The Compleat Will Wilkinson

Heritage DeMinted

ww@willwilkinson.net (W.W. | HOUSTON) — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:53:35 -0800

AS MY colleague noted earlier, Jim Demint, a Republican senator from South Carolina, will vacate his senate seat and assume the presidency of the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank.

With Mr DeMint's move, all of Washington's three most prominent right-leaning think tanks will have undergone regime change in recent years. The changes are telling. Arthur Brooks took the reins of The American Enterprise Institute in 2008. Mr Brooks was previously a chaired professor of public policy at Syracuse University. A protracted struggle this year and last over control of the Cato Institute's board of directors resolved with the "retirement" of Ed Crane, who had presided over Cato since its earliest days, and his replacement as president by John Allison, an incredibly wealthy former bank executive with a commitment to the philosophy of Ayn Rand. And now Heritage, which has been helmed by Ed Feulner since 1977, will take on a high-profile Republican senator as its chief. These changes in leadership speak to the character of Washington's most influential right-leaning think tanks. The wonkish professor, the Randian banker, and the establishment Republican politician each tell us something about the priorities of the institution he was been chosen to lead.

During my tenure at the Crane-era Cato Institute, the idea that Heritage had increasingly become a research and propaganda arm of the Republican Party, and therefore no longer much of an independent conservative influence on Republican politics, had become common among even right-leaning wonks and journalists. The announcement that Mr DeMint will soon take over is sure to reinforce that notion, and rightly so. Jennifer Rubin, a conservative blogger for the Washington Post, is distressed by this prospect:

Let me first explain why this is very bad indeed for Heritage. Even DeMint would not claim to be a serious scholar. He is a pol. He’s a pol whose entire style of conservatism—all or nothing, no compromise, no accounting for changes in public habits and opinions—is not true to the tradition of Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk and others. By embracing him, Heritage, to a greater extent than ever before, becomes a political instrument in service of extremism, not a well-respected think tank and source of scholarship. Every individual who works there should take pause and consider whether the reputation of that institution is elevated or diminished by this move. And I would say the same, frankly, if any other non-scholarly pol took that spot.

Whether the reputation of Heritage "is elevated or diminished by this move" is not such a simple question. Surely the move will elevate Heritage in the estimation of millions of partisan Republicans who have barely heard of the Heritage Foundation and wouldn't know Ed Feulner from Adam. I expect that Mr DeMint, a favourite of the tea-party movement, will lead to a fund-raising bonanza. There is a clear sense in which that is very good for Heritage. That said, the institution's reputation among "thought leaders" as an independent conservative voice will surely suffer. However, as I've already suggested, this simply caps off an ongoing decline in Heritage's reputation for intellectual autonomy. Surely this will interfere with the ability of Republican operatives to pass off Heritage research as something other than self-serving partisan propaganda, but from another perspective, the advent of Heritage's DeMint era may look like the culmination of the foundation's mission. From this perspective, Heritage appears to have been so successful at exerting influence on the substance of Republican Party politics that it has become impossible to distinguish between the general stance of a dogmatically partisan conservative politician, such as Mr DeMint, and the general stance of the Heritage Foundation. Victory!

Heritage's ongoing piecemeal merger with the GOP may be a sign of corruption or success, but it's probably more-or-less inevitable. A good number of right-leaning think tanks were founded in the 1970s and 80s in large part to give conservative and libertarian intellectuals, who had struggled to find a place in academia and the mainstream media, a secure institutional perch from which to preach the gospel of "fusionist" conservatism to both the public and the complacent Republican Party establishment. For good or ill, success in this endeavour over the decades has indeed brought the GOP and many "independent" right-leaning institutions closer together. Initially, the liberal intellectual establishment at America's most prestigious universities and media outlets looked upon institutions such as Heritage with a mixture of pity and contempt. It was not until the past decade or so, when the influence of right-leaning think tanks on public and elite partisan opinion became undeniable, that the left scrambled to get into the game. When John Podesta, a White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, launched the Center for American Progress (CAP) in 2003, he was aiming to combat the influence of conservative institutions like Heritage by building a left-leaning simulacrum. As Matt Bai reported in a 2003 New York Times piece:

[Mr Podesta's] goal is to build an organization to rethink the very idea of liberalism, a reproduction in mirror image of the conservative think tanks that have dominated the country's political dialogue for a generation.
[...]
"The rise of the machinery of ideas on the right has been impressive,'' Podesta told the gathering, to nods of assent. ''People have noticed it, and we have talked about it. But we haven't really found the vehicles to compete with what's coming at us.''
Going back to Barry Goldwater, Podesta said, conservatives ''built up institutions with a lot of influence, a lot of ideas. And they generated a lot of money to get out those ideas. It didn't happen by accident. And I think it's had a substantial effect on why we have a conservative party that controls the White House and the Congress and is making substantial efforts to control the judiciary.''
Podesta laid out his plan for what he likes to call a ''think tank on steroids.'' Emulating those conservative institutions, he said, a message-oriented war room will send out a daily briefing to refute the positions and arguments of the right. An aggressive media department will book liberal thinkers on cable TV. There will be an ''edgy'' Web site and a policy shop to formulate strong positions on foreign and domestic issues. In addition, Podesta explained how he would recruit hundreds of fellows and scholars -- some in residence and others spread around the country -- to research and promote new progressive policy ideas.

The difference between Heritage and CAP is that CAP, founded by a faithful Clinton operative, has been a research and propaganda arm of the establishment Democratic Party from the very beginning. CAP was not founded to develop and propagate an upstart conception of liberalism, but to give a shot in the arm the implicit creed of the status quo Democratic Party. The prospicient Mr Podesta smartly began where Heritage has, after decades of institutional evolution, only recently arrived. Mr DeMint's Heritage will join the Center for American Progress at the in-the-pocket partisan think-tank avant garde.

(Photo credit: AFP)

Bombing Kant's test

ww@willwilkinson.net (W.W. | HOUSTON) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 07:00:10 -0800

AN EMINENT Prussian bachelor once argued that rational creatures are bound, by the very nature of reason, to act only according to rules of conduct one would affirm, when at one's rational best, to equally guide everyone's choices. This is not, it turns out, very useful as a day-to-day rule of thumb. It is, however, an excellent test for government policy in a multi-party democracy. If a policy seems advisable when one party is in power, but inadvisable when the other party is in power, then it is inadvisable, full stop. This is how we know that the Obama administration's drone policy is, to put it mildly, inadvisable.

As the New York Times reported last week:

“There was concern that the levers might no longer be in our hands,” said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity. With a continuing debate about the proper limits of drone strikes, Mr. Obama did not want to leave an “amorphous” program to his successor, the official said. The effort, which would have been rushed to completion by January had Mr. Romney won, will now be finished at a more leisurely pace, the official said.

Why the subjunctive rush? Was the idea that, in Mr Romney's hands, a surfeit of discretion would lead to the outrageous slaughter of innocents? Would counterproductively invite "blowback"? Why the leisurely pace now that Mr Obama's second term is assured? Because the pattern of drone attacks so far, guided ultimately by Mr Obama's moral sensibilities and strategic judgment, have not had such consequences, and can't be expected to have? Does anyone other than the administration itself actually believe this?

Establishing truly general, and thus potentially morally justifiable, "rules of engagement" for drone attacks is urgent for a rather more important reason than the possibility that a less enlightened politician might come to power: America's conduct sets an example for the world. As this newspaper noted earlier this month, "Staying true to America’s principles is one worry. Providing a template for other countries is another. China and Russia have similar technologies but their own ideas about what constitutes terrorism."

We Americans are inclined to think of ourselves as a morally upstanding lot who act according only to the highest ideals in our violent escapades abroad. Much of the rest of the world is inclined to view us rather differently, as smugly unwitting Thrasymacheans who cannot see the difference between what is right and what America, in its unmatched might, gets away with. The question Americans need to put to ourselves is whether we would mind if China or Russia or Iran or Pakistan were to be guided by the Obama administration's sketchy rulebook in their drone campaigns. Bomb-dropping remote-controlled planes will soon be commonplace. What if, by another country's reasonable lights, America's drone attacks count as terrorism? What if, according to the general principles implicitly governing the Obama administration's own drone campaign, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue turns out to be a legitimate target for another country's drones? Were we to will Mr Obama's rules of engagement as universal law, a la Kant, would we find ourselves in harm's way? I suspect we would.

Now, I hope we can all be fairly sure that the White House will remain undroned. But if its safety is due more to fear of overwhelming American retaliation, or to the unsurpassed excellence of America's defences, and not so much to the fact that America's drone war is constrained by a generally acceptable framework of rules, then Mr Obama's people need to kick it back into high gear. It's simply chilling to consider the possibility that the White House might really believe that absent the threat of Mitt Romney there are in this matter no grounds for haste.

Read on: The dronefather

(Photo credit: AFP)

Technical Difficulties

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 10:25:25 -0800

This blog done broke. I can only post from the WordPress Android app. So, until I can find time to fix it, you’ll find my rare personal blogging at willwilkinson.tumblr.com.

Test

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 23:10:42 -0700

Hello?

Why We Try

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 16:18:21 -0700

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?

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 14:37:12 -0700

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

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 14:37:28 -0700

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

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 11:42:18 -0700

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?

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 22:02:17 -0700

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

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 19:23:58 -0700

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?

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 22:23:32 -0700

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

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 22:16:36 -0700

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?

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 11:15:32 -0700

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

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 13:26:06 -0700

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.

How to Do Things With Wars

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 19:59:19 -0700

We turn our attention here to a buzzing philosophical activity in post-war England, and primarily among Oxfords young dons, animated by Austin, but including a number of older and already influential colleagues like Gilbert Ryle, editor of Mind. Here, Oxford seemed to be cutting a way for itself, leaving Russell and his Cambridge colleagues — including their celebrated darling Wittgenstein — behind and out.[1] With Germanys defeat in WWII, an entire page in history was felt to have been turned. During the war, Austin had been recruited to set up, and ended up heading, the “order of battle” section of what became SHAEF the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force under Eisenhower. The section was responsible for collecting and analysing information from a variety of sources, including the top-secret Enigma at Bletchley Park, but also through the developing art of aerial reconnaissance which later became satellite imaging and human intelligence from the resistance across Europe, in support of the war effort generally and to prepare for the D-Day landing.It is said that when the German army surrendered at Frankfurt, Austin was the only person amongst the Allies who knew where all of the German army was actually located.[2] Returning to do philosophy at Oxford from this high-level Intelligence posting, it was natural for the young Austin to try applying this very special war experience in his resumed philosophical investigations. He set himself the task again, as he preferred it, and had found more effective during the war, through team-work of demystifying philosophical concepts in a somewhat parallel way, one imagines, to the manner he employed as scattered data e.g., pictures or separate pieces of information e.g., a train movement were painstakingly put to work in order to interpret the data being gathered — very much a bottom-up, piece-by-piece approach to finding out what these meant.

Fascinating!

via When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame.

The Sadness of Stay-at-Home Moms

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Fri, 18 May 2012 11:17:07 -0700

Gallup:

Stay-at-home moms fare worse than employed moms at every income level in terms of sadness, anger, and depression. On the other items Gallup measures — laughter, enjoyment, happiness, worry, stress, learning something interesting, and having a high life evaluation rating — middle- and high-income stay-at-home moms for the most part do as well as employed moms.

However, low-income stay-at-home moms do worse on all of these items than their employed counterparts. These moms — with annual household incomes of less than $36,000 — are less likely than employed moms at this income level to say they smiled or laughed a lot or experienced happiness or enjoyment “yesterday.” They are also slightly less likely to say they learned something interesting.

via Stay-at-Home Moms Report More Depression, Sadness, Anger.

Hop on the Welfare Wagon!

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Mon, 14 May 2012 20:36:59 -0700

Shakesville via the Sequential Artist’s Workshop

Narrative vs. Truth

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Fri, 11 May 2012 21:24:22 -0700

So the next time you hear a good story about why the financial recession, or any other economically significant event, was caused by a single collection of bad actors — or how a simple linear narrative “explains” an important event — remember this: Just as we are wired to like a diet rich in fats and sugars, we have an appetite for simple, coherent narratives. Neither habit is good for our long-term health.

via Our Gift for Good Stories Blinds Us to the Truth – Bloomberg

The Eagleman Stag

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 09 May 2012 23:48:17 -0700

By Mikey Please

ASPL!

Cowen on the Austerity Facts Foofaraw

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 09 May 2012 10:43:46 -0700

I don’t wish to respond point-by-point to some of the writings in the blogosphere, but given the above, Ryan Avent also is not looking deeply enough. Both he and Brad Plumer did not see that the posts in question clearly distinguished between spending cuts and “austerity” (Brad did issue what is arguably a correction.) I admire both bloggers and read them regularly, but these two posts both fail; here are some comments from Veronique. I would say there is a dominant narrative, repeated many times in not always precise language, which people find it very hard to think outside of.

Most of the time “austerity” is a misleading word and more precise concepts — readily intelligible I might add — are available. There really are some times when we should relabel austerity as “mostly tax increases,” but many people are reluctant to do so.

via Economic growth is not contractionary, and other confusions about stimulus and spending — Marginal Revolution.

Hayek on Social Justice & Minimum Income

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 09 May 2012 08:19:45 -0700

Kevin Vallier tries to sort it out:

On Hayek’s view, the UBI is required as a condition of democratic legitimacy within the framework of a social contract. I’m not saying Hayek is a social contract theorist, but he sounds like one in this passage. In order for a democratic government to be legitimate it must treat people as equals by imposing only abstract rules on them. Government gives no one special privilege, and this requirement is compatible with providing them with means to secure basic goods and services.

via Hayek: against social justice, for a minimum income | Bleeding Heart Libertarians.

Psychological Egoism Refuted, Again

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Tue, 08 May 2012 21:15:57 -0700

A New Jersey roofer jumped into a vat of nitric acid solution to save a co-worker who had fallen 40 feet into the tank, fire officials said.

Rob Nuckols, 51, was working on the ground floor Monday morning at Swepco Tube LLC when his colleague Martin Davis plunged through a roof and into the vat of diluted acid and became fully submerged, officials said.

He jumped into the vat and was waist-high while he and three others pulled Davis out, Clifton Fire Chief Vince Colavitti told The Record of Woodland Park. The vat contained a 40 to 70 percent nitric acid solution used for cleaning metal tubing.

via Worker jumps into vat of acid to save colleague | ajc.com.

Democracy Works, So Government Sucks

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Tue, 08 May 2012 20:54:26 -0700

Jason Brennan hands you the check:

The quality of the candidates who make it on the ballot depends upon the quality of the electorate. The politicians who make it on the ballot are low quality because they appeal to the median voter. If the median voter has silly views, then smart, well-informed, intellectually honest, forthright politicians don’t stand a chance.

Many people complain that we’re always stuck choosing the lesser of two evils. The Comedy Central show South Park compared the 2004 presidential election to a school mascot election between a Turd Sandwich and a Douche. Why are we often stuck choosing between a Republican Turd Sandwich and Democratic Douche? It’s not because the system is broken or corrupt. It’s because the system works. …

If we want to fix our democracy, then we need to fix ourselves. We need to become smarter, less biased, and more intellectually honest when it comes to politics. We need the median voter to be a virtuous voter.

via Princeton University Press Blog » Blog Archive » Bad Government is Our Fault.

If You Love Truth So Much, Why Not Give Up Stories?

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Tue, 08 May 2012 20:11:15 -0700

Robin Hanson wants to know:

A few days ago I asked why not become religious, if it will give you a better life, even if the evidence for religious beliefs is weak? Commenters eagerly declared their love of truth. Today I’ll ask: if you give up the benefits of religion, because you love far truth, why not also give up stories, to gain even more far truth? Alas, I expect that few who claim to give up religion because they love truth will also give up stories for the same reason. Why?

One obvious explanation: many of you live in subcultures where being religious is low status, but loving stories is high status. Maybe you care a lot less about far truth than you do about status.

via Overcoming Bias : Stories Are Like Religion.

Emulating Fictional Characters

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Tue, 08 May 2012 18:02:13 -0700

Researchers at Ohio State University examined what happened to people who, while reading a fictional story, found themselves feeling the emotions, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses of one of the characters as if they were their own – a phenomenon the researchers call “experience-taking.”

They found that, in the right situations, experience-taking may lead to real changes, if only temporary, in the lives of readers.

In one experiment, for example, the researchers found that people who strongly identified with a fictional character who overcame obstacles to vote were significantly more likely to vote in a real election several days later.

via ‘Losing Yourself’ In A Fictional Character Can Affect Your Real Life.

Steve Horwitz on Corporate Personhood

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Mon, 07 May 2012 19:43:11 -0700

Corporations are composed of people. So are unions. So are universities. So are families. The belief that we can somehow “tax corporations” without “taxing people” is the fallacy at the heart of Romney’s exchange. It’s the same with any collective: If we take away union rights, we take away the rights of individual union members. If we strip a university’s accreditation, we also strip credibility from its students and its graduates.

I am composed of cells. The belief that we can somehow tax me without taxing my cells is the fallacy at the heart of [something something.]

Is this not the fallacy of division? Why isn’t Steve’s version?

via Yes, corporations are people | The Daily Caller.

Ron Paul’s Delegate System Hacking

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Mon, 07 May 2012 15:22:21 -0700

Doug Mataconis says it’s not helping his cause:

[I]t’s unclear what Paul’s supporters think they are going to accomplish here. Regardless of how many “wins” they rack up they are not going to be able to stop Mitt Romney from winning the nomination on the first ballot, although I keep running into Paul supporters online who seem to actually believe that Ron Paul can somehow come out of Tampa with the nomination. That delusion aside, though, it’s hard to see what they think they’re accomplishing. By and large, it appears pretty clear that they are antagonizing mainline Republicans every time they pull this stunt. That’s hardly the kind of thing that will win friends and influence people, nor is it the kind of thing you should do if you want to become a voice of influence in the Republican Party as Paul supporters claim that they do.

via Ron Paul’s Delegate “Wins” Won’t Amount To Anything.

Is Gender Equality a Boudoir Buzkill?

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 04 May 2011 13:34:38 -0700

Image via Wikipedia

Elizabeth Nolan Brown inspects a Psychology Today blog post by Ogi Ogas (no joke!) arguing that “gender equality inhibits arousal” and finds one nugget of pertinent scientific information, on the neurology of dominance and submission, prefaced by a bunch of blustering armchair gender psych speculation.

[I]n order to get to this – in order to get to this in a blog post on Psychology Today, not some lad magazine or MRA-site, mind you – we’ve had to sift through several rounds of feminist bashing, romance-novel-based evidence and bastardized ev-psych theorizing. On behalf of all folks (and feminists!) who truly are interested in the neural components of sexual arousal… it’s just insulting, Ogi.

A response to Ogas reports contrary findings:

Fortunately, Linda Young, also writing for Psychology Today, offers a much less sensationalistic (and idiotic) take:

To say “feminism” is causing loss of desire and damping male arousal is totally misleading. In fact, there is research that supports the opposite. Rudman and Phelan (1) found that men who had feminist partners reported being in more stable relationships and greater sexual satisfaction.” Brezsnyak & Whisman (2), showed that more egalitarian decision making was associated with elevated levels of sexual desire. Schwartz and Young summarized a number of studies showing a relationship between equitable couples and greater sexual satisfaction (3).

Feminism is about social, economic and political equity and is independent of what turns someone on in a bedroom or fantasy. Ogas, like lots of folks, finds it easier to parse people and ideologies into black and white polarities than to consider the complex grays that don’t fall neatly into categories. A feminist with cleavage in high heels who wants to be ravished in bed is not a contradiction!

And neither is a man who’ll smack you around one minute and beg to be tied up the next. I mean, so I’ve heard …

The whole post is entertaining.

The Order of Public Reason

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 04 May 2011 13:00:34 -0700

Gerald Gaus’ new book The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World is a major event in moral and political philosophy. It is also very long. And stupefyingly expensive. Fortunately for those of us who aren’t billionaires, the political philosophy blog Public Reason is wrapping up a symposium on The Order of Public Reason, and for those of us who don’t have the scholarly leisure to browse the full discussion, Kevin Vallier has provided an excellent summary of Gaus’ concluding summary, from which it is possible to get a gist of the richness of the argument of this book.

Here’s are couple of especially interesting bits from Vallier:

I. Hayek and the Social Contract Tradition

I suggest that if we take Jerry at his word, we can shed light on the deepest themes in the book. First, note that this claim in effect rejects the entire basis of the social contract tradition, a tradition one might easily think that Jerry is defending and extending rather than rejecting. In some sense, Jerry rejects the contract metaphor. The idea that our interest in social morality can ground our reasons to follow social-moral rules (the idea that arguably lies at the heart of the contractarian tradition) must be rejected; and Jerry has tried to show why at great length. Instead, we must adopt an entirely distinct philosophical anthropology, one that is at root deeply Hayekian, for as Jerry says, “Our reason did not produce social order – we did not reason ourselves into being followers of social rules. Rather, the requirements of social order shaped our reason.” This just is Hayek, who wrote:

Man is as much a rule-following animal as a purpose-seeking one. And he is successful not because he knows why he ought to observe the rules which he does observe, or is even capable of stating all these rules in words, but because his thinking and acting are governed by rules which have by a process of selection been evolved in a society in which he lives, and which are thus the product of the experience of generations (LLL, 11).

Many of you know Hayek the classical liberal, but Jerry is following Hayek the social theorist, who attempted to integrate the rationality of rule-following into his philosophical anthropology at the deepest level. Jerry has argued throughout the book that the conception of the person employed within public reason liberalism and liberalism broadly speaking must move in this Hayekian direction. If public reason liberals follow Jerry’s lead, the fundamental structure of public reason and even the nature of the social contract theorists’ project must substantially change. In short, political justification must not begin with deriving the rationality of rule-following from a teleological conception of practical reason. Instead, it must begin with an understanding of the nature of human beings who are already rule-followers and the nature of the moral emotions and cooperative activities that accompany such rule-following. He goes further by arguing that even the Kantian conception of the person he endorses cannot be constructed out of practical reason alone. Instead, human nature contains Kantian elements for thoroughly Humean-Hayekian-evolution reasons. Our rule-following nature is contingent on our social development (though no less contingent than our goal-seeking nature).

[...]

VII. Summary

In sum, OPR defends public reason liberalism without contractarian foundations. It is Kantian without being rationalistic. It is Humean without giving up the project of rationally reforming the moral order. It is evolutionary but not social Darwinist. It is classical liberal without being libertarian. It is Hegelian and organicist without being collectivist or statist. It shows us how political authority can be justified but only by accepting that moral authority limits it. It pushes us to look towards the practical and reject the utopian while simultaneously maintaining that a truly free and equal social order is within our grasp. It rejects the aspiration of political liberalism to neutrality among conceptions of morality while simultaneously retaining its spirit by sectioning off social morality from other normative domains.

I’ve spent many hours in my pre-print copy of The Order of Public Reason. This is as good as contemporary political philosophy gets, folks.

[Update: Here's the schedule for the Public Reason colloquium with links to the discussions of the various book chapters. There's also instructions for contacting Kevin Vallier if you'd like an electronic sample of the book.]

The Debate Over Experimental Philosophy Is Dead

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 04 May 2011 12:18:59 -0700

Image via Wikipedia

Tammler Sommers writes an obituary:

In my perfect world, experimental philosophers would restrict their discussions to specific studies and the implications they draw from them – even in venues geared towards wider audiences. And this is largely what is happening, which is why this essay is best regarded as an obituary. The debate over experimental philosophy, if it ever really existed, has reached its fitting end. It is time for philosophers everywhere to move on.

The experimental philosophy debate is survived by articles in the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Prospect, Slate, many scholarly journals, and countless blog posts, forums, and podcasts

Or maybe it’s just resting. See David Papineau’s caveats.

Educated Women and “Marrying Down”

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 19:05:30 -0700

Kay Hymowitz notes that this year, 57% of all college grads will be women, which leads her to ponder:

So here’s a question: when the time comes, will these women be willing to marry “down”? Don’t bet on it.

It’s not entirely clear to me why Hymowitz asks this question, but I guess I get the gist of it. So, back when the typical woman had fewer years of college education than the typical man, and women had fewer and worse job opportunities, the typical marriage involved women marrying “up” educationally and socioeconomically. As women’s equality advanced, both altering the economic structure of the household and making it easier to pair off with an opposite-sex peer, it has become more common for like to marry like. And, now, more women than men are graduating college. It stands to reason that some of them are going to have to marry men who don’t graduate college.

My question is: in what sense does this count as marrying “down”? Back in the Mad Men era, a bright college-educated young man who married a sharp non-college-educated young woman of his general social class wasn’t marrying “down”. So why would it count as marrying “down” today if a young woman with a freshly-minted degree in elementary ed from Local U (2.6 GPA!) marries an enterprising chap who dropped out of Regional State after his sophomore year to run a thriving cell-phone kiosk in the mall? Answer: it wouldn’t!

Anyway, let’s talk about this:

[T]he biggest reason we probably won’t see a lot more college-educated women walking down the aisle with their plumber is one we don’t like to say out loud: they want to have smart kids. Educated men and women are drawn to spouses they think will help them produce the children likely to thrive in the contemporary knowledge-based economy. That means high IQ, ambitious, and organized kids who will do their homework and take a lot of AP courses. The preference for alpha kids is the reason there is a luxury market for Ivy League egg and sperm donors. It also explains why, though we don’t have solid research distinguishing between elite and State U mating choices, Ms. Harvard will probably not accept a proposal from Mr. Florida State.

Ridiculous… and personal!

Look, the desire for smart kids is not why most smart women don’t want to get hitched to less smart men. It’s because most women (and, as the old sexual division of labor become increasingly obsolete, most men) don’t want a lifetime with someone who doesn’t understand them, who doesn’t “get” their interests and enthusiasms, who thinks they’re “weird.” Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers are right that our grandparents’ marriages were largely about shared production, but contemporary marriage is largely about shared consumption. If he’s bully for Bay and she’s mad about Malick, it’s probably not going to work out. If your IQ is three standard deviations above the mean, then chances are so are your best friends’–including your romantic partner’s. We like people who are like us. Wild! I bet even gay people, who aren’t out to merge genomes, prefer partners of similar intelligence, physical attractiveness, with similar interests, and the like. You think?

Sometimes it even happens (and I have solid empirical evidence to this effect) that Ms. Georgetown will accept a proposal for Mr. Northern Iowa. Seriously, if Mr. Florida State has gotten so far with Ms. Harvard that a proposal makes sense, he probably stands a fair chance. As Matt Yglesias correctly observes, college quality may be a decent proxy for intelligence, but fellas who graduate from colleges with superior football teams, or who don’t graduate college at all, can nevertheless signal their mental mettle by, say, talking. It works. Believe me.

Mark Pennington on Hayek and Habermas

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:54:20 -0700

At Pileus:

Image via Wikipedia

Influential though Habermas has been, his case for deliberative democracy is undermined by its complete failure to address a point that Hayek made on numerous occasions. Though formal argumentation that takes place in democratic forums is one way in which people can learn from each other, it is by no means the most important. Far more significant is the capacity to observe the lived experience of other individuals and groups. Much of what we need to learn cannot be ‘put into words’ – it is ‘tacit knowledge’, which can only be communicated by observing the practical results of what other people do and imitating successful role models even when the ‘reasons’ for this success cannot be articulated verbally. For such knowledge to be transmitted it is imperative that there is a wide range of ‘experiments in living’ – whether in the production or consumption of goods – on which people can draw. The spread of knowledge in markets, the arts and science does not typically proceed via collective deliberation, but advances best when individuals and groups have a ‘private sphere’ that secures the freedom to experiment with projects that do not conform to majority opinions. Then, incrementally, through a process of emulation the prevailing wisdom may change over time. It is not sufficient for people to be able to talk about their ideas. Rather, they must have scope to act on those ideas – and this requires ‘property rights’, not ‘speech rights’. To restrict private property and the right of exit in favour of collective decisions is to reduce the total number of decisions made and hence limits the range of practical, lived experience from which we may all learn.

Neither is deliberative democracy likely to have the egalitarian effects that Habermas claims. On the contrary, procedures that rely on the statement of explicit reasons systematically exclude those individuals who are less able to engage in the articulate persuasion of majorities but who may still possess valuable knowledge embodied in the exercise of entrepreneurship, a practical skill or adherence to a particular ethical code. In markets and other exit based procedures such as competitive federalism, rich and poor, articulate and inarticulate, can act on the basis of relatively easy comparisons between prices, qualities of goods and lifestyles across competing products and jurisdictions. Voice-based institutions, by contrast, give special privilege to those skilled in the use of articulate persuasion alone. The latter point provides perhaps the best explanation for Habermas’s enduring appeal with academics and other professional talkers.

I think this is quite right, though I would stick up for the importance of public deliberation nevertheless. There is no avoiding the need to deliberate over institutions and public policy. Pennington here is engaging in a nice spot of public reasoning, voicing a partial justification for exit-based institutions. Hayekian institutions will prevail only if Hayekians are able to talk others into the need for the liberty to exercise incommunicable embedded and embodied know-how. A constitution of liberty is something you lay out discursively and defend with reasons, not something you dance, which explains Hayek’s abundance of essays and lack of grande jetés.

This is sort of obvious, but it’s worth resisting the obscurantist drift of a certain overemphasis on tacit knowledge and cultural evolution that makes a mystery of Hayek’s own adventures in “constructivist” institutional design. The question isn’t whether we ought to have voice-based or exit-based institutions. The question is how to mix them, and the attempt to answer it is an enterprise in collective deliberation.

Libertarians Can’t Win the Future by Breeding

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 11:56:06 -0700

Yesterday on Facebook, my friend Bryan Caplan made the following provocative claim:

[T]he most realistic long-run path to liberty is boosting libertarians’ Total Fertility Rate to 3.

That is to say, if libertarians have more kids than everyone else (and those kids have more kids, and so on), libertarians will eventually outnumber their foes and win the day. Bryan has made versions of the “strategic fertility” argument before, and I want to say what’s wrong with it, even if one shares Bryan’s goals and assumptions. I take these to be:

the goal of arriving at a society of full-blown liberty, whatever that amounts to,
the assumption that personality is largely passed along genetically, and
the assumption that ideological inclination is largely determined by personality, and
the assumption that there is a distinctively libertarian psychological profile.

Of course, advocates of any ideology could adopt this strategy. I’m talking about libertarians throughout this post, but I think my argument against the demographic strategy is general.

A libertarian pawn? - Image via Wikipedia

Now, the evidence for the heritability of personality is mixed. If it turns out to be low, the logic of Bryan’s libertarian eugenics is busted. But let’s go with the assumption that when we breed, we do produce little mini-mes.

The evidence that ideological dispositions reflect personality is pretty good. The gist of Jost et al‘s study correlating Big Five personality traits to ideology is that “openness to experience” (liberals are) and “conscientiousness” (conservatives have lots of it) are where the action is. “In general, liberals are more open-minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking, whereas conservatives are more orderly, conventional, and better organized.”

How do libertarians fit into this? Is there a distinctively libertarian psychological profile? Yes. Haidt et al find that libertarians are pretty much exceptionally thinky liberals with a bit of a sympathy deficit who care a lot about autonomy (my gloss, not theirs). In terms of the Big Five?

[L]ibertarians scored lower than the other two groups on agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion. They scored low (similar to conservatives) on Neuroticism, and they scored quite high (similar to liberals) on Openness to Experience.

If Jost et al are right, Neuroticism (emotional stability) doesn’t significantly distinguish conservatives from liberals, so don’t get hung up on Neuroticism. In terms of the dimensions of personality that distinguish liberals from conservatives, Openness and Conscientiousness, libertarians look like low-Conscientiousness liberals. (This, by the way, describes me incredibly well.)

Anyway, the point is that there is something it is like to be libertarian. As Haidt and friends sum it up:

We found that, compared to liberals and conservatives, libertarians show 1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle and correspondingly weaker endorsement of other moral principles, 2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional intellectual style, and 3) lower interdependence and social relatedness.

So let’s assume that these traits, and whatever else it is that inclines libertarians toward libertarianism, are passed along from parent to child. Can libertarians breed their way to libertopia?

No!

Broad ideological dispositions may be stable features of personality passed along genetically, but the content of ideology is an unstable product of history and cultural evolution. The content of conservative and liberal ideology in the middle of last century was a lot different from conservative and liberal ideology now. And “libertarianism” as a going cultural concern didn’t exist in 1950. What did psychological libertarians believe before the advent of libertarianism? Something available. Consider the possibility that had Bryan and I been born in the early 1910s instead of the early 1970s, we might have found that era’s cosmopolitan creed of universal liberation and economic progress very attractive. It was called “communism.”

Ideologies emerge, mutate, evolve, and die. In all likelihood, in another fifty or sixty years, libertarianism of the sort Bryan and I encountered and embraced as young adults will exist only as a historical curiosity. Even if the libertarian label sticks around, the cluster of propositions it designates won’t. The term “classical-libertarian” will have to be coined to distinguish throwbacks attracted to the libertarianism of Bryan Caplan’s youth from those attracted to whatever it is libertarianism eventually becomes. The conception of liberty Bryan’s children will find attractive will be different from his. The conception of liberty his grandchildren find attractive will be more different still. And, despite close psychology similarity to their grandfather, they may well find his politics repellent.

Birthing a horde of children with “libertarian” personalities is not a realistic long-run path to liberty. It is, at best, a realistic long-run path to “liberty”–to a society shaped by whatever unforeseeable future ideology to which individuals with libertarian inclinations find themselves attracted.

I think grasping the inevitability of the cultural evolution of ideology is helpful in clarifying the role of the intellectual. The task is not to discover and promote the true final philosophy. (And certainly not to promote the inclusive fitness of the true final philosophy’s adherents!) The task is to help steer the distributed process of cultural evolution toward truth and/or goodness by acting as a virtuous selection pressure. The attempt to enforce an orthodoxy–to protect a doctrine against cultural evolution–is the religious apologist’s task. The only plausible way of making the content of an ideology stable enough to sustain the hope that our grandchildren will believe what we believe is to make an institutional religion out of it.

Intellectuals who spend their time enforcing ideological orthodoxy as though it were a religion, but without the aid of religious institutions, are wasting it. A high-fertility strategy can work for Mormonism, but if anything resembling contemporary libertarianism is to survive, much less spread, it’s going to take new, better, and more persuasive arguments, not more babies.

Anyway, I left out one of Bryan’s implicit assumptions because it’s too risible to accept even for the sake of argument. It’s this:

Libertarians can be motivated to bear the opportunity costs of large families for the sake of a libertarian future they will not live to see.

!!!

I don’t doubt Bryan’s new book will persuade a few libertarians (and a few conservatives and liberals) to have an extra kid or two, but I’m sure he would do much better campaigning for libertarian sperm and egg donation.

More on Patriotism and Progress

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 22:10:20 -0700

In the course of my skeptical reply over at Democracy in America to Adam Serwer’s progressive apology for American exceptionalism, I briefly addressed what I took to be a related progressive defense of national pride from Richard Rorty. Because Rorty’s argument concerns the moral psychology of progressive political motivation, I thought I’d also take it up here. “[A] nation cannot reform itself,” Rorty wrote, “unless it takes pride in itself—unless it has an identity, rejoices in it, reflects upon it and tries to live up to it.”

Yesterday, Stanford philosopher Joshua Cohen kindly sent me a draft of a review of Rorty’s book Achieving Our Country that he wrote with Joel Rogers for Lingua Franca. In their review, Cohen and Rogers make the same objections (and more) I made to Rorty’s argument for the necessity of national pride, but much more powerfully:

Though characteristically evasive, Rorty seems to believe that national pride is necessary to political action–that it is impossible to move people to improve their country if they don’t take pride in it. But this claim seems either trivially true or wrong. True, but trivial, if pride amounts simply to the belief that life in the country can be improved. Wrong, if pride means anything more than that.

After all, people are routinely moved to concerted political action by all sorts of motives. A simple sense of injustice–at children’s suffering, imprisoned innocents, subhuman wages, dangerous working conditions, or a night of terror imposed on other peoples–often suffices. So can a perception of material interest. While hatred of one’s country and its institutions may demobilize, and pride may spur efforts at reform, it is also possible simply to care about and act on injustice or cruelty because it hurts persons (not “peoples”) and violates principles (not “nations”). Patriotic appeals need not figure. Indeed, the preening self-involvement of some of Rorty’s own patriotic appeals–”America will create the taste by which it will be judged;” Americans are “the greatest poem because we put ourselves in the place of God”–may repel. Why, given his desire to improve the country, does Rorty restrict the grounds for doing so?

These observations about national pride in general apply with even greater force to Rorty’s particular antifoundationalist brand of patriotism. Although its pragmatic ethos may have some appeal to the 1990s cultural left, and historic resonance with Legal Realists and New Deal staffers, it is very far from the view of those who “achieved” this country. The abolitionists opposed slavery not because it cramped “social learning” but because they thought slaves were human beings and that it was morally wrong to enslave human beings. The Congress of Industrial Organizations was formed not to foster “experimental diversity” but to get workers dignity on the job and greater equality in dealing with bosses. The civil rights movement was inspired not by a faith in “social invention” but by absolutist moral beliefs in human equality. The women’s movement was originally fired not by interests in “reinvention” but by the outrage that women were “human beings in truth but not in social reality” (a remark of Catharine MacKinnon’s that Rorty finds disappointingly “ahistoricist”). Throw away all the American struggles animated by ideas about human equality, and you don’t have much of a democratic history left to tell.

None if this is to say that a desire to see one’s beloved nation live up to its foundational ideals cannot be a powerful inducement to progressive reform. It can be. But we’re not so wicked that we lack sufficient will to overcome injustice without the assistance of our powerful tribal instincts. And those same instincts lead to so much wickedness–from the marginalization of immigrants to the cavalier neglect of the rights and lives of foreigners in war–that the cause of justice seems more likely to be served by emphasizing the moral arbitrariness of national membership than by talking up its moral indispensability.

David Foster Wallace’s Depression: Neurodiversity and Flourishing

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 14:24:54 -0700

David Foster Wallace - Image via Wikipedia

When your undergrad philosophy thesis is posthumously published in a lovely package padded out with admiring commentary, you know you’ve made into some kind of canon. Or you would know it, if you weren’t dead. David Foster Wallace is having a good death. Leland de la Durantaye’s diverting essay in the Boston Review tangles with ideas of freedom, happiness, and love in DFW’s thesis and his celebrated 2005 Kenyon commencement address. La Durantaye’s piece made me wonder whether the fact that an author killed himself adds or detracts from the authority of his meditations on things like freedom, happiness, and love. In Wallace’s case, I think it adds, but we should be careful.

Wallace suffered from relatively severe depression for two decades before his death. He managed, seemingly very well, with the help of medication. According to most reports of Wallace’s last days, his choice to go off his tried-and-true meds, in order to try a new set of drugs recommended by his doctor, spun him into a downward spiral from which he never recovered.

There’s some evidence that the moderately depressed are less self-deceived. “Depressive realism” is said to leave us less disposed to happy illusions about our abilities or our degree of control over our behavior. It’s easy to see how an unblinkered sense of the self could be an asset to a novelist. Moreover, an unshakable sense of dissatisfaction and hopelessness in the face of the forces that control us, even if muted, can act as a powerful prod to serious contemplation of the conditions for happiness and autonomy. Of course, if depression can make seeing the truth about some things easier, it makes doing everything more difficult. And Wallace appears to have adopted, by choice or chance, demanding standards both in literature and life, and these standards seem not to have been unreasonable. He could, sometimes, live up to them.

But a foible of neurology that keeps us from meeting our own high standards consistently can put us in a terrible bind. Our options are to (a) try, fail, and struggle to avoid becoming utterly defeated; (b) fail to try and struggle with self-loathing; (c) try with every ounce of effort we can summon, succeed, and leave ourselves too exhausted to succeed again, or to want to try; (d) lower our standards and meet them, but struggle with the thought that we have cheated ourselves and the world of our best.

There are, in fact, other choices, though they are hard to see or accept. We can (e) come to see the seemingly disordered aspects of our psychologies as part of a bundle of assets and liabilities that make each of us unique — as an expression of our neuro-individuality — and to see our reconciliation with the limits our brains impose upon us not as defeat, or a lowering of our standards, but as practical wisdom in aligning our aims with our inevitably idiosyncratic constitution.

But it’s hard, hard, hard, hard not to see this as (d). Our deepest desires for life precede significant self-knowledge. To arrive early at the ambition to achieve some kind of greatness (or the social recognition of greatness) may be an adolescent point from which we cannot as adults convince ourselves to return. And the prudence of fitting our aims to our natures can seem to many of us to flow from a confusion between a healthy life and a worthy life. It is less pleasant to die trying, than to survive healthily. But it’s not obvious that a short life on fire is a less flourishing one than eight more modest but better-adjusted decades.

I just sort of drifted onto this from the subject of Wallace’s depression. I’m not sure there’s much here to illuminate his life and death. I don’t know that he flamed out reaching for the sun. I think he wanted to be healthy so he could be and do good, but the profundity of his depression finally made it impossible to live. If I were to speculate, I would speculate that Infinite Jest is the product of exhausting option (c). This left Wallace somewhat depleted, but he could not resist the social and personal imperative to outdo himself. He tried for (c) again and may have hit (a). But that he never finished The Pale King is no real failure. It may have been, like Infinite Jest, an almost impossible project. That Wallace managed to do so much so beautifully within the constraints of his depression suggests a higher sort of health that makes more than years.

I started out meaning to comment on the Boston Review essay, and on DFW’s conception of freedom, but it looks like I didn’t. Later.

The Crisis in Moral Psychology

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 11:04:30 -0700

In an important and unfortunately gated essay, “Family, Community, Trolley Problems, and the Crisis in Moral Psychology,” Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom makes a compelling case that most experimental moral psychology is studying the psychology of making tough decisions about strangers, but most of in-the-wild moral judgment and behavior takes place among familiars–in families, among coworkers, among neighbors and friends.

Paul Bloom - Image via Wikipedia

[There is ] a problem in contemporary moral psychology, which is the field that explores the nature of moral judgment and moral action, including empathetic responses to the pain of others, altruistic behavior, the so-called moral emotions, such as guilt, shame, gratitude, and anger, and considered judgments about what’s morally obligatory, permissible, and forbidden. Psychologists in this area explore our moral sense, looking at how it is instantiated in the brain, how it develops in children, and how it evolved.

The problem is that most research in this field, including my own, focuses almost entirely on how people make sense of, judge, and respond to the interactions of unrelated strangers. We have little to say about how people think of interactions that occur between parent and child, brother and sister, and other closely related individuals. We also often ignore moral judgments and moral feelings that concern spouses, close friends, colleagues, allies, and compatriots. I will argue here that these are the interactions that matter the most, and that our failure to explore them leads us to ask the wrong questions, design the wrong studies, and develop the wrong theories.

Drawing on Joseph Henrich’s idea that most psychologists and their subjects are drawn from WEIRD societies–Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies–and Jonathan Haidt’s five foundations theory, Bloom suggests that WEIRD, liberal scholars are fixated on abstract puzzles within WEIRD, liberal moral philosophy.

It’s not that the circumstances under which people are prepared to shove a fat man over a railing or throw a switch to send a trolley on a less deadly course is not interesting or important. (The argument for intervention in Libya sounds a lot like Peter Unger-Peter Singer arguments about the impermissibility of failing to intervene to prevent distant suffering.) It’s just that this stuff in not all that illuminating about the moral psychology of family obligation, moral shame in the face of the disapproval of our friends, or altruistic punishment on the company softball team–the stuff that dominates most of our moral experience as it is lived.

This is a lovely, thoughtful essay. I hope it can come out from behind the paywall. And I look forward to hearing what the psychologists and philosophers working down at the trolley yards have to say about it.

Cougar Dating Expert on Sperm Wars

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 21:02:17 -0700

Some of my best internet friends sometimes give me a bit of grief for ragging on “vulgar evolutionary psychology.” They say, “What gives, Wilkinson! I thought you were down with Darwin?” (Internet friends speak in a strange non-era-specific patois.) I say, “I said ‘vulgar’.” And “Wait for it… Wait for it…” And, indeed, one day a tidy disquisition explaining why human behavioral ecology is the bees non-vulgar knees will issue forth upon this page, but until that glorious day I present to you Lucia, a “dating/relationship expert specializing in Cougar relationships,” and two of her “12 Reasons Women Can’t Stand Nice Guys.”

How about…

Mother Nature: Women are designed to nurture. However, instead of doing this with children, they often end up doing it with bad boys. They think their love will save them. Nice guys rarely need to be saved.

Or try…

Sperm wars: Women are designed to procreate with the strongest possible genes. Bad boys are sending an unconscious message that they have great genes, so they’re not afraid of losing the woman by misbehaving. Nice guys are sending a message that they don’t think their genes are good enough, so they won’t misbehave.

Maybe you’ll say: “Well, Lucia is just sort of dumb, Will. Some people think global warming means eventually everyone will live on boats. Likewise, methylated yokels who drive their bitchin’ Camaros into ditches mostly send the unconscious message that they have great genes to dames who don’t–to asymmetrical dames. Surely one Cougar dating expert’s unsteady grip on the psychological implications of the neo-Darwinian synthesis cannot blemish the evo psych of more learned men!”

Well said, my friend. But seriously, frankly, I stopped listening because you bore me and I ain’t gonna send an unconscious message that I don’t got great genes by paying attention, see. Anyway, you listen: I don’t send unconscious messages. Either my deafening message tears an excruciating gash in your conscious mind or I am a black hole of virile taciturnity from which no message, conscious or unconscious, may escape. My message is this: my genes are outstanding. For a nice guy.

Where was I? Yes, this is what passes for science among dating coaches and also, I’m afraid to say, among more than a few frustrated engineers who frequent blog comments. Is my claim that a certain strain of evo psych is especially liable to this sort of trickle-down?

Here’s a treat! The lady herself:

Makes ya think twice about being nice, huh fellas?

[HT: The Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee.]