Category Archives: books and book reviews

Number One Pick on polarization

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Scott Alexander writes,

So although polarization is definitely rising in the US, it’s stable in other countries, and falling in still others. There is no consistent trend toward more polarization in the First World! As Klein points out, this is a strong challenge to any story relying on digital media or social media or the changing media landscape.

But also: the average country at the average time is about as polarized as the US is now. This confirms Klein’s thesis that the US isn’t in a historically unprecedented state of hyperpolarization. It’s coming out of a period of unusually low polarization, into a more normal era.

He is reviewing Ezra Klein’s book on polarization. I would have expected Number One Pick to start the way he usually does, by posing a precise question, looking at survey articles and meta-analyses to get the perspective of the highest status academics, and then digging into some of the literature to see how well supported that perspective is. But instead, Scott mostly discusses Klein’s speculations and offers counter-speculations.

A precise question, which he comes close to asking, would be: will polarization, as measured by voting patterns in Congress and opinion polls in the general public, continue to increase, or is it likely to level off?

I am not going to try to locate an academic article, but I remember Jonathan Rauch wrote a useful essay.

We are not seeing a hardening of coherent ideological difference. We are seeing a hardening of incoherent ideological difference.

. . .In 2017, Pew’s polling found that blacks’ political attitudes have not diverged significantly from whites’ since 1994, or women’s from men’s, or college graduates’ from non-college graduates’. Even across lines of age and religious observance, political attitudes have diverged only modestly. But the attitudinal gap between Democrats and Republicans has risen from 15 percentage points in 1994 to a whopping 36 points in 2017. In other words, the growing, and now gaping, divide in Americans’ political values is specifically partisan. And the growth in partisanship does not reflect a clear or clean ideological divide. First and foremost, the increase in partisanship reflects, well, an increase in partisanship.

I think that Rauch would answer my question by saying that he is somewhat hopeful that polarization will level off or decline, because there are many people who see our current polarization as a problem and are making attempts to alleviate it.

Overall, I would score this game as Rauch first, Alexander second, Klein third. Alexander usually plays better, so I am not suggesting that you draft Rauch ahead of him, but you should consider these results when you get ready for the FITs draft.

Academic corruption 2: Emasculated culture

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Saturday summers, when I was a kid
We’d run to the schoolyard, here’s what we did
Pick out the captains, choose up the teams
It was always a measure of my self-esteem
Cause the fastest, the strongest, played shortstop and first. . .

“Right Field,” Willy Welch (popularized by Peter, Paul and Mary)

I enjoyed this podcast with Joyce Benenson, about her book, Warriers and Worriers. She and Roy Baumeister are the rare social scientists who see that (a) men and women differ on average in their behavioral tendencies and (b) male tendencies are not all bad.

Her book is grounded in observations of young boys and girls. My memories of my boyhood align perfectly with her picture of boys, and with the song lyrics above. We played team sports without supervision, put a lot of effort into setting rules, and competed to demonstrate skill. When we weren’t playing sports, we imagined ourselves fighting the “bad guys,” either in the Old West or in World War II.

One of her ideas is that men have a social strategy that works well in war: organize unrelated males, fight other groups overtly according to rules, then reconcile after battle. Women have a social strategy that works well for protecting their individual health and the health of their children: emphasize safety, covertly undermine the status of unrelated females, and exclude rivals rather than reconcile with them.

This leads me to speculate on the consequences of adding a lot of women to formerly male domains. Over the past several decades, a number of important institutions that were formerly almost exclusively male now include many women: academia, journalism, politics, and management positions in organizations. These institutions increasingly are discarding the values that sustained them when the female presence was less.

1. The older culture saw differential rewards as just when based on performance. The newer culture sees differential rewards as unjust.

2. The older culture sought people who demonstrate the most competence. The newer culture seeks to nurture those who are at a disadvantage.

3. The older culture admires those who seek to stand out. The newer culture disdains such people.

4. The older culture uses proportional punishment that is predictable based on known rules. The newer culture suddenly turns against a target and permanently banishes the alleged violator, based on the latest moral fashions.

5. The older culture valued open debate. The newer culture seeks to curtail speech it regards as dangerous.

6. The older culture saw liberty as essential to a good society. The newer culture sees conformity as essential to a good society.

7. The older culture was oriented toward achievement. The newer culture is oriented toward safety. Hence, we cannot complete major construction projects, like bridges, as efficiently as we used to.

I think that in each case, the older culture was consistent with male tendencies (what Benenson calls “warriors”); the newer culture is consistent with female tendencies (what she calls “worriers”). Keep in mind that men can have worrier personalities and women can have warrior personalities, but those are not the norm.

Overall, we have made institutions harder for warriors to navigate. College no longer helps men to make the transition to adulthood. It keeps them sheltered and controlled, and after graduation they end up living with their parents.

Why did opening up opportunities for women lead to this outcome? One can imagine other outcomes. Perhaps women would have assimilated into the male culture, adopting some male tendencies in the process. Perhaps women and men would have retained their different behavioral tendencies but agreed to accommodate one another.

Instead, both men and women seem to have agreed that a purge of male tendencies is in order. Some women scorn male values as tools of oppression, and most men would rather accommodate this view than voice disagreement.

I note that the readership of this blog appears to be overwhelmingly to be male, at least based on those who leave comments. Note also that this is the long-postponed “cancel-bait” post.

Razib Khan’s book list

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Razib Khan, a likely high-draft-choice FIT, offers a list of 15 books that influenced him. I have read five of them–which is much more than one would expect–but oddly enough, only two of them really stuck with me: Albion’s Seed and The Secret of Our Success. Those books also “left deep grooves in my mind,” to use Razib’s phrase.

FITs stars among the authors listed include Henrich, Steven Pinker (although I go with The Blank Slate), Jerry Muller (The Mind and the Market is so far my favorite of his), and Matt Ridley.

Does Jared Diamond belong on the draft board? Guns, Germs, and Steel is worth reading. But I think the market over-values him, so I am inclined to stay away from him in a FITs contest.

Thomas Sowell is nowhere on Razib’s list. For me, The Vision of the Anointed is the most influential of Sowell’s books, but if you pick another of Sowell’s works I won’t hold it against you. He’ll definitely go in the first round. Check out this recent documentary, narrated by Jason Riley.

Speaking of the trust problem

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I reviewed Kevin Vallier’s Trust in a Polarized Age.

Vallier is saying that we are constrained to living among people with divergent values, and in that setting the most feasible libertarian society is one which sometimes bends libertarian principles to the popular democratic will.

This struck me as an argument for what Tyler Cowen calls “state-capacity libertarianism.” In a pluralistic society, many people will have expectations for state interventions. It is better to have state intervention well-executed. Government failure will only lead people to cede more power to government in the hope of seeing improvement.

Blame the Boomers?

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In a review of Helen Andrews’ Boomers, Barton Swaim writes,

“The theme that connects all these seeming digressions,” Ms. Andrews writes, “is . . . the essence of boomerness, which sometimes manifests itself as hypocrisy and other times just as irony: they tried to liberate us, and instead of freedom they left behind chaos.” I’m not convinced that this theme, if that’s what it is, sufficiently connects all the discursive wanderings in these essays; you sometimes get the sense that Ms. Andrews wants to bring up a few points of irritation before she takes leave of the subject. But I don’t complain—she’s worth following.

Each essay in the book has a central Boomer character, such as Steve Jobs or Camille Paglia or Aaron Sorkin. My thoughts:

1. The only character I ever knew personally was Jeff Sachs. When we were in our twenties, he seemed like a great guy. Since then, we have not interacted, and I have not followed him closely. I respect him for not kowtowing to the “in crowd” of Fischer/Blanchard/Bernanke/Yellin and company, but I disagree with a number of his positions on issues. I get the sense that he has not handled fame well, and Andrews dwells on anecdotes that reinforce that impression. But in this Tyler Cowen conversation, I see mostly the Jeff Sachs I knew and little or nothing of the jerk.

2. I think that Andrews is more on target than Swaim gives her credit for. The common element in the Boomers she portrays, and in our generation as a whole, is self-aggrandizement.

The pre-Boomers might be symbolized by Dwight Eisenhower. He was self-effacing. When he was given a major challenge, he succeeded at it. And as President, he undertook the Interstate Highway System, which achieved its goals, rather than the War on Poverty or the invasion of Iraq, or Obamacare, which did not.

The Boomers portrayed by Andrews are gifted at self-promotion. They make grandiose promises to make the world better, and they undertake projects that have results that are mixed, at best. Andrews assiduously reminds us of the adverse consequences of some of Sachs’ economic advice, of Paglia’s celebration of pornography, of Aaron Sorkin’s glamorization of White House aides, etc.

Swaim notes that Jobs accomplished a lot. But Jobs and the other pioneers and the computer and the Internet set goals that were more grandiose than coming up with products. They wanted to achieve a social revolution that gave more power to ordinary individuals. The failure of that project is evident in the popularity of the phrase “tech oligarchs.”

Martin Gurri writes,

We need elites who can stand straight in the digital storm and exploit the institutional stage to build and grow rather than strut and self-promote.

He is hopeful that the younger generation will be better at this than the Boomers. Andrews is pessimistic about that. So am I.

My intellectual influences, part 5: Net-heads

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In the winter of 1993, a group of us at Freddie Mac visited snowbound Albany, New York, to meet with some researchers at General Electric about their automated underwriting project. But while higher-ups were conferring, one of the nerds took me down to the basement to show me Mosaic, the first graphical browser for the World Wide Web. At that point, I became a net-head. Continue reading →

Liberalism, conservatism, and change

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Edmund Fawcett’s books on the history of liberalism and conservatism take as their fundamental difference their stances toward social change. In Fawcett’s essay, he wrote,

Liberalism responded to a novel condition of societies, energised by capitalism and shaken by revolution in which populations were growing fast and where, for better or worse, material and ethical change was now ceaseless.

One might say that the liberal disposition is to embrace and manage social change. The conservative disposition is to resist and reverse social change.

In the essay on liberalism, Fawcett wrote,

Four ideas in particular seem to have guided liberals through their history.

The first is that the clash of interests and beliefs in society is inescapable. Social harmony, the nostalgic dream of conservatives and the brotherly hope of socialists, is neither achievable nor desirable – because harmony stifles creativity and blocks initiative. Meanwhile conflict, if tamed and put to use as competition in a stable political order, could bear fruit as argument, experiment and exchange.

Secondly, human power is not to be trusted. . .

Progress for the better is both possible and desirable. . .

Finally, the framework of public life has to show everyone civic respect, whatever they believe and whoever they are.

Fawcett argues that neither conservatives nor radicals can accept these ideas. Conservatives believe that traditional societies were harmonious in the past. Radicals believe that harmony can be achieved in the future through socialism.

Regarding power, Fawcett says that conservatives urge that we submit to authority, and radicals believe that they must take power, at least until the revolution has created the new utopia.

Conservatives have doubts about progress, and radicals see progress as something that they must direct.

Conservatives have resisted giving equal rights to everyone, and radicals believe that some people’s rights (the privileged) must be reduced in order to give others the rights they deserve.

A few more thoughts:

1. Fawcett’s definition of liberalism is capacious. It can include economic liberty. But it also includes “taming” the market, which seems to be the point of his essay.

2. The difference between merely embracing change and managing change is a major divide between libertarians and others. The Cato Institute’s Human Progress embraces change. The idea of managing change is implicit in the Obama slogan “hope and change,” in Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State, and in the Communist idea of a “vanguard” leading the proletariat.

3. In his latest book, on conservatism, Fawcett takes the view that conservatism is stupid and backward. Conservatives are always saying that change will have terrible results, and yet things work out. Conservatives opposed integration and civil rights, and those worked out. They opposed feminism, and that worked out. Etc.

A conservative would say that liberals’ memory is selective. They have forgotten that they once embraced eugenics as a way to achieve social progress. They have forgotten that Prohibition backfired. They have forgotten that they once said of the Soviet Union “I have seen the future and it works.” They have forgotten their support for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. They have overlooked the decline of living standards and freedom in Cuba.

Looking ahead, it may be too early to tell about the effects of some changes. The warnings about the adverse effects of affirmative action seem to me to be accurate, but the left wants to double down on it. Same with the decline of religion, the traditional family, and child-bearing. We have not seen the dire consequences of deficit spending yet, but that does not mean that we will escape dire consequences.

Perhaps if you read his books, you will find that when Fawcett gets into specific intellectual histories he is even-handed. But in his overall characterization of the two sides he is not. Instead, he comes very close to defining any positive feature of society as liberal and any bad idea for social arrangements as conservative.

Irrational commitments

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Bobby Jindal and Alex Castellanos write,

We don’t make the big decisions in our lives with a calculator: whom we love, whom we marry, the children we bring into the world, the groups to which we are loyal, the causes for which we fight and die. We make those commitments not only with our heads, but also with our hearts.

People live not just with rational beliefs but also with irrational commitments. When Bohr says to interpret the Uncertainty Principle as implying that the location of an electron is probabilistic, he is stating a rational belief. When Einstein replies “God does not play dice!” he is stating an irrational commitment.

Moshe Koppel’s Judaism Straight Up makes a case for respecting, or at least not dismissing, irrational commitments. As an example, he uses the belief in free will. But the Enlightenment, which raised the status of Reason and lowered the status of dogma, has apparently given us a better way to approach issues in science, business, and politics. The philosophical project of many epistemologists in the British empiricist tradition seems to involve making an irrational commitment to get rid of irrational commitments.

Loyalty and Particularism

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I posted an Amazon review of Moshe Koppel’s Judaism Straight Up. He contrasts two quasi-fictional characters. One is an Orthodox Jewish Holocaust survivor, Shimen, who is loyal to the community that follows his traditions. The other is a Baby Boomer, Heidi, who feels free to discard traditions. Heidi tries to be a universalist, while Shimen is a particularist. The question of particularism vs. universalism is a major source of tension for many modern Jews.

This provoked me to think about the topic of loyalty.

1. I don’t think that people can live for long without any loyalties. Koppel sees Heidi’s world view as “doomed,” and one way to describe this is that it will fail for lack of loyalties.

2. Loyalty means giving preferential treatment. If I am loyal to you, then when you say “jump” I ask “how high?” When someone else says “jump” I ask “why?” If I am loyal to you, I will give you a gift neither as charity nor because I expect something in return. If I am loyal to you, I will do something unpleasant for you that I would not do for someone else.

3. Loyalty can be misplaced or excessive. It is not always for the best.

4. It is most natural for loyalty to be strongest in our immediate world. Most loyal to your mate and to your children. Beyond that, to your siblings and to your parents. Then to your friends. Then beyond your friends to others in your community. In the army, most loyal to your buddies. Then to the platoon as a whole. Then to the regiment. Then to the service (“beat Navy!”). Finally to the country.

5. In a prehistoric hunter-gatherer band, there would be little need for loyalty beyond the immediate group. If you are only loyal to your band, that is sufficient.

6. A complex society requires some degree of loyalty at scale. Religions helped inspire this. So do other institutions and rituals.

7. Heidi wants to avoid treating anyone preferentially. But that would mean having no loyalty. Or being loyal in a very abstract sense, to principles. There is something to be said for this stance, if it could only work.

8. Your judgment about loyalty is probably much better in your immediate world than in the remote world. I can pick out an admirable person among the people I know with greater accuracy than I can among politicians or celebrities.

9. The world of smart phones and Internet may lead me to believe that I know enough about people in the remote world to be able to rely on my judgment of them. That could produce some very poor choices of loyalty.

10. It looks as though the social justice movement is very hung up on loyalty. In Koppel’s book, Heidi’s daughter becomes devoted to social justice, which means that she wants to give preferential treatment to people she classifies as oppressed and to people who agree with the daughter about political beliefs. So loyalty is coming back, but it is not Shimen’s loyalty to a community that he knows that shares his traditions.