Links to Consider, 10/15

Lorenzo Warby on Somewheres/Anywheres; Matt Yglesias questions "deaths of despair." Noah Smith on military reality; Helen Dale on contemporary Nazi sympathizers

Lorenzo Warby writes,

Once you see the Anywheres/Somewheres division, it becomes hard to un-see; forms of it reach deep into history. It is precisely the Somewhere patterns of repeated local marriage and highly localised lives and connections that create and sustain ethnicities: that is, locality-based dialects, folkways and genetic clusterings.

And if you haven’t heard of Anywheres/Somewheres, you are missing something important.¹ Warby writes,

If someone who achieves public prominence starts talking to Somewheres—rather than at or over them—they are likely to inspire considerable loyalty from people starved of public representation for their concerns. Such a political entrepreneur is also likely to inspire fury from the Anywheres, who want politics to remain their game: a dominance enforced by policing the legitimacy of discourse. Donald Trump is the most salient (but hardly only) exemplar of this pattern and response.

I would add that in this country the Somewheres tend to have an honor culture, and Mr. Trump speaks that language.

There is a selection effect at work:

Any political entrepreneur who breaks through the Anywhere cartel is likely to be some mixture of unusually egotistical, or unusually ideologically alienated, in order to be willing to endure the angry crap that predictably comes his way. Hostility to considering the downsides of migration drives discussion of the issue to the politically alienated or other outliers. There are likely to be plenty of flaws in such a political entrepreneur, flaws at which Anywhere critics can point.

The problem with conservative elites, as Warby points out, is that they either fail to speak to Somewhere concerns when campaigning or else fail to make those concerns a priority when in office.

There are many other insights in Warby’s essay. It is one of his best, in my opinion.

Matt Yglesias writes,

Andrew Gelman noted on his blog that the statistical trend Case and Deaton were writing about is somewhat fake. Older people have higher death rates than younger people. And if you look at, say, the 45-54 age group during the time period that Case and Deaton are interested in, the average age of people inside that cohort rose during the 1999-2013 period. So if you use age-adjusted death rates rather than arbitrary binning, you get an increase that looks much less impressive.

There are interesting parallels between Deaths of Despair by Deaton and Case, on the one hand, and The Race Between Education and Technology, by Goldin and Katz.

• Both title phrases exemplify the way that I describe popular nonfiction books as “bumper stickers with hundreds of pages attached.” These phrases turned into memes, widely circulated among academics, policy makers, and journalists. Almost none of these people passing around these memes has ever delved into the substance of the books to examine the validity of the authors’ claims. This is as true of academics as it is of general readers.

• One co-author of each book was awarded a Nobel Prize. Deaton’s award came in 2015. This preceded the publication of Case-Deaton’s book, but it was subsequent to their initial report of the claim. Goldin’s award came just this year. Both Nobel Laureates have a much larger body of work, and this may very well justify their awards.

• Both books made very strong claims about the policy implications of their memes. Deaton and Case indicted the entire capitalist system. Goldin and Katz argued that we need to increase the number of people attending college. These policy implications resonated very well with the Left.

• I wrote essays on both books in which I argued that they were intellectual swindles. Here is my essay on Deaton and Case. Here is my essay on Goldin and Katz. Shortly after the announcement of Goldin’s Nobel award, I told the story of how I came to publish my essay in a peer-reviewed journal, only to have Goldin and Katz refuse the offer made by the journal’s editor to provide a rebuttal.

Make what you will of these parallels. I strong recommend the entire essay by Yglesias.

In a podcast with Eric Torenberg, Noah Smith says,

tanks are done um tanks will be a rear supporting role the the number of handheld weapons that tanks are impervious to is shrinking by the day yeah like yes a tank will still protect you against an AK-47 but like handheld missiles destroy tanks now

Noah’s moral judgments are not the ones that I would make. But his analysis of the causes and consequences of declining American power strike me as spot on. I would add that I would push back against Noah on the need for a large military budget. I think that America’s military budget is sufficient, just massively misallocated.

As Noah would agree, given today’s technology, the most useful weapons are small, smart and narrow-purposed. Hand-held missiles. Smart bombs. Drones. The weapons that are least cost-effective, and possibly even liabilities, are large, not so smart, and multi-purposed. Armored vehicles, aircraft carriers, fighter-bombers.

Helen Dale writes,

Key to understanding the Holocaust is understanding the extent to which the Nazis sneaked around when carrying it out. They did not want folks back home in the Vaterland to know what was being done in their name.

…It is legitimate to compare Hamas with the Einsatzgruppen, but not with other Nazi killers. The gleeful, brutal pride we’ve all seen across social and conventional media in the last week represents humanity at such a nadir that even Hitler, our contemporary folk-devil, struggles to provide a useful comparator.

Lest you miss the point, Germany was ashamed of its barbarity toward Jews and tried to hide it. The anti-Zionists are proud of their barbarity toward Jews and are trying to get Palestinian sympathizers to celebrate it.

This is a moment of choosing for the American left. Many will side with Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib. That could damage the Progressive brand. It deserves to be damaged.

substacks referenced above:

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The N-word

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The "Deaths of Despair" narrative is wrong

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The Revolt of the Somewheres: II

1. I think that a good question for

The Permanent Problem

and Brink Lindsey’s proposed solution is how it fits into that framework. Concerning his attempt to revive localism, I wonder whether he is trying to turn Anywheres into Somewheres or Somewheres into Anywheres. It strikes me that his project requires one or both shifts to happen. I cannot see either shift naturally taking place.