Eric Topol vs. CDC; Hanania talks his book; Caplan talks his next book; Razib Khan on SAT tests; Bari Weiss on minds that changed in 2021, including Patrick Collison; Kling; Roberts/McArdle
Regarding Razib Khan on abolishing tests, it might be observed that this can also work as a way for the privileged to overcome the competitive advantage of East Asians.
On “somewheres” vs. “anywheres”: This is a take by people who, if they move about, move from blue city to blue city. Out here in rural America people are very wedded to place, and they despise government at all levels, even the local building inspector. It’s specifically the crypto millionaires who are “anywheres.” But the blue elites favor large federal govt. so that they have one set of rules (favorable to themselves) to follow as they migrate to the next blue city.
I will quote a comment I made at Kling's old blog some time ago:
---
I am hardly the only one to note that “rootlessness”, a popular adjective for the elite of the faction Bo has abandoned, doesn’t quite put the finger on it. The same goes for “portable identities”, a similar expression applied by David Goodhart to what was at other times called “creative class”, “symbolic analysts”[, "anywheres" - added now] etc., all sets which have very large intersections with the upper reaches of the set of people with progressive beliefs – what Moldbug used to called Brahmins. It is easy to notice that these so-called portable identities are not in fact portable to places where there is no internet, knowledge and/or media economy and the social ecosystem built around these. So one might say that there exists a distributed society, and to some extent a distributed state, that consists of all the places and social milieus to which portable identities are in fact portable. It obviously includes much of urban agglomerations all over the Western world. I suggest that the bearers of portable identities are in fact rooted in this distributed society just as much as Bo’s rural West Virginians are rooted in their rural necks in the woods. And least in America this distributed society has its historical and geographical roots in (where else?) Massachusetts.
Just like Fish distinguished between Real and Fake (i.e., 'boutique') Multiculturalism, one can distinguish between Real and Fake (i.e. 'imperial') Cosmopolitanism.
Consider two examples of "dispersed somewheres."
First, there are the soldiers (or, more broadly, colonists) of an empire with bases spread across all the diverse provinces across the many peoples and vast imperial territory. On the one hand, they are hyper-mobile: they can pick up from any base and land on any other base, anywhere, anytime, and do indeed rotate among them quite frequently. On the other hand, every base is more-or-less the same, a "little imperium", and the soldiers are more-or-less doing the same jobs, following the same rules, and speaking the same language (to each other, often to locals too), in different geographic locations. Anything that makes one locality different from another is mostly 'local color', the variance of which can be accommodated and which, in the scheme of things, is usually of minor importance. Anytime the empire acquired a new territory and builds a new base, it stays more or less the same.
Another example is a 'disapora' nation with small ethnic enclaves in lots of places which also tend to look and feel like all the other little ethnic enclaves. Not too long ago it was typically easy for a Chinese or Jewish merchant to travel between Jewish quarters or Chinatowns thousands of miles apart and immediately get settled, integrated, and down to business, with perhaps a little help when a matter involving the locals came up - as if they never left their proper 'somewhere' at all.
And now every big city in the world has at least some portion of it which resembles that 'somewhere', but for the globally-mobile white-collar worker somewhere down the status ladder from "Davos jet-set integrated world-elite culture".
But the difference is, the 'somewhere' tends to wipe away all the color, and homogenize not just to the imperial style, but to empty, soulless, blandness. The Chinatowns have rich Chinese culture, the military bases have rich Imperial culture, but the 'anywhere spots' will - it seems automatically as a consequence of its own nature - reduce down to the bare-minimum anywhere culture.
The problem with being 'placeless' or 'people-less' is that it tends to eliminate the salience and perpetuation of all the objects and institutions that are the stuff of particularity and which are thus essential to make something a 'place' for human experience and culture, in Marc Auge's sense of the word.
He already noticed this trend 30 years ago, which is why we wrote his widely misunderstood 'non-place' essay. You kind of have to step in the mind of early 90's Frenchman to get his point, and even contemporary Frenchmen, increasingly affected by being increasingly un-placed, can't do that anymore. The problem is, if you adopt a kind of universalist or globalist perspective, all human particularities are viewed like variances in the landscape from 30,000 feet, as essentially arbitrary and mere curiosities and historical contingencies, perhaps beautiful but only in terms of something you might enjor to see in a museum or as a tourist attraction, not as an extension of your own identity, heritage, existence.
But not 'meaningful'. What Auge meant by 'non-place' are the sites and experiences which can only retain their meagre salience by default, as a manifestation of their utility fulfilling a function which is akin to all the indispensable services and infrastructure that one needs on one's 'new posting' to 'hit the ground running', or which has become a mere convergence of convention of some support role for the modern lifestyle. A hotel, a restaurant, a bank, etc. Not so much that form follows function, but when all there is function, then inevitably, there will just be one, bland, homogenized form, everywhere and 'anywhere'.
So, it isn't just that all the places the 'anywheres' go have been converging for a long time (though check out Darren Anderson's article in The Atlantic from two years ago, "Why Every City Feels The Same Now", in which he name-drops Auge but, I think, fails to grasp Auge's broader point about the mechanism that gave his prediction such accuracy and force.) It's the impact they are having because of the conceit that they aren't just another set of 'somewheres', but they are, just 'imperial somewheres.'
I think there are an awful lot of people in the upper tiers who think they would have gotten to go to an even better school if their test scores had been higher. The US educational system isn’t based on high-risk testing except at the very end, unlike foreign systems.
"I would not under-estimate the power of the backlash coming from the Somewheres".
I will, seeing as the Elites are all on the side of the Anywheres, and are making things ever more clear, that that they'll delighted to liquidate those who stand in their way.
Hard to trust Caplan's assessment of the evidence of the costs and benefits of the welfare state when he's made it abundantly and publicly clear that he blames the American poor for their predicament.
I think Khan is wrong here. Opposition to tests isn't motivated by self-interest among the 'privileged' (though that makes for good rhetoric). Grades and other metrics are much easier to manipulate to yield the 'right' conclusions. See this Quillette article on how grading can be fudged to make sure the right people get ahead (https://quillette.com/2021/12/02/standards-based-grading-will-ruin-education/). It's possible that the process can be captured by rich people, but in theory 'equity' can be attained by highly subjective methods like grading; it cannot possibly be attained with test scores.
Re needing to change people's identity, an interesting anecdote: East German Economists in the 50s tried to gently push the government away from central planning. They did so not by openly arguing for free market reforms, but by arguing for free market reforms under the auspices of technological innovation. They talked about decentralized production networks (something like markets) using terms like 'cybernetics' as though they were describing some new, advanced kind of socialism. This is one example of trying to change one's ideas without changing their identity. One can try to convince socialists to support capitalist ideas without letting them know that what they're supporting capitalism. Of course, for those East German economists, it only worked for awhile; eventually, the government realized that these reforms were basically liberal reforms, and shut it down, and the economists got fired or sent to re-education.
You wrote the reaction to Caplan's idea that political incentives are to do bad stuff that looks good would be that anyone who does not already agree with him will respond to those arguments by sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming epithets at him. Of course they will; he is attacking a sacred salvationist belief, namely that we have the ability to enter into a collective management of human affairs so as to ward off all the evils that beset the human condition. And this dogma also functions as the moral cover for self-interest; it is the justification for all the grift. Caplan's observation is a dagger aimed at the heart of such belief.
Rather it also suggests that ameliorative change has to be very cautious given all the ways it can and will go wrong given the perverse incentives. The types that react as Arnold suggests are not typically looking for improvements at the margin, but in"fundamentally transforming" the society.
Re: "To people whose identity is tied closely to their beliefs that markets are bad, Bryan simply represents 'outside opposition,' and his book will generate a hostile reaction. I would speculate that changing people’s minds requires something other than logic—it requires changing their identity."
If I understand Bryan Caplan's views correctly, he deems immigration restrictions and housing regulations the two most harmful restrictions on free markets. (See his book, Open Borders; and his forthcoming book, Build, Baby, Build.)
If I understand the median voter correctly, opposition to deregulation involves both logic and identity. For example, most homeowners deem themselves stakeholders in (a) a private investment and (b) a way of life. They believe, more or less reasonably, that their stakes rest on an implicit contract in status-quo housing regulations. They fear, not without logic, that housing deregulation might amount to an uncompensated taking.
Here (at the link below) is an empirical illustration from a recent study of “a major zoning reform on the build environment” (p. 3) in Sao Paolo, Brazil:
(Santosh Anagol, "Estimating the Economic Value of Zoning Reform," NBER working paper no. 29440, October 2021)
The authors quantify the magnitude of the reform as follows: “the maximum BAR [built-area-ratio] in the city’s approximate 45,000 blocks increased from 1.54 to 2.09, allowing 36% more construction for a given lot size, and 45% of the city blocks had a maximum BAR increase of 1 or more.” (p. 3) They estimate that “nominal house price losses faced by existing homeowners and landlord overshadow all consumer welfare gains.” (Abstract)
My point is not to put too much weight on one NBER paper. Rather, my point is about political economy and persuasion. If housing regulations really block gains from trade, and if current homeowners really have some reason to fear change, then it would behoove even libertarians to ponder whether and how the visible hand might compensate current homeowners for deregulation, now.
Instead, centralizers seem to hold the field in housing-deregulation policy. They would transfer jurisdiction from municipalities to States. See, for example, "Katherine Levine Einstein on Neighborhood Defenders" (EconTalk, 14 December 2020):
Outside the Beatles, most Liverpool groups were not very good. They simply covered the same Chuck Berry and R&B songs as everyone else. None came close to the Beatles in quality of their original songs - if they had any. The Searchers were a very good cover band with nothing much in the way of original songs. Gerry and the Pacemakers, another Liverpool group, had an appealing lead singer, and were produced by Beatles producer George Martin, who picked songs for them from London's Tin-Pan Alley writers.
But why don’t foreign policy hawks pay any attention to economic growth issues like immigration lower deficits, free trade urban land use restrictions taxation of net CO2 emisiones?
Regarding Razib Khan on abolishing tests, it might be observed that this can also work as a way for the privileged to overcome the competitive advantage of East Asians.
On “somewheres” vs. “anywheres”: This is a take by people who, if they move about, move from blue city to blue city. Out here in rural America people are very wedded to place, and they despise government at all levels, even the local building inspector. It’s specifically the crypto millionaires who are “anywheres.” But the blue elites favor large federal govt. so that they have one set of rules (favorable to themselves) to follow as they migrate to the next blue city.
I will quote a comment I made at Kling's old blog some time ago:
---
I am hardly the only one to note that “rootlessness”, a popular adjective for the elite of the faction Bo has abandoned, doesn’t quite put the finger on it. The same goes for “portable identities”, a similar expression applied by David Goodhart to what was at other times called “creative class”, “symbolic analysts”[, "anywheres" - added now] etc., all sets which have very large intersections with the upper reaches of the set of people with progressive beliefs – what Moldbug used to called Brahmins. It is easy to notice that these so-called portable identities are not in fact portable to places where there is no internet, knowledge and/or media economy and the social ecosystem built around these. So one might say that there exists a distributed society, and to some extent a distributed state, that consists of all the places and social milieus to which portable identities are in fact portable. It obviously includes much of urban agglomerations all over the Western world. I suggest that the bearers of portable identities are in fact rooted in this distributed society just as much as Bo’s rural West Virginians are rooted in their rural necks in the woods. And least in America this distributed society has its historical and geographical roots in (where else?) Massachusetts.
---
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/some-are-teachable/#comment-509495
Right. And I think it's even worse than that.
Just like Fish distinguished between Real and Fake (i.e., 'boutique') Multiculturalism, one can distinguish between Real and Fake (i.e. 'imperial') Cosmopolitanism.
Consider two examples of "dispersed somewheres."
First, there are the soldiers (or, more broadly, colonists) of an empire with bases spread across all the diverse provinces across the many peoples and vast imperial territory. On the one hand, they are hyper-mobile: they can pick up from any base and land on any other base, anywhere, anytime, and do indeed rotate among them quite frequently. On the other hand, every base is more-or-less the same, a "little imperium", and the soldiers are more-or-less doing the same jobs, following the same rules, and speaking the same language (to each other, often to locals too), in different geographic locations. Anything that makes one locality different from another is mostly 'local color', the variance of which can be accommodated and which, in the scheme of things, is usually of minor importance. Anytime the empire acquired a new territory and builds a new base, it stays more or less the same.
Another example is a 'disapora' nation with small ethnic enclaves in lots of places which also tend to look and feel like all the other little ethnic enclaves. Not too long ago it was typically easy for a Chinese or Jewish merchant to travel between Jewish quarters or Chinatowns thousands of miles apart and immediately get settled, integrated, and down to business, with perhaps a little help when a matter involving the locals came up - as if they never left their proper 'somewhere' at all.
And now every big city in the world has at least some portion of it which resembles that 'somewhere', but for the globally-mobile white-collar worker somewhere down the status ladder from "Davos jet-set integrated world-elite culture".
But the difference is, the 'somewhere' tends to wipe away all the color, and homogenize not just to the imperial style, but to empty, soulless, blandness. The Chinatowns have rich Chinese culture, the military bases have rich Imperial culture, but the 'anywhere spots' will - it seems automatically as a consequence of its own nature - reduce down to the bare-minimum anywhere culture.
The problem with being 'placeless' or 'people-less' is that it tends to eliminate the salience and perpetuation of all the objects and institutions that are the stuff of particularity and which are thus essential to make something a 'place' for human experience and culture, in Marc Auge's sense of the word.
He already noticed this trend 30 years ago, which is why we wrote his widely misunderstood 'non-place' essay. You kind of have to step in the mind of early 90's Frenchman to get his point, and even contemporary Frenchmen, increasingly affected by being increasingly un-placed, can't do that anymore. The problem is, if you adopt a kind of universalist or globalist perspective, all human particularities are viewed like variances in the landscape from 30,000 feet, as essentially arbitrary and mere curiosities and historical contingencies, perhaps beautiful but only in terms of something you might enjor to see in a museum or as a tourist attraction, not as an extension of your own identity, heritage, existence.
But not 'meaningful'. What Auge meant by 'non-place' are the sites and experiences which can only retain their meagre salience by default, as a manifestation of their utility fulfilling a function which is akin to all the indispensable services and infrastructure that one needs on one's 'new posting' to 'hit the ground running', or which has become a mere convergence of convention of some support role for the modern lifestyle. A hotel, a restaurant, a bank, etc. Not so much that form follows function, but when all there is function, then inevitably, there will just be one, bland, homogenized form, everywhere and 'anywhere'.
So, it isn't just that all the places the 'anywheres' go have been converging for a long time (though check out Darren Anderson's article in The Atlantic from two years ago, "Why Every City Feels The Same Now", in which he name-drops Auge but, I think, fails to grasp Auge's broader point about the mechanism that gave his prediction such accuracy and force.) It's the impact they are having because of the conceit that they aren't just another set of 'somewheres', but they are, just 'imperial somewheres.'
Re Standardized Tests
I think there are an awful lot of people in the upper tiers who think they would have gotten to go to an even better school if their test scores had been higher. The US educational system isn’t based on high-risk testing except at the very end, unlike foreign systems.
"I would not under-estimate the power of the backlash coming from the Somewheres".
I will, seeing as the Elites are all on the side of the Anywheres, and are making things ever more clear, that that they'll delighted to liquidate those who stand in their way.
Hard to trust Caplan's assessment of the evidence of the costs and benefits of the welfare state when he's made it abundantly and publicly clear that he blames the American poor for their predicament.
The same Eric Topol that was asking for the vaccine to be delayed until after the election? Yep.
I think Khan is wrong here. Opposition to tests isn't motivated by self-interest among the 'privileged' (though that makes for good rhetoric). Grades and other metrics are much easier to manipulate to yield the 'right' conclusions. See this Quillette article on how grading can be fudged to make sure the right people get ahead (https://quillette.com/2021/12/02/standards-based-grading-will-ruin-education/). It's possible that the process can be captured by rich people, but in theory 'equity' can be attained by highly subjective methods like grading; it cannot possibly be attained with test scores.
Re needing to change people's identity, an interesting anecdote: East German Economists in the 50s tried to gently push the government away from central planning. They did so not by openly arguing for free market reforms, but by arguing for free market reforms under the auspices of technological innovation. They talked about decentralized production networks (something like markets) using terms like 'cybernetics' as though they were describing some new, advanced kind of socialism. This is one example of trying to change one's ideas without changing their identity. One can try to convince socialists to support capitalist ideas without letting them know that what they're supporting capitalism. Of course, for those East German economists, it only worked for awhile; eventually, the government realized that these reforms were basically liberal reforms, and shut it down, and the economists got fired or sent to re-education.
You wrote the reaction to Caplan's idea that political incentives are to do bad stuff that looks good would be that anyone who does not already agree with him will respond to those arguments by sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming epithets at him. Of course they will; he is attacking a sacred salvationist belief, namely that we have the ability to enter into a collective management of human affairs so as to ward off all the evils that beset the human condition. And this dogma also functions as the moral cover for self-interest; it is the justification for all the grift. Caplan's observation is a dagger aimed at the heart of such belief.
But it is also aimed at the idea of ameliorative change
Rather it also suggests that ameliorative change has to be very cautious given all the ways it can and will go wrong given the perverse incentives. The types that react as Arnold suggests are not typically looking for improvements at the margin, but in"fundamentally transforming" the society.
Re: "To people whose identity is tied closely to their beliefs that markets are bad, Bryan simply represents 'outside opposition,' and his book will generate a hostile reaction. I would speculate that changing people’s minds requires something other than logic—it requires changing their identity."
If I understand Bryan Caplan's views correctly, he deems immigration restrictions and housing regulations the two most harmful restrictions on free markets. (See his book, Open Borders; and his forthcoming book, Build, Baby, Build.)
If I understand the median voter correctly, opposition to deregulation involves both logic and identity. For example, most homeowners deem themselves stakeholders in (a) a private investment and (b) a way of life. They believe, more or less reasonably, that their stakes rest on an implicit contract in status-quo housing regulations. They fear, not without logic, that housing deregulation might amount to an uncompensated taking.
Here (at the link below) is an empirical illustration from a recent study of “a major zoning reform on the build environment” (p. 3) in Sao Paolo, Brazil:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3953966
(Santosh Anagol, "Estimating the Economic Value of Zoning Reform," NBER working paper no. 29440, October 2021)
The authors quantify the magnitude of the reform as follows: “the maximum BAR [built-area-ratio] in the city’s approximate 45,000 blocks increased from 1.54 to 2.09, allowing 36% more construction for a given lot size, and 45% of the city blocks had a maximum BAR increase of 1 or more.” (p. 3) They estimate that “nominal house price losses faced by existing homeowners and landlord overshadow all consumer welfare gains.” (Abstract)
My point is not to put too much weight on one NBER paper. Rather, my point is about political economy and persuasion. If housing regulations really block gains from trade, and if current homeowners really have some reason to fear change, then it would behoove even libertarians to ponder whether and how the visible hand might compensate current homeowners for deregulation, now.
Instead, centralizers seem to hold the field in housing-deregulation policy. They would transfer jurisdiction from municipalities to States. See, for example, "Katherine Levine Einstein on Neighborhood Defenders" (EconTalk, 14 December 2020):
https://www.econtalk.org/jenny-schuetz-on-land-regulation-and-the-housing-market/
"That culture produced the Beatles and others"
What "others"? Perhaps it's because I'm a millenial, but I don't know what other bands were from Liverpool or Hamburg.
https://theguideliverpool.com/it-wasnt-just-about-the-beatles-here-are-12-other-bands-who-made-the-1960s-merseybeat-scene/
I remember Cilla Black from Last Night in Soho, and that's about it.
Outside the Beatles, most Liverpool groups were not very good. They simply covered the same Chuck Berry and R&B songs as everyone else. None came close to the Beatles in quality of their original songs - if they had any. The Searchers were a very good cover band with nothing much in the way of original songs. Gerry and the Pacemakers, another Liverpool group, had an appealing lead singer, and were produced by Beatles producer George Martin, who picked songs for them from London's Tin-Pan Alley writers.
I've always preferred Manchester and Sheffield, the Factory Records/Warp Records powerhouses iirc.
But why don’t foreign policy hawks pay any attention to economic growth issues like immigration lower deficits, free trade urban land use restrictions taxation of net CO2 emisiones?