The Moral Sciences Club | Big Think

Why We Try

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 19:18:21 -0400

An Internet connection has only now materialized in my new Houston pad, so perhaps you'll forgive me if I kvetch about last week's David Brooks column. In the wake of the "you didn't build that" controversy, Brooks applies himself to the following question: "How much of my success is me, and how much of my success comes from forces outside of me?"

It's Brooks' view that the question "has no definitive answer," as a matter of fact, but that there is "a practical and a moral answer":

You should regard yourself as the sole author of all your future achievements and as the grateful beneficiary of all your past successes.

He then refines this idea, arguing that one ought to take less and less credit for one's success (and failure?) as one advances through the stations of life. One is to start out in one's 20s as "an Ayn Randian Superman who is the architect of the wonder that is you," proceed to "thinking like a political scientist" in one's 30s and 40s with a "lower estimation of your own power and a greater estimation of the power of the institutions you happen to be in," then in one's 50s and 60s advance to an "understanding that relationships are more powerful than individuals" ("like a sociologist"), and then, finally, in one's golden years, "[y]ou’ll be struck by the astonishing importance of luck," as ancient historians allegedly are.

This is characteristically confused and confusing. Brooks' initial "practical and moral answer" is not his actual answer. His actual answer is: "It depends on how old you are." Then, as he expounds his idiosyncratic theory of the individual's evolving conception of the locus of responsibility over the life-cycle, Brooks skips sloppily from prescriptive to descriptive language. He is, remember, proposing "a practical and moral answer" to the question of how much responsibility for success (and failure?) one should assign to oneself. Yet he writes as though 60 year-olds typically do come to think like sociologists, which is obviously false, when he means that they practically or morally ought to come to think like sociologists.

But why should they? Why should I, pushing 40, think like a political scientist? Why shouldn't I think like an ancient historian now, today.

In his penultimate paragraph, Brooks declares that "as maturity develops and the perspectives widen, the smaller the power of the individual appears, and the greater the power of those forces flowing through the individual." So, it's Brooks' view that the fully mature individual, who has achieved a panoramic perspective on life, understands that individual agency is swamped by impersonal forces. If that's not a "definitive answer" about the relative role of individual initiative in individual success, what is it? Anyway, if there's really "no definitive answer" to the factual question, how does Brooks arrive as such a definitive answer to the practical and moral question?

He concludes:

Great companies, charities and nations were built by groups of individuals who each vastly overestimated their own autonomy. As an ambitious executive, it’s important that you believe that you will deserve credit for everything you achieve. As a human being, it’s important for you to know that’s nonsense.

So Brooks started out lying. He does think there's a definitive answer to the descriptive question: very, very little of what we accomplish is ultimately due to us. He must also think that his readers are incredibly dumb. Why not just come out and say that we can't handle the truth, and that it's important for wise people like David Brooks to lie to the rest of us so that we don't languish in poverty, subjection, and truth?

Well, I guess if you think that's true, you probably also think you shouldn't say so. But Brooks does say so, right there in the last paragraph! Well, if it's okay to say so, and pretty transparently, after talking nonsense for a while, then it's probably okay to just leave out the nonsense and say it straight. The folks who need fooling don't read the Times anyway.

The fact that Brooks is philosophically committed to mendacity aside, the truth of the matter is really not so tricky. In any endeavor, individual effort generally plays only a small role in achieving the desired result, when compared to the contribution of all other relevant causal factors. Still, the success or failure of most human endeavors depend critically upon the supply of effort, and most endeavors will fail if too little effort is supplied. In some circumstances, a realistic assessment of the effect of greater effort on the odds of success will be demoralizing, leading to less effort and even lower odds of success. But this doesn't mean that successful people need to be systematically deceived about the efficacy of volition. It means that people need to internalize norms that stigmatize, at least some of the time, the rational withholding of effort.

Of course, people aren't generally self-destructive, and this sort of thing (i.e., morality, culture) only goes so far, even if it does goes pretty far. Incentives matter, as the economists like to say. You won't write try to write the Great American Novel if you don't think you can. But, even if you think that there's some small positive probability you could succeed, it may not be worth trying unless the payoff for success is really huge. Do the math. Which is why winner-take-all markets and the vast wealth and status inequalities they entail may not be so bad for the commonweal. A more egalitarian distribution of money and status for novelists would result in a decreased overall supply of novel-writing effort, and thus to fewer and fewer really valuable novels. (The stats quo also leads to a lot of wasted effort, but so what!) If widespread false belief doesn't work, try inequality!

That said, a smart culture can probably limit wealth inequality while maintaining the possibility of huge inequalities of status, which is why I suspect Ed Conard, whose book I have not read, overstates the case for economic inequality. Successful cultures produce individuals who try hard, because that's what one does, and who dream of riches and/or glory. Maybe successful cultures also produce individuals deluded about the efficacy of the will, too, as Brooks seems to think. But I really don't think there's any risk in talking about openly about the possibility. I mean, watch:

God is dead! Nothing matters! Your life is a worthless, insignificant blip in an endless blank expanse.

See what happened? Another can-do American just won another stupid gold medal.

Why Aren't There More Auroras?

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 17:37:12 -0400

The killings in Aurora, Colorado are literally sickening. I've been a little sick about it all day. And I find myself with the urge to say that this sort of horrifying mass murder is "senseless," that it defies comprehension, though it's not clear to me why I want to say that. I guess some part of me wishes it were senseless. But it isn't. We can make sense of hopelessness, anger, violent nihilism, bloodlust. It's not really so hard to see why someone might want to punish the world, or to make life intensely vivid for a few fleeting moments by killing a roomful of screaming people. We recoil from such gruesome inner scenes, but only because imagination is so capable of calling them forth. I wouldn't go so far as Terence and say "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto." People do plenty that simply does not compute. But Aurora, I guess I'm sorry to say, is not one of those things. What's truly terrifying to me is not that that this sort of thing is impossible to understand, but that it is so easy to imagine from the perspective both of the murdered and the murderer, and then, having imagined it, finding that I cannot quite fathom why it doesn't happen all the time. It is our safety that's mysterious.

Paul Campos writes:

[T]he surprising thing about the Aurora shooting is that incidents of this type don’t happen more often. We live in a (compared to the rest of the developed world) extraordinarily violent, deeply economically stratified nation, with more than 270 million guns floating around – enough to arm every adult and half the kids in the nation.

A lot of Americans are broke, or angry, or paranoid, or all three, and a lot of these people are heavily armed. It’s not exactly a shock that this combination of factors helps produce 15,000 murders per year.

Why should it be "surprising ... that incidents of this type don’t happen more often"? Because we don't really understand why they don't. The fact that all the people who were murdered had gathered to watch the latest in a series of movies about mass-murdering lunatics must be meaningful. Our pop culture is chock full of deranged figures plotting mass destruction and death, which seems to me strongly to suggest that we find it pretty easy, enjoyable even, to imagine our way into the minds and motivations of men set on atrocity. Would we pay so much so often to feel the frisson of fictive enormities if the drive to commit them seemed to us too baffling to take seriously, like the desire to be suffocated by eels, or the urge to put a little glitter in every fat man's pockets? I don't think we would.

The URL but not the headline of Campos' piece asks "why-arent-there-more-auroras". Well, why aren't there? Campos does not hazard a guess. Here is mine. We are more thoroughly controlled by our society's norms than we tend to imagine. In a setting of peace, outside the context of war, to perpetrate an act like the Aurora massacre requires an almost superhuman feat of volition. There aren't more Aurora's because we are sociable robots, programmed for peace. To override that programming and act really monstrously requires both an uncommon estrangement and an implausibly free will.

Rights, Traffic, and Freedom at Work

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 17:37:28 -0400

Intervening on the great Crooked Timber vs. Bleeding Hearts Libertarians debate on freedom in the workplace, Matthew Yglesias says:

My standard approach to this is that in almost all political contexts, including this one, both the concept of freedom and the concept of property rights are red herrings. A political movement genuinely focused on freeing people from the coercive authority of the state would spend a ton of time tackling the everyday tyranny of traffic signals, lane striping, jaywalking laws, and the dozens of other similar regulations that impinge upon the day-to-day lives of hundreds of millions of law-abiding American citizens. By the same token, a movement obsessively focused on property rights would be outraged by the fact that every automobile driver and factory owner in America is causing fine particulate emissions to traspass on people's backyards all across this fine land.

As it happens, the most satisfactory libertarian account of property rights I know of, David Schmidtz's, proposes we understand "property rights as a system of traffic management." (Similar, ungated paper here.) Here's David Schmidtz on the coordinating function of property, at length:

Consider that the whole point of fences, and of rights, is to get in the way. Or to use a different metaphor: rights are like traffic lights. A mere liberty is a green light. A full-blooded right is a green light combined with a correlative red light. Some rules are better than others at unobtrusively enabling people to get on with their business. Traffic lights facilitate traffic movement not so much by turning green as by turning red. Without traffic lights, we all in effect have a green light, and at some point traffic increases to a point where the result is gridlock. By contrast, a system in which we take turns facing red and green lights is a system that keeps us out of each other’s way. Of course, the system itself gets in the way when it presents us with a red light, but almost all of us gain in terms of our overall ability to get where we want to go, because we develop mutual expectations that enable us to get where we want to go more peacefully and more expeditiously.

We can see from this that we do not want lots of rights, for the same reason we wouldn’t want to face red lights every fifty feet. We want the most compact set of lights that enables motorists to know what to expect from each other, and thereby get from point A to point B with minimal interference. By getting in our way to some degree, well-placed traffic lights, like well-placed property rights, liberate us, and help us stay out of each other’s way.

...

Property rights are, among other things, red lights that tell you when the right to use the intersection belongs to someone else. Red lights can be frustrating, especially as a community becomes more crowded, but the game they create is not zero-sum. When the system works, nearly all of us get where we are going more quickly, safely, and predictably than we otherwise would, in virtue of having been able to coordinate on a system that enables us to know what to expect from each other.

Commercial traffic consists of people coordinating in a thick sense of undertaking elaborate projects together, and in a thin sense of staying out of everyone else’s way as they pursue their respective projects. To secure coordination in a thin sense, people need some common understanding of torts and property. To secure coordination in a thick sense, people need a common understanding of their right to say no and also of new obli-gations created by freely saying yes. Thus, they need common understandings of contract as well as of tort and property. ...

What about the pedestrians, one might ask? That is a crucial respect in which the traffic-light metaphor radically understates the benefit of a successful property regime. Literal traffic lights are working well when people manage to stay out of each other’s way, but commercial traffic management must pass a far more stringent test. Commercial traffic’s aim is not merely to be accident-free but to bring people together. Rising commercial traffic is a boon, not a drag. The ultimate secret of progress and prosperity is the cooperation of multitudes. Commercial traffic—the trucking and bartering of multitudes—is a community’s lifeblood, enabling children to grow up to become drivers.

Not every would-be motorist gets a car at the same time, but commercial traffic’s point is to produce and disperse the means of participating in the market. Ensuring that everyone gets a car on the same day, or at the same age, is not the point. If, instead, we were to insist on a distributive principle such as “no one gets cars or computers or kidney transplants until there is enough for everyone to be guaranteed one at the same time,” that would be the sort of red light that gridlocks a system, bringing progress to a crashing halt. That red light has no place in a community’s system of traffic management, no place in its system of property, and therefore no place among its principles of justice, because that sort of red light cannot coexist with people having reason to live in that community.

The traffic management function of property conditions what can count as justice, given that whatever we call justice has to be compatible with people prospering, which means it has to be compatible with the system of property that enables people to prosper. If whatever we choose to call justice is not compatible with property, then we have no reason—indeed, no right—to take so-called justice seriously.

There are a few points I'd like to draw out.

Schmidtz agrees that "mere liberty," a world of green lights everywhere, just leads to gridlock. However, the necessity of limits on "mere freedom" created by a system of rights does not imply, as Yglesias seems to suggest, that "freedom" is a distraction from the real issue. The point of red lights is to ensure that we're all relatively unimpeded in our travels, that we're free to get where we're going. As Kant liked to put it, "hindering a hindrance to freedom" serves freedom. A well-enforced (by coercion or conscience or whatever) system of coordinating property conventions put us in the sort of "civil condition" (as Kant called it) in which the exercise of liberty is least likely to be stymied or frustrated. In the positive sense, a "compact" system of property rights gives people more freedom than they have otherwise by enlarging the set of available choices. This certainly suggests to me that coercion isn't the only or most important limit on effective liberty. There's also disorder -- everybody getting in everybody's way by making incompatible claims over the same scarce resources. A well-ordered scheme of constraints on "mere liberty" guarantees liberty's worth. (I'm not saying this is Schmidtz's view, exactly. It's mine, today.)

Now, obviously, an "obsessive focus on property rights" conceived as a system of traffic management isn't going to lead to outrage over "the fact that every automobile driver and factory owner in America is causing fine particulate emissions to traspass on people's backyards all across this fine land." As Schmidtz emphasizes, "internalizing externalities" is a good deal of what decent systems of property rights help us do:

Which kinds of property rights enable people to prosper together? In a nutshell, the kind that can evolve to internalize evolving externality problems while securing the opportunity and incentive to produce, invent, and otherwise help a society make progress. In most times and places, this will mean a mixed regime in which important bits of property areheld by the public but in which the primary means of production are in private hands. That kind of mixed regime has been tested repeatedly in practice. Evidently, and for well-known reasons, it just works better.

I doubt Yglesias disagrees. The problem is that Yglesias fixes on crazy notions of freedom and property rights in order make it seem plausible that freedom and property right are a distractions when considering working conditions. He goes on to argue:

I think the better way of putting it is that we have political disagreements about market capitalism and that the construction of a functioning market capitalist economy requires considerable infringement of human liberty and property rights in order to facilitate the deployment of modern industrial and transportation technologies. Which is fine. And fortunately the construction of a functioning social democratic economy would also require those things and so we don't argue about the principle that people's freedom to move about the streets should be restricted by little lights or that a non-zero level of air pollution should be permitted.

But that just means that whatever it is we're arguing about when we argue about restricting the range of permissable labor market contracts, we're not arguing about "freedom" or about "property rights."

Again, this seems weird. Does Yglesias really accept that the craziest libertarian conceptions of freedom and property rights are the most plausible conceptions?

Of course an argument about the range of permissible labor market contracts is about freedom and property rights. When the social-democrat Timberites say that workers often suffer an unacceptable loss of freedom under fairly typical capitalist working conditions, they're not confused about the nature of their complaint. Likewise when the libertarian Bleeding Hearts counter that forbidding workers from entering into certain labor-market agreements unacceptably limits their freedom; they aren't confused either.

That said, Yglesias is right about full employment:

One concept that I was surprised to see both sides of the debate leave off the table is full employment. Nothing is quite so empowering in the workplace as the knowledge that if your boss treats you like a jerk, you'd be able to quit and go get a roughly similar job with a less jerky boss. Even a guaranteed social minimum isn't nearly as good as another job because there's disapprobrium attached to being unemployed. In a world of human beings, some bosses are always going to be two standard deviations jerkier than the average boss. Full employment punishes asshole bosses as a class rather than seeking to bureaucratically circumscribe them with a narrow list of specific prohibited abuses.

I'd suggest that this sort of "empowerment" is a matter of freedom, and that full employment has a great deal to do with a sound system of property rights and the sort of commercial traffic it promotes.

Liberal Metapaternalism and Higher Education

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 14:42:18 -0400

Matt Yglesias replies to an argument from Mike Konczal:

Mike Konczal has a fairly compelling argument that it would make sense to dismantle the entire crazy quilt of "submerged state" tax deductions and credits designed to help make college affordable and just use the money to directly provide free or near-free college education at public universities.

I think, though, that any effort to radically rethink higher education finance does need to go back to first principles. Why spend public money on this at all? Why not dismantle the submerged state exactly as Konczal suggests, and give the money to poor people? Then people could use the money to buy higher education services or not according to whether or not they thought vendors of said services were, all things considered, offering a reasonable value proposition. There are good answers to this question (I think) but the nature of the answer you give helps shape your agenda for higher education reform.

So why not just give poor people money and let them decide how they want to spend it? The obvious answer is that they ought to spend it on education, but they won't. In a smart follow-up post, Konczal tries to find a nice way to say this.

As Konczal has it, the "liberal paternalist" argument against simply giving cash to the poor is that this encourages dependence, but we're trying to encourage independence. I think this is a good argument!

Against this sort of liberal paternalist Konczal offers Peter Frase, who argues from the left that it's better to give the poor money than to make to sure they have access to jobs, because most wage labor is demeaning and enervating, and the only reason anyone does it is to make money. So just give them money!

Frase thinks "that having a job gives a person a greater sense of self-worth than getting a handout" only to the extent that "we, as a society, treat wage labor as though it is a unique source of dignity and worth." The suggestion seems to be that if we, as a society, treated as a source of dignity and worth whatever else folks are up to, other than wage-laboring, there'd be no particular problem with the dole. This strikes me as a bit silly.

We, as a society, just aren't going to regard whatever folks want to do as a source of dignity and worth. Lots of us have a fairly narrow, though eminently reasonable, view of what's dignified and worthwhile. The ideal of society as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage is a good one, as is the idea of society as an order of mutual respect and fair reciprocity (which comes to the same thing, by my lights). If you want a cut of the cooperative surplus, you've got to pitch in and cooperate! If you can, but you don't, most of us are going to resent your insisting on a cut anyway, even if we think we owe you something, just because you're a person. There's an important sense in which you don't have it coming, that it's unfair to claim a share, and if you feel a little bad about taking it, most of us are going to be glad you feel a little bad, because probably you should. In a decent order of fair reciprocity, having a job gives a person a greater sense of self-worth than getting a handout because paychecks are compensation for having made others better off -- are hard evidence we are worth something to somebody else -- and handouts, as such, aren't. Being worth something to others gives us good reason to feel we're worth something to ourselves.

Frase talks a bit about the importance of non-market labor, and it is important. But, again, it's not clear that it's money we owe to people who are providing services to their own families, or selflessly volunteering to write Wikipedia entries.

Now, sometimes we need help, and we shouldn't feel too bad about accepting it when we need it. But we should try not to need it, and part of what it means to treat people with respect is to encourage them not to need it. If this is a matter of convention, it's a good convention. Now, like Frase, I favor a guaranteed social minimum, but not because people should get a cut of the surplus no matter what they do or don't do, but because I think (and this is an empirical hypothesis) indemnifying one another against downside risk induces more and better cooperation. My pitching in to put a floor under you is something you can justify to me, and everybody else, if it's likely to put you in a better position to make me, and everybody else, better off than we'd be if you (and we) didn't enjoy the assurance of a floor.

Konczal goes on to quote T.M. Scanlon at length, and Scanlon makes a great point:

The strength of a stranger’s claim on us for aid in the fulfillment of some interest depends upon what that interest is and need not be proportional to the importance he attaches to it. The fact that someone would be willing to forgo a decent diet in order to build a monument to his god does not mean that his claim for aid in his project has the same strength as a claim for aid in obtaining enough to eat (even assuming that the sacrifices required on others would be the same). Perhaps a person does have some claim on others for assistance in a project to which he attaches such great importance. All I need maintain is that it does not have the weight of a claim to aid in the satisfaction of a truly urgent interest even if the person in question assigns these interests equal weight.

Right! And there are facts of the matter about what our interests are. One of the greatest of these is that it is much in our interests to develop the capacity to tell the difference between what we actually need and what we just happen to want. Let's call this capacity "autonomy." Autonomy has real developmental conditions. If we haven't become able to exercise judgment in this way, if we haven't developed what it takes to be a reliable agent of our own interests, it's not always going to be in our interests to be empowered to buy what we want.

This is, to my mind, the best reason to not just give people money and then find out whether they spend it on what they are or their children need in order to become full-blooded autonomous agents. Is there something a little paternalistic about this? There sure is! Is this a problem? Yes! It's not easy to come to agreement about the developmental conditions for autonomy. But we do the best we can, and it's not that controversial. We agree, more or less, that a certain measure of economic security, access to decent food, decent health care, and a decent education are generally necessary for the development of the capacities that put us in a position to make robustly autonomous decisions about our lives.

One problem is that those of us who were deprived of these goods may not be well-positioned to make great decisions on the behalf of our children. Offering free school, nutritional assistance, subsidized housing and the like, instead of just giving parents a chunk of change to buy whatever they do or don't want for their kids is a pretty literal kind of paternalism. I call it "meta-paternalism," paternalism in the service of the development of the sort robust autonomy it is wrong to paternalistically interfere with, once it's in place. We paternalistically intervene to prevent parents from being bad paternalists to their kids. Kids need their parents to make good decisions on their behalf, and we, as a society, try to help kids the best we can while minimizing the chance parents will make bad decisions to their kids' detriment. Alas, parents can always use their autonomy to screw up the development of their kids autonomy, but not as much as they might like.

Now, is higher education needed for the development of autonomy? I don't think so. One thorny issue here may be timing. If we've done a good job giving kids the basic goods and opportunities they need for the development of autonomy, they may nevertheless require a little time before it all comes together. Suppose the government gives every kid from a relatively poor family a big check on their eighteenth birthday (how big depends on how poor, say) and tells them they can spend it any way they like. Go to school! Start a business! Whatever!

What's going to happen? I dunno, but I would predict more than a little regret by age twenty-something. Does this mean we should nudge young adults toward college by, say, making it free. I don't think so. This strikes me as an excellent way to subsidize the academy. But if the idea is to help finish off the development of robust autonomy, and/or to subsidize the development of socially valuable human capital, it might be better to just give hard-up kids money with strings attached.

How Hawkish is John Allison?

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 01:02:17 -0400

So Cato Institute president Ed Crane is taking an "early retirement" and megabucks former BB&T CEO John Allison is set to take his place. It's easy to see why Allison makes sense as a peacemaking Crane replacement. He's a High Church Randian -- indeed, he's on the board of the Ayn Rand Institute -- which puts him in a theological camp apart from the Kochs and most Catoites. Additionally, he's extremely rich and thus unlikely to be too intimidated by the titanic combined Koch fortune. Indeed, I'm told that during his introductory chat with the Cato staff, Allison made of point being a one-percenter who owes nothing to the Kochs. But isn't the fact that Allison sits on the board of ARI more than a little worrying? As my former Cato colleague Jeremy Lott writes:

Many Randians are intensely hawkish and Cato’s foreign policy is, to put it mildly, not hawkish. In his opening remarks to Cato scholars, Allison said that he did not want Cato’s foreign policy to be the Republican Party’s foreign policy. That’s all to the good but this bears watching because the foreign policy work Cato does is important.

Indeed. Actually, to say that the Ayn Rand Institute is "intensely hawkish" puts it mildly. ARI is led by Yaron Brook, a former Israeli army intelligence officer who seems rather more concerned to wipe Iran-as-we-know-it off the map than to spread Ayn Rand's theory of concept-formation. Here's Brook in a recent interview more or less demanding an invasion of Iran:

The 2009-10 protests in Iran offered the possibility of a non-military way of replacing the regime with one that's less- or non-threatening. But the administration squandered that opportunity. I see no real solution without using military force.

But to be clear, what I'm referring to is nothing like what the United States did in Afghanistan or Iraq. Those campaigns were far from the kind of war necessary to eliminate a threat; as Elan and I write in the book [Winning the Unwinnable War], those campaigns are best characterized as essentially "welfare" missions, where the priority in reality was not to eliminate whatever threat the regime posed, but rather to fix up hospitals, clear sewers, and deliver ballot boxes. The kind of military action I believe is necessary in the case of Iran is far, far different. The exclusive goal would be to end the threat—not an open-ended nation- building crusade à la Bush. One consequence of Iraq and Afghanistan is that people can scarcely imagine that military action can actually succeed in delivering peace—as it did, for example, in World War II.

Lately in the foreign-policy establishment some have argued that a nuclear-capable Iran is something we can live with, something we could cope with through "containment." It worked with the USSR, they tell us, because of the fear of Mutually Assured Destruction, so we can count on the same approach tocheckmate the threat of a nuclear Iran. I disagree.

The analogy with the Communists completely breaks down, because the Soviets at least wanted to live on earth; the fear of mutual destruction could deter them. But an essential characteristic of the Islamist regime in Tehran is that its ideology celebrates martyrdom and glorifies the afterlife. Can we trust containment to succeed in the face of that kind of mentality? No. There are other reasons why containment is untenable—among them the risk that neighboring regimes, themselves politically unstable and unfriendly, will immediately seek nuclear capability, too. The bottom line is that Tehran's ideology is the problem—it's the driving force behind Iran's decades of aggression. Ultimately, only changing that regime can eliminate it as a threat. The hope is that there would be enough Iranians who oppose it from within, capable of establishing a successor regime that is at minimum a lesser or non-threat to the United States.

This sort of thing would set Ed Crane's hair on fire, if he had any. Indeed, this is about as far from the Cato foreign policy shop as you can get. Ron Paul's "So what if Iran has nukes?!" position is pretty much where the Cato war wonks are. Yaron Brooks' "Iran must be conquered, and quick, because superstitious Persians fear not death" stance would send the Catoites into conniptions.

John Allison has been on the ARI board for a good long time, which certainly suggests he's sympathetic with Yaron Brooks' agenda. And Yaron Brooks' agenda is, among other things, war with Iran. During the whole Koch v. Crane hullabaloo, I got an earful from some of my former colleagues about how Cato would be absolutely ruined if its reputation for independence were compromised, and that this would be especially tragic if it led Cato to lose influence in foreign policy, since it is Washington's most visible, principled anti-war institution. So now Cato's about to have a president who does not happen to be, as far as I know, a GOP partisan, but does happen to be an Ayn Rand evangelist who gives time and money to an institution that is actively campaigning for war in Iran. Does this, on the whole, really help Cato's reputation?

How hawkish is Allison, really? I know this question must be of concern to at least some Cato staff. If they know the answer, or have had from Allison some sort of promise that he won't meddle, I hope they'll share. Anyway, it seems to me that either Allison's (a) not remotely as hawkish as one would guess given the nature of ARI's foreign policy output, in which case it would be good to hear him explain why he supports warmongers like Brook, or (b) he is as hawkish as one would guess given the nature of ARI's foreign policy output, in which case you'd think the Crane faction would not have seen him as an acceptable Cato prez. I eagerly await clarification.

SCOTUS Obamacare Prediction

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 22:23:58 -0400

On the basis of having for a time shared a house with a John Roberts clerk who conveyed to me no useful information about the Chief Justice's cast of mind, here is my prediction about tomorrow's SCOTUS decision.

The court will uphold the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Roberts, writing for the majority, will offer a hyper-causuistical decision that discovers in standing commerce clause precedent principled grounds for ruling in an insurance mandate while ruling out congress' power to mandate purchase of any goods and services that don't begin with an "i" and end with an "e", and aren't ice or iodine. To brighten the dashed hopes of conservatives, the "Why there can never be a broccoli mandate" section of Roberts' decision will on the whole narrow Congress' commerce-clause regulatory powers. However, in their very great relief, and schadenfreude over bitter conservative disappointment, liberals will largely miss the minor revolution contained in Roberts' sly scholasticism.

If I'm right, you've all got to pitch in and buy me some health insurance. Please.

Where Was the Left's "Permission Structure" Wrecking Ball?

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 01:23:32 -0400

In an illuminating piece, the Washington Post's Ezra Klein traces the trajectory of the constitutional argument against the individual mandate from preposterous, fringe position to a real, greatly-feared legal possibility. The concept at the center of Klein's account is something called a "permission structure" with the power to make the improbable plausible through "third-party authentication" or "endorsements from respected figures or institutions" the public admires.

[W]hat the conservative movement had done — with a big assist from Verrilli [the bumbling solicitor general who screwed the pooch in oral arguments] — was build a permission structure that would permit the Republican-appointees to the Supreme Court to rule against the individual mandate. They had taken a legal campaign initially dismissed as a bitter and quixotic effort based on a radical and discredited reading of the Commerce Clause and given it sufficient third-party authentication to succeed. If the Supreme Court rules against the mandate, it will no longer be out on a ledge. It will be in lockstep with the entire Republican Party, many polls, a number of judges, the impression the public has gotten from the media coverage, and the outcome of the oral arguments.

I think Klein gets the story of how all this came about pretty much right. And Klein's correct to assign a substantial role to Verrilli's ineptitude, yet I don't think he captures the significance of the stumble: the solicitor general was caught unprepared, just as the entire progressive movement was caught unprepared by the remarkably unified conservative offensive. The conservative campaign wasn't just "initially dismissed" as quixotic. Liberals dismissed the constitutional challenge at the beginning, in the middle, and all the way up to the end of oral arguments, at which point it suddenly and finally dawned on the institutional left that the wingnuts weren't just a bunch of posturing idiots. At which point, too late.

In the shadow of Klein's "permission structure" story is the story of how the American left failed to rouse itself sufficiently to dismantle this structure and deny its "permission." A concerted drive for "third-party authentication" won't likely prevail over an equal and opposite campaign of "third-party invalidation," or whatever you'd call it. Yet liberals, very comfortable indeed with the resounding consensus of liberal legal scholars who don't have seats on the Supreme Court, largely confined themselves to haughtily scoffing at the right's "radical and discredited reading of the Commerce Clause," and then were startled and astonished to discover that this may not have been enough.

However the Supreme Court rules this week, I don't think anyone can say that the right's decades-long effort to build an integrated system of institutions operating largely outside the ambit of liberal academia and liberal legacy mass media was entirely misspent. And one can see in variably successful ventures such as Air America, MSNBC, the American Constitution Society, and the Center for American Progress a healthy spirit of emulation born of the recognition that all the Ivy League, the New York Times, and NPR won't cut it. So it's a little surprising that the left remains to this day so liable to surprise by the occasional efficacy of the right-wing noise machine. How many floggings does it take to expect the Spanish Inquisition?

The Meanings of American Decline

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 01:16:36 -0400

A new Pew poll, and the global perception captured in the chart below, leads Ali Wyne, a fellow Big Thinker, to inquire in an interesting post about the meaning of the idea, recently in vogue, that the U.S. is in decline.

Wyne writes:

[T]he more that folks opine on the question of American decline, the more I wonder what the question means. For starters, I’d deconstruct “Is America in decline?” into at least three sub-questions:

Is it in absolute decline? Is it in relative decline? Neither?
What metric(s) are we using to measure decline? Share of global GDP? Share of global defense spending? Ability to achieve desired geopolitical outcomes?
From what baseline are we measuring decline? The end of World War II? The end of the Cold War? 9/11? The onset of the global financial crisis?

Before offering my reflections on the idea of American decline, let's take a moment to note that China isn't even close to America in absolute economic terms. In terms of GDP, China's economy is about half as large as America's. So the perception that it is now the world's leading economic power is pretty interesting. When China finally catches up depends on your assumptions about growth and inflation rates. This little widget from The Economist allows you to plug in your own assumptions and see the date of convergence. What's more telling is the chart further down the same page. China is now the world's largest manufacturer and the largest consumer and importer of a fair number of goods, and so quite sensibly looms larger than the U.S. in countries that export, say, raw materials for steel production, and in countries that import more Chinese than American goods. Obviously, the less a country depends on American goods, and on American demand for its goods, the less America matters to that country, other things equal. When dependence on American trade decreases in many economies at once, there's a clear sense in which America matters less in the world, even if the U.S. share of world GDP has remained remarkably steady, which it has.

Turning back to Wyne's useful set of clarificatory questions, how we answer them clearly depends on who's asking and why. If our interest is geopolitical power, we'll answer one way. If our interest is America's sense of itself, and its health as a culture and economy, we'll answer another way.

In terms of geopolitical heft, I think the economic story is sort of obvious. It's about relative influence, and that's not simply a matter share of global GDP. It's also about how important the American market is to the rest of the world, about the extent to which countries can literally afford to ignore the U.S. An increasingly competitive global market means the a loss of market power for the U.S. It just does.

Now, the international affairs folk are way more interested than I am in the ability of the people in control of the American state to impose their will upon the rest of the world, or, as Wyne puts it, to "achieved desired geopolitical outcomes." I think that's the metric those people are after. Some think "share of global defense spending" tells us something important about achieving desired geopolitical outcomes, and I can't say it doesn't. But the money thrown at the death-dealing industries is rather less important than the credibility of the threat all that expenditure is supposed to add up to, and nobody knows how to measure that, and thus nobody knows how to measure the ability of states to achieve (somebody or other's) desired geopolitical outcomes through the threat of violence.

If you're a state, your effective relative power in the global anarchy depends to a distressing degree on what sportscasters like to call "intangibles." This is especially so if, like the U.S., you always want to play the face and never the heel. How much "legitimacy" do you have in the "international community"? Where do you stand with your own people? Do they feel cash-strapped and ground down by pointless recent wars? My sense is that the American state is not in the best of shape in terms of these intangibles -- in terms of what you might call its "moral capital."

In terms of America's sense of itself, perceived relative global position matters a good deal. Do Americans feel that their country is where the future is happening now? This is not important. That America's where it's at is a central part of American identity. But I'm not sure this matters more than absolute domestic economic health. Americans are in fact suffering a nasty bout of the blues, and not because Chinese GDP is going to converge with American GDP some time in the next decade, but because Americans recently discovered that we're less wealthy than they thought they were, we're not getting richer, and increasing prosperity is nowhere on the horizon--not for most of us, at least. Some of us want to blame the Chinese, or somebody, but it's not really anybody's fault we've lost a bit of our economic mojo and the corresponding sense of cultural vitality. And if Benjamin Friedman is right, and I suspect he is, a widespread sense of economic stagnation leads to a slowdown, if not reversal, of progressive social change. When our culture becomes in some ways more truculent, possessive, and defensive, that can feel like decline, because it is. Some of this is cyclical, but some of it isn't.

This is what I find interesting. But for those who insist on very serious global realpolitik, surely this domestic sense of retrenchment, embattlement, and ennui has something to do with America's power to get what it wants globally.

We can also measure American decline personally, one by one. Here are my tests. If traveling abroad, how tempted am I to say that I am Canadian? How often do I wonder whether I might be more likely achieve what I would like to achieve elsewhere? On this basis, the prognosis is mildly negative. How's it looking where you sit?

Writing the Rich: What Is it Like to Be a Banker?

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 14:15:32 -0400

Christian Lorentzen makes an excellent point excellently:

Tougher for the novelist are the tasks of rendering convincing characters across the class spectrum and capturing economic intricacies in a way that’s both cogent and readable. I’ve not heard of any institutions that offer joint MFA-MBA degrees.

The impulse to become a writer suggests a fundamental fiscal incompetence. Fiction writers, often deriving their income from their status as writers (by teaching) rather than from their actual writing, tend to carve out lives somewhere within the middle class but find themselves at a remove from the higher and lower echelons of economic activity. The campus—a zone that encourages all participants to make a pretense of classlessness—has become the default home of most novelists, and this may partly explain why class is an easier subject to avoid now than in the days of Wharton, Fitzgerald, or Ellison. The love triangle in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot tilts not according to a geometry of class but according to the characters’ reading tastes. In any case, authors’ actual relationships to money don’t make for thrilling plot twists. Nobody wants to read a novel that climaxes with a successful book deal. There might, however, be a decent conceptual fiction to be written under the title A History of My Student Loans.

Milo Burke, the narrator of Sam Lipsyte’s 2010 novel, The Ask, makes a useful class distinction after an encounter with a governor’s daughter: “She was from the people who kept everything. I was from the people who rented some of everything for brief amounts of time. I knew I deserved no pity, would get none from the people who kept everything. They only pitied the people with nothing at all.” I don’t think it’s rash to assume that most American fiction writers come from and remain the people who rent things, and it’s worth considering how much sympathy they extend to people wealthy enough to keep things. So pity the novelist who sets out to write about the rich: Demonizing bankers may be an effective political tactic, but it’s not an option for a novelist trying to draw well-rounded characters, or for one who wants to offer an understanding of contemporary society that becomes more than a class grievance.

That passage in The Ask hurt when I read it. Anyway, the problem Lorentzen identifies is real, and he ably adduces evidence of it in a number of recent novels. Lorentzen's mention of "class grievance" called to mind Robert Nozick's account of "wordsmith" intellectuals' attraction to socialism and hostility toward capitalism. According to Nozick:

In the currency the schools had to offer, the smartest constituted the upper class. Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.

The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority "entitled" them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?

[...]

It is not surprising that those successful by the norms of a school system should resent a society, adhering to different norms, which does not grant them the same success. Nor, when those are the very ones who go on to shape a society's self-image, its evaluation of itself, is it surprising when the society's verbally responsive portion turns against it. If you were designing a society, you would not seek to design it so that the wordsmiths, with all their influence, were schooled into animus against the norms of the society.

So, if Nozick's right, it's not only ignorance of the inner workings of business, and of the money-making classes, which leaves fiction writers unable to write insightfully about the commanding heights of the economy. Simple innocence would not explain the urge to demonize bankers Lorentzen warns writers against, but Nozick's conjecture might.

I think Lorentzen is right that "The campus—a zone that encourages all participants to make a pretense of classlessness—has become the default home of most novelists...," and he's also right to suggest that on campus classlesness is pretense. Because, of course, Eugenides' Brown is a place where class distinction is reinforced and rehearsed -- especially among the wordsmiths.

Steven Johnson (Sam Lipsyte's roommate at Brown!) wrote an interesting piece in the New York Times, coinciding with the release of Eugenides' The Marriage Plot, about the Brown semiotics scene in the 80s:

The obscurity of the field was partly the point. In Jeffrey Eugenides’s new novel, “The Marriage Plot,” which takes place in part at Brown in the early 1980s, the heroine first stumbles across the semiotics program when a friend comes home with a copy of Jacques Derrida’s “Of Grammatology”: “When Madeleine asked what the book was about, she was given to understand by Whitney that the idea of a book being ‘about’ something was exactly what this book was against, and that, if it was ‘about’ anything, then it was about the need to stop thinking of books as being about things.”

Greek for the “science of signs,” semiotics as a field dates back to fin de siècle philosophers and linguists like C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand De Saussure; in modern times it is most commonly associated with Umberto Eco. The general thrust of pure semiotics is a kind of linguistics-based social theory; if language shapes our thought, and our thought shapes our culture, then if we are looking for a master key to make sense of culture, it makes sense to start with the fundamental structures of language itself: signs, symbols, metaphors, narrative devices, figures of speech. You could interpret a Reagan speech using these tools as readily as you could a Nike ad.

A master key to the culture: a pretty powerful thing to have. And then there's this:

“Going to college in the moneymaking ’80s lacked a certain radicalism,” Eugenides writes. “Semiotics was the first thing that smacked of revolution. It drew a line; it created an elect; it was sophisticated and Continental; it dealt with provocative subjects, with torture, sadism, hermaphroditism — with sex and power.”

So we have a sophisticated, worldly elect among all that Ivy League classlessness. And it was already attracted to "revolution" (against what?!) and allergic to "moneymaking." Not that the elect has fared poorly:

[A] striking number of semiotics students have gone on to influential careers in the media and the creative arts. ... NPR’s Ira Glass, the novelist Rick Moody, the filmmaker Todd Haynes, Eugenides himself — all spent their formative years in the semiotics program. The antihero of Sam Lipsyte’s hilarious 2010 novel, “The Ask,” takes theory classes at a college clearly modeled on Brown. (Lipsyte was in fact my roommate for most of my college career; I like to think the stinging parodies of semio-babble in that book were modeled on his other friends.)

This is a pretty impressive set of white guys. They are indeed, as Nozick puts it, "the very ones who go on to shape a society's self-image, its evaluation of itself." But Ed Conard probably spends more renovating a bathroom than their combined net worth, and that's got to rankle. What does Ed Conard know about Saussure?!

All that said, Nozick's explanation is a bit too sociological for me. Perhaps it's true, as Lorentzen says, that "The impulse to become a writer suggests a fundamental fiscal incompetence." But what stands behind the impulse to become a writer? Whatever it is, maybe it also predicts relatively weak pecuniary motivation. I'd guess a largely native strain of personality has a good deal to do with literary aspiration. If I were to go over to the Dey House and force the fiction MFA students take a Big Five personality survey, I'm confident I'd find a group almost uniformly super-high in "openness to experience." By itself, high openness predicts left-leaning politics. Indeed, as Jost and colleagues have argued, personality is fairly ideological. This is important.

If the personality traits that generate liberals are also a goodly part of the recipe for making literary novelists, then "write what you know" is, in effect, instructions to remain inside a left-leaning mind's experience or the world. Now, high openness is very strongly correlated with curiosity and empathy. So high-openness novelists may want to understand the subjectivity of bankers. Bankers, on the other hand, probably couldn't care less about the rich inner world of writers. But the motivation to enter into a foreign perspective doesn't guarantee success. It can be exceedingly hard for a super-high openness, super-low conscientiousness (and thus super-liberal) writers (like me) to imagine, must less connect sympathetically with, the motivation of super-low openness, super-high conscientiousness (and thus super-conservative) business-folk. Mostly, we do a terrible job. In some ways, conservatives understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives.

So that's three things. First, novelists just don't know enough about business or people in business to write about them well. Second, novelists are wordsmith intellectuals who feel poorly treated by the distributive principles of market societies and tend to resent those who thrive in its non-semiotics-based class structure. Third, novelists have left-leaning ideological personalities that, on the one hand, make them curious and empathetic, but, on the other hand, make it hard for them to imagine what it's really like to experience the world as a right-leaning ideological personality.

Zing!: What the New Science of the New Sciences Tells Us About Our Unquenchable Craving for the Illusion of Scientifically-Validated Insight

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 16:26:06 -0400

Amid the tiny din of two-hundred micturating rodents, Ralph X. Bumblefutz goggled in disbelief at a discovery that would forever lay waste to the West's most cherished ideas about incontinence. It was a clear Autumn morning in 1974, in a cluttered basement laboratory occupying a disused corner of the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, and pants would never be the same. But before we can come to terms with Bumblefutz and his paradigm-exploding diapered hamsters, we must travel in time to 14th-century Tuscany and confront the mystery of a beloved Dominican friar hanged to death for frock-soiling. ...

O' God! What hath Gladwell wrought?! Plenty of "ideas non-fiction" editors think this hype is what readers want. And maybe they do want this. Maybe editors know readers. But not this one. No, not me. I swear to sweet Moses I'm sick unto death of the anecdote-choked, aha!-hunting ,"What the New Science of Blah Tells Us about Blech," book-length collection of pop-sci features articles. Which is why I have not come, to the best of my knowledge, within fifteen feet of Jonah Lehrer's Imagine: How Creativity Works. Which is terribly unfair. Lehrer's a smart guy capable of fine writing, and I only suspect he's plowing the field I'd rather see salted. Still, Issac Chotiner's smart, harsh review of Imagine played to my prejudices. (And I wanted to try my hand at a gee-whiz parody, which is fun!)

Chotiner comes down hard on Lehrer's attempt to torture a Bob Dylan anecdote into the illustration of a principle drawn from the science (the "new science", one trusts) of how the brain does it thing:

THERE IS LITTLE to be learned about Bob Dylan, or the creative process more generally, from Jonah Lehrer. What his book has to teach, and by example, is the fetishization of brain science, and the anxious need for easy answers to complex questions. Imagine is divided into two sections, “Alone” and “Together,” because Lehrer is interested in distinguishing between an individual’s creativity and the environments that allow creativity to flourish. His basic argument regarding individuals, captured in his discussion of Dylan, is that being obsessively focused on a problem can lead to a dead end. When we are relaxed, by contrast, we are more likely to direct our attention inward, and thus detect the “connections that lead to insights.” Similarly, Lehrer preaches the value of so-called “horizontal interactions,” which are characterized by “people sharing knowledge across fields.” The benefit of such “conceptual blending” is that it allows “people to look at their most frustrating problems from a fresh perspective.”

Sounds a heck of a lot like Arthur Koestler's 1964 The Act of Creation, my favorite book about creativity. (I think I've read two books on creativity, maybe.) Also, ouch. Anyway, Chotiner is not impressed by Lehrer's mode of argumentation:

Lehrer’s slippery language is crucial to his method. He writes, “The people deep inside a domain—the chemists trying to solve a chemistry problem—often suffer from a kind of intellectual handicap.” A page later he notes that “the young know less, which is why they often invent more.” In both cases, the crucial, slippery word is “often.” In the first instance, Lehrer is just stating an obvious fact—a fresh look may be useful, an outsider can see what an insider may overlook—but one which does not explain much. In the second instance, the “often” completely destroys the point of the sentence. Do the young invent more, or not? No doubt in the entire history of humanity, the young have “often” come up with inventions. But how often, exactly? And what does he mean by young? In the ancient and medieval and early modern centuries, and even into the nineteenth century, thirty or forty was not young. Their dates of birth are not all we need to know.

The problem keeps recurring. Of a surfing expert with Asperger’s, Lehrer writes, “Clay’s ability to innovate in surfing is rooted in a defining feature of his mental disorder.” Is Lehrer saying that Clay’s surfing expertise is the result of his disease, or merely that certain properties of the disease may lead to success in fields like surfing? Are there an unusually high number of surfers who suffer from Asperger’s? We are not further enlightened.

Chotiner goes on, hacking away mercilessly. Again, I'm not sure it's all fair, though I'm inclined to accept the gist of his assessment. But I am sure Chotiner's critique of Lehrer's genre is fair:

IMAGINE is really a pop-science book, which these days usually means that it is an exercise in laboratory-approved self-help. Like Malcolm Gladwell and David Brooks, Lehrer writes self-help for people who would be embarrassed to be seen reading it. For this reason, their chestnuts must be roasted in “studies” and given a scientific gloss. The surrender to brain science is particularly zeitgeisty. Their sponging off science is what gives these writers the authority that their readers impute to them, and makes their simplicities seem very weighty. Of course, Gladwell and Brooks and Lehrer rarely challenge the findings that they report, not least because they lack the expertise to make such a challenge.

As I complained in my review of David Brooks' The Social Animal, Brooks' gallimaufry of "studies say" tidbits never comes together into a coherent picture, suggesting he doesn't understand the science he cites very well. I think that's generally true of synthetic pop-science books by journalists writing in a Gladwellian or Brooksian vein. Popularizations that hold up are most likely penned by actual experts who happen to write well, such as Daniel Kahneman or Jonathan Haidt. More often, though, serious scholars with fresh findings worth taking to the intelligent public are led by their editors or their own dim sense of popular style to ruin otherwise good books by littering them with hyperventilating anecdotes of doubtful relevance. Far from making these texts more readable, books bristling with zingy narrative hooks suggest to the reader that the actual intellectual content is too boring to bear. I'm through with this stuff.

Man, now I want to read The Act of Creation again. (Time to reissue, publishers!) That's a damn good book.