Reacting to an essay by George Packer, I write,
In a recent essay drawn from a forthcoming book, George Packer says that American society has fractured into four groups. But David Hackett Fischer noticed these same four traditions, dating back to the first English settlers, in his carefully-researched book, Albion’s Seed. Fischer’s concept then became the basis of Walter Russell Mead’s book on tensions in American foreign policy, Special Providence.
The scout welcomes contrary information as helping to correct this map. The soldier uses reasoning to defend one’s map of reality. The solider fights contrary information as if to stave off defeat.
It looks as though this is going to be a good year for new books. Galef’s is one of the best so far.
1. Noise, by Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, and Olivier Sibony. The first two authors are Fantasy Intellectual Teams selections. As I often do when reading, I skipped ahead to the conclusion. They make the point that algorithms can reduce noise relative to human judgment. Think of mortgage underwriting as an example.
Or think of deciding when a fantasy intellectual has earned a point for stating a Caveat. I think it would be possible to state the criteria in algorithmic terms. Then in theory one could use machine intelligence to assign points. That would be powerful.
2. High Conflict by Amanda Ripley and The Way Out by Peter Coleman. These are both inspired by the problem of political polarization and purport to offer solutions. The authors are familiar with one another’s work.
Ripley is also a FITs selection, and I have listened to some of the many podcasts that she has done on the book, in which she comes across as a careful thinker. She is a journalist, and she likes to convey ideas through specific cases. Some readers claim that she tries to squeeze too much out of a couple of them. I have not gotten far enough into the book to say.
Coleman is an academic, who likes to speak in abstractions. Here is a passage from p. 78 of The Way Out.
However, the bubble principle also suggests that in order to sustain any positive change in our situation resulting from building on what is working, it is paramount that we also seek to actively reduce the attraction of our more (now latent) detrimental tendencies. Therefore, we must also find ways to break down or otherwise diminish the attraction of the more destructive dynamics that are driving us to mitigate the worst inclinations of our system. These practices complicate the need to address these drivers upstream, away from the heat of the conflict, to minimize resistance. In addition, it stresses the importance of leveraging or expanding existing repellers or social taboos for engaging in more destructive political acts.
I am inclined to associate clarity of thought with clarity of writing. Even after reading the entire book, this passage is opaque to me. A couple of chapters of the book are worthwhile. But Coleman’s style is not to my taste.
My latest essay covers Yascha Mounk and Amanda Ripley on Ripley’s recent book.
Ripley says that one of the keys to getting out of high conflict is to disengage from conflict entrepreneurs. Stop following the conflict entrepreneurs. I would say to start following instead people like Mounk and Ripley and the Fantasy Intellectual Teams category leaders.
In 2021, we’re seeing a surge in con-like corruption cases once again, many involving old-school ripoffs. An economy puffed up by the steroid enhancement of Fed support has led to a great flowering of such creative grifts. Some are not terribly accessible to non-financial audiences at first glance, so to make it a bit easier to keep track of new cases coming in, I’m creating a new feature, “Racket of the Week.”
Charles Kindleberger, in Manias, Panics, and Crashes, pointed out that when there is a lot of new wealth you tend to get a lot of scams.
I would bet that five or ten years from now, people will look back at GameStop, Dogecoin, and Hometown Deli and say it was obvious that monetary policy and regulatory policy were too loose. Future inflation is here–it just hasn’t been evenly distributed.
The thirty-somethings who are driving policy in Washington these days are ignorant. They don’t know history. They don’t know economics. I would not under-estimate the damage they can do.
If you have $200,000 in assets today, it would not surprise me to see that ten years from now inflation and taxes have eroded half of their value. In other words, ten years from now, you will be able to buy what today is $100,000 worth of stuff.
Some assets will hold more of their value. Some will hold less. It is possible that a house could lose even more than half its (inflation-adjusted) value once interest rates go up, because high interest rates make it hard to afford amortizing mortgages. But I expect instead that housing will do well relative to other investments, in part because the Federal government tends to avoid taxing housing wealth as severely as other assets.
I review Shelby Steele’s White Guilt.
In the United States, whites abused blacks for many decades. Legally, this abuse ended with the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. But those acts did not erase the sordid history. Steele’s thesis is that sensitivity to this history produces white guilt and fuels black anger. The result is that blacks have become the abusers, and whites—liberal whites, especially—have become the abused.
Long time reader Roger Sweeny emails.
I recently read Daniel M. Wegner’ and Kurt Gray’s The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters (Viking, 2016), a book that has nothing explicitly to do with politics or wokeness. . . .
I will copy the full email below. But for now, I have to say that this book presents a very powerful model of how people frame moral issues. I have a learned a lot just from reading a few pages.
The book argues, based on empirical analysis, for a moral dyad theory, based on the extent to which an entity is viewed as having experience (being able to feel pain or joy) and/or having agency (having the ability to change outcomes). Consider this matrix.
| low agency | high agency | |
|---|---|---|
| high experience | a baby | a healthy adult |
| low experience | a rock | a robot |
Sweeny wants to apply this moral dyad theory to the social justice movement. Suppose that the social justice advocates see whites as privileged, i.e., having “a large capacity to act and a small capacity to suffer,” like the robot in the matrix, while blacks occupy the opposite pole, like the baby.
Note that John McWhorter and other black intellectuals who deplore the social justice movement are most angry at the way that it denies agency to blacks. It treats them as if they were nothing more than dogs helplessly beaten.
Most people see George Floyd as comparable to the baby and Derek Chauvin as comparable to the robot. That is, Floyd could suffer, but he could do nothing about his suffering. Chauvin was making conscious decisions, but he has no feelings..
But one could tell the story the other way. Floyd chose to resist arrest. Chauvin was reacting to the situation in response to his fears and those of the other policemen. I am not saying that this is the right framing, just that it leads to a different moral assessment.
The authors point out that people see corporations as being akin to robots–having no feelings but having powerful capabilities. There is much more to be said about how the moral dyad relates to political economy, but I will save that for when I have finished the book.
Note that fans of Girard talk of a scapegoat mechanism, which also addresses how people assign moral rights and responsibilities. I like the moral dyad better. It is better defined and apparently more empirically grounded. Here is what Sweeny wrote:
I found out about her from a FITs owner, who was very enthusiastic. It looks like he was right. Here is Michael Shermer reviewing her new book, The Scout Mindset.
Scouts, Ms. Galef explains, “revise their opinions incrementally over time, which makes it easier to be open to evidence against their beliefs.” They also “view errors as opportunities to hone their skill at getting things right, which makes the experience of realizing ‘I was wrong’ feel valuable, rather than just painful.” In fact, the author suggests, we should drop the whole “wrong” confession and instead describe the process as “updating”—a reference to Bayesian reasoning, in which we revise our estimations of the probability of something’s being true after gaining new information about it. “An update is routine. Low-key. It’s the opposite of an overwrought confession of sin,” Ms. Galef continues. “An update makes something better or more current without implying that its previous form was a failure.”
The information sphere teems with platforms of communication: that is its most typical and abundant feature. The governing elites are not forbidden or unable to speak. They are unwilling to compete for attention. They dread the thought that the public will shout back. This phobia has been the strategic advantage of populists like Trump, who achieve proximity with the public by engaging with it on digital platforms. Until more constructive politicians master the art of online communication, the crisis of the elites will only deepen.
It is a long essay, but worth your time.
2. Gurri interviews Andrey Mir. Mir says,
The internet revealed that the business of the news media rested not on information but on the lack of information. Those conditions are gone. The market is already willing to abandon newspapers, but society is not yet ready. Social habits have slowed down the process. But it is demographics that have begun the final countdown. This is why it is possible to calculate the deadline, figuratively speaking. Millions of students today have never even touched a newspaper. They simply do not know how to consume the press, nor are they aware of why they should do it. As soon as this generation takes command, newspapers are done. Hence the last date for the industry—the mid-2030s.
The newspaper business is going to die within the next twenty years. Newspaper publishing will continue, but only as a philanthropic venture.
I know Washington is political, and a Treasury Secretary must go along with her President’s agenda. But that does not mean you have to say such silly things in public. It will cost us all dearly, including yourself and the institutions you care about.
Here we see the stark difference between the incentive to seek the truth and the incentive to seek power. I have been interested in this ever since I read David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. That theme permeates the book, starting with the opening vignette, which describes the way that the power game was played as of 1960. These game-players gave us the Vietnam War. Our contemporary game players are giving us things like Woke financial regulators and the antics of the peacetime bureaucrats of the FDA and the CDC.