Taken as a whole, opinion was hostile to the middleman

A series of passages from the recently read Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell. Combative to the point of provocative but as usual crammed with unexpected facts or interpretations of facts. Page 71. Sowell's argument in this chapter is that there is significant evidence that the prejudice that is seen against traders such as Jews, Ibo, Chinese, Lebanese, etc. is not against them as minorities but against them in their function.

An often-cited economist's account of rudimentary economic activities within a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany during World War II showed the economic and social role of middlemen among the men in the camp. Prisoners of war were fed by their captors, while the monthly shipments of Red Cross packages supplemented their food and provided a few amenities like chocolates and cigarettes. All prisoners received the same material goods but of course they valued different items differently. Non-smokers traded cigarettes for chocolates. Sikhs among the prisoners traded away canned beef for jam or margarine.

On days when the Red Cross packages arrived, direct one-on-one trades created chaos in a camp with more than a thousand prisoners. Camp authorities sought to bring some order into the situation by setting up bulletin boards on which prisoners could make their offers of trades. But what proved to be even more efficient arose spontaneously among the prisoners themselves: Particular prisoners would circulate around the camp, trading back and forth - playing the role of middleman among their numerous fellow prisoners, who traded with one another without coming into direct contact. The other prisoners saved themselves the bother and the middlemen ended up with more material goods, in effect charging for their services.

The middlemen who emerged in this informal economy were not necessarily ethnically different. Those individuals who played the middleman role in the camp ranged from a Catholic chaplain to a Sikh. Moreover, the needs they met, though seemingly trivial from the perspective of a larger and more affluent society, were matters of "urgency," according to a British economist who was one of these prisoners. Things like cigarettes, jam, razor blades and writing paper meant a lot in the grim conditions of a prisoner-of-war camp.

The other function of middlemen - lending and charging interest - also arose in the camp. As prisoners' supplies of cigarettes or sugar ran low near the end of the month, those who had saved these items would provide them to those had run out - in exchange for a pledge to pay back more than was lent when the next Red Cross package arrived. The economist among them was fascinated to see many of the economic phenomena associated with a complex market economy appearing spontaneously in these primitive conditions. But he also noted social and political phenomena generated by the work of middlemen:

Taken as a whole, opinion was hostile to the middleman. His function, and his hard work in bringing buyer and seller together, were ignored; profits were not regarded as a reward for labor, but as the result of sharp practices. Despite the fact that his very existence was proof to the contrary, the middleman was held to be redundant...

Here, in a microcosm, was the fundamental problem of the middleman down through the centuries and around the world. In the prisoner-of-war camp, at last these misconceptions were not compounded by the additional factor of ethnically different middlemen and there was no market
for political demagoguery.

Facing limits is a contentious exercise in making choices

From The twilight of entitlement by Robert J. Samuelson.

Weighed down by these contradictions, entitlement has been slowly crumbling for decades. The Great Recession merely applied the decisive blow. We’re not entitled to many things: not to a dynamic economy; not to secure jobs; not to homeownership; not to ever-more protective government; not to fixed tax burdens; not to a college education. Sooner or later, the programs called “entitlements,” including Social Security, will be trimmed because they’re expensive and some recipients are less deserving than others.

The collision between present realities and past expectations helps explain the public’s extraordinary moodiness. The pandering to the middle class by both parties (and much of the media) represents one crude attempt to muffle the disappointment, a false reassurance that the pleasing past can be reclaimed. It can’t.

[snip]

In the post-entitlement era, people’s expectations may be more grounded. But political conflicts — who gets, who gives — and social resentments will be, as they already are, sharper. Entitlement implied an almost-limitless future. Facing limits is a contentious exercise in making choices.

This is most visible in Europe where the issues and tribulations are much more advanced than here. Never-the-less we would be well served to watch that canary in the coal mine. We have to make smart changes to establish a new affordable post-entitlement equilibria. Unfortunately, it seems few of our politicians are prepared to make hard trade-off decisions that are painful today but necessary for tomorrow. A reluctance which we as voters reward by punishing those that actually do attempt hard decisions.

It’s not youth that passed us by, but adulthood.

From Against Eternal Youth by Frederica Mathewes-Green. She discusses the stark contrast between the way adults are portrayed in movies today versus in the 1930-50's.

I grew up in Sweden in the early 1970's when there were only two TV channels, both government owned, both operating for only a few hours a day. Even such a restricted schedule posed a challenge as to how it might be filled given a limited budget. The answer was to purchase very cheap content which meant American movies from the 1900s to the 1940's, avant-garde films from various Western European countries (avant-garde meaning state produced films of such intellectualism and sophistication that they had never been viewed by anyone outside the immediate family of the actors and producers), and existential cartoons from Soviet Bloc countries such as East Germany, Poland, and Bulgaria.

This, by the way, in combination with dark and inclement weather for nine months of the year, is an excellent, though hard to replicate, regimen for encouraging people to become enthusiastic readers.

As a consequence of such circumstances, I was reared on such classics as Arsenic and Old Lace, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, etc. I understand exactly what Mathewes-Green means.

The adults in these films carry themselves differently.

They don’t walk and speak the way we do. It’s often hard to figure out how old the characters are supposed to be — as though they were portraying a phase of the human life-cycle that we don’t have any more.

and

Characters in these older movies appear to be an age nobody ever gets to be today. This isn’t an observation about the actors themselves (who may have behaved in very juvenile ways privately); rather, it is about the way audiences expected grownups to act. A certain manner demonstrated adulthood, and it was different from the manner of children, or even of adolescents such as Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.

Today actors preserve an unformed, hesitant, childish quality well into middle age. Compare the poised and debonair Cary Grant with Hugh Grant, who portrayed a boyish, floppy-haired ditherer till he was forty. Compare Bette Davis’ strong and smoky voice with Renée Zellweger’s nervous twitter. Zellweger is adorable, but she’s thirty-five. When will she grow up?

Finally,

Future historians will have to sort out our plight — how a whole generation could forget to grow up, while still attempting to raise a younger generation and lead the most powerful nation in the world through times of war and terror. The skills of adulthood are not ones we know how to use. Being kittenish, or obscene, or adorably perplexed — we can do that. But gathering the gravity and confidence that signals full maturity is beyond our capabilities. It’s not youth that passed us by, but adulthood.

A way of life that has been tested before and found wanting

A series of passages from the recently read Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell. Combative to the point of provocative but as usual crammed with unexpected facts or interpretations of facts. Page 63.

Whether black redneck values and lifestyle are a lineal descendant of white redneck values and lifestyle, as suggested here, or a social phenomenon arising independently within the black community and only coincidentally similar, it is still a way of life that has been tested before and found wanting, as shown by its erosion over the generations among whites who experienced its counterproductive consequences. By making black redneck behavior a sacrosanct part of black cultural identity, white liberals and others who excuse, celebrate or otherwise perpetuate that lifestyle not only preserve it among that fraction of the black population which has not yet escaped from it, but have contributed to its spread up the social scale to middle class black young people who feel a need to be true to their racial identity, lest they be thought to be "acting white." It is the spread of a social poison, however much either black or white intellectuals try to pretty it up or try to find some deeper meaning in it.

Facts, stories, and catalysts for inquiry

I don't like the partisanship and underlying anger in this article, The Difference Between Newtown and Boston by Jonathan S. Tobin , but the author does have an intriguing insight.

In what ways are the tragedies of Newton (primary school massacre) and Watertown (Boston terrorist bombing) the same and/or different from one another and, given the similarities, why are they reported differently and why do they have such a different impact on the political process?

All interesting questions. From the article.

One crime was committed by a person motivated by no cause or political interest and driven only by personal demons. Another crime was committed by two people whose actions were clearly driven by their religious and political beliefs. Under these circumstances, which of these terrible tragedies do you think would be considered an incident that could only be properly understood as something that ought to spur the nation to specific political actions?

If you answered the latter, you clearly know nothing about our political culture.

The former is, of course, the Newtown massacre in which a crazed, lone gunman murdered 20 1st-graders and six teachers at a Connecticut elementary school. The latter is the Boston Marathon bombing that took the lives of three spectators and wounded nearly 200, to which the toll of one police officer murdered and another wounded during the manhunt for the terrorists must be added. Though the first was a random act of personal madness and the second was just the latest in a long string of terrorist acts motivated by Islamist hatred for the West and America, there has never been any doubt about which of the two our chattering classes would consider as having undeniable political consequences and which would be treated as an unknowable crime about which intelligent persons ought not to think too deeply.

I would argue that both events are legitimate catalysts to reflection on existing policies as well as an opportunity to reconsider root causes.

Bearing in mind the old legal adage that bad cases make bad law and the paraphrase, exceptional events make bad policy, what might be made of comparing Newton and Watertown?

In Newton, the perpetrator is known. The reasons for his actions are known to the extent that they are knowable. He had a history of mental illness. The means by which his actions were committed are also known. He stole the weapons from his mother. For whatever reason, the analysis of Newton quickly devolved in to two simplistic root causes, both of which are correct as far as they go. 1) The tragedy occurred because of mental illness. 2) The tragedy was facilitated by relatively easy (though illegal) access to weapons. These root causes are treated as exclusive of one another when in fact they are entirely compatible.

I view the former issue (mental health) as the greater of the two issues in part because I believe mental health and substance dependency are tightly related and have far reaching consequences. "Solve" mental health and substance dependency and numerous social pathologies plunge such as homelessness, burglary rates, murder rates, number of massacres, suicide rates, domestic violence, prison overcrowding, morbidity issues, healthcare costs, education attainment, disparate group impacts, etc. "Solve" gun access and at most you might reduce the murder and suicide rate. Maybe.

But the interesting consequence of Newton was a proposed legislative package which all parties, both proponents and opponents, acknowledged would have had no preventive impact on Newton and which would have little or no impact on future crime rates. In essence, a classic Non Sequitur. The Newton tragedy was hijacked to achieve an unrelated political goal. This was in itself a tragedy because we omitted having the discussions that might have been beneficial to all communities - what can be done to improve access to and the effectiveness of good mental health care and what can be done to help people with substance addictions? Those might have had some prophylactic impact on future tragedies but we never got to that conversation.

In Watertown, the perpetrators are known. The reasons for their actions are suspected (with some evidentiary basis) but are not completely understood. The perpetrators chose to adhere to a violent, exclusionary and destructive dogma. The means by which the tragedy was committed are also known. They used commonly available knowledge and materials to create bombs to kill and maim. For whatever reason, the analysis of Watertown is quickly devolving in to two simplistic root causes, both of which are correct as far as they go. 1) The route to radicalization was quick, complex and unpredictable. 2) The tragedy was facilitated by religious fervor and perhaps law enforcement incompetence. These root causes are treated as exclusive of one another when in fact they are entirely compatible.

It is hard to see where Watertown will go in terms of policy implications but it appears that it will go nowhere.

Instead of examining both these tragedies as political events, could we achieve more by looking at it as a catalyst for understanding rather than simply as a knee-jerk response of how do I use this to advance a pre-existing political agenda. I think we could.

What Tobin does is call attention to unstated assumptions and unseen perspectives.

In both Newton and Watertown it would be immensely easy, if Americans were as crude as the newspapers make them out to be, to simply blame the mentally ill and Muslims for the respective tragedies.

The newspapers barely mentioned discrimination against the mentally ill in the context of Newton. There were a few advocates of the mentally ill that expressed concern but the whole issue was marginal to the broader discussion. By and large the newspapers appeared indifferent to any concern that Newton would lead to increasing discrimination and violence against the mentally ill.

On the other hand, post-Watertown, the concern that all Muslims should not be tarred with the same brush is a leitmotif in most the major papers. Of course, they should not be, but on what basis is that concern on the part of newspapers (increased prejudice against Muslims) greater than the concern for discrimination against the mentally ill? The FBI hate crimes figures indicate that hate crimes against Muslims are up by a factor of 4-6X or so from the late 1990s (with a one year spike after 9/11). But despite such later Muslim-related terrorist incidents as the Fort Hood massacre or the DC sniper, anti-Muslim hate crimes have remained pretty steady between 125-175 crimes per year for a dozen years.



Of course the desired number is zero hate crimes but out of a total population of some 310 million, those are pretty low numbers. Context and perspective are also critical. Anti-Jewish hate crimes continue to run 4-5X as high as anti-Muslim hate crimes without an apparent media concern that there is a rising tide of anti-Semitism.

The theoretical concern about a potential anti-Muslim backlash is of course valid. But what if all the evidence indicates that in fact Americans are extraordinarily tolerant and that there is no evident causative relationship in recent years between terrorist acts committed by Muslims and the number of individual hate crimes committed against Muslims? Where does that lead us with regard to the Mainstream Media's obsession that there might be such a backlash? Either, the MSM are ignorant of the data, in which case, shame on them, or they are inveterate bigots with a disparaging and unfounded view of their fellow Americans.

This latter interpretation would be supported by the reported 2006 incident in which NBC solicited Muslims to walk around a NASCAR event in the hopes that it would elicit some evidence of anti-Muslim behavior (reported at MNBC), a hope that apparently was dashed. It is little wonder that the public so little trusts the traditional media when the media's prejudice against the public is so vividly on display.

It seems to me that:

1) By failing to look at Newton and Watertown disinterestedly and with negative capability, the media has helped forestall meaningful discussion about real root causes and possible policy changes that might make a real beneficial difference in the lives of Americans.

2) The MSM would be well counseled to read the Sermon of the Mount: "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" The prejudices and biases of the media help perpetuate unsupported prejudices (Americans are biased against Muslims) and at the same time shutoff discussion about real issues that need addressing (mental healthcare).

3) There is an unacknowledged assumption on the part of the members of the press that every tragedy can be "solved."

4) There is a deep reluctance to engage with facts, data, and hard trade-offs. It is nice to say that we ought to be better at discerning the mentally ill who pose a danger to themselves or others or to say that the intelligence services ought to be better at discerning when on the continuum dogmatic complaining ends and terroristic impulses begin. It would be nice if we could do those things but likely unrealistic. Fundamental laws of liberty and practicalities of expense and the variability of human nature all intrude and constitute a fortress-like wall.

5) Humble inquiry will move us forwards towards better answers, usually incrementally but the nature of the MSM beast precludes such approaches. A steady one percent improvement a year in anything is fantastic news that goes unreported whereas a once-off variant outcome gets all the attention.

Greatly disinclined to exact and careful reasoning

A series of passages from the recently read Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell. Combative to the point of provocative but as usual crammed with unexpected facts or interpretations of facts. Page 23.

A Southerner said to Frederick law Olmsted: "The fact is, sir, the people here are not like you northern people; they don't reason out everything so." Olmsted himself likewise concluded from his travels in the antebellum South that Southerners were "greatly disinclined to exact and careful reasoning." As late as the First World Ward, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania. At higher levels of achievement, the contrast between the South and other regions was even more stark. A study of leading American figures in the arts and sciences in the first half of the nineteenth century found most clustered in the Northeast, while vast regions of the South ”Virginia alone excepted” were without a single one.

The kinds of statistical disparities found between Southern whites and Northern whites in the past are today often taken as evidence or proof of racial discrimination when such disparities are found between the black and white populations of the country as a whole, while others have taken such disparities as signs of genetic deficiencies. Yet clearly neither racial discrimination nor racial inferiority can explain similar differences between whites in the North and the South in earlier centuries. This should at least raise questions about such explanations when applied to blacks of a later era who inherited the culture of white Southerners.

Hidden deceits and trust

This is insignificant but interestingly revealing. Pew Research Center recently conducted a survey of some 1,000 adults regarding their level of basic science knowledge, as reported in Public’s Knowledge of Science and Technology .

The findings themselves are of a like with past such surveys. There were two items which I found interesting, one in terms of the finding itself and the second with regard to the fashion in which the Research Center chose to report it.

The first item was that:

Overall, men outperformed women on the quiz, though in many cases the differences are modest. On average, men answered 8.6 items correctly, compared with 7.7 items for women.

Given that men and women have the same IQ this is a little surprising. I can construct a story in which this is explained because more men than women go into the sciences and technology, and/or that many more men work and work continuously and that working outside the home might increase the probability that you are exposed to more and a wider range of science knowledge but I would have to set that against the fact that more women attend university than men. So an intriguing little mystery of probably no substance given the notorious fallibility of such surveys.

But the second, and I think the more fascinating, item was the way the Center chose to present the information. A couple of days ago I posted (Negative Capability and Dogmatic Simplists) about Keats' idea about Negative Capability, the capacity to take an impression of the world without imposing pre-existing assumptions on it. It appears that the Center has a Negative Capability issue.

Overall, men outperformed women on the quiz, though in many cases the differences are modest. On average, men answered 8.6 items correctly, compared with 7.7 items for women.

If you do the math, men outscored women by 12% which in most processes is a fairly material differential. That is not a modest difference. Clearly that is something that the Center did not want to emphasize and so, instead of reporting the percentage differential as they did with all their other results, they reported the raw numbers, apparently on the assumption or hope that readers would not do the calculation.

Why do that? Why not simply report the results rather than try and hide them?

It seems that there are three possible explanations. One - that there is a margin of error on all responses that is greater than 12% and so even though men outscored women by 12%, it is not a meaningful differential being within the margin of error. If the margin of error is greater than 12% then the whole survey is of virtually no value and Pew would obviously not want to bring attention to that.

Two - This a freak result arising from an unrepresentative sample. This would invalidate the whole survey, again something Pew would not wish to draw attention to.

Third - The result is accurate but Pew does not like the result itself or its implications. For example, one might wish to believe that there is no difference between the sexes or one might be concerned about the sociological and political implications (if men are better informed on STEM than women then that differential might contribute to other unequal outcomes).

This is much ado about nothing. Its just a survey with a suspect finding. But it throws some light on hidden biases. Little deceits such as this might explain why "Americans' distrust in the media hit a new high this year, with 60% saying they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly."

It would be ironic if a survey that could be read as designed to show up the ignorance of the American public, inadvertently provided evidence to support that the canny American public are indeed right to not trust the media.

It was not the skill that was lacking, but the enterprise

A series of passages from the recently read Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell. Combative to the point of provocative but as usual crammed with unexpected facts or interpretations of facts. Page 21.

Not only in the South, but in the communities from which white Southerners had come in the Scottish highlands, in Ulster, and in Wales of an earlier era, most of the successful businessmen were outsiders. Even the poorest highland Scots would not skin their horses when they died. Instead, "Scots sold their dead horses for three pence to English soldiers who in turn got six pence for the skinned carcass and another two shillings for the hide." This was not due to a lack of knowledge of skinning. In earlier times, when Scotland and England were at war, one of the atrocities committed by the Scots was skinning captured English officers alive. During the sixteenth century border feuds, the "Johnston-Johnson clan adorned their houses with the flayed skins of their enemies the Maxwells." It was not the skill that was lacking, but the enterprise.

There is no Frigate like a Book

Emily Dickinson

There is no Frigate like a Book

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry

This Traverse may the poorest take
Without offense of Toll;
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul!

Unexpected facts.

A series of passages from the recently read Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell. Combative to the point of provocative but as usual crammed with unexpected facts or interpretations of facts. Page 13.

Any broad-brush discussion of cultural patterns must, of course, not claim that all people - whether white or black - had the same culture, much less to the same degree. There are not only changes over time, there are cross-currents at a given time. Nevertheless, it is useful to see the outlines of a general pattern, even when that pattern erodes over time and at varying rates among different subgroups.

The violence for which white Southerners became most lastingly notorious was lynching. Like other aspects of the redneck and cracker culture, it has often been attributed to race or slavery. In fact, however, most lynching victims in the antebellum South were white. Economic considerations alone would prevent a slave owner from lynching his own slave or tolerating anyone else's doing so. It was only after the Civil War that the emancipated blacks became the principal targets of lynching. But, by then, Southern vigilante violence had been a tradition for more than a century in North America and even longer back in the regions of Britain from which cracker sand rednecks came, where "retributive justice" was often left in private hands. Even the burning cross of the Ku Klux Klan has been traced back to "the fiery cross of old Scotland" use by feuding clans.