Links to Consider, 8/16

Timothy Taylor on declining American mobility; Joshua Tait on the alt-right; The WSJ on the college spending spree; An anonymous reviewer on Henrich

Timothy Taylor writes,

Here’s the overall picture. The “mover rate” on the right-hand axis looks at the share of households living in a different place than one year earlier. It used to be up around 20%; now its under 10%. . . Notice that the decline in the mover rate is a long-run trend over four decades. It is axiomatic that you cannot plausibly explain a long-run trend with a one-time event, like the Great Recession of 2007-9 or the more recent pandemic. Something else is going on.

Alex, I go with “Aging of the population.” People in their 20s and 30s move frequently. People in their 60s don’t. In 1982, the Boomers were 18 to 36. In 2022, they were 58 to 76.

Joshua Tait writes,

In a telling linguistic shift, these nascent movements generally consider themselves of the right, rather than conservative. . .it also repudiates 50 years of conservative activism and perceived failure.

…For the alt-right, if their brand is damaged and their most palatable ideas in wide circulation, they remain distinguished by their racism, bile, and Nietzschean posturing.

Yet, the rise and fall of the alt-right and the reformation of the American right over the past eight years has meant a generation of right wing political actors – congressional staffers, campaign volunteers, Young Republicans, legal clerks – has matured while race, nationalism, state power, and foreign affairs have been live questions.

I hold Progressives responsible for the prominence of race in today’s politics. Without Woke, there would be no anti-Woke.

In foreign affairs, the establishment is guilty of getting carried away with democracy promotion. If the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq had been carried out as brief punitive expeditions, for harboring Al Qaeda and refusing to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors, respectively, that probably would have been ok with most Americans. But as long-term nation-building failures, under Colin Powell’s “You broke it, you bought it” doctrine, they damaged the Republican establishment brand. I remember early in the Iraq war a foreign policy intellectual talking excitedly about surrounding Iran on two sides with working democracies. Nope.

But I think that younger activists on the right have gone overboard in their rejection of the Republican establishment. I will probably have to spell that point out in a longer essay.

Melissa Korn and others (WSJ) write,

The nation’s best-known public universities have been on an unfettered spending spree. Over the past two decades, they erected new skylines comprising snazzy academic buildings and dorms. They poured money into big-time sports programs and hired layers of administrators. 

….For every $1 lost in state support at those universities over the two decades, the median school increased tuition and fee revenue by nearly $2.40, more than covering the cuts, the Journal found.

Universities do seem to have cut back in one area: the use of full-time faculty to teach. Instead, poorly-paid adjuncts have been increasingly employed.

Private colleges and universities went along with the spending boom. Perhaps they led it. The campus of my alma mater, Swarthmore college, is unrecognizable to anyone who went there in the 1970s. What was then a lavish performing arts center has since been replaced by. . . an even more lavish performing arts center. Green space has disappeared, in favor of massive building, for a student body that is barely larger than it was 50 years ago. There is probably enough classroom space to seat ten times the number of students. And a 21,000 square foot fitness center.

On Scott Alexander’s site, an anonymous reviewer looks at Joseph Henrich’s book on how we became Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD). This paragraph summarizes Henrich’s main thesis.

[Catholic] marriage regulations served to dismantle intensive kin networks, which are the social cement of society almost everywhere else in the world. For most people in history, family hasn't just been the place where children grow up and couples spend time together. Family has been the basic human group, and there have been extensive and precise rules dictating who counts as family (or clan) and how each person should act with respect to different relatives. The Church's regulations, the Marriage and Family Programme (MFP), aimed to replace intensive kinship, and over many centuries it was more or less successful in doing that.

Later, the reviewer writes,

The Church no longer holds sway over Europe, but Henrich (I think!) believes that the change to WEIRD psychology is irrevocable. Extended kinship is dead.

[but] contemporary education looks pretty different, and that the other teaching institutions Westerners built to support their norms have also changed, then what would you predict will happen? 

Plenty of folks (Lorenzo Warby, for example) are quite worried that WEIRD psychology is in the process of changing.

Substacks referenced above:

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Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World