Links to Consider, 5/29

John Cochrane on policy issues; Lorenzo Warby on bureaucracy; Freddie deBoer on psychotic disorders; Antonio Garcia Martinez on religion

[note: no Zoom meeting tonight; it looks like June 19th is the next plausible date]

John Cochrane was awarded a Bradley Prize, and he gave a lecture. I used to attend these lectures, but I guess I am no longer on the list that receives notifications. Congratulations to John. Here are some excerpts of what he said (the rest of the speech is at the link):

Much regulation protects politically influential businesses, workers, and other constituencies from the disruptions of growth. Responsive democracies give people what they want, good and hard. And in return, regulation extorts political support from those beneficiaries. We have to fix the regulatory structure, to give growth a seat at the table.  

Economists are somewhat at fault too. They are taught to look at every problem, diagnose “market failure,” and advocate new rules to be implemented by an omniscient, benevolent planner. But we do not live in a free market. When you see a problem, look first for the regulation that caused it.

…Bad incentives are again the unsung central problem of our social programs.  Roughly speaking, from zero to about sixty thousand dollars of income, if you earn an extra dollar, you lose a dollar of benefits. Fix the incentives, and more people will get ahead in life. We will also better help the truly needy, and the budget.

Lorenzo Warby writes,

Bureaucracy is useful because almost any administrative function can be turned into a set of processes, to a series of sequential tasks, thereby creating administrative regularity. Our highly complex societies are pervaded by bureaucracy, whether government, non-profit, or corporate.

That seems to echo Max Weber.

I might offer a slight variation on it. I think that a bureaucracy gets established when a Bad Thing happens to an organization. The response is to set up the Department To Make Sure That Bad Thing Never Happens Again. And when the Bad Thing happens to enough organizations, other organizations become sufficiently aware of the Bad Thing that even if they have not themselves experienced the Bad Thing, they still set up a Department To Prevent That Bad Thing From Happening Here.

I think that this explains why DEI bureaucracies, which Warby discusses, are so prevalent. It is a Bad Thing is to be accused of being a “hostile environment” for some protected class. DEI is supposed To Prevent That Bad Thing From Happening Here.

Warby goes on to describe the pathologies of bureaucracies. The main pathology comes from the fact that the more that a Bad Thing is perceived as a threat, the better it is for the status of the Department that is supposed to protect us from it. So the Department needs to make sure that everybody is aware of the threat of the Bad Thing. While it has to show that it is working hard to ward off the threat, actually coming up with an elegant solution for preventing the Bad Thing would be self-defeating for the Department. If the Department really did away with the Bad Thing, then the organization could do away with the Department.

Freddie deBoer writes,

Every step we take towards seeing the severely mentally ill as inherently harmless and “valid” is a step we take away from fully and compassionately understanding the depths of their problems. Real severe mental illness is constantly painful, periodically debilitating, always ugly, and sometimes violent. If you aren’t willing to admit to those things you will never be a friend to the severely mentally ill.

When we had our subscriber Zoom conversation a couple weeks ago, I was expecting to discuss this topic for a few minutes. He went on much longer, because he feels so passionately about it, and because he is so frustrated by the unthinking disagreement that he encounters.

Antonio Garcia Martinez writes,

Public life in the West these days is a feverish cycle of figuring out which divine victim to elevate, and which world-saving millenarian “current thing” to embrace this week. It’s the secularized sequel to Christianity with all of the grace, chastity, and virtue stripped out leaving only the faith in a victim-prophet and in an imminent apocalypse that will right all wrongs and initiate the Kingdom of God on Earth.

I doubt that conversion to Judaism is the way to escape the oppressor-oppressed framing of the world. The Exodus is certainly an oppressor-oppressed story. The Communist faith attracted many Jewish followers. And Joseph Henrich credits Christian marriage rules for making us Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. So the influence of religious teachings on culture is complicated.

Substacks referenced above:

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Diversity Inclusion Equity as bureaucratic pathology