see what is so remarkable about this configuration: It presumes that sovereignty rests not with the state, but with supra-national organizations—NAFTA, WTO, the U.N., the EU, the IMF, etc.—and with subnational sovereign sites that we name with the term “identity.”

…When you start thinking in terms of management by global elites at the trans-state level and homeless selves at the substate level that seek, but never really find, comfort in their “identities,” the consequences are significant: Slow growth rates (propped up by debt-financing) and isolated citizens who lose interest in building a world together. Then of course, there’s the rampant crony-capitalism that arises when, in the name of eliminating “global risk” and providing various forms of “security,” the collusion between ever-growing state bureaucracies and behemoth global corporations creates a permanent class of winners and losers.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Read Mitchell’s whole piece, as well as the earlier essay to which he links. I find his thoughts congenial, because I agree that the election pitted cosmopolitan vs. anti-cosmopolitan.

However, this is far from the last word. In fact, I would say that the longer you take to react to news, the better off you are. In general, I like to schedule my posts several days in advance. (This one is being drafted 3 days before it is scheduled to appear.) That gives me time to revise or delete a post before it appears. You may have noticed that when stock futures plummeted the night of the election, Paul Krugman predicted that the plunge would be permanent. I bet he wishes he had scheduled that post for a few days later, in which case he could have deleted it before it became public. In fact, I rarely have to revise or delete, because scheduling a post in advance forces me to be less reactive and to think ahead.

A lot of social media lacks the “schedule in advance” feature. I don’t think Twitter has it (I only use Twitter automatically, to announce blog posts, so I do not know how Twitter actually works.) Facebook does not have it. Software for posting comments does not have it. (If you like to comment on this blog, feel free to hold back for a few days. Old comments on old posts show up for me to read just as well as fresh comments on fresh posts.)

Thus, for the most part, social media leads people to be reactive and trigger-happy, as opposed to reflective and sober. It is something that one has to be aware of and push back against.

Election Over-read

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Tyler Cowen writes,

I see Democrats as somewhat concentrated in particular cities and also in particular occupations, more than Republicans are. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is another way in which Democrats are less diverse.

Read the whole thing. He is delicately suggesting that Democrats might have a notion of diversity that is too narrow. However, I doubt that he would have written that post if the election had gone the other way. Moreover, the election easily could have gone the other way. Maybe if it had been held a few weeks earlier or a few weeks later the outcome would have been different. Maybe if the Democratic ticket had been more attractive the outcome would have been different. Maybe if Rubio or one of the other Republican establishment favorites had won the nomination the outcome would have been different.

I should note that all election-reading, including my own, tends to be self-serving. One crude way to describe the social order in this country is that straight, white progressives are at the top, conservatives are in the middle, and various presumably oppressed groups are at the bottom. Progressives prefer to read the election as a kick in the pants of the folks at the bottom. Conservatives prefer to read the election as a kick in the pants of the folks at the top. I might add that some progressives see a social order that includes two layers on the left, with centrist Clinton Democrats on top of true progressives. In this view, the centrists are the ones who received the kick in the pants.

Elections prove much less than we are inclined to think they do. I would say that if progressives and Democrats were right about policy issues before the election, then they are still right. If they were wrong, they would still be wrong, even if they had won.

What I take away from recent elections is that other people bought into Barack Obama and Donald Trump much more than I would. I am not sure what else I should read into the results.

Picturing Genetic Engineering

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A commenter writes,

Imagine you have a button on the wall you could press which would which would eliminate schizophrenia in all people born after say January 1, 2017. Would you press it?

That is not the way I picture genetic engineering working, at least in the near future. Instead, the question might be posed as, “This gene raises the probability of schizophrenia by .03, but it also raises the probability of artistic genius by ___. Would you like us to edit that gene out of your offspring?”

To put it another way, if there is a single gene that caused schizophrenia, and it has no beneficial effects that compensate, then how does that gene persist?

My amateur understanding is that many characteristics are determined by multiple genes, and many genes have multiple impacts. That means that for genetic engineers the choices will not be clear-cut for a long time, perhaps never.

TLP watch

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Sean Blanda wrote,

Sharing links that mock a caricature of the Other Side isn’t signaling that we’re somehow more informed. It signals that we’d rather be smug [jerks] than consider alternative views. It signals that we’d much rather show our friends that we’re like them, than try to understand those who are not.

In The Three Languages of Politics, I also discuss political discourse that is designed to close the minds of the people on your side, as opposed to opening their minds or those of the opponent.

Blanda linked to another piece, from 2015, written by self-described leftist Fredrik DeBoer, who wrote,

Right now I just think there’s this fundamental problem where so many people who identify themselves as being part of the broad left define their coalition based on linguistic cues, cultural overlap, and social circles. The job of politics, at its most basic, is finding common cause with people who aren’t like you. But current incentives seem to point in the opposite direction — surveying the people who are just like you and trying to come up with ways in which that social connection is actually a political connection.

The essay ended with a plea

You have to be willing to sacrifice your carefully curated social performance and be willing to work with people who are not like you.

Now, apply those thoughts to libertarians.

If California Wants a Divorce, We Need a Pre-Nup

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Reportedly, the election of Trump has caused some Californians to talk about secession. Secession got a bad name when the slave states did it, but the concept appeals to me. In general, I wish secession were easier in this country. I would like to see little towns be able to secede from counties, or counties secede from states, or what have you.

However, I have a hard time figuring out the logistics of a California secession. Take Social Security (please). On secession day, I assume that Californians stop paying taxes to the Federal government. So, somebody somewhere has to pay taxes in order for a Californian to continue to receive Social Security benefits. (You do know, don’t you, that the government never “saved up” your taxes to pay for your Social Security?) Will California taxpayers pick up the tab? Or will elderly Californians be encouraged to emigrate back to the legacy U.S. in order to get their benefits? And if the latter happens, will the legacy U.S. agree to let them in and give them their benefits?

Somebody needs to work out a generic pre-nup agreement if we are going to sort out the logistics of a state getting a divorce.

Martin Gurri Watch

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Jim Newell writes,

The Democratic Party establishment has beclowned itself and is finished.

I think of the lawmakers, the consultants, the operatives, and—yes—the center-left media, and how everything said over the past few years leading up to this night was [baloney sandwich].

Once again, Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public seems to be the best guide to events. It seems as though the Democratic Party is ripe for the sort of anti-establishment revolt that hit the Republicans this year.

Speaking of Gurri, prior to the election, he wrote,

In somewhat slower motion than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is unbundling into dozens of political war bands, each focused with monomaniacal intensity on a particular cause – feminism, the environment, anti-capitalism, pro-immigration, racial or sexual grievance. This process, scarcely veiled by the gravitational attraction of President Obama and Clinton herself, will become obvious to the most casual observer the moment the Democrats lose the White House.

That moment has come, and we’ll see how the prediction plays out.

President Nixon’s Wage and Price Controls

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Burton A. Abrams and James L. Butkiewicz write,

We uncover and report in this paper evidence that Nixon manipulated his New Economic Policy to help secure his reelection victory in 1972. He became convinced that wage and price controls were necessary to grab the headlines away from the defeatist abandonment of the Bretton Woods Agreement and the closing of the U.S. gold window. Nixon understood the impact of his wage and price controls, but chose to trade off longer-term economic costs to the economy for his own short-term political gain.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. The paper is based on President Nixon’s secret tapes.

I think that Nixon’s New Economic Policy is under-studied by economists. At the time, many people though that the central policy was getting rid of the gold peg and that wage and price controls were a “cover.” The cover worked, both in the short term and the long term, as people focused on the wage and price controls then and now.

The conventional story of the inflation of the 1970s is that Fed Chairman Arthur Burns printed a lot of money. But as you know, I need to fined a different explanation. My alternative is that abandoning fixed exchange rates set off an inflationary wave, starting with traded goods but spreading elsewhere.

It was less than two years later that OPEC was able to quadruple the dollar price of oil. After that, inflationary psychology took over. Even though we retained price controls on refined petroleum products, such as gasoline, this regime probably raised costs (such as gasoline shortages) more than if prices had been allowed to rise.

What alternative did the Nixon Administration have? The U.S. had been losing reserves of gold and foreign currency at an unsustainable pace. Higher domestic interest rates would have stemmed the outflow, but this would have been unpopular. A lower government budget deficit would have raised net domestic saving (T-G + S-I) and reduced the outflow from the trade deficit, but Mr. Nixon did not go for that, either.

Two Types of Beliefs

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Kevin Simler writes,

From the inside, via introspection, each of us feels that our beliefs are pretty damn sensible. Sure we might harbor a bit of doubt here and there. But for the most part, we imagine we have a firm grip on reality; we don’t lie awake at night fearing that we’re massively deluded.

But when we consider the beliefs of other people? . . .

Later,

I contend that the best way to understand all the crazy beliefs out there — aliens, conspiracies, and all the rest — is to analyze them as crony beliefs. Beliefs that have been “hired” not for the legitimate purpose of accurately modeling the world, but rather for social and political kickbacks.

Still later,

The trouble with people is that they have partial visibility into our minds, and they sometimes reward us for believing falsehoods and/​or punish us for believing the truth.

My thoughts:

1. One might suggest that incentives apply only to beliefs that you espouse. You can choose your private beliefs on merit. However, it is hard to maintain a private/public disparity. You might have to reveal your true beliefs at some point. Also, when you espouse something, I think it makes you more inclined to believe it.

2. Of course, all beliefs are socially communicated. One way to rephrase Simler’s thesis is that some beliefs are transmitted via reason and others are transmitted via incentives.

3. It might be hard to avoid proceeding from the insight that beliefs can be affected by incentives to go on to say that well, my beliefs are based on merit but yours are based on incentives. Simler, too, is worried about this. His solution is to recommend embedding oneself in a community where the norms of behavior go against maintaining confidence in beliefs that are affected by incentives. Such a community will create good incentives to counteract bad incentives.

My concern is that we are prone to deceive and to self-deceive. Suppose that economist X at Yale and economist Y at GMU are each convinced that he or she is part of a community that creates good social incentives for shaping one’s beliefs. Yet their beliefs differ. What should we do then? I think Simler would say that in that case we should reward those who have low confidence in their beliefs and punish those who have high confidence. But what if neither the Yale nor the GMU economics department effectively does this?