Staying away from twitter, facebook, writing posts, and reading blogs.
Monthly Archives: April 2019
TLP conversations
1. I did a Zoom meeting with Professor Ryan Phelps’ class. The topic was the Three Languages of Politics.
2. I did a podcast with Connor Boyack.
I enjoyed both.
Pro-Trump rhetoric
Thomas D. Klingenstein writes,
Multiculturalism conceives of society as a collection of cultural identity groups, each with its own worldview, all oppressed by white males, collectively existing within permeable national boundaries. Multiculturalism replaces American citizens with so-called “global citizens.” It carves “tribes” out of a society whose most extraordinary success has been their assimilation into one people. It makes education a political exercise in the liberation of an increasing number of “others,” and makes American history a collection of stories of white oppression, thereby dismantling our unifying, self-affirming narrative—without which no nation can long survive.
. . .Trump is the only national political figure who does not care what multiculturalism thinks is wrong. He, and he alone, categorically and brazenly rejects the morality of multiculturalism. He is virtually the only one on our national political stage defending America’s understanding of right and wrong, and thus nearly alone in truly defending America. This why he is so valuable—so much depends on him.
In an interesting rhetorical move, he equates the fight against multiculturalism with the fight against slavery.
multiculturalism, as with abolition, has the potential to energize the conservative movement.
His essay is a counterpoint to an essay from two years ago by Yuval Levin. Levin contrasts conservatism with alienation.
Conservatives incline to be heavily invested in society and its institutions, even when deeply concerned about their condition and their fate. When these institutions are threatened from the left, conservatives tend to be defensive of them. Even when they are dominated by the left, as so many of our institutions are, conservatives by instinct and reflection tend to argue for reclamation and recovery—for building spaces within these institutions more than for rejection and contempt of them. If our traditional ways of doing things speak to yearnings that arise anew in every generation, then there is always reason to hope for a resurgence of orthodoxy and to work for it.
Alienation denies or rejects the possibility of such resurgence and therefore the importance of working to keep that possibility open. The work of keeping it open is the work that conservatives can often be found doing, particularly outside politics, as in the service of religious missions or of liberal education, among other causes.
Think of academia, the chief bastion of multiculturalism. A conservative would seek to reform it, by pursuing efforts such as Jonathan Haidt’s Heterodox Academy. The more alienated opponent of academia would place little hope in such attempts.
In that regard, I am probably closer to the alienated frame of mind. I doubt that Haidt has enough support among professors born after 1975.
Politics of the future?
On the left, appeals to identity and structural oppression have become increasingly mainstream, while on the right, criticisms of these appeals have become similarly popular.
Harris suggests that this is the primary political division going forward, and this places the Intellectual Dark Web squarely on the right. He says it like it’s a bad thing.
Polygenic score for obesity. . .and?
The adults with the highest risk scores weighed on average 13 kilograms more than those with the lowest scores, and they were 25 times as likely to be severely obese, or more than 45 kilograms overweight. “What’s striking is not just the weight,” says Sekar Kathiresan, a cardiologist and geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the study. “If you have a high risk score for obesity, you’re at high risk for heart attack, stroke, diabetes, hypertension, heart failure, and blood clots in the legs.”
And what else? The polygenic score is a result of a statistical fishing expedition. We do not know whether the genes in the score govern physical characteristics, such as metabolism and food preferences, or whether they affect psychological traits, such as conscientiousness. I would be willing to bet that a lot of it is the latter.
If my intuition is correct, then the “obesity score” would predict a lot of other behavioral traits as well. Propensity for getting into financial difficulty. Grades in school. etc.
Question from a reader
He writes,
I have not been able to find a causal account as to why information failures (particularly with regards to quality) lead to market failures
In textbook economics, a market failure is when the private incentives lead to either too little or too much of a good being produced.
In terms of information, consumers make purchases based on what they can observe. If what they observe is highly correlated with quality, they should do well. But not necessarily otherwise.
Consider a high school student making a college visit. The appearance of the facilities can be observed relatively accurately, but it is not very highly correlated with quality. The quality of classroom instruction cannot be observed so accurately, because the high school student will not sit in on very many classes. But suppose that the quality of classroom instruction is highly correlated with the value that the student gets out of college.
We can predict that colleges will over-spend on the appearance of facilities, because that factors heavily into the decision of the high school student. We can predict that colleges will under-spend on classroom instruction. Market failure.
The public policy response should be to tax college facilities and/or subsidize quality classroom instruction.
I am not offering this as a realistic picture of a market failure in the market for higher education. My point is to answer the reader’s question about connecting information failure to textbook market failure.
Worth re-reading on Internet regulation
I recently noticed that one of the most favorably-viewed essays of mine on medium is the one about How the Internet Turned Bad. It says many things, including
I compare IETFs with government agencies this way:
— IETFs are staffed by part-time or limited-term volunteers, whose compensation comes from their regular employers (universities, corporations, government agencies). Agencies are staffed by full-time permanent employees, using taxpayer dollars.
— IETFs solve the problems that they work on. Agencies perpetuate the problems that they work on.
— A particular group of engineers in an IETF disbands once it has solved its problem. An agency never disbands.
When I hear calls for government regulation of the Internet, to me that sounds like a step backward. The IETF approach to regulation seems much better than the agency approach.
The whole essay is worth a re-read.
Philosophy and economics
Yesterday, an undergraduate emailed me to ask for book recommendations about the overlap between economics and philosophy. I recommended:
Amartya Sen The Idea of Justice
Michael Sandel What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
Agnar Sandmo Economics Evolving
and
D M Hausman and M S McPherson and D Satz Economic analysis, moral philosophy, and public policy
Then I asked Twitter, and here is the resulting, much longer, list. [snipped]
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I have not read any of these. I have read some on the longer list. Thinking of the most lively reads, and trying to include left, right, and center, I would recommend:
The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner.
Radicals for Capitalism, by Brian Doherty.
Capitalism and the Jews, by Jerry Muller.
If I were teaching an undergraduate course in philosophy and economics, I would include as articles
Hayek’s “The Pretense of Knowledge”
McCloskey’s “Why I am no longer a Positivist”
Leamer’s “Let’s take the Con out of Econometrics”
my own “How Effective is Economic Theory?”
In my view, there are two issues at the center of the overlap between economics and philosophy.
1. What methods best serve economics? In particular, what are the pros and cons of treating economics as a science?
2. How do markets fit in to the moral universe? What problems do they address? What problems do they cause?
The essays on my list deal primarily with the epistemological issue. The books on my list deal mostly with the moral issue.
Not with their own money
In their 2018 return, [Sen. Kamala] Harris and her husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, listed an adjusted gross income of $1.89 million, including Harris’ Senate salary and $320,000 she made from writing a book, “The Truths We Hold.” Harris and Emhoff married in 2014, then began filing jointly. In 2018, they paid $563,426 in federal taxes and donated $27,000 to charity.
Like many progressives, they are not very generous with their own money. If a couple with an income of $63,000 were to donate the same percentage of their income to charity, it would amount to just $900.
Yet, because of their generosity with other people’s money, these sorts of politicians can be heroes.
Preston McAfee on big firms
The thing that shocked me the most was how inefficient large firms can be. Sure, there is government waste, but it is commensurate with size and clarity of mission. In one sense, I already knew that large firms could be inefficient — the failure of Kodak and Blockbuster are examples — but it is another thing to live through it.
I have a much deeper appreciation that slow optimization is a better model of human behavior than full optimization, and indeed, I’ve often used evolutionary models rather than optimization models in my work. People do respond to incentives, and they respond faster to stronger incentives, but along the way there are lots of mistakes and bad choices and hysteresis.
I like to say that anyone who is scared of a giant firm has never worked for one. Learning that lesson is one of the reasons that economics programs should require internships in business. Having experience in business would lead you to be less committed to theories of optimization and more likely to regard the market as what I call The Great Miscalculator. That latter essay is a powerful indictment of the entire paradigm policy analysis that permeates academic economics.