Food desert fantasies

From Food deserts may play little role in obesity, Rand study says by Soumya Karlamangla.

For the past few years there has been a lot of happy clappy talk about food deserts (urban locations with few or no retailers of fresh or otherwise healthy food) and their role in the obesity epidemic, particularly among minority children. It has become a partisan issue owing to the desire by some to intervene in many ways to address the food desert issue. Some want crony-capital incentives to encourage grocery stores to build in particular locations, others want to ban or punitively tax some types of food. Others want to restrict EBT cards from being used for non-healthy foods.

This wave of concern followed many public policy arcs. Declaration of firm cause-and-effect based on skimpy or non-existent evidence. Then questions about whether food deserts actually exist (see here .) Then questions about whether,even if you increase food choices it will have any effect (see here here.) And now, Karlamangla touches on unintended consequences.

But back to the story.

Conventional wisdom suggests that if you live in an area devoid of fresh, healthy food, you won't eat well. These so-called food deserts, the logic goes, are a root cause of the obesity epidemic.

But new research indicates that the picture is much more complicated, with food choices being affected by several factors, including the cost of food, cultural preferences and marketing. Eliminating food deserts, researchers say, may only marginally improve people's health.

"I wouldn't put it at the top of my policy agenda," said Roland Sturm, a senior economist at the Santa Monica-based Rand Corp.

He and his colleagues published a study this month in the journal Preventing Chronic Disease that found virtually no link between the type of food and drinks that Los Angeles County adults consume and the proximity of fast-food outlets, grocery stores and convenience stores to their homes. In the last few years, he has published other papers evaluating the connection between the food environment — the distribution and number of food shops — and people's eating habits and, for the most part, found little connection.

[snip]

The study released last week evaluated 150 effects that food environments could have on people's health and found only two that were statistically significant. For the most part, there was no connection found between the location of certain kinds of food stores — whether it be a fast-food outlet a block away or a grocery store a mile away — and how much soda or fruits that residents consumed per week, or whether they were overweight.

The final movement of the arc of good intentions is the realization that there might some unintended negative consequences. A finding which, no matter how reliably it happens, is always a surprise.

In 2008, Los Angeles lawmakers banned new fast-food restaurants in South Los Angeles as part of a campaign to improve residents' health. The law aimed to stem high rates of obesity and diabetes that afflict African American areas.

Sturm published a study earlier this year that found that from 2007 to 2012, the percentage of people who were overweight or obese increased everywhere in Los Angeles, but the increase was significantly greater in areas covered by the fast-food ordinance, including Baldwin Hills and Leimert Park.

"There is just nothing easy. That's the problem," he said.

Part of the problem is the existential need for the crisis on the part of self-interested institutions. Another part of the problem is ideological blinkers which blind advocates to different ways of understanding the world than the abstract ideological convictions. Clare Fox illustrates both. Executive Director of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council, she needs there to be food deserts which cause obesity. No food deserts, no need for the LAFPC. Plus, note how she introduces the ideological non sequitur.

Clare Fox, executive director of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council, said there's no single solution to the obesity epidemic. However, she said she feared that studies such as Rand's discount the importance of fighting for healthy food options. There are long-standing disparities in food access across neighborhoods, she said.

She said advocates should be "empowering stores that are residing in low-income communities to market and brand healthy food in new ways so that we can interrupt these systemic and historic inequities."

Ideologically, it might be quite critical that there are or are not "long-standing disparities in food access across neighborhoods" but that is not the question. Who cares about inequalities unless it affects health outcomes. What the Rand study is indicating is that inequalities are not the causative factor in neighborhoods, it is eating habits. Food deserts and inequality are both red herrings that distract from critically thinking about the important outcome desired - how to help people eat more healthily.

Childhood outcomes predictable based mostly on family variables

From The Neighborhoods They Live in: The Effects of Neighborhood Residence on Child and Adolescent Outcomes by Tama Leventhal and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn.

Across the studies reviewed, neighborhood effects are demonstrated in the childhood as well as the adolescent years. Most studies, however, have focused either on early childhood or on late adolescence. Two main findings are evident in the following review. First, neighborhood effects are more common for neighborhood SES than racial/ethnic heterogeneity or residential stability across all of the outcomes, and second, more consistent neighborhood effects are reported in the national samples as compared with the city- and region-based studies. In most instances, the neighborhood effects reported are small to modest and account for 5% to upwards of 10% of the variance in child and adolescent outcomes.

Although not reviewed here, family-level variables tend to be more strongly associated with individual outcomes than are neighborhood-level variables.

Crudely - In terms of impact on childhood outcomes, family trumps neighborhood, neighborhood trumps race and churn.

Upgrading the moral standing and the operational competence of the political class

From Britain’s Unsettling Omen by Brett Stephens.

Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of Britain’s Labour Party is being cheered on the right as a gift—as close as you get in politics to a guarantee that your side will win an election that’s still five years out. Mr. Corbyn leans so far left that he might not be able to assemble a parliamentary shadow cabinet, never mind a governing majority.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that the political ascent of a man who admires Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and keeps company with Holocaust deniers is another milepost in Britain’s long decline amid a broader unraveling in the West.

Last year the United Kingdom nearly came undone after David Cameron’s government misjudged the politics of the Scottish referendum on independence. The Scots voted to stay in the U.K. by a 55%-45% margin, then turned around and rewarded the Scottish National Party—which had led the drive for independence—with a whopping 56 seats in Parliament in May’s general election.

That election was seen as a vindication for Mr. Cameron, who defied the polls to win a slender parliamentary majority—330 of Parliament’s 650 seats. But it was not an overwhelming British vote of confidence in Conservative governance. Even the hapless John Major took 336 seats in his unexpected 1992 victory.

In other words, what separates Britain from the sundry furies of nationalism and nutterism are six seats in Parliament. What happens when there’s the inevitable recession, the inevitable sex scandal, the inevitable Tory ructions over membership in the European Union?

Then there is the wider political context in which Mr. Corbyn now finds his place. We are living through an era of bitter, and usually justified, disillusion with political establishments. In Europe, that establishment trumpeted a new era of multicultural transnational technocracy but hasn’t delivered sustained economic growth or low unemployment for nearly four decades. In the U.S., Barack Obama has presided over a feeble recovery while relying on obedient Democrats and a pliant media to jam through his domestic and foreign policy agendas over broad popular objections.

The response to this political highhandedness on both sides of the Atlantic is rage: the rage of people who sense that they aren’t even being paid lip service by a political class that is as indifferent to public opinion as it is unaccountable to the law.

These are the people flocking to the banners of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, Marine Le Pen and Jeremy Corbyn—leaders who, either through the consistency of their views or the toughness of their persona, suggest a kind of incorruptibility. They can’t be bought. They’ll never change. They are authentic and pure. What else do you need to govern a country?

Such are the leaders who are coming to the fore in an era in which the worst ideas of the past—protectionism, punitive taxation, isolationism, opposition to immigration, hostility to finance, hatred of Jews in both its anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist variants—are making a political comeback in ways that defy old ideological categories.

Indeed there are two concerns - 1) an incompetent political class and 2) the popular electorate's response to that incompetence. And this is a phenomenon across the OECD, not just an American circumstance.

Many are wanting to treat the second symptom without addressing the first. Doing so is merely a stop gap measure.

The real challenge is to significantly upgrade the moral standing and the operational competence of the political class. No easy matter.

Causes, outcomes and the unknowing of the relationships between the two

An example of the importance of knowing the causal link between what you are looking for (the cause) and the outcome you are seeking to achieve (longer life).

Korea thryoid cancer screening & overdiagnosis. More you look, more you find. No impact on mortality. #podc2015 pic.twitter.com/DeUKuTPFuU

— Gary Schwitzer (@garyschwitzer) September 2, 2015

A primer in left wing thought in contemporary America

I have for a good while been trying to sort out the classifications of left wing radical thought in the US, a task made more challenging given the proclivity towards schism and fine distinctions. Without being a political science major, it has always seemed to me that there was a lot of overlap between different philosophical groups and yet who also had quite different agendas. What I wanted to understand is how these groups or philosophies are related and why non-adherents kept referring to them all as Communists and Marxists.

The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that each school of philosophy tends to have only a narrow base of informed intellectuals capable of sustaining their core argument but a much larger constellation of intellectual hangers-on who deploy certain slogans and philosophical memes without any comprehension of their history, context, or evidentiary base. At a third remove there is an even larger crowd of the generally vocal community organizers, agitators if you will, who further muddy the waters by dipping into the grab-bag of ideas to use in a piecemeal appeal to authority without any grounding at all. Finally, there is a fourth circle of people, issue advocates, who quite innocently appeal to these ideas in their effort to drum up support for particular solutions to what are generally agreed to be real problems.

For example, while we can all agree that abject poverty is a problem that it is desirable to solve, there are multiple possible approaches to reducing poverty, including many approaches which are empirically based rather than philosophically based. Any approach that requires some redistribution of resources has a natural affiliation with critical race theory, social justice theory, liberation theology, etc. If I am a person who wants to reduce poverty simply by raising taxes on the wealthy and giving that money to the poor, it is perfectly natural to appeal to canned ideas within those philosophies to support the argument for redistribution without actually subscribing to the theories themselves. Historically, these individuals are often referred to as useful idiots by those of the hard left, or more kindly, as useful innocents by those of the philosophical right.

As best I can tell, the current pantheon of schools of left wing thought is a product of the Pre-World War II Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophy fused with post-War French post-modernists and married with John Rawls’ philosophy of Social Justice.

Here is what I have come up with as a working understanding. Caveat emptor - this is not my knowledge domain and this is constructed from the perspective of a curious outsider trying to come up with a ready reckoner.

All the main left factions of thought in the US are broadly descendants of the Frankfurt School of philosophy which relocated from Germany to Columbia University at the time of World War II. The Frankfurt School of philosophers were reform Marxists, wanting to fix the theoretical underpinnings of Marxism through amending errors and filling in gaps in Karl Marx’s works. The main philosophical platform of the Frankfurt School was Critical Theory, the idea that culture and society can be scientifically understood through history, sociology, economics, political science, psychology, geography, etc. and having been understood can then be scientifically refashioned to desired ends. Basically, they share the belief that there is a science of humanity and knowledge of that science allows you to reengineer humanity in the same way one might engineer a factory.

The philosophical offspring of the Frankfurt school are multitudinous and not wholly aligned with one another. Indeed, it is almost like there is philosophical demographic target marketing – something for everyone without consideration for logical coherence or evidentiary integrity between the schools of thought. I think this is in part why outsiders to this Gramscian world are puzzled and disinclined to pushback. They assume that there is logical coherence and evidentiary integrity and they are just not informed enough about the logic and/or are not privy to the supporting data. The reality is that there is little or no logical coherence and there is little supporting data for the central positions and much disaffirming data.

I found this passage by academic Marxist Stephen Eric Bronner in his book Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction to be illuminating.

The Frankfurt School first achieved popularity in the United States by appealing to what Martin Jay, its first historian, termed “the generation of 1968.” Well into the 1980s, critical theory was still considered eccentric in mainstream academic circles and somewhat exotic even among progressive intellectuals. With the collapse of the New Left, however, the Frankfurt School became institutionalized within the academy. Critical legal studies, critical race theory, critical gender studies began interrogating prevailing paradigms and assumptions. As subaltern groups emerged from the shadows of public life, however, the integrated assault upon an integrated system of domination began to erode. New emphasis was placed on contesting master narratives, the established canons of the Western tradition, and even popular culture entered the mix. The critical theory of society, its coherence, was becoming imperiled. Its transformative purpose was taking increasingly arbitrary forms.

New proposals have not been forthcoming for dealing with imperialist exploits, economic contradictions, the state mass media, and the character of resistance in modern society. The negation is casting a pall over critical theory. The intellectual heir of Hegel and Marx now lacks an understanding of power and, as a consequence, the ability to confront the imbalance of power.

The Frankfurt School begat Critical Theory. Critical Theory then begat:

Postmodernism
Critical Race Theory
Critical Legal Studies
Deconstructionism
Multiculturalism
Rawlsianism (Social Justice)
Liberation Theology
Feminist Sociology Theory
Post-structuralism
Post-colonial theory

It is certainly possible that some of the above, for example, Liberation Theology, may be direct descendants of Marxism rather than through the branch of Critical Theory. As an outsider, it is difficult to tell the direct lineage distinct from parallel lineages. Likewise, it is quite possible that the work of John Rawls is not really so much a descendant of Marxist philosophy as it is a parallel development of a philosophy which happens to have shared traits.

Leading lights in these movements include

Martin Heidegger
Jacques Derrida
Michel Foucault
Jean-Francois Lyotard
Richard Rorty
Jean Baudrillard
Fredric Jameson
John Rawls

Catch-phrases, tropes, techniques and concepts common within these philosophies include:

Hegemony
Identity Politics (Race, Class, Gender, Orientation, Religion, Regionalism, Ethnicism, etc.)
Diversity
Patriarchy
Oppression
Privilege
Trigger Warnings
Microaggressions
Structural Bias
Disparate Impact
Ethno-centrism
Intersectionality
Systematic Oppression
Poverty breeds crime
War on Women
War on Blacks
People of Color
Determinism of the institution of slavery
People are a product of their environment
No free will
People are a product of their society
All whites are racist and only whites can be racist

The list of such concepts and tropes is extensive and the above represents just a sampling.

The taint of these different schools of thought are deepest in Ethnic Studies and Gender studies programs with strong representations in Sociology, Psychology, Philosophy, and Anthropology departments. History and English departments also seem prone. Education programs in particular have been a very successful vector for conveying the general ideas of Critical Theory out into the general world via new teachers in K-12.

To people who subscribe to natural law, natural rights, individual agency, rule of law, consent of the governed, and other integral elements of the Age of Enlightenment, these various offspring of Marxism seem, in their essence, to be racist, despotic and coercive. And they are. Even more critically, the ideas and ideals of the Age of Enlightenment are broadly incompatible with the various aspects of Critical Theory.

Why has Critical Theory (and its progeny) continued for so long with so little logical consistency or evidentiary integrity? I suspect that because at their heart, most of these schools of thought have some element of truth to them. Is race simply a social construct as is argued? Of course not, there is a biological and empirical basis for differences between races and ethnicities. However, it is also very clear that how those differences are processed are very much influenced by assumptions and shared social beliefs. For virtually every one of these schools of Marxist thought, there is a hard claim and a weak claim. The hard claim (ex. race is only a social construct) is always wrong and yet the hard claim is what is most central to the school of thought. The weak claim (ex. there is a social element to the concept of race) is usually true but either immaterial or irrelevant.

What I have seen in numerous left wing philosophical arguments is a classic motte and bailey debating technique. They will advance the hard claim (race is a social construct), which is also the weakest to defend (the bailey). When debated on that claim they will first seek to shame the questioner, then obfuscate through arcane terminology, and then use ad hominem attacks. If all that fails, then they retreat back to the motte of their weak claim (“OK maybe it is not purely a social construct, but there is a social element to the concept of race.”) Once out of the debating arena, they then revert to their strong claim which remains as indefensible as before.

This left wing debating style presents a challenge for those on the center and right. For the pragmatist and someone of the right, the challenge is that you are essentially arguing with a religious belief based on faith. All the basic claims of the left have been disproved over the past century. But over that time frame, the liturgy and language of left religion has become increasingly arcane and complex. This is strictly a product of intellectual evolution. The clearer an argument, the easier it is to determine whether it has any useful truth. If there is no useful truth to the argument, then obfuscation and thin distinctions and refined definitions become the rhetorical defense mechanism. A person not sharing the religion of Marxist belief has to acquire an extraordinary dictionary of terms and definitions to engage in useful debate. In doing so, they have immediately conceded the high ground. You are arguing on the field they have constructed and therefore are always going to be disadvantaged.

I think the challenge to non-left wing dogmatists is to bring the debate back out into the parlance of the citizenry. Make it clear, specific and simple.

So your argument is that if we raise taxes on the rich and give the proceeds to the poor, we will eliminate poverty? How will that work? How soon will it work? What will happen after the poor have spent their proceeds? Has this been done successfully anywhere before? Why will it work this time? How will we know if it has worked? Etc.

The less you buy in to arcane concepts and language and the more you keep it clear, specific, and simple, the more obvious it becomes just how dreadfully bereft much of the history of left wing philosophy is of good outcomes for people.

Post facto criticisms

From Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn about the Enemy by John Keegan.

There is an argument at times made that Japan's entry into World War II was a consequence of US diplomatic and economic actions in the late 1930s. This is an argument made on the part of a segment of intelligentsia who have a visceral reaction against broad American success and accomplishments and who will always make absurd arguments to allay their own foolishness. Not infrequently there are nuggets of truth in their otherwise untruthful arguments. Just enough to lend credibility to an otherwise meritless argument. Other than misrepresentation, selective representation, the most common trick among this particular crowd is to omit context.

Yes, the US had an oil embargo on Imperial Japan in the late 1930s but this was tied to Japanese militarization and to imperial Japanese territorial conquests (and corresponding massacres).

Keegan is not addressing this particular argument but his discussion in chapter six, Midway: The Complete Intelligence Victory? provides some of the missing context to the argument about the weight of US responsibility for the course of Japan's actions. Japan was pursuing its own military interests without real engagement at either the economic or diplomatic levels. When this happens, what are the effective tools that can be wielded by a correspondent party, such as the US, other than the threat of military violence? It is nice to assume that everyone shares the same goals, objectives, assumptions, values, etc. But when it is obvious that those are not shared, what becomes the appropriate course of action?

Although the outcome of the FIrst World War made Japan a Pacific oceanic power, both its domestic and external affairs after 1919 and until the late thirties were concerned almost exclusively with China. For centuries, even millennia, China's cultural subordinate, Japan by the twentieth century had determined that its future lay in a reverse subordination, economic but also political and military, of China to its imperial needs. In 1915 Japan had issued a set of "twenty-one demands" which required China to concede rights and privileges to Japan, according it overlord status. The Chinese prevaricated and resisted, as far as they were able. In 1931 they were forced, however, to submit to effective Japanese annexation of Manchuria and then in 1937 to a full-scale Japanese invasion of the south. The nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek withdrew inland, first to the city of Nanking, then to Chungking. Its capacity to resist was hampered by the attacks of the Chinese Communist Party armies under Mao Tse-tung.

Japan's imperial policy was strengthened and furthered during the 1930s by the rise of an intense nationalist spirit within its military class, particularly in the army. The "Manchuria Incident" of 1931 was largely the work of nationalist officers, in the Manchuria garrison. The "China Incident," so-called by American observers, of 1937 in Shanghai was equally an outburst of ill-discipline by the Japanese occupying troops. By that date, however, the army led the government, which had escaped from the control of constitutional statesmen. By the outbreak of the Second World War, Japan, then in alliance with Germany and Italy, was a totalitarian state, committed to an imperialist programme of territorial expansion directed against China, with which it was in full-scale war, the Asian possessions of the European empires, principally Britain and the Netherlands, and the United States.

The war on the mainland of China consumed most of the strength of the Japanese army, which fielded twenty-five divisions. Militarily it was far superior to that of the Republic of China, which survived total defeat only by its ability to use space as a means of defence. The Japanese were not able to penetrate far beyond the coastal provinces, though as those contained China's larger cities and main rice-growing areas, they had little strategic reason for mounting deeper offensives.

The Japanese navy was scarcely involved in the China war, which had no marine dimensions. It was, nevertheless, much concerned with the strategic future since Japan's attack on China had provoked the wrath of the United States, manifested in a series of increasingly constrictive trade embargoes. Japan, like Britain, lacked the domestic resources necessary to support an imperial policy. Its home islands did not produce enough food to support its population, which relied heavily on imports of rice, while its industries and infrastructure required large imports of metal ores, scrap and oil. By 1941, after Japan's deployment of troops into French Indo-China, enforced on the defeated Vichy government, an initiative which directly threatened British Malaya, the American oil and metal embargoes were seriously hampering Japan's ability to sustain its manufacturing output. America's intention was to restrain Japan's military ambitions. The effect was to drive Japan towards aggressive war.

So Japan has a declared and escalating program of territorial conquest. Diplomacy is not working. Do economic embargoes such as oil and metal hurt or help the cause of peace? In effect, they brought the conflict to a head, first delaying, and then accelerating the race to war. The US government and diplomatic corps were in the position, much as we are today with ISIS, of damned if you do and damned if you don't.

As a civilized, conflict-avoiding society (Europe as well), you seek to exercise all the levers of diplomacy and economics to stem the course of an enemy who has a completely different set of precepts, goals and considerations. There is no good answer, just answers with greater or lesser degrees of probability of success and which in hindsight will be deemed as having been inadequate or inflammatory.

In her masterpiece, The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman says that

A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function?

Much as I admire Tuchman as a gifted author and historian, I think this strips the challenge of its complexity. She identifies four kinds of misgovernment (tyranny or oppression, excessive ambition, incompetence or decadence, and folly or perversity) and dedicates her book to the investigation of folly or perversity.

To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must have been perceived as counter-­productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight. This is important, because all policy is determined by the mores of its age. “Nothing is more unfair,” as an English historian has well said, “than to judge men of the past by the ideas of the present. Whatever may be said of morality, political wisdom is certainly ambulatory.” To avoid judging by present-­day values, we must take the opinion of the time and investigate only those episodes whose injury to self-­interest was recognized by contemporaries.

Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available. To remove the problem from personality, a third criterion must be that the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime.

I think it estimable for her to try and create rigor to her process but I am doubtful of its success.

To those arguing that the US exacerbated the circumstances leading to war, they could argue that 1) there were those at the time arguing that embargoes were counter-productive, 2) there were feasible alternatives (such as appeasement, "if we give them Manchuria, perhaps they will be satisfied and we will avoid a regional conflagration") and 3) the issue of an expansionist Japan extended beyond a single administration, the rise of Japan being an issue at least since their defeat of Russia in 1905.

There is a class of problems for which there are no clear directly causal solutions (I do X and Y is always the outcome). Instead, there are infinite recursive feedback loops, unknown goals and priorities, interpretations of fragmentary evidence, etc. The decision for action (or non-action) has to be taken but any decision is endlessly wrapped in caveats, asterisks, and unverifiable assumptions.

It is not that there is a definitive answer that can be known. All you can guaranty is whether there was a sufficiently robust, rigorous, open process of consideration of the courses of action.

"Any fool", as Churchill, the amateur brick-layer, once said of a critical comment about his crooked brick wall, "can see what is wrong, it takes a genius to see what is right."

When considering some pivotal decision which produced a result that was less than desirable, such as the avoidance of war through embargoes, perhaps the right approach is not to look for the mechanistic cause-and-effect steps between decision and outcome. Once the outcome is known, then the initiating decision can always be held accountable for producing less than desired outcomes.

The challenge is to maintain the frame of reference of chances and probabilities holding at the time before the outcome could be known. Under that regime, you have to ask what were the reasonable alternatives known and knowable at the time and what were the spreads of probability associated with each possible course of action.

This is emotionally less satisfactory because what it will often reveal is that at the time of the decision, there were several courses of reasonable action within some acceptable range of probability of success. Just because you chose course of action A over course of action B and A produced bad results, does not mean that the choice was either foolish or unwarranted.

Sometimes decisions are inherently difficult and all five reasonable courses of action might also all have an inescapably high probability of failure.

Accusations of microaggression and charges of privilege are simply social bullying to coercively exploit others

Microaggression and Moral Cultures by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning kicks it off. A sparkling new conceptual idea is kicked out into the petrie dish of the internet and suddenly lots of smart people are talking about it including, Where microaggressions really come from: A sociological account by Jonathan Haidt, How Grown-Ups Deal With 'Microaggressions' by Megan McArdle, The Rise of Victimhood Culture by Conor Friedersdorf.

Here is the Bradley/Campbell abstract.

Campus activists and others might refer to slights of one’s ethnicity or other cultural characteristics as “microaggressions,” and they might use various forums to publicize them. Here we examine this phenomenon by drawing from Donald Black’s theories of conflict and from cross-cultural studies of conflict and morality. We argue that this behavior resembles other conflict tactics in which the aggrieved actively seek the support of third parties as well as those that focus on oppression. We identify the social conditions associated with each feature, and we discuss how the rise of these conditions has led to large-scale moral change such as the emergence of a victimhood culture that is distinct from the honor cultures and dignity cultures of the past.

McArdle summarizes it a bit differently:

Western society, they argue, has shifted from an honor culture -- in which slights are taken very seriously, and avenged by the one slighted -- to a dignity culture, in which personal revenge is discouraged, and justice is outsourced to third parties, primarily the law. The law being a cumbersome beast, people in dignity cultures are encouraged to ignore slights, or negotiate them privately by talking with the offender, rather than seeking some more punitive sanction.

Microagressions mark a transition to a third sort of culture: a victim culture, in which people are once again encouraged to take notice of slights. This sounds a lot like honor culture, doesn't it? Yes, with two important differences. The first is that while victimhood is shameful in an honor culture -- and indeed, the purpose of taking vengeance is frequently to avoid this shame -- victim status is actively sought in the new culture, because victimhood is a prerequisite for getting redress. The second is that victim culture encourages people to seek help from third parties, either authorities or the public, rather than seeking satisfaction themselves.

Most people outside of the academy or fringe ideologies recognize that most of this is nonsense, a consequence of hothouse John Rawlsian abstractions of social justice that can only survive, and indeed does only survive, in the protected environs of academia but which occasionally slop over into the real world, gumming up honest efforts to improve lives.

I have little concern that we are transitioning to a victim culture. Yes it is being cultivated in academia (everybody's a winner, no one's a loser, everybody is equally remarkable, no one is responsible, everybody is a victim, etc.) That is very real and stretches down into K-12. I attended a graduation ceremony a couple of years ago from a small private college preparatory school in a big city. Extremely diverse student body in terms of race. Not so much in terms of class with everyone being at least middle and most being upper middle class.

Each member of the small graduating class, headed off to Yale and Stanford and elite engineering schools and the like, had to do a five minute speech. They had to follow a very generic template of welcome, acknowledgement, appreciation, and then story.

What was striking to me was that almost without exception, they all told stories casting themselves as a victim. All these privileged, healthy, smart young graduates. They all had a story of some grave tragedy overcome, health setback, loss, etc. Now, truly, there were one or two true tragedies in there. But by and large these were just the mundane bumps in the road and setbacks that everyone encounters but writ large into Greek tragedies. What delusional nonsense.

That was a searing experience: multiple lashings of delusional nonsense that went on and on. But I have seen this and heard others describe this from other schools as well. Apparently overcoming tragedy is the favored meme in university applications these days. When I questioned some juniors about this and argued that perhaps a more positive message might be better received, I was met with so many rolled eyes - how could I be so naive? Everyone knows universities want applicants who can show they have overcome.

So yes, there is likely a real issue out there that is centered on victimhood and I think is being cultivated and transmitted via the education system. That said, reality intrudes at some point and pretty soon people make the transition into the real world of real work and most of those soft notions of social justice and perpetual victimhood gets knocked away.

But what I find interesting is that all the above very intelligent authors are grasping the shiny idea of cultural evolution without ever discussing what I think is really going on.

Competitive victimhood is being evinced because it is what is, temporarily, being rewarded. In addition, it is a very cheap and easy rhetorical tool for getting what you want. All these discussions/accusations of microaggressions, privilege, etc. are simply bully tools and should be confronted as such because they otherwise undermine the social fabric.

Each claim of microaggression or accusation of privilege is no less than an asserted claim that you should shut up and give me what I want, be it agreement, respect, acknowledgement, admission, time, resources, etc.. It is coercive and extractive which is what makes it so destructive and undermining of social progress to date.

Social cohesion, mutual regard, assistance and productivity all depend on some degree of cooperation, trust and shared worldviews. Deploying the microaggression or privilege cudgels are the very opposite of cooperation, trust and shared worldviews. Indeed, they are a claim that you owe me something for no other reason than because I am different from you and I can make up a better story of victimhood than you can.

Anyone who is strong, productive, tolerant, and self-respecting will lose this battle because they have accepted the bully's premises even if they have no merit. As long as these claims of microaggression, victimhood and privilege are in the social circle, it will encourage the disengagement of the strong, tolerant and productive because no one wants to be exposed to disrespectful and perpetual blackmail.

Yes, a culture of victimhood is mentally risky and is subversive of societal (and individual) well-being and yes there are some small sectors where it is tolerated and encouraged. But let's not get side-tracked and confused. It is simply bullying and blackmailing on a contemporary form, seeking to exploit others for their own benefit. The sooner it is shamed out of existence, the better.

Shocking and shameful

From U.S. Drops Charges That Professor Shared Technology With China by Matt Apuzzo.

WASHINGTON — When the Justice Department arrested the chairman of Temple University’s physics department this spring and accused him of sharing sensitive American-made technology with China, prosecutors had what seemed like a damning piece of evidence: schematics of sophisticated laboratory equipment sent by the professor, Xi Xiaoxing, to scientists in China.

The schematics, prosecutors said, revealed the design of a device known as a pocket heater. The equipment is used in superconductor research, and Dr. Xi had signed an agreement promising to keep its design a secret.

But months later, long after federal agents had led Dr. Xi away in handcuffs, independent experts discovered something wrong with the evidence at the heart of the Justice Department’s case: The blueprints were not for a pocket heater.

Faced with sworn statements from leading scientists, including an inventor of the pocket heater, the Justice Department on Friday afternoon dropped all charges against Dr. Xi, an American citizen.

Yes there is a real threat out there:

The United States faces an onslaught from outside hackers and inside employees trying to steal government and corporate secrets. President Obama’s strategy to combat it involves aggressive espionage investigations and prosecutions, as well as increased cyberdefenses.

But in what material way is this different from racial profiling?

But Dr. Xi’s case, coming on the heels of a similar case that was dismissed a few months ago in Ohio, raises questions about whether the Justice Department, in its rush to find Chinese spies, is ensnaring innocent American citizens of Chinese ancestry

And despite the fact that the government was wrong in its accusations and wrong because it had behaved foolishly and badly, there is little prospect that there will be any accountability.

A spokeswoman for Zane D. Memeger, the United States attorney in Philadelphia who brought the charges, did not elaborate on the decision to drop the case. In court documents, the Justice Department said that “additional information came to the attention of the government.”

Additional information like actually relevant facts above and beyond the fact that an American of Chinese ancestry had routinely shared public information with scientists in China.

Not only is this entirely repulsive behavior of the government but it calls into question the moral authority to bring other important prosecutions. How can you, with moral authority, bring a prosecution against individuals and companies that might be discriminating against people because of their race when that is what you as the government are already doing as well. Such fact-based cases should be brought, but it weakens the moral authority of the government when it opens itself to similar accusations. I view this as criminal because I don't think we ever acknowledge the degree to which our huge and complex society depends on first order trust; trust of one another and trust of our critical institutions including government.

The Force is speaking through you

From Why a Woman Can't Be More Like a Man by Megan McArdle. I enjoy McArdle's research and insights and she has among the better commenters out there. Usually, not always, on topic and many of them making worthwhile conversational contributions whether in terms of wit or knowledge.

The above column deals with emerging evidence regarding the innate differences between men and women. It includes this always critical caveat that is too often missing from other pundits.

Even if group averages are different, you can't infer anything about individual ability by looking at their group memberships.

Regardless of her column, I enjoyed this exchange in the comments.

walruss10 • 2 days ago
You know, this is what really concerns me about hyper-politically correct culture. It's opposed to knowledge.

Feynman once gave a lecture in which he talked about the continual use of the incorrect number to represent an electrical charge in various physics experiments. Experimenters would re-test if their readings didn't come out close to that number, but would not re-test if they did. As a result, they ended up using a number that was too small for years.

Now imagine that this error is politicized. It's not just that being wrong will mean you're contradicting established scientific cannon. Being wrong will mean you're being deeply offensive towards someone. How long would it take to discover our error?

Jay walruss10 • 2 days ago
I think it was the weight of an election.

It took years to converge to the true value.

...Max... Jay • 2 days ago
the weight of an election

Do not fix this typo because it transcends the Freud!

Texan99 ...Max... • 2 days ago
Oh, man, I gave him credit for meaning the joke, which was a good one.

Jay ...Max... • 2 days ago
Hah. Fine.

You have no idea how much it hurts me to leave a spelling error though. ;)

...Max... Jay • 2 days ago
Do not think of it as a spelling error because it isn't. The Force is speaking through you.

No Birkenhead drill here. Men first.

I noticed these UN numbers on the refugees in Europe the other day and concluded that while there is definitely going to be a real refugee component to the hundreds of thousands descending on Europe, and despite how the press is so far presenting the invasion, this is actually primarily a mass migration for economic opportunity. Doesn't make any of the individual tragedies less real, but this recognition should change the range of policies which ought to be considered in dealing with the numbers.

But mine was a pedestrian line of thought. It takes David Burge to set up the civilizational contrast.

Titanic survival rates: women 75%, children 50%, adult men 19% http://t.co/mPR4CSE0vo https://t.co/ebc5mMuiBZ

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 11, 2015

According to the UN, 72% of those fleeing to Europe in this crisis are men, only 13% women and 15% children. http://t.co/1QHjPHryXQ

— Peggy Noonan (@Peggynoonannyc) September 11, 2015

No Birkenhead drill here. Each man look to his own interests first and the devil take the weak and dependent.