Links to Consider, 6/11

Kevin Corcoran on Tim Urban's Ladder; Robin Hanson on feminism and status; me on stable money; Richard Gunderman on health industry consolidation

Kevin Corcoran writes,

The highest rung is for what he calls “scientists.” This is rung is for the Platonic Ideal of how thinkers should operate. Scientists are open-minded, willing to consider all the evidence, will freely admit when their interlocutor makes a good point, follow the evidence wherever it may lead, aren’t committed to a pre-existing view, and so forth. …

The next rung down is for what he calls “sports fans.” Sports fans have a preferred outcome and are rooting for a side, but they are also fundamentally driven by respect for the game. … They want their team to win, but only if they win fair and square.

The next rung down is for the “attorney.” … They will always seek out some grounds to argue against any evidence contradicting their established position. Still, they are attempting to persuade and make arguments, tendentious as their arguments will be.

The lowest rung is for “zealots.” Zealots don’t bother with arguments and aren’t interested in the evidence. They operate on pure tribalism and are convinced members of the other tribe are necessarily stupid, evil, or otherwise corrupt.

He refers to Urban’s book, What’s Our Problem?

In principle, I think that the quality of one’s arguments can be evaluated. I am not sure that the ladder works for me. I still prefer the FITs categories, which mostly involve addressing the strong points of an opposing view and acknowledging the weaknesses of one’s own position.

Robin Hanson writes,

It seems pretty plausible that many high status women are primarily bothered by their personally facing gender-based obstacles to gaining even higher status. …

It seems less plausible to me that the primary motive here is to cut feature differences between typical people and those in power. After all, people in power are also much more likely to be older, taller, healthier, sociopathic, and lawyers, yet I see far less energy devoted to reducing such differences. 

Think of just about any political movement as a movement to redistribute status among elites. Feminism is an attempt to redistribute status in favor of elite women. Woke is an elite movement on the left, and anti-Woke is an elite movement on the right.

Status redistribution movements do not have to emerge just because status inequalities exist. There is a potential for short men (like me) to create a status movement, but we probably will not see such a movement. Instead, my guess is that some sociological changes have to be taking place in order for a new status movement to emerge. For example, technology that enabled women to do more market work and less child-bearing helped give rise to feminism. The increase in Midwits attending college helped give rise to Woke. Homework: use this model to explain the emergence of movements to deal with climate apocalypse or AI apocalypse.

I review a new book by Lawrence White on the pros and cons of fiat money.

In a fiat money standard, the government issues money, and people accept money as payment. As White points out:

• No country we know of switched to a fiat standard following an open public discussion of its benefits and costs. p. 194

Instead, fiat currency arises from a bait-and-switch. A government will start with a well-defined currency, with its value tied to gold or some established foreign currency. Then the public becomes accustomed to using that currency. At some point—typically during a crisis—the government will let the currency float, dropping its promise to exchange currency for gold or other valuable assets.

Richard Gunderman writes,

fifty years ago, virtually all non-academic, non-government U.S. physicians had an ownership interest in their practices. Today, approximately 70% of U.S. physicians are employed by hospitals or other corporate entities. Likewise, mergers and acquisitions have landed more than 70% of hospitals and 90% of hospital beds in multi-hospital health systems. As such, health care organizations have increased in size and their complexity has multiplied. For example, between 1975 and 2010, the number of U.S. physicians roughly doubled, but the number of healthcare administrators—employees of medical practices, hospitals, and health systems who do not directly care for patients—increased about thirty-six times.

If consolidation were purely efficiently-promoting, one would expect the ratio of administrators to physicians to decrease rather than increase. But the driving factor is increased regulation. This drives up compliance costs, forcing small units in the health care sector to merge with larger units. Some of the regulation comes directly from the government. But some of it comes indirectly from insurance companies, which were strengthened by the government in the misguided belief that more powerful insurance companies would drive down health care prices.

Note that the same thing is true in K-12 education. There was dramatic consolidation of school districts between 1950 and today. Yet the ratio of administrators to classroom teachers has soared. You can take this as illustrating the tendency for government-run organizations to be inefficient, regardless of economies of scale or other alleged advantages of centralization.

Substacks referenced above:

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Gender And Status