Links to Consider, 9/29

Peggy Noonan on standards of conduct; Louise Perry on the individual, family, and community; Simon Cooke on managerialism; Alice Evans on the zero-sum paper

Peggy Noonan writes,

Here are reasons John Fetterman, and all senators, should dress like an adult.

It shows respect for colleagues. It implies you see them as embarked on the serious business of the nation, in which you wish to join them.

It shows respect for the institution. “Daniel Webster walked there.” And Henry Clay, “Fighting Bob” La Follette, Arthur Vandenberg and Robert Taft. The U.S. Senate is the self-declared world’s greatest deliberative body.

It shows a mature acceptance of your role, suggesting you’ve internalized the idea of service. You are a public servant; servants by definition make sacrifices.

It reflects an inner discipline. It’s not always easy or convenient to dress like a grown-up. You’ve got to get the suit from the cleaners, the shoes from the cobbler. The effort means you bothered, took the time, went to the trouble.

I feel the same way about refraining from using four-letter words. Doing so says “I will discipline myself in your presence, out of respect for your humanity.”

Arguably, it does not mean that anymore. But even now, I would say that among people that I observe, the use of four-letter words is inversely related to their level of kindness and respect toward others.

I’ll admit that sometimes a four-letter word adds humor. For example, Louise Perry writes,

Economic and social liberalism go hand in hand (or are, as Mary Harrington likes to say, ‘two cheeks of the same arse’) because the latter enables the former. You need to be maximally mobile, open-minded, and self-interested if you’re going to prioritise money making. And those ambitious individualists then go on to build businesses and create technologies that benefit other people. A little bit of wealth allows such people to escape the pre-modern village, and by doing so they create much more wealth. Wealth creation is a good thing.

There is something to be said for individualism and for mobility. There is also something to be said for lots of close cousins living in the shtetl.

But there is a trade off. At a societal level, we can be rich, or we can be communitarian. I don’t think we can be both – at least, not for long.

Simon Cooke writes,

we are in a period where the dominant governing ideology is best called ‘managerialism’. We have a set of accepted certainties: that the state directs the economy, that the climate is changing to our detriment, that health and welfare can only be provided by the government, that individuals are more important than family and that the international order is good. And the task of the government is to manage policies founded on these certainties.

The issue with this managerialism isn’t that experts aren’t useful, or even important, but that it results in an increase in what Geert Hofstede called ‘power distance’. Because the people who we elect are only tangentially involved in the development of policy choices, there is little or no contest between competing choices outside those choices constrained by accepted certainties….Managerialism treats ordinary people as either a problem or as clients where commentary alternates between characterising them as ignorant, probably racist, gammons or else as hapless victims who require the state’s help.

even when there is a clear and significant majority in support of tougher action on crime or illegal immigration, the proponents of those ideas become the baddies.

The point that policy is created by unelected elites (in Britain in this case, but obviously it applies in the U.S. as well) is not new, but here it is well made. It is why even though I appreciate Matt Yglesias when he challenges Democrats on specific matters, I have a problem with his fundamental outlook. It’s still managerialism.

Of course, my opposition to managerialism is not populist. It is Hayekian. If the average voter wants to tell everyone else what to do, then that is no better than elites wanting to tell everyone else what to do.

Alice Evans writes,

A new paper by Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira and Stefanie Stantcheva examines beliefs that the world is ‘zero sum’: your success is my loss.

…Zero-sum thinking is associated with support for redistribution, awareness of racial and gender discrimination, as well as being anti-immigrant.

Younger groups and Black Americans are especially zero-sum. They’re more likely to say that when one group thrives, another is disadvantaged.

Note that the paper ventures into territory that used to be the preserve of sociologists. I have long predicted that there is where economics is headed.

Others have also commented on the paper. Alex Tabarrok writes,

The problem, of course, is that zero-sum thinking can causally lead to lower growth because it leads to anti-growth policies such as tariffs, anti-immigration, NIMBY, low-trust, high taxes, redistribution, identity politics and so forth.

All of this is reminiscent of Bryan Caplan’s Idea trap model.

Alex is saying that we need to overcome zero-sum thinking in order to have policies that favor economic growth.

I tried to sort this out years ago when I wrote about Luck Village and Effort Village.

Consider two hypothetical farming villages, each with ten households and ten parcels of land. In both villages, each household occupies a parcel at random.

In Luck Village, nine of the parcels yield at most a subsistence level of food, no matter how hard their owners work. The remaining parcel yields a vast abundance of food, also regardless of whether the household works hard or not.

In Effort Village, each parcel is identical. Moreover, the yield on each parcel depends on how hard the household works. Diligent households will have larger harvests than lazy households.

In theory, you could do well and think it’s mostly luck. And you could do poorly and think that others make more effort. But that is not how things shake out. The zero-sum paper apparently says that if people live under circumstances where they do not move forward economically, they come to think that they live in Luck Village. They think in zero-sum terms, and economic justice requires redistribution. People who live under more positive circumstances tend to think that they live in Effort Village.

I wonder to what extent the paper confirms or contradicts the claims made decades ago by Helmut Schoeck. His notion of envy goes beyond zero-sum thinking to negative-sum thinking: I want you to lose, even if I don’t gain.

Substacks referenced above:

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The Economics of Resentment

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Modern democracy should not be treated as a ship of fools. The case against managerialism.

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We will all become boring