Links to Consider, 5/17

Glenn Reynolds on meeting violence with violence; Peter Gray on an adverse educational intervention; Lorenzo Warby on belief systems as social capital; Samo Burja on Mexican drug cartels

Glenn Reynolds writes,

UCLA told its police not to do anything to the pro-Hamas encampment even after a pro-Israel Jewish girl was beaten unconscious.  It was attacked by pro-Israel students and neighbors, and torn down, while the police didn’t arrive to the encampment – which reportedly was emblazoned with “All Cops Are Bastards” and the like – for two hours.  But afterwards, UCLA removed the encampment.

He argues that disruptive protesters will get away with it as long as no one fights back. The authorities will follow the path of least resistance, allowing vandalism and intimidation to take place. But once other people start to confront the protests and clashes take place, the authorities finally will intervene.

If this is true, note the incentives that it creates.

Peter Gray writes,

In brief, the Pre-K group performed better than the control group on all academic measures at the beginning of kindergarten, but the control group soon caught up and, by third grade, the control group performed better on all academic measures than the pre-K group. Moreover, by third grade those in the pre-K group were significantly more likely to have been diagnosed with a learning disorder and had a higher rate of school rule violations than those in the control group.

This refers to an experiment with “quality Pre-K.”

I claim that most educational interventions, even those endorsed by the education establishment, have no effect. I call this The Null Hypothesis. For an intervention to demonstrate that it is better than The Null, first of all it has to be subject to a controlled experiment. Next, the result has to replicate in other experiments. Third, its effects must be materially significant (mere statistical significance is too easy to obtain—you can get statistical significance of a trivial improvement with a large enough sample size). Finally, if years later the difference has disappeared (this is known as “fadeout”), then the intervention has not defied the Null.

I would caution Gray against jumping to the conclusion that this intervention is harmful. My prediction would be that the negative outcomes would fail to replicate if the experiment were tried again. If so, then we would be back to The Null Hypothesis.

Lorenzo Warby writes,

This motivated core generates a cluster of prestige opinions—opinions that mark one as being of the good and smart—and luxury beliefs—opinions with entry costs for those lacking relevant social, human and other capital. Opinions and beliefs are based on future-directed, and future-grounded intentions held to be morally ennobling. All use the social justice template for rhetorical, and increasingly institutional, dominance.

…Yes, there are much more powerful indicators of elite status than beliefs: more powerful to those outside the elite. Both Veblen and Henderson’s observations are concerned with status indicators within the elite.

The motivated core are like a religious cult. Note Warby’s definition of luxury beliefs, which implicitly uses the theory of costly signaling. There are people who will not be able to converse in the language of intersectionality, privilege, and gender fluidity because it is costly to attend the institutions where that language is taught.

Samo Burja writes,

the cartels are far more like junior partners to corrupt government officials rather than an independent and competing force of their own, though their allegiances have ebbed and flowed from the state level to the federal level—Mexico is a federation of united states—and seemingly back over the last sixty years. This makes Mexico’s cartels clients of the Mexican state, not its competitors, and, in turn, Mexico’s status as a client of the U.S. explains why the cartels continue to flourish and why there is unlikely to be any U.S. intervention in the near future.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

substacks referenced above: @

Mexico’s Drug Cartels Are Not Competitors to the State

@

Dominion Capital: I

@

#40. Long-Term Harm of Early Academic Training

@

Pushback Works