Links to Consider, 2/25

Jane Psmith on America's nations; Martin Gurri on freedom in the digital age; A WSJ writer says that war is good for the economy; Dan Williams finds interesting articles

In a long and very insightful review essay of Colin Woodard’s American Nations, a book which in turn harkens back to David Hackett-Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, Jane Psmith writes,

Founded on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay by gentlemen from southern England, and with a sizeable population influx a generation later from Royalists who had found themselves on the losing side of the English Civil War, Tidewater began with an aristocratic ethos. Its gentlemen wanted to recreate the rural manor life of the English landowners: ruling benevolently over their estates and the tenants who inhabited the associated villages, presiding over the courts and local churches, hunting and visiting their neighbors and paying for the weddings and funerals of the poor. To play the role of the peasantry in this semi-feudal system, they imported indentured servants from among the English poor.

She explains that the tenant farming of England was untenable here, because available land gave the tenants an option to strike out on their own. So Tidewater wound up resorting to slavery. A couple of other random insights:

high-cultural capital Americans are far more mobile than they used to be. Plenty of people spend a few years in DC, then a few years in Austin, or maybe San Francisco or Boulder or Brooklyn, regardless of where they grew up. Second, and perhaps more important, is the role of education. Maintaining or improving your class position depends far more on a “good” college than it used to (witness the to-do when someone claims the distinction of Harvard on a night school degree!). The Yankee emphasis on education means that most of America’s prestigious colleges and universities are in Yankee-settled areas.¹¹ Thus, membership in a higher stratum of society practically depends on four or eight years marinating in Yankeedom. What’s a kid from rural Nebraska to do?

…a “national divorce” can never happen: for the Yankee-dominated blue states, and the Yankee-acculturated elite everywhere, the idea of letting someone go off on their own and keep being wrong is utterly anathema. For another, it goes a long way to explaining the anti-elitism of the American Right, which tends to be opposed not just to our present Left-leaning elite but to elites generally: it’s the Greater Appalachian strain, suspicious and resentful of anything that smacks of arrogance or condescension.

Martin Gurri writes,

The democratic process would be less representative and more direct, with the online electorate regularly consulted, as the Swiss are today, on questions of major interest, such as immigration or taxes. Government services will run 24/7, and applications for passports, building permits, and business licenses could be handled with greater speed and transparency than at present. The relationship of citizen to government would be transformed from petitioner to paying customer, bringing the usual expectation for clarity, fair treatment, and ease of service.

…The public would have access to most government planning and policy documents, at every phase of completion. Information about an individual held, say, by the IRS or the police, would become available to that individual upon request. The new openness should shock the bureaucracy out of the reflexive habit of secrecy.

…We can humanize the web. We can bring to it what tech theorist Balaji Srinivasan calls “in-person levels of civility.” We can punish the screamers and exhibitionists by denying them attention. Nothing in the current structure of information prevents that.

We must civilize ourselves before we begin the strenuous task of civilizing the web. As in every frontier situation, civility will initially be restricted to small outposts dotting the wilderness—an example today might be Substack. Once we impose the weight of our historical selves on a largely subjective medium, the tide of brutish narcissism—the whole culture of self-destruction—must recede. Barbarians will always be at the gate. Signal will remain a scarcer commodity than noise. But we can model online the discipline that we practice in the flesh, in sufficient numbers to flip the mood and graft the virtues of democracy onto the digital.

That is his vision for society’s recovery from the shock of the digital world. I am skeptical of some of it, but I pass it along for consideration.

In the WSJ, Tom Fairless writes,

The latest money, on top of previous commitments, could inject funds worth about 0.5% of one year’s gross domestic product into the U.S. industrial defense base over several years.

No. In Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt wrote,

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Fairless needs to learn the one lesson. Defense spending may be needed for national security. But the resources that go into military production would benefit the economy more if used elsewhere.

Dan Williams summarizes theories and findings from five interesting articles.

The first one describes a coalitional theory of political belief formation.

the main difference between, say, conservatives and liberals doesn’t involve differences in fundamental values. It’s much simpler: whom they treat as their allies and rivals in competition for power, status, and other goods.

The result is political belief systems specialised not for Truth or Justice but for promoting and justifying the interests of some alliances over others. As Pinsof and colleagues detail, this explains why political ideologies frequently look less like coherent philosophies than bundles of rationalizations, embellishments, moralizations, ad hoc justifications, and gross hypocrisy.

Williams describes this as novel, but it seems to me to be somewhat unsurprising if one has read Cosmides and Tooby. Still, it puts one in a better position than other models of politics to explain how Democrats and Republicans can switch sides on issues, like free speech or trade.

The second concerns religion.

religions emerge because individuals (a) believe such religions will promote cooperaton and (b) are motivated to make other people more cooperative.

In other words, religions evolve as people strive to manipulate other people into being more cooperative. At the same time, because people want to be seen as cooperative, they’re also motivated to endorse religious beliefs to signal that they’re cooperative.

The fifth concerns intellectual humility.

intellectual humility can signal that one is an attractive and competent source of information. At the same time, a conspicuous lack of intellectual humility can be used to signal dominance.

On the right, Donald Trump strictly plays a dominance game. On the left, social justice activists do the same. On the other hand,

there’s research in philosophy that views intellectual humility as an epistemic virtue that promotes people’s ability to acquire knowledge

substacks referenced above:

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REVIEW: American Nations, by Colin Woodard

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My five favourite academic articles from 2023