Links to Consider, 8/7

Christine Rosen on Jill Biden; Scott Alexander on Nietzsche; Glenn Reynolds on the NYT on JD Vance; Kling and Gill on Seabright's Divine Economy; Mark Koyama on same

Christine Rosen writes,

The role of first lady is notoriously challenging, particularly when it comes to navigating public opinion. Those who have done it well, such as Laura Bush and Michelle Obama, understood that whatever their personal accomplishments and opinions, their public role was always a supportive one. They never succumbed to main-character syndrome. Those who did, such as Hillary Clinton and, now, Jill Biden, have assumed that the public wants “two for the price of one,” as President Clinton put it, and learned the hard way that a presidential spouse intent on aggrandizing power is not something Americans find appropriate. Nor are they fooled by Jill Biden’s efforts to pretend to be a woman of the people. “Teaching isn’t just what I do. It’s who I am,” she said at a recent event, according to the Wall Street Journal. But teachers don’t appear on the cover of Vogue dressed in expensive clothing, nor do most of them own second or third homes where they breakfast regularly on “crab-topped eggs Benedict.”

Rosen finally articulates what I believe, which is that Dr. Jill is an absolute villain.

Scott Alexander writes,

Jason Crawford, one of the pioneers of Progress Studies, writes about a sort of mid twentieth century vibe shift.

…Our buildings became smaller and duller. Last month’s Works In Progress magazine tried to investigate why. Some economists have blamed “Baumol’s cost disease” - as industrialization makes some things (like consumer goods) cheaper, other things (like skilled labor) become relatively more expensive. So maybe the rising cost of skilled labor put buildings like the one of the left out of reach. But Works In Progress found that wasn’t true; if anything, industrialization has made fancy buildings cheaper. They concluded that it was “a story of cultural choice, not of technological destiny” - in other words, people stopped wanting impressive buildings.

…Parts of this vibe shift still confuse me, but the zoomed-out version seems clear enough. The old pro-embiggening world was complicit in moral catastrophes - racism, colonialism, the Holocaust, the destruction of much of the natural world. At some point these atrocities caught up to and outpaced its very real accomplishments, and society stopped being proud of itself and shifted to a harm-reduction approach. Nobody comes out and says outright that harm reduction necessarily has to mean doing as little as possible and trying to make yourself smaller and less impressive and sadder and uglier until you curl up into a tiny point and disappear. But “slave morality” and “master morality” are attractors; if you select too hard for part of one, you end up with the whole package.

Alexander proposes a “compromise” between master morality and slave morality, which includes

1. The existence of rich people can be challenged, but can ultimately be defended on the grounds that they create jobs and valuable products for the masses. Rich people owe a debt to society for creating the conditions in which they can flourish; by coincidence, this debt exactly matches the current tax rate in their jurisdiction.

2. The value of technological progress, economic prosperity, and cultural sophistication can also be challenged, but can be similarly defended insofar as they improve the lot of the worst-off and improve equality. For example, GDP growth is good since it lifts people out of poverty; new discoveries about the nature of the brain are good since they might one day produce Alzheimers drugs; art is good since it can include underrepresented groups or teach some kind of lesson about social progress

That sounds sort of Rawlsian. Actually, I don’t find the master-morality, slave-morality discussion (or Rawls, for that matter) very helpful for thinking about political philosophy.

My view is that it is very important to keep in mind that social engineering is hard to do right. There are many ways to do social engineering badly, including just about every method that relies on an attempt to scale up moral philosophy. The problems of large-scale society differ from those of individual conduct.

In large-scale society, a central issue concerns what makes for better evolution. We should be grateful that the market works as well as it does as an evolutionary system.

I am for local charity that has a broad donor base, providing a form of social insurance. Churches used to do that.

I am against big philanthropy. Successful capitalists should be encouraged to invest for profits. Non-profits are cesspits of corruption.

I am for government that does a few things very well. I am against government that tries to do many things and does them poorly.

Glenn Reynolds shares some NYT readers’ comments on an attempt by the newspaper to make JD Vance look bad.

So the good news here is that the NYT is out over its skis, way beyond its readers' views on the subject.  And it's getting the "have you no decency?" treatment, usually employed by leftists against people on the right, from its own readers.  Maybe because it doesn't.

But its readers do, and they're judging the Times harshly as a result.  Given the political division we face these days, it's good to remember this.

I have been wondering whether it is worth getting angry at the left-leaning media for trying to portray Vance as the Devil and Kamala Harris as America’s sweetheart. I don’t imagine that undecided voters in swing states are going to make up their minds by studying the “Kamalot” issue of New York magazine. And even the NYT’s readers do not seem to be swallowing its propaganda.

Paul Seabright’s latest book is The Divine Economy, which looks at the economic aspects of religion. I talked with Tony Gill, who is a scholar in the field, about the book, and Professor Gill was lively and insightful.

About the book, Mark Koyama writes,

Seabright notices that there is a cyclical feature to this relationship. Highly successful religious organizations often evolve independently of politics. Their success, however, tempts secular rulers into co-opting them. This co-option then leads to decline,

Marcus Shera (an incoming postdoc at Chapman University) has just written a dissertation which sheds light on precisely this phenomenon within Christianity. His argument is that it was the rise of monasticism in the 4th century CE that played a critical role in allowing Christianity to navigate this dilemma. Put simply, his argument is that while Christianity was a persecuted sect, it necessarily selected for devout and sincere members. The worldly payoffs of membership were low (and negative during periods of persecution) so it could only attract members who believed in other worldly payoffs. This changed when Constantine made Christianity part of the Roman state in the early 4th century. There were strong worldly returns to entering the Church.

I got some insights from Koyama’s review that went beyond the book.

Recall that I say “You get what you select for.” The more challenging it is to adhere to a religion, the more it will select for the “devout and sincere members.”

When a religion obtains political support, it tends to attract the less devout and it becomes perceived as corrupt. But for Christianity,

Shera argues that the emergence of monasticism prevented this. While religious leaders like bishops could not credibly isolate themselves from the corrupting effects of political power, monks could do so. Monks could therefore play a role in legitimating bishops and other religious leaders in the eyes of the wider population.

substacks referenced above:

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The Divine Economy

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J.D. Vance, the New York Times, and Decency

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Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman