Links to Consider, 10/26/2024

Noah Smith changes his mind; Greg Lukianoff's depressing data on professors canceled; Musa Al-Gharbi talks his book; Aswath Damodaran on breaking up big corporations

Noah Smith writes,

The simple fact — and the thing I failed to properly realize before 2020 and 2021 — is that policing works. A bunch of evidence shows that police deter crime — through the threat of incarceration they represent, their presence on the street, and through their simple removal of the most criminal fraction from wider society.² That doesn’t mean police are the only thing that reduces crime, and there are still plenty of reforms that America could implement to make our police more professional, responsible, and safe. But police are an essential, indispensable part of American public safety, and without public safety nothing else in society can function.

It is really important to be able to change your mind and to articulate why you are doing so. And here is a belief that differs from mine, and one of us will have to change our minds in a few years.

I believe in the power of wonky technocrats to implement incremental policy tweaks to accelerate the energy transition, fix the immigration system, and make police more effective and less violent.

I believe in decentralized innovation to improve energy production and policing. On immigration, I think that the issue is too salient to be solved. That is, if a politician compromises with the other party, everyone finds out about it, and he gets primaried out of office. Even though most of the public probably would be happy with the compromise.

Greg Lukianoff writes,

with 2023 being the worst year on record for campus deplatformings, with a record-setting 145 total attempts and 75 successes. Even more unfortunately, 2024 is almost certainly going to beat it. As of Oct. 15, FIRE has logged 134 attempts in our Campus Deplatforming Database for 2024, and there are still 2 1/2 months to go before the end of the year.

And how about de-banking as a way of punishing Wrongthink? Rupa Sabramanya writes,

it’s not just Trump supporters. Also debanked have been a number of Christian charities, including Indigenous Advance Ministries, a Memphis-based charity that does philanthropic work for orphans in Uganda, and Family Council, a pro-life charity based in Arkansas. According to Democratic lawmakers, many Arab and South-Asian Americans—who are considered “high risk” because of being Muslim—have been debanked, too.

In a conversation with Tyler, Musa Al-Gharbi says,

looking at the same kinds of empirical measurements, we can see that actually there were three previous episodes of great awokenings. By comparing and contrasting these cases, we can get insight into questions like, Why did they come about? Why do they end? Do they influence? Do they change anything long-term? and so on.

He sees these episodes as contests between established elites and frustrated elite wannabes. But I suspect that these phenomena are overdetermined: there are too many possible causes to be able to reliably sort out what happened and why.

I don’t particularly want to read another book on the woke phenomenon, but it sounds like there is enough other stuff to make this one worthwhile. For example, he says,

the symbolic professions — in virtue of gatekeeping who becomes part of them by college degrees and as a result of other factors, like the socioeconomic communities symbolic capitalists tend to grow up in, etc., etc. — it is the case that the people who get folded into the symbolic professions tend to think about the social world at all times, even when we’re not in periods of awokening.

Aswath Damodaran writes,

if you have blinders on, and view only one of these dimensions (consumers, competition, company or the economy) as critical, it is entirely possible that the actions you take can have net negative consequences, in sum. Using this framework to assess the AT&T break up in 1981, the break up into seven regional phone companies and a long distance one was initially praised as an action that would promote innovation and new thinking, but history suggests otherwise. The regional phone companies continued to behave like the old Ma Bell, investing little in new technologies, and continuing with the high debt and high dividend policies of the original. Much of the innovation in telecommunications came from outsiders entering the business, and the business itself has reconsolidated suggesting that the economics cannot support a dozen or more players. And just as a bonus, Bell Labs was renamed Lucent Technologies, and after an initial burst of enthusiasm about promise and potential, sank under its contradictions.  

I’ve always read that the AT&T breakup was a good thing. It is credited with moving the communication revolution along faster than would have happened otherwise. I think that the counterfactual, in which the courts leave AT&T alone, is really difficult to pin down. You do not know what AT&T’s strategy would have been. You do not know what the political/regulatory environment would have looked like around cable, the Internet, and cellular.

One possibility is that AT&T would have died a natural death. As the Internet and cellular emerged, it would not have had the profit margins to sustain Bell Labs. It might have been reluctant to move into mobile phone service, for fear of cannibalizing its land line business.

Damodaran asks who benefits from a breakup of Alphabet or other big tech companies. I think of the whole antitrust arena as a huge transfer from shareholders and consumers to the legal profession.

substacks referenced above:

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Breaking up Big Tech: Cui Bono?

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The Debanking of America

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What remains of the progressive project?

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'Coddling' and 'Canceling': A Tale of Two Titles