Monthly Archives: March 2017

Tyler Cowen’s Complacency Quiz

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It sorts you into four categories:

Trailblazer

Striver

Comfortable

Complacent

I was rated as a striver. I don’t think of myself that way. I might feel better if there were a category called “contrarian.” It would describe me, and I think it also would describe Tyler.

In terms of the categories as given, I would self-identify as comfortable now and a trailblazer when I was younger. I was very entrepreneurial in my 30s and 40s. Now, I just blog. My wife and I have visited many countries, but lately we would rather travel to visit relatives than to see new places. I would much rather go folk dancing than go to a party or have a new experience.

It could be that my score was affected by questions that were impossible to answer, forcing me to almost randomize. For example, dancing is the source of suggestions for music to which I like to listen. That was not one of the choices in the quiz.

Other comments:

1. The introduction to the quiz says that

Complacency is defined as self-satisfaction accompanied by unawareness of possible deficiencies or dangers

This differs from the definition that is offered in The Complacent Class, but I think it gets much closer to what Tyler means.

2. Making up a quiz is fun, but I wonder if it was made up with complacency (as defined above). In theory you ought to test your quiz to see how well it works. You would ask a bunch of beta testers to both self-identify in terms of categories and to take the quiz. If the quiz puts them in their self-identified categories, then it works. Otherwise, it needs to be tweaked.

In the first edition of The Three Languages of Politics, I used a made-up quiz. I only tested it out on a few friends beforehand. They said that it worked ok. I imagine that it was easier for people to self-identify as libertarians progressives, or conservatives than to self-identify into Tyler’s idiosyncratic categories. But in the new edition that is about to come out, I dropped the pretense of a quiz, and instead I just used the examples as illustrations of the three-axes model.

The Overton Window and Health Insurance

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Liz Sheld writes,

The implicit standard in analysis of the health insurance system is that every consumer must have government-selected coverage. But why? This chosen paradigm doesn’t take into consideration the most forceful motivation of human behavior, namely, whether a large expenditure of limited resources is in one’s economic interest. This standard of “universal coverage” is as artificial as the government’s bloated health care costs.

This is the debate that the Congressional Republicans are ducking. As a result, the Overton Window has moved to the point where Obamacare will not be replaced until the Democrats replace it with full-on single payer.

The points that I would make are:

1. What we call health “insurance” is not real insurance. It is instead a layer of insulation between the recipients of medical services and the providers of those services.

2. It seems that hardly anybody wants real health insurance, meaning a policy that pays benefits rarely and only under extreme circumstances. Instead, what people want as individuals is unlimited access to medical services without having to pay for them. If that is the definition of health insurance in the popular mind, then we are all going to lose our health insurance. Unlimited access to medical services without having to pay for them is an unsustainable approach.

3. There are two alternatives to the unsustainable approach. One alternative is to have people face more of the cost of medical services, in which case they ration their own use of those services. The other alternative is to have the government pay for medical services, in which case it will be the government that rations the use of those services.

4. Much of health care spending is on medical procedures that have high costs and low benefits. Socializing the cost of those procedures means that people will undertake more of them, until the government starts to get serious about health care rationing.

5. Health spending is approaching one fifth of all spending in the economy. If we become culturally committed to socialized medicine, then we can expect the usual consequences of socialism: productivity stagnation; the emergence of an underground economy; corruption; and government repression.

The Winner of the Charles Murray Thread

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Is it Andrew Sullivan?.

And what I saw on the video struck me most as a form of religious ritual — a secular exorcism, if you will — that reaches a frenzied, disturbing catharsis. When Murray starts to speak, the students stand and ritually turn their backs on him in silence. The heretic must not be looked at, let alone engaged. Then they recite a common liturgy in unison from sheets of paper. Here’s how they begin: “This is not respectful discourse, or a debate about free speech. These are not ideas that can be fairly debated, it is not ‘representative’ of the other side to give a platform to such dangerous ideologies. There is not a potential for an equal exchange of ideas.” They never specify which of Murray’s ideas they are referring to. Nor do they explain why a lecture on a recent book about social inequality cannot be a “respectful discourse.” The speaker is open to questions and there is a faculty member onstage to engage him afterward. She came prepared with tough questions forwarded from specialists in the field. And yet: “We … cannot engage fully with Charles Murray, while he is known for readily quoting himself. Because of that, we see this talk as hate speech.” They know this before a single word of the speech has been spoken.

Or is Sullivan’s apocalyptic rhetoric just another example of the sort of outrage politics that is dominating the media these days?

The State of State Schooling

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Andy Smarick writes,

Today, almost 60 state-level government programs enable students to attend private schools, and approximately three million students enroll in about 7,000 charter schools in more than 40 states.16 In 17 cities, at least 30 percent of public school students are now enrolled in charters. The continuous growth of these programs and participating students shows no signs of abating; for instance, national enrollment in charter schools has grown by about 10 percent annually for the past decade, and student participation in private school choice programs doubled between 2011 and 2016.

As a historical matter, in the existing paradigm’s early days, especially in rural areas, some districts had only one school. So initially the district-based approach was not especially associated with technocratic thinking, a powerful central office, residence-based student assignment, and so on. But over the course of the 20th century, as America’s student population expanded and migrated and as the benefits of economies of scale became attractive, districts grew in size. Today, the average district has seven schools, but even that masks the hundreds of districts (including county-based districts in the South and urban districts nationwide) that have grown gargantuan—some with hundreds of schools and hundreds of thousands of students.

This is an interesting point. I think that a big weakness of the modern version of state-run schools is its centralization and bureaucracy. The Department of Education, especially under Democrats, reinforces the way in which power is taken away from parents, classroom teachers, and school principals.

In many private industries, firms have discovered that they cannot dictate to consumers. They have to empower employees to serve consumers. Back when school districts were small, they had to operate that way. Now they do not, and Smarick sees the trend toward choice expanding as a result.

Martin Gurri on President Trump and His Opponents

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He writes,

The fact that established institutions have felt compelled to berate a newly-elected president, and benefited materially from it, shows how deeply the way of the web has penetrated the real world. Aggression garners online attention. Persistent and outrageous aggression will build a following. Every incentive pulls you toward the promotion of outrageous antagonists as worthy objects of aggression. The ideal is perpetual combat with the most extreme opponents, aggression on aggression, outrage against outrage. To a casual glance, this will resemble the behavior of two scorpions in a bottle. A closer look will reveal a finely-tuned symbiotic relationship, in which both players benefit so long as they continue to move ever farther out, to opposite extremes.

When cultivating outrage becomes the dominate strategy, expect to encounter the outrageous.

Charles Murray at Middlebury

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The coverage in the Washington Post and in the New York Times was meager, with no follow-up op-eds.

The Times story, to its credit, says in the lead paragraph that it was “an encounter that turned violent and left one faculty member injured.” The Post story, which was buried deep in the paper (or maybe only appeared on line?) waits until the 6th paragraph to say that it “felt like it was edging frighteningly close to violence.”

On the other hand, the Times very early in the story quotes the Southern Poverty Law Center accusing the Murray of being a “white nationalist.” That is an irresponsible allegation coming from an unreliable source.

My thoughts:

1. In the view of conservatives, this is a very important story. I am pretty sure that a staff of reporters and editors that was more ideologically balanced would have given the story more prominence.

2. In terms of the three-axes model, this story feeds the worst fears of conservatives, which is that in the struggle between civilization and barbarism, progressives are on the wrong side.

3. Megan McArdle writes,

when it comes to physical violence, however noble the cause, that’s assault, not speech, and the perpetrators should be arrested.

The problem is that college administrators do not think in those terms. If you think that a college is capable of punishing violent demonstrators, you will be disappointed. For the most part, college administrators believe in hand-wringing and therapy, as opposed to punishment.

If I were in charge at a college, I would have real police at the event, and I would announce that protestors would be given five minutes to peacefully yell whatever they want. Following that, disturbing the peace will be dealt with by the authorities.

But that approach is about as alien to today’s college administrator as a visitor from Mars.

4. This incident will greatly reduce the likelihood of conservative speakers being invited to college campuses. Administrations do now want to risk being embarrassed by radical protests, and the best way to avoid that risk is to avoid having prominent conservative speakers. I may not be quite so prominent, and I only get one or two invitations a year, but my guess is that I have received my last invitation.

5. College politics can provide a prelude to national politics. Gender identity was a big issue on campus before it flared up on the national scene. The anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party today looks a lot like the anti-Israel movement that emerged on college campuses several years ago. If conservatives are treated as unacceptable and violence against them becomes the norm on colleges, then there is a risk that this will spread well beyond the campus.

6. Late in 2015, I started to write a novel in which a left-wing movement became increasingly violent. I shelved it, because I did not have experience writing fiction (not even short stories), and I was making things too complex for a rookie writer. Also, only one person to whom I showed a draft gave me any encouragement. Still, many of the sorts of left-fascist rationalizations and behaviors that I was going to speculate on in the novel have become more manifest in the past year.

7. All that said, there is a non-zero chance that the Murray incident was isolated, and that it has no larger significance. I hope it turns out that way.

Yuval Levin on Paulos and Cowen

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He writes,

Stagnation moved by insecurity seems a little more like the predicament we are in than stagnation moved by complacency (which Cowen defines as “a growing sense of satisfaction with the status quo”). The former, more negative, kind of stagnation is what both books are really about, it seems to me. Poulos focuses on the underlying sense of insecurity, which runs much deeper than our economistic ways of thinking about politics usually suggest. Cowen focuses on the resulting paralysis, which is a huge problem for a society that is barely capable of understanding itself in any terms other than the terms of change. And both argue that the way forward is to recognize that insecurity is our natural condition and that this is by no means all bad. In this sense, the two books help to clarify each other.

I will look into the Poulos book, but I do not assign a high probability to my finishing it.