So obvious we can't see it

From a gloomy article on the prospects of China sustaining its unparalleled multi-decadal 9% growth, China Will Need A Series Of Miracles To Sustain Growth by John Maudlin. We get so accustomed to changed realities that we forget what went before and we lose a sense of magnitude and proportion.

Every time I go to Singapore I hear this story about Deng Xiaoping. It is said he came to Singapore in the late ’70s and saw the progress there under the leadership of one of the great men of the last century, Lee Kuan Yew. Supposedly he said something like, “These are Chinese people doing this. We can too.” He went back to begin the reforms that produced the results we see today.

In my opinion he is one of the most important of a small handful of leading figures of the 20th century. It is impossible to think of a modern China today without Deng Xiaoping.

Inheriting a country fraught with social and institutional woes resulting from the Cultural Revolution and other mass political movements of the Mao era, Deng became the core of the "second generation" of Chinese leadership. He is considered "the architect" of a new brand of socialist thinking, having developed "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and led Chinese economic reform through a synthesis of theories that became known as the "socialist market economy". Deng opened China to foreign investment, the global market and limited private competition. He is generally credited with developing China into one of the fastest growing economies in the world for over 30 years and raising the standard of living of hundreds of millions of Chinese. (Wikipedia)

When we discuss the future of China, it is important that we develop some perspective. Go back to 1978 and the economic disaster that Deng Xiaoping faced. China was coming off the Cultural Revolution, which had seen Deng himself purged at least twice, forced into menial work, and his son tortured. The hard-core party elite saw Deng as a huge threat.

If in 1978 someone had shown you a photo of a city like Shanghai or Beijing today and asked you the odds of that happening within 36 years in China, you would have laughed at them. What if that someone had told you then that 250 million people would be moved from the country into the cities and modern jobs created for them? That some of the most important companies and richest citizens the world would be based in China? And that China would be the second largest economy in the world with the potential to become the largest not long thereafter? By this time you would be rolling on the floor laughing, tears in your eyes. Such a thing would have been impossible to imagine in 1978.

A couple of points. I agree that Lee Kuan Yew is a currently overlooked near-history character whose stature, I think, will be greater in the future. Apart from his personal strengths and weaknesses, Lee demonstrated convincingly that a small, resource poor, multi-ethnic/multi-community nation surrounded by large and expansionist neighbors could could go from nothing to OECD status in a generation. Economic development is a choice of trade-offs, not an exercise in hoping for the best. It is not easy and the trade-offs are not pleasant but it can be done and Lee proved it. Hard work, postponed consumption, calculated risks. Technocrats tend to have a sullied name, but Lee showed what could happen when done right. It used to be easy for countries to complain that they were the victims of colonialism, discrimination, geographical circumstance, geopolitical challenges, economic poverty, etc. and that the West owed them money to fund their development. Lee showed that these were not the root causes. Root causes lay in choices made by the country and its institutions.

Lee's position in history becomes even more pivotal if the Deng Xiaoping anecdote is true.

Deng is an example of what I mean by loss of perspective. If we ask who was most instrumental in reducing world poverty in the 20th century, I think most people would struggle to provide a reasoned answer. I am guessing that nominees might include the UN or something like the Red Cross. Perhaps 1 in 1,000 might justifiably mention Norman Borlaug (father of the green revolution which raised so many out of nutritional poverty.)

But how many would mention Deng Xiaopeng? Depending on the count, Deng and his policies raised 2-400 million out of poverty in China in the span of twenty years.

And what would people answer if you asked them what was the most effective economic development program of the twentieth century? Many might answer again, the UN, but also likely candidates would be hydroelectric power, perhaps the green revolution. But how many would answer competitive markets? But between India and China, some 6-800 million humans have moved from near poverty into the middle class in thirty years. Amazing.

Our proper business is improvement.

From The Bunker Hill Monument June 17, 1825 by Daniel Webster. Webster delivered this speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. We are in the midst of a lot of anniversaries at the moment. D-Day invasion, start of World War One, Civil Rights legislation, etc. Moments such as these are calls for reflection and consideration. It is interesting to capture similar past moments. While the language may differ somewhat, the emotions are so similar. It also forces to reflect on past reflections. I find it fascinating to let Webster put me in mind of an American in 1825 looking back on 1775.

VENERABLE MEN! you have come down to us from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives, that you might behold this joyous day. You are now where you stood fifty years ago, this very hour, with your brothers and your neighbors, shoulder to shoulder, in the strife for your country. Behold, how altered! The same heavens are indeed over your heads; the same oceans roll at your feet; but all else how changed! You hear now no roar of hostile cannon, you see no mixed volumes of smoke and flame rising from burning Charlestown. The ground strowed with the dead and the dying; the impetuous charge; the steady and successful repulse; the loud call to resistance; a thousand bosoms freely and fearlessly bared in an instant to whatever of terror there may be in war and death; - all these you have witnessed, but you witness them no more. All is peace. The heights of yonder metropolis, its towers and roofs, which you then saw filled with wives and children and countrymen in distress and terror, and looking with unutterable emotions for the issue of the combat, have presented you to-day with the sight of its whole happy population, come out to welcome and greet you with a universal jubilee. Yonder proud ships, by a felicity of position appropriately lying at the foot of this mount, and seemingly fondly to cling around it, are not means of annoyance to you, but your country's own means of distinction and defence. All is peace; and God has granted you this sight of your country's happiness, ere you slumber in the grave. He has allowed you to behold and to partake the reward of your patriotic toils; and he has allowed us, your sons and countrymen, to meet you here, and in the name of the present generation, in the name of your country, in the name of liberty, to thank you!

Webster ends the speech in a spirit thoroughly American, out of favor among the clerisy but easily observable among everyone outside the dank corridors of Academia and the closeted pundits.

And let the sacred obligation which have devolved on this generation, and on us, sink deep into our hearts. Those who established our liberty and our government are daily dropping from among us. The great trust now descends to new hands. Let us apply ourselves to that which is presented to us, as our appropriate object. We can win no laurels in a war for independence. Earlier and worthier hands have gathered them all. Nor are there places for us by the side of Solon, and Alfred, and other founders of states. Our fathers have filled them. But there remains to us a great duty of defence and preservation, and there is opened to us, also, a noble pursuit, to which the spirit of the times strongly invites us. Our proper business is improvement. Let our age be the age of improvement. In a day of peace, let us advance the arts of peace and the works of peace. Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered. Let us cultivate a true spirit of union and harmony. In pursuing the great objects which our condition points out to us, let us act under a settled conviction, and an habitual feeling, that these twenty-four States are one country. Let our conception be enlarged to the circle of our duties. Let us extend our ideas over the whole of the vast field in which we are called to act. Let our object be, OUR COUNTRY, OUR WHOLE COUNTRY, AND NOTHING BUT OUR COUNTRY. And, by the blessing of God, may that country itself become a vast and splendid monument, not of oppression and terror, but of Wisdom, of Peace, and of Liberty, upon which the world may gaze with admiration for ever!!

Success? Serving others

I think I have mentioned it in the past in the context of foreign affairs and international relations but I am struck by the reversal of the stereotypes I carry from my youth (and which to some extent you still see today) between Democrats and Republicans.

In my youth I had the impression of Democrats being the party for global engagement, trade and exchange and the Republicans being isolationist and xenophobic. Today it is, in terms of policy, largely the reverse. When exactly did that happen?

Likewise with the stereotypes around interpersonal relations. Democrats were the ones who were about individualism, community involvement, serving others, giving more than receiving and Republicans were supposed to be about greed and self-interest and subjugation of individual to national interests. Today, in terms of policy and measured evidence, it seems again like the roles have been reversed.

This was brought to mind by Should You Follow Your Passion? by Jeff Carter. The two relevant comments were:

Following your passion is extremely dangerous and it’s rare when the two meet. Passions can change. They can evolve. What happens if you are passionate about fly fishing, follow your passion, and fail?

[snip]

Instead, find something to do that people want. Being of service to them will make you feel good. They’ll pay you for it if it’s valuable.

I don't know if Jeff Carter is a Republican or a conservative, but he is certainly a capitalist and the odds are probably good.

Jeffrey Carter is an angel investor and independent trader. He specializes in turning concepts into profits. In April of 2007, he co-founded Hyde Park Angels, one of the most active angel groups in the United States. He is a former member of the CME Board of Directors. Currently he is trying to raise a small VC fund, West Loop Ventures. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois College of Business, and has an MBA from the University of Chicago, Booth Graduate School of Business.

I would also infer that he is conservative from the general tenor of some of his posts such as If You Protested At McDonald’s Yesterday; Quit Your Job by Jeff Carter which fully comport with Classical Liberalism (al la Adam Smith) but are inconsistent with modern Liberalism.

But look at what he is saying - being of service to others is the best route to good life outcomes. And look at what he does in terms of community involvement.

Mr. Carter is a Trustee at the National World War Two Museum in New Orleans, LA. The museum has been designated by Congress as the nation’s museum for all things World War Two. Please donate online.

He is just a single example and I am not intending to rest the case on him alone. It just seems like today the roles have reversed; Republicans are about service and community and protecting the individual from the intrusions of the state and Democrats, well, not so much.

Since I am largely of the "A pox on both of them" school of thought, I am not trying to make a particular political point. I am just curious as to whether what I think I see is real and if so what were the dynamics that brought it about.

If you want a culture of givers the most important thing is in fact to screen out takers

I don't know how robust this fellow's research is but it comports with my experience. Nice Guys Finish First by Seth Stevenson.
Here is the general assumption.

We often assume that the people most likely to zoom ahead within organizations are the ruthless, pragmatic types who are all about No. 1: People always looking for ways to benefit themselves. “Operators” who try to derive maximum gain from every workplace transaction.

But here is the construct the researcher Adam Grant sees.

Grant divides the typical workplace into three types of people: takers, matchers, and givers. Takers are those selfish folks who always have a sharky angle and forever put their personal interests ahead of everybody else’s. Matchers (the bulk of us) view the world in terms of fairness and balanced ledgers—I scratch your back, with the unstated but firm understanding that at some point you will scratch mine. Givers, by contrast, perform all sorts of selfless acts with no expectation of reciprocity. They tirelessly pitch in for their colleagues, eagerly mentor their underlings, and regularly prioritize other people’s needs above their own.

You might guess that givers—while lovely people—lack the sharp elbows required to get ahead in corporate America. And, to some extent, you’re right. Grant acknowledges that studies reveal many givers tend to linger at the bottom of the food chain, with low promotion and productivity rates. They fail to excel because they’re too busy helping other people do just that.

But though they’re overrepresented at the bottom, Grant’s most interesting finding is that givers also climb to the top. You’ll find givers massed at the two ends of the spectrum, with takers and matchers in the middle.

Why is this? Grant suggests that takers may temporarily succeed, but once found out they pay a hefty price. Most people are in fact eager to punish folks they perceive as takers: Studies show that we’ll choose to sacrifice our own gains if it means seeing justice meted out to someone we deem piggy.

Matchers don’t suffer in this way as a result of their attitudes. But they also don’t benefit. As Grant has written, “matchers often leave a transactional impression, as if they’re always keeping score.” We know where we stand with matchers, and for the most part we respect their moral code, but we grant them no particular credit for their behavior.

Meanwhile, givers construct valuable networks out of all the grateful colleagues who correctly perceive them as selfless and agenda-less. Givers share credit without demanding any in return, which spurs co-workers to flock to their projects. Their generosity earns them deep and lasting respect, which translates into potency. When a taker suggests an idea, others are naturally skeptical—what’s in it for her? But when a known giver has a notion, people are willing to get on board out of a sense that it must come from a place of genuine good will. What’s more, Grant argues, givers’ justified sense that they are contributing to a greater good helps keep them motivated and fulfilled in their work, which in turn improves their output.

This is an interesting observation.

A workplace full of givers is, in Grant’s view, an ideal scenario. An environment where people are motivated to help will actually enhance their own effectiveness. When I asked Grant how managers might encourage a culture of giving, he told me the first step is, not surprisingly, careful hiring.

“Most people think you should try to hire givers,” says Grant, “but the data suggests that if you want a culture of givers the most important thing is in fact to screen out takers. The negative impact of a taker is double or triple the positive impact of a giver. With one taker on a team, you begin to notice that paranoia spreads and people hold back out of fear that they'll be exploited.” And how do you spot a taker? “The main sign that someone’s a taker is kissing up and kicking down. Takers are good fakers when they’re dealing with powerful people, but it's a lot of work to pretend to care about everyone so, selectively, they'll let their guard down. Another telltale sign is taking a lot of credit for successes, and blaming other people for failures. Givers are more likely to take responsibility for failures.”

The importance of context in understanding the accuracy of an argument

An excellent example of how important it is in an argument to both have context and understand the unstated trade-offs.Why has French employment (for some workers) done so well? by Tyler Cowen

Here is the instigating claim from a column by Paul Krugman.

France’s prime-age employment rate overtook America’s early in the Bush administration; at this point the gap in employment rates is bigger than it was in the late 1990s, this time in France’s favor.

Much rides on the chosen measurement - prime-age employment rate. Arguments that ride on narrow definitions are almost always avoid addressing some undesirable trade-off arising from a broader definition which might include total labor force participation rate at all ages.

Cowen has an extensive list of factors which change how one views the validity of Krugman's argument. A few examples from that list.

1. In France the influence of less regulated short-term jobs has been rising in importance. . . . Very few French think their children will be able to enjoy the same standard of living as they have.

2. . . . “The extensive recourse to short term jobs (STJ) is a striking feature of labour markets with stringent employment protection.”

7. The French system has a much poorer record of employment for the young and for the old, so focusing on prime age workers, while valuable, also doesn’t show the whole picture. For instance French seniors participate in the labor force at 42.5% compared to 72.6% for Sweden, a huge gap.

8. French youth unemployment is quite bad, and contrary to what Krugman seems to suggest it is not mainly because the French are all getting so well-educated.

10. The large number of protected jobs in France has come at a significant growth and efficiency cost: “Until the 1990s, France was among Europe’s leading economies in per capita GDP. By 2010, however, the country had dropped to 11th out of the EU-15.”

A simplistic, but not inaccurate, summary of Krugman's real argument is something along the lines of: It is important to have a heavily regulated labor market with significant job protection in order to achieve high rates of prime-age employment. This is worthwhile even though it entails slower economic growth, higher government debt, a less efficient and therefore less competitive economy, higher youth unemployment, higher older worker unemployment and a higher proportion of labor force churn (more short term employment at the expensive of longer term employment).

Krugman may be right that some population of people (presumably prime-age workers) might endorse the trade-off. But likely a significant portion of the population would not.

The important thing is to 1) disambiguate the argument to understand what is being claimed, 2) recognize and acknowledge the trade-offs inherent in any argument, and 3) assess the likely support for an argument based on the real benefits of the argument versus the real costs as perceived by the whole population of affected people.

Krugman's argument also calls attention to the distinction between an argument about fact (is the French prime-age employment rate higher than that of the US) and an argument about relevance (what measurement gives us the best understanding of employment patterns in the two countries?)

Who is reading enthusiastically - City Edition

I am a sucker for lists and maps and therefore particularly prone to maps of lists. From The Most Well-Read Cities in the United States by David Vandagriff.

A study conducted by Amazon and therefore potentially skewed to the degree that Amazon sales patterns differ from non-amazon sales. Given that Amazon is some 60% of the channel to market for books, it is possible that that concern may be misplaced. The list is total sales (e-book and print) of books, magazines and newspapers in cities larger than 100,000. With those caveats, the 20 Most Well-Read Cities are:

1. Alexandria, Va.
2. Miami, Fla.
3. Knoxville, Tenn.
4. Seattle, Wash.
5. Orlando, Fla.
6. Ann Arbor, Mich.
7. Berkeley, Calif.
8. Cambridge, Mass.
9. Cincinnati, Ohio
10. Columbia, S.C.
11. St. Louis, Mo.
12. Pittsburgh, Penn.
13. Vancouver, Wash.
14. Salt Lake City, Utah
15. Atlanta, Ga.
16. Gainesville, Fla.
17. Dayton, Ohio
18. Clearwater, Fla.
19. Richmond, Va.
20. Tallahassee, Fla.

I last saw something like this maybe 5-10 years ago and at that time it was compiled, not on sales, but on number of bookstores per 100,000 or some similar measure. So more a measure of the prevalence of an apparent book culture rather than a measure of actual book consumption. It was quite a different list of cities.

Happy to see Atlanta on this list at #15. I am struck that, counter to stereotypes, cities in the South are 50% of the list. Of your stereotypical hotbeds of culture; Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, only Boston makes an appearance (with Cambridge). Actually, I guess San Francisco ought to be included as well with Berkeley. Otherwise, the enthusiastic readers are almost completely in flyover country and the South.

Cargo Cult Arguments - Reparations edition

It is quite interesting, from an argument perspective, to see how commentators respond to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic article, The Case for Reparations. Much of the response has been to not directly engage with Coates’ arguments but rather to engage with the reader’s own concept of reparations. This probably has to do in part with the fact that it is a 16,000 word article. Rather a daunting hill to climb, particularly if you have any concerns about the premises to Coates’ argument. In fact, Coates alludes in an interview that perhaps many people are only acting like they have read the 16,000 words.

The criticisms of the concept of reparations center around a lot of operational and philosophical issues. Here, in no particular order, are the ones I see most commonly being raised:

• We don’t compensate for general crimes, we compensate for specific crimes
• Many actions that are condemned today were legal at the time
• Many actions that are interpreted today as repressive and detrimental were seen as progressive and beneficial at the time
• We don’t accept group guilt for crimes committed by individuals
• We don’t believe in blood guilt (assignment of responsibility for a crime to those who share an attribute such as religion or race)
• We don’t believe in intergenerational guilt (guilt of the fathers being visited upon the sons)
• We don’t retroactively impose new values on old actions
• All groups have suffered at the hands of individuals (and the government) to a greater or lesser extent. There is no basis for determining what makes one class of victims superior to another.
• The loss of 600,000 lives in the Civil War and the expenditure of a trillion dollars on social welfare programs (believed to disproportionately benefit African Americans) is held to expiate any conceived group guilt
• The negative socio-economic indicators of African-Americans today are not evidence of systemic discrimination or of history but are the consequences of present-day individual decision-making
• The capacity of African, Caribbean and Asian refugees and immigrants to thrive In America today is taken as evidence that there is no color based discrimination
• The fact that slavery and judicial discrimination were prevalent in some parts of the country but absent in others is held to limit group responsibility to only those directly involved
• Slavery and its consequences are held to have been a net diminishment of national productivity so there are no beneficiaries of any color
• Descendants of those who emigrated after the Civil War (or 1900 or 1945 or 1965) are held to have no potential liability
• A claim for African-American reparations must necessarily open the door for a claim by Native Americans and all other immigrant groups who have been disadvantaged and exploited in the past
• Policies have trade-offs, prioritizing one goal above another doesn’t mean that the second is disavowed
• Disparate impact is no basis for concluding that there is or was any nefarious intent
• Many negative consequences in the past were the unintended outcomes of pursuing other goals, i.e. there was no intent
• Total absence of limiting principle to the proposal of reparations (how far back, how small a crime, who is considered a victim, etc.)
• Belief that any transfer of wealth would have no long term impact on African-American socio-economic outcomes
• Rejection of race based decision making

All good points. But these are criticisms of the general concept of reparations, they don’t necessarily relate to Coates’ argument. If he took 16,000 words to make his case for reparations, it would be courteous to at least engage with his actual argument.

I ignored Coates’ article for a while but then began to get interested in looking at it as an argument. How well does Coates lay out a defined problem, the root causes of the problem, the measured manifestations of the problem, the direction and evidence of causation, a solution to the problem, and a plan for implementation of the solution? Everyone is critiquing the idea of reparations but no one seems to be critiquing the quality of Coates’ argument. So how good is it?

Not good. This is primarily 16,0000 words of rhetoric with very little in the way of a structured argument seeking to illuminate or discover. In fact, there is virtually no argument at all, merely assertion dressed up as argument. Paraphrasing Richard Feynman, this is Cargo Cult Argument. It has the form and feel of an argument but none of the rigor and structure. It is a Petri dish of logical fallacies and evidentiary errors.

Essays of this sort follow one of two paths (or sometimes a hybrid). One path is to make an assertion that such-and-such is true under so-and-so circumstances and usually includes some sort of recommendation based on the asserted truth. These arguments are then supported with evidence and logic in an effort to convince a reader of the validity of the argument. A distinguishing feature of truth seeking arguments is that they usually include robust data from credible sources, evidence that is accepted by mainstream practitioners, a clear structuring of the argument including definitions and assumptions, and most especially an engagement with counterfactuals and disconfirming evidence. In other words, they not only seek to prove the positive value of their argument but also seek to show why alternative explanations are not true.

The alternate form of argument is much more common because it involves much less work. This is to make a rhetorical argument rather than an empirical argument. With a rhetorical argument, you are seeking to persuade people of the truth and value of your position. It doesn’t matter if the position is empirically or logically supported so long as it is believed.

And then you have the blended versions. As mentioned, these are Cargo Cult Arguments. They look like the pursuit of truth, they might include some smattering of data and evidence, there is the pro forma of a scientific method, there might even be some maths and statistics. But it is strictly for appearances. There is no effort to lay out a coherent sequence of necessary statements connecting the predicate assumptions with the stated conclusions, critical concepts are left undefined, assumptions are made without being stated, strawmen arguments advanced, ad hominem attacks made, questions begged, circular logic indulged, etc. All these defects are in evidence in Coates’ article along with other biases, errors and fallacies including correlation pursued without causation, red herrings, a reliance placed on the affect heuristic, use of affirming the consequent, indulgence of amphiboly, fundamental attribution error, appeals to belief, appeal to emotions, unintentional appeals to ignorance, attentional bias, avoiding the issue, base rate fallacy, bias blind spots, biased sampling, clustering illusion, complex cause fallacy, composition fallacy, conditional probability, confirmation bias, congruence bias, conservatism bias, converse accident, Disregarding Occam’s Razor, expectation bias, failure to elucidate, fallacy of exclusion, false analogy, false assumptions, false continuum, false dichotomies, reliance on fluency heuristic, focusing effect, framing effect, goal confusion, group attribution error, hasty generalizations, hindsight bias, identifiable victim effect, ingroup bias, insensitivity to sample size, ipse dixit, genuine but insignificant cause, joint effect, limited depth fallacy, limited scope fallacy, loaded language, missing context, ignoring moral hazard, negativity bias, non sequitur, obfuscation, outcome bias, one sided argument, passive voice, post hoc ergo propter hoc, prejudicial language, priority confusion, reactive devaluation bias, selection bias, Semmelweis Reflex, shared information bias, missing situational awareness, special [pleading, spurious correlations, stereotyping, survivorship bias, tautology, too broad definition fallacy, tu quoque, unacknowledged trade-offs, the undistributed middle fallacy, unstated assumptions, weasel words, wrong direction fallacy, and zero sum heuristic.

Now it is not unusual for even short arguments to demonstrate multiple biases , errors and fallacies. We assume the audience has the same assumptions, knowledge, goals and priorities as we do and we thereby fail to make the case adequately. It is also true that the longer the argument and the more complex the argument, the more likely it is that there will be a greater variety of biases, errors and fallacies. There’s just more scope. Finally, no matter how many biases, errors and fallacies there are, it does not make the argument untrue. It just makes it untrue for the reasons offered. But as a matter of experience, the more biases, errors and fallacies, the more likely it is that the argument is not true.

Coates has a lot of biases, errors and fallacies in his argument. He also has an unusually wide variety of biases, errors, and fallacies. But he also has a notable intensity of biases, errors, and fallacies. They aren’t random. He relies heavily on the fundamental attribution error, appeals to emotions, avoiding the issue, biased sampling, circular reasoning, compositional fallacy, confirmation bias, disregard of Occam’s Razor, failure to elucidate, fallacy of exclusion, ipse dixit, framing effect, identifiable victim effect, limited depth fallacy, loaded language, missing context, post hoc ergo propter hoc, stereotyping, and tautological arguments. Each of these argument defects show up multiple times over the entirety of the article.

Because Coates’ is a rhetorical argument, you have to disambiguate the article to get at what might be the argument on which the rhetoric is built. Doing this requires a lot of work and charitable interpretation. Where the author does not specify the problem, the causes, the measured consequences, the proposed solution, how the solution is to be implemented, and the benefits of the solution, then you have to make a lot of inferences. Hybrid and rhetorical arguments are advantageous to an ideological advocate because they off-load the work of constructing the argument on to the reader. By having to disambiguate the unstated or obfuscated argument, the reader has to make inferences that they author can then reject, but usually still without actually clarifying their position. This process is already underway with Coates rebuking a number of critiques essentially by claiming to be misunderstood but without clarifying.

The first thing that comes in to focus as you sift through the words is that Coates has at best only a narrow targeted proposal. He wants the US House of Representatives to pass HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, a bill introduced every year for twenty-five years by Congressman John Conyers, Jr. and defeated every year for twenty-five years. Coates’ is arguing that we should pass HR 40 in order to understand how reparations might work. But that begs the question. Why examine the how if there is no agreement on the whether. In other words, if there is no agreement whether reparations are owed, then there is no need to examine how they might be paid. Coates does this time and again, assuming into existence that which he is supposed to be proving.

Getting your opponent to accept an action that is predicated on your argument being correct is one of the oldest rhetorical devices around and is representative of the whole article. Coates appears not interested in establishing the moral or legal grounds for reparations. Instead, what he wants is non-black America to accept his interpretation of American history without argument and pay some undetermined amount of money simply on the basis of racial identity and with no identified improvement in the national welfare arising from that action. In doing so he prioritizes African-American interests as uniquely deserving above all other comparably positioned claimants such as Native Americans, lower class citizens, impoverished groups, Women, etc. In fact, it is critical for his argument that no other claimants exist.

In order to advance support for his direct proposition that HR 40 be passed and for the broader proposition that reparations are owed to all black Americans by all other non-black Americans, Coates spends probably 14,000 of the 16,000 words documenting particular episodes of egregious events in the past that disproportionately affected African-Americans. The problems with this approach are legion. Frequently, Coates advances interpretations of events that may be received in the cloakrooms of grievance studies programs but are not widely shared in mainstream academia. Often, Coates is describing negative events that were shared by all citizens. For example, local operators fleecing people moving from the country to the city are a staple of all immigrant experiences. Irish, Chinese, Eastern European Jews were all defrauded of possessions and in commercial transactions. Did it happen disproportionately to African Americans moving from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago? Perhaps, but that is not on the face of it obvious and Coates makes no effort to make the case that the real suffering of such internal migrants was different in kind or degree from the suffering of foreign immigrants. Coates routinely ignores the trade-off complexities of past decisions. For example, across the South, particularly in the Tennessee Valley and Appalachians, electrification in 1920s-1940s was seen as a critical predicate to development. But in the process of bringing that benefit to the region, innumerable citizens were displaced from their land and not infrequently defrauded by federal land purchase agents. Bad things happened in pursuit of beneficial ends – how is that calculus worked in creation of a heritable claim?

Coates relies heavily on local and narrowly constrained circumstances to make the case for an overall indictment of the nation. He spends a lot of time documenting the hardships of African Americans in Chicago. Was Chicago representative of the whole nation? Certainly not. Close? Outlier? No way to tell. Coates only documents the local conditions and then indicts the whole nation.

Looking through the entire article, there are about 150 major statements of fact or opinion that are either demonstrably wrong, arguable (matter of interpretation), unsupported, or asserted based on faulty logic. Rather than go through those individually, better to summarize.

Fundamentally the problem is that Coates advances no basis for race-based reparations. It isn’t that he advances a bad argument. It is that he advances no argument whatsoever. He dips his hand into a lot of kettles and pulls out whatever might look good in support of a raw assertion of the need for reparations but there is no effort to build a coherent, robust and convincing argument. There is no argument to be answered because there is no argument made.

People agree that bad things have happened in the past. People agree that some groups have suffered more than others in the past. People agree that some people today suffer disproportionately in terms of particular socio-economic measures of well-being such as morbidity, life expectancy, education attainment, income, wealth accumulation, etc. People agree that past circumstances influence in some degree current choices.

That is a platform on which to build. But from there you have to build some sort of consensus around numerous issues including:

• That the past determines (not just influences) the present
• That the role of personal current actions are minimal in terms of life outcomes compared to the consequences of past events
• That blood guilt, group guilt and generational guilt are valid bases for moral decision-making
• That new values can be the basis for exacting payment for old actions
• That the success of numerous immigrant groups does not refute the proposition that there is systemic racism today
• That there is any measurable positive national good that might arise from the payment of reparations
• That the claim by African-Americans is distinctly different from the claims of all other possible groups who have suffered in the past and continue to suffer today
• That there was some beneficial wealth creation that occurred out of the treatment of African-Americans that can and has been passed down to the non-African-American community
• That there are both just and feasible limiting principles that can guide reparations calculation and apportionment

Absent agreement on any of these issues, there is no basis for reparations other than raw assertion of personal preference. More fundamentally, as long as people are broadly interested in evidence, causation, personal responsibility, equal treatment of people in the face of the law, the moral foundation for claims, etc. the argument for reparations cannot advance simply by assertion. Coates waves all these issues away, repeats stories of suffering, and concludes that something is owed. There is no there.

Coates believes the current conditions of African Americans in the US are almost entirely attributable to institutional and societal racism which has been and is being exercised in a deliberate fashion.

In disambiguating Coates’ argument from the clutter and rhetoric, the most charitable construction seems to be something along the following lines. I have followed each necessary statement (necessary in order to make sense of Coates’ argument) with two numbers in brackets. The first is the percentage degree that I am confident that Coates would agree with the statement. The second number is my estimation of the degree to which the American public (an averaging of the general public and domain specialists) would accept the truth of the statement. For example, Necessary Statement 6 (deliberate white supremacy) is rated (100, 25). The first number, 100, indicates that this is almost a direct quote from Coates. The second number,25, is my estimate of what percentage of the population (including historians) believe that all the identified exploitations were undertaken specifically to support white supremacy (as opposed, for example, for personal gain, fear, or as unintended consequences in the pursuit of other goals).

1. Blacks in America have suffered repeated and grievous exploitations and financial setbacks at the hands of particular individuals and particular sets of municipal, state and federal laws. (100, 95)
2. Similar exploitations and financial setbacks were suffered by other specific groups (Native Americans, Women, the Lower Classes, Immigrants, Religious Minorities, Ethnic Minorities). (70, 100)
3. These exploitations benefited particular individuals and classes of individuals who were overwhelmingly non-black (including other specific groups as above). (100, 90)
4. The benefits accruing to individuals have passed down through multiple generations and have had a material benefit to present day non-blacks. (85, 20)
5. The legal/institutional disadvantages (such as redlining) created benefits to non-blacks which continue to accrue only to non-blacks to the present day. (80, 15)
6. The exploitations were undertaken consciously and deliberately to support white supremacy. (100, 25)
7. Slavery and continuing exploitation of African-Americans was net beneficial to white society above any alternatives. (95, 5)
8. The financial setbacks arising from past exploitation have prevented blacks from benefitting to the same extent as other groups. (100, 20)
9. Racism and white supremacy continue to disadvantage blacks today. (100, 35)
10. Non-white immigrant success (Nigerians, Haitians, Cubans, Chinese, Koreans, etc.) does not negate (Necessary Statement 9). (100, 20)
11. All negative disparate impacts are the result of design and not of unintended consequences. (90, 10)
12. The improvement in socio-economic measures (and narrowing of gaps) between 1900 and 1965 (and the subsequent decline) does not negate the hypothesis that all current negative outcomes are attributable to past exploitation. (90, 20)
13. No benefit of past circumstances have accrued to current day blacks. (100, 10)
14. No alternate explanations than white supremacy and active racism explain current black negative socio-economic numbers. (90, 10)
15. The black experience is sufficiently different in kind and degree to set it apart from comparable experiences of all other claimant groups. (100, 15)
16. Past exploitation of Native Americans, Women, Lower Classes, Immigrants, Religious Minorities, Ethnic Minorities have not had comparable detrimental present day consequences as suffered by African-Americans. (100, 10)
17. Racial reallocation of wealth from non-blacks to blacks is the only way to make blacks whole for the accumulated past sufferings. (100, 5)
18. Such reallocation has to be accompanied by a sincere endorsement of the Coates interpretation of history. (85, 5)
19. That financial reallocation will allow blacks to become successful members of the national community with comparable socio-economic outcomes going forward. (60, 0)
20. Such a reallocation will be of worth to non-blacks by allowing atonement for guilt over the past actions of other people. (95, 5)

I believe this is the actual disambiguated case for reparations as advanced by Coates in disjointed and scattered fragments throughout his long article. All the Necessary Statement need to be true in order for Coates argument to work. Presented in logical sequence and with clarity in this way makes it possible to go back to the article to find where Coates actually provides clear evidence to support each Necessary Statement. When you do so, all you get is clear evidence for Necessary Statement 1. All the other Necessary Statements are unsupported assertions. Could the other Necessary Statements be better supported? Marginally but not much. It is not that Coates did not provide the evidence that exists. It is that the evidence does not exist, is mixed and contradictory or is plagued by definitional problems and/or subjective interpretation. Absent robust evidence, all you can do is assert the statements to be true. Hence the reliance on rhetoric versus logic and evidence.

The Atlantic trumpets this as the article that makes The Case for Reparations. It does no such thing. It lays out Coates’ interpretation of reality. When you pay attention to his argument it becomes clear that this interpretation is not shared and will unlikely ever be shared by the public at large.

Never in the history of the world have there been so many civilized tenderhearted souls as have lived in this century. Never in the history of the world have so many people been killed.

An interesting conversation going on over at Althouse, Sentimentality/tenderness and the gas chamber by Ann Althouse.

Read the whole thing but the meat is here.

But why is opposition to tenderness an argument against what Nazis represent? And what's with the 2 versions of the aphorism? What meaning is there in the shift from sentimentality to tenderness? And how closely do the thoughts of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy connect to present-day debates about empathy and trigger warnings?

MORE: In fact, O'Connor, like Percy, used the word "tenderness." She wrote:

One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him.... Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus' hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.

Walker Percy — who claimed not to realize he was appropriating O'Connor — wrote:

Beware, tender hearts! Don’t you know where tenderness leads? To the gas chambers. Never in the history of the world have there been so many civilized tenderhearted souls as have lived in this century. Never in the history of the world have so many people been killed. More people have been killed in this century by tenderhearted souls than by cruel barbarians in all other centuries put together. My brothers, let me tell you where tenderness leads. To the gas chambers! On with the jets!

Interviewed about that passage, Walker said:

It is the widespread and ongoing devaluation of human life in the Western world -- under various sentimental disguises: "quality of life," "pointless suffering," "termination of life without meaning," etc. I trace it to a certain mindset in the biological and social sciences which is extraordinarily influential among educated folk -- so much that it has achieved the status of a quasi-religious orthodoxy.... Although it drapes itself in the mantle of the scientific method and free scientific inquiry, it is neither free nor scientific. Indeed, it relies on certain hidden dogma where dogma has no place. ... The first: In your investigations and theories, [thou] shalt not find anything unique about the human animal even if the evidence points to such uniqueness. ... Another dogma: Thou shalt not suggest that there is a unique and fatal flaw in Homo sapiens sapiens or indeed any perverse trait that cannot be laid to the influence of Western civilization. ... Conclusion: It is easy to criticize the absurdities of fundamentalist beliefs like "scientific creationism" -- that the world and its creatures were created six thousand years ago. But it is also necessary to criticize other dogmas parading as science and the bad faith of some scientists who have their own dogmatic agendas to promote under the guise of "free scientific inquiry." Scientific inquiry should, in fact, be free. The warning: If it is not, if it is subject to this or that ideology, then do not be surprised if the history of the Weimar doctors is repeated. Weimar leads to Auschwitz. The nihilism of some scientists in the name of ideology or sentimentality and the consequent devaluation of individual human life lead straight to the gas chamber.

A lot of nuances. From 30,000 feet, I'd buy in to the argument that misplaced empathy often incites well intentioned actions that often/usually/almost always have significant unintended negative consequences which can outweigh any putative benefit that was originally being sought.

To the extent possible, it is always best for local and poorly understood complex problems to be solved locally. Good intentions are not the same as good outcomes.

The things that matter to literary people (character and story) are entirely secondary and are generally pasted on as an afterthought.

An interesting insight. Dystopian science fiction is cheaper by Tyler Cowen. The original is The Remarkable Neal Stephenson Interview by Damien Walter.

In my discussions with people interested in books and reading, there is a sturdy disinterest in the economics and commerce of the book business and a desire to ascribe outcomes to social issues (bias, risk aversion, fear, etc.) rather than to logical outcomes from economic first principles. This is evident in a new campaign, an extenuation of one that has been going on since 1965, to increase the number of African-American characters in books (see New Initiative Aims To Encourage Diversity In Kids' Publishing by NPR Staff). The challenge for people wanting to highlight particular attributes (race, culture, gender, class, etc.) is that the market numbers can get very small very quickly. This is compounded by changes in the industry, there are fewer channels to market (independent bookstores) where customers can be exposed to a broader and more varied selection rather than the best selling titles from the catalogue of biggest publishers. It is all about economics. If a publisher cannot find a market among readers for its wares it will not continue, it cannot continue to publish those books. In the NPR article, First Book seeks to rectify that problem by guaranteeing that they will buy 10,000 copies of any book with an African-American protagonist. But Coretta Scott King award has been around for several decades to bring commercial attention to books by and about African-Americans and still books go out of print pretty quickly owing to low demand. First Book is committing the limited depth fallacy. They are correct that the biggest barrier is that people aren't buying the books they wish to propagate. Offering to purchase books that meet their specified criteria deals with the first level issue. But as is so often the case, by dealing with the symptom, they have overlooked the cause.

People have to want to read the books. If they are not desired, then all First Book has done is create a temporary subsidy that will at some point disappear and everything will revert to the norm. Simply buying books that are not read is a mere palliative. People have to want to read the books and that is the problem that needs solving.

From the interview with Stephenson, he highlights an even less observed commercial influence in the publishing industry.

DW – We seem to have a lot of these negative cultural narratives about technology – the apocalypse of course, environmental collapse, but also the most negative assessment of our economic situation, that capitalism has reached its end game and technology won’t power it any further. Do we face a hard limit on our current development? What comes next?

NS - It is worth pointing out that the narratives are just that: narratives. We should begin by asking ourselves where those narratives come from and why they are that way; there’s no prima facie evidence that they have any connection whatsoever to how the future’s actually going to play out. Except, of course, insofar as they might make people so discouraged and skeptical that they become self-fulfilling prophecies.

For practical purposes, the only narratives that matter are the ones we see on screens in video games, TV series, and movies (much as I would like to believe in the power of the written word to sway the imagination, it just doesn’t have the same ability to swerve the zeitgeist as the screen-based media).

In the budget of a video game or a movie, writing is a very small wedge of the pie. The money all goes into other wedges. In both games and movies the production of visuals is very expensive, and the people responsible for creating those visuals hold sway in proportion to their share of the budget.

I hope I won’t come off as unduly cynical if I say that such people (or, barring that, their paymasters) are looking for the biggest possible bang for the buck. And it is much easier and cheaper to take the existing visual environment and degrade it than it is to create a new vision of the future from whole cloth. That’s why New York keeps getting destroyed in movies: it’s relatively easy to take an iconic structure like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty and knock it over than it is to design a future environment from scratch. A few weeks ago I think I actually groaned out loud when I was watching OBLIVION and saw the wrecked Statue of Liberty sticking out of the ground. The same movie makes repeated use of a degraded version of the Empire State Building’s observation deck. If you view that in strictly economic terms–which is how studio executives think–this is an example of leveraging a set of expensive and carefully thought-out design decisions that were made in 1930 by the ESB’s architects and using them to create a compelling visual environment, for minimal budget, of a future world.

As a counter-example, you might look at AVATAR, in which they actually did go to the trouble of creating a new planet from whole cloth. This was far more creative and visually interesting than putting dirt on the Empire State Building, but it was also quite expensive, and it was a project that very few people are capable of attempting. Only James Cameron has the clout to combine such a large budget with so much creative independence; he was able to turn Rick Carter loose on the design and create magic. But in basically every other movie, game, and TV show, the creators of the visual environment are caught in a trap where their work is expensive enough to draw scrutiny from executives who are, by and large, unwilling to take chances on anything new, and will always steer in the direction of something that is cheaper to produce and that they have seen before. And this ends up being the degraded near-future environment seen in so many dystopian movies.

That environment also works well with movie stars, who make a fine impression in those surroundings and the inevitable plot complications that arise from them. Again, the AVATAR counter-example is instructive. The world was so fascinating and vivid that it tended to draw attention away from the stars.

Compared to all of these considerations, the things that matter to literary people (character and story) are entirely secondary and are generally pasted on as an afterthought. So, what you are characterizing as “negative cultural narratives about technology” are, in my view, just an epiphenomenon of decisions made by entertainment executives who basically don’t care about narrative at all. Taking those narratives seriously is kind of like looking at a Rolls-Royce and assuming that it is made entirely out of a giant block of paint.

Everything comes down to supply and demand. Because people aren't demanding what you want to supply doesn't make them evil.

Square your shoulders, lift your pack

A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman

LX. Now hollow fires burn out to black
by A.E. Housman

Now hollow fires burn out to black,
And lights are guttering low:
Square your shoulders, lift your pack,
And leave your friends and go.

Oh never fear, man, nought’s to dread,
Look not left nor right:
In all the endless road you tread
There’s nothing but the night.