Links to Consider, 7/5

Rob Henderson reams out libertarians; Kulak reports from two festivals, and praises libertarians; Yuval Levin on 21st-century political troubles; David Roman vs. Joseph Henrich

Rob Henderson writes,

Highly educated and affluent people are more economically conservative and socially liberal. This makes less sense. The position is roughly that people should not adhere to strong social norms and should not curtail their freedoms and if and when they inevitably hurt themselves or others, then there should be no safety net available.

It’s a luxury belief.

…The luxury belief class thinks that the unhappiness associated with certain behaviors and choices is primarily stems from the negative social judgments they elicit, rather than the behaviors and choices themselves.

I consider myself socially libertarian, but personally judgmental. I do not want the government to decide what drugs you can use, how many weeks into a pregnancy a woman is allowed to have an abortion, who you can have sex with, and so on.

But I believe that you should make choices that put you onto the path of becoming a grandparent and a good example for your grandchildren. Not like the self-styled rationalists described below.

Kulak writes about Vibecamp (for rationalists).

none of them seem likely to breed.

…Which indeed is what you’d expect from a festival of terminally online Twitter people from The Bay Area, New York, and DC who when not trans or otherwise queer disproportionately Identify with polyamory, kink, or other sexual proclivities which are actively anti-correlated with actual sexual reproduction.

Pointer from Mary Harrington. Kulak also attended Porcfest (mentioned by David Friedman), put on by the libertarian crowd in New Hampshire. Concerning Friedman’s debate with Gene Epstein about Austrian vs. Chicago economics, she writes

I was almost laughing at the humour of it, that 100-200 cantankerous rural whites from across the country, half of them with holsters and sidearms on their hips, had just watched two 80 year old Jews animatedly and unintelligibly sperg out about the relative merits of the neoclassical theories of Irving Fisher for an hour straight…

But Kulak was impressed by the libertarians’ children.

All of them were skinny, healthy, and they were all hustling and running little businesses more impressively than the adults. There was the 12 year old hustling poker, there were kids doing motorcycle repair on their minibikes, countless girls running food and lemonade stands doing very brisk businesses, and a whole host more…

…PorcFest and the New Hampshire Free State Project might be the only truly Eugenic instead of Dysgenic culture that I’ve seen… Anywhere.

Max Tabarrok writes,

the institution of academia is depreciating. Inward looking networks of grant applicants and reviewers reward a fixed cohort of researchers that gets older every year. Risk averse funders and reviewers that reward incremental, labor intensive research. A business model based on exclusivity that requires more and more hurdles as the initial pool of applicants grows.

Institutional decay in the academy is obvious to anyone who looks and can explain our observations of aging, narrowing careers in academia.

He argues that the slowdown in scientific progress is not due to science getting harder, but instead is due to this institutional decay.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who also points to the work of Adam Ozimek and others on the American work force. This research is outside of the academic research cartel and seems at least as rigorous and is much more interesting than what appears in the journals nowadays.

In a podcast with Yascha Mounk, Yuval Levin says,

if you listen to the words Trump said and the words the Tea Party had said, you would think they would be enemies. The Tea Party was very libertarian. Trump was dismissive of all of that. But if you listen to the tone of the Tea Party and Trump, you would see that these are very much akin to each other. And it turned out, I think, that the tone was much more important than the substance, and that what the right was looking for was a populist vehicle to register intense dissatisfaction with American elites.

Hard to excerpt, but here is another:

We're living now with two weak parties, and there's no question about it, because the only thing either party can think to say to voters is that it would be really bad if the other party won.

And here is his swipe at the NatCons:

I think that contemporary post-liberalism is a way of seeing the downsides of the liberal society and missing or ignoring or dismissing the upsides. It's a way of fundamentally engaging in active despair, and saying this society stands in the way or contradicts the pursuit of a flourishing life.

The take goes on in interesting ways.

David Roman writes,

Now, it’s important to understand where Henrich goes wrong in his book. He’s not wrong in claiming that cousin marriage is bad, or that low rates of cousin marriage have long been a competitive advantage of Western societies. Where he’s wrong is in claiming that the Christian Church is responsible for this taboo, and is the main reason why it’s been enforced. In reality, one could argue that the opposite is closer to the complex truth.

Roman’s essay is well worth reading. But he never takes on the empirical evidence that Henrich provides that proximity to Catholic outposts produced behavioral differences.

substacks referenced above:

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Quick Take: The Christian Church Didn't Save the West from Cousin Marriage

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Yuval Levin on the Coming Realignment

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Against the Burden of Knowledge

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The IQ Shredder Is Good, Actually

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You Can’t Be Socially Liberal and Fiscally Conservative

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Vibecamp & Porcfest: An Ethnography of The Internet's Edge