Links to Consider, 6/19

Aaron Renn on partisan divides over family; Timothy Taylor on trends in U.S. government debt; Dan Williams on over-estimating our pro-sociality; The WSJ on stock prices rising, volatility falling

Aaron Renn writes,

A very interesting Pew Research poll shows a large partisan skew in views on family. Only 19% of Biden voters believe society is better off if people prioritize marriage and children compared to 56% of Trump supporters.

Note that he has more interesting data to share. As always, I recommend clicking through to the links I provide here.

Timothy Taylor writes,

Federal debt held by the public was around 35% of GDP as recently as 2008. Now it’s up around 95% of GDP

…the usual pattern of the last half-century was for the Fed to hold US federal debt equal to about 5% of GDP–an amount used for the Fed’s day-to-day financial duties. But from 2008 to about 2014, when the overall debt-to-GDP ratio rose by about 30 percentage points, the Fed ended up holding about one-third of that debt.

The Fed is now down to holding about 18% of GDP, but my bet is that it will stay the same or go higher.

when the US debt-to-GDP ratio takes off around 2008, the holdings of foreign investors rise sharply–from about 15% of GDP to 35% of GDP, before sagging a little since then.

…we now owe about one-third of that federal debt–and the associated interest payments–to others outside the US economy.

…The Congressional Budget Office says that in 2024, federal interest payments will exceed defense spending; by 2025, federal interest payment will exceed Medicare.

Dan Williams writes,

For people to be motivated to help others, they must, at some level, view it as promoting their interests—for example, because it will be reciprocated or improve their reputation or because failing to help will be punished. Without such incentives, cooperation evaporates….

Nevertheless, when people describe their cooperative behaviour, they almost never acknowledge this situation. They depict self-interest as irrelevant to their friendliness, fair-mindedness, and generosity. The help others because others need help, because they care about the “common good”, because it is “the right thing to do”, and so on. They value cooperation not because it constitutes a personally advantageous strategy; they value it as an end in itself.

…the stories we tell—and believe—about our motives for cooperation are designed not for accuracy but to paint our behaviour in ways that make us look good.

His point is that we can mislead ourselves into thinking that “good motives” are sufficiently abundant that we can build a society without institutions (such as markets) that channel self-interested motives for the greater good.

The WSJ reports,

Stocks have been on a steady climb, with the S&P 500 up 14% nearly halfway through 2024 and closing at 29 records along the way. One-day index changes of 1% in either direction have been rare, and there has been just one 2% move, the fewest since 2017 through this point in the year.

I’ve just been reading a review copy of Making Sense of Chaos, by J. Doyne Farmer (the book has been out for a couple of months). He and his associates build “agent-based” models of the stock market, and of the economy in general. One of their models has the property that rising stock prices and reduced volatility reinforce one another in a positive feedback loop…until the process suddenly and violently goes in reverse.

Have a nice day.

substacks referenced above: @

Socialism, self-deception, and spontaneous order

@

The New Polarizations