Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

Well this is a pretty bald-faced summary of facts. I imagine little critical theory minds popping everywhere. From We Must Face Persistent Racial Gaps in Academic Performance by Stuart Taylor Jr. I have few quibbles about interpretation of evidence here and there but this is perhaps the most succinct and honest summary of the known data which I have seen in a very long while. These are not things people wish to acknowledge; but by ignoring the data, we keep repeating policies which have consistently and repeatedly failed. We need to try new approaches and yet we keep hoping that policy preferences informed by ideological illusions will carry us through to better outcomes. They don't.

In covering the most highly publicized “affirmative action” lawsuit in decades – against Harvard University -- the news media are continuing their pattern of averting their eyes from stubborn facts that cut against their ideological preferences.

In recent trial testimony, Harvard and other selective schools claim that the only way they can maintain adequate racial diversity is to use large racial preferences to admit a great many more black (and brown) students than would otherwise get in based on their academic performance.

A person of ordinary curiosity might wonder: Why is that? Just what is the state of black academic performance, after more than 40 years of racial preferences? Is it improving? How soon might significantly more black students gain enough ground on whites and Asian-Americans to win admission to selective universities based on merit? And what about the Supreme Court’s unanimous assertion in 2003 that “[e]nshrining a permanent justification for racial preferences” would be unconstitutional?

The news media, like the universities, do not ask questions like these because they cannot accept honest answers, which include the following inconvenient truths:

--The state of average black academic achievement, from kindergarten through graduate schools, is extremely discouraging -- far behind that of Asian-Americans and whites, and substantially behind that of Latinos.

--Worse, black academic achievement in K-12 schools has not improved noticeably relative to that of whites or Asian-Americans in about 30 years, and has in some ways deteriorated, despite the growth of the black middle class. There is little reason to believe this will change in the foreseeable future.

--For those reasons, the tacit meaning of “diversity” has morphed into “racial preferences forever” in the minds of many university officials and journalists

These well-documented but disheartening facts are treated as taboo by academia, the media, and other establishment institutions. But the taboo is unhealthy. “Closing the racial achievement gap is the most important civil rights battle of the twenty-first century,” as the distinguished African-American Harvard sociologist Roland Fryer wrote in 2012.

And as long as the nation shrinks from facing the racial academic gaps, they will persist, and perhaps grow larger – as did the white-black gap in 12th grade reading between 1992 and 2015 (the last year for which comparative data are available).

The racial gaps make it imperative to find effective ways to improve the academic achievement of black (and Latino) children – and to end policies that may make hold kids back or diminish their incentives to excel academically.

In this regard, there is evidence suggesting that far from being part of the solution, racial preferences in college admissions are part of the problem with K-12 black education.

I won't excerpt the litany of facts which Taylor musters. They are grim but also consistent with the data I have been seeing from multiple sources.

One interesting twist is the knitting together of two different observations which I think are true but which seem inconsistent with one another at a superficial level. The first observation is from Taylor's article.

But these hopes looked forlorn as long ago as 2003, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for herself and four other justices in Grutter v. Bollinger: “[T]he number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased. ... We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further” racial diversity in selective college enrollments.

The claimed increase in high-end achievement by minority applicants was wishful thinking, for which Justice O’Connor cited no data and not one serious study. As I wrote in 2003, at the time there was “overwhelming evidence that the racial academic gap [was] enormous and ... [had] been growing for the past 15 years [since about 1988].

This reversed a trend of rapid progress in closing the racial gaps from the 1950s until about 1988. But over the three decades since 1988, there has been no significant decline in the test score gap between both black and Hispanic high school seniors and their white counterparts.

From research and data I have seen, that early data of the 1950s looks too early but whether it is 1950s to 1988 or early sixties to 1988 is not especially critical. The important thing is that out of the civil rights and desegregation era we did get a twenty year bump in performance. But that trend of gap-closing ended in 1988 and has actually on some measures regressed since then.

I have written elsewhere that it is difficult to disentangle the various things that were happening circa 1955-1965 which might have led to that twenty year run from 1968-1988 when the gap was closing. While I do not like the statism and ignorance of much of the desegregation era (right policy, bad implementation), I do suspect that desegregation was one of the principle mechanisms for closing the academic gap. Not necessarily because of desegregation per se but because desegregation brought new money to education, brought an overdue upgrading of facilities, brought greater transparency and accountability, etc. I suspect that is what was going on but I cannot prove it. It might be attributable to other factors.

We picked the low-hanging fruit of improving facilities, providing adequate funding, and improving transparency and accountability and that gave us a twenty year bump in performance that narrowed the gap but did not eliminate it. But then the gap stabilized and started widening again, suggesting that facilities, funding and transparency were not the sole root causes of the gap, not even the primary causes.

The other observation is from Thomas Sowell and appears to be in opposition with Taylors assumption. Taylor says that educational gaps narrowed between the 1950s and 1988 before widening again.

On the other hand, Thomas Sowell makes the argument that on virtually all the key indices of psycho-social well-being, the measures and trends for African Americans were very positive from 1880 to the mid-1960s before then taking a plunge.

One of the major findings and conclusions is that affirmative action (and its new form, diversity), as nice as it sounded, has been an almost unmitigated disaster. It has provided official endorsement to the idea that African Americans are not equal, it has undermined the accomplishments of those who do achieve, it has doomed some of the best and brightest African American students to lesser academic achievement than they would otherwise have attained, it has bolstered drop-out figures, it has burdened otherwise capable students with unsupportable debts, etc.

Throwing money at schools has not shrunk the performance gap, reducing class sizes, eliminating rule enforcement, improving teacher credentials, relaxing grading standards, pre-k, wrap-around services, desegregation, eliminating assessments, none of these have closed the gap. None of the fads work. But we don't want to say so. Because if we did, then we might choose to do something truly radical, which is to focus on root causes and policies which would work.

What thirty years of experimentation have told us is that we have not yet identified the real root causes of the performance gap. We know it is not funding. Our schools are awash with money compared to history and compared to other countries. We might not be spending it well, indeed are almost certainly not spending it well, but money is not the issue.

Race per se doesn't seem to be the issue either. Within each racial group, there are sub groups who do fantastically well compared to their native born racial counterparts and others who do very poorly. African American students can't easily blame systemic racism if Nigerian and Haitian students (also black) do better than native born African Americans (and indeed, for Nigerians, better than native-born whites) and Somalis do even worse. Clearly something else is at play than simple racism.

I think the next frontier is, or should be, on folkways, culture if you will. It is not the race that matters, it is the culture. Taylor gets close to this towards the end of his piece. Most his recommendations look kind of anemic, but this one could be consequential.

Third, the focus of almost all academics, policymakers, civil rights groups, and others on perpetuating racial preferences and lowering academic standards for black students diverts attention, reformist energy, and resources from the far more urgent task of improving their educations at home and school during their first 18 years of life – “the most important civil rights battle of the twenty-first century,” in Roland Fryer’s words.

Focus on the folkways of people. We know folkways are a huge predictor of success, regardless of race. If you focus on family, and work, and education, and faith, and community, etc. then you are far more likely to experience life success.

Some of the many posts are here. There is no easy summary - read them for the larger picture. A summary of some of the most important folkways which have known predictive effects on life outcomes include:

Speech Ways: "Conventional patterns of written and spoken language; pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax and grammar."
Building Ways: "Prevailing forms of vernacular architecture and high architecture, which tend to be related to one another."
Family Ways: "The structure and function of the household and family, both in ideal and actuality."
Marriage Ways: "Ideas of the marriage-bond, and cultural processes of courtship, marriage and divorce."
Gender Ways: "Customs that regulate social relations between men and women."
Sex Ways: "Conventional sexual attitudes and acts, and the treatment of sexual deviance."
Child-Rearing Ways: "Ideas of child nature and customs of child nurture."
Naming Ways: "Onomastic customs including favoured forenames and the descent of names within the family."
Age Ways: "Attitudes towards age, experiences of aging and age relationships."
Death Ways: "Attitudes towards death, mortality rituals, mortuary customs and mourning practices."
Religious Ways: "Patterns of religious worship, theology, ecclesiology and church architecture."
Magic Ways: "Normative beliefs and practices concerning the supernatural."
Learning Ways: "Attitudes toward literacy and learning, and conventional patterns of education."
Food Ways: "Patterns of diet, nutrition, cooking, eating, feasting and fasting."
Dress Ways: "Customs of dress, demeanor, and personal adornment."
Sport Ways: "Attitudes toward recreation and leisure; folk games and forms of organized sport."
Work Ways: "Work ethics and work experiences; attitudes toward work and the nature of work."
Time Ways: "Attitudes toward the use of time, customary methods of time keeping, and the conventional rhythms of life."
Wealth Ways: "Attitudes towards wealth and patterns of its distribution."
Rank Ways: "The rules by which rank is assigned, the roles which rank entails, and the relations between different ranks."
Social Ways: "Conventional patterns of migration, settlement, association and affiliation."
Order Ways: "Ideas of order, ordering institutions, forms of disorder, and treatment of the disorderly."
Power Ways: "Attitudes toward authority and power; patterns of political participation."
Freedom Ways: "Prevailing ideas of liberty and restraint, and libertarian customs and institutions."

This is not about assimilating per se. It is about the extent to which any particularly integrating group already practices folkways which are predictive of success, and more importantly, the extent to which they are willing to modify their personal behaviors in order to exploit the benefits of those folkways.

Improving folkways is, I suspect, the easiest way to close the performance gap. It is also the way most opposed by both ends of the ideological spectrum.

The problem for us as a nation is that both the statists and the individualists have ideological challenges when considering the State to be endorsing particular modes of behavior.

Statists really don't want to let go of the idea that personal outcomes are the result of victimhood from the system. They want to believe that all people are potentially equal in outcome and therefore all variance in outcomes (failures) are a failure of system rather than a failure of individuals. They want to work on the system. That's what we have been doing for forty years to little effect.

Individualists are deeply opposed to the State being explicitly responsible for molding the folkway norms of a free people. They believe variances in outcomes are a natural consequence of any dispassionate system because of variances in individuals. However, they want the locus of decision-making to be the individual, not the State. If folkways are a means of achieving more equal outcomes, great. As long as people freely choose those folkways rather than have them imposed on them.

But folkways exact a cost from individuals. People benefit through adherence to folkways which are known to be conducive. We know we ought to value education very highly (as some do) but education is hard work. We know we ought to not have children out of wedlock but that requires a lot of self-control. We know we ought to defer to authority to an extent but that requires submission. We know we ought to save for the future, but that requires sacrificing current consumption for future well-being. When faced with the benefits of adhering to beneficial folkways, many people freely choose to be grasshoppers rather than ants.

And so the problem persists. For the time being, we keep fooling ourselves that the gap is because of systemic racism, or segregation, or insufficient resources, even when all the data shows that not to be the case. Eventually we will figure out how to foster beneficial folkways without it being a matter of State imposition.

Eventually, but regrettably not immediately. Taylor will be howled down and we will persist like Maduro, trying to make a known failed system work through sheer will and ideological wishfulness.

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. And the truth is that folkways probably matter a lot more than we are willing to acknowledge.

Folkways

I was having breakfast with some acquaintances last weekend when Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer came up in the conversation. I have had the book for some time now and have read portions of it but never cover to cover. Based on the conversation, I will revisit that.

Fischer focuses on the folkways of each of four waves of emigration from the British isles in the 17th and 18th century, the Puritans, the Quakers, the Anglican Aristocracy and the Scots-Irish borderers. It is fascinating material.

He explores the folkways which were brought over (and how did they differ from one another) and how they evolved in the United States and to a more minor degree, how they affect us today. The folkways are:

Speech Ways, Conventional patterns of written and spoken language; pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax and grammar.

Building Ways, Prevailing forms of vernacular architecture and high architecture, which tend to be related to one another.

Family Ways The structure and function of the household and family, both in ideal and actuality.

Marriage Ways Ideas of the marriage-bond, and cultural processes of courtship, marriage and divorce.

Gender Ways Customs that regulate social relations between men and women.

Sex Ways Conventional sexual attitudes and acts, and the treatment of sexual deviance.

Child-Rearing Ways Ideas of child nature and customs of child nurture.

Naming Ways Onomastic customs including favoured forenames and the descent of names within the family.

Age Ways Attitudes towards age, experiences of aging and age relationships.

Death Ways Attitudes towards death, mortality rituals, mortuary customs and mourning practices.

Religious Ways Patterns of religious worship, theology, ecclesiology and church architecture.

Magic Ways Normative beliefs and practices concerning the supernatural.

Learning Ways Attitudes toward literacy and learning, and conventional patterns of education.

Food Ways Patterns of diet, nutrition, cooking, eating, feasting and fasting.

Dress Ways Customs of dress, demeanor, and personal adornment.

Sport Ways Attitudes toward recreation and leisure; folk games and forms of organized sport.

Work Ways Work ethics and work experiences; attitudes toward work and the nature of work.

Time Ways Attitudes toward the use of time, customary methods of time keeping, and the conventional rhythms of life.

Wealth Ways Attitudes towards wealth and patterns of its distribution.

Rank Ways The rules by which rank is assigned, the roles which rank entails, and the relations between different ranks.

Social Ways Conventional patterns of migration, settlement, association and affiliation.

Order Ways Ideas of order, ordering institutions, forms of disorder, and treatment of the disorderly.

Power Ways Attitudes toward authority and power; patterns of political participation.

Freedom Ways Prevailing ideas of liberty and restraint, and libertarian customs and institutions.

24 types of folkways

From Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer. Fischer identifies 24 folkways which he defines as "the normative structure of values, customs and meanings that exist in any culture," but which "are often highly persistent, but they are never static. Even where they have acquired the status of a tradition they are not necessarily very old. Folkways are constantly in the process of creation, even in our own time."

The 24 categories of folkways are:

Speech Ways: "Conventional patterns of written and spoken language; pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax and grammar."
Building Ways: "Prevailing forms of vernacular architecture and high architecture, which tend to be related to one another."
Family Ways: "The structure and function of the household and family, both in ideal and actuality."
Marriage Ways: "Ideas of the marriage-bond, and cultural processes of courtship, marriage and divorce."
Gender Ways: "Customs that regulate social relations between men and women."
Sex Ways: "Conventional sexual attitudes and acts, and the treatment of sexual deviance."
Child-Rearing Ways: "Ideas of child nature and customs of child nurture."
Naming Ways: "Onomastic customs including favoured forenames and the descent of names within the family."
Age Ways: "Attitudes towards age, experiences of aging and age relationships."
Death Ways: "Attitudes towards death, mortality rituals, mortuary customs and mourning practices."
Religious Ways: "Patterns of religious worship, theology, ecclesiology and church architecture."
Magic Ways: "Normative beliefs and practices concerning the supernatural."
Learning Ways: "Attitudes toward literacy and learning, and conventional patterns of education."
Food Ways: "Patterns of diet, nutrition, cooking, eating, feasting and fasting."
Dress Ways: "Customs of dress, demeanor, and personal adornment."
Sport Ways: "Attitudes toward recreation and leisure; folk games and forms of organized sport."
Work Ways: "Work ethics and work experiences; attitudes toward work and the nature of work."
Time Ways: "Attitudes toward the use of time, customary methods of time keeping, and the conventional rhythms of life."
Wealth Ways: "Attitudes towards wealth and patterns of its distribution."
Rank Ways: "The rules by which rank is assigned, the roles which rank entails, and the relations between different ranks."
Social Ways: "Conventional patterns of migration, settlement, association and affiliation."
Order Ways: "Ideas of order, ordering institutions, forms of disorder, and treatment of the disorderly."
Power Ways: "Attitudes toward authority and power; patterns of political participation."
Freedom Ways: "Prevailing ideas of liberty and restraint, and libertarian customs and institutions."

The challenge is the intersection between the governance provided by folkways and the governance provided by law.

From Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails by Christopher J. Coyne. Page 186.

It is important to note that social scientists lack a strong understanding of how to influence underlying customs and beliefs effectively so as to achieve the foundations for desired formal rules. So while we know that customary rules are crucial to the operation of formal rules, we know much less about how to change informal rules to align them with the desired formal rules. This has important implications for efforts by “outsiders,” those who aren’t embedded within the existing rules governing societal interactions, to (re)design rules in order to address root causes by achieving what appears, from their perspective, to be a preferable state of affairs. What seems desirable to outsiders cannot simply be assumed to be desirable to those inside the system due to differing interpretations of the perceived benefits and costs associated with proposed changes.

I think this is a crucial insight. The law cannot govern everything but it must govern that for which it is appropriate. Too great a span and it loses efficiency owing to particularities. Too compressed a span and it loses effectiveness.

Folkways are ideal at the local level for particularities but they do not compass larger heterogenous communities.

The challenge is that intersection between the governance provided by folkways and the governance provided by law.

Dressing a story in random data does not make it a fact-based story

There has been a hot trade in the social justice league of late in the idea that society is organized to obstruct the upward mobility of various victim groups. One argument made with some frequency is that the upper class in general, and elite universities in particular, are hoarding opportunities in a fashion which preclude non-traditional groups from moving in.

But as data from the IRS indicates, America really is the land of opportunity with individuals rising in a single generation from the bottom to the top and falling from the top to the bottom at various points in their life.

The issue is not so much opportunity as being able to hold on to achievements and income and wealth. People have their moments of success but they are challenged to sustain that success over stretches of time. Gregory Clark has discovered remarkably stable levels of inequality crossing multiple generations over centuries.

Charles Murray, in Coming Apart, argues empirically that this sustenance of inequality is primarily a product of folkways - marriage, education attainment, no children before marriage, no divorce, low time discounting, church attendance, innovation and considered risk taking, high-value profession selection, etc. Deirdre McCloskey makes much the same point in her Bourgeoise Virtues books.

But the social justice league labor on, trying to muster the data to support their view. Usually with cherry-picked, highly selected data. This is the latest entry in such arguments, The Ivy League Students Least Likely to Get Married by Kevin Carey.

There is no doubt that stable marriages are a huge multiplier in terms of psychological, social and financial well-being. High IQ is a pretty good multiplier as well, most especially when in combination with the ordinary bourgeoise virtues.

The data come from the Equality of Opportunity Project, which followed the economic and educational progress of Americans born between 1980 and 1991. For each year, researchers tracked who went to which college, how much money their parents made, and whether they were married in 2014.

Marriage rates for young adults just out of college are low across the board. But as people get into their 30s, trends diverge. For example, more than half of Princeton students born into upper-income households in the early 1980s — roughly, the classes of 2002 through 2006 — were married by 2014. They didn’t all marry other Princetonians, of course, but it’s common.

But for Princeton alumni from the lowest-income households — the bottom one-fifth compared with the top one-fifth — the trends are different. Only a third were married by 2014. This pattern holds for other elite colleges and universities. For people born over the five years from 1980 to 1984, the marriage rate for upper-income students who attended Ivy League institutions was 14 percentage points higher than the rate for lower-income students.

Aha! Princeton has social systems that reduces the chances of bottom quintile income students from integrating and marrying at the same rates as those children from the top quintile. Well, maybe. The fact that some other prestigious institutions such as University of Chicago has nearly identical marriage rates between top and bottom suggests that there must be something else going on beyond simple exclusive social systems at elite universities which is what the social justice advocates need it to be.

Carey offers a case study of a bottom quintile student as an example.

Alana Tornello, Princeton class of 2012, grew up in a working-class community on Staten Island. Her mother ran a small hair salon where Ms. Tornello spent her afternoons after school. Her father was a social worker. She tested into a specialized high school and applied to Princeton on a whim. When the acceptance letter arrived on April 1, she thought someone was pulling her leg.

Those doubts followed her onto campus, where she struggled academically her freshman year. The Princeton social scene revolves around “eating clubs,” to which people apply for membership, much like rushing a fraternity or sorority. The clubs, mostly housed in a row of imposing old mansions next to campus, are implicitly part of extensive social networks connected to exclusive private boarding schools and families with multiple generations of Princeton alumni. Eating clubs are where many upper-income marriages begin.

Ms. Tornello didn’t feel at home there. And while Princeton gave her a generous scholarship, the eating clubs were still expensive. She decided to be an “independent” — the telling label for students who didn’t eat at a club. “If you were independent,” she said, “you were kind of seen as a lone dog.”

Sounds like Tornello might possibly have suffered from social exclusion which might have possibly reduced her marriage chances. Possible, but is that the most likely explanation? Carey admits:

Ms. Tornello thought she’d study something “practical” at Princeton, like engineering or pre-med. Instead, she fell in love with her humanities courses and majored in comparative literature. In her spare time, she became interested in faith-based organizing. After graduation and a short stint in Washington, D.C., she moved back to Staten Island to help with Hurricane Sandy relief efforts. Today, she lives with six housemates in Brooklyn and recently started work in emergency planning and operations for a city agency. There are a lot of other Princeton graduates nearby, many commuting to Wall Street. She leads a different kind of life.

Ms. Tornello has mixed feelings about the path she chose. “You don’t quite belong anymore to where you’re from,” she said. “But I also didn’t belong at Princeton. There’s a meaning in my life that I can’t deny was created by my time there. I traveled the world from Princeton. I’m not in a better place than my family financially, but I have something I wish they had, too.”

After setting up the argument that Tornello's unmarried status is a function of social exclusion, Carey then introduces evidence that 1) Tornello is doing exactly what she wants and 2) what she wants to do is not associated with high income/wealth/status attainment with their corresponding linkages to marriage.

Carey wants to conclude, per the social justice fad, that

Instead of being places that provide equal opportunity to everyone based on merit, colleges are often complicit in the forces that push us apart.

Much as he might want that to be the conclusion, he makes it really hard to see that that proposition is in fact true. Elite universities have widely varying rates of marriage differential between their bottom and top quintiles. Many elite universities have close to zero variation. Personal behaviors and choices of career and field of endeavor have a huge impact on marriage opportunities.

And that is to say nothing about some pretty obvious multivariate confounders. People from top quintile households, on average, are far more likely to grow up in intact families compared to those in the bottom quintile. Perhaps pre-existing social norms from their childhood is driving the marriage differentials. You need to hold originating family structure and other such folkways constant to compare differences in like-to-like circumstances of income quintiles.

At most elite universities, students originating from bottom quintile circumstances are also highly likely to have been special admits (sports, race, under-represented, etc.) who correspondingly tend to have dramatically lower standardized test scores compared to their academic peers. Since IQ combined with normed folkways is predictive of outcomes, you also need to control for test scores between the quintiles.

Perhaps there are field of study differences between top and bottom quintile student groups, one gravitating towards challenging and high compensation professions (ex. electrical engineering or finance) and the other gravitating towards low income fields of study (ex. comparative literature or sociology.) If bottom quintile students are choosing to pursue low income professions, then the fact that low income professions are associated with reduced marriageability becomes pertinent.

Those are just three of the more obvious confounders between top and bottom quintile. The fact that Carey did not control for those obvious variables makes his conclusion even less supportable.

There is data. There is a table. There is jargon. But this has all the hallmarks of a conclusion seeking the appearance of empirical support. Carey has not made much of an effort to actually make his empirical argument. He has not controlled his variables. He has not dealt with the exceptions to his alleged pattern. He has not illustrated his article with a very convincing case study.

I am actually pretty sympathetic to the idea that most elite universities are far more interested in appearing to be socially just than they are interested in actually being socially just. Despite that disposition, Carey is unconvincing.

Which is a pity because pursuing social justice solutions does not solve real world problems for people. You cannot simply assume causes into existence, no matter what they taught in the intersectional social justice postmodernism classes. University of Texas had an interesting exercise going a number of years ago. They observed that their admits from the bottom quintile were accruing higher debt, were less likely to graduate, and were having worse post-graduation outcomes. They put together a holistic team to track such students to discover the real pitfalls and provided structured and testable interventions. They were having some good success in reducing the quintile disparities. And their solutions had nothing to do with eating clubs or social exclusion or mystical forms of class prejudice.

Solving real problems through fact based interventions. An approach so radical, it just might work.

A cultural transmission belt

From JOINT REVIEW: Family Unfriendly, by Timothy P. Carney by Jane Psmith and John Psmith.

The correct way to view all the changes that Carney lists is as a sort of transmission belt that has slowly and inexorably propagated and magnified the effects of the one, very simple technological change that occurred. The story goes something like this: birth control is introduced, but large families are still normative and supported by generations of cultural accretion. So people still have an above-replacement number of kids, because they remember their mothers and grandmothers having 10 or 12 kids, and because society is still basically set up for families. But time passes, and culture gradually shifts to accommodate material reality. Law and economics follow culture. The next generation remembers their parents having 3 or 4, and maybe manages 1 or 2 themselves. The fewer people are having lots of kids, the less of a constituency there is for having lots of kids, and the harder society makes it, further turning the screws on marginal parents.

There is a separate implication here.  There is a tendency to view culture as a set of folkways and values.  Things people value and believe in.  And I believe that is true up to a point.  But those folkways and values produce outcomes.

As long as technology is unchanging or slowly changing, over time, culture will refine towards the mean of its outcomes.  Culture becomes outcomes.

But when technological change is a reality (last five hundred years) and accelerating (last fifty years), the cultural transmission belt slips.

There are now outcomes arising not from culture and values but from technological munificence.  Dysfunctional value and behaviors can now survive despite their negative outcomes.  What the Psmiths are pointing out is that cultural transmission is part explicit (values learned in church or school or explicitly articulated in family) and part implicit (values picked up by emulating the examples set by others).  

Abundance arising from technological productivity is eroding the explicit transmission of culture.  But that happens it undermines the implicit transmission via the environment of examples.  

How can America be so intensely developed and so violent? Speculation

From an interview by Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney with Steven Pinker at the time of his book, The Better Angels of our Nature.

If you subtract out all the gun homicides in the United States and you just look at the homicides committed with, say ropes, candlesticks, and daggers, we still kill people at a higher rate.

I have made the claim elsewhere that Americans live with a degree of intensity not common in other OECD countries and that that intensity shows up in many ways such as healthcare costs, accident rates, morbidity rates, etc.

Pinker's observation is consistent with that intensity of living argument.

There are many hypotheses surrounding why the US is so violent, primarily focusing on the Second Amendment and access to guns. Pinker's point suggests that the violence is more fundamental than just access to weapons. That perhaps weapons are incidental and that the underlying driver is cultural.

I would make two arguments. First is that while we are a synthesized nation from many cultural roots, those roots are characterized by dramatically different rates of violence. Take, for example, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer. Fischer identifies four cultures from the British Isles who came to these shores within approximately a hundred years of one another - Quakers, Puritans, Cavaliers, and Border Reivers.

It is not Fischer's primary focus, but it is clear from his book that these four groups, originating from the same isles (though different areas), brought dramatically different attitudes (folkways) with regard to violence, either personal or institutional. From most peaceful to most violent they were Quakers, Puritans, Cavaliers, and Border Reivers as measured by the number of murdered within their own community and mortal violence against outsiders. And that is just from Britain.

The upshot is that the role of violence in America is a product of many cultural influences over time, each of those cultures with widely divergent orientations towards violence. This is Simpson's Paradox in the field of violence. I have discussed this elsewhere in terms of education (here, here, and here.) In international education achievement, Americans from each of the main cultural groups (European, Meso-Hispanic, African-American and Asian) perform better than their peers in each of the origin locations (Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia) but the overall American average is mid-tier because each cultural group has different performance levels. I suspect that in terms of violence, we would find that violence in European-American communities, in African-American communities, in Asian-American communities and in Hispanic communities in the US is better (lower) than in the best countries in the continents of origin (Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia) but that the overall average is worse because there are such different levels of violence in the different cultural groups.

Related to Simpson's paradox of mixed cultural violence levels but, I think, a separate argument, is the fact that the US has had many waves of migration. It is not just the mix that impacts the outcome, it is the constant shocks to the system.
It is hard to sustain steady cultural evolution over time if there are frequent and highly variant exogenous shocks.

There is an argument among anthropologists and sociologists that increasingly complex societies have multiple mechanisms for evolving out tendencies towards lack of self-control and tolerance of violence (by actual death of violent members and thus removal from the gene pool but also via evolution of cultural and legal norms). There is likely merit in the argument but there are innumerable complexities and is probably frequently overstated.

The substance though is that Sweden (as an example) has a lower rate of lethal violence because they have purged the inclination towards violence from their genetic heritage, from their cultural norms, and from their institutional norms.

Perhaps. But what happens when multiple groups are overlaid upon one another, each group with different stage points of accommodation for violence? Upon the seeds of Albion (different as they were from one another), there were later cultural infusions of Germans, Poles, north Italians, Sicilians, Russians, Greeks, Mexicans, Chinese, etc. each with their own cultural base rates of violence.

If the native system of culture is evolving over time, how is the process affected by these later infusions? I suspect it is more complicated than simply averaging the attitudes towards violence. The system itself is disrupted. Perhaps cultural and institutional progress towards lower tolerance of violence is actually reset back to the base when subject to a cultural shock? I have no idea, but I suspect that the American experience of frequent punctuations to the equilibrium of cultural evolution might be more disruptive than we can readily perceive.

And certainly there is evidence for the persistence over time of longstanding cultural heritages. Americans of different heritages have academic scores more similar to their original cultures than to one another. Americans of Scottish heritage save more money than non-Scots Americans. Americans of Scandinavian descent have labor force participation rates more comparable to their distant brethren than to other hyphenated Americans. It would not be surprising to find that there are long degrees of persistence in attitude towards violence as well.

I am guessing that America's proclivity towards economic dynamism and innovation (and intensity of lived experience) is in part a function of the constant infusion of new ideas and attitudes arising from episodic disruptive immigration but that that episodic disruptive infusion of different cultures with differences in attitude toward violence has perhaps curtailed (or destabilized) a steady evolution that enhances self-control and expunges tolerance of violence. Unexamined trade-offs.

The line of veracity has become somewhat undulating.

From A treasury of American anecdotes; sly, salty, shaggy stories of heroes and hellions, beguilers and buffoons, spellbinders and scapegoats, gagsters and gossips, from the grassroots and sidewalks of America by Benjamin Albert Botkin.   

Nor does it matter if in the course of traveling and much handling, the “line of veracity has become somewhat undulating.” The story’s the thing. If it seems true, fine. If not—well, “it makes a good story.” The final test of a good anecdote is not so much its truth to experience as its power to sum up and illuminate experience—a power of concentration and crystallization in which the anecdote excels, to a greater degree, perhaps, than any other genre. The anecdote illuminates not only a situation but a human attitude or relationship, ineluding the relationship between the storyteller and his audience. It also illuminates the folkways of a people, as symbols, allusions, bywords, and other forms of popular fantasy are designed to do. Because the fantasies and the folkways constantly reinforce each other, American anecdotes unlock doors to understanding America and open windows on the American past and the American heritage.

 

Each Chicago neighborhood was a village unto itself, with its fairly intensive ethnic ethos, its own mores and folkways.

 A couple of days ago, I posted Complex systems rarely have mono-causal sources of change discussing urban dynamics demographic flight and gentrification.  Some of the themes mentioned there, echo in A Literary Education and Other Essays by Joseph Epstein.  He captures a much richer tapestry of change, transition and memory.  From page 97, "A Toddlin' Town"

Time was, if you told me your address in Chicago, I could tell your ethnic origins, make a reasonably accurate guess at your family’s household income, know whether your parents ate in the kitchen or in the dining room and whether your father came to table in his undershirt. So balkanized was the Chicago of my youth—the 1940s and ’50s—that each Chicago neighborhood (and there are by current count some 237 of them) was a village unto itself, with its fairly intensive ethnic ethos, its own mores and folkways. And one didn’t often, except to go to work, and not always then, leave the neighborhood; no great need to, for churches, parks, restaurants, movie theaters, taverns, and everything was there, close at hand.

Chicago was then filled with European immigrants—Poles, Greeks, Czechs, Irish, Italians—and very Catholic. Priests in dog collars and nuns in full habit were part of the urban landscape of my boyhood, so much so that, until perhaps the age of 10 or 11, I thought Catholicism and Christianity coterminous. Blacks were chiefly locked away in their own neighborhoods on the city’s South Side, though soon to take over west-side neighborhoods, and “were, in Ralph Ellison’s sense, largely invisible, encountered only doing servile jobs. No homeless people walked the streets panhandling. We had only bums, in those days confined to one of Chicago’s two skid rows, one just south, the other west of the Loop.

That time, of course, isn’t any longer. I now drive through neighborhoods I once knew to be drab working class and find them filled with charmingly refurbished houses lived in by young, college-educated married couples. Neighborhood taverns—the workingman’s country clubs—are largely gone, sometimes replaced by franchise fast-food joints but just as often by coffee bars or small chichi restaurants. The grand Catholic churches, built by the tithing of immigrants, still stand, and the parks remain, but neighborhood life doesn’t seem quite so centered in these institutions as once it did. In former days, if you asked a Chicagoan where he lived, he was likely to answer with the name of his parish (St. Nicholas of Tolentine) or the nearest park (Green Briar), where he grew up playing the 16-inch-ball version of softball played only in Chicago or in whose field house he later went to do business with his Democratic ward committeeman. Catholic culture, if not the religion itself, seems to have all but disappeared; people are not so recognizably Catholic as once they were or so dedicated to sending their kids to what used to be called parochial schools.

Black life, once, once segregated, is largely segregated still, but no longer so strictly. In the bad old days, few were the Chicago restaurants to which one could take a black friend or acquaintance without fear of rebuff. The Hispanic population has grown greatly, demographically, politically, in prominence generally. Devon Avenue, the great Jewish shopping street of West Rogers Park, the neighborhood of my own boyhood, is now dominated by Indians and Pakistanis; on Saturday nights, women in saris and boys in cricket sweaters walk the street.

 

Probability Stack

From Why Did Greenland’s Vikings Vanish? by Tim Folger. The traditional explanation is that the European Viking settlers were inadequate in making adjustments to their technology and folkways in order to accommodate the different Greenland environment.

Folger reports on recent archaeological finds which indicate that the Viking settlers in fact adjusted their folkways almost immediately on settlement and that the adjustments made were similar to those of the later Inuit settlers. It now appears that the Viking settlers were not simply farmers. They did farm but from the very beginning they also supplemented their diet with seal.

They hunted walrus for ivory to trade with Scandinavia and Europe. One adaptation involved division of labor. The walrus hunting season coincides with the short farming season. It appears that men and women ran the farm together but with women minding the farm while the men hunted seal in the spring and walrus during the summer.

How profitable was the ivory trade? Every six years, the Norse in Greenland and Iceland paid a tithe to the Norwegian king. A document from 1327, recording the shipment of a single boatload of tusks to Bergen, Norway, shows that that boatload, with tusks from 260 walruses, was worth more than all the woolen cloth sent to the king by nearly 4,000 Icelandic farms for one six-year period.

[snip]

When the Norse arrived in Greenland, there were no locals to teach them how to live. “The Scandinavians had this remarkable ability to colonize these high-latitude islands,” says Andrew Dugmore. “You have to be able to hunt wild animals; you have to build up your livestock; you have to work hard to exist in these areas....This is about as far as you can push the farming system in the Northern Hemisphere.”

And push it they did. The growing season was short, and the land vulnerable to overgrazing. Ian Simpson has spent many seasons in Greenland studying soil layers where the Vikings farmed. The strata, he says, clearly show the impact of their arrival: The earliest layers are thinner, with less organic material, but within a generation or two the layers stabilized and the organic matter built up as the Norse farmwomen manured and improved their fields while the men were out hunting. “You can interpret that as being a sign of adaptation, of them getting used to the landscape and being able to read it a little better,” Simpson says.

So, if not maladaptation, then what?

For all their intrepidness, though, the Norse were far from self-sufficient, and imported grains, iron, wine and other essentials. Ivory was their currency. “Norse society in Greenland couldn’t survive without trade with Europe,” says Arneborg, “and that’s from day one.”

Then, in the 13th century, after three centuries, their world changed profoundly. First, the climate cooled because of the volcanic eruption in Indonesia. Sea ice increased, and so did ocean storms—ice cores from that period contain more salt from oceanic winds that blew over the ice sheet. Second, the market for walrus ivory collapsed, partly because Portugal and other countries started to open trade routes into sub-Saharan Africa, which brought elephant ivory to the European market. “The fashion for ivory began to wane,” says Dugmore, “and there was also the competition with elephant ivory, which was much better quality.” And finally, the Black Death devastated Europe. There is no evidence that the plague ever reached Greenland, but half the population of Norway—which was Greenland’s lifeline to the civilized world—perished.

The Norse probably could have survived any one of those calamities separately. After all, they remained in Greenland for at least a century after the climate changed, so the onset of colder conditions alone wasn’t enough to undo them. Moreover, they were still building new churches—like the one at Hvalsey—in the 14th century. But all three blows must have left them reeling. With nothing to exchange for European goods—and with fewer Europeans left—their way of life would have been impossible to maintain. The Greenland Vikings were essentially victims of globalization and a pandemic.

That last sentence is an odd summary of the preceding evidence. Explicitly, the "Greenland Vikings were essentially victims of" climate change, "globalization and a pandemic."

As an aside, the global climate change advocates have always been reluctant to address that there has been, even within historical times but long before CO2 emitting industrialization, dramatic climate change. This is an instance of that journalistic misdirection which is so irritating to the critical reader.

Climate change, globalization, and pandemics. There is one further element that might have contributed to the disappearance of the Greenland Vikings.

The Norse, he says, were especially vulnerable to sudden death at sea. Revised population estimates, based on more accurate tallies of the number of farms and graves, put the Norse Greenlanders at no more than 2,500 at their peak—less than half the conventional figure. Every spring and summer, nearly all the men would be far from home, hunting. As conditions for raising cattle worsened, the seal hunts would have been ever more vital—and more hazardous. Despite the decline of the ivory trade, the Norse apparently continued to hunt walrus until the very end. So a single storm at sea could have wiped out a substantial number of Greenland’s men—and by the 14th century the weather was increasingly stormy. “You see similar things happening at other places and other times,” McGovern says. “In 1881, there was a catastrophic storm when the Shetland fishing fleet was out in these little boats. In one afternoon about 80 percent of the men and boys of the Shetlands drowned. A whole bunch of little communities never recovered.”

An interesting article.

This fits into a line of thinking I have been pursuing recently regarding determinants of life outcomes. What makes success happen?

That's a long conversation but one aspect is having the right ingredients of success. Scott Adams refers to this as the skill stack. His hypothesis is that in a complex society with great specialization of labor, any particular job or vocation is dependent on a range of skills that have to occur in the right proportions, at the right time, in the right sequence. In his instance, it was insufficient to have a modicum of drawing skills, or a dry sense of humor, or plenty of material. He needed all three to occur and occur in the right mix and right order.

I have expanded the idea beyond the career frame to a life perspective. Over the course of a life, what are the constituent elements of success? With a hat tip to Adams, I have called this a Capability Stack. The determinants of your life outcomes are dependent, I suspect, on at least six capabilities: physical capabilities, cognitive capabilities, social capabilities (ability to interact with others), personal capabilities (psychological and experiential), cultural capabilities (values, goals, and knowledge from your culture), and contextual capability (circumstances in which you are embedded). This Capability Stack shapes your outcomes.

The experience of the Greenland Vikings suggests another Stack perspective - the Probability Stack. You might also refer to it as a Fragility Stack.

What Folger is suggesting is that the Greenland Vikings were highly adaptive and successful but that their successful outcomes were fragile. In order for their economic/social system to work, many things had to go right in the right order. Some of which were beyond their direct control.

They had to have the social cohesion and organizational capabilities to share work between the sexes, and among many people. The growing seasons and hunting seasons had to be stable. The weather needed to be mild. There had to be a market for their luxury goods. There had to be a source for trade to supply the essentials they could not produce. Their population had to be sufficiently large to sustain themselves over fluctuations due to natural ravages but small enough not to over stress the ecology.

Each of these elements had a probability of occurring. Things went well when the probabilities for all the elements were sufficiently high.

Collapse occurred when the probabilities of some elements in the stack dropped below a critical level. One bad storm, some prolonged disruption in trade supplies or routes, one collapse in markets, one change in the climate, etc.

The system was successful within its parameters but given the circumstances of the day (trade systems, technology, customs, etc.), the system was complex and therefore also fragile. It worked when the stars aligned and failed when they came out of alignment with one another.

Four ideas of freedom

From Ayn Rand and American Culture by Peter Saint-Andre, a 2004 book review.  It includes this synthesis of David Hackett Fischer's argument in Albion's Seed.  

In broad brush, there were four main emigrations from England to America before the Revolution:

• Dissenting Puritans from East Anglia to New England (1629-1641)

• Low-Church Anglican Cavaliers and indentured servants from Wessex and Sussex to Virginia and the Carolinas (1642-1675)

• Quakers from the North Midlands to the Delaware Valley (1675-1725)

• Presbyterians from Ulster and the Scottish-English Borderland to the Appalachian backcountry (1717-1775)

In Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer argues persuasively that these four comprise the founding cultures of America, and that American culture did not emerge full-grown from the head of Zeus or develop without precedent through the "frontier experience", but instead that American culture can best be explained through reference to the cultures of its founding residents (Fischer 1989). Part of what makes his exploration so persuasive is the detailed information he provides regarding each culture's social and regional origins, religious beliefs and behaviors, speech patterns, architectural styles, family ways, marriage customs, gender relations, attitudes toward elders and toward death, educational approaches, food and dress customs, ways of working and of recreation, use of time, attitudes toward wealth, division of labor, societal orders and social rankings, patterns of settlement, and relations of power -- culminating in each culture's ideas about freedom and liberty. These details are fascinating and telling, providing connections both back to the cultures of four distinct English regions (which in turn had deeper roots in the migrations to the British Isles of the Angles, Saxons, Scandanavian Vikings, and Celts, respectively), and forward to our own times and to the regional and cultural tensions evident throughout American history.

Consider, for example, child-rearing. The intent in Puritan New England was to break the child's will for the sake of social and religious conformity in small-town democracies; the intent in Cavalier Virginia was to bend the child's will back upon itself for the sake of a kind of Stoical leadership in the "Squirearchy" of the coastal plantations; the intent in Quaker Pennsylvania was to enlighten the will for the sake of personal and familial fulfillment in strong meetinghouse communities; the intent in the mainly Presbyterian backcountry was to build up the will for the sake of a fierce, stubborn independence in a shifting, warlike culture on the frontier between civilization and chaos.

These founding folkways, and much else besides, led to quite distinct, and often diametrically opposed, ideas about liberty. Fischer calls the New England idea "ordered liberty" (freedom to determine the course of one's own society), at worst exemplified in the stifling, moralistic conformism that we still associate with the word "Puritan", at best in the strong town-based democracies (and suspicion of anything but local power) still evident in parts of northern New England. The Virginia idea was that of "hegemonic liberty" (freedom to rule and not be ruled), at worst exemplified in the hierarchical "Slaveocracy" that valued freedom for those at the top but not for poor white trash or black slaves, at best in the aristocratic excellence of men such as George Washington. The Quaker idea was that of "reciprocal liberty" (freedom for me and for thou), at worst exemplified in the pacifistic pursuit of commerce without regard for nation or principle, at best in a quite modern-sounding respect for all human beings to pursue their own fulfillment. The frontier idea was that of "natural liberty" (a freedom without restraints of law or custom), at worst exemplified in the violent and often-emotionalistic chaos of life beyond the reach of civilized norms, at best in eternal vigilance with regard to the sovereignty of the individual.

Folklore and adages as a knowledge/wisdom transmittal mechanism of mental models and heuristics which in turn prime productivity.

From Folklore by Stelios Michalopoulos and Melanie Meng Xue. From the Abstract:

Folklore is the collection of traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth. This vast expressive body, studied by the corresponding discipline of folklore, has evaded the attention of economists. In this study we do four things that reveal the tremendous potential of this corpus for understanding comparative development and culture. First, we introduce and describe a unique catalogue of folklore that codes the presence of thousands of motifs for roughly 1,000 pre-industrial societies. Second, we use a dictionary-based approach to elicit group-specific measures of various traits related to the natural environment, institutional framework, and mode of subsistence. We establish that these proxies are in accordance with the ethnographic record, and illustrate how to use a group’s oral tradition to quantify non-extant characteristics of preindustrial societies. Third, we use folklore to uncover the historical cultural values of a group. Doing so allows us to test various influential conjectures among social scientists including the original affluent society, the culture of honor among pastoralists, the role of family in extended kinship systems and the intensity of trade and rule-following norms in politically centralized group. Finally, we explore how cultural norms inferred via text analysis of oral traditions predict contemporary attitudes and beliefs.

I have long been interested in the connection between folklore, folkways, aphorisms, proverbs, adages and societal progress and productivity. My supposition is that developed nations might be developed because there is a rich store of useful mental models and cultural coding sustained through folklore and adages.

Michalopoulos and Xue don't answer that question directly but they lay the groundwork for answering it. Here is a much earlier ungated version of their paper.

Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

From In the Beginning...Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself—and more than just graphical. Let’s call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.
Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces, and embracing graphical or sensorial ones—a trend that accounts for the success of both Microsoft and Disney?

Part of it is simply that the world is very complicated now—much more complicated than the hunter-gatherer world that our brains evolved to cope with—and we simply can’t handle all of the details. We have to delegate. We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft to make a few choices for us, close off some options, and give us a conveniently packaged executive summary.

But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.

We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books anymore, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations non-verbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it’s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

See also the late Neil Postman's marvellous Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future.

A list of my excerpts from Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future. from when I first read it ten years ago.

Ideology delays and exacerbates the day of reckoning

A rather overstretched argument in The Trap of Minority Studies Programs by John Ellis, but with a core truth.

Ellis argues that Universities side-track students, particularly minority students, away from a real education and instead channel them to non-productive, and in fact, destructive degrees which fail the student but serve the grander objectives of the faculty and administration.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, large populations of poor immigrants arrived in the U.S.–Irish, Italians, and Jews from Russia and Poland. Their extreme poverty placed them at the bottom of the social ladder, and they were often treated with contempt. Yet just a few generations later they were assimilated, and their rapid upward social mobility had produced mayors, senators, judges, and even Presidents from among their ranks. None of this could have happened without first-rate public education.

To be sure, they worked hard to get ahead, but they were not obstructed by something that afflicts the have-nots of today: as they walked through the school gates they were not met by people intent on luring them into Irish or Italian Studies programs whose purpose was to keep them in a state of permanent resentment over past wrongs at the hands of either Europeans or establishment America. Instead, they could give their full attention to learning. They took courses that informed them about their new land’s folkways and history, which gave them both the ability and the confidence needed to grasp the opportunities it offered them.

When we compare this story with what is happening to minority students today, we see a tragedy. Just as Pinocchio went off to school with high hopes, only to be waylaid by J. Worthington Foulfellow, minority students are met on the way to campus by hard-left radicals who claim to have the interests of the newcomers at heart but in reality prey on them to advance their own selfish interests. Of course, what black students need is the same solid traditional education that had raised Irish, Italians, and Jews to full equality. But that would not serve the campus radicals’ purpose. Disaffected radicals wanted to swell the ranks of the disaffected, not the ranks of the cheerfully upward mobile. Genuine progress for minority students would mean their joining and thus strengthening the mainstream of American society–the mainstream that campus radicals loathe.

[snip]

As thinkers, campus radicals are poor role models for students. Their ideas are simple and rigid, and they rely heavily on conspiracy thinking that infers far too much from too little. They are powered by emotional commitments that are highly resistant to the lessons of experience. As a result, their cherished ideas are now virtually obsolete, and strike any reasonably well-informed observer as downright silly. The minority students that they attract into their orbit are dragged down to this low intellectual level.

This background is the key to the fury that Naomi Schaefer Riley¹s criticisms of Black Studies dissertations unleashed. Radical leftists have achieved considerable influence on campus in part because they were able to add substantial numbers of incoming minorities to their numbers. They need those students in self-destructive Black Studies courses that keep them resentful and under-educated. But that is only possible if they can maintain the illusion that they help and support black students, rather than exploiting them. Ms Schaefer Riley was a threat to that illusion, and that is why she was attacked so vehemently.

Like I say, a little overdrawn as an argument.

But there is a gem in the mud. I think there are five bad consequences arising from the various Studies programs but the degrees of badness are not the same. I might argue that in ascending order of badness, Studies programs are responsible for 1) Ignorance, 2) Misunderstanding, 3) Anger, 4) Helplessness, and 5) Isolation. I view Isolation as the most egregious consequence.

Ignorance - Time spent studying the detail of out-of-the-mainstream and largely abandoned ideologies of grievance (postcolonialism, postmodernism, poststructuralism) displaces time spent on the broader sweep of history, literature, arts, sciences, etc. This is both bad and sad but not uncommon. The difference is that the displacement yields little in terms of productivity. An electrical engineer, a sciences major, an economics major also have large portfolios of knowledge that they have to acquire which in effect marginalize the amount of time they are able to dedicate to the classical humanities which provide a context for their specialized knowledge. The benefit, though, is that they emerge from university with a degree that is in demand and which allows them to be productive in a fashion that then allows them later to acquire the broader range of knowledge which they missed out on.

Misunderstanding - Everyone is to some degree ignorant, no one is omniscient. But some fields of knowledge cultivate an inquiring mind, critical thinking and a habit of openness combined with skepticism. In all the sciences and to some degree the harder humanities (such as economics) there is both a portfolio of knowledge to be acquired but there are also laws to be mastered. It is not enough to know that X is true but you have to be able to show why and under what conditions X is true. It is not enough to know that supply and demand determine price. You have to master the conditions under which that is true, why there are occasional exceptions, and the mechanisms by which supply and demand move the price. In contrast, many or most of the fields of grievance studies depend to a far greater degree on rhetoric and conviction than on skeptical enquiry and empirical evidence. It is enough to parrot the right words arising from belief without having to prove anything. Not only does the student lose by failing to acquire useful knowledge but more importantly the student also loses from failing to cultivate habits of critical thinking, inquiry, and skepticism. Even when provided evidence that contradict their beliefs, they are unable to process that information, thereby failing to adapt to a real world that does not match the abstract theoretical world in which they have been shaped.

Anger - This is a two sided outcome. Grievance studies are intended to convince their students of the legitimacy of their grievances and more than that to be sufficiently stirred to take action on those beliefs. It is broadly true that it is insufficient to have knowledge and to be skilled in alacritous thinking. Those are a great foundation but ultimately, there is only value if you deploy that knowledge and that skilled thinking to useful purpose. You have to be stirred to action. It is broadly better when the motif force is love or conscientiousness or respect or some other noble sentiment. But anger will do in a pinch. The problem for the students in grievance studies is that their motif force is almost always negative: envy or anger or jealousy or resentment. The negative motive is then compounded by being directed in a false or non-productive direction (arising from ignorance and misunderstanding).

Helplessness - Oddly in combination with the incitement to anger. In virtually all these grievance programs, there is a strong element that current status is a function solely of external conditions and malevolent actions of others and not at all a consequence of individual chosen actions and behaviors. In a world where everything is a consequence of impersonal forces and where the individual has no traction, there is a tendency towards fatalism and defeatism. Why bother when all is preordained? Of course that is not the reality at all. Individuals do make a difference, individual choices do have consequences. To the extent that you accept the doctrine of helplessness, your life circumstances will not improve at all and are likely to decline.

Isolation - I think this is the most egregious and difficult to overcome consequence of the grievance studies programs. Like a cult, you are lured in and then isolated from anything that contradicts the received wisdom. Not only do you lose knowledge, understanding and positive motivation but you lose the capacity to acquire those things as long as you remain hostage in epistemological isolation. Openness, transparency, skepticism, inquiry, agency, consequentiality, engagement all combined create a turbulent but ultimately self-correcting process for knowledge acquisition and refinement. Isolation and protection accomplish the reverse.

As an example of the counterproductiveness of this isolation, see the responses quoted in Ferguson Report Puts ‘Hands Up’ to Reality Test by Jack Healy, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and Vivian Yee.

Others rejected the Justice Department’s conclusions entirely, and said they still believed Mr. Brown was trying to surrender when he was killed.

They said they did not trust an earlier state grand jury process that had cleared Mr. Wilson, who left the Ferguson police force late last year, of state criminal charges in November, and had no faith in the federal investigation or the high bar set to find a law enforcement officer responsible for civil rights violations.

African-American congressmen and congressional staff members on the steps of the Capitol in December. Credit Gary Cameron/Reuters
“To me, he had his hands up,” said Michael T. McPhearson, co-chairman of the Don’t Shoot Coalition in St. Louis. “It doesn’t change it for me.”

In this world of grievance, it doesn't matter what the facts are, belief trumps everything, particularly belief in victimhood. This belief system blinds the angry advocates both from recognition of the real problem and real solutions that might dramatically improve everyone's circumstances. Ferguson is not a product of racism but of dysfunctional governance with a predatory system of funding through the legal system which disproportionately disadvantages the poor (who are disproportionately black).

Accepting the grievance studies program's interpretation that this is all a function of overt and covert racism on the part of the city council and the police department, all you have to do is replace white leaders and officers with black leaders and officers. We have more than enough empirical evidence to demonstrate that this will not solve the problem but will make it worse (lesser transparency and capacity to criticize.)

A classical liberal with an open, skeptical, inquiring mind not hampered by the victim lenses, would look at the Ferguson situation and identify changes in governance structure (likely mergers with comparable entities to achieve critical mass) and changes in government funding as the means to improve the quality of life of the residents. Ferguson is the product of long postponed fundamental changes made necessary by changing demographics, economy, technology, etc. What worked in the past clearly is not working today. No one will like higher property taxes but that has to be the first necessary step to move away from a predatory judicial system. The fact that no one wants higher property taxes likely means that the residents of Ferguson will have to choose either lower services or will have to merge with another municipality to achieve critical mass for service provision. That might not be the choice people want, but that is what they face and no amount of diversity training, affirmative action hires, gerrymandering or other nonproductive strategies will change that. It will just postpone the day of reckoning with reality.

Lower cousin marriage rates predict higher civicness and more inclusive institutions today

An interesting paper on a long running dispute - the sources of economic and political development. Some argue for an overwhelming role of factors such as geography, institutional strength, the nature of the institutions, culture, population IQ, religion, path dependency, technology, folkways, marital pairing and mating traditions, market economy, degree of freedom, etc. Some (and I number myself among these) argue that is a mix of all those things, attaching different weights to each.

From The Catholic Church, Kin Networks, And Institutional Development by Jonathan F. Schulz. From the Abstract:

Political institutions vary widely around the world, yet the origin of this variation is not well understood. This study tests the hypothesis that the Catholic Church’s medieval marriage policies dissolved extended kin networks and thereby fostered inclusive institutions. In a difference-in-difference setting, I demonstrate that exposure to the Church predicts the formation of inclusive, self-governed commune cities before the year 1500CE. Moreover, within medieval Christian Europe, stricter regional and temporal cousin marriage prohibitions are likewise positively associated with communes. Strengthening this finding, I show that longer Church exposure predicts lower cousin marriage rates; in turn, lower cousin marriage rates predict higher civicness and more inclusive institutions today. These associations hold at the regional, ethnicity and country level. Twentieth-century cousin marriage rates explain more than 50 percent of variation in democracy across countries today.

I think one of the West's great accomplishments, through the Age of Enlightenment, has been to model a transition towards viewing people as individuals with God given rights rather viewing the world as a set of zero-sum competing identity factions. Once people see themselves as having many identities, the mechanisms for affirmingly interacting with others across traditional barriers such as clan, tribe, gender, religion, class, etc. dramatically improves information flow, productivity, and capacity to accept others.

I fear the profound ignorance of the social justice, intersectional, critical theory Jacobins is facilitating the return of the primitive with their unrelenting focus on building barriers between individuals - barriers based on race, religion, class, gender, etc.

This research provides some evidence about the importance of removing barriers based on identity rather than building them up.

UPDATE: Related, The origins of WEIRD psychology by Tyler Cowen.

Recent research not only confirms the existence of substantial psychological variation around the globe but also highlights the peculiarity of populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD). We propose that much of this variation arose as people psychologically adapted to differing kin-based institutions—the set of social norms governing descent, marriage, residence and related domains. We further propose that part of the variation in these institutions arose historically from the Catholic Church’s marriage and family policies, which contributed to the dissolution of Europe’s traditional kin-based institutions, leading eventually to the predominance of nuclear families and impersonal institutions. By combining data on 20 psychological outcomes with historical measures of both kinship and Church exposure, we find support for these ideas in a comprehensive array of analyses across countries, among European regions and between individuals with different cultural backgrounds.

ALSO: Cousin Marriage Conundrum by Steve Sailer.

Statism and Individualism shifting the balance

Ross Douthat is wrestling. From Is the Religious Right Privileged? by Ross Douthat.

I mentioned in an earlier post that he seems troubled by something going on in the Mandarin Class salons of the great Swamp City. It is still not entirely clear, but reading this piece makes some things marginally more understandable.

There is plenty of nonsense he is responding to. He is, in good faith, trying to answer some bad faith arguments.

This might be the rub.

In fact, the religious right consists of an alliance of several groups that, without experiencing anything like the oppression visited on black Americans, have consistently occupied lower rungs in the American social hierarchy. Today’s evangelicalism is a complicated mix, but it is heavily descended from Bible Belt, prairie and Sun Belt folkways that were often poor and marginalized and rarely close to the corridors of power. Its allies in pro-life, pro-family politics include Orthodox Jews, whose history is not exactly one of power; Mormons, who were harried westward by a brutal persecution and then forced to rewrite their doctrines by state power; and conservative Roman Catholics, about whose difficult relationship to liberalism I will say more in a moment. And all of these groups are embedded in global religious communities in which persecution is as common as privilege — which if anything probably leads them to worry too much about what a hostile government might do to them, not to fail to imagine such oppression.

All of these groups have their own sins to answer for (my own Catholic Church’s scandal being particularly salient these days), and some of the stances religious conservatives take in their struggle with secular liberalism are clearly influenced for the worse by the racism that has pervaded every white religious tradition in America.

But while that secular liberalism, in its meritocratic-elite form, may present itself as a vehicle for long-suffering minorities to finally grasp power, in many ways it is also a peculiar post-Protestant extension of the old WASP ascendancy — shorn of that ascendancy’s piety and sense of duty, but still at war with fundamentalists on one flank and Catholics on the other, still determined (to borrow an image from National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty) to impose the current doctrines of Episcopalians on the Baptists and the Papists.

I especially like that last line because it rings so true. Being Episcopalian, I am conversant with the more doctrinaire and intolerant strands of the Episcopal Mandarin Class. I had always thought of them principally in terms of philosophy but I see Douthat's insight. The Mandarin Class Episcopalians rub a lot of traditional Episcopalians the wrong way. I can only imagine how they come across to Baptists and Papists. That special magical blend of intolerant doctrinaire arrogance mixed with enthusiastic malicious ignorance is not everyone's cup of tea.

It strikes me that Douthat is trying to navigate between religious belief and the pieties of the Mandarin Class which derive from postmodernism, critical theory, deconstructionism, etc. If you accept that frame, then Douthat's concerns and arguments make more sense to me.

I have a different frame. The Age of Enlightenment birthed two incompatible philosophies, one grounded in the sovereignty of the state and the other grounded in the sovereignty of the individual. Both are steeped in rule of law, empiricism, scientific methodology, logic, reason. But they are inconsistent with one another.

Sovereignty of the state encompasses Marxism, Statism, Totalitarianism, Fascism, etc. The center gets to make all the important decisions, usually by the credentialed technocrats. Those decisions tend to be oriented towards optimizing short term efficiency. How do we get the most for the least in the near term. It speaks the language of science but is rarely actually conversant with science. The real language is always the language of control and power.

In contrast, sovereignty of the individual speaks the language of freedom and encompasses a hodgepodge of philosophies within an arena of Classical Liberalism. Burkeans, Chesterfieldians, religious, bourgeoise, Hayeckian, Lockean, Smithian, etc. They are concerned about the efficacy of the State but they are as concerned or more about the freedom of individual people. They have a more complex view of the world. They are more aware of a broader set of trade-offs. They set greater store on tolerance AND compliance. They recognize the importance of emergent order versus deterministic order. They value strategic effectiveness over tactical efficiency. They will tolerate short term waste for long term effectiveness.

Both the Statists and Individualists share philosophical DNA. They both understand one another and simultaneously misconstrue one another. Any particular individual will be inclined on particular issues to tilt towards the opposite pole. Consistency is illusive.

My frame is that during World War II Statism surged to the fore. Only a massive concentration of focus by countries out of the Individualist tradition allowed them to defeat the Statists (Germany, Russia, Japan, Italy). But to do so, the Individualist cultures all adopted many of the trappings of Statism. Monetary controls, price controls, circumscribed freedom of speech, control of industry, etc.

After six years of WWII and then the next decade or two of Cold War, the return to Individualism was slow and by fits and starts. If you are on the inside of a Statist system, even if you believe in Classical Liberalism, it is tempting to ignore individual freedoms.

In the past couple of decades, the deep regulatory system of the State has begun to be challenged for a variety of reasons. The taste for freedom of individuals is returning. We are having conversations about the balance between individual freedom and State control which we have not had for a long time.

And the very act of having those conversations is making the Statists uncomfortable. The fact that people object to being governed badly is being misconstrued as people objecting to being governed at all.

I suspect that underlying fear and tension, that people want to be as free as responsibly possible, is what is driving the Statists crazy. Here, Europe, South America, the Antipodes. Everywhere.

I think we are locked in antiquated discussions about extremism and populism and communism, etc. when the real conversation is about the legitimacy of power in a system intended to maximize freedom.

Or I could be wrong.

Good intentions and bad outcomes

Ed Jong is a pretty good science writer for the The Atlantic magazine. Somewhat a victim of Atlantic's editorial bias towards "clickable" articles, but at core, a good journalist, writing well about interesting topics.

But like most in his field of journalism, there is a blindness to their own ideological assumptions and its implications. The field is steeped in social justice postmodernism, intersectionality, etc.

I didn't see it at the time but I am now reading I Spent Two Years Trying to Fix the Gender Imbalance in My Stories by Ed Yong from this past February.

I empathize with Yong's objectives - he wants to make sure he doesn't have any possible unconscious misogynistic prejudices that blinds him from quoting women scientists as often as he quotes male scientists. He goes back and examines his past articles. He uses an excel spreadsheet to track his on-gong performance. Good, rigorous approach to tackling a plausible problem. Yong is asking himself whether he has a hidden bias against women and finding ways to document whether that might be the case.

But is it a problem? Does a differential pattern in sourcing between male and female scientists reflect a bias on the part of Yong that he needs to correct or does it reflect a reality? We know that differential patterns of behavior are manifest everywhere. There are virtually no sub-groups which display perfect proportionality of the super group.

I refer to this as the social justice fractal assumption of sociology. Fractals demonstrate similar/identical patterns at any scale of analysis. Correspondingly, social justice jacobins assume that, for a given super population, if a group X has a representation of 10%, then for any sub-group of the super-group, then the proportion of group X also should be 10%. If Asian-Americans are 5% of the national population, then Asian-Americans should be 5% of all journalists (or firemen or farmers or Rotarians or elected officials or whatever other sub-group is of interest).

This social justice fractal assumption of sociology is paired with an assumption that any deviance from the fractal pattern of correspondence, any disparity, must be, and can only be, the result of conscious or unconscious malevolent prejudice on the part of an individual or an institution. Rounding out the trifecta of evil assumptions, social justice jacobins assume that any such observable disparity, being the result of bigoted prejudice, must be addressed by the state in an educational or coercive fashion, not infrequently via quotas.

If people's personal choices do not yield the fractal sociology which social justice jacobins want, then the jacobins want to force people to change their personal choices. That is naively rational if individuals are making evil decisions but completely destructive if free individuals are making good decisions which optimize their well-being across multiple dimensions of what is good.

Which is kind of a problem because in no country, at any time, ever, is there a perfect, or even close, fractal sociology. Virtually no sub-group is a fractal mirror of the supergroup on any of the possible variables which could be chosen.

Social justice jacobins are enamored of racial discrimination, gender discrimination, orientation discrimination, ethnic discrimination, national-origin discrimination. They throw in fat-shaming and slut-shaming on occasion just to mix it up. But why are these particular identities preferred? Or privileged, as one might claim? This is one of the things to which SJJs are blind. They fail to recognize that their hierarchy of privileges is in itself a prejudice, and a malevolent one at that.

What are other identities that are pertinent, often more pertinent in terms of how people choose to identify themselves? Marital status, age, familial structure, handedness, height, morbidity, religion, territorial locality, social status, educational status, ableness, mobility, affiliative ability, folkways, work habits, culture, time discounting preferences, self-control, etc.. The list is endless. All of these are explanatory variables for disparate outcomes.

If you look at the average household income for Hispanics and Japanese Americans and see that the former earn $40,000 while the latter earn $70,000 there is no logic that dictates that that differential is due to either negative or positive prejudice. Factors which materially influence household income include age (middle aged people earn more than younger people), education attainment (more years of education and degrees attained is correlated with higher income), morbidity (healthier people earn more than sicker people), urbanity (city people earn more than rural people), etc.

Virtually all the household income differentials between Japanese and Hispanic Americans are explained by these factors. Japanese households are, on average, older, more educated, more concentrated in cities, more concentrated in professions, have better health, etc. Bigotry has nothing to do with it.

But that is reality and does not impinge on the SJJ article of faith that all disparities between groups can only be explained by bigotry.

Another stumbling block for the SJJ trifecta of evil assumptions is that those countries with the greatest degrees of cultural, social and legal egalitarianism (Anglo-phone, Scandinavia, northwest Europe) between genders also demonstrate the highest levels of gender differentials in career choices and income outcomes.

SJJs are unconsciously imposing an explanation for disparities in a bigoted fashion and against the evidence.

Back to Yong. He musters a lot of indicators which support the idea that women in sciences are discriminated against. He fails to present the other side of the argument, the other studies which demonstrate that there is no discrimination, that women are preferentially selected in both the academy and in jobs, etc. Both sides of the argument are supported by a lot of research but taken together the research is broadly inconclusive. It is only conclusive if you select only those studies which support one side of the argument or the other.

Yong is testing himself to make sure he is not unconsciously excluding women scientists from his articles. Great goal.

Shortly after Adrienne published her analysis, I looked back at the pieces that I had published in 2016 thus far. Across all 23 of them, 24 percent of the quoted sources were women. And of those stories, 35 percent featured no female voices at all. That surprised me. I knew it wasn’t going to be 50 percent, but I didn’t think it would be that low, either. I knew that I care about equality, so I deluded myself into thinking that I wasn’t part of the problem. I assumed that my passive concern would be enough. Passive concern never is.

I’ve since been trying to actively redress the balance, by spending more time searching for women to interview. For any given story, I almost always try to contact several sources. If, for example, I’m writing about a new scientific paper, I will interview the scientists behind the work, but also pass the paper around to get comments from independent researchers. To find the right people, I’ll look at related work that’s cited by the paper in question. I’ll google for people who do similar research. I’ll check Twitter. I’ll look at past news stories. To find more female sources, I just spend a little more time on all of the above—ending the search only when I have a list that includes several women.

Crucially, I tracked how I was doing in a simple spreadsheet. I can’t overstate the importance of that: It is a vaccine against self-delusion. It prevents me from wrongly believing that all is well. I’ve been doing this for two years now. Four months after I started, the proportion of women who have a voice in my stories hit 50 percent, and has stayed roughly there ever since, varying between 42 and 61 percent from month to month. And of the 312 stories I’ve written in that two-year window, only 7 percent feature no female voices. (This figure excludes the small number of stories that feature no voices of any gender.)

What Yong doesn't address, indeed avoids, is what percentage is the right target? He says it won't be 50% but he thinks it should be more than 24% (his actual performance). What should it be? 25%, 30%, 35%, 40%? He doesn't say explicitly and that's kind of a crucial point. He seems happy that it is now 50% and that seems to be the acceptable level to which he has been striving.

If you are insisting on fractal sociology, you have to know the pattern. And obviously it is going to differ by field. If you have an article about forestry work and you are interviewing lumberjacks, it is no surprise if 99% of your quotes from lumberjacks come from male lumberjacks because it is a field that is virtually without women lumberjacks. Trying to ensure that 25% of your interviews come from female lumberjacks, or 50%, is obviously not correct, indeed misleading and possibly skewing.

The Department of Labor is a good place to start in terms of estimating the labor force pattern to guide what a representative base of interviews might look like. Here is one such study focusing on fields in which women are underrepresented.

But Yong is, presumably, not looking at the averages for the field in general. As a journalist, he is wanting to talk to the leading lights. There is patchy information on this, depending on the field. My research over the years covering medical, legal, accounting, government, authors and writing awards, movie directors, research scientists, academics, board memberships, etc. indicates that the broad parameters are that women constitute between 15-30% of the leadership or award winners in any given field.

Why not 50%? The elephant in the room is biology. Women take time off for pregnancies, many take longer breaks, some decide on long duration career interruptions, some never return to the workforce, some return part-time, some take the opportunity to change fields. They make those decisions, presumably in conjunction with their partner. They are influenced by their personal ambitions, the financial reward structure of their fields, the relative prospects of their field, their own personal values, social expectations, etc. A highly variable set of factors with highly variable weights. It is impossible to draw aggregate conclusions from highly heterogenous individual decisions.

Cutting edge performance, top positions, top awards, are all usually associated with distinctive accomplishments which are the result of long duration effort (many years), excessive effort (long hours), persistent effort (no breaks or interruptions).

The 15-30% makes a lot of sense if you are willing to acknowledge the heterogeneity of people's values and objectives in combination with the requirements needed to be among the top performers. Women can obviously be top performers in virtually every field. It is worth noting that gender disparities in patents, science papers, business founders, executives, journalists, author awards, etc. are the greatest in Scandinavia where the culture and laws are most empirically egalitarian.

In terms of proportionality, the US beats Sweden in virtually every field of endeavor in terms of having the highest number of top performers being women in a far wider range of fields.

Yong is trying to increase the number of women he quotes from? Why? 24% is solidly in the 15-30% range. What number should it be? If he is writing about theoretical physics, it would be close to 10% (not many top theoretical physicists are female). If it is biology or sociology, it is likely to be more like 40 or 45%. I cannot tell whether his 24% achieved number indicates that he is over or under representing women because it depends on the mix of fields about which he has been writing.

Given that he is a science writer (a set of fields with, in general, below average female participation) and making the assumption that he is writing about the leading performers in those fields (where female representation is de facto lower), we would expect that women would be at the lower end of the 15-30% range. I.e. Pretty much where he was at the beginning before he undertook this social justice experiment.

If indeed, women are, say 25% of the top performers in the fields about which he is writing, then what are we to conclude given that he now has 50% of his sources being women?

I think it can only be one of two things.

1) He is discriminating against men among the top performers. If 35% of the top performers in a field are women and he is quoting 50%, then he is actively discriminating against men with equal performance based solely on their gender. The Social Justice Jacobins are, potentially, behaving in exactly the bigoted fashion as the phantom strawman against whom they think they are fighting.

2) He is dipping deeper into the performance well in order to get his numbers. He samples the best performers and only gets 35% who are female. He then goes the next level down in terms of accomplishments and capabilities to get the extra 15% he is seeking. But now you are dealing with mixed populations, apples and oranges. Whatever research he is doing is compromised.

As a hypothetical: Assume you are doing research on the effectiveness of corporate training on managers. 35% of managers are women. You interview 100 manager participants. For your resulting story, you only have 35% women. So you go back and you interview some supervisors (next layer down) and maybe even some front line workers until you have your extra 15. But what you have now are, hypothetically 50 male managers, 35 female managers, 10 female supervisors, and 5 female front line workers.

If you find a difference in training effectiveness between men and women, is it because the training is poorly designed for women or is it because your sample for women is no longer a sample of women managers?

These are the type of issues that creep in when you deliberately oversample in order to hit a quota that is not representative of the population.

Yong acknowledges, though he downplays it, that he is investing extra time in order to hit his self-imposed 50% quota. So there is a productivity hit to him at a professional level.

And it is even worse than he highlights. He notes:

As the year went on, I found that I would need to contact around 1.3 men to get one male quote, and around 1.6 women to get one female one.

So not only are women materially less represented in his field than men, compared to the 50% quota, but women are ~20% less willing to be interviewed when he contacts them. So not only does he need to spend extra time finding names to make up his 50% quota but he also has to chase more of them in order to hit his mark.

It may make Yong feel good, and it may earn him kudos in a field dominated by social justice thinking, but as a journalist is he doing his readers any favors and is he even doing women scientists any favors?

Readers are left to conclude that either they are getting biased reporting (he kept the quality standard but discriminated against a class of people in favor of another class of people) OR that they are getting misrepresented and subpar reporting (he had to go to the second and third tier of performers to hit his quota.)

Women scientists are similarly negatively affected. If they are part of a quota then their expertise is discounted even though they might be the experts. The reader can't tell whether they are getting the equal quality expert or the filler. If the woman is a filler, then she is being held to a standard of competence which she might not yet have achieved, and that can cut two ways - it either opens opportunities or she can suffer a setback from misplaced expectations.

Internally, within their field of endeavor, women are being privileged by journalists, and their male peers may resent the privileging with possible, but uncertain consequences. The women themselves, may end up wasting time on journalists that would have been more beneficially expended on field activities.

The social justice idealist assumes they are doing right by the target of their sympathy, but more often than not they can create bad outcomes. (See Doing Bad by Doing Good for the dynamic in economic development).

I have seen this in my career in management consulting. In the mid-1980s there was a concerted push to make it easier for new mothers to stay in the field. Management consulting involves frequent travel, unpredictable travel, long hours and unpredictable hours. Career results are a cumulation of typically 10-15 years sustained performance. Not a set of factors obviously compatible with personal pregnancy and reasonable expectations of time invested in infants and young children.

We were losing too many young women to reasonable personal objectives of family and parenthood. Our early efforts were ham-fisted. OK, we'll reduce the travel burdens on pregnant and young mothers. Except the travel requirements did not go away. Male consultants and single female consultants had to take up the slack which set up all sorts of undesirable team dynamics.

We got more and more sophisticated over the next fifteen years, primarily through trial and error. We ended up striking a sort of median where we were providing career support, preferences and benefits to women which we did not provide to men but not so many that it became self-defeating. But one of the noticeable unintended and undesirable side-effects by the mid- or late nineties was the differential pattern of public speaking requests for our male and female partners.

Male partners tended to be invited to speak at industry or sector events - "Supply Chain trends in the Utility Industry", for example. These type of speaking events aren't especially great at driving new business but they do to a degree. As a profession, it was something you did between managing the business, managing people and serving clients.

On the other hand, our women partners were getting invitations to speak on things such as "Women Executives in the Tech Sector" or "Managing work life balance in consulting". Speaking gigs that valued them as women rather than as experts. These type of speaking events were far less likely to drive business. And driving new business is an important partner role which in turn drives partner compensation.

Women partners, if they wanted to do speeches, had the opportunity to do so, to a greater extent than their male counterparts. But if they did so, they reduced the amount of time on activities for which they were rewarded such as managing the business, managing people and serving clients. And on an activity that wouldn't lead to new clients.

It was, in the scheme of things, a very minor problem that they were more than capable of managing themselves, but it was a notable pattern of how good intentions can lead to potentially negative outcomes.

Consciously choosing to discriminate against people based on their race or gender or religion or any other non-pertinent factor is bad - whether done by an ignorant bigot, or by a well-intended social justice-pursuing journalist. But we now have a lot of advocates asserting that discrimination is just fine so long as the discrimination is done against the right targets.

Yong is a good writer. I hope he thinks this through and ditches the quotas.