To My Parents, Ayn Rand, and God

Notes on fusionism

2012-02-12T11:53:00.000-08:00

The Athens and Jerusalem blog expresses frustration at libertarians who urge the GOP in strong terms not to nominate Rick Santorum. I am a bit baffled by the claim that encouraging people who share your core convictions to stay home on Election Day, rather than voting for the GOP, is somehow remotely equivalent in shrillness or thuggishness to encouraging people to send themselves to the gas chambers.
Nonetheless, in the spirit of the Welch/Golberg show I wrote about a few days ago, let me do my best to slap a few Band-Aids on the fusionist alliance.

Look, I can't claim to speak for every libertarian everywhere generally. I'm sure that somewhere, there is some libertarian who would reject every single viable-ish candidate as being too impure. I don't read Nate Nelson regularly and can't entirely speak for him. But, speaking as someone who is married to a libertarian more prominent than she and who hangs out regularly with other Beltway libertarians, there are plenty of viable-looking options whom many of us would consider a reasonable compromise pick, especially in contrast to Santorum. In fact, I think for all of us, every other candidate whom the GOP has put up so far would be better. Mitch Daniels and Paul Ryan's names both get thrown out a lot in this vein, although both are more socially conservative than many of us and in Ryan's case also probably more hawkish. I also occasionally hear Tim Pawlenty's name being floated in this vein. I know less about him because he didn't stay in the race that long, but I'd have been willing to consider it. I have much the same impression of Chris Christie. At least some libertarians held out hope for Rick Perry; it was his persistent debate fumbles, more so than his ideas, that did him in for many of us. And yes, even Romney or Gingrich would be a better pick than Santorum.

Yes, I'm aware that Santorum has made some effort to move to the right on fiscal issues. But I view this in much the same way that many social conservatives view Mitt Romney's movement right on abortion; i.e. more opportunistic than sincere. Yes, Santorum might be willing to follow his party on economic issues. Yes, he might be willing to do what his advisors say he must to placate the Tea Party. But I doubt that entitlement and tax reform will ever be the issues that get Rick Santorum out of bed in the morning. The content of his book suggests that Santorum's heart lies elsewhere, whereas economic issues appear to be much higher priorities for Daniels or Ryan. Is it really all that unreasonable for libertarians to urge the GOP to nominate a candidate like that -- especially given that both Daniels and Ryan seem to be fairly conservative on social issues?

Karl Rove once said (I believe I read this in David Frum's book a few years ago) that winning elections was like trying to pick up as many magnets as possible from a big pile. Trying to grab some means that inevitably, you repel others. You have to think strategically about which ones you want to attract, repel, and why. Trying to attract populist voters who support special measures to protect manufacturing means that one will repel libertarians. Nothing odd or strange about that; such is the political process.

Tech question

2012-02-10T17:52:00.000-08:00

So no need to respond to this if you've also responded to my very similar query at Facebook, but Pnin was considering getting me an iPad 2 for Valentine's Day. It now appears that the iPad 3 will come out shortly. Should we go ahead with our original plan or wait? Note that alternative cravings include the new iPhone 4 with Siri (I still have the 3Gs) or these flats in fresh mango*, if that matters for your answer.

*J. Crew appears to practice some kind of crazy price discrimination model according to which the entire website goes on sale every few weeks. So I have been sitting on my hands waiting for same, which may also counsel for asking for something else as a Valentine's Day present.

The Goldberg/Welch show

2012-02-10T14:14:00.000-08:00

Arnold Kling has a a good post up summarizing a "Are Libertarians Part of the Conservative Movement?" debate that took place at AEI on Wednesday night. I thought about going, but was busy paying someone to teach me how to lift weights, and so I figured I'd catch it on the Internet later. "Later" meant around 10:00 p.m. Thursday night on the couch. A worn-out Willow wandered over, briefly sniffed Matt Welch's on-screen image, and then concluded that there was nothing to see here. She toddled over to the doormat and promptly fell asleep. Does this mean that my golden retriever is shaping up to be a libertarian, conservative, or neither? Inquiring minds want to know.

While I like much of what Goldberg had to say and found it heartening, I would note that Goldberg's probably in the most libertarian quarter or so of conservatives. Yay for him and all. But I do think that conservative support for big government to advance socially conservative policies is more common that Goldberg makes it out to be here. Take, for example, the popularity of the federal marriage amendment. That makes alliances somewhat harder than it appears here.

Finally, the moderator quoted Russell Kirk as insultingly calling libertarians "ossified Benthamites." Let me note only that this would be a splendid title for a libertarian-ish blog, and I am deeply disappointed that I did not think to start one under that title. I suppose I always could, but, like, I'd have to make all three of my readers change their feeds and all. Aspiring libertarian bloggers, note that ossifiedbethamite.blogspot.com has not yet been grabbed up, should any of you want it!

Vote on the issues

2012-02-09T15:38:00.000-08:00

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry has a contrarian post up at the American Scene arguing that voters should vote on "character" rather than "the issues." I am not really averse to arguing that elites should weigh character slightly more heavily than they do now. Indeed, in some places in the post, Gobry seems to be limiting himself to that more modest claim, although not in others. And it is the broader formulation of the claim with which I take issue.

First, I find it a bit odd to emphasize this argument at this particular moment in political history. Gobry concedes that it's useful to look at the issues in "broad strokes" situations, i.e. when choosing between a conservative vs. a moderate vs. a liberal. But Republican primary voters are choosing between quite different candidates at this point. Romney is a former moderate governor born again as a National Review-style fusionist. Gingrich is a more-or-less conservative prone to medical outbreaks of what a Dr. Hayek once diagnosed as the Fatal Conceit. Ron Paul is a hard-core libertarian, but Rick Santorum is an anti-matter version of the Cato Institute made flesh. Nobody thinks any of these people are especially alike in terms of their policy preferences. Nor does anyone think that any of them have much in common policy-wise with a liberal Democrat like Obama. Gobry's example of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is much more plausible an argument for him because they were much closer to each other on policy than are the remaining candidates in the GOP primaries. Thus my confusion about the usefulness of this particular example at this moment in politics.

Gobry also allows that it matters significantly what kind of coalition these people will put in charge of the executive branch. Yes, that's true. But that's why looking at a candidate's policy proposals matters tremendously. Does anyone really think that there would be much overlap between the likely appointees of a Romney vs. a Santorum vs. a Paul vs. an Obama administration?

Third, it might be instructive to look for buyer's remorse in people who have championed a candidate in the past on "character" rather than policy grounds. Take, for example, conservative pundit David Brooks, who supported Barack Obama the last time around. Yet one finds Brooks voicing discomfort with his choice years after his preferred candidate won.

Finally, Gobry suggests shortcuts that voters can use instead of policy proposals to evaluate candidates. See Part 3 of this Cato Analysis from Pnin for a detailed explanation of why most of those shortcuts don't work very well.

Holding together at the seams

2012-02-08T19:29:00.000-08:00

So I've now read all of the review copy of Charles Murray's Coming Apart that arrived in the mail. A few thoughts:

One, I still agree with what I said in this old post about an essay that Murray wrote a couple of years ago foreshadowing the major themes of this book. It would be good to get more novels, television shows, and movies about a wider swath of America. This includes, but is not limited to, more sympathetic portrayals of Red America. So I am generally in agreement that there should be more television shows not set in New York and also more that are sympathetic generally toward small-town life (I can't fault Glee too much here, first because I have never seen an episode of it, and secondly because I kind of felt much the same way in high school. I am not troubled that there is one particular TV show in the world representing such experience, but I am more concerned that there is a dearth of shows generally showing small-town life favorably.)

All that said, I can't move from there to the conclusion that more Red State friendly art will lead its viewers to more Red State politics. Ayn Rand was not a subtle writer. Yet I have seen her influence work on people in dozens of different ways. More often that not, Rand leads to libertarianism, but often to different flavors of it, and every once in a while, one comes across ex-Objectivist-ish progressives or social conservatives. It's rarely one step from politically inflected art to political ideology. It's more like twenty, and it's often not the same twenty steps for each person.

I'm a libertarian, but I work professionally on an issue where there generally isn't much daylight between us and conservatives. My conservative young lawyer friends do not seem to have substantially different tastes and preferences than my progressive young lawyer friends. Some from each camp fit the Whole Foods shopping, latte-drinking stereotypes to a T; others not at all; and most have a combination of tastes that don't fit neatly into either camp. What's relevant is that, somewhere along the way, they became convinced that conservatives have the better side of the argument on policy questions. So if Murray wants more people from this class to become Republicans (or conservatives or libertarians), he is best off pitching straight policy arguments to them and encouraging others to do likewise. Wagging one's finger at these people about their sushi-eating habits might lead to some fun form of navel-gazing, but in my experience, it is unlikely to lead anyone politically in the direction that he wants them to go in.

Second, there is a long section in which Murray encourages the elites to "preach what they practice." That is, Murray notices that people in his elite groups are more likely to stay married longer, less likely to bear children out of wedlock, and so on. Yet these same people are, according to him, overly shy about condemning illegitimacy and divorce as kind of bad. I'm with him, sort of. I do want elites (and everyone else) to preach why these behaviors are good. But I do want Murray to recognize that the gospel that he would like elites to preach looks very different from most contemporary varieties of social conservatism. It is common for members of Murray's Belmont class to enjoy not-particularly-risky varieties of premarital sex (e.g. within well-established relationships and with use of contraception.) It is also generally common within this class to treat gay relationships as on an equal footing with heterosexual ones. Yet both of these practices draw jeremiads from many contemporary socially conservative politicians. Because Murray doesn't acknowledge that his social conservatism is much more modest than what's out there on the market, I'm afraid that he'll too easily lose liberal and progressive readers who confuse Murray's conservatism with, say, Rick Santorum's or Michelle Bachmann's.

On having Asperger's, briefly

2012-02-02T20:57:00.000-08:00

Benjamin Nugent, author of the wonderfully titled American Nerd, has an essay at The New York Times up called "I Had Asperger's. Briefly." In it, he recounts having grown up as a nerd kid who was diagnosed by his psychology professor mother as having Asperger's. Yet by the time he was an adult and had found a more congenial group of friends, most of the symptoms of the disease had vanished. In the NYT essay, he grapples with what his experience implies for the new diagnostic standards that are likely to make Asperger's diagnoses rarer.

Nobody has ever slapped the clinical label of Asperger's on me. I've found a few online quizzes on which I test positive. But that depends on how much weight one should give to my Emotional Quotient ratings; I'm pretty happy to admit to liking maps or dinosaurs, but I get nervous when asked to confirm that all of my friends think I am awesome. Do they, really? Is it possible that I'm being socially inept and they're just too polite to tell me? Would that explain what was up with so-and-so re: such-and-such weird gossip?

The bottom line is that I think I fall somewhere on the fuzzy border between merely eccentrically nerdy and clinical. And I'm not sure how much good it would have done me if somebody had swooped down from the sky when I was twelve and decided that I belonged on the clinical side on the line. It's possible that some course in how to read people might have helped me overcome these weaknesses earlier in life. On the other hand, maybe it just would have felt stigmatizing or become a self-fulfilling prophecy that I could never learn to socialize. Maybe, too, learning how to socialize through talk therapy would be like trying to learn how to bike by listening to lectures about biking. Maybe the best thing is to try bike riding, albeit on an easy course, like a beer-soaked nerd paradise in the woods.

(By the way, I never spoke like an E.M. Forster character. That would have been, like, way too Edwardian. I was mostly channeling Thackeray or George Eliot as a teenager.)

I think I'm repeating things I've written on the blog before. But Nugent's take on all this is quite interesting, so I highly recommend checking it out.

Things that people in my social circle like that I don't get, #138

2012-02-01T12:35:00.000-08:00

.... this op-ed. As many Constant Readers know, I have participated in several Koch-funded programs and really benefited personally and professionally from them. Naturally, I've therefore been disappointed by many of the sleazier and less fair allegations levied at them. See generally the "libertarianism" tag. At the same time, this particular column doesn't do a particularly good job detailing specifically problematic things that President Obama personally has done against the Kochs. Indeed, the only specific transgression by a politician mentioned comes at the end of the 2nd paragraph, where it's mentioned that Democrats in Congress want to drag Koch before Congress to respond to questions about the Keystone XL pipeline project. I agree that such would be stupid and vindictive, but it's hardly clear from this piece that this particular bad idea originated with Obama. I imagine that he and members of Congress don't always see eye to eye; just ask Nancy Pelosi sometime if you're inclined to disagree. The rest of this rhetoric about Nixon's Enemies List and so forth therefore hardly seems all that helpful or illuminating.

Indeed, it's not surprising that Obama should speak out vehemently against the Kochs from time to time. Obama and the Kochs disagree on important principles. A lot is at stake. That's bound to lead to some heated rhetoric and incivility. But unless it's clear that Obama is actually misusing executive office to go after the Kochs, all of this writing about bills of attainder and so forth seems more inflammatory than useful.

In which I agree with Ann Althouse

2012-01-31T10:07:00.001-08:00

... re: values.

On "how to build a dog"

2012-01-30T12:41:00.001-08:00

Interesting reflections on how my Willow came to be.

Oh, clementine

2012-01-23T19:55:00.000-08:00

And giant boxes of said fruit are filling up the markets this time of year! Here's how I got through my box.

1. I think I've blogged this clementine cake before, but it is worth noting again just how marvelous it is. Note that because of the almond flour, it's gluten-free; good if you are entertaining people who adhere to this particular popular diet.

2. This clementine vanilla quick bread is yummy and easy enough, but the process of scraping out the vanilla bean freaked Willow out. Yes, that's right; our golden retriever erupted in one of her once-monthly fits of barking. "Don't worry, Willow," I had to explain. "See, vanilla beans cost $10.99 for two at Whole Foods, which alas means we don't have them all that frequently. Markets can be more effective at deterring certain kinds of conduct than using force via barking." I'm not sure she quite got the love-the-price-system sermon, but she's learning.

3. Chicken paillards with clementine salsa were also yummy and fresh-tasting. Only con is the giant amount of salsa. It probably serves more like six people rather than four. Also, ambivalent reaction of golden retriever to pounding chicken breasts thin with sherry bottle was noted.

4. Halibut with clementine gremolata was okay, although I wouldn't serve it with spinach again. The bitter with the sweet didn't quite work.

On gay equality and capitalism

2012-01-20T14:07:00.000-08:00

Andrew Sullivan is famous (infamous?) for moving all over the map politically; when I first started reading his blog, he was a Burkean conservative. Then he became a passionate defender of Obama whose Burkeanism became increasingly more theoretical and abstract and whose positions on contemporary meat-and-potatoes issues appeared fairly mainstream Democratic. Recently, he endorsed Ron Paul, and the compass needle seems to have hit "libertarian." In this vein, he's put up two good posts on how the private sector appears more receptive to the movement for gay equality, and why this means that advocates for this cause should focus on changing civil society rather than enacting more laws. For all of his bumping around the political compass, good for Sullivan for realizing this important point.

Interesting paper on racial and other admissions preferences at Duke

2012-01-18T11:02:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if anyone actually reads or appreciates my occasional posts on this topic, but in case people do, this is an interesting new empirical paper on preferences at Duke. Alex Tabarrok also has a nice summary of it up at Marginal Revolution. For earlier coverage of the science and engineering issue, see here.

Why didn't I think of doing this?

2012-01-17T20:51:00.000-08:00

" In civil marriage, prenuptial agreements are permitted, so the man hardly shares all his worldly goods, and plenty of people marry with reservations, and without violating the law when they do so. People write their own vows too. Sometimes they say them in Vulcan! "

-- Conor Friedersdorf, commenting on Rick Santorum's opposition to gay marriage. It's a good piece, although not one that has much that's unfamiliar to libertarians or liberals who have tried to make the case for gay marriage to social conservatives.

Petite blondes of the world unite

2012-01-16T10:05:00.000-08:00

Stranger outside of Whole Foods, to Pnin and Willow: She's such a nice dog. Calm, sweet, obedient. I was thinking of getting a golden retriever, but they're too big. I want a dog like her, though -- like a golden retriever, but smaller.

Pnin: Actually, she is a golden retriever.

Stranger: Oh.

Pnin: She's a puppy, so she's still growing. And she's maybe a little small for her age. There are some females who are 60 pounds at six months. Willow was only in the high 30s or low 40s. So maybe she'll be only 55 or 60 pounds when she's full grown.

It's all too common for people to get my beloved's breed wrong. It's not too weird that people sometimes mistake her for a Labrador. Little goldens don't have the big fluffy coat that bigger ones do, and they do look more like Labs. But when Willow was a lot littler, someone asked me if she was a cocker spaniel. Lest I worry about her being small for her age too much, though, I've also been asked if she was part Great Dane. Uh, no. As a small human myself, though, I guess the two of us will just have to stick together.

Rights gone wrong gone not quite right

2012-01-14T13:27:00.000-08:00

I wanted to like Rights Gone Wrong by Richard Thompson Ford a lot more than I actually did. The sum of the parts is somehow greater than the whole. That is, Ford's pretty good at describing, chapter by chapter, problems with particular civil rights laws currently on the books. I particularly appreciated his account of the flaws of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act -- he notes that older workers are more likely to face discrimination and irrational stereotypes before they're hired and employers have a chance to learn about their true abilities. But it's actually quite hard to figure out whether one has been discriminted against at the hiring stage, because it's hard to figure out if one wasn't hired due to the employer's leaning on irrational stereotypes or because there were simply better-qualified applicants whom one has never seen in the pool. Thus, the act winds up being in effect a rather large wealth transfer to older, already-comfortable workers. Similarly, Ford does a good job discussing how laws requiring accommodations for disabled students have given families an incentive to seek out attention deficit disorder diagnoses for their children. Because the line between clinical attention deficit disorder and garden-variety inability to focus on things that are hard or boring is inherently fuzzy, it's all too tempting for doctors to diagnose children ADHD who may not be really so that they can get the very rich benefit of extra time on tests.

I found the book far less satisfying when Ford attempts to tie these narratives about the very real problems with these disparate laws together into a common story of "rights gone wrong." One, the book is in some ways surprisingly fuzzy on what a right is. In some places, Ford appears to be equating "right" with "entitlement to some special benefit." I have never felt entirely comfortable within the philosophical natural rights tradition, but as I read this book, I found myself wondering if I'm more of a natural rights person than I used to think I was. That is, in my view, the list of "civil rights" is pretty much the same as what was enumerated in Corfield v. Coryell. I prefer to think of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other civil rights legislations as attempt to remedy violations of those rights -- though one can certainly debate whether some of these remedies are over-broad, still necessary today, etc. -- rather than creating new civil rights, as Ford in some places indicates it does. In other places, Ford laments "excess individualism" in our culture and the like for these reasons, which just raises my ex-Objectivist hackles further.

Ford's preferred remedies for these problems entails more "pragmatism" and "nuance" in lieu of "absolute" rights. This would appear to entail giving judges more discretion. While this might avoid some of the more ridiculous extremes avoided with literal interpretation of a law to a situation to which it doesn't seem to fit, discretion can also be bad because it permits judges to skew the literal text of civil rights statutes to fit with their political or ideological views. Ford also seems to prefer administrative-based approaches to enforcing civil rights laws, an approach that would have the virtue of saving parties' litigation costs. On the other hand, there are real public choice problems with giving bureaucracies additional power to enforce civil rights laws. These issues are not really addressed in the book.

In summary: this book is better on diagnoses than it is on cures.

On my inner life

2012-01-13T15:58:00.000-08:00

Should I be alarmed that I dreamed last night that I'd somehow been transported back to 1994, and that Rick Santorum was teaching my middle school math class? Instead of having us do math, though, he has us doing painful and difficult abs exercises on the floor underneath a special tent-like blanket. Never have I been so relieved to find myself waking up at 7 a.m. and scrambling to get off to a 9:30 meeting. Relatedly, I'm about ready to give up on rapid eye movement sleep.

On brushing up on one's medieval British history

2012-01-12T20:32:00.000-08:00

Pnin, Willow and I recently finished listening to a Teaching Company course, The Story of Medieval England: From King Arthur to the Tudor Conquest. It's been one of my favorite Teaching Company courses so far. The lectures are easy to follow and well-organized, and Paxton has a crisp, clear voice that works well for the medium. I'm a fan of Teaching Company courses primarily as gap fillers -- to pick up knowledge that I should've gotten somewhere along the way during the course of a decent liberal arts education, but didn't. So I've loaded up on classical music, for example, and on periods of history that I happened never to study. It's thus entirely possible that there are significant omissions or distortions that a real scholar of this stuff would notice that I'm not. But as far as I can tell, that's not been a problem for my purposes.

Relatedly, Pnin recently recommended Sharon Kay Penman's historical novels, which cover the same perid and place. I've made my way through the Henry II/Eleanor of Aquitaine trilogy and am now delving into the recently released Lionheart. I'd recommend them readily to George R.R. Martin fans. Penman's novels obviously lack the magical elements of the Song of Ice and Fire series, but they do feature similarly sprawling casts of characters faced with complicated, morally ambiguous situations. Penman's technique of shifting rapidly between the points of view of different characters is also somewhat similar, though her cast isn't nearly so large nor separated in time and space as Martin's. Overall, very enjoyable thus far.

Thoughts on athletic preferences

2012-01-11T19:29:00.000-08:00

Dartblog has two posts up regarding an editorial questioning Dartmouth's athletic recruitment policies. The post at the second link, by way of defending the existing policy, reproduces in full an editorial from government professor Allan Stam describing his experiences as a student-athlete at Cornell. The post at the first link by recent grad Isaiah Berg defends reforming athletic policy by noting that, lyrical and well-written as Stam's op-ed is, it is hardly clear from it that large admissions preferences (as opposed to no preferences at all or very modest preferences) can give student-athletes the benefits that Stam identifies. I agree with most of Berg's analysis, but I wanted to add a few thoughts of my own.

First, Berg doesn't cite any numbers in his post about the magnitude of the differences between recipients of athletic preferences at selective schools and those students who don't. Some such numbers are out there; this piece by Princeton professor Thomas Espenshade indicates that recruited athlete status is worth about 200 points on the SAT (on the 1600 scale.) To put that number into additional context, the same study found that being His panic is worth about 185 points and being African-American is worth about 230. There is a growing body of research showing that African-American and Hispanic students who receive racial preferences in admissions may actually learn less than their counterparts attending schools at which they are better matched on the basis of academic credentials; this amicus brief sums up the state of play in this field. Notably, due to the ill effects of mismatch, beneficiaries of race-based affirmative action appear less likely to receive degrees in science, technology, and engineering than their counterparts attending schools at which they are good matches or to pursue the Ph.Ds that would permit them to enter Stam's own profession (university teaching.) Given that the credentials deficits Espenshade identifies between average recruited athletes and affirmative action beneficiaries are similar, it's entirely plausibe that the same mismatch effects apply, and university officials would be wise to be concerned about them.

Second, Stam conclucdes his piece by noting, "I often wonder if the loathsome dismissiveness with which America's intellectuals view athletes, soldiers, business people, and politicians lies in their own insecurities rather than in any better sense of judgment they might have rather than the rest of us." I don't think that intellectuals generally have a better sense of judgment than most people, except perhaps in the limited domains that they have studied more closely than most people. Nor has it been my experience that most intellectuals are loathsomely dismissive of professional athletes, as opposed to benignly indifferent, and I find it hard to believe that any intellectual alive can be adequately loathsomely dismissive of most politicians for my taste (Richard Epstein perhaps excepted.)

That said, I do share Stam's concern that too many intellectuals are too dismissive of soldiers and of business people. It is perhaps possible that immersion in intense athletic experience might make more such people less reflexively sympathetic to anti-military or anti-free market ideas. But one should not confuse sympathy to a political or economic idea with exposure to or engagement with a set of political ideas. It's been my experience that the children of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, for example, are pre-disposed to be more receptive to libertarian ideas than kids whose parents are from other racial and ethnic groups; it's easy to understand why. But having tea with Ukrainian grandparents once a week as a nine-year-old as an introduction to libertarianism is a poor substitute for real exposure to the great libertarian thinkers (Hayek, Mises, etc.) and sustained discussion and debate about their ideas. The situation with left-wing anti-military and anti-capitalist ideas at elite universities, I suspect, is similar. The goal ought not to be to provide students with life experiences that will make them more receptive to these ideas, but to ensure that these ideas are actually taught and engaged with in the classroom.

Finally, most of us, in this day and age, want an intellectual class that includes both men and women. There are perhaps a few exceptions in the most conservative sliver of the population, but even many of them have gone to rallies for female politicians like Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin. I doubt that the military would've really welcomed 18-year-old five-foot-one-inch, ninety-two-pound Isabel Archer as an enlistee. Perhaps they would have put her at a desk somewhere to analyze aerial photographs or maybe shipped her off to language school. And indeed, though there are a few women who will be strong enough to fight in combat and face the kind of physical rigors that Stam writes about, there are likely fewer women physically capable of doing so than there are men. While it's true that participating in varsity college athletics is less physically demanding than military work, Stam's entire vision of achieving personal excellence and leadership qualities through militaristic or quasi-militaristic physical discipline is one that seems more readily accessible to men than to women. How are those of us not capable of fighting in combat to achieve self-mastery and excellence?

Whither the state of Asian America?

2012-01-10T18:51:00.000-08:00

Charles Murray has an essay in The New Criterion titled "Belmont and Fishtown: On Diverging Classes in the United States." I believe it is an excerpt from his forthcoming book titled "The State of White America." In it, he posits the rise of an increasingly stratified society that is bifurcated into a new upper class and a new lower class -- people who reside in the fictional neighborhoods that he calls Belmont and Fishtown, respectively. Arnold Kling has the reasonable response that if this were a problem in the way that Murray claims, one would expect to see a more bimodal distribution of I.Q. scores emerging among the children of these new classes. He doesn't cite any such I.Q. data one way or the other, but I am inclined to suspect that if such data existed confirming Murray's hypothesis, someone would've brought it to his attention.

I have a different point than Kling to raise, though (and, to be fair, perhaps Murray addresses it in his book or in writings other than this short essay -- I've no way of knowing.) I've spent much of my adult life in and around Murray's Belmont-ish circles, and what's striking to me is how easily Murray glides over how over-represented recent Asian-American immigrants and their children are in these circles. When I took honors math and science classes in high school, my parents and friends used to joke that I brought diversity to the group because I was one of the few white women in the room. Most of my competitors were Asian guys. My dad used to tease me about the strange-sounding names of the guys who would call -- "Hey, Rabindranath wanted to check his answers for physics with you, and Srikanath wanted to know if you'd been able to get number 23" -- looking for help or commiseration with the homework from those classes. More recently, I see the same dynamic with the students I interview for the selective college that I attended. I've interviewed five women this year and last. Three were born outside the United States.

Some such of my friends and interviewees have come from wealthy families; some have come from poorer ones that were unusually obsessed with education and hard work. But I'd venture to guess that even the wealthiest such immigrant and child-of-immigrant kids are more attuned to the norms of social classes other than their own than is typical for children of native-born wealthy families. They seem to spend more time, on average, going to family, ethnic community or religious functions, where one meets people from a variety of different backgrounds. Their parents were less likely to express exquisite sensitivities along the lines of "I don't watch any TV except for Mad Men and The Wire," or disdain for people who like the Olive Garden. It's also quite common for my immigrant friends to travel back to their home countries and to spend substantial amounts of time visiting relatives who are far worse off than Murray's Fishtown dwellers.

So... while it might well be true that there are not a lot of students at Ivy League schools who are attuned to the feelings of truck drivers from Iowa, it is also true that there are many more students there who are exquisitely attuned to the problems of working-class Pakistani restaurant owners from suburban New Jersey. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that such students are actually discriminated against in the admissions process at such schools. It is not entirely clear to me why having one type of sensitivity is more important than the other. Assuming that there is not some reason for this that I have missed, then there would seem to be a few easy remedies for the situation that Murray describes. One would be to stop discriminating against Asian-Americans in elite admissions, a reform that might also be desirable for many other reasons.

Two, more broadly, Murray's concerns about insularity of elites argues for more liberal immigration policies. Let the most cognitively able students from countries around the world churn up into the Belmont class and shake up complacent attitudes there. As the winds of economic and political opportunity shift around the world, let America see fluxes of talented immigrants from different groups that leave their marks on the new upper class. While I've focused on Asian-Americans in this post, I understand that Eastern European Jews went through a similar process of becoming over-represented in the upper class and leaving a mark on new upper class behavior a generation before. I've no idea what the next group or groups to do so will be -- that depends in large part on how the winds of political and economic opportunity abroad change -- but I've little doubt that there will be some.

i

GOP's Working Class Muddle, etc.

2012-01-09T17:58:00.000-08:00

So apologies for the lack of blogging, but I've been coming out from under a bad cold. Through trial and error, I've learned recently that the CVS pills with pseudophedrine in them are just about the only things that help my congested nose. But under current federal law, you now have to display a state ID to get them from behind the counter and sign a statement that says that you are not making any material misstatements in connection with buying them, lest you be subject to a $25,000 fine. I am reminded of the periodic cries from some that voter ID laws are tantamount to Jim Crow because black voters disproportionately lack state IDs ; where is the NAACP to point out that ridiculous regulations on the sale of pseudophredine based drugs have a similar disparate impact? Heck, if they demanded hearings on this on Capitol Hill, I'd be strongly tempted to support them.

In the meantime, however, while I'm dipping my toes back into blogging's waters, please go read this column by Kimberly Strassel in the WSJ on "The GOP's Working Class Muddle." It's excellent, and I wish I could say I'd written it myself.

I really need to incorporate the phrase "caucus virgin" into my everyday vocabulary.

2012-01-04T09:14:00.001-08:00

So I am back to D.C. and environs after a nice Massachusetts trip, and little Willow appears to be recovering from her misadventures in sock theft. Perhaps a full post and pictures will follow, but I fear overwhelming you all with too much cuteness. Also, while I am sure that everyone has figured out by now that I am a totally unserious person, I might as well at least try to maintain some pretense of non-frivolousness by writing about subjects other than my darling golden retriever.

As some of you may have noticed, there was an Iowa caucus last night. And Rick Santorum narrowly lost to Mitt Romney, generating plenty of buzz. Like many other libertarians, I am no Santorum fan, for reasons ably laid out by David Boaz in a recent Cato at Liberty post and Jonathan Rauch in a 2006 essay for Reason. Reading most of his conservative defenders has been depressing; Jennifer Rubin's stating that the blemishes on Santorum's record as a fiscal conservative are merely a vote for No Child Left Behind and some earmarks rather glosses past the long list of non-fiscally conservative statements he made in his book and elsewhere as documented by Boaz and Rauch. David Brooks's column praising Santorum had its share of equally cringeworthy moments, though I suppose Brooks's big government conservative streak is well-documented enough that nobody should be surprised. But memo concerning the last line; as a UChicago grad, when you write that "The country doesn't want an election that is Harvard Law vs. Harvard Law," the point you ought to be making is that Harvardians are unserious jocks, not that they are scary intellectual elitists, which was presumably what you meant based on context.

I suppose I can take some comfort in knowing that his particular brand of populist big government conservatism is unlikely to play as well outside of Iowa than it did within it and that his popularity is likely to fade once some of his more extreme remarks come under closer public scrutiny. Also, while I have decidedly mixed feelings about Ron Paul, it's nice to see that at least some polling data indicate that it is the small government elements of his message, and not the creepy paleo-libertarian ones, that resonate most with Iowa's younger voters. (I am also indebted to said blog for coming up with the charming "caucus virgin" locution that appears in the post title). Thus, onto N.H. as it is!

Ailing Willow

2011-12-28T15:19:00.000-08:00

Alas, poor Willow. She'd made a safe trip with my husband up to see his family in Massachusetts for a few days. I'd come back to D.C. to hopefully get some work done (and avoid burning up scarce vacation days in anticipation of a trip to ancestral homelands of Ukraine and Russia this summer) and then join the Pnins over the weekend. She did well on her first day, even getting along better than expected with the Pnin family cocker spaniel (see above.) I was even hoping that she'd connect with some of the local academics regarding her recent paper, "Coase on Toast?: An Empirical Investigation into Asymmetric Bargaining at the Breakfast Table," possibly putting herself on tenure track in the econ department at MIT. But this has not transpired so far. She swallowed a sock around 11:30 this morning and had to be whisked off to the local animal hospital. The vet was able to get her to throw up Sock #1, but discovered a Sock #2 lurking in her gut. Now she has to stay overnight in the hopes that she'll pass Sock #2. If she doesn't, surgery awaits. Theists, please summon up thy superpowers on Miss Willow's behalf. Meanwhile, I'll just stare at the floor and remind myself over and over to try to be confident in modern medicine.

UPDATE: Young Willow has passed Sock #2 and returned home without needing surgery. She has more or less gotten back to her frisky and energetic ways. But all socks will now be under lock and key -- perhaps even the lockbox that Al Gore mentioned in his 2000 presidential campaign, as Pnin puts it...

Shinto Willow

2011-12-27T19:14:00.000-08:00

Each December, any blended family must inevitably confront the question, "In what religious tradition will we raise our golden retriever?" So first, we exposed Willow to her Jewish side by letting her watch us light the tiny $10 menorah from Target. She seemed intrigued enough that she avoided jumping up on the kitchen table to like it. This was followed by the eating of the Hanukkah gelt, which we'd actually purchased for the presidential candidate themed holiday party to serve as the Ron Paul appetizer (y'know, because of his love of the gold standard.) Associating paleo-ish Ron Paul with Jewish tradition perhaps felt not quite right, but Willow seemed more miffed that we couldn't share any of our chocolate with her.

Then she traveled north to visit her Archer grand-owners for a celebration of Christmas. This was all somehow so exciting -- tree! pine needles from tree to put into her mouth! terrifying plastic Santa Clau on neighbors' lawn to bark at! stacks of presents around it which can double as a homemade golden retriever agility course! -- that she managed to inflict diarrhea on herself. But she does approve of the numerous special dog cookies that she received from friends and relatives and the new Kong Wobble that she got as a present. If she were, like the heroine of a popular young adult novel, forced to try to pick one religion for herself, I don't know which one she would settle on.

Fortunately, however, Willow is nothing if not an outside-the-box thinker. (Though she hastens to add that she does sometimes like to stick her head into empty J. Crew boxes and sniff around in them. In fact, if you have some, feel free to send them her way.) And so she has apparently settled on... Shinto ancestor worship... which slights neither of us! Yes, she has discovered a pillow on my parents' couch with a picture of one of her distant ancestors, Am. Can. Bda. Ch. Cummings' Gold-Rush Charlie. She is quite content to stare at it for hours on end while she's relaxing on the sofa. And thus our clever girl splits the difference between her two divergent religious backgrounds and offends neither of her humans!

My Christmas gift to you is a link to the Wikipedia entry for "revealed preference."

2011-12-23T09:06:00.000-08:00

Increasingly, I'm convinced that news articles recommending giving gifts that the recipient doesn't actually want are not actually about providing recommendations that are supposed to be useful, but instead a literary device that enables the author to mount her soapbox on behalf of a familiar cause without her plea sounding tired and shopworn. Ignoring the gimmick aspect of the genre would be akin to my husband's refusing pick up Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation because he is Jewish and it is rude to read letters addressed to other people. Or encouraging my sort-of boss to stop writing "Questions for the President" blog posts because the President never seems to answer his questions, without realizing that the "question" device is a clever way of framing his commentary on Obama's policies.

Take, for example, the most extreme and outrageous entrant into the genre that I have yet discovered -- ""As a Christmas Gift, Tell Your Friends and Relatives That They Are Overweight." No sane person can possibly think that this is intended to be real gift-giving advice. Please, please, as my husband points out in a somewhat different context, while we can perhaps easily judge the health risks associated with a friend's being overweight, it's much harder for us to figure out how much pleasure the other person gets from indulging in her bad habits. This would counsel for leaving our friends to their own devices and not sticking our nose into others' private business. Fortunately, most of us do this already.

That said, the genre's feeling pretty tired to me already. I'm starting to prefer my "here's why you should support my pet cause" sermons straight up, rather than watered down with "here's how this is relevant to the Christmas season" gambit. I'm in luck then that it's December 23. But I hope that this particular form of gimmickry gets retired next year, seeing how not-fresh and not-original it feels.

Notes on fashion

2011-12-22T20:37:00.001-08:00

How to explain the periodic appearance of long-sleeved sheer T-shirts in the world? Yes, they look fine when one buys a "layering piece" to put underneath it, e.g. a basic white tank top. But basic white tank tops are also useful when paired with articles of clothing other than the aforementioned sheer T-shirt. So, inevitably, there will be days when one is tempted to wear the sheer T-shirt by its lonesome but realizes that there are no suitable clean layering pieces in the drawer. Long-sleeved T-shirts of fabric of normal thickness notably don't have this drawback. Given that, why does anyone persist in buying the sheer kind? It's doubly annoying to number among the unsuspecting who think "Ah ha! Cute shirt on sale!" and then realize, no, that its sheerness makes it vastly limited for wear and un-buyable. Gah.

Also: how am I to understand the tall boots worn over jeans or leggings trend? It seems aesthetically appealing enough. It conjures up nice images of people in equestrian dress. I can support that. But where should I be looking for boots that are suitable for this purpose? The good ones all run expensive, and I don't want to sink a lot of money into some I'm unlikely to wear regularly. And I fear cheap ones would just be uncomfortable in all the wrong ways.