A tide of frustration churned up by liberal lintheads and elitist malcontents

From Fear And Loathing At Netroots Nation by David Marcus. I like articles that leverage books from the past for perspective on the present.

I have never been a particular fan of Hunter S. Thompson, though I do have a number of his books knocking around the house somewhere. My oldest son has read several of his books and enjoys Thompson's writing. I have just never gotten around to him. Yet.

Marcus's main point is to draw parallels on the Democratic Left between now and the 1972 campaign. It is his belief that the party is as hostage to its ideological fringe now as it was then and that that bodes ill for its electoral prospects. Marcus has several passages where he quotes Thompson. This is Thompson's analysis of McGovern's postmortem of the campaign.

After months of quasi-public brooding on the Whys and Wherefores of the disastrous beating he absorbed last November, McGovern seems finally to have bought the Conventional Wisdom—that his campaign was doomed from the start: conceived in a fit of hubris, born in a momentary power-vacuum that was always more mirage than reality, borne along on a tide of frustration churned up by liberal lintheads and elitist malcontents in the Eastern Media Establishment.

Well, that part, "a tide of frustration churned up by liberal lintheads and elitist malcontents" certainly sounds contemporary.

The ungagging of thousands of conservative voices

I just posted The blood of Charles Martel no longer runs in the veins of today’s Europeans commenting on an article by Kurt Schlichter.

According to the bio, "Kurt Schlichter is a retired Army colonel who holds a masters in strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College. He is also a trial lawyer and a writer." That prompted a thought, the trail of which is convoluted. It starts with that titular line. Schlichter's prose is purplish but it is peppered with cultured references such as "the blood of Charles Martel." I know who Charles Martel is, Charles the Hammer, but I am very interested in and widely read in military history. How many general readers would recognize the reference? Certainly most military officers because Martel is studied as a great general. Which led to the thought that it is not commonly recognized just how smart and educated our military officers have become. The military understands the importance of human capital better than just about anybody. All that led to following sequence.

One of the odd things is that the US is far more conservative than you would think listening to any of the major media sources. Partly this is just a consequence of two intertwined phenomenon. The humanities in universities have become dramatically left leaning in the past thirty years. Most journalists, also left leaning, come out of the humanities. Journalists approach news stories with their left leaning assumptions and then, when they need someone "expert" they go to left leaning university academicians for interviews. Nothing necessarily conspiratorial, or even conscious, just a couple of complex processes interconnected with one another.

Those who come out of the harder sciences and business and economics and who deal with limited budgets, hard unforgiving processes, capricious customers, etc. and who are more numerous and more likely to be more conservative (whether fiscally or socially), you just don't hear that much from them. Why?

I think it is just the nature of the beast. Most major corporations and private businesses seek to satisfy the whole market, not just pieces of it. They shy away from political controversy. So those more likely to be conservative simply don't seek out controversy and aren't heard.

That is possibly true but I think it is probably only somewhat marginally true in terms of its effect size. But the consequence is that conservatives have a strong incentive structure to be silent about their political beliefs while radicals have a strong incentive structure to trumpet their beliefs. Working for academies and liberal institutions and the liberal media, there just aren't the negative consequences that there are for those in competitive industries.

What Schlichter's article made me wonder is related to this. We are in the middle of a massive downsizing of the US military. It doesn't get much press attention but it is occurring. A lot of mid-career officers, Captains, Majors and Colonels are being pulled from the front lines and separated from the military.

The thing is, these are the smartest, most experienced, most seasoned and most educated officers we have ever had in our history. They have lived their careers on the pointy end of international diplomacy and know much more about how the world works than just about anybody in government and academia. Because they are so well educated, they are able to articulate their beliefs well. While they are not monolithic in their political views, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that they are overwhelmingly conservative. As long as they are part of the military, their voices, like their peers in commerce, are silenced.

So what happens when some tens of thousands of educated, experienced, informed and wickedly smart conservative voices are freed up from the professional gag orders?

Probably not a whole lot. Some will go into private industry and likewise be gagged again. But some will open their own businesses and some will take early retirement. Perhaps it won't be measurable but I suspect that an indirect consequence of downsizing the military will be to increase both conservative activism and the number of conservative voices. They will still be excluded from the mainstream media, but the monopoly of the MSM erodes further each year.

Just speculation.

Books valued by smart people

Tyler Cowen asks his readers, a pretty smart bunch, Which book has the most page-for-page wisdom?

As might be expected, there is some intellectual posturing and some people seem to have conflated "Important to me" with "Most page-for-page wisdom." Similarly there is some confusion between important for the development of world knowledge versus wisdom. All that said, it is an interesting list. I have omitted duplicates and a handful of what seemed simply improbable selections.

The first six are Cowen's nominations and then the rest follow from the comments section.

The Stoics
Democracy in America by Tocqueville
Pensees by Pascal
Enquiry by David Hume
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Moby Dick by Herman Melville

A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich Hayek
Mestizo Logics by Jean-Loup Amselle
The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker
The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker
The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
How The Mind Works by Steven Pinker
Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith
Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
Beyond Backpacking by Ray Jardine
Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
William Shakespeare
The Bible
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
Shopcraft as Soul Craft by Matthew B. Crawford
The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford
Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
Free to Choose by Milton Friedman
Pragmatism by William James
Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
The Discourses by Livy
Epictetus
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Seneca
The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Political Theology by Carl Schmitt
Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt
Disquisitiones Arithmeticae by Carl Friedrich Gauss
Republic by Plato
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals by Immanuel Kant
Twilight of the Idols by Friedrich Nietzsche
On Certainty by Ludvig von Wittgenstein
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Collected Fiction by Jorge Luis Borges
The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
On Human Nature by E.O. Wilson
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Apophthegmata Patrum)
Waste Books by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Essays by George Orwell
The Old Regime and the Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville
Don Colacho by Nicolás Gómez Davila
Never Trust a Calm Dog, and Other Rules of Thumb by Tom Parker
Discourse on Inequality by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
Stephen Jay Gould
The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
Critical Rationalism: A Restatement and Defence by David Miller
Jacques the Fatalist and his Master by Denis Diderot
Zero To One by Blake Masters and Peter Thiel
The Use Of Knowledge In Society by Friedrich Hayek
The Downing Street Years by Margaret Thatcher
Walden by Henry Thoreau
Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat translated by Fitzgerald
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay
Essays by Montaigne
The Good News Is the Bad News IS Wrong by Ben Wattenberg
Perpetual Peace by Immanuel Kant
The Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
Mysteries by Knut Hamsun
Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Dr. Samuel Johnson
Maxims and Reflections by Francesco Guicciardini
Les particules elementaires by Michel Houellebecq
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein
Collected poems of Wallace Stevens
The Federalist Papers
Augustine’s Confessions
Best short stories by Anton Chekhov
Gods Of The Copybook Headings by Rudyard Kipling
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent
Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis
The Superior Man by David Deida
Maxims by La Rochefoucauld
Human, All too Human by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Ghost Dance by Weston LaBarre
The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
Niklas Luhmann
The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
Pilgrim’s Regress by C.S. Lewis
Theology and Sanity by Frank Sheed
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Man, the State, and War by Kenneth Waltz
Lucretius
Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu
Enjoy Calculus by Eli S. Pine
I, Pencil by Leonard E Read
The Strategy of Economic Development by A. O. Hirschman
Dialogo dei due massimi sistemi del mondo by Galileo Galilei
The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain
Georgics by Virgil
Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Restless Universe by Max Born
Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Wittgenstein’s Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Aesop’s Fables
The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Other Men’s Flowers by Wavell
Thoughts and Reflections by George Savile Halifax
Discourses by Epictetus
H.L. Mencken
Sun Tzu
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity by James Fitzjames Stephen
Up the Organization by Peter Townsend
The Mythical Man Month by Frederick Phillips Brooks
Sex and Character by Otto Weininger
Death on Credit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The Old Man and the Boy by Robert Ruark
The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
Human Action by Ludwig Von Mises
Lila: An Inquiry into Morals by Robert Pirsig
Les fables de La Fontaine
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
The Construction of Social Reality by John Searle
The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
Edward Mills and George Benton: A Tale by Mark Twain
The City of God by St. Augustine
The Small Catechism by Martin Luther
1984 by George Orwell
The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
Man’s Search For Meaning by Victor Frankl
The Unteathered Soul by Michael Singer
Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler
On Power by Bertrand de Jouvenel
Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek by Annie Dillard
Back when we were grownups by Anne Tyler
Han Feizi Zhuanzi
Word and Object by Willard Van Orman Quine
Sermons of Meister Eckhart
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
The Traditions of the Western World by J. H. Hexter
Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
A Pattern Language by Alexander Ishikawa
The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon
Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple
Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Bacon's Essays
The Imitation of Christ by Kampis
The Kural
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer
2nd Treatise by John Locke
Heraclitus Fragments
Euthyphro by Plato
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Underground Man by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
If by Rudyard Kipling
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Vision of the Annointed by Thomas Sowell
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The collected essays of Frederick Bastiat
The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert Simon
Lives of the 12 Caesars by Suetonius
Iliad by Homer
Odyssey by Homer
How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt
The Machinery of Freedom, by David D. Friedman
The Death and Life of the Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

The blood of Charles Martel no longer runs in the veins of today’s Europeans

This morning there was a very muscular argument, Europe Is Partying Like It’s 1939 by Kurt Schlichter. The prose is a little purple for my taste, the cry of doom a little overconfident. None-the-less, there is a resonance. He observes differences between the Europe he sees today and the Europe he first knew in the 1980s. I was living in Europe as far back as the 1960s and can vouch for some of these trends.

When traveling through Europe accompanied by a copy of Martin Gilbert’s magisterial one-volume biography, “Churchill: A Life,” you cannot ignore the parallels between today and the 1930s. With the enemies of freedom prowling along on the periphery of civilization and the economy wobbling, the West once again finds itself at an existential crossroads. This time, there is no Winston Churchill to set us upon the road toward victory.

Europe is different from when I first lived there in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was not as superficially wealthy then, although this time I rarely wandered far from where the tourists congregate. On the outside, at least, you would hardly see the rot of debt and welfare-state mismanagement even in Italy and Spain. The people were well dressed. The cafés were expensive but still packed. The cars are fairly new and have shockingly little body damage, when you consider the insanity that overtakes Europeans when they slide behind a steering wheel.

But that’s on the surface. Once you get behind the walls and into interior of the homes, the old cramped shabbiness is still there. All their money goes to clothes, food, and drink, because there’s no room in European apartments for the stuff Americans pack into theirs.

Like a cheesy disaster movie foreshadowing the apocalypse during Act I, the TVs in the bars where the locals drink wine and gobble pricey tapas cover the looming Greek default 24/7. The coming collapse is background noise to a cacophony of people chattering into iPhones. The revolution is being televised, and no one’s watching.

Countless stores will dress women in the latest, most expensive fashions, but few supply the woman who wishes to dress her children. The merchants know their markets, and you need babies to support baby clothes stores. When you walk the streets, you notice the couples with kids—they stand out, and it’s always just one kid. Even the cabbies sigh that the birth rate is below replacement level. Children are the ultimate luxury item. Most Italians don’t move out of their families’ apartments until they’re in their 30s. There’s no room for kids—not in the tiny apartments and not in young people’s social lives. Moreover, children represent an investment in the future, but it’s a buyer’s market.

There are fewer immigrants than you might think from what we read here in America, although this time I wandered primarily through the more affluent neighborhoods. On the continent, the immigrants are largely kept out of sight and, for the moment, out of mind—at least those not engaged in trying to sell you selfie sticks outside the Sagrada Familia.

Not so in England. When you go to a restaurant or a store in or around London, you almost certainly won’t be served by a native Englishman. Often, it’s an Eastern European. Our most frustrating language challenges took place in the United Kingdom. The immigrants do the work, while working-class Londoners apparently stay home and collect dole checks.

You do not see many cops with submachine guns, a fixture in Europe in the late 1980s. Perhaps they now rely on the closed-circuit television cameras bolted to every building and pole in every big city. There were a few policemen in Barcelona, but you get the impression they were there mostly to keep the Catalan separatists in line.

Yet the threat of violence is hangs over the continent. When an ISIS sympathizer decapitated his coworker and stuck his head on a factory gate in Grenoble, France, I was about 100 miles away. I would have been in Tunis the day before nearly five dozen European tourists were machine-gunned on the beach, except that stop had been cancelled after the last time ISIS machine-gunned several dozen tourists there.

These atrocities seemed to create barely a stir, certainly nothing like the kind of groundswell for vengeance upon the savages that Churchill would have demanded. Winston, veteran of battles on the Indian frontier, Omdurman, the Boers War, and the trenches, would have made the savages pay for their perfidy in blood. Current British Prime Minister David Cameron can’t even work up a lather sufficient to convincingly commit to few tentative airstrikes somewhere down the road. Of course, no one else did, either. Maybe the electronic dance music was too loud and no one in Europe was able to hear the bells tolling for them over the dope beats.

Then there are the looming threats of less-intimate violence. The Russian bear stalks back and forth in the East, temporarily restrained by arbitrary lines on maps. When people realize that this time no one in Europe will die for a line on a map, Russia will cross them. And, of course, thanks to the surrender of President Obama and the rest of the West, Iran will soon have the bomb. It’s little mitigation that the initial generation of Iran’s ballistic missiles will only be able to hit Europe and we will have to wait until they deploy their second generation before they can unleash the Twelfth Iman’s vengeance on Los Angeles.

The world is preparing for war, but not in Europe, where Daft Punk’s beat goes on.

The blood of the likes of Charles Martel no longer runs in the veins of today’s café-dwelling Europeans.

Mugger's complaining about patsies

A quite curious news report in the Sunday New York Times, Germany Risks Its Reputation With Idea of Greece Exiting Eurozone by Steven Erlanger.

Despite being a news report, Erlanger comes across much more as an editorialist with a point of view that he wants to convey but for which he doesn't really have many facts to support. The second paragraph is a model of tentativeness and aversion to being held accountable for any possibly offensive facts or evidence. Emphasis added:

But with its handling of Greece’s bailout package, Germany is at risk of losing that trust, some European analysts say. By taking what sounded to many as an aggressive, punishing, contemptuous tone toward Greece, the German leadership may have undercut its moral authority, they say. And by floating the notion that Greece might be better off leaving the common currency, Germany displayed its national interest more nakedly than in the past and made it clear there are limits to its willingness to put European unity first.

May, might, nameless sources, they say; what a load of waffling bilge.

The problem, it appears, is that Erlanger wants to make the editorial argument that most people regard Germany as being irresponsible for not letting the Greeks throw away money provided by hardworking Germans. More fundamentally, what the article is complaining about is that since the formation of the EU, German productivity has underwritten fanciful spending in many EU countries and they have now decided to quit being the patsy. Without someone else's money (Germany's) there are many EU leaders who all of sudden are going to have to govern within the financial limits of their country, a sad outcome which they are trying to avoid by shaming Germany to keep on funding everyone else's holiday from reality.

Erlanger is stymied because, while he can find a few bankrupt politicians who are making a lot of noise about Germany's stinginess, most everyone else with a brain and/or a moral compass understand Germany's predicament and reluctance to continue as Europe's banker for the spendthrift.

Germany was hardly alone. In its tough stance toward Greece, it had support from northern European countries like the Netherlands and Finland, and the newer countries of central and Eastern Europe and the Baltics. Even the French and Italians, who fought to keep Greece in the eurozone, were reluctant to push too hard, given the behavior of Syriza, Mr. Tsipras’s political party.

Merkel has to mind the German store and make sure that its productivity and prosperity continue to grow while at the same time ensuring that the many other EU countries who do not share Germany's work ethic, self-discipline, and financial rectitude do not keep coming back to the Germans like an EU ATM.

All those committed to the socialist dream of unending prosperity without striving, self-discipline, oh-so regrettable trade-off decisions, and financial rectitude, are gravely frightened of this new Germany. Without German money, the dream comes to an end and the postmodernists may end up having to acknowledge the benefits of middle-class values and traditional Western values, and worse yet may have to begin making trade-off decisions from which they were shielded by that nice German money.

It is hard to work up much sympathy when the ne'er-do-well mugger begins to complain about their victims standing up for themselves.

The findings suggest that the upfront investment costs are about twice the actual energy savings

I have been interested in alternative energy sources, energy efficiency and conservation since my college days in the latter part of the last century (to provide a patina of age). I elected not to pursue a career in the field as my assessment was that the economics and technology, while progressing, still did not make a compelling case. But even then I was too optimistic. I was thinking that we would get to competitive levels of efficiency within a couple of decades. We're still waiting and we are still paying subsidies to big corporations to produce solutions that aren't competitive.

In the most recent great recession, it was interesting that as municipalities became increasingly desperate in their tightened financial circumstances, one of the first programs on the chopping block were recycling programs. Nice in concept but they still do not pay their way after all these years. Many of these programs have been tarred with the brush of crony capitalism - using the coercive power of government to press resources into the hands of some favored insiders to pursue activities that are not in themselves desired by anyone.

So I am accustomed to having a somewhat jaundiced view of claims in this area. That still did not prepare me for this research result. I hope it is wrong but, if not, this is an incredible waste of scarce resources. From Do Energy Efficiency Investments Deliver? Evidence from the Weatherization Assistance Program by Meredith Fowlie, Michael Greenstone, Catherine Wolfram.

Conventional wisdom suggests that energy efficiency (EE) policies are beneficial because they induce investments that pay for themselves and lead to emissions reductions. However, this belief is primarily based on projections from engineering models. This paper reports on the results of an experimental evaluation of the nation’s largest residential EE program conducted on a sample of more than 30,000 households. The findings suggest that the upfront investment costs are about twice the actual energy savings. Further, the model-projected savings are roughly 2.5 times the actual savings. While this might be attributed to the “rebound” effect – when demand for energy end uses increases as a result of greater efficiency – the paper fails to find evidence of significantly higher indoor temperatures at weatherized homes. Even when accounting for the broader societal benefits of energy efficiency investments, the costs still substantially outweigh the benefits; the average rate of return is approximately -9.5% annually.

All knowledge is contingent - Euro style

I often mention that all knowledge is contingent by which I mean that whatever we know, and whatever we may passionately believe to be true, is contingent on yet further information that may prove that belief to be either wrong or more limited in scope than we thought. The world was obviously flat until it was obviously round.

Who Predicted the Eurozone Crisis? by David Beckworth provides a great example of passionate belief, arising from theoretical constructs, in a real-world policy being upended by new information. Beckworth is disputing a contention that only nine economists predicted that the Eurozone would ultimately fail. He is right, there were hundreds that made that argument in the nineties and earlier.

What caught my eye was research he cites from 2010, It Can’t Happen, It’s a Bad Idea, It Won’t Last: U.S. Economists on the EMU and the Euro, 1989-2002 by Lars Jonung and Eoin Drea. Jonung and Drea are making the argument that the success of the Euro and European Union discredits the skepticism and quality of argument of the American economists.

The main finding of our survey is that US academic economists were mostly skeptical of the single currency in the 1990s. By now, the euro has existed for more than a decade. The pessimistic forecasts and scenarios of the U.S. academic economists in the 1990s have not materialized. The euro is well established. It has not created political turmoil in Europe, and it has fostered integration of financial, labor and commodity markets within the euro area. Trade within the euro area has increased, and so has business cycle synchronization. Inflation differentials within the euro area are presently of the same order of magnitude as in the United States.

Why were U.S. economists so skeptical towards European monetary integration prior to the physical existence of the euro?

As Beckworth notes,

Ironically, the article was published in early 2010 just as the Eurozone crisis was unfolding.

Jonung and Drea are victims of the reality that all knowledge is contingent. At the point in time of 2010, it appeared to them that the success of the Eurozone had emasculated the arguments of the American skeptics. Five years later, most of the concerns expressed by the Americans have come to fruition. Their skepticism was actually well-founded and turned out to be right. Whether and how the Eurozone is saved remains to be seen but it is no longer possible to dismiss the concerns that had been raised in advance of the plan.

Knowing that all knowledge is contingent makes it no easier to remain cautious and humble. Some knowledge just seems so obvious that only the most foolish could possibly question it. And then the world serves up a steaming pile of humility by showing us to have been the dupes in the first place.

I will think the way I want to think, not the way I know I need to think.

From What good is training in moral philosophy? by Tyler Cowen referencing a new research paper.

We examined the effects of framing and order of presentation on professional philosophers’ judgments about a moral puzzle case (the “trolley problem”) and a version of the Tversky & Kahneman “Asian disease” scenario. Professional philosophers exhibited substantial framing effects and order effects, and were no less subject to such effects than was a comparison group of non-philosopher academic participants. Framing and order effects were not reduced by a forced delay during which participants were encouraged to consider “different variants of the scenario or different ways of describing the case”. Nor were framing and order effects lower among participants reporting familiarity with the trolley problem or with loss-aversion framing effects, nor among those reporting having had a stable opinion on the issues before participating the experiment, nor among those reporting expertise on the very issues in question. Thus, for these scenario types, neither framing effects nor order effects appear to be reduced even by high levels of academic expertise.

So people who are trained in structured and critical thinking and with the most likelihood of being aware of impediments to structured thinking are as susceptible to those impediments as anybody else. That's not good.

Oh Harvard, by your progeny ye shall be known.

An embarrassing article from Atlantic Magazine, The Destruction of a Black Suburb by Alana Semuels. In the past couple or three years, Atlantic has become more and more prone to running click-bait articles on race simply to attract traffic, and this seems to be one. Regrettably, the writer is not even good at making a bad argument. It is, to quote the famous Wolfgang Pauli, "not only not right, it is not even wrong."

It is shocking that a Harvard grad should, after eleven years of reporting experience, not be able to construct an even marginally defensible argument. Regrettably, it appears she has imbibed too much at the postmodernist well and sees everything through totalitarian eyes.

Semuels argument is:

How one of the first black suburbs in the country fell so far from its halcyon early days exemplifies how systemic racism hampered the goals of those who were trying to build a community there. The people of Lincoln Heights might have had their own suburb, but the world made sure they had little else. From the beginning, historians say, the town was doomed to fail.

As is usual in these cases, (see Sabrina Rubin Erdely), the author does not even deign to present two sides to an argument. There is the advocacy position of the author and there is nothing presented to contradict her assumptions. She doesn't seem to be aware that there are always other ways of looking at evidence and other interpretations. All the sources cited in the article are wedded to the idea that state level power structures and interests are to blame for the facts that

Home values fell 76.4 percent between 2007 and 2013, while home values in tiny Indian Hill, a nearby suburb, rose 27.7 percent. The elementary school is abandoned, and when the district put it up for auction earlier this year, with a minimum bid of $69,900, no one came forward to buy it.

Semuels is repeatedly angered by the fact that neighboring towns which are predominantly white are doing so much better. She never examines any other explanations other than that it must be systemic racism. It is not as if the Midwest has a shortage of townships and cities which have suffered from deindustrialization with which to compare Lincoln Heights.

The interesting thing not alluded to by either Semuels, or any of the commenters as far as I read, is that usually the most effective strategy is for the State or the Federal Government to help people relocate to where there are actual opportunities. Investing taxpayer funds in communities that are not willing or able to invest in themselves almost always results in wasted taxpayer dollars. There was a great example of this a few months ago from an excellent article in The New York Times, 50 Years Into the War on Poverty, Hardship Hits Back by Trip Gabriel. I posted then,

The article is basically arguing that the War on Poverty has been lost in McDowell County (poverty rate declined from 50% in 1960 to a low of 24% in 1980 but has risen back to 34%. But

As coal mining jobs have declined over half a century, there has been a steady migration away from the mountains. McDowell County’s population is just 21,300, down from 100,000 in the 1950s. Those who stayed did not have the education or skills to leave, or remained fiercely attached to the hollows and homes their families had known for generations.

34% of those who remain are in poverty and that is not a good outcome but there is the matter of the seen and unseen. The article paints the picture that we have we lost the war on poverty but maybe we have almost won. Effectively, nearly 80,000 people have moved away from poverty in McDowell County to other locations (recognizing that to be a broad assumption and that not everyone who moves away also leaves poverty). Put differently, in 1960 there were 50,000 people in poverty in McDowell County and today there are 7,250. That is actually and clearly a huge improvement. Sometimes we let averages and relative measures hide the absolute truth.

There is nothing unusual that is happening in Lincoln Heights that is not happening all across The United States. It is Schumpeter's Creative Destruction in play. Semuels, blinded by her own progressive racism (always wanting to see things as solely the consequence of racism) fails to tackle the real public policy challenge. Looking at white McDowell county as an example of systemic decline, should the government be investing money (an activity prone to failure, to crony capitalism, and to corruption) in order to revitalize an area, or should it be providing funds to mitigate the decline (welfare of various forms), or should it simply provide funds to assist people to relocate to where there are actual opportunities? Strategies one and two have an extensive track record of failure. We do very little of the third strategy though it is the one most often adopted by individuals themselves as exemplified by the experience of McDowell county.

I could go through all the holes in Semuels argument, but I don't need to. The commenters do an adequate job (look at the most upvoted comments). This is not about race. This is about municipal incompetence and people wanting more than they are willing to pay for. Semuels is sufficiently indoctrinated that she is unwilling to look at the evidence that contradicts her argument because she wants to believe that

nearby wealthy towns seem to have little inclination to share services or revenues with Lincoln Heights. They were built, after all, not by sharing but by taking away. And they have little motivation to change that now.

This is the crude politics of simple avarice. I want what you have, I am unwilling to provide it for myself, and therefore I am going to make up arguments without facts to support my desire to take what you have created away from you. Oh Harvard, by your progeny ye shall be known.

A mother’s whisper

Hmmm. I like to be surprised by people. I have had, till now, a fairly negative opinion of Cass Sunstein. He is an American lawyer and writer who has a penchant for using lessons from psychology and microeconomics to facilitate government control over people's decision making. He is obviously a smart person and he argues and writes well, but I struggle to get past the shortsightedness. The State exists to serve its people and yet he focuses on how to enable to the State to get people to better serve its interests.

But then he goes and pens a remarkably sensible Finding Humanity in Gone With the Wind by Cass R. Sunstein.

Progressive zealots have sought to capitalize on the tragedy of Charleston, absent any of the Christianity, grace and class which both the victims and the Charleston community have displayed. With great political courage, Governor Haley took the bold step which so many had long sought, to dissociate the State from the battle flag of the Confederacy. Sure, there are a lot of nuances to the argument and the pro or anti flag camps both have solid people making honestly believed arguments. The tragedy served as the catalyst to crack that nut.

That was insufficient to the ideological zealots for whom that Orwellian and profoundly statist phrase "the personal is political" is the anthem. Without catching breath they immediately turned to pressuring retailers to remove the flag from stores, and discussing when might be the right time to remove all the War Memorials to the fallen that blanket the small towns and cities of the South. Some wanted to discuss sandblasting the four Confederates from the face of Stone Mountain. And then there was that book near and dear to so many Southern hearts, Gone With the Wind. The progressive extremists thought it might be a good idea to ban that apology for the Confederacy from libraries and schools.

That's the problem with statists. Sometimes they identify legitimate problems that need addressing. But usually they are simply indulging their own prejudices dressed up in some form of moral crusade. And almost always, even when they have a legitimate issue, their solution involves giving the state more power over private lives, coercion against the wishes of citizens, and ultimately and inevitably, failure to actually solve the problem because their ideological lenses prevent them from seeing and understanding the real root causes.

Along comes Sunstein doing three things that are not commonly associated with progressive statists. First, he actually read the book before forming an opinion. Second, he formed an independent opinion based on his interpretation of the evidence. Third, he made public his departure from the received progressive statist received wisdom. Good for him.

When Americans think about the Confederacy, they often think about Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 classic, Gone With the Wind. Inspired by recent debates over the Confederate flag, I decided to give the book a try. I confess that I did not have high hopes. I expected to be appalled by its politics and racism, and to be bored by the melodrama. (Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, and Ashley Wilkes? Really?) About twenty pages, I thought, would be enough. I could not have been more wrong. The book is enthralling, and it casts a spell.

Does it make a plausible argument for continuing to display the Confederate flag? Not even close. But it does raise a host of questions—about winners’ narratives, about honor and humiliation, about memory, about innocence and guilt, about men and women, about what’s taken for granted, about the particularity of human lives, and about parallel worlds. Teeming with life, it offers surprising insights into the Confederacy and the Old South. To be sure, its presentation of slavery is appalling. But at its core, it’s much less about politics than it is about the human heart. On that count, it has a lot to say, not least about how to come to terms with history.

Read the whole article. It is a good refutation of the common cargo cult mentality in academia and the chattering classes where the mantra of "the personal is political" is so common and so strong. No, you won't be tainted by reading something against which you might be uninformedly biased and yes, it is appropriate to change your mind when the evidence is against your prejudices.

Regrettably, Sunstein has to throw his fellow progressive statists a few bones. It is not sufficient to argue that GWTW is simply a good story that can be enjoyed on its own terms and is not an apology for either slavery or the Confederacy. He has to find further justification. So there are some nods towards other mantras. "The book has strong feminist themes" and "Mitchell also offers diverse voices." But he comes back to the central issue.

Nonetheless, Gone With the Wind should not be mistaken for a defense of slavery or even the Confederacy. Mitchell is interested in individuals rather than ideologies or apologetics.

There is hope for Sunstein. As long as you care more about individuals than ideologies and abstract identities, then there is hope for you.

A wonderful passage:

She is elegiac not about politics, but about innocence, youth, memory, love (of all kinds), death, and loss (which helps make the book transcend the era it depicts). Irrevocably stuck in the past, and a bit of a ghost, Ashley Wilkes reminds Scarlett of “the sad magic of old half-forgotten songs,” and “the far-off yelping of possum dogs in the dark swamp under cool autumn moons and the smell of eggnog bowls, wreathed with holly at Christmas time,” and “Stuart and Brent with their long legs and their red hair and their practical jokes,” and “a whisper and a fragrance that was Ellen,” Scarlett’s mother, who died during the war. Mitchell draws a sharp distinction between those pathetic souls who keep hearing that sad magic, like Ashley, and those who want to move forward, like Scarlett and Rhett. Her own heart ultimately sides with the latter. But she also cherishes, and tries to capture, the magic, the yelping, the practical jokes, and a mother’s whisper.