Links to Consider, 8/19

Alice Evans on cross-country regressions; Brian Chau on Michael Lind; Helen Dale on Rufo and Caplan; Mingardi on Pareto;

Alice Evans warns about studies of cross-country differences that assume a stable population.

Out-migration has been very high in Eastern, South-Eastern Europe and Caucasia. Migrants are often university graduates.

It may be that attitudes in these countries are not determined by past culture but instead by these migration patterns.

Brian Chau writes,

In Lind’s view, a class of managers is oppressing the multiracial working class. If left alone, the working class would band together and choose Christian Social Democracy. In order to stop them, elites imposed a dual program of neoliberal economics and socially progressive cultural policy – stripping them of the economic power and cultural solidarity necessary to defend their own interests. The solution is populist Representation: someone like Donald Trump, or maybe Michael Lind, has to come along and bring the jobs back, shut down the border, remove the woke HR department, and get the working class on his side.

Chau is responding to an essay in which Michael Lind writes,

a substantial share of GOP donors, journalists, think-tankers, and activists structure their politics around hereditarian theories that claim that the patterns of class and race in America and the world are the result of unalterable DNA.

Call them the eugenic conservatives, or “eugenicons.”

Chau gives Lind too much credit. Lind’s essay is not even straw-manning. It is just one long exercise in mudslinging. It puts Lind in the dictionary next to the word “troll.”

Helen Dale writes,

A lot of feminist and civil rights leaders thought that removing legal impediments like Jim Crow and sexist hiring practices would create something quite close to equality of outcomes. John Stuart Mill thought this. Martin Luther King thought this. Germaine Greer thought this. This warm, comforting belief was not just common among people who became disillusioned loonies and Marxist fellow-travellers. Lots of smart liberals in good standing believed it, too.

But it didn’t happen. Not even close. Black-white gaps in the US, if anything, got wider.

…I remember thinking that the stubborn persistence of unequal outcomes would only become more painful and glaring once legal impediments to equality were several decades in the rear-view-mirror. The result, I suspected, would be a worsening—rather than an improvement—in relations between the races and sexes.

I’m impressed that she saw it coming.

Incidentally, she mis-characterizes my writing on marijuana, saying that I see every libertarian policy idea I have ever endorsed coming apart. As far as I know, I never endorsed marijuana legalization. I have endorsed markets over government, and I continue to do so. That idea is not “coming apart.” It’s just getting (wrongly) denounced, right and left.

Alberto Mingardi writes about Vilfredo Pareto’s political economy,

On the one hand, there are “rentiers” who value stability, oppose change and newcomers, and tend to live on land rent or fixed income. Pareto characterizes their “residue” as the “persistence of aggregates” – such as customs, traditions, social classes, and so forth.

On the other hand, there are “speculators” who thrive on change and the pursuit of innovation, but who also tend to manipulate government for their own ends. Pareto describes their “residue” as the “instinct for combination,” which suggests an ability to invent ever-new things.

…In the long run, governments do not pay their debts, and they will tax people as much as they can. Speculators are better at surfing the wave and profiting from these tendencies, whereas rentiers (or pensioners and others on fixed incomes) are more likely to end up paying the bill.

Substacks referenced above:

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Life's Rich Pageant

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Michael Lind Stands Up For The Oppressed

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Beware of Cross-Country Regressions!