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Oct 9Liked by Arnold Kling

My apologies but to caricature the subtle and diverse thought of the great Puritans of history, men like John Milton, John Lilburne, John Bunyan, John Dryden, John Winthrop, Roger Williams, Roger Sherman, Richard Bennett and countless others, by association with our modern “social justice activist movement,” if indeed, that which the phrase refers to is worthy of that label, might be considered a most shallow affront to historical truth and understanding. Skold’s superficial and reductionist depiction of Puritanism conflicts markedly with the nuanced pictures painted by in-depth studies like William Haller’s books The Rise of Puritanism (1938) and Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (1063), and Percy Scholes’ The Puritans and Music (1962). Scholes is perhaps worth quoting here regarding the persecution of the puritans following the restoration:

“Morally the reign of Charles II was a time of insincerity in public life and, in many quarters, of licentiousness of private conduct. In just one way the Puritan influence survived in general social life. The nation had learned to value the quiet of Sunday, and kept up the stay-at-home and church-going habits associated with it. This must have done much to give an opportunity for the rebirth of Puritanism which came with the Evangelical Revival.” (see page xx:https://archive.org/details/puritansandmusic000115mbp/page/n23/mode/2up )

Although some Puritans at times did indeed behave in less than desirable ways, the work Puritanism as a movement did to advance religious tolerance, democracy, individualism, and even solidarity, (“Puritan solidarity” someone (?) once wrote according to my notes ‘Wherever puritan thought leaned towards acceptance of the possibility of universal salvation and hence of universal priesthood, or to the Socinian idea that Christ was God-in-humanity, then Puritanism became as intensely secular and naturalistic as it was Biblical and Apocalyptic.’” the truth of which appears throughout the puritan Leveller tracts) deserves recognition and appreciation.

When thinking of Puritanism it might be helpful to place it in historical context, arising to prominence as part of the reaction against Charles I’s revolution in which he attempted to impose an absolutism similar to that which is sought by today’s anti-populist activists. Charles sought to centralize power and diminish democratic and local powers, an unconstrained ability to tax, control over the Church of England whose bishops he would appoint and who would act as his servants, and the unconstrained ability to suppress dissent via censorship or prison. Puritanism offered an alternative. Our modern activist movements, both left and right, do not. Unfortunately, to quote Scholes again “It seems as though we English-speaking people delight to vilify some of the noblest of our ancestors.”

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I have complained about this before, but you cannot blame Puritans for wokism. It is not a Neo-Puritan movement. It's like blaming Kant for Communist Russia—yeah, Kant’s thought was the impetus for Hegel who influenced Feuerbach who influenced Marx, but there’s no proximate cause (in the legal sense). In other words, the chain of causation is simply way too long.

My longer version of this take is as follows. I am a genealogical descendant of Puritans. Family reunions on that side make it clear to me that mostly everyone votes Republican. I took a class on critical race theory in law school, meanwhile, and everyone we read was either black or Jewish. Remember, places like Vermont voted solidly Republican until demographic change made it liberal. Old stock Yankee Americans did not change their voting habits. Wisconsin voted for socialists in the early 20th c. because of German immigrants--not because of Yankees.

If you can prove that genealogical descendants of Puritans vote for/adopt progressive ideas more than the typical American, then I am wrong. But I would bet if you investigated it, you would find that the 10 million or so descendants of the Puritans tend to vote Republican and are generally more conservative than the typical American. In fact, I would bet they are a lot more conservative than the typical American. This is borne out by the data presented by Noah Carl in this post: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/who-are-the-most-right-wing-americans. Americans of English descent are among the most right-wing groups in the United States.

A response I have heard from what I stated above is that while the genetic descendants of Yankees may be conservative, their cultural descendants are not. This is nuts. Plenty of Americans actually take the ideas of the Puritans seriously: we call them Christians (of the Calvinist/Evangelical variety). For example, Jonathan Edwards's books are still read by Evangelical and Reformed Christians. You could read his sermons in many churches, and, aside from the language differences, they would fit right in. We're talking about at least tens of millions of people--the true ideological/cultural descendants of Yankeedom. Jonathan Edwards is especially an interesting example, since he defended emotional reactions in the First Great Awakening--the kind of stuff you only encounter in Evangelical churches today. I guess my simple point would be that Jonathan Edwards was a Christian minister and theologian. He continues to be read by Protestant ministers to this day. Edwards's primary contributions/ideas related to specific branches of Christianity, and tens of millions of people still practice in this tradition. His ideas did not give rise to racialist-Marxists (i.e., wokism)--unless you squint really hard and make the influence extremely indirect.

Attributing wokism to Puritanism and their descendants in any significant sense seems silly. Having said that, it is true (from what I have heard) that Unitarian churches (~150,000 old people) still organize themselves like Congregationalist churches. A couple of the Supreme Court justices whose rulings helped aid the rise of the present non-sense--looking at you Earl Warren and William Douglas--did grow up Presbyterian in Yankeedom... But they rejected the faith of their fathers. Most of the justices of that era appear to be Episcopalian. Blaming Puritans for the actions of Episcopalians seems unfair to say the least!

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I'm not sure I follow this reasoning. Seems to me that the Puritans were pretty much the definition of tribal. That's why Roger Williams and Ann Hutchinson had to leave.

I knew Malcolm Gladwell was full of malarky when I read his theory that it doesn't take talent to excel at an endeavor; it takes 10,000 hours of practice. I'm not sure i practiced basketball for 10,000 hours, but it only took 5 minutes playing against Tiny Archibald for me to realize that practice would not get me anywhere close to perfect. In the town next to me in NJ there was an individual who was the greatest athlete I have ever personally known. He was far better at basketball than me yet I know he didn't practice nearly as much as I did. How do I know this? Because he was All-State in four sports. There aren't enough hours in the day. He went on to play professional baseball at an extremely high level.

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“The essay is from 2006. I believe that since the 1960s, race relations on average are better in the South than in the North.” I recently moved to North Carolina after living out West my entire life. I detect very little racial tension here as compared to California and Idaho. The woke racial strategy, it would seem has little chance of becoming popular here, beyond its current ubiquity in schools and other organizations. Glad to see that in the South you’re observing the same racial harmony as me.

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"My guess is that the social distance between the median black and the median white is higher in the North today than it is in the South."

The expression from, IIRC, the 60's, was, "The whites in the South would let blacks get close, so long as they didn't get too big. In the North they'd let them get big, but not close."

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I think people in the South are a) not as self-conscious about race, though I'm sure Northerners would prefer to think it was the opposite; and b) do not tend to have unreasonable expectations of one another - or any expectation that people are or should be all exactly the same - from both directions. And c) the wisdom - although that may be fading away with the obsessions of the public school curriculum makers - to know when things are best left alone, least said.

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I think it makes sense for the Ivies to recruit student athletes in an environment in which fewer and fewer people are literate and no one really cares about rational inquiry. In this environment, you want to recruit glib, attractive, and energetic people to represent the vast well-endowed computerized bureaucracies that the schools overwhelmingly direct graduates towards.

In the past, knowledge and acculturation was valued more, so it helped to be witty and cultured. In an elite world in which culture is HBOFlixYonceSwift slop and no one thinks more deeply than the Powerpoint requires, radiant health and beauty become much more important. Let the engineers do the thinking: we have to get ready for the sales presentation.

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founding

Re: Gladwell.

Richard A. Posner's scathing review of a previous Gladwell book ("Blink") makes me hesitate to read anything by Gladwell:

https://newrepublic.com/article/68000/blinkered

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I am not a Gladwell fan either because it always sounds interesting and well researched. When you read it everything makes sense… but then when you put it down and perhaps read some other sources and apply some thought you realize you just ate a bunch of empty calories.

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I live in one of the counties that is in the top 5 for interracial marriage. It is also a county that had a civil rights bombing in the 1950s. The population when the bombing happened was under 25,000 people. Today the population is over 600,000. Also, the largest city in my county on the racial dot map has essentially zero segregation with 99 percent of the housing built after 1960. There is a large degree of variability in the South in terms of the degree of housing segregation and interracial marriage. Where marriage rates are the highest is actually in the post civil war frontiers, Central Florida, Texas, the West, and California.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/feature/intermarriage-across-the-u-s-by-metro-area/

Also, with regard to Puritans I spent the first 25 years of my life in Yankeedom of the Upper Midwest, which was supposedly founded by Puritans. Yet my public school experience was pretty consistent with the post on Liberal Quakerism.

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I interviewed Robert Frank a couple of months ago (part 1): https://youtu.be/_4zMOanQAGk

Text version: https://substack.com/@mupetblast/p-149544094

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Imagine if you were offered a different job at an increased salary, but the catch is you have to refer to refer to yourself at all times as a janitor. What's the minimum % increase in salary you'd need before accepting? For me, I think it'd be at least 10%, probably more.

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I clean up other people's messes. I'm The Janitor.

I bounce to a new company for 20%. Inside, only 5% more than prior year avg increase.

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So I was in the upscale grocery store one day, and noticed a lot of identically-clad in athletic wear, attractively fit, vaguely multi-ethnic young people of both sexes buying a large quantity of groceries and sacking them up as a group. I figured it was a team of some sort, but what team I couldn't quite guess. My city is 65% Hispanic (at least, I don't imagine we know how many people live here), and this group didn't look characteristic.

In the parking lot I saw their vans - they were from a "minor" branch, 150 miles away, of one of the state university systems. Like, virtually anyone can gain admission there, I believe (that's sort of the deal - two colleges will be very competitive - and the rest available to all - given the state subsidy). I deduced they were tennis players somehow, so when I got home I looked up the roster. I can't recall what precisely it was, but apart from having one from my state last year, it's much the same on looking it up now: for the boys - 4 from France, one from England (although with a French name), one from Greece, and one from Czech Republic.*

I looked up the roster for the top state university, the one with a tennis team that might occasionally win a national championship perhaps - and there is one boy from Belgium, two that seem to be from my state, although one is Euro and both appear to have been homeschooled/attended online schools, which if you read the achievements on their bios, makes sense - they have obviously traveled constantly for years. The bio I clicked on in full looks more like that of a pro to me, even including Wimbledon in some junior tennis way. And the others from, basically sunshiny affluent enclaves.

I don't know whether Gladwell would have his mind blown that his issue with Harvard - which basically boils down to, it has a tennis team - is an issue he would be forced to have with - just going on my purely accidental research on this issue, based on curiosity about what I observed in the grocery store, a United Nations of happy fit kids purchasing a lot of healthy food, which conclusion I am confident would hold across some other colleges, but don't care to look up any more rosters - the US News "7th best public university" as well as the US News "392nd best public university".

What really is Gladwell's point?

*The branch campus has a great athletics website so it is easy to see the rosters each season. France has been heavily represented for some reason, but in other recent years, Belgium, Japan, Mexico, Bolivia, Spain, Canada also appear. Also an Eritrean by way of California. There has been one state native.

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I would actually like him better if he would just say something like: I think these quasi-professional sports are unsuited to being yoked to the mission of a university, even down to making a mockery of general fitness of the student body if that's a modern notion of something the young scholars should enjoy; tennis is a particularly egregious example because the time requirements and resources that must be devoted to it in youth are utterly antithetical to the minimum education, self- or otherwise, that I see as a requirement for university entry.

But then he'd have to take out football as well, and obviously that would spoil his chosen argument.

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Today's links are catnip to me:

1. I grew up in the South (Kentucky) then moved to the North (Chicago, Michigan)and this was very true. Integration basically ceased north of the Mason Dixon line.

2. "I preferred to hire someone who is motivated by a desire to learn, not by the status of a job title."

As an academic-minded person working in the private sector (thought mostly for the Federal government), I have come to see that my "desire to learn" needs to be refined into tangible outputs. Titles are important for the same reason titles are important in academia. At this point in my career, I have a lot of subject matter expertise, but to turn that into being listened to and relied upon, I need "Vice President" or "Project Manager" or "Engineer" in my title, depending on the audience.

3. Gladwell is somewhat right, but from personal experience, not completely. One of my sons is on track to be a runner at a very good (academically) DIII school. We've spent very little to get him there. Gladwell is right in that this "industry" of producing college athletes does exist. And he's probably right that if you want to be a DI level athlete, you've got to do this. My son's friend who's a really GREAT runner is continuously training and has been from a young age. That kid is spending a lot of money to be a runner. My kid, and others I know are ending up being college athletes simply by working at it. So it is possible. And if it's possible for a kid with my genes to be a college athlete without spending a fortune, it's possible for many.

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In the quote provided Gladwell was specifically referring to tennis, which was my main sport growing up. Tennis is usually played at country clubs or tennis clubs, and membership isn't cheap. Lessons are also expensive. You have to pay to play in tournaments and if you're really good you're probably traveling to them.

I don't think this applies to all sports, at least not to the same degree.

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Blacks in the south are also more rural versus urbanized northern blacks.

Raliegh, NC is only 25% black for instance.

Charlestown, SC is only 17% black (and falling for the last 20 years), its lower then the statewide average!

By contrast your northern Rust Belt cities are absurdly black. Detroit 77%, Baltimore 57%, Cleveland & Newark 47%. Etc.

The northern cities also took in a lot more Hispanic immigration compared to southern cities, making them even less white.

So in the south while there are a lot of black people, they are largely spread out and have little political power at the state and even city level. Their dysfunctions happen in a rural out of the way context. In the North they basically took over these cities and ran them into the ground.

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I enjoyed the Rob Henderson piece. I’ve worked in eight different technology companies. In my opinion—and this is just within within defense companies—the most valuable engineers, scientists and technicians seem underpaid, but I can’t say for sure that my opinion of their contributions correlate with profit outcomes. It does seem like certain employees enable the project to succeed and that without them it would be much less successful or fail. Finding equivalent replacements for these individuals seems unlikely.

But how can we know with confidence unless we run multiple experiments? I think we have to remain fairly agnostic on this one unless we have a great deal of experience in that particular area.

For many employees, HR and management seem to base pay primarily on 1) educational attainment, with gradations for each degree conferred, and then 2) years relevant work experience. At most companies, annual raises vary only by a few percent which I doubt is representative of the differences in employee contributions. But I think this is a reasonable starting place.

I would imagine that the largest differences in pay occur because some pursue a strategy of: “get another job offer, bring it to your boss and jump ship if he doesn’t give you the raise.” I would guess this tactic succeeds most of the time. Why don’t more people do this? I don’t know. I’ve never done it.

I'm was happy just doing the work and taking the typical pay. The quality of work and the learning opportunity mattered a great deal to me. Maybe most important is who I get to work with. Best is to work with your friends and people you respect.

I don’t claim to understand these norms, but I point to the tendency for humans to value sharing and equality among tribe and family as a general explanation for the discrepancies between pay and contribution.

And I agree with Henderson’s conclusion: “For many people, prestige is more valuable than income. Or even job security.”

Apple is the one company I know of that seems to pay its top contributors vastly more than its average employees. Is this only due to their incredible success? Does anyone know how Apple determines pay and how this differs from typical Silicon Valley companies? I would imagine that this is a legacy of Steve Jobs.

Here are a couple of interviews with Jobs that serve as a reminder that leadership makes a huge difference in company culture. I like to think of Steve Jobs as a prophet as best that one can be attributed that description.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PznJqxon4zE&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F

https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=61&v=QplyFXgIx7Q&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F

https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=156&v=wTgQ2PBiz-g&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fj0hpsJvrko&t=119s&pp=2AF3kAIB

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I don't think you need multiple experiments. Top technical talent overcontributes to copyrightable and patentable software, technologies, and methods. But it is ubiquitous for companies to require that all technology developed by an employee go to the company. It's all considered for-hire. It's easier to see in tech companies that exclusively earn money from licensing IP, but it's not uncommon for both individuals and teams of people to turn over gigantically valuable IP to their employers. Sensibly many of these companies are sure to compensate the employees with stock in measure with their contributions to the technology, but other shareholders in turn keep this in check.

The other effective way to short your technologists is just inherent to team structure. If a team develops a blood flow tracking technology for the Apple Watch team, it's not clear which technologist really contributed what to which part of the ultimately patentable technology. So each potential claimant is more likely to have to negotiate separately than as a bloc, and anyway, they already signed away all of their rights when they were hired, which severely weakens their negotiating position vis-a-vis the company.

I think it's fair to say that certain star technologists have a leg up in negotiating, as their charisma, genuine brilliance, and perhaps independent reputation as inventors helps them to get outsized compensation within the tech firms, like Jeff Dean at Google. Most engineers are unable to develop this "rizz" as the children would say, so perhaps they miss out to a greater proportion on what they might otherwise merit.

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Excellent! Especially that last paragraph. Thank you.

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