Dan Williams on flaws in social epistemology; Lorenzo Warby on how bureaucracies decay; Rob Henderson on college as a sorting mechanism; Timothy Sandefur on libertarians
Re: "The college degree is losing its signaling power not only for the labor market, but for assortative mating, too."
Indeed, the trend is that graduates of selective colleges increasingly delay marriage, partly because female graduates want to observe a clearer signal of a prospective spouse's future earnings. On average, it takes several years to clarify career trajectory, precisely because the college degree has become a noisier signal.
See Muhammed Alparslan Tuncay's dissertation, "Assortative Mating and Inequality":
I'd argue "partly" is a key word in your comment. I'm highly skeptical this is anything close to a primary factor. It seems far more likely these women simply have other priorities than marrying in their early 20s, or 20s at all and they aren't looking to marry.
Re: "If that analysis [cited by Rob Henderson] is correct, then most colleges are not selecting for intelligence. What are they selecting for? Conformity? Willingness to pay tuition?"
Most colleges aren't selective.
The student who applies to college ipso facto passes the conformity bar at non-selective colleges.
Re: revenues. In addition to willingness to pay tuition, colleges rely on *willingness to take out loans.* Remarkably, an offer of college admission goes a long way to qualify youths for large loans. The incentives are screwy. The college finance system is thoroughly gamed by all players. On the one hand, incentives in college finance are a prime example of what Arnold calls "decadent systems." On the other hand, markets and competition among colleges play a large role in college admissions.
Perhaps the Achilles heel is regulatory distortion: massive taxpayer subsidies, guaranteed student loans -- and now forgiveness of loans. College finance is exhibit no. 21,378 in the phenomenon, "baptists & bootleggers" coalition-formation. Ideals of "access" and education-worship play the baptist role.
I'll add on rather than make a top level comment - a non-selective college degree (of some sort) may still be required to access a dating market at or post graduation from selective colleges.
Re: "it is difficult to see how open societies can make good collective decisions." — Dan Williams
A countervailing behavior might be *wise deference*. As Arnold Kling likes to say, we decide what to believe by deciding whom to believe. How might an open society cultivate wise deference?
I would add that we should trust institutional openness:
Decentralization (the principle of subsidiarity).
More markets, less majority rule (public choice). See Arnold's case for markets.
"Exit" options as a check on power, and as a complement to (or substitute for) "voice."
Thus wise deference differs from technocracy or rule by experts.
How much should we tax or spend to reduce net CO2 emissions.
How should police/prosecutors act to deter crime and apprehend and punish violators?
What was the right amount and form of reduction social interactions during the pandemic? How could we discover it?
How many of what kinds of potential immigrants should we exclude and how should we exclude them and how should this decision be made?
It seems to me that Libertarians stick to much to general good principles without thinking enough about how to make the principles engage with the society as it presently exists. And pointing out the flaws or existing arrangements is not enough.
The short answer to your questions is that you may find reasonable, often incisive, real-time answers in Arnold Kling's blogposts in recent years.
Let me add my own brief replies.
1) CO2 emissions: See Gary S. Becker, Kevin Murphy, and Robert Topel, “On the Economics of Climate Policy,” B. E. Journal of Economic Policy & Analysis 10:2 (2010). Available
Nutshell: Enact a carbon tax at a modest magnitude, then increase gradually. Provide taxpayer subsidies for basic R&D.
I would add: Track insurance markets for price evidence of climate risks. Deregulate construction to enable efficient private adaptation to climate change.
2) Crime: Increase police funding, training, accountability. Enforce laws against public nuisance. Experiment with ways to change norms, to reduce mind-drug prevalence.
3) Pandemic policy: Rely on private adaptation (without censorship). Lockdowns and experimental vaccine mandates violate liberty unnecessarily and backfire. Avoid pretense of pseudo-precise cost-benefit analysis. Heed thought experiments inspired by the Coase theorem; e.g., conjectures about the least-cost avoider. The Coase theorem aligned with focussed protection of the elderly and persons with renal disease during the Covid pandemic.
4) Immigration: Allow only orderly legal immigration at a modest level, then experiment with gradual increase. Given the level, admit migrants from a wide range of source countries (in order to avoid creation of a concentrated rival ethnic culture). Delay access to public subsidies for immigrants. If populism is a political constraint against immigration, then double down on open trade as a partial substitute for labor immigration.
You must have been reading my SubStack. :) Except I would _sharply increase_ legal immigration of skilled, educated/educable. entrepreneurial even if some do turn out politically like Musk :))
Also, I think we may need better regulation hazard insurance markets to allow/ensure that insurers set premia according to expected (not historical) risks.
I like and agree with your examples but I don't think they in any way mitigate what John said. If we started with John's approach, I think the number of difficult questions would be greatly reduced. It might also put us in a better position for addressing the difficult questions.
I have to disagree with the libertarian take. I’ve always said libertarianism is the best approach if it weren’t for the people involved. It doesn’t recognize the realities of human interdependence. We will form governments that skilled people will manipulate. We will approach problems emotionally, etc. Government will get involved in lots of things. The US government has done about as good a job as any in recognizing these flaws and accounting for them. I wouldn’t call it libertarian. Libertarian approaches cause large inequalities and people can’t handle that. The backlash isn’t worth the gain.
“Instead, it recognizes that people are fallible—often ignorant, foolish and malevolent—and concludes that for this very reason, their ability to use government’s coercive powers should be minimized.”
Right. Take this assumption all the way to its end. Most people are fallible, ignorant and even malevolent, and I recognize this even in my self.
If you take this to be true, then it is true many people are incapable of using government’s coercive powers. But this is no less likely to be true in any other facet of life.
Most people either need the heavy hand of a virtuous culture to provide them models and encourage them to make wise choices, or they will need the heavy hand of government to do so.
The problem with libertarianism is the libertarian slide into social liberalism. The view that it is dangerous and wrong for government to moralize tends to collapse into the more general view that it is dangerous and wrong to moralize at all.
“Philosophers use the term “ideal theory” to describe an argument that posits an optimal society based on abstract, idealized assumptions about people’s behavior. Libertarianism is the opposite of this.”
I question this. Yes, conservatives and libertarians recognize that people are fallible, but libertarians seem to me to be the poster children for basing political theory on abstract and idealized assumptions rather than testing and empirical review.
Libertarians don’t make their decisions on drug laws or immigration based upon what really is happening in San Francisco or Sweden, but on their abstract and idealized assumptions.
"Libertarians try to rid people of the notion that someone suddenly becomes endowed with wisdom and benevolence when he moves into a position of power."
While I agree with this, I prefer to emphasize the contrast between *collective* and *individual* decision-making. Start with a simple (even absurd) example: Should we each individually get to decide what clothes to wear every morning, or should we take a vote on this? Most people will feel instinctively that it is none of other people's business what they wear. Next translate this sentiment into more consequential domains (education, health care, savings, employment, etc.). Hopefully people get the point.
Related is the distinction between *social* and *socialist*. I define social as providing a safety net, while socialist as having a large degree of collective decision making. These are arguably two (very) distinct concepts.
Socialism/collectivism subjects minorities to the will of the masses. And, as Rand said: "The smallest minority is the individual".
Re assortative mating, while the average IQ of college grads may have dropped to the overall population average, this is probably not or not yet the case for the so-called elite schools. So it may be that assortative mating continues at a numerically reduced level, thus producing a smaller (and more inbred?) elite. Does this work toward solving the problem of excess production of elites? (I use the term elite loosely - the degradation of culture has certainly lowered their quality so that perhaps pseudo-elite might be a better label).
Convenience for analysis is the only reason to use "college grad or not" as a way to break up the population into two big groups. But to the extent "college grads" tend to marry each other, it isn't with some random other "college grad". If you break up "education" into more status tiers of quantity and quality, you'll find even more finely-tuned assortment, and the whole "same average IQ" thing disappears as a mere artifact of the recent vast increase in the "diploma mills for dummies" phenomenon, which lower-IQ "college grads" rarely being able to "marry above their station", so to speak.
I wish Libertarian would help us Liberals figure out how to actually have a government which WILL try to raise the incomes of people whose "market value" is low, provide some public services, and deal with some externalities _given_ that "someone [does not] suddenly becomes endowed with wisdom and benevolence when he moves into a position of power."
They may not be able to help you figure that out, but perhaps they could teach you that technocratic projects for the collective rational management of human affairs continually run into the problem of human fallibility (what religions called "man's fallen nature), and run off the rails. But perhaps an even greater impediment is the fact that human wishes and desires vary so widely and are so incommensurable that such projects to impose common solutions inevitably tend toward unacceptable coercion. It looked from your comment like you were hoping to be shown how to avoid those realities rather than accept their sad implications.
Fair point. I can't speak for Thomas, but I think the question, given our political and social constraints, is finding effective least-intrusive approaches to address problems which, left unaddressed, tend toward more intrusive political shocks and policy reactions.
There are market-based solutions to this and a lot of problems we associate with the state, but they can't work when the government bans one from trying.
As a hypothetical example, imagine that instead of relying on the police and the criminal justice system, a whole retail business district instead pays insurance premiums on one-year-term contracts to one of several competing security companies who becomes responsible for paying for the harms from ordinary crimes such as thefts or property damage should they occur. The security-insurance company has the incentive to prevent crime by the optimal amount based on market prices.
But to perform this security function adequately, it would need extremely wide latitude to set its own terms of its discretion and authority with regards to its rights to monitor, interact with, control, or eject anyone entering the district, to include physical restraint and violence if necessary, with questions of liability going to private arbitration instead of the insane political and court systems.
To understate things by quite a lot, this kind of thing is not allowed* to exist. And because the police and policy-makers which do exist face no direct liability from not preventing crime, they will often focus on other incentives and just let crime happen to certain people in certain places. Which would be tolerable if people were allowed to grumble about their wasted tax money but still permitted to take things into their own hands, but they are not.
*Unless you are a very-very-VIP who gets their own armed bodyguards and has the kind of money or pull to make sure that when those bodyguards have to get rough that it doesn't cause you or them the kind of trouble it would cause the owner of a dry cleaning shop in downtown Minneapolis trying to prevent his business from getting burned down in a riot.
Shopping malls do a little of this on a small scale. There was a Supreme Court case during the Warren years which said they were semi-public and were limited in what they could do. Going the opposite direction from what Handle would like.
The government doesn't even have to ban it. One can't opt out of paying for police protection and if a retail district opted for its own security system, unlike an individual business that hires security, the district would almost certainly get less police protection and has a disincentive to the route you propose.
Dysfunctional big government is a bad equilibrium with perverse feedback loops.
Partial remedies? Maybe technology shock. Maybe movements for autonomy (e.g., home schooling, school choice?). Once upon a time there was the frontier -- a ready exit option.
Hasn’t the modern breakthrough often referred to as the Industrial Revolution done just this? Average incomes are up over 30X in just over two centuries. Poverty, hunger, disease and premature death have been reduced to levels never before believed possible.
If a libertarian points away from the institutions and values which created this breakthrough, then they better explain it well.
I became depressed about government when I learned public choice theory in the. 1980s. Then Jeffrey Friedman's project on political ignorance provided an even more robust critique. Both from an incentive perspective and an informational perspective deliberative democracy is wildly implausible beyond very small jurisdictions (I think Ilya Somin suggests 10,000).
A marketplace in governments is the solution. Both incentives and information are more highly aligned when we shop for groceries, cars, or computers. We can't evaluate quality ourselves at an expert level, but we have a greater incentive to identify more reliable expert opinions. There is an active market in expert opinion in most consumer choices (consider Amazon reviews).
This won't solve any problems in the US on a short term time horizon. But as we get private governance systems developed in Prospera, Ciudad Morazon (both Honduran ZEDEs) and increasingly around the world (there are dozens of projects in the works), gradually we'll see a market in governance systems arise, true competitive governance.
Dan Williams is extending public choice/political ignorance arguments for the mainstream. The first step towards a better system is a radical disillusionment with deliberative democracy as an ideal. As James Buchanan described public choice, "politics without romance."
Williams insightful writing is a pleasure to read. I reluctantly accept his pessimism about human ability to face reality objectively. Originally, I thought this inability applied to utopian idealism, but it seems our flaws seep into even the most realistic of expectations. Namely, as he puts it, even humble, open societies. I'm so looking forward to his forthcoming "bleaker" picture. Sigh.
"if your highest level of education is a high school diploma, your probability of marrying a college graduate is only nine percent. In contrast, if you hold a college degree, your probability of marrying a fellow college graduate is sixty-five percent."
Am I missing something? These numbers don't seem compatible. If we take out those who haven't graduated high school, we have about 40% college grad and roughly the same percent high school grad. How do they not marry each other at a similar rate?
One way to get there is if way less college grads marry but that doesn't sound right.
Another way is if the study defines a group with more education than high school but not a college grad. I can't confirm that because I don't have access to the study paper but if this is the case, it seems what Henderson states is rather misleading as 35% of college grads are marrying someone who isn't one and most of these 35% are marrying someone not in the high school grad group and presumably in some middle group. He doesn't even address how many high school grads are marrying into this middle group. ... Unless "college grad" excludes those with further education. But now the original statement gets even more ambiguous and meaningless.
As I write this comment, the quoted statistics seem less likely wrong but more likely misleading and uninformative.
"What are they selecting for? Conformity? Willingness to pay tuition?"
Certainly a bit of those but depending on the situation, the first to fail out or otherwise leave tend to be in one or more categories:
The stereotypical dropout is too immature or otherwise distracted to go to class, do homework, or study enough to get by. Of course brighter students can do less and still get by but dropping out is rarely solely do to low intelligence. Someon making a good effort but without the needed aptitude can and often does successfully switch to an easier major.
There are also plenty of dropouts who are financially unstable and those with too many other obligations such as kids and jobs. These students face a much bigger challenge but it still usually boils down to effort, perseverance, and maturity.
Maybe there's another factor to consider. I'd argue that "good" employment candidates who chose not to go to college tend to have very different skill sets versus those who take the college path. What percent of your college grad friends learned to change brake pads on a car as a youngster? Or even know how now?
I read the profile of Tucker Carlson in the WSJ this weekend. A farrago of opinions and beliefs, probably better than half of them correct.
He was quoted as saying that mass immigration was making America “poorer and dirtier and more divided”.
That would undoubtedly be considered an “inaccurate view of reality” acc. to mainstream elite opinion - yet it would have been the utterly humdrum expectation of many economists 40 years ago.
But then, we now understand that the fact that we throw all our stuff away means we are admirably unmaterialistic. Practically on an astral plane, only with food delivery. Ignore all the plastic packaging. It’s immaterial.
I'm not sure how much I agree with your point but you made me think of the experiment guessing the weight of the cow. Pretty much everyone was wrong but the collective wisdom was even better than the experts.
For various reasons that case might not even be relevant here but it seems worth considering but a big difference is our tendency to group think. The cow example fails by hearing other people's guesses. Even hearing a random number can bias guesses.
Re: "The college degree is losing its signaling power not only for the labor market, but for assortative mating, too."
Indeed, the trend is that graduates of selective colleges increasingly delay marriage, partly because female graduates want to observe a clearer signal of a prospective spouse's future earnings. On average, it takes several years to clarify career trajectory, precisely because the college degree has become a noisier signal.
See Muhammed Alparslan Tuncay's dissertation, "Assortative Mating and Inequality":
https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1881?ln=en&v=pdf
I'd argue "partly" is a key word in your comment. I'm highly skeptical this is anything close to a primary factor. It seems far more likely these women simply have other priorities than marrying in their early 20s, or 20s at all and they aren't looking to marry.
Yes, plausible.
Re: "If that analysis [cited by Rob Henderson] is correct, then most colleges are not selecting for intelligence. What are they selecting for? Conformity? Willingness to pay tuition?"
Most colleges aren't selective.
The student who applies to college ipso facto passes the conformity bar at non-selective colleges.
Re: revenues. In addition to willingness to pay tuition, colleges rely on *willingness to take out loans.* Remarkably, an offer of college admission goes a long way to qualify youths for large loans. The incentives are screwy. The college finance system is thoroughly gamed by all players. On the one hand, incentives in college finance are a prime example of what Arnold calls "decadent systems." On the other hand, markets and competition among colleges play a large role in college admissions.
Perhaps the Achilles heel is regulatory distortion: massive taxpayer subsidies, guaranteed student loans -- and now forgiveness of loans. College finance is exhibit no. 21,378 in the phenomenon, "baptists & bootleggers" coalition-formation. Ideals of "access" and education-worship play the baptist role.
I'll add on rather than make a top level comment - a non-selective college degree (of some sort) may still be required to access a dating market at or post graduation from selective colleges.
Re: "it is difficult to see how open societies can make good collective decisions." — Dan Williams
A countervailing behavior might be *wise deference*. As Arnold Kling likes to say, we decide what to believe by deciding whom to believe. How might an open society cultivate wise deference?
I would add that we should trust institutional openness:
Decentralization (the principle of subsidiarity).
More markets, less majority rule (public choice). See Arnold's case for markets.
"Exit" options as a check on power, and as a complement to (or substitute for) "voice."
Thus wise deference differs from technocracy or rule by experts.
Nice phrases, but how does that cash out?
How much should we tax or spend to reduce net CO2 emissions.
How should police/prosecutors act to deter crime and apprehend and punish violators?
What was the right amount and form of reduction social interactions during the pandemic? How could we discover it?
How many of what kinds of potential immigrants should we exclude and how should we exclude them and how should this decision be made?
It seems to me that Libertarians stick to much to general good principles without thinking enough about how to make the principles engage with the society as it presently exists. And pointing out the flaws or existing arrangements is not enough.
The short answer to your questions is that you may find reasonable, often incisive, real-time answers in Arnold Kling's blogposts in recent years.
Let me add my own brief replies.
1) CO2 emissions: See Gary S. Becker, Kevin Murphy, and Robert Topel, “On the Economics of Climate Policy,” B. E. Journal of Economic Policy & Analysis 10:2 (2010). Available
online: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5225
&context=journal_articles
Nutshell: Enact a carbon tax at a modest magnitude, then increase gradually. Provide taxpayer subsidies for basic R&D.
I would add: Track insurance markets for price evidence of climate risks. Deregulate construction to enable efficient private adaptation to climate change.
2) Crime: Increase police funding, training, accountability. Enforce laws against public nuisance. Experiment with ways to change norms, to reduce mind-drug prevalence.
3) Pandemic policy: Rely on private adaptation (without censorship). Lockdowns and experimental vaccine mandates violate liberty unnecessarily and backfire. Avoid pretense of pseudo-precise cost-benefit analysis. Heed thought experiments inspired by the Coase theorem; e.g., conjectures about the least-cost avoider. The Coase theorem aligned with focussed protection of the elderly and persons with renal disease during the Covid pandemic.
4) Immigration: Allow only orderly legal immigration at a modest level, then experiment with gradual increase. Given the level, admit migrants from a wide range of source countries (in order to avoid creation of a concentrated rival ethnic culture). Delay access to public subsidies for immigrants. If populism is a political constraint against immigration, then double down on open trade as a partial substitute for labor immigration.
You must have been reading my SubStack. :) Except I would _sharply increase_ legal immigration of skilled, educated/educable. entrepreneurial even if some do turn out politically like Musk :))
Also, I think we may need better regulation hazard insurance markets to allow/ensure that insurers set premia according to expected (not historical) risks.
I like and agree with your examples but I don't think they in any way mitigate what John said. If we started with John's approach, I think the number of difficult questions would be greatly reduced. It might also put us in a better position for addressing the difficult questions.
I have to disagree with the libertarian take. I’ve always said libertarianism is the best approach if it weren’t for the people involved. It doesn’t recognize the realities of human interdependence. We will form governments that skilled people will manipulate. We will approach problems emotionally, etc. Government will get involved in lots of things. The US government has done about as good a job as any in recognizing these flaws and accounting for them. I wouldn’t call it libertarian. Libertarian approaches cause large inequalities and people can’t handle that. The backlash isn’t worth the gain.
“Instead, it recognizes that people are fallible—often ignorant, foolish and malevolent—and concludes that for this very reason, their ability to use government’s coercive powers should be minimized.”
Right. Take this assumption all the way to its end. Most people are fallible, ignorant and even malevolent, and I recognize this even in my self.
If you take this to be true, then it is true many people are incapable of using government’s coercive powers. But this is no less likely to be true in any other facet of life.
Most people either need the heavy hand of a virtuous culture to provide them models and encourage them to make wise choices, or they will need the heavy hand of government to do so.
The problem with libertarianism is the libertarian slide into social liberalism. The view that it is dangerous and wrong for government to moralize tends to collapse into the more general view that it is dangerous and wrong to moralize at all.
“Philosophers use the term “ideal theory” to describe an argument that posits an optimal society based on abstract, idealized assumptions about people’s behavior. Libertarianism is the opposite of this.”
I question this. Yes, conservatives and libertarians recognize that people are fallible, but libertarians seem to me to be the poster children for basing political theory on abstract and idealized assumptions rather than testing and empirical review.
Libertarians don’t make their decisions on drug laws or immigration based upon what really is happening in San Francisco or Sweden, but on their abstract and idealized assumptions.
What people fail to understand is that if you throw a libertarian bone to a collectivist dog, it’s going to choke on it.
"Libertarians try to rid people of the notion that someone suddenly becomes endowed with wisdom and benevolence when he moves into a position of power."
While I agree with this, I prefer to emphasize the contrast between *collective* and *individual* decision-making. Start with a simple (even absurd) example: Should we each individually get to decide what clothes to wear every morning, or should we take a vote on this? Most people will feel instinctively that it is none of other people's business what they wear. Next translate this sentiment into more consequential domains (education, health care, savings, employment, etc.). Hopefully people get the point.
Related is the distinction between *social* and *socialist*. I define social as providing a safety net, while socialist as having a large degree of collective decision making. These are arguably two (very) distinct concepts.
Socialism/collectivism subjects minorities to the will of the masses. And, as Rand said: "The smallest minority is the individual".
Re assortative mating, while the average IQ of college grads may have dropped to the overall population average, this is probably not or not yet the case for the so-called elite schools. So it may be that assortative mating continues at a numerically reduced level, thus producing a smaller (and more inbred?) elite. Does this work toward solving the problem of excess production of elites? (I use the term elite loosely - the degradation of culture has certainly lowered their quality so that perhaps pseudo-elite might be a better label).
Convenience for analysis is the only reason to use "college grad or not" as a way to break up the population into two big groups. But to the extent "college grads" tend to marry each other, it isn't with some random other "college grad". If you break up "education" into more status tiers of quantity and quality, you'll find even more finely-tuned assortment, and the whole "same average IQ" thing disappears as a mere artifact of the recent vast increase in the "diploma mills for dummies" phenomenon, which lower-IQ "college grads" rarely being able to "marry above their station", so to speak.
I wish Libertarian would help us Liberals figure out how to actually have a government which WILL try to raise the incomes of people whose "market value" is low, provide some public services, and deal with some externalities _given_ that "someone [does not] suddenly becomes endowed with wisdom and benevolence when he moves into a position of power."
They may not be able to help you figure that out, but perhaps they could teach you that technocratic projects for the collective rational management of human affairs continually run into the problem of human fallibility (what religions called "man's fallen nature), and run off the rails. But perhaps an even greater impediment is the fact that human wishes and desires vary so widely and are so incommensurable that such projects to impose common solutions inevitably tend toward unacceptable coercion. It looked from your comment like you were hoping to be shown how to avoid those realities rather than accept their sad implications.
Fair point. I can't speak for Thomas, but I think the question, given our political and social constraints, is finding effective least-intrusive approaches to address problems which, left unaddressed, tend toward more intrusive political shocks and policy reactions.
There are market-based solutions to this and a lot of problems we associate with the state, but they can't work when the government bans one from trying.
As a hypothetical example, imagine that instead of relying on the police and the criminal justice system, a whole retail business district instead pays insurance premiums on one-year-term contracts to one of several competing security companies who becomes responsible for paying for the harms from ordinary crimes such as thefts or property damage should they occur. The security-insurance company has the incentive to prevent crime by the optimal amount based on market prices.
But to perform this security function adequately, it would need extremely wide latitude to set its own terms of its discretion and authority with regards to its rights to monitor, interact with, control, or eject anyone entering the district, to include physical restraint and violence if necessary, with questions of liability going to private arbitration instead of the insane political and court systems.
To understate things by quite a lot, this kind of thing is not allowed* to exist. And because the police and policy-makers which do exist face no direct liability from not preventing crime, they will often focus on other incentives and just let crime happen to certain people in certain places. Which would be tolerable if people were allowed to grumble about their wasted tax money but still permitted to take things into their own hands, but they are not.
*Unless you are a very-very-VIP who gets their own armed bodyguards and has the kind of money or pull to make sure that when those bodyguards have to get rough that it doesn't cause you or them the kind of trouble it would cause the owner of a dry cleaning shop in downtown Minneapolis trying to prevent his business from getting burned down in a riot.
Shopping malls do a little of this on a small scale. There was a Supreme Court case during the Warren years which said they were semi-public and were limited in what they could do. Going the opposite direction from what Handle would like.
The government doesn't even have to ban it. One can't opt out of paying for police protection and if a retail district opted for its own security system, unlike an individual business that hires security, the district would almost certainly get less police protection and has a disincentive to the route you propose.
Dysfunctional big government is a bad equilibrium with perverse feedback loops.
Partial remedies? Maybe technology shock. Maybe movements for autonomy (e.g., home schooling, school choice?). Once upon a time there was the frontier -- a ready exit option.
Hasn’t the modern breakthrough often referred to as the Industrial Revolution done just this? Average incomes are up over 30X in just over two centuries. Poverty, hunger, disease and premature death have been reduced to levels never before believed possible.
If a libertarian points away from the institutions and values which created this breakthrough, then they better explain it well.
It seems to me that it's the socialists who point away from the institutions and values that created this breakthrough.
Agreed. Sorry I worded my first comment so poorly.
I became depressed about government when I learned public choice theory in the. 1980s. Then Jeffrey Friedman's project on political ignorance provided an even more robust critique. Both from an incentive perspective and an informational perspective deliberative democracy is wildly implausible beyond very small jurisdictions (I think Ilya Somin suggests 10,000).
A marketplace in governments is the solution. Both incentives and information are more highly aligned when we shop for groceries, cars, or computers. We can't evaluate quality ourselves at an expert level, but we have a greater incentive to identify more reliable expert opinions. There is an active market in expert opinion in most consumer choices (consider Amazon reviews).
This won't solve any problems in the US on a short term time horizon. But as we get private governance systems developed in Prospera, Ciudad Morazon (both Honduran ZEDEs) and increasingly around the world (there are dozens of projects in the works), gradually we'll see a market in governance systems arise, true competitive governance.
Dan Williams is extending public choice/political ignorance arguments for the mainstream. The first step towards a better system is a radical disillusionment with deliberative democracy as an ideal. As James Buchanan described public choice, "politics without romance."
Williams insightful writing is a pleasure to read. I reluctantly accept his pessimism about human ability to face reality objectively. Originally, I thought this inability applied to utopian idealism, but it seems our flaws seep into even the most realistic of expectations. Namely, as he puts it, even humble, open societies. I'm so looking forward to his forthcoming "bleaker" picture. Sigh.
Try this
When North Korea Comes to America
https://shorturl.at/M3T0E
But we already know what universities are selecting for, don’t we? It’s spelled DIE, or something like that.
"if your highest level of education is a high school diploma, your probability of marrying a college graduate is only nine percent. In contrast, if you hold a college degree, your probability of marrying a fellow college graduate is sixty-five percent."
Am I missing something? These numbers don't seem compatible. If we take out those who haven't graduated high school, we have about 40% college grad and roughly the same percent high school grad. How do they not marry each other at a similar rate?
One way to get there is if way less college grads marry but that doesn't sound right.
Another way is if the study defines a group with more education than high school but not a college grad. I can't confirm that because I don't have access to the study paper but if this is the case, it seems what Henderson states is rather misleading as 35% of college grads are marrying someone who isn't one and most of these 35% are marrying someone not in the high school grad group and presumably in some middle group. He doesn't even address how many high school grads are marrying into this middle group. ... Unless "college grad" excludes those with further education. But now the original statement gets even more ambiguous and meaningless.
As I write this comment, the quoted statistics seem less likely wrong but more likely misleading and uninformative.
"What are they selecting for? Conformity? Willingness to pay tuition?"
Certainly a bit of those but depending on the situation, the first to fail out or otherwise leave tend to be in one or more categories:
The stereotypical dropout is too immature or otherwise distracted to go to class, do homework, or study enough to get by. Of course brighter students can do less and still get by but dropping out is rarely solely do to low intelligence. Someon making a good effort but without the needed aptitude can and often does successfully switch to an easier major.
There are also plenty of dropouts who are financially unstable and those with too many other obligations such as kids and jobs. These students face a much bigger challenge but it still usually boils down to effort, perseverance, and maturity.
Maybe there's another factor to consider. I'd argue that "good" employment candidates who chose not to go to college tend to have very different skill sets versus those who take the college path. What percent of your college grad friends learned to change brake pads on a car as a youngster? Or even know how now?
Williams also just posted an excellent companion piece: https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/the-marketplace-of-misleading-ideas?publication_id=2203516&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=2cvd4&utm_medium=email
I read the profile of Tucker Carlson in the WSJ this weekend. A farrago of opinions and beliefs, probably better than half of them correct.
He was quoted as saying that mass immigration was making America “poorer and dirtier and more divided”.
That would undoubtedly be considered an “inaccurate view of reality” acc. to mainstream elite opinion - yet it would have been the utterly humdrum expectation of many economists 40 years ago.
But then, we now understand that the fact that we throw all our stuff away means we are admirably unmaterialistic. Practically on an astral plane, only with food delivery. Ignore all the plastic packaging. It’s immaterial.
I'm not sure how much I agree with your point but you made me think of the experiment guessing the weight of the cow. Pretty much everyone was wrong but the collective wisdom was even better than the experts.
For various reasons that case might not even be relevant here but it seems worth considering but a big difference is our tendency to group think. The cow example fails by hearing other people's guesses. Even hearing a random number can bias guesses.