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
Re: Managerialism, increasing wealth, tradeoffs with communitarian ways of life:
In the heady days of the Holy Roman Empire, the Dutch Republic, and other emerging republics of the 16th/17th centuries and the early days of the American republic, self-government was in vogue. It required a lot of additional time and effort from the middle class to sustain. The militia system touched upon in our 2nd Amendment, echoes of which are memorably portrayed by Rembrandt in his Night Watch paintings (https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1c/37/13/1c37134512a21defdd9f7fa55938c3fb.jpg) took a lot of time and effort. It meant hours of drilling, a lot of time spent appearing in assemblies, and/or exemptions that had to be purchased. They had the guns, they had the gold, so they made the rules. To put it into economic terms, economic relationships require some level of management. Either that work is delegated to someone else, or the underlying workers participate more actively in managerial work. To have self-government, you must also allow for substantial inefficiency, because it necessarily decreases specialization.
In our own lives, it is much easier for me to bill more hours doing something esoteric and unrelated to local matters than it is for me to cut my hours to attend town meetings. In practice, back then, due to travel and communication lags, the inefficiency just did not matter that much because it was just a less "always on" time. But why did the impulse to self-govern emerge both in Europe and in America? Well, there was a combination of the MEANS of accumulated wealth for the middle class, and the MOTIVE provided by centuries of arbitrary and brutish treatment by unaccountable authorities. Managerialism has grown because the government managed to sustain a fair amount of credibility, so the middle class felt comfortable delegating away its political power. The people of means traded political freedom for individual freedom: they may no longer have the effective right to determine the laws under which they are governed, but they are left mostly alone apart from the need to pay tax. The government has the guns, the government has most of the gold, so the government makes all the rules. The only way to change that is to rectify that balance power because suasion has never accomplished that trick ever before.
The inefficiency was also much less back then, because it is relative. It is the opportunity cost that directs allocation of time, rather than cost itself. Both the degree of specialization of human capital and the multiplier from accumulated physical capital were much smaller, so the opportunity cost of self-government was lower than it is today, or has been for many decades. Note, though, that this is true only for a narrow short-term economic reading of cost. As my older relatives say, one doesn't bring anything inside the cemetery wall, so considerations other than strictly monetary ought to have weight. Put the opportunity cost in terms of the existence, number and well-being of one's grandchildren, and suddenly the calculation might look quite different.
Well said: "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."
Perry's tradeoff hypothesis between societal wealth and communitarianism ramifies throughout these referenced posts.
A wealthy society is complex. A complex society subjects individuals to remote and illegible forces. People want to manage those forces, and tend to impute them to the zero sum moves of others (blaming either the arrogant elites in government or business, or blaming the ignorant masses)
That management can take technocratic or populist form, both of which are suboptimal. Hayekian responses probably require a level of trust and tolerance of uncertainty that is tough to achieve in a wealthy individualistic society.
"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’. "
Laughable. The problem with expertise in managerialism is that there is no expertise any longer.
My thouhgts exactly. The fact our government gave a grant to the pan handle of Fl and it failed to deliver......well so what. How many businesses fail? lots. But those that succeed. Great.
It's ridiculous to try and defend that kind of regularized mischief.
Every federal grant program degenerates instantaneously into brazenly corrupted schemes for sending as much of the cash as possible to political allies in indirect, tacit exchanges as payback for support and for personal benefits and favors without any regard or genuine connection to the purported motivating public purpose of the program.
About dressing like an adult, maybe Americans on the left are capable of voting for people who show disdain for institutions and who consider irreverence to be a political asset, just as Americans on the right have shown themselves clearly capable of voting for those politicians.
I'm not American, but I'm very familiar with a political culture where irreverence for irreverence's sake is a political weapon that will get you the votes of those who consider "the system" to be unfair and always biased against them.
Sometimes things don't work in the American context. Dress codes unite and camouflage difference, and sure, nobody cares about that anymore though Fetterman and whoever else in their old comfies may be said to be following their own code, wishing to distinguish themselves as genuine and populist and couch-dwelling, Mr. Slob Goes to Washington. So far so good for that subgroup. You can bet the Congressional Black Caucus will not join them in favoring cargo shorts and sweats. This kerfuffle reflects a splintering, though not an important one at this point.
Wearing of uniforms, a dress code of sorts, makes a huge difference affecting the mindset in a positive way which is why such has been the case of private schools and other institutions. a business suit in the workplace, too.
I used to be a lawyer, and had to wear a suit to go to court. I had some opinions about professional dress that were flouted all the time:
1. Cardigans are not "suits." To count as a suit, the jacket (a cardigan is not even a jacket, if you ask me) should have structured shoulders, and match the pants in fabric and color.
2. Standing, button your suit jacket, sitting, unbutton it.
This was federal court too, and I would read lamentations that lawyers no longer shined their shoes to a mirror polish. For my part, my shoes did not come from a cobbler, but from zappos.com. And ask some English barristers about our court dress. Does the lack of wigs show our disrespect for the institution?
Now I am a manager of software developers. Nobody is going to tell a software developer to wear a suit and expect them to show up to work. I still own two suits, neither of which I've worn in years.
As for "luck village" and "effort village," a suit, as even Noonan says, isn't that much of an effort. It's a relatively weak signal of effort.
Peggy Noonan is entitled to her opinions about suits. But saying that wearing a suit is "dressing like an adult" is insulting. A majority of American adults don't even own a suit, much less wear one to work. So nobody but litigators and (Who else? On the west coast, transactional lawyers don't wear suits anymore) and legislators are adults anymore? Please.
I took a look at the paper by Chinoy, Nunn, Sequeira and Stantcheva. It was very interesting (with a few moments where I thought "really?") until I got to Figure 12, which leads to the conclusions at the top of page 29. Sorry: that chart does not remotely support that conclusion.
Where to begin?
First, you can't regress a unidirectional trend against another unidirectional trend and conclude that the resulting high r squared means anything. You could just use calendar year (which increases monotonically over the period) and conclude that zero-sum thinking is simply a consequence of birth year, with equal mathematical validity - but people would see through that one. Or, how about regressing it against the percentage of conservative professors in universities, and claiming it's ideological education that is driving the zero-sum thinking? Equally valid - and equally not proven by that much data (although an interesting hypothesis to test more rigorously!). And yes, I do see that the trends aren't strictly unidirectional but the fluctuations oppose the stated thesis as much as they support it.
Second problem: correlation does not show causation. We could equally (plausibly, but statistically and causally invalidly) conclude that it is all the zero-sum thinking that drives the declining growth rates.
Once I see claims with that kind of validity in a paper, I lose all faith in the rest of it.
We need to judge everybody, each individual moral agent, based on their behavior. Including results, and intentions and effort. And reward those with better results with more status, or buying from them. All customers discriminate against the places they're not choosing.
We need meritocracy.
Social justice mistakes inevitable life unfairness with injustice - there is no way to make life fair. Their is no just way to help the less lucky, but it is especially bad to set up systems which support the wrong idea that being in an unlucky, difficult situation, means no improvement is possible. Most folk want to believe that their problems are more caused by others, rather their own lack of effort or their own mistakes.
If we want a society which has the minimum of such problems of being unlucky, we need a culture that most of any person's results are mostly due to their own behavior. And we need to make that true.
Identity politics and evaluation is contrary to judging behavior.
The Envy spectrum goes from American style "admiration / emulation / desire to be better", thru willingness hurt the other in order to help yourself, down to wishing the other is hurt even without benefit to you, to finally actually hurting the other yourself, at no benefit but some cost to yourself.
It's better to separate admiration from envy and only use "envy" in one of the negative senses.
It's a terrible feeling that too many people have.
I like your quote from Simon Cooke,. I like you piece on two villages even better. I'd like to think I could give these to my far left friends without them thinking I'm a far right or libertarian nut and that maybe they'd even understand the points being made. I'm probably being too optimistic.
At one higher level of complexity, I think both of your villages exist. More precisely, there are people of both types. Some are incapable of caring for themselves or need help reaching a self-sufficient status. Others are only hindered by such help and need to be left to fend for themselves. The problem is we have minimal, if any, ability to figure who among the less successful is in which group.
Why is it unsustainable? This seems like just another "buzz" word as it is applied. "Equitable" is another "buzz" word that only sounds good. If you tied "unsustainable" to thermodynamics it may have some meaning, but that would lead to the conclusion that only energy and human creativity limit humanity and all forms of energy from food to fuel are fungible.
Give me electrical energy and I can make fuel from water and CO2 and/or produce a fish dinner using todays technology and scientific knowledge. Given fission and fusion nuclear energy there is an effectively infinite supply of energy available.
Re: Managerialism, increasing wealth, tradeoffs with communitarian ways of life:
In the heady days of the Holy Roman Empire, the Dutch Republic, and other emerging republics of the 16th/17th centuries and the early days of the American republic, self-government was in vogue. It required a lot of additional time and effort from the middle class to sustain. The militia system touched upon in our 2nd Amendment, echoes of which are memorably portrayed by Rembrandt in his Night Watch paintings (https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1c/37/13/1c37134512a21defdd9f7fa55938c3fb.jpg) took a lot of time and effort. It meant hours of drilling, a lot of time spent appearing in assemblies, and/or exemptions that had to be purchased. They had the guns, they had the gold, so they made the rules. To put it into economic terms, economic relationships require some level of management. Either that work is delegated to someone else, or the underlying workers participate more actively in managerial work. To have self-government, you must also allow for substantial inefficiency, because it necessarily decreases specialization.
In our own lives, it is much easier for me to bill more hours doing something esoteric and unrelated to local matters than it is for me to cut my hours to attend town meetings. In practice, back then, due to travel and communication lags, the inefficiency just did not matter that much because it was just a less "always on" time. But why did the impulse to self-govern emerge both in Europe and in America? Well, there was a combination of the MEANS of accumulated wealth for the middle class, and the MOTIVE provided by centuries of arbitrary and brutish treatment by unaccountable authorities. Managerialism has grown because the government managed to sustain a fair amount of credibility, so the middle class felt comfortable delegating away its political power. The people of means traded political freedom for individual freedom: they may no longer have the effective right to determine the laws under which they are governed, but they are left mostly alone apart from the need to pay tax. The government has the guns, the government has most of the gold, so the government makes all the rules. The only way to change that is to rectify that balance power because suasion has never accomplished that trick ever before.
The inefficiency was also much less back then, because it is relative. It is the opportunity cost that directs allocation of time, rather than cost itself. Both the degree of specialization of human capital and the multiplier from accumulated physical capital were much smaller, so the opportunity cost of self-government was lower than it is today, or has been for many decades. Note, though, that this is true only for a narrow short-term economic reading of cost. As my older relatives say, one doesn't bring anything inside the cemetery wall, so considerations other than strictly monetary ought to have weight. Put the opportunity cost in terms of the existence, number and well-being of one's grandchildren, and suddenly the calculation might look quite different.
Well said: "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."
Perry's tradeoff hypothesis between societal wealth and communitarianism ramifies throughout these referenced posts.
A wealthy society is complex. A complex society subjects individuals to remote and illegible forces. People want to manage those forces, and tend to impute them to the zero sum moves of others (blaming either the arrogant elites in government or business, or blaming the ignorant masses)
That management can take technocratic or populist form, both of which are suboptimal. Hayekian responses probably require a level of trust and tolerance of uncertainty that is tough to achieve in a wealthy individualistic society.
"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’. "
Laughable. The problem with expertise in managerialism is that there is no expertise any longer.
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
--Gore Vidal
My thouhgts exactly. The fact our government gave a grant to the pan handle of Fl and it failed to deliver......well so what. How many businesses fail? lots. But those that succeed. Great.
It's ridiculous to try and defend that kind of regularized mischief.
Every federal grant program degenerates instantaneously into brazenly corrupted schemes for sending as much of the cash as possible to political allies in indirect, tacit exchanges as payback for support and for personal benefits and favors without any regard or genuine connection to the purported motivating public purpose of the program.
About dressing like an adult, maybe Americans on the left are capable of voting for people who show disdain for institutions and who consider irreverence to be a political asset, just as Americans on the right have shown themselves clearly capable of voting for those politicians.
I'm not American, but I'm very familiar with a political culture where irreverence for irreverence's sake is a political weapon that will get you the votes of those who consider "the system" to be unfair and always biased against them.
Sometimes things don't work in the American context. Dress codes unite and camouflage difference, and sure, nobody cares about that anymore though Fetterman and whoever else in their old comfies may be said to be following their own code, wishing to distinguish themselves as genuine and populist and couch-dwelling, Mr. Slob Goes to Washington. So far so good for that subgroup. You can bet the Congressional Black Caucus will not join them in favoring cargo shorts and sweats. This kerfuffle reflects a splintering, though not an important one at this point.
I get the impression that Russians tend to negative sum thinking
Wearing of uniforms, a dress code of sorts, makes a huge difference affecting the mindset in a positive way which is why such has been the case of private schools and other institutions. a business suit in the workplace, too.
I used to be a lawyer, and had to wear a suit to go to court. I had some opinions about professional dress that were flouted all the time:
1. Cardigans are not "suits." To count as a suit, the jacket (a cardigan is not even a jacket, if you ask me) should have structured shoulders, and match the pants in fabric and color.
2. Standing, button your suit jacket, sitting, unbutton it.
This was federal court too, and I would read lamentations that lawyers no longer shined their shoes to a mirror polish. For my part, my shoes did not come from a cobbler, but from zappos.com. And ask some English barristers about our court dress. Does the lack of wigs show our disrespect for the institution?
Now I am a manager of software developers. Nobody is going to tell a software developer to wear a suit and expect them to show up to work. I still own two suits, neither of which I've worn in years.
As for "luck village" and "effort village," a suit, as even Noonan says, isn't that much of an effort. It's a relatively weak signal of effort.
Peggy Noonan is entitled to her opinions about suits. But saying that wearing a suit is "dressing like an adult" is insulting. A majority of American adults don't even own a suit, much less wear one to work. So nobody but litigators and (Who else? On the west coast, transactional lawyers don't wear suits anymore) and legislators are adults anymore? Please.
I am very happy with the quality of analysis you're providing, and feel I'm getting full value for my paid subscription. Thank you.
I took a look at the paper by Chinoy, Nunn, Sequeira and Stantcheva. It was very interesting (with a few moments where I thought "really?") until I got to Figure 12, which leads to the conclusions at the top of page 29. Sorry: that chart does not remotely support that conclusion.
Where to begin?
First, you can't regress a unidirectional trend against another unidirectional trend and conclude that the resulting high r squared means anything. You could just use calendar year (which increases monotonically over the period) and conclude that zero-sum thinking is simply a consequence of birth year, with equal mathematical validity - but people would see through that one. Or, how about regressing it against the percentage of conservative professors in universities, and claiming it's ideological education that is driving the zero-sum thinking? Equally valid - and equally not proven by that much data (although an interesting hypothesis to test more rigorously!). And yes, I do see that the trends aren't strictly unidirectional but the fluctuations oppose the stated thesis as much as they support it.
Second problem: correlation does not show causation. We could equally (plausibly, but statistically and causally invalidly) conclude that it is all the zero-sum thinking that drives the declining growth rates.
Once I see claims with that kind of validity in a paper, I lose all faith in the rest of it.
Peggy Noonan: If you get your kicks starving babies, dress codes provide a good push back when you get called on it. Hey, both sides do it.
We need to judge everybody, each individual moral agent, based on their behavior. Including results, and intentions and effort. And reward those with better results with more status, or buying from them. All customers discriminate against the places they're not choosing.
We need meritocracy.
Social justice mistakes inevitable life unfairness with injustice - there is no way to make life fair. Their is no just way to help the less lucky, but it is especially bad to set up systems which support the wrong idea that being in an unlucky, difficult situation, means no improvement is possible. Most folk want to believe that their problems are more caused by others, rather their own lack of effort or their own mistakes.
If we want a society which has the minimum of such problems of being unlucky, we need a culture that most of any person's results are mostly due to their own behavior. And we need to make that true.
Identity politics and evaluation is contrary to judging behavior.
The Envy spectrum goes from American style "admiration / emulation / desire to be better", thru willingness hurt the other in order to help yourself, down to wishing the other is hurt even without benefit to you, to finally actually hurting the other yourself, at no benefit but some cost to yourself.
It's better to separate admiration from envy and only use "envy" in one of the negative senses.
It's a terrible feeling that too many people have.
I like your quote from Simon Cooke,. I like you piece on two villages even better. I'd like to think I could give these to my far left friends without them thinking I'm a far right or libertarian nut and that maybe they'd even understand the points being made. I'm probably being too optimistic.
At one higher level of complexity, I think both of your villages exist. More precisely, there are people of both types. Some are incapable of caring for themselves or need help reaching a self-sufficient status. Others are only hindered by such help and need to be left to fend for themselves. The problem is we have minimal, if any, ability to figure who among the less successful is in which group.
Use of vulgar profanity also demonstrates
Also demonstrates reduced level of imagination
Economic growth in and of itself is unsustainable, it's cancerous. A balanced, equitable growth is the more rational choice of words and thought.
Why is it unsustainable? This seems like just another "buzz" word as it is applied. "Equitable" is another "buzz" word that only sounds good. If you tied "unsustainable" to thermodynamics it may have some meaning, but that would lead to the conclusion that only energy and human creativity limit humanity and all forms of energy from food to fuel are fungible.
Give me electrical energy and I can make fuel from water and CO2 and/or produce a fish dinner using todays technology and scientific knowledge. Given fission and fusion nuclear energy there is an effectively infinite supply of energy available.