Clifton Roscoe on race-based college admissions; Aswath Damodaran on corporate governance; Robin Hanson on government's sacred status; Bret and Heather on the Emily Oster Thing;
Re: forgiving overreactions to Covid: For outrageous and life threatening demands imposed on us against our will, apologies are not good enough. There must be both real repentance and enough punishment to deter. I say we need to hold Nuremberg trials. (And yes, the mass loss of life that Klaus Schwab and his friends were and still are trying to achieve for their own personal profit is every bit comparable to the Nazi Holocaust.)
Re: college admissions -- The problem here is not with black people per se (though it's easy to blame them when they take the attitude that all criticism of them is motivated entirely and only by racism on the part of whites). The problem is that because most of them have had that very attitude since grade school, they haven't learned to study, aren't prepared to profit by going to college, and will flunk out if they go. And while part of this problem can be blamed on the K-12 education establishment, the people both most responsible for the problem and most capable of fixing it are parents themselves. Those who don't see it as their responsibility should not breed.
All that affirmative action in higher education achieves is to so dumb down the value of a degree -- especially those of elite schools that have become "woke" -- that rational employers will prefer applicants who don't have one over those who do.
"My guess is that my proposal for a Chief Operating Officer and Chief Auditor also threatens to cross the sacred-profane boundary."
Toy model:
Many intuit government as not quite sacred but aspirational. That there are inadequate societal equilibria that should be addressed through government.
Public choice theory identifies inadequate equilibria in government itself.
The COO/CA model addresses the latter, which helps address the former.
All by way of saying the proposal has hope of successfuly straddling the boundary.
Re: “My guess is that my proposal for a Chief Operating Officer and Chief Auditor also threatens to cross the sacred-profane boundary.”
I would think just the opposite. Establishing yet another self-purification ritual within the government only further sacralizes the government. Something efficacious on the truly profane side is necessary to bring the tax-eaters to heel, for example imposing common law liability upon agency management for betrayal of public trust.
Thomas Gordon in Cato’s Letter No. 8, “ The Arts of able guilty Ministers to save themselves. The wise and popular Conduct of Queen Elizabeth towards publick Harpies; with the Application” ( https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Cato%27s_Letters/Letter_8 ) usefully reminds us that this is what Queen Elizabeth did upon returning from an event and finding that those to whom she had entrusted various authorities had betrayed her trust: “’The Queen, upon her return from a progress, held a Parliament at Westminster; wherein, among other things, several good laws were made for the relief of the poor, and of maimed and disabled soldiers and seamen; against fraudulent guardians and trustees; the cheats and impositions of clothiers; and the robberies and outrages committed upon the borders of the kingdom towards Scotland. But whereas great complaints were made in the lower house, relating to the engrossing practice:’
(for it seems there were some, who, under the colour of publick good, but, in reality, to the great damage of the kingdom, had got the Queen's letters patents, for the sole privilege and liberty of vending some particular sorts of wares):
‘The Queen therefore, to forestall them, published a proclamation, declaring those grants to be null and void; and also left them to be tried at common law.’”
Yes, give citizens individual standing to sue the tax-eaters as individuals and collectively, and let a jury sit in judgment as to whether the tax-eaters' actions are in keeping with the public trust. That is how you get some meaningful accountability.
Re: Aswath Damodaran on Shareholder Centered Corporate Governance
Found myself agreeing with much in this interesting and insightful piece from the sharehold perspective, so perhaps all the better to attempt a little critical analysis. Whenever confronted with writing on corporate governance, my initial reaction is to ask myself “What would Professor Bainbridge say about this?” And this is particularly apropos in this situation given that Bainbridge is an advocate for Board of Director centered governance and tends to advocate a minimal role for shareholders. Bainbridge offers a brief summary of his views on shareholder activism here: https://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2005/11/why-not-shareholder-activism.html Which if I understand it correctly, posits that the market for corporate control, that is if a company is not being managed to its full potential, a Warren Buffet will happen along and buy out the company and pocket the profit from installing better management. (But my interpretation fails to is likely inept and fails to capture quite a lot of the nuance he would bring to the discussion: https://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2005/09/mannes-primer-on-corporate-governance.html ) Perhaps if there were a dozen more Warren Buffets, corporate governance would not be the shambles it is nowadays. But, then there would also be even fewer remaining publicly traded corporations. (https://snippet.finance/listed-companies-in-the-us/ ). If publicly traded companies were South-Central Wayne County Fat-Cheeked Chipmunks they would be eligible for endangered species protection.
Towards the end of the piece, when Damodaran talks about “shareholder surrender” and listing “Lazy Investors” as a cause of shareholder disempowerment, I would suspect that Bainbridge might point to this article ( https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3623381 ) to suggest that even in a world of highly passive investing, there are sufficient competitive pressures in the market to prevent total shareholder plunder. In the end, “doing the Wall Street Walk” and just selling off shares in companies that have under-performing boards of directors is perhaps the most effective form of shareholder activism. Investors, it has been suggested, need to maintain balanced, diversified portfolios, so selling off nonvoting shares that don’t fit into your portfolio because the voting shareholders are more or less engaged in self-dealing and neglecting nonvoting shareholders and are thus unlikely to lend any balance to your portfolio, is a non-lazy shareholder response as well.
Damoradaran raises a good point, to my way of thinking, that the exchanges are failing to maximize their profits by maximizing share of the market through listing shares like Meta and Amazon that show no signs that they will ever pay a dividend in their existence. This may be the reason so many Americans view real estate as the better investment ( see the chart at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/392528/cryptocurrency-infrequently-named-best-investment.aspx ) The general public might invest more in stocks if there was an exchange with an index that shielded them from exposure to the likes of Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Bankman-Fried. At any rate, one might expect that self-dealing by insiders will continue so long as investors are willing to buy what they are selling.
There are many factors in why various countries and regions of countries have higher or lower death rates but one that seems obvious to me is the high rate of comorbidities in the US. I've not seen data (except for obesity) but suspect those are way less in most or all of Asia.
I worked in pharmaceutical research for 20 years. During that entire time I saw exactly one black person hired at our company in the entire research facility. In chemistry, both process and drug discovery, during that 20 years, I know for a fact that dozens of offers were made to such candidates, but we only managed to hire the single one. The competition for such candidates is insanely competitive.
Re. The affirmative action issue: I thought their reasoning here was that people who “look black” will (relative to a white person) be discriminated against by society, and therefore affirmative action is balancing the cosmic scales by giving these students a disproportionate leg up.
I still don’t agree with this, but it’s a different case from the one Arnold mentioned. Under this rationale, Africans would fit the goal.
I had forgotten about the June 1st 2020 essay- all of those predictions now look correct, even the one about giving up on the vaccines, even though you were wrong about one being rolled out quickly.
The instituting of racist standards against whites and Asians will result in the destruction of whatever entity institutes them.
This will be because better alternatives will emerge to meet the needs of those populations, resulting in all races & ethnicities adopting them because of their superiority.
I covered the affirmative action issue last December. I witnessed it first hand - you end up with the wealthiest kid from Ghana, rather than an American-born black person. I Whether or not you think that is good, it is clearly not the intent of the policy. https://leebressler.substack.com/p/kungflu
"public choice theory" is somewhat confusing in the name, since it's not me choosing, tho I'm part of the public, it's government. Small gov't supporters, who most often refer to it, should be calling it something more accurate - like "Government choice theory".
And similarly for gov't schools and gov't regulation. In representative democracies, we public voters get to choose the representatives, who choose the leaders of the gov't agencies - and it is those gov't agencies that make the gov't choices talked about in (public) government choice theory.
A quick look at the current tiny Prospera.hn, which I had looked at before, is not yet as encouraging as I hoped. Robin doesn't link to the bad press, but there are two separate issues:
1) how it will work, in practice, and
2) how it will be publicized. The bad press needs to be anticipated with explanations prepared of why the reality will be better than bad press.
It's pointed out that, like a charter city, it exists as a gov't grant. And is subject to a change in gov't and a change in the gov't grant conditions.
A big reason for slower development in the US and throughout the world is the increase in the ability of gov't associated elites to change the rules so as to extract more of any surplus for the gov't & ruling classes.
Great links. Like overturning Roe, getting rid of the racist Affirmative Action has been a long time anti-racist goal of Republicans. In Theory.
Clifton Roscoe notes it well: "Black Americans won't achieve equality with their peers until the pipeline of highly competitive black college applicants is filled. ...
It will be almost impossible for colleges, universities, employers, and most of our institutions to reach their racial diversity goals without lowering standards for black applicants until more black K-12 students are competitive with their peers. Not many people are willing to say this out loud, but the data speak for themselves."
What we haven't so much seen, yet, is honest discussion of self-victimization.
Women who have sex with men that lust after, not love, them - followed by pregnancy and becoming an unwed mother have chosen to be "victims". Young men who choose to commit crimes, then get investigated by cops, become "victims" of their own guilt.
They ARE victims. But such men or women, when white, are clearly not victims of racism. They are victims of reality combined with bad choices. Same with blacks - but there are a higher proportion of self-victimizations by blacks, which naturally results in much lower economic progress.
Another not too much noted is the lack of Hispanics and Asians in the NBA -- because of merit, not racism. Similarly, Asian domination of math Olympics is not because of racism. We need more meritocracy - and the racist AA programs need to be ended to get more towards the colorblind society we say we want.
Having more males as teachers in K-12 will be one of the ideas that should be tried - limited data shows some success at reducing problems.
The gov't should make sure that low-wage working married couples with kids have something like 20% higher disposable income than the same people as unmarried would qualify for welfare. Poverty trap programs need to have a range of decreasing benefits so it's always better to work than not.
It seems to me the conversations about affirmative action ignore that about 3% of colleges and universities are almost entirely black. What would other schools look like if HBCUs did not exist?
But before we can forgive, we need to know exactly (more exactly) what the offense was. We sense that schools were closed to long, but how long was long enough and what other things (ventilation?, frequent asymptomatic testing? vaccine requirement?) should have been done to allow them to stay open the right amount. Etc.? CDC dis not provide people and governments with the information that would have allowed them to make rational cost benefit decisions, many bad decisions are more to be regretted than forgiven.
Links to Consider, 11/18
"I forget where I saw this"
It's a paper by Bhattacharya, Magness and Kulldorff that you saw at Boudreaux's blog:
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/covid-back-in-the-day
I did comment in that same post with a link to what I think is not so weak evidence for previous immunity in the Asia-Pacific region.
Re: forgiving overreactions to Covid: For outrageous and life threatening demands imposed on us against our will, apologies are not good enough. There must be both real repentance and enough punishment to deter. I say we need to hold Nuremberg trials. (And yes, the mass loss of life that Klaus Schwab and his friends were and still are trying to achieve for their own personal profit is every bit comparable to the Nazi Holocaust.)
Re: college admissions -- The problem here is not with black people per se (though it's easy to blame them when they take the attitude that all criticism of them is motivated entirely and only by racism on the part of whites). The problem is that because most of them have had that very attitude since grade school, they haven't learned to study, aren't prepared to profit by going to college, and will flunk out if they go. And while part of this problem can be blamed on the K-12 education establishment, the people both most responsible for the problem and most capable of fixing it are parents themselves. Those who don't see it as their responsibility should not breed.
All that affirmative action in higher education achieves is to so dumb down the value of a degree -- especially those of elite schools that have become "woke" -- that rational employers will prefer applicants who don't have one over those who do.
"My guess is that my proposal for a Chief Operating Officer and Chief Auditor also threatens to cross the sacred-profane boundary."
Toy model:
Many intuit government as not quite sacred but aspirational. That there are inadequate societal equilibria that should be addressed through government.
Public choice theory identifies inadequate equilibria in government itself.
The COO/CA model addresses the latter, which helps address the former.
All by way of saying the proposal has hope of successfuly straddling the boundary.
Re: “My guess is that my proposal for a Chief Operating Officer and Chief Auditor also threatens to cross the sacred-profane boundary.”
I would think just the opposite. Establishing yet another self-purification ritual within the government only further sacralizes the government. Something efficacious on the truly profane side is necessary to bring the tax-eaters to heel, for example imposing common law liability upon agency management for betrayal of public trust.
Thomas Gordon in Cato’s Letter No. 8, “ The Arts of able guilty Ministers to save themselves. The wise and popular Conduct of Queen Elizabeth towards publick Harpies; with the Application” ( https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Cato%27s_Letters/Letter_8 ) usefully reminds us that this is what Queen Elizabeth did upon returning from an event and finding that those to whom she had entrusted various authorities had betrayed her trust: “’The Queen, upon her return from a progress, held a Parliament at Westminster; wherein, among other things, several good laws were made for the relief of the poor, and of maimed and disabled soldiers and seamen; against fraudulent guardians and trustees; the cheats and impositions of clothiers; and the robberies and outrages committed upon the borders of the kingdom towards Scotland. But whereas great complaints were made in the lower house, relating to the engrossing practice:’
(for it seems there were some, who, under the colour of publick good, but, in reality, to the great damage of the kingdom, had got the Queen's letters patents, for the sole privilege and liberty of vending some particular sorts of wares):
‘The Queen therefore, to forestall them, published a proclamation, declaring those grants to be null and void; and also left them to be tried at common law.’”
Yes, give citizens individual standing to sue the tax-eaters as individuals and collectively, and let a jury sit in judgment as to whether the tax-eaters' actions are in keeping with the public trust. That is how you get some meaningful accountability.
Re: Aswath Damodaran on Shareholder Centered Corporate Governance
Found myself agreeing with much in this interesting and insightful piece from the sharehold perspective, so perhaps all the better to attempt a little critical analysis. Whenever confronted with writing on corporate governance, my initial reaction is to ask myself “What would Professor Bainbridge say about this?” And this is particularly apropos in this situation given that Bainbridge is an advocate for Board of Director centered governance and tends to advocate a minimal role for shareholders. Bainbridge offers a brief summary of his views on shareholder activism here: https://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2005/11/why-not-shareholder-activism.html Which if I understand it correctly, posits that the market for corporate control, that is if a company is not being managed to its full potential, a Warren Buffet will happen along and buy out the company and pocket the profit from installing better management. (But my interpretation fails to is likely inept and fails to capture quite a lot of the nuance he would bring to the discussion: https://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2005/09/mannes-primer-on-corporate-governance.html ) Perhaps if there were a dozen more Warren Buffets, corporate governance would not be the shambles it is nowadays. But, then there would also be even fewer remaining publicly traded corporations. (https://snippet.finance/listed-companies-in-the-us/ ). If publicly traded companies were South-Central Wayne County Fat-Cheeked Chipmunks they would be eligible for endangered species protection.
Towards the end of the piece, when Damodaran talks about “shareholder surrender” and listing “Lazy Investors” as a cause of shareholder disempowerment, I would suspect that Bainbridge might point to this article ( https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3623381 ) to suggest that even in a world of highly passive investing, there are sufficient competitive pressures in the market to prevent total shareholder plunder. In the end, “doing the Wall Street Walk” and just selling off shares in companies that have under-performing boards of directors is perhaps the most effective form of shareholder activism. Investors, it has been suggested, need to maintain balanced, diversified portfolios, so selling off nonvoting shares that don’t fit into your portfolio because the voting shareholders are more or less engaged in self-dealing and neglecting nonvoting shareholders and are thus unlikely to lend any balance to your portfolio, is a non-lazy shareholder response as well.
Damoradaran raises a good point, to my way of thinking, that the exchanges are failing to maximize their profits by maximizing share of the market through listing shares like Meta and Amazon that show no signs that they will ever pay a dividend in their existence. This may be the reason so many Americans view real estate as the better investment ( see the chart at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/392528/cryptocurrency-infrequently-named-best-investment.aspx ) The general public might invest more in stocks if there was an exchange with an index that shielded them from exposure to the likes of Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Bankman-Fried. At any rate, one might expect that self-dealing by insiders will continue so long as investors are willing to buy what they are selling.
There are many factors in why various countries and regions of countries have higher or lower death rates but one that seems obvious to me is the high rate of comorbidities in the US. I've not seen data (except for obesity) but suspect those are way less in most or all of Asia.
I worked in pharmaceutical research for 20 years. During that entire time I saw exactly one black person hired at our company in the entire research facility. In chemistry, both process and drug discovery, during that 20 years, I know for a fact that dozens of offers were made to such candidates, but we only managed to hire the single one. The competition for such candidates is insanely competitive.
Re. The affirmative action issue: I thought their reasoning here was that people who “look black” will (relative to a white person) be discriminated against by society, and therefore affirmative action is balancing the cosmic scales by giving these students a disproportionate leg up.
I still don’t agree with this, but it’s a different case from the one Arnold mentioned. Under this rationale, Africans would fit the goal.
I had forgotten about the June 1st 2020 essay- all of those predictions now look correct, even the one about giving up on the vaccines, even though you were wrong about one being rolled out quickly.
The instituting of racist standards against whites and Asians will result in the destruction of whatever entity institutes them.
This will be because better alternatives will emerge to meet the needs of those populations, resulting in all races & ethnicities adopting them because of their superiority.
I covered the affirmative action issue last December. I witnessed it first hand - you end up with the wealthiest kid from Ghana, rather than an American-born black person. I Whether or not you think that is good, it is clearly not the intent of the policy. https://leebressler.substack.com/p/kungflu
"public choice theory" is somewhat confusing in the name, since it's not me choosing, tho I'm part of the public, it's government. Small gov't supporters, who most often refer to it, should be calling it something more accurate - like "Government choice theory".
And similarly for gov't schools and gov't regulation. In representative democracies, we public voters get to choose the representatives, who choose the leaders of the gov't agencies - and it is those gov't agencies that make the gov't choices talked about in (public) government choice theory.
A quick look at the current tiny Prospera.hn, which I had looked at before, is not yet as encouraging as I hoped. Robin doesn't link to the bad press, but there are two separate issues:
1) how it will work, in practice, and
2) how it will be publicized. The bad press needs to be anticipated with explanations prepared of why the reality will be better than bad press.
It's pointed out that, like a charter city, it exists as a gov't grant. And is subject to a change in gov't and a change in the gov't grant conditions.
A big reason for slower development in the US and throughout the world is the increase in the ability of gov't associated elites to change the rules so as to extract more of any surplus for the gov't & ruling classes.
Great links. Like overturning Roe, getting rid of the racist Affirmative Action has been a long time anti-racist goal of Republicans. In Theory.
Clifton Roscoe notes it well: "Black Americans won't achieve equality with their peers until the pipeline of highly competitive black college applicants is filled. ...
It will be almost impossible for colleges, universities, employers, and most of our institutions to reach their racial diversity goals without lowering standards for black applicants until more black K-12 students are competitive with their peers. Not many people are willing to say this out loud, but the data speak for themselves."
What we haven't so much seen, yet, is honest discussion of self-victimization.
Women who have sex with men that lust after, not love, them - followed by pregnancy and becoming an unwed mother have chosen to be "victims". Young men who choose to commit crimes, then get investigated by cops, become "victims" of their own guilt.
They ARE victims. But such men or women, when white, are clearly not victims of racism. They are victims of reality combined with bad choices. Same with blacks - but there are a higher proportion of self-victimizations by blacks, which naturally results in much lower economic progress.
Another not too much noted is the lack of Hispanics and Asians in the NBA -- because of merit, not racism. Similarly, Asian domination of math Olympics is not because of racism. We need more meritocracy - and the racist AA programs need to be ended to get more towards the colorblind society we say we want.
Having more males as teachers in K-12 will be one of the ideas that should be tried - limited data shows some success at reducing problems.
The gov't should make sure that low-wage working married couples with kids have something like 20% higher disposable income than the same people as unmarried would qualify for welfare. Poverty trap programs need to have a range of decreasing benefits so it's always better to work than not.
It seems to me the conversations about affirmative action ignore that about 3% of colleges and universities are almost entirely black. What would other schools look like if HBCUs did not exist?
But before we can forgive, we need to know exactly (more exactly) what the offense was. We sense that schools were closed to long, but how long was long enough and what other things (ventilation?, frequent asymptomatic testing? vaccine requirement?) should have been done to allow them to stay open the right amount. Etc.? CDC dis not provide people and governments with the information that would have allowed them to make rational cost benefit decisions, many bad decisions are more to be regretted than forgiven.