Links to Consider, 3/27

Niccolo Soldo on Western meddling via NGOs; Kling on feminist economics; Lorenzo Warby on moral agency; Richard Hanania on East Asian exceptionalism

Niccolo Soldo writes,

It was open warfare against Meciar by NGOs seeking to:

1. aid the transformation of the country through influencing the policy-making and contributing to an informed public discussion

2. assist in the troubled process of democratic transition

By 2001, they were embedded into the Slovakian Government. Who were these NGOs? Who financed and staffed them? What did they say? What did they do?

…90% of funding of anti-Meciar NGOs came from western sources …

Could that be considered Slovak civil society? Or is it foreign destabilization?

What Soldo sees is the American empire at work in Eastern Europe. You may disagree, on the grounds that we are always the good guys. But still worth considering.

As part of a symposium, I wrote,

What concerns me about the lead essay is that it appears to say that in order to study gender outcomes we face the either-or choice of relying on standard economics or Marxist-style sociology. In the example of gender inequality of salaries within the profession of academic economics, the essay asserts that:

According to standard economics the gap is the effect of women’s free choice. Conversely, feminist economics claims that the gap is the effect of gender discrimination.

...They are two opposite ways of considering this specific kind of gender inequality. Any social phenomenon has many possible causes and correlations...

What I would like to have seen in the lead essay is more discussion that addresses these “many possible causes and correlations.” I do not want to return to the “old-time religion” of standard economics, which ends up dealing with social norms by trying to stuff them into utility functions. But neither do I want to be forced to rely on Marxist sociology, seeing power relations, exploitation, and repression everywhere.

Lorenzo Warby writes,

The metabolically sicker we get as a population, the more resources go to public health and the more salient health issues become. The metabolically healthier we get as a population, the less resources go to public health and the less salient health issues become.

In such circumstances, given the standard bureaucratic incentives to hoard authority, to increase resources flowing to and through the bureaucracy, and to select for protections from the complexities of competence, the efficient level of self-deception among health bureaucrats tends to be very high.

I see a parallel in financial regulation. The more that financial regulation fails to stabilize banking, the more the regulators exercise their tendency to hoard authority.

Later:

One of the deep divides in politics is between those who see things in terms of power, powerlessness and constraint-as-oppression and those who see themselves as having agency and a desire to preserve that which enables and protects agency.

Recall the moral dyad. We should think of humans as having both agency and feelings. But we tend to think of this as either-or: one party is an unfeeling robot with agency, and the other side is a helpless baby with feelings. Warby is describing a Left view that sees social constraints, including the market economy, as the robot, with the low-income individual as the helpless baby. The Right sees the low-income individual as having agency.

Warby refers to the issue of differences in executive function. I wonder: can you be blamed for having poor executive control? The left does not want to assign blame, because it wants to locate the source of all ills in society writ large rather than the individual. The Right sees everyone as having poor executive control, and society as a whole develops norms and institutions to address that. These norms and institutions include the assignment of blame, so that crime is punished.

Richard Hanania writes,

You’d think social scientists, if they were serious people, would treat this as one of the most important things they could be studying. We all want a longer life expectancy and less crime, and reducing illegitimacy and getting test scores up are forever goals of public policy. We have a major region of the world that is filled with extreme outliers on all of these measures. If there was a country with nearly no cancer, wouldn’t medical researchers want to know why that was? Why is it so uninteresting that an entire region of the globe seems almost completely free of the social pathologies that afflict much of the rest of the world?

The region is East Asia, and the exceptionalism follows East Asians as they migrate elsewhere. Hanania points out that that there is considerable cultural diversity in East Asian countries. He does not say so, but it sort of leaves genetics as the most plausible explanation. I expect East Asians to show a higher propensity to pass the marshmallow test.

Substacks referenced above:

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Choosing pseudo-realities

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Regime Change and Colour Revolutions Part 2: Security Vacuum and Streamlining Democracy