Jean Twenge on the case for reading; Two reviews of Rob Henderson's book; Jason Manning and me on pre-modern society; David Roman on self-discipline and early religion
"The [classical liberal] position is roughly that people shouldn’t have to adhere to norms and if/when they inevitably hurt themselves or others, then there should be no safety net available. It’s a luxury belief.”
No. The classical liberal position is that there should be a safety net, but one provided by the private sector. Private charities deal with individuals, governments with categories.
Marvin Olasky’s book, "The Tragedy of American Compassion," documents in detail the tens of thousands of lodges, charities, mutual aid societies, missions, civic associations, and fraternal organizations that existed across the country in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These organizations helped pull people out of poverty by addressing individual causes – ignorance, addiction, or simply bad luck. Thanks to the power of the free market and organizations such as these, the poverty rate plummeted from 80% of the population in 1800, to about 15% in the 1960s.
Unfortunately, the government stepped in with its “Great Society” programs and displaced private charitable organizations. As a result, the poverty rate has remained frozen at about 12-15% ever since. The government is very good at writing checks, but not very good at compassion. Real compassion isn’t feeling pity for the less fortunate, it’s climbing into the foxhole with them and sharing and understanding their individual problems.
Rather than addressing the unique issues that keep individual people in poverty, the government writes checks that do little more than help make the poor more comfortable in their poverty.
To be a good example to the poor you would have to forego and even condemn indulgences you yourself think you can handle but you know the poor can't. The UMC doesn't want to give up its indulgences.
I have no desire to live my life as a good example to the poor. I do, however, want to set a good example for my children and grandchildren. Moreover, by acting in accordance with the so-called “success sequence,” I’ll have a rich, productive, and fulfilling life.
No, here (unlike your very good piece above) you have mangled Henderson’s quite excellent idea of luxury beliefs.
Liberals are generally quite happy paying their taxes, and in fact it is the rare case where their beliefs DO directly impact them.
Advocating that marriage and the nuclear family is an antiquated patriarchal structure, favoring government policies that make two parent families less likely among the poor, while yourself raising kids in a nuclear family, is a prototypical “luxury belief”.
Quite so. Have you read David Beito's book "From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State" ? It looks at the history of private mutual aid groups, from lodges to hospitals, and comes to very similar conclusions. The individual attention to those in need, and making sure they stop being in need instead of long term clients, is really important.
While my sympathies also lean toward the non-governmental programs you mention, they are no more responsible for the reduction in poverty than the New Deal (which precedes the Great Society you mention) which liberals like to claim as the reason poverty rates fell. The poverty rates fell because society got much richer.
We can argue whether that wealth did it directly through higher wages, slightly less directly through unions, through charity and social programs, or other ways but none would have had ANY success without much bigger per capital GDP and income.
As for the minimal improvement in measured poverty rates since the Great Society, there are many likely contributors and a few more which some people claim but that probably have minimal or no positive impact.
Measurement error
A remainder who generally can't succeed on their own
Government disincentives to work. This works along with a need for greater skills.
Fiscal policy that that exerts market forces mostly holding down wages at the low end to minimize inflation.
Easy credit, alcohol, drugs, gambling and other hazards with most severe impacts on the poor
Whatever the cause, increased kids raised by single parent.
As you state, family breakdown is a big problem. Study after study shows the impact of fatherlessness on children:
- 85% of currently imprisoned youths grew up without fathers.
- 70% of male sociopaths grew up without fathers.
- 70% of youths currently in state-operated prisons grew up without fathers.
- Children from fatherless homes are twice as likely to drop out, twice as likely to commit suicide, and far more likely to abuse drugs.
- Girls who grew up without fathers are four times more likely to become mothers before the age of 20.
- According to Chicago Police Department records, the neighborhoods with the highest murder rates are also the neighborhoods with the most births to single mothers.
Much of the family breakdown experienced in this country is a direct result of Johnson’s Great Society programs. Welfare laws not only created incentives for fathers to leave their families, but welfare workers *demanded* that they leave.
“In the words of Harvard’s Paul Peterson, ‘some programs actively discouraged marriage,’ because ‘welfare assistance went to mothers so long as no male was boarding in the household… Marriage to an employed male, even one earning the minimum wage, placed at risk a mother’s economic well-being.’ Infamous ‘man in the house’ rules meant that welfare workers would randomly appear in homes to check and see if the mother was accurately reporting her family-status.”
Amity Shlaes also documents the “anti-father patrols” in her book, “Great Society.”
On top of the perverse incentives created by the welfare state are those created by progressive movements such as feminism and the sexual revolution, which held that the family is an oppressive, patriarchal, social construct designed to cement the status quo in place. The results were catastrophic:
“From 1890 to 1950, black women had a higher marriage rate than white women. And in 1950, just 9% of black children lived without their father. By 1960, the black marriage rate had declined but remained close to the white marriage rate. In other words, despite open racism and widespread poverty, strong black families used to be the norm.
“But by the mid-1980s, black fatherlessness skyrocketed. Today, only 44% of black children have a father in the home. In unison, the rate of black out-of-wedlock births went from 24.5% in 1964 to 70.7% by 1994, roughly where it stands today.”
“If you are reading whole books, rather than skimming them, chances are you are wasting a lot of time.” This is presumptuous. The way you read depends on what your goal is.
Aye. I would be interested to see what, exactly, Arnold defines as "skimming". I can see that most books just aren't worth reading closely, possibly at all, but then it seems that just skimming makes it very likely you are not getting the same message. For most people, skimming seems to be roughly equivalent to listening to a podcast where someone talks about their book a bit, which isn't what you want to really evaluate and understand an argument. Even audio books seem to really limit actual grasping the material.
Maybe Arnold should do a blog post on how he reads. Would it be a monologue on skimming? Some books deserve only skimming. A well written book, containing material new to the reader, deserves to be read line by line. My guess is that Arnold had read so much and knows so much that most books deserve only skimming. I’m not at that level. :)
I think that could be the case. Even a bad book though I think should be either read carefully or abandoned. I am imagining reading like Sunstein and Holmes; "The Cost of Rights". Terrible book, not recommended, but I don't think skimming it through and saying "Nah, this is dumb" is a good strategy. If it is truly dumb, just stop reading; you aren't missing anything. If it isn't actually dumb, will you really get the insight you need to change your mind on the matter by skimming? Seems to me one would just take away what confirms their position while lying to themselves that they read the book and there is nothing there.
I think that one should read carefully until you have a pretty good grasp of the argument (or find enough gaping chasms in it that you know they aren't capable of making one) and then either keep reading carefully because it is solid, or just abandoning it once you are pretty sure it isn't worth while. Maybe go through and read the introduction to each chapter just in case there is something clever that plugs the holes later that was strangely buried in the back; if that's what he means by skimming, ok.
Anyway, I think that skimming is sort of a cheating way to claim one read the book without actually reading it. It's like saying you went to the gym when all you did was go in, take a shower, then walked out. Of course, you have to be willing to admit "I read the first hundred pages or so and it was bad enough I just quit," but most nonfiction books don't even deserve to have 100 pages of them read.
I’m with you. Read carefully in general. Stop reading when a book gets dumb. Use skimming occasionally, especially if you’re about to give up on a dumb book.
No doubt. I stop reading most computer sciency books about half way through because at that point they start delving into arcana I'll look up when the time comes.
On the other hand, I just listened to the Audible version of "Fellowship of the Ring" which forced me to actually listen to the poems and songs. I'd missed a lot by skimming over them.
Re: classical liberalism, to some degree, I think is mainly a set of values, so calling it a luxury belief system is a bit of a misnomer. To the extent that there are beliefs encoded, though, I would just say that I think they're informed by a recognition of the limits of and downsides to authoritarianism, as displayed in the discussion of prohibition. The 30 Years War would be another obvious historical example.
I feel weird about contradicting Rob Henderson about a term he coined, but I have to do it anyway. The thing to me about a luxury belief is that it's either demonstrably false, highly contestable, or unfalsifiable. There is also the element of hypocrisy, in that the person who espouses the belief doesn't behave as if they actually believe it. You can maybe find some classical liberals who fit that bill, but you'll find plenty, I think, who, for example, either enjoy smoking weed and gambling now and again but recognize the dangers of immoderation in these activities (hey, that's me!) or who don't and wouldn't recommend anyone else do so either, but nevertheless doesn't think they should be entirely illegal. The luxury belief version of this would be something like "smoking weed and gambling are forms of recreation that many adults enjoy greatly and are part of many people's identities and self-actualization. People who do so compulsively are just living their best life and its immoral to judge or interfere with their behavior."
"The position is roughly that people shouldn’t have to adhere to norms and if/when they inevitably hurt themselves or others, then there should be no safety net available. It’s a luxury belief.”
This strikes me as untrue by his own definitions. We don't generally have safety nets (public at least, but you can buy others) for people making dumb decisions that get them hurt. Usually we do the opposite: no safety net, so when they do something a little stupid it hurts quickly and in a small amount, and learn to avoid the bigger related stupidities. Typically the pattern is
1: Warn people "This is bad if you aren't careful, and will get you hurt",
2: Show examples if possible of people doing bad thing and getting hurt.
3a: If dangerous thing is normal part of life (driving, drinking, using the stove, skiing) introduce the process in controlled environments and limit accidental damage
3b: If dangerous thing isn't a normal part of life you make it taboo, and when they do it anyway highlight how bad an idea it was and how hurt they are, and help them go back to normal.
4: Let people do what they want, and when they screw up let them take the consequences, hopefully small enough at the start that they learn their lesson without getting wrecked.
5: If the person persists in doing dumb things in ways that they get hurt, they become an example to others in stage 2.
At the moment we do seem to be falling down at step 1, failing to properly highlight the dangers of excessive alcohol and drug use, although with drugs it seems the failure is largely in over stating the danger of a little use that causes people to highly discount the advice. More so though, what the excessive social safety net problem creates is the lesser pains are reduced or made tolerable so that those observing and even those experiencing them think that there are no downsides to what they are doing. It's like taking pain killers to cover up the pain of tearing a muscle during a sporting event so you can keep playing: you are covering up the signal that says "Hey, things have gone bad! You need to stop!" As a result people don't get the feedback they need at the early stages before real problems set in, and we lose much of the power of example necessary for step 2.
Telling people "Don't do this thing, but when you do we will take care of you" is not a good method of keeping them from doing it. That it would be seems like more a of a luxury belief to me. When you have kids you tell them "Look, if you jump on the couch and fall off into the coffee table, it is going to hurt you a lot. So don't do that." Then when they do it anyway you say "See? What did I tell you?" shortly followed by "No, I can't make it stop hurting. Put some ice on it. That's all you can do." Once kids learn that adults can't wave a wand and make problems go away they start learning to avoid the problems.
The whole "luxury belief" thing seems odd. a) DO "elites" believe that marriage is neutral (negative?) for others while practicing it themselves (a sort of reverse hypocrisy?) b) DO these beliefs cause non-elites to fail to practice the actual good behaviors of the "elites."
The simple model of belief doesn't really work well to describe how people think, act, and talk - especially about "the right way to act" for any culturally important subject - because a lot happens below the conscious level and people don't have good theory of mind even for their own mind. There is some knowing and conscious lying, but in our culture it accounts for only a small amount of the observable behavioral discrepancies, especially for people affiliating with the higher status side of those debates. The way people talk is mostly optimized for pursuing meta-level social interests orthogonal to whatever the object-level topic of conversation might be. The way people act is often more a function of optimizing for core interests, though this can be lead astray by hacking the human learning system to provide humans with misleading training data. Because there is going to be lots of inconsistency between socially-optimized statements on right action and inferred principles of personally-optimized right-action, there is a need for a bullshit rationalization engine to pick up on and generate all kinds of socially acceptable excuses to prevent any undermining of internal sense of congruence, confidence, and sincerity that will get picked up on immediately in social interactions because these intuitive "manipulative deception" detection instincts are very good and sensitive in humans, having been honed in the crucible of thousands of generations of social-game arms race. The equilibrium solution to the game theory of these social interactions is for some cognitive module invisible to the level of conscious awareness to run interference to whatever degree required to create false meta-beliefs (beliefs about what you "really" believe) to maintain the emotional and physical indicators of sincerity so your social signals are accepted as currency instead of suspected to be counterfeit.
There are a number of psychological experiments, many involving brains with split hemispheres, in which one can observe this in real time by asking people for explanations of information fed to only one side. Usually it's the left hemisphere (which is apparently, and still quite mysteriously given typical bilateral symmetry, is specialized to house the "human LLM" in terms of the ability to translate the brains statistical model code back and forth into human language. The human LLM just keeps making up increasingly preposterous stories and rationalizations to "explain" all kinds of discrepancies, and the subject seems to "really believe" all these bogus stories the minutes the brain comes up with them, and even "really believes" that he has always believed them, with zero awareness of the functioning of the underlying process that is just making up lies on the spot, because that cognitive module must also be able to rewrite memory to cover its tracks, like elite hackers have to edit logs of access and modifications and so forth. The right brain apparently specializes in scrutinizing these rationalizations and editing them to be as consistent and socially acceptable as possible, but when it is cut out of the process - literally cut out in the case of these experiments- then the left brain is much freer to concoct rationalizations bordering on hallucinations so long as they fit within the patterns of normal linguistic arrangements.
This is how "luxury beliefs" really work, and unfortunately there really is no way to talk about the reality of the social-psychological mechanisms at play without engaging in "asymmetric insight" to some degree, because it is an empirical fact about human psychology that human brains with those elephants inside of them function specifically to prevent the very possibility of symmetric insight.
Yes, you're right. I think most of the reviewers are getting it wrong. There is however a salvageable way to look at it that even usesv the word 'luxury' (maybe inspiring Henderson?) per Aaron Sorkin's great* screenplay and Colonel Jessup's testimony in A Few Good Men, "... I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know -- that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives; and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives."
You could almost replace the word luxury with "obliviously privileged naivete". Most elite students "have the luxury of not knowing" just how bad deviations from the behavioral patterns of almost all their patterns affect even those with high talents but raised in the lower classes with their chaotic relationships, family chaos, and social pathologies. So they have the luxury of not feeling any pangs of dissonance when spouting some nonsense about all those bad behaviors being equally valid choices about equally arbitrary preferences with equally good outcomes. They can afford (psychologically, emotionally, spiritually) to say that clueless stuff because they never had to stain their innocence by getting smacked by the 2x4 of harsh human reality, and they can afford (personally, materially, behaviorally) to keep spouting it because they will (mostly) end up spontaneoisly mimicking and fitting into those same old traditional behavioral patterns that provide long- term support for personal success and happiness. Getting them to snap out of it and see the light and start "preaching what they practice" is basically impossible so long as they don't have the kind of immediate terror of personal ruination that would raise the true value of these behavioral norms to the level of conscious awareness.
*Don't give Sorkin too much credit, he wrote some nice dialogue, but didn't even make the story up, or have to find or research it. The story is actually based on real events and his sister was a Navy JAG directly involved with the case and she just told him what happened and he turned that into his breakthrough success credited for its dramatic realism, which as it turns out, was easy, because actually real. Art imitating life, but it gets weirder because the real world hazing was apparently itself inspired by the hazing of the character played by Kevin Bacon in his own personal breakout role as the Marine ROTC cadet in Animal House. So Art imitating Life imitating Art. You can't make this stuff up!
Ha, that's not a bad idea. For added comic effect I could do it in the style of Lawrence Auster and take a work everyone expects to be criticized from the left and instead accuse the author of not even being aware he is just a slightly watered-down radical leftist and criticize him from the much, much farther right. I'll order a copy of the book.
Layers or layers. _I_ DO take it as a Rightist critique who must SEE himself as a not hugely radical exemplar. But yes criticizing him from te Right would be fun. More than from the center.
I think better examples to understand the concept are helpful. I think about how many elites will say that students shouldn't have to work and study so much, so effort can't be what is driving differences in outcomes, but their own kids are in all sorts of classes and really work hard at school. Or that single mothers raise kids just as well as two parent households so higher rates of single motherhood can't explain differences in outcomes, but obviously they are serious about not having kids outside of marriage.
I think the big idea is that most modern luxury beliefs are around personal responsibility not mattering, but for personal activities those holding them tend to act as though they believe it does. (Or they believe that responsibility doesn't matter, and continue to do so because their wealthy parents support them, a luxury poorer people don't have... that seems like an important distinction but one that doesn't seem to get made much.)
I agree to a point, but for example, the "work" idea could be that our kids should not have to work so hard either, but we are stuck in bad system.
I am statistically and "elite" and associate with similar elites and I just don't hear much expression of these erroneous "luxury beliefs" at least in any more than a very passive way. And as such it's hard to see how they could have much causal power to explain other people acting out those beliefs.
You might even think causation goes the other way; injurious actions arise and elites have little experience in seeing the negative consequences, shrug, and "believe" the actions are not so bad. The "luxury belief" just a NMP reaction.
Possibly, yea. I was struggling a little with the school one and it is definitely a multifaceted problem. I kind of had in mind the people that will say SATs shouldn't matter to college admission because not being academically prepared is not going to be a handicap, but make damned sure their own kids are academically prepared. The key is the difference between professed beliefs and actions they take for themselves. Like if I said smoking crack was fine and never caused anyone any problems, but personally never touched the stuff and actively avoided it.
I think we see it more academia (where everyone pushes everything too far) and policy, where feelings matter more than reality. Which I think is really what it boils down to: luxury beliefs are those that feel good to hold but tend not to match with reality, typically highlighted when people don't act in accordance with what the profess because people act in accordance with reality.
I will probably pick up a copy in a few months, and if so I will write up a review. I think Henderson's idea of luxury beliefs is interesting and useful, and am interested in seeing it developed more. I kind of feel like it gets used a lot by other people in not entirely consistent ways, but of course sometimes people misuse an idea, or use an early version of it that doesn't quite line up with the latter version, etc. Most of us are doing essays here online, not final drafts :D
My take is that it's just another pejorative to use about Progressives, elites, etc. It does not seen useful for a) changing the readers perceptions about Progressives, nor b) useful in changing a Progressives' ideas.
Maybe it's just think it is not useful to me in the "center" who is already not sympathetic to Progressives but form non-conservatives reasons.
Yeah that rings hollow for me too. I would say the elite belief is more that marriage matters a lot, and because of that you should be very choosy about whom you marry. And one of the best ways to develop a good screener is to date around and wait until you’re mature enough to make a good decision.
Relatedly, if you make a bad decision and end up in an abusive marriage, it should be relatively easy to get out of it.
That said, the trans movement empowering minors to make a lifelong decision is the opposite of that.
If you're sleeping around it's hard to end up in a good marriage, and a decent % of the time your going to end up with an unplanned pregnancy.
The UMC sort of solves this with more conscientious use of birth control and lower overall promiscuity/substance abuse, but at the cost of late marriage and below replacement total fertility rate. Unsurprisingly the lower classes have less conscientiousness to manage this arrangement.
As for divorce, the definition of "abusive" is sufficiently broad that basically any reason for ending the relationship is valid. Eat, Pray, Love type stuff.
I don't think Henderson has written the final word on this issue by any means, but he has asked a string of what my father used to call "proper curly posers" that are well worth attempting to answer honestly--and seeing where the answers lead.
Twenge is writing about reading for pleasure -- NO to skimming. A big purpose of reading, for pleasure, is to enjoy the process of reading, and creating in your own mind the story being written by the author.
Yes to skimming textbooks, assigned books, academic articles (especially?), and stuff where you want the answer. Want to know what happens, in the end, only. Know enough of what was said in order to get the test questions right. Not so much fun, but efficient. A good life is not "efficient".
I'm pretty sure neither Hellen Dale, nor Holly MathNerd (fine substack!) were skimming when they read Rob Henderson's "Troubled." Did Arnold really skim that book? I enjoyed reading it line by line. (So much that I skipped some days of reading my usual many stacks & blogs.)
In the Twenge comments, there's a phrase "Distress tolerance" which is related to impatience but different. There is a related issue of ingratitude, and for me the idea of Snowflakes -- those unable to cope, emotionally, with major crises of life (job loss, family death, divorce) or even many annoying aspects of reality like being stuck in traffic or unable to decide what clothes to wear.
("It takes me so long to decide what I'm gonna wear" - Manic Monday)
I just bought Harry Potter 1 for my youngest son - to help him learn German better (we have it in both English & Slovak, I've read all 14; it helped my Slovak a lot). It's a great book, and Not Boring, which is why so many like it. My wife, older 2 sons & daughter also read all the HP books, some (like #3) multiple times, even taking it on vacations to read, again, at the beach.
My daughter also read the Twilight series, and possibly the 50 Shades of Grey BDSM romantic porn.
Holly has a fantastic post about Tumblr based sex ed for girls.
My 26 yr old son, living at home studying for a PhD (in nuclear engineering), stopped reading most books, but is going thru some 10,000,000 (million! really??) words by an author now getting about $15,000 / month by patreon. Here's the start from 7 years ago.
He's reading it on his phone and/or desktop, between his TA teaching, writing articles, working on his dissertation, and playing LOTS of videogames. Also board games like Magic, The Gathering. But not yet dating.
Rob and Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker, 105k subscribers) both talk about their reading habits. Slow. Every line, active engagement, make notes, write in columns, think about it. Mostly for thoughtful books, Rob seldom reads novels (which *I* read for pleasure), not sure about Ted. Recently he's got a great post: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/is-honest-writing-the-next-new-thing
With his biggest writing fear: "honest writing might be boring."
I'm always looking for truth, like here, but also pleasure in fiction (NOT real) that simulates some important aspect of Truth. Like the truth that power corrupts - so I oppose govt power (as all good libertarians should!). Which explains why Gandalf does NOT accept the Ring.
Children out of wedlock and fat shaming (and don't need religion and tell others I got lucky but family that the key is hard work and sacrifice):
I thought this was great but I'm wondering how many other things we could add. The one that come to mind is parental involvement in education, especially at the pre-K ages. It seems the lie is that if we expanded head start, equality will increase (never mind whether most Head start is crap). Maybe drug legalization goes on the list? Surely defined police. I'm mixed about emptying prisons as quite a few lives are made extremely difficult by having felony convictions.
“If it were up to me, we would have much stronger social norms against alcohol and drug use.” Agreed; but it is very hard to affect (informal) social norms. It is easier to get a legislative majority to pass prohibitory legislation, but this is a quite inadequate substitute for a near-universal strongly negative attitude towards the use of alcohol and other recreational drugs. The negative attitude would be great; the legal prohibition is not.
Wow, that article about Gen Z and reading is very concerning.
I wonder if we are headed toward a post literate society and how that will turn out.
Just as the LLMs come along and flood the world with text, there’s no one who actually reads it. People will just be using the LLM to summarize it all back into 3 bullet points and no one will have a deep understanding of anything anymore.
“If it were up to me, we would have much stronger social norms against alcohol and drug use.”
One way to do that is through stiff fines on public use, public intoxication, etc. Another way is through advertising that promotes pro-social acts, like telling someone smoking pot on the subway to put it out. But both of these pretty much require government to act over a period of at least years, without much in the way of measurements of output.
“Welcome! I'm David Roman and this is my History of Mankind newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone kind and decent forwarded it to you.
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"In societies where the well-off had a reasonable expectation of living a long, comfortable life"
Those are the societies where is pays to "have a low discount rate", to be concerned about not just next year but several years down the road. It is a society where it pays to forgo some present consumption, to save and invest, i.e., to have "delayed gratification".
Regarding Henderson’s idea of luxury beliefs, I didn’t feel a sting like Helen Dale, but felt two nudges: one on drug legalization and the other on immigration policy. Classical liberalism is very much on the good side of luxury beliefs. For example
"The [classical liberal] position is roughly that people shouldn’t have to adhere to norms and if/when they inevitably hurt themselves or others, then there should be no safety net available. It’s a luxury belief.”
No. The classical liberal position is that there should be a safety net, but one provided by the private sector. Private charities deal with individuals, governments with categories.
Marvin Olasky’s book, "The Tragedy of American Compassion," documents in detail the tens of thousands of lodges, charities, mutual aid societies, missions, civic associations, and fraternal organizations that existed across the country in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These organizations helped pull people out of poverty by addressing individual causes – ignorance, addiction, or simply bad luck. Thanks to the power of the free market and organizations such as these, the poverty rate plummeted from 80% of the population in 1800, to about 15% in the 1960s.
Unfortunately, the government stepped in with its “Great Society” programs and displaced private charitable organizations. As a result, the poverty rate has remained frozen at about 12-15% ever since. The government is very good at writing checks, but not very good at compassion. Real compassion isn’t feeling pity for the less fortunate, it’s climbing into the foxhole with them and sharing and understanding their individual problems.
Rather than addressing the unique issues that keep individual people in poverty, the government writes checks that do little more than help make the poor more comfortable in their poverty.
To be a good example to the poor you would have to forego and even condemn indulgences you yourself think you can handle but you know the poor can't. The UMC doesn't want to give up its indulgences.
I have no desire to live my life as a good example to the poor. I do, however, want to set a good example for my children and grandchildren. Moreover, by acting in accordance with the so-called “success sequence,” I’ll have a rich, productive, and fulfilling life.
The real luxury belief is, “I pay my taxes, let the government handle it.”
No, here (unlike your very good piece above) you have mangled Henderson’s quite excellent idea of luxury beliefs.
Liberals are generally quite happy paying their taxes, and in fact it is the rare case where their beliefs DO directly impact them.
Advocating that marriage and the nuclear family is an antiquated patriarchal structure, favoring government policies that make two parent families less likely among the poor, while yourself raising kids in a nuclear family, is a prototypical “luxury belief”.
You do a great disservice getting this wrong.
Quite so. Have you read David Beito's book "From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State" ? It looks at the history of private mutual aid groups, from lodges to hospitals, and comes to very similar conclusions. The individual attention to those in need, and making sure they stop being in need instead of long term clients, is really important.
No.
While my sympathies also lean toward the non-governmental programs you mention, they are no more responsible for the reduction in poverty than the New Deal (which precedes the Great Society you mention) which liberals like to claim as the reason poverty rates fell. The poverty rates fell because society got much richer.
We can argue whether that wealth did it directly through higher wages, slightly less directly through unions, through charity and social programs, or other ways but none would have had ANY success without much bigger per capital GDP and income.
As for the minimal improvement in measured poverty rates since the Great Society, there are many likely contributors and a few more which some people claim but that probably have minimal or no positive impact.
Measurement error
A remainder who generally can't succeed on their own
Government disincentives to work. This works along with a need for greater skills.
Fiscal policy that that exerts market forces mostly holding down wages at the low end to minimize inflation.
Easy credit, alcohol, drugs, gambling and other hazards with most severe impacts on the poor
Whatever the cause, increased kids raised by single parent.
...
As you state, family breakdown is a big problem. Study after study shows the impact of fatherlessness on children:
- 85% of currently imprisoned youths grew up without fathers.
- 70% of male sociopaths grew up without fathers.
- 70% of youths currently in state-operated prisons grew up without fathers.
- Children from fatherless homes are twice as likely to drop out, twice as likely to commit suicide, and far more likely to abuse drugs.
- Girls who grew up without fathers are four times more likely to become mothers before the age of 20.
- According to Chicago Police Department records, the neighborhoods with the highest murder rates are also the neighborhoods with the most births to single mothers.
Much of the family breakdown experienced in this country is a direct result of Johnson’s Great Society programs. Welfare laws not only created incentives for fathers to leave their families, but welfare workers *demanded* that they leave.
From the paper “Family Breakdown and America’s Welfare System” (https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-breakdown-and-americas-welfare-system):
“In the words of Harvard’s Paul Peterson, ‘some programs actively discouraged marriage,’ because ‘welfare assistance went to mothers so long as no male was boarding in the household… Marriage to an employed male, even one earning the minimum wage, placed at risk a mother’s economic well-being.’ Infamous ‘man in the house’ rules meant that welfare workers would randomly appear in homes to check and see if the mother was accurately reporting her family-status.”
Amity Shlaes also documents the “anti-father patrols” in her book, “Great Society.”
On top of the perverse incentives created by the welfare state are those created by progressive movements such as feminism and the sexual revolution, which held that the family is an oppressive, patriarchal, social construct designed to cement the status quo in place. The results were catastrophic:
“From 1890 to 1950, black women had a higher marriage rate than white women. And in 1950, just 9% of black children lived without their father. By 1960, the black marriage rate had declined but remained close to the white marriage rate. In other words, despite open racism and widespread poverty, strong black families used to be the norm.
“But by the mid-1980s, black fatherlessness skyrocketed. Today, only 44% of black children have a father in the home. In unison, the rate of black out-of-wedlock births went from 24.5% in 1964 to 70.7% by 1994, roughly where it stands today.”
“If you are reading whole books, rather than skimming them, chances are you are wasting a lot of time.” This is presumptuous. The way you read depends on what your goal is.
Aye. I would be interested to see what, exactly, Arnold defines as "skimming". I can see that most books just aren't worth reading closely, possibly at all, but then it seems that just skimming makes it very likely you are not getting the same message. For most people, skimming seems to be roughly equivalent to listening to a podcast where someone talks about their book a bit, which isn't what you want to really evaluate and understand an argument. Even audio books seem to really limit actual grasping the material.
Maybe Arnold should do a blog post on how he reads. Would it be a monologue on skimming? Some books deserve only skimming. A well written book, containing material new to the reader, deserves to be read line by line. My guess is that Arnold had read so much and knows so much that most books deserve only skimming. I’m not at that level. :)
I think that could be the case. Even a bad book though I think should be either read carefully or abandoned. I am imagining reading like Sunstein and Holmes; "The Cost of Rights". Terrible book, not recommended, but I don't think skimming it through and saying "Nah, this is dumb" is a good strategy. If it is truly dumb, just stop reading; you aren't missing anything. If it isn't actually dumb, will you really get the insight you need to change your mind on the matter by skimming? Seems to me one would just take away what confirms their position while lying to themselves that they read the book and there is nothing there.
I think that one should read carefully until you have a pretty good grasp of the argument (or find enough gaping chasms in it that you know they aren't capable of making one) and then either keep reading carefully because it is solid, or just abandoning it once you are pretty sure it isn't worth while. Maybe go through and read the introduction to each chapter just in case there is something clever that plugs the holes later that was strangely buried in the back; if that's what he means by skimming, ok.
Anyway, I think that skimming is sort of a cheating way to claim one read the book without actually reading it. It's like saying you went to the gym when all you did was go in, take a shower, then walked out. Of course, you have to be willing to admit "I read the first hundred pages or so and it was bad enough I just quit," but most nonfiction books don't even deserve to have 100 pages of them read.
I’m with you. Read carefully in general. Stop reading when a book gets dumb. Use skimming occasionally, especially if you’re about to give up on a dumb book.
No doubt. I stop reading most computer sciency books about half way through because at that point they start delving into arcana I'll look up when the time comes.
On the other hand, I just listened to the Audible version of "Fellowship of the Ring" which forced me to actually listen to the poems and songs. I'd missed a lot by skimming over them.
Arcana - that’s a great word. I’m making a mental note to remember that one.
Re: classical liberalism, to some degree, I think is mainly a set of values, so calling it a luxury belief system is a bit of a misnomer. To the extent that there are beliefs encoded, though, I would just say that I think they're informed by a recognition of the limits of and downsides to authoritarianism, as displayed in the discussion of prohibition. The 30 Years War would be another obvious historical example.
I feel weird about contradicting Rob Henderson about a term he coined, but I have to do it anyway. The thing to me about a luxury belief is that it's either demonstrably false, highly contestable, or unfalsifiable. There is also the element of hypocrisy, in that the person who espouses the belief doesn't behave as if they actually believe it. You can maybe find some classical liberals who fit that bill, but you'll find plenty, I think, who, for example, either enjoy smoking weed and gambling now and again but recognize the dangers of immoderation in these activities (hey, that's me!) or who don't and wouldn't recommend anyone else do so either, but nevertheless doesn't think they should be entirely illegal. The luxury belief version of this would be something like "smoking weed and gambling are forms of recreation that many adults enjoy greatly and are part of many people's identities and self-actualization. People who do so compulsively are just living their best life and its immoral to judge or interfere with their behavior."
"The position is roughly that people shouldn’t have to adhere to norms and if/when they inevitably hurt themselves or others, then there should be no safety net available. It’s a luxury belief.”
This strikes me as untrue by his own definitions. We don't generally have safety nets (public at least, but you can buy others) for people making dumb decisions that get them hurt. Usually we do the opposite: no safety net, so when they do something a little stupid it hurts quickly and in a small amount, and learn to avoid the bigger related stupidities. Typically the pattern is
1: Warn people "This is bad if you aren't careful, and will get you hurt",
2: Show examples if possible of people doing bad thing and getting hurt.
3a: If dangerous thing is normal part of life (driving, drinking, using the stove, skiing) introduce the process in controlled environments and limit accidental damage
3b: If dangerous thing isn't a normal part of life you make it taboo, and when they do it anyway highlight how bad an idea it was and how hurt they are, and help them go back to normal.
4: Let people do what they want, and when they screw up let them take the consequences, hopefully small enough at the start that they learn their lesson without getting wrecked.
5: If the person persists in doing dumb things in ways that they get hurt, they become an example to others in stage 2.
At the moment we do seem to be falling down at step 1, failing to properly highlight the dangers of excessive alcohol and drug use, although with drugs it seems the failure is largely in over stating the danger of a little use that causes people to highly discount the advice. More so though, what the excessive social safety net problem creates is the lesser pains are reduced or made tolerable so that those observing and even those experiencing them think that there are no downsides to what they are doing. It's like taking pain killers to cover up the pain of tearing a muscle during a sporting event so you can keep playing: you are covering up the signal that says "Hey, things have gone bad! You need to stop!" As a result people don't get the feedback they need at the early stages before real problems set in, and we lose much of the power of example necessary for step 2.
Telling people "Don't do this thing, but when you do we will take care of you" is not a good method of keeping them from doing it. That it would be seems like more a of a luxury belief to me. When you have kids you tell them "Look, if you jump on the couch and fall off into the coffee table, it is going to hurt you a lot. So don't do that." Then when they do it anyway you say "See? What did I tell you?" shortly followed by "No, I can't make it stop hurting. Put some ice on it. That's all you can do." Once kids learn that adults can't wave a wand and make problems go away they start learning to avoid the problems.
David Roman’s first line: “A rare feature of stoicism is that it was a philosophical system closely based on morality.” I get hung up on poor grammar.
So do I.
The whole "luxury belief" thing seems odd. a) DO "elites" believe that marriage is neutral (negative?) for others while practicing it themselves (a sort of reverse hypocrisy?) b) DO these beliefs cause non-elites to fail to practice the actual good behaviors of the "elites."
The simple model of belief doesn't really work well to describe how people think, act, and talk - especially about "the right way to act" for any culturally important subject - because a lot happens below the conscious level and people don't have good theory of mind even for their own mind. There is some knowing and conscious lying, but in our culture it accounts for only a small amount of the observable behavioral discrepancies, especially for people affiliating with the higher status side of those debates. The way people talk is mostly optimized for pursuing meta-level social interests orthogonal to whatever the object-level topic of conversation might be. The way people act is often more a function of optimizing for core interests, though this can be lead astray by hacking the human learning system to provide humans with misleading training data. Because there is going to be lots of inconsistency between socially-optimized statements on right action and inferred principles of personally-optimized right-action, there is a need for a bullshit rationalization engine to pick up on and generate all kinds of socially acceptable excuses to prevent any undermining of internal sense of congruence, confidence, and sincerity that will get picked up on immediately in social interactions because these intuitive "manipulative deception" detection instincts are very good and sensitive in humans, having been honed in the crucible of thousands of generations of social-game arms race. The equilibrium solution to the game theory of these social interactions is for some cognitive module invisible to the level of conscious awareness to run interference to whatever degree required to create false meta-beliefs (beliefs about what you "really" believe) to maintain the emotional and physical indicators of sincerity so your social signals are accepted as currency instead of suspected to be counterfeit.
There are a number of psychological experiments, many involving brains with split hemispheres, in which one can observe this in real time by asking people for explanations of information fed to only one side. Usually it's the left hemisphere (which is apparently, and still quite mysteriously given typical bilateral symmetry, is specialized to house the "human LLM" in terms of the ability to translate the brains statistical model code back and forth into human language. The human LLM just keeps making up increasingly preposterous stories and rationalizations to "explain" all kinds of discrepancies, and the subject seems to "really believe" all these bogus stories the minutes the brain comes up with them, and even "really believes" that he has always believed them, with zero awareness of the functioning of the underlying process that is just making up lies on the spot, because that cognitive module must also be able to rewrite memory to cover its tracks, like elite hackers have to edit logs of access and modifications and so forth. The right brain apparently specializes in scrutinizing these rationalizations and editing them to be as consistent and socially acceptable as possible, but when it is cut out of the process - literally cut out in the case of these experiments- then the left brain is much freer to concoct rationalizations bordering on hallucinations so long as they fit within the patterns of normal linguistic arrangements.
This is how "luxury beliefs" really work, and unfortunately there really is no way to talk about the reality of the social-psychological mechanisms at play without engaging in "asymmetric insight" to some degree, because it is an empirical fact about human psychology that human brains with those elephants inside of them function specifically to prevent the very possibility of symmetric insight.
What you say makes a great deal of sense but also makes hash of the concept of "luxury beliefs" as reviewers of Henderson's book explain it.
Yes, you're right. I think most of the reviewers are getting it wrong. There is however a salvageable way to look at it that even usesv the word 'luxury' (maybe inspiring Henderson?) per Aaron Sorkin's great* screenplay and Colonel Jessup's testimony in A Few Good Men, "... I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know -- that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives; and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives."
You could almost replace the word luxury with "obliviously privileged naivete". Most elite students "have the luxury of not knowing" just how bad deviations from the behavioral patterns of almost all their patterns affect even those with high talents but raised in the lower classes with their chaotic relationships, family chaos, and social pathologies. So they have the luxury of not feeling any pangs of dissonance when spouting some nonsense about all those bad behaviors being equally valid choices about equally arbitrary preferences with equally good outcomes. They can afford (psychologically, emotionally, spiritually) to say that clueless stuff because they never had to stain their innocence by getting smacked by the 2x4 of harsh human reality, and they can afford (personally, materially, behaviorally) to keep spouting it because they will (mostly) end up spontaneoisly mimicking and fitting into those same old traditional behavioral patterns that provide long- term support for personal success and happiness. Getting them to snap out of it and see the light and start "preaching what they practice" is basically impossible so long as they don't have the kind of immediate terror of personal ruination that would raise the true value of these behavioral norms to the level of conscious awareness.
*Don't give Sorkin too much credit, he wrote some nice dialogue, but didn't even make the story up, or have to find or research it. The story is actually based on real events and his sister was a Navy JAG directly involved with the case and she just told him what happened and he turned that into his breakthrough success credited for its dramatic realism, which as it turns out, was easy, because actually real. Art imitating life, but it gets weirder because the real world hazing was apparently itself inspired by the hazing of the character played by Kevin Bacon in his own personal breakout role as the Marine ROTC cadet in Animal House. So Art imitating Life imitating Art. You can't make this stuff up!
Maybe you should review Henderson for the Astral Star Codex "contest"
But do address the other prong as well.
Elites are clueless, so what? I'm not serting zero effect, but I do want to go from material cause to efficient cause.
Ha, that's not a bad idea. For added comic effect I could do it in the style of Lawrence Auster and take a work everyone expects to be criticized from the left and instead accuse the author of not even being aware he is just a slightly watered-down radical leftist and criticize him from the much, much farther right. I'll order a copy of the book.
Layers or layers. _I_ DO take it as a Rightist critique who must SEE himself as a not hugely radical exemplar. But yes criticizing him from te Right would be fun. More than from the center.
I think better examples to understand the concept are helpful. I think about how many elites will say that students shouldn't have to work and study so much, so effort can't be what is driving differences in outcomes, but their own kids are in all sorts of classes and really work hard at school. Or that single mothers raise kids just as well as two parent households so higher rates of single motherhood can't explain differences in outcomes, but obviously they are serious about not having kids outside of marriage.
I think the big idea is that most modern luxury beliefs are around personal responsibility not mattering, but for personal activities those holding them tend to act as though they believe it does. (Or they believe that responsibility doesn't matter, and continue to do so because their wealthy parents support them, a luxury poorer people don't have... that seems like an important distinction but one that doesn't seem to get made much.)
I agree to a point, but for example, the "work" idea could be that our kids should not have to work so hard either, but we are stuck in bad system.
I am statistically and "elite" and associate with similar elites and I just don't hear much expression of these erroneous "luxury beliefs" at least in any more than a very passive way. And as such it's hard to see how they could have much causal power to explain other people acting out those beliefs.
You might even think causation goes the other way; injurious actions arise and elites have little experience in seeing the negative consequences, shrug, and "believe" the actions are not so bad. The "luxury belief" just a NMP reaction.
Possibly, yea. I was struggling a little with the school one and it is definitely a multifaceted problem. I kind of had in mind the people that will say SATs shouldn't matter to college admission because not being academically prepared is not going to be a handicap, but make damned sure their own kids are academically prepared. The key is the difference between professed beliefs and actions they take for themselves. Like if I said smoking crack was fine and never caused anyone any problems, but personally never touched the stuff and actively avoided it.
I think we see it more academia (where everyone pushes everything too far) and policy, where feelings matter more than reality. Which I think is really what it boils down to: luxury beliefs are those that feel good to hold but tend not to match with reality, typically highlighted when people don't act in accordance with what the profess because people act in accordance with reality.
This should go into the review. :)
I will probably pick up a copy in a few months, and if so I will write up a review. I think Henderson's idea of luxury beliefs is interesting and useful, and am interested in seeing it developed more. I kind of feel like it gets used a lot by other people in not entirely consistent ways, but of course sometimes people misuse an idea, or use an early version of it that doesn't quite line up with the latter version, etc. Most of us are doing essays here online, not final drafts :D
My take is that it's just another pejorative to use about Progressives, elites, etc. It does not seen useful for a) changing the readers perceptions about Progressives, nor b) useful in changing a Progressives' ideas.
Maybe it's just think it is not useful to me in the "center" who is already not sympathetic to Progressives but form non-conservatives reasons.
Yeah that rings hollow for me too. I would say the elite belief is more that marriage matters a lot, and because of that you should be very choosy about whom you marry. And one of the best ways to develop a good screener is to date around and wait until you’re mature enough to make a good decision.
Relatedly, if you make a bad decision and end up in an abusive marriage, it should be relatively easy to get out of it.
That said, the trans movement empowering minors to make a lifelong decision is the opposite of that.
If you're sleeping around it's hard to end up in a good marriage, and a decent % of the time your going to end up with an unplanned pregnancy.
The UMC sort of solves this with more conscientious use of birth control and lower overall promiscuity/substance abuse, but at the cost of late marriage and below replacement total fertility rate. Unsurprisingly the lower classes have less conscientiousness to manage this arrangement.
As for divorce, the definition of "abusive" is sufficiently broad that basically any reason for ending the relationship is valid. Eat, Pray, Love type stuff.
I don't think Henderson has written the final word on this issue by any means, but he has asked a string of what my father used to call "proper curly posers" that are well worth attempting to answer honestly--and seeing where the answers lead.
My grasp of Brit slang is failing me... what does "curly" mean in that sentence?
Awkward, intricate, entwined, hard to resolve.
Ahh that makes sense, thanks!
Twenge is writing about reading for pleasure -- NO to skimming. A big purpose of reading, for pleasure, is to enjoy the process of reading, and creating in your own mind the story being written by the author.
Yes to skimming textbooks, assigned books, academic articles (especially?), and stuff where you want the answer. Want to know what happens, in the end, only. Know enough of what was said in order to get the test questions right. Not so much fun, but efficient. A good life is not "efficient".
I'm pretty sure neither Hellen Dale, nor Holly MathNerd (fine substack!) were skimming when they read Rob Henderson's "Troubled." Did Arnold really skim that book? I enjoyed reading it line by line. (So much that I skipped some days of reading my usual many stacks & blogs.)
In the Twenge comments, there's a phrase "Distress tolerance" which is related to impatience but different. There is a related issue of ingratitude, and for me the idea of Snowflakes -- those unable to cope, emotionally, with major crises of life (job loss, family death, divorce) or even many annoying aspects of reality like being stuck in traffic or unable to decide what clothes to wear.
("It takes me so long to decide what I'm gonna wear" - Manic Monday)
I just bought Harry Potter 1 for my youngest son - to help him learn German better (we have it in both English & Slovak, I've read all 14; it helped my Slovak a lot). It's a great book, and Not Boring, which is why so many like it. My wife, older 2 sons & daughter also read all the HP books, some (like #3) multiple times, even taking it on vacations to read, again, at the beach.
My daughter also read the Twilight series, and possibly the 50 Shades of Grey BDSM romantic porn.
Holly has a fantastic post about Tumblr based sex ed for girls.
https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/when-harry-met-draco
My 26 yr old son, living at home studying for a PhD (in nuclear engineering), stopped reading most books, but is going thru some 10,000,000 (million! really??) words by an author now getting about $15,000 / month by patreon. Here's the start from 7 years ago.
https://wanderinginn.com/2017/03/03/rw1-00/
He's reading it on his phone and/or desktop, between his TA teaching, writing articles, working on his dissertation, and playing LOTS of videogames. Also board games like Magic, The Gathering. But not yet dating.
Rob and Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker, 105k subscribers) both talk about their reading habits. Slow. Every line, active engagement, make notes, write in columns, think about it. Mostly for thoughtful books, Rob seldom reads novels (which *I* read for pleasure), not sure about Ted. Recently he's got a great post: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/is-honest-writing-the-next-new-thing
With his biggest writing fear: "honest writing might be boring."
I'm always looking for truth, like here, but also pleasure in fiction (NOT real) that simulates some important aspect of Truth. Like the truth that power corrupts - so I oppose govt power (as all good libertarians should!). Which explains why Gandalf does NOT accept the Ring.
Children out of wedlock and fat shaming (and don't need religion and tell others I got lucky but family that the key is hard work and sacrifice):
I thought this was great but I'm wondering how many other things we could add. The one that come to mind is parental involvement in education, especially at the pre-K ages. It seems the lie is that if we expanded head start, equality will increase (never mind whether most Head start is crap). Maybe drug legalization goes on the list? Surely defined police. I'm mixed about emptying prisons as quite a few lives are made extremely difficult by having felony convictions.
“If it were up to me, we would have much stronger social norms against alcohol and drug use.” Agreed; but it is very hard to affect (informal) social norms. It is easier to get a legislative majority to pass prohibitory legislation, but this is a quite inadequate substitute for a near-universal strongly negative attitude towards the use of alcohol and other recreational drugs. The negative attitude would be great; the legal prohibition is not.
:)
Wow, that article about Gen Z and reading is very concerning.
I wonder if we are headed toward a post literate society and how that will turn out.
Just as the LLMs come along and flood the world with text, there’s no one who actually reads it. People will just be using the LLM to summarize it all back into 3 bullet points and no one will have a deep understanding of anything anymore.
It’s worse than Carr described in The Shallows.
You say:
“If it were up to me, we would have much stronger social norms against alcohol and drug use.”
One way to do that is through stiff fines on public use, public intoxication, etc. Another way is through advertising that promotes pro-social acts, like telling someone smoking pot on the subway to put it out. But both of these pretty much require government to act over a period of at least years, without much in the way of measurements of output.
“Welcome! I'm David Roman and this is my History of Mankind newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone kind and decent forwarded it to you.
If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this little button below:” Weak and annoying way to begin every newsletter.
"In societies where the well-off had a reasonable expectation of living a long, comfortable life"
Those are the societies where is pays to "have a low discount rate", to be concerned about not just next year but several years down the road. It is a society where it pays to forgo some present consumption, to save and invest, i.e., to have "delayed gratification".
Regarding Henderson’s idea of luxury beliefs, I didn’t feel a sting like Helen Dale, but felt two nudges: one on drug legalization and the other on immigration policy. Classical liberalism is very much on the good side of luxury beliefs. For example
https://scottgibb.substack.com/p/ten-luxury-beliefs-to-consider?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2