The social divide is even starker than the income divide

From an article by David Brooks, The Wrong Inequality. He discusses Red and Blue inequality. Red Inequality is that between the educated and the uneducated. Blue Inequality is that between the richest and poorest. An interesting distinction. Red Inequality is about an aggregate life outcome inequality, encompassing as it does, the accumulation of multitudinous decisions. Blue Inequality is about a statistical snapshot in time. Most people that manage to make a million dollars in a year will do so only once in their life. Red and Blue do overlap (the high functioning individuals that translate that high functioning into high productivity that is also highly compensated productivity).

His description of the consequences of Red Inequality:

Then there is what you might call Red Inequality. This is the kind experienced in Scranton, Des Moines, Naperville, Macon, Fresno, and almost everywhere else. In these places, the crucial inequality is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent. It’s between those with a college degree and those without. Over the past several decades, the economic benefits of education have steadily risen. In 1979, the average college graduate made 38 percent more than the average high school graduate, according to the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke. Now the average college graduate makes more than 75 percent more.

Moreover, college graduates have become good at passing down advantages to their children. If you are born with parents who are college graduates, your odds of getting through college are excellent. If you are born to high school grads, your odds are terrible.

In fact, the income differentials understate the chasm between college and high school grads. In the 1970s, high school and college grads had very similar family structures. Today, college grads are much more likely to get married, they are much less likely to get divorced and they are much, much less likely to have a child out of wedlock.

Today, college grads are much less likely to smoke than high school grads, they are less likely to be obese, they are more likely to be active in their communities, they have much more social trust, they speak many more words to their children at home.

Some research suggests that college grads have much bigger friendship networks than high school grads. The social divide is even starker than the income divide.

The Paradox of Chesterton's Fence

The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic by G.K. Chesterton, Chapter 4.

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

A lot of bad habits have gotten hardwired into Chinese life

From IMF: China Isn’t Ten Feet Tall by Walter Russell Mead. He is highlighting that with which I have been concerned for the past ten years. The development of China has been a blessing in the past thirty years, one of, if not the greatest, improvements in human well-being ever. And yet it is not sustainable. All countries go through cycles of political and economic development - if we are lucky they are in synch and reinforcing. Mead highlights four key transitions. Number three in particular has a resonance in the US.

First, as the IMF report suggests, China faces a dynamic of inexorably mounting complexity: as the Chinese economy grows, the economy and Chinese society become more complicated and harder to manage. There are more domestic interests that need to be consulted, more economic issues to manage, more complicated interactions between financial markets and the real economy to watch, to regulate and to manage. Even in the absence of formal democratic structures, the Chinese government is accountable to powerful domestic interest groups and public opinion. As society grows more complex and new actors become more empowered, it is harder and harder for the government to deliver “pure” technocratic solutions.

[snip]

Second, China’s development model will not work forever. Every other country that has developed on the basis of an export-oriented manufacturing strategy did spectacularly well for a long time before hitting a wall when lower, slower growth became inevitable. Look at Japan.

[snip]

Third, over a long period of nearly unbroken prosperity, a lot of bad habits have gotten hardwired into Chinese life. Banks have made speculative loans to party officials, shady developers and to their own brothers-in-law and over time, with ten percent growth, most of these loans have worked out pretty well. Prudence and transparency have long been hooted out of town: there has been no interest in being careful for a very long time. When the music stops, a lot of loans are going, very suddenly, to look terrible.

[snip]

Fourth, there is the global situation. China can’t control the global economy and can’t even influence it very much. But the mess in Europe, the slow growth in the US and problems like the impact of a US-Iran crisis on world oil prices can all serve as the matches that could ignite a conflagration in China.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking

Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

We are responsible for our actions roughly to the extent that we possess these capacities

From Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will? by Eddy Nahmias. I like his definition of free will: "a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling actions in the face of competing desires."

These discoveries about how our brains work can also explain how free will works rather than explaining it away. But first, we need to define free will in a more reasonable and useful way. Many philosophers, including me, understand free will as a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling actions in the face of competing desires. We act of our own free will to the extent that we have the opportunity to exercise these capacities, without unreasonable external or internal pressure. We are responsible for our actions roughly to the extent that we possess these capacities and we have opportunities to exercise them.

These capacities for conscious deliberation, rational thinking and self-control are not magical abilities. They need not belong to immaterial souls outside the realm of scientific understanding (indeed, since we don’t know how souls are supposed to work, souls would not help to explain these capacities). Rather, these are the sorts of cognitive capacities that psychologists and neuroscientists are well positioned to study.

What we may become

William Shakespeare

We know what we are, but we know not what we may become.

It still sported the bullet hole

True Achievers by Jeremy Lott is a book review of Daniel J. Flynn's Blue Collar Intellectuals. It contains this eye-catching pebble.

That chapter, "Poet of the Pulps," is a short biography of Ray Bradbury. In it, we learn that Bradbury was born poorer than dirt. How dirt poor? "In 1938, Ray graduated from high school wearing his only suit, which his uncle had been wearing when murdered by a stick-up man six years earlier. It still sported the bullet hole."

For people always applaud the most for the song that is newest

From Homer, Odyssey I.351-352

For people always applaud the most for the song that is newest to circulate among the listeners.

Is there anything those ancient Greeks didn't get to first?

Real expertise predicated on predictability: no predictability, no expertise

In that article, Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence by Daniel Kahneman, Kahneman is making the suggestion that in systems that are complex, chaotic, and loosely coupled (ex. stock markets), there is little comprehension about the linkage between cause and effect, so participants are not able to extract useful information and therefore their performance is going to be random. In systems that are simple, stable, and have good feedback systems, practitioners have the capacity to develop and demonstrate expertise and accuracy of forecasts, i.e. their performance will be predictable.

The corollary insight, such as it is, is that where you do not have predictable performance, you are likely dealing with a complex, chaotic, loosely coupled system.

Open societies have unequal outcomes, societies that pursue equal outcomes sacrifice openness

From The Paradox of the New Elite by Alexander Stille one might conclude that inclusive societies (ease of immigrant absorption) tend to yield unequal market outcomes (growing income disparity). This describes the US. Conversely, the data suggests that societies that pursue an equalization of outcomes are more likely to reject non-members. This describes OECD Europe.

This set of observations seems to relate to the observation by Milton Friedman IIRC, that you can have a generous welfare system or an open immigration policy but you can't have both.

This is an interesting insight by Stille.