Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it

The continued rantings and screechings of the authoritarian few (ideological offspring of the Frankfurt School as they are and which have so infected our academies) have drawn a lot of attention in the past week, first at Yale and then the University of Missouri. These sorry totalitarians trying to inflict their bigotry on everyone else while suppressing freedom of speech is a repulsive spectacle. It brings to mind the speech I have posted of earlier by Judge Learned Hand which I repost here. His warning is prescient of "a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few" a la those Gramscian protesters who wish to subject everyone to their emotional will. I think Hand has the right antidote, for everyone to live out their rights and understandings of freedom. His second stanza is wonderful.

We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion.
Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land. What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice? We sought liberty - freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves. This then we sought; this we now believe that we are by way of winning. What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few - as we have learned to our sorrow.

What then is the spirit of liberty?
I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten - that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side-by-side with the greatest. And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be - nay, which never will be except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it - yet in the spirit of America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America so prosperous, and safe, and contented, we shall have failed to grasp its meaning, and shall have been truant to its promise, except as we strive to make it a signal, a beacon, a standard to which the best hopes of mankind will ever turn; In confidence that you share that belief, I now ask you to raise your hand and repeat with me this pledge:

I pledge allegiance to the flag and to the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands--One nation, Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

You have to get the diagnosis right to get to a good remedy

An interesting example of talking at cross-purposes as well as of epistemic closure.

Ben Casselman is a reporter at the Fivethirtyeight site which is dedicated to bringing empirical evidence and quantitative analysis to discussions. Casselman seems an OK reporter from my reading experience but representative of the media in that he is carries certain assumptions that might not be widespread outside media/academia and subscribers to the various postmodernist, critical race theory, critical theory, third wave feminist, post-colonial theory ideologues. I don't think he likely subscribes to many of the extreme positions of these ideologies but has likely unquestioningly absorbed some of their assumptions and precepts.

He gets called out and tangled up in a somewhat innocuous article, Mizzou’s Racial Gap Is Typical On College Campuses by Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Ben Casselman. Their opening paragraph:

Thousands of college students across the country on Thursday joined protests demanding that their schools do more to address racism and discrimination on campus. Students at many campuses are calling for an increase in the diversity of faculty and more resources to help minority students succeed. The data suggests that they have a point: Colleges across the country are far less diverse than the communities they serve.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Ben Casselman support their conclusion with a useful visualization of their data analysis.

The argument here is that minority students claim they are underrepresented and that they are correct that they are underrepresented. There is an implied corollary; that underrepresentation creates some measurable problem for the minority students. There is the further argument, that the underrepresentation must be the result of either conscious or systemic discrimination.

In the comments, commenters are pointing out several flaws in the article and the accompanying analysis. The general commenter perspective seems to be that by analytically attesting to the accuracy of underrepresentation, Casselman is also endorsing the wider student argument, i.e. that underrepresentation is both a problem in itself and that it is the consequence of racial discrimination.

I don't think that is a correct reading of Casselman's argument but it is easy to see how he was not sufficiently clear about divorcing the factual issue of underrepresentation from the broader argument being made by the protesting students.

But Casselman does open himself to more substantive criticism by his flawed analytical methodology which breaks several standard scientific method protocols. The main areas of weakness are data manipulation, failure to define relevant populations, failure to compare like-to-like, and ignoring contextual conditions that invalidate his argument.

We looked at 2013 data from the U.S. Department of Education for four-year universities with heavy research activity, a proxy for the selective schools that are Mizzou’s peers. We excluded historically black universities and colleges (HBCUs), which have much higher black enrollment and skew the overall figures.

This is substantially an issue of framing and Casselman's chosen framing is representative of general biases in the media.

This paragraph contains the first big flaw. In fact, two flaws. The first is the restriction of the data set to selective four-year universities with heavy research activity. The problem isn't the restriction per se, but the restriction without justification. Why are you looking just at these type of universities which are a small portion of all colleges and universities and by definition are distinctive in nature and therefore likely unrepresentative. You can make an argument, but it has to be made explicitly, not left to the imagination of the reader.

The second major flaw is that "We excluded historically black universities and colleges." To see why this is an issue consider a hypothetical. Assume African-Americans attend university at the same rate as everyone else, that they perform equally well, and that there is no discrimination. Also grant that there are historically black universities and colleges which attract some portion of the African-American student population. By logic and mathematics, all other non-historically black universities and colleges will have an underrepresentation of African-American students to the same degree that African American students choose to attend historically black universities and colleges. If 13% of African-American students choose to attend historically black universities and colleges, then all other universities will have a 13% underrepresentation of African Americans. Not because of any action on the part of the universities but because of choices made by African American students.

Casselman, by excluding historically black universities and colleges, has instantly begun validating the protester's argument that there is underrepresentation but without acknowledging that some portion of that underrepresentation is due to the choices of the students and has nothing to do with discrimination. For a rational empiricist and anyone more right of center, this makes Casselman look like he is sympathetic with the student's unsupported argument. It is unacknowledged biases of this sort, I think, which generates the overwhelming public perception that the media is overwhelmingly biased and cannot be trusted.

There are further issues in the framing. Casselman not only focuses exclusively on selective four-year universities with heavy research activity, but he fails to provide the overall picture. African Americans are about 13% of the population. According to the government, 15% of college students are African American. So they are not, in fact, underrepresented overall, but only in some sectors of the higher education establishment. With this context, the picture becomes quite a bit murkier.

It becomes murkier still when we turn to the final major analytical flaw in Casselman's analysis and that is comparing apples and oranges.

What are the two base requirements of attending a competitive college? 1) You have graduated from high-school and 2) You are within a couple standard deviations of the mean IQ/SAT/ACT for that particular institution.

In a multicultural society, different groups value different goals and behaviors differently, including the valuation of education attainment. To the extent that culture correlates with ethnicity (not always though), you would then expect there to be a variation among ethnic groups in college matriculation and graduation. There is an eleven percentage point gap in the high school graduation rates between African Americans and the national average.

It is not quite as simple as that, but for simplicity's sake, let's make the leap that a 11% deficit in graduation rates corresponds to a 11% reduction in college attendance. So now we have two sources of underrepresentation having nothing to do with university actions - 13% owing to the number of African American students who choose to attend historically black universities and colleges and 11% owing to lower high school graduation rates.

The next issue not addressed by Casselman in getting to a point of comparing like-to-like is that there is the very material variation in SAT scores between ethnic groups in the US. Not so much an issue at the overall average, but given the gaussian distribution of scores, the mean differences have an exponential impact at the most competitive universities where most the students are in the far right tail of the distribution where the differences in group means are most consequential.

When you take into account the reduced number of candidates students because of differences in mean SAT scores, AND the differences owing to student choices regarding attending historically black universities and colleges, AND the differences arising from lower high school graduation rates, I suspect that the putative racial gap disappears substantially or completely. Indeed, with residual affirmative action programs still in place, it is not improbable that African American students are overrepresented in selective four-year universities with heavy research activity.

One final complicating contextual piece of information which Casselman omits but which is relevant to the larger protester argument. Particularly among the most competitive universities, 25-40% of African American students enrolled are actually either African or are first generation. So the issue does not appear to be racial discrimination per se on the part of universities but rather to do with cultural orientation, behaviors and demonstrated abilities.

Casselman ends up writing an article that purports to support at least one leg of the student argument, that African Americans are underrepresented in competitive universities. He (and the students) are correct that they are underrepresented in terms of the general population. He gets into two different pots of trouble. One pot is that he fails to make clear that his attempt at validation of a single fact in the students' argument does not reflect an endorsement of the entirety of their argument, particularly the accusation that the underrepresentation is a product of racism on the part of the universities.

The second pot of trouble is that his purported validation of the the fact of underrepresentation is too glib and subject to rigorous fact checking. He omits important data (HBCUs). He fails to define the comparison pools (comparing underrepresentation against the general population instead of the relevant population which are high school graduates who are college ready at a certain achievement level (Ex. SAT scores)), and finally, he ignores counter evidence such as the success of foreign born black students in the most competitive US universities.

The reason that this failure on the part of Casselman is important is two-fold. One is that such failures of analysis fuel the general perception that mainstream media is not to be trusted to convey facts and that the media is left-biased.

The second reason for the importance of this failure is that it supports continued misdiagnosis of the problem. As long as we simply accept the argument that all the problems must be due to administrative action or inaction on the part of universities, and more particularly as long as we accept that such universities are racist, then we fail to tackle the real issues. As long as we support HBCUs, then there will always be an underrepresentation of African American students in universities. That is simply a trade-off choice that is unpleasant but has to be made. More substantively, if the underrepresentation is substantially due to low graduation rates and poor academic achievement, then no action at the university level is going to likely make a material beneficial difference. To solve the problem, you have to diagnose it correctly. By failing to do so, and by appearing to support a misdiagnosis, Casselman, and journalists of his ilk, fail their readers and the citizens of the nation.

If someone says something unkind, report it to the police - Pravda edition

This thuggish suppression of diversity of opinion and free speech is getting out of hand. Two samples that should be dismissed as unrepresentative except that you wouldn't have thought either was possible in America in the first place.

The Climate Change Inquisition Begins by Robert Tracinski.

New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, has started an investigation of Exxon Mobil “to determine whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how such risks might hurt the oil business.” According to The New York Times, its sources “said the inquiry would include a period of at least a decade during which Exxon Mobil funded outside groups that sought to undermine climate science.” See what they did there? To have a different view of climate science is to “undermine” it because there is no scientific study of the climate except that which they agree with.

We should start with the observation that Exxon could not possibly have “lied” about climate change, even if it intended to, because first there would have to be a proven truth on the subject. If the company later contradicted warnings about global warming issued by scientists it funded in the 1980s, that would be justified by the fact that those warnings were almost certainly wrong. The arguments for global warming have been undercut — not by anything Exxon did — but by what the earth didn’t do. It didn’t keep warming, with global temperatures leveling off for the past 15 to 20 years. Global temperatures are now trending at or below the lowest, least dire predictions of warming.

But this isn’t really about the science, is it? To make it clear that this is entirely a political witch hunt, the Times explains that “the company published extensive research over decades that largely lined up with mainstream climatology. Thus, any potential fraud prosecution might depend on exactly how big a role company executives can be shown to have played in directing campaigns of climate denial, usually by libertarian-leaning political groups.”

A Bloomberg analysis describes the “weird theory” needed to transform this into a case of securities fraud but gets down to the nub of why Schneiderman is pursuing that theory: to evade the First Amendment. “[S]ecurities fraud is perhaps the least protected speech of all. Securities law fits notoriously uncomfortably with the First Amendment; the Securities and Exchange Commission forbids even truthful speech by companies in many situations.”

So there you go. This is about suppressing political speech by using the threat of government prosecution to intimidate corporations into withdrawing funding from pro-free-market advocates.

Despicable, un-American, and totalitarian. Run them out of town on rails.

But Schneiderman is just a man of his authoritarian times.

In Missouri you have this alarming example of Leviathan trying to police its unruly individual citizens from thinking for themselves. From Missouri U. Police: Call us about ‘harmful’ or ‘hurtful speech’. You can't get much more Maoist than that it would seem. How could a sentient adult even begin to think that this was appropriate?

From the memo sent by the Missouri University Police:

From: MU POLICE
Date: November 10, 2015 at 9:52:16 AM CST
To: MU POLICE
Subject: Reporting Hateful and/or Hurtful Speech

To continue to ensure that the University of Missouri campus remains safe, the MU Police Department (MUPD) is asking individuals who witness incidents of hateful and/or hurtful speech or actions to:

* Call the police immediately at 573-882-7201. (If you are in an emergency situation, dial 911.)

* Give the communications operator a summary of the incident, including location.

* Provide a detailed description of the individual(s) involved.

* Provide a license plate and vehicle descriptions (if appropriate).

* If possible and if it can be done safely, take a photo of the individual(s) with your cell phone.

For those of us who grew up in Europe at the time of the Soviet Union, this is familiar stuff. But this is America and memos like this would seem to be more appropriate to an Onion satire than a real-life police agency.

Absurd. Hopefully the wake-up calls from the Yale (and Columbia, and Duke, and UVA, and UCLA, etc.) incidents will be heard this time and the responsible stakeholders will act to reign in this nonsense and inject some sanity and maturity back into higher education.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk. - What?

I have heard this quotation a number of times over the years and taken it at face value but with a nagging question in my mind about the context. The quote is from Henry David Thoreau,

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

Yes, I get that a trout in your milk is strong evidence of something, but what? What were the circumstances that actually made this make sense?

The observation was written in 1849 at the time of a dairyman's strike. Apparently there was a rumor making the rounds that the dairymen were diluting their milk with water. Hence, the trout in the milk as compelling evidence in support of a rumor. Now that makes sense to me.

Solving life's little cultural questions, one at a time.

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence

Growing up and in college, I never really took to T.S. Eliot. I knew his story, I was assigned and read some of his poems in classes, but he and his poems never clicked.

But since sometime in my forties, I find myself enjoying his work in a way that I never did. First Four Quartets, then parts of Waste Land, then other pieces. What is this cycle of acculturalization? Better vocabulary, more life experiences, simple aging? I do not know. I'm just along for the ride. But it is humbling. What I once firmly viewed as not much more than blather now reveals itself as having depths I did not appreciate. It is a suitable caution against harsh and inflexible judgments.

I came across Choruses from The Rock which I think is collected in its entirety in his The Collected Poems by T.S. Eliot. So many wonderful lines. Similar to Hamlet in that respect. The strength is perhaps more in the nuggets than in the whole piece. Here are the opening verses.

Choruses from The Rock.
by T.S. Eliot

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

The lot of man is ceaseless labor,
Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,
Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant.
I have trodden the winepress alone, and I know
That it is hard to be really useful, resigning
The things that men count for happiness, seeking
The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting
With equal face those that bring ignominy,
The applause of all or the love of none.
All men are ready to invest their money
But most expect dividends.
I say to you: Make perfect your will.
I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.

The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change,
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
Forgetful, you neglect your shrines and churches;
The men you are in these times deride
What has been done of good, you find explanations
To satisfy the rational and enlightened mind.
Second, you neglect and belittle the desert.
The desert is not remote in southern tropics
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother.
The good man is the builder, if he build what is good.
I will show you the things that are not being done,
And some of the things that were long ago done,
That you may take heart, Make perfect your will.
Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen.

In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks
There are hands and machines
And clay for new brick
And lime for new mortar
Where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone
Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers
Where the word is unspoken
We will build with new speech
There is work together
A Church for all
And a job for each
Every man to his work.

What life have you, if you have not life together?
There is not life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of GOD.
Even the anchorite who meditates alone,
For whom the days and nights repeat the praise of GOD,
Prays for the Church, the Body of Christ incarnate.
And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor
Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance,
But all dash to and fro in motor cars,
Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.
Nor does the family even move about together,
But every son would have his motor cycle,
And daughters ride away on casual pillions.

Much to cast down, much to build, much to restore;
Let the work not delay, time and the arm not waste;
Let the clay be dug from the pit, let the saw cut the stone,
Let the fire not be quenched in the forge.

The Word of the LORD came unto me, saying:
O miserable cities of designing men,
O wretched generation of enlightened men,
Betrayed in the mazes of your ingenuities,
Sold by the proceeds of your proper inventions:
I have given you hands which you turn from worship,
I have given you speech, for endless palaver,
I have given you my Law, and you set up commissions,
I have given you lips, to express friendly sentiments,
I have given you hearts, for reciprocal distrust.
I have given you the power of choice, and you only alternate
Between futile speculation and unconsidered action.
Many are engaged in writing books and printing them,
Many desire to see their names in print,
Many read nothing but the race reports.
Much is your reading, but not the Word of GOD,
Much is your building, but not the House of GOD,
Will you build me a house of plaster, with corrugated roofing,
To be filled with a litter of Sunday newspapers?

And the wind shall say: “Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.”

When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city ?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
What will you answer? “We all dwell together
To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?

Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.

Then it seemed as if men must proceed from light to light, in the light of
the Word,
Through the Passion and Sacrifice saved in spite of their negative being;
Bestial as always before, carnal, self seeking as always before, selfish and
purblind as ever before,
Yet always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming their march on
the way that was lit by the light;
Often halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet following no other
way.

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened
before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has
never happened before
That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,
And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.
The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do
But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards
In an age which advances progressively backwards?

There came one who spoke of the shame of Jerusalem
And the holy places defiled;
Peter the Hermit, scourging with words.
And among his hearers were a few good men,
Many who were evil,
And most who were neither,
Like all men in all places.

In spite of all the dishonour,
the broken standards, the broken lives,
The broken faith in one place or another,
There was something left that was more than the tales
Of old men on winter evenings.

Our age is an age of moderate virtue
And moderate vice

The soul of Man must quicken to creation.

Out of the meaningless practical shapes of all that is living or
lifeless
Joined with the artist’s eye, new life, new form, new colour.
Out of the sea of sound the life of music,
Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal
imprecisions,
Approximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken the
place of thoughts and feelings,
There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.

LORD, shall we not bring these gifts to Your service?
Shall we not bring to Your service all our powers
For life, for dignity, grace and order,
And intellectual pleasures of the senses?
The LORD who created must wish us to create
And employ our creation again in His service
Which is already His service in creating.
For Man is joined in spirit and body,
And therefore must serve as spirit and body.
Visible and invisible, two wolds meet in Man;
Visible and invisible must meet in His Temple;
You must not deny the body.
Now you shall see the Temple completed:
After much striving, after many obstacles;
The work of creation is never without travail;
The formed stone, the visible crucifix,
The dressed altar, the lifting light,

Light
Light
The visible reminder of Invisible Light.

Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

O Light Invisible, we praise Thee!
Too bright for mortal vision.

O Greater Light, we praise Thee for the less;
The eastern light our spires touch at morning,
The light that slants upon our western doors at evening,
The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight,
Moon light and star light, owl and moth light,
Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade.
O Light Invisible, we worship Thee!

We thank Thee for the light that we have kindled,
The light of altar and of sanctuary;
Small lights of those who meditate at midnight
And lights directed through the coloured panes of windows
And light reflected from the polished stone,
The gilded carven wood, the coloured fresco.
Our gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward
And see the light that fractures through unquiet water.
We see the light but see not whence it comes.
O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!

In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain.
We are children quickly tired: children who are up in the night and fall asleep as the rocket is fired; and the day is long for work or play.
We tire of distraction or concentration, we sleep and are glad to sleep,
Controlled by the rhythm of blood and the day and the night and the seasons.
And we must extinguish the candle, put out the light and relight it;
Forever must quench, forever relight the flame.
Therefore we thank Thee for our little light, that is dappled with shadow.
We thank Thee who hast moved us to building, to finding, to forming at the ends of our fingers and beams of our eyes.
And when we have built an altar to the Invisible Light, we may set thereon the little lights for which our bodily vision is made.
And we thank Thee that darkness reminds us of light.
O Light Invisible, we give Thee thanks for Thy great glory!

Religion and morality are indispensable supports of prosperity

George Washington's Farewell Address of 1796 is an often overlooked document that warrants occassional revisiting.

One passage in particular seems pertinent, emphasis added:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Retail religion gets a bad name through bad actors and through noxious obsessions. But there is a beauty and grace in religion seen in individuals and, at moments, in all institutionalized religion, moments where humility and awe open our eyes to aspects beyond ourselves.

But the bad actors have tainted the pool and it is indisputable that there is a rise in secularism around the world, particularly in Europe. But with that rise it is also notable that there is a corresponding decline in both family and fertility. This is usually ascribed to straightforward economic conditions. The wealthier people become, the more confident they are in their own power and independence. Greater income means there is a higher comparative cost to the strictures of any constraining religion - why go to church when you can be watching a show on your wide screen TV in your entertainment room? With wealth, the cost of children, both in terms of money outflows and in terms of foregone (self-serving) opportunities, increases. Why put up with another person in your orbit, why commit to caring for them through thick and thin, when that constrains your own activities?

I subscribe to the economic explanation. But I am not sure it is the whole explanation. I have no opposition to people's declared atheism or agnosticism. We all travel our own paths of discovery. But the irrelevance of religion to an increasing percentage of the population does seem to have a causally deleterious effect on the overall health of culture. The decline in conscious pursuit of morality is one long term issue. The more immediate impact arises from the decline in fertility. It is almost as if, without religion, people as a cultural community have nothing further to live for. The fertility rate plummets, their numbers decline from one generation to the next, and soon they disappear from history's stage.

Dramatic outcomes occur when multiple events coincide in a perfect storm

An apocalyptic article, The Alarming Signposts that this Could Be a Crazy Year by Jonathan Rose.

Rose starts out.

I was fifteen, it was 1968, and seeking refuge from adolescence and the turmoil of the times, I often curled up with science fiction. When your world spins apart, you can find some respite in alternate worlds. And so I did – until one story wrenched me back to the chaotic present.

It was “The Year of the Jackpot,” in which Robert A. Heinlein stunningly foresaw it all.

The story had been published in 1952, but it conjured up the annus mirabilis/horribilis that I could see flashing before me every day: nudity in public, nudity in the churches, transvestites, draft-dodgers, cigar-smoking feminists, bishops promoting sex education, ludicrous lawsuits, a “startling rise in dissident evangelical cults,” and the Alabama state legislature proposing to abolish physics (not the teaching of physics, no, they wanted to repeal the laws of nuclear physics). Heinlein even predicted that weird antiwar protesters would be arrested in Chicago and disrupt their subsequent trial. In the story, a bespectacled statistician (they always wear glasses) discovers that all varieties of human behavior move in waves, and now (as he plots on graphs) all the waves are cresting at once. “It's as clear as a bank statement,” he warns. “This year the human race is letting down its hair, flipping its lip with a finger, and saying, 'Wubba, wubba, wubba."'

The first thing that caught my attention was a personal discrepancy. On the one hand I am pretty confident that I have not read this story by Heinlein. On the other hand, the synopsis, "all varieties of human behavior move in waves, and now (as he plots on graphs) all the waves are cresting at once", sounds so familiar. Have I actually read this story and just don't recall it? Alternatively, have I read a similar story with the same statistical premise by someone else? I don't know and won't know until I put my hands on a copy of this and see if reading it refreshes my memory. It is a puzzling position, though, to have two such contradictory impressions at the same time.

Rose then goes on into apocalyptic mode:

For historians, prediction is a mug’s game, but I’ve studied the graphs (metaphorically) and I can’t help but think that the waves are about to peak once again. The Chinese economy is slowing and will probably drag the rest of the world into a slump – and as a distraction, China just might project her naval forces into the western Pacific. Vladimir Putin has already pounced on the Ukraine and Syria, and may push his luck in the Baltics or the Arctic. The European Union, swamped with Greek debt and refugees, could go the way of the League of Nations and the Holy Roman Empire (both of which seemed like good ideas at the time). The centrist political consensus that united European elites is already giving way to radical populism on the left and right. Just when you think Middle East turmoil couldn’t get worse, the entire region could descend into an Islamic civil war. We may face another financial meltdown, having never really recovered from the last one, and this time outraged voters would probably (1) make another round of bailouts politically impossible and (2) demand blood. It’s entirely possible that, a year from now, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders could face off in a presidential election. Even if neither of them wins their party’s nomination, they could transform American politics – just as Eugene McCarthy did. This scenario assumes and hopes that we will see nothing like the assassinations of 1968, though Twitter now buzzes with threats against Trump. But if yet another black suspect is killed by a white police officer, there could be urban rioting on a scale that we last witnessed almost 50 years ago.

Certainly anything is possible but I wouldn't put this series of impressionistic interpretations into the category of rigorous forecasting.

But it does, for whatever reason, crystalize the oddity of contextual determinism and individual determinism.

There are many trends which are clearly fundamental; they are underlying forces which might be hard to predict in detail but which are in many ways ineluctable. Bill Gates, for example rode a technology wave that carried along many people. Some argue that he was simply in the right place at the right time. He went to a high school with an early computer lab where he put in long hours of code writing and experimentation that put him in a good position to exploit the opportunities that the technology wave and Moore's Law were about to make available. The argument goes that if it weren't Gates, it would have been someone else. He was just lucky. This is the spin that Gladwell puts on it in one of his books. This is contextual determinism. its not the person, its the circumstance.

On the other hand you have the individual determinists. Their reading of the story is that yes, there was a wave growing, but that there was nothing that was predetermined. Gates spent the thousands of hours immersed in the emerging but not yet comprehended technology wave and he took bold gambles against the advice of everyone else. He achieved the outcomes he did through his own unique efforts and not through luck alone.

Our desire for contrasting, binary explanations probably blinds us to the reality. It is not either/or, it is if/then. Yes there are fundamental trends with contextual determinism and path dependency. But there is also decision-making and choice. Perhaps Gates might not have been a technology billionaire had he listened to others and not dropped out of Harvard to pursue his vision. But almost certainly he would have been successful in some other field of endeavor, just not to the same degree.

Yes, there is a degree of luck but, as Pasteur says, "fortune favors the prepared mind." Which gets to Rose's final paragraph.

If you ask whether the Bastille was stormed because bread prices were skyrocketing, or because Louis XVI was inept, or because his tax system was hopelessly corrupt and his government couldn’t pay its bills, or because the armed forces had been humiliated in military adventures, or because the Enlightenment had undermined faith in the established order, or because the lower classes wanted an end to feudalism, or because the middle classes wanted power, most historians would answer: “Sure.” Revolutions never have single causes; they take off only when multiple dysfunctions coincide in a perfect political storm.

Versailles Treaty not as harsh as the terms for the end of WWII

From 10 big myths about World War One debunked by Dan Snow. His ten myths are:

1. It was the bloodiest war in history to that point
2. Most soldiers died
3. Men lived in the trenches for years on end
4. The upper class got off lightly
5. 'Lions led by donkeys'
6. Gallipoli was fought by Australians and New Zealanders
7. Tactics on the Western Front remained unchanged despite repeated failure
8. No-one won
9. The Treaty of Versailles was extremely harsh
10. Everyone hated it

I have read up on most of these and his brief synopses match what I have read.

I still occasionally come across the argument that the upper class got off lightly. It is a logically appealing argument to the Frankfurt School adherents who see everything through the lens of class, but the numbers belie the belief.

Although the great majority of casualties in WW1 were from the working class, the social and political elite were hit disproportionately hard by WW1. Their sons provided the junior officers whose job it was to lead the way over the top and expose themselves to the greatest danger as an example to their men.

Some 12% of the British army's ordinary soldiers were killed during the war, compared with 17% of its officers. Eton alone lost more than 1,000 former pupils - 20% of those who served. UK wartime Prime Minister Herbert Asquith lost a son, while future Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law lost two. Anthony Eden lost two brothers, another brother of his was terribly wounded, and an uncle was captured.

Why is the war seen as so uniquely destructive? Likely in small part because it was so uniquely destructive to the class who usually write the histories.

I have heard the argument that the Versailles treaty was not as harsh as it has been made out to be but I have retained some skepticism of that claim. Snow provides additional context that bolsters the argument.

The Treaty of Versailles confiscated 10% of Germany's territory but left it the largest, richest nation in central Europe.

It was largely unoccupied and financial reparations were linked to its ability to pay, which mostly went unenforced anyway.

The treaty was notably less harsh than treaties that ended the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War and World War Two. The German victors in the former annexed large chunks of two rich French provinces, part of France for between 200 and 300 years, and home to most of French iron ore production, as well as presenting France with a massive bill for immediate payment.

After WW2 Germany was occupied, split up, its factory machinery smashed or stolen and millions of prisoners forced to stay with their captors and work as slave labourers. Germany lost all the territory it had gained after WW1 and another giant slice on top of that.

Versailles was not harsh but was portrayed as such by Hitler, who sought to create a tidal wave of anti-Versailles sentiment on which he could then ride into power.

His is an interesting observation that underpins the importance of perspective. I have accepted that Versailles was harsh (though perhaps not quite as harsh as made out to be). However this is an instance of not making all the necessary comparisons. I compared Versailles to other treaties in the past. Snow compares it to the end of WWII. When you do that, the terms of Versailles do not look nearly as harsh as we usually think of them. I find it an interesting wake up call to think of the terms of WWII as being more harsh than the terms of the Versailles treaty. That does not quite seem right to me, but there is an objective case to be made that it is true. Interesting.

Cultural valuation of education

From How upwardly mobile are Hispanic children? Depends how you look at it. by Nathan Joo and Richard V. Reeves.

I have in the past made the argument that culture has a lot more impact on current circumstances than we otherwise acknowledge. For example, while the US performs only at a middling level on the international education testing PISA, this can be attributed to some degree to the cultural hodgepodge which is the US. When you look at PISA scores by race (as a crude proxy for cultural origin), Americans do much better than every corresponding group. In other words, white Americans outscore all Europeans, Asian Americans outscore all Asians, Hispanic Americans outscore all Central and South Americans and African Americans outscore those countries with a black plurality.

These cultural influences can echo on for generations. In Great Britain, Scots are famous for their carefulness with money (says I as a Scottish descendant). In The Millionaire Next Door or one of his later books, Thomas J. Stanley identifies which groups in the US are the top of the wealth league. Among the top are Scots Americans even though we are centuries since the last big immigrant surge from Scotland and long since one would have guessed that they had assimilated culturally.

While I make the argument that culture has an underappreciated impact over long durations, I have also been cautious about just how certain that reading is. Joo and Reeves seem to provide some confirming evidence about the importance of culture over appreciable time frames.

They look at education attainment of different groups of immigrants in comparison to the first generation of immigrants. As might be expected, second-generation groups attain greater education than first generation. One could anticipate that the amount of education immigrants bring is highly circumstantial to their country of origin. However, once here, all their children likely have roughly the same degree of access to higher education as one another. There really shouldn't be much difference between groups unless cultural valuation of education is 1) different between groups and 2) transmitted across generations. And that is what Joo and Reeves find. Look at the differences between groups, i.e. the differences in cultural orientations towards education based on region of origin.

Fascinating.

Effect size and publication bias: old small studies have big effects and new large studies have small effects

From Everything I Needed to Know (About Publication Bias), I Learned In (Pre-) Kindergarten by Gabriel.

I constantly grumble about newspapers and magazines who report on studies and never reveal either 1) the sample size on which the study was based and/or 2) the effect size. You get headlines such as "Eating vegemite extends life" but never find out that it is based on a sample size of 46 undergraduate students and the average increase in life is one day. Tell me the effect size.

Gabriel has an interesting angle on this, looking for publication bias (small studies showing large effects are privileged over larger studies with smaller effects). The particular issue at hand is pre-k education though the issues are the same across the spectrum. Pre-k seems such a logical no-brainer. It can't hurt can it? And even if it is not as effective as alternative programs, surely there has to be some benefit. The simple logic got a boost back in the late 60's and early 1970s when two studies indicated large effect sizes. The challenge was that both studies were small, one of 123 students and one of 100. Regrettably, we have seen nothing similar since then. The larger the study, the smaller the effect size, with the most recent two large studies actually showing a small negative impact (almost certainly spurious, but there is a logical argument that would support such an outcome).

The standard way to detect publication bias is through a meta-analysis showing that small studies have big effects and big studies have small effects. For instance, this is what Card and Krueger showed in a meta-analysis of the minimum wage literature which demonstrated that their previous paper on PA/NJ was only an outlier when you didn’t account for publication bias. Similarly, in a 2013 JEP, Duncan and Magnuson do a meta-analysis of the pre-K literature. Their visualization in figure 2 emphasizes the declining effects sizes over time, but you can also see that the large studies (shown as large circles) generally have much smaller β than the small studies (shown as small circles). If we added the Tennessee and Quebec studies to this plot they would be large circles on the right slightly below the x-axis. That is to say, they would fall right on the regression line and might even pull it down further.

This is what publication bias looks like: old small studies have big effects and new large studies have small effects.

I suppose it’s possible that the reason Perry and Abecedarian showed big results is because the programs were better implemented than those in the newer studies, but this is not “demonstrated definitively” and given the strong evidence that it’s all publication bias, let’s tentatively assume that if something’s too good to be true (such as that a few hours a week can almost deterministically make kids stay in school, earn a solid living, and stay out of jail), then it ain’t.