"As far as I know, I never endorsed marijuana legalization."
I'm a long-time reader and thought a recent post of yours on marijuana legalization was somewhat out of character, so I checked the econlog archives on the above point. I didn't see either any full-throated endorsements or rejections of marijuana legalization, but the following two articles implied that you supported legalization. I didn't see any that implied the reverse.
In which you state you are figuratively part of a church of limited government, and then refer to other reasons for supporting marijuana legalization. The implication being that members of the church of limited government would support legalization for a different reason, that government should be limited.
In which you state: "The challenge for libertarians is that many of our ideas have not crossed the threshold of legitimacy. Legalizing marijuana or seriously cutting back on future entitlements are treated as fringe, kooky ideas. Our challenge is to move our ideas out from the fringe and into the mainstream."
I recall an article, perhaps multiple, in which he said the libertarian party had no policy accomplishments in the last several decades except marijuana legalization which is “great if you’re into that”. [IIRC, paraphrasing]
Not exactly coming out against the policy, but it was clear in context he wasn’t excited about it.
Yea, it is funny come to think of it, but I had considered marijuana to one of Kling's odd cases of not favoring legalization; I always took it to be a result of being older and having kids, kind of a "I don't want my kids getting involved in that, so I prefer it be illegal" sort of deal. Not really banging a drum in either case, but against legalization if asked.
It's funny because I often find myself accused of saying or believing or even advocating things I am certain I have never done, at least in my adult life. I wonder how much the modern deluge of textual information tends to make us conflate writers in our mind, either forgetting who said what or flattening many different commentators down to "people who say this sort of thing." The end result being discussion and debate with people who aren't actually our present interlocutors, and leaving us saying "Wait, when the hell did I say that?!" a lot.
"unequal outcomes would only become more painful and glaring" even though smaller. Does Dale really think that removing legal discrimination made things worse? Did MLK think it would lead to utopia?
Speaking as a not-quite-100-year-old I'm not sure either. But it does seem to me that pre-60s race relations in America is almost always framed in terms of the worst of that time. The stock image of Jim Crow is the one that usually gets trotted out (unsurprisingly given the let's-shock-you nature of mass media's narrative imperative). What gets eclipsed is that, in large parts of the country, attitudes were already very liberal.
Yesterday I took my kids to the brand new playground that was built at the historic black school (segregated). It's full of civil rights propaganda, though my kids are too young to notice and just like that it's full of state of the art play equipment.
Today for the first time I noticed that it had a profile of Angela Davis, whom I did not even know existed until she was mentioned on Chris Rufo's interview with Bryan Caplan. This is a literal terrorist and she's being held up as a hero on a children's playground.
What's interesting of course is that not even knowing who she was Angela Davis and her like are responsible for a lot of the propaganda that would later become school policy and curriculum on race in my kids K-12 school.
In Marfa, Texas a thoroughly unremarkable adobe building called the Blackwell school where - horrors! - the local taxpayers paid for Mexican and Mexican-American children to be taught until the 60s - is America's newest national park! Yes, the fun you will have there on your family road trip. Just imagine this - NPS is struggling with the dichotomy in visitation between the big popular parks, and the smaller, typically historical ones, that yet must be staffed - and still they think it's a good idea to turn this schoolhouse into ... a national park! Not a historic site with a plaque, but a unit of the national park system, staffed and interpreted, that will see half a dozen visitors a year, for ten minutes. I am prepared to guarantee two things - nobody gave any thought to this building, all these decades since it closed, as to its being a symbol of injustice in a town that historically never had but about 3000 people, and where very possibly virtually all the children were Mexican; and the folks who have perpetrated this absurdity are definitely, 100%, Anglo. Now that it's done, will there be folks come out of the woodwork, moaning their grievances about a school they probably never attended, or if they did so, perfectly happily?- of course! People are only too ready for such demagoguery. But the idea can only have originated with what the media now like to call a Karen.
I am guessing much the same is true of, say, the Biden administration's decision to pave over and develop an area of the the Grand Canyon South Rim - despite official admission that there would be no more development as generally agreed overmuch development was allowed to occur, given that the whole thing is served by a single spring down in the canyon, thus stealing water from wildlife - solely in order that "the tribes" (only one of which ever had a presence in the Grand Canyon, and which tribe owns the most beautiful part of it) can have their own separate entrance and visitors' center, so that they don't have to mingle with everyone else.
I don't blame the Indians. That's an idea that can only have originated in D.C., or Harvard or Yale.
Do you have a feel for the relative weight of different factors contributing to bad race relations? For example, some might say it's mostly empirical, that is, the experience of disappointment with continued inequality and a lack of the once hoped-for convergence. Others would say it is mostly socially constructed, for example, by continuous demonization and agitprop efforts by influential opinion-makers perpetually stoking the fires of bitter resentment. Some might say 50/50 between those two, or add in additional factors. What do you think?
I expect that the former is largely causal to the latter explanation. After the legal accomplishment of the stated goals of the civil rights movement, the relative positions and gaps didn't close. This created cognitive dissonance, and demanded an explanation as to why the racial leadership (using that term loosely) failed to achieve what it promised. Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton weren't going to say "Well, damn, I guess we were wrong!" So the cause of disparities had to be something deeper, but also intrinsically not the fault of those at the less desirable end of the disparity.
Enter "structural racism" and its ilk: secret, subtle and importantly unacknowledged racism that kept the relevant minorities down. A devil that lurks in the hearts and institutions of everyone not of the oppressed group, that is working tirelessly to keep the oppressed down, even without the knowledge or intent of the oppressor, and in fact in spite of their active attempts to promote the oppressed!
That's great if you are a leader who needs an excuse as to why their leadership never seems to improve anything. It is really terrible in terms of race relations, however, as it makes everyone outside your group (and many in it) the presumptive enemy. Effectively it makes impossible any coexistence because even those who claim to oppose the oppression are themselves unwitting oppressors. They just can't help it, their very existence keeps you down.
After 1964 MLK seemed to move towards affirmative action, reparations, and broadly speaking a lot more socialism as the solution to unequal outcomes. In other words, he was no classic liberal just trying to get people equal rights.
It's unclear what would have happened if he had lived. Most of the other Civil Rights leaders became increasingly frustrated with the lack of black progress and became repulsive race hustlers. More "productive" attempts to alleviate the gap like education reform also failed.
Arnold: “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.”
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end.
Or, if you prefer the David Byrne, same as it ever was.
I don't think there is too much daylight between what he outlines and Hanania, etc.
1) Eugenicons don't believe in forced sterilization, but they certainly believe in voluntary eugenics. And they would probably be in favor of trying to get poors to agree voluntarily to getting IUDs, abortions, etc. Many wouldn't object to linking state welfare to sterilization. No violation of the non-aggression principal there.
2) While they wouldn't force anyone to marry or prevent them from marrying, I think all would agree with the statement that pairings amongst the eugenic class creates eugenic offspring and those offspring create human progress. Hanania would look on that approvingly and Murray with trepidation, but they wouldn't dispute the facts.
3) View on dysgenic immigration are mixed in this group. Hanania has changed his mind on immigration because he no longer thinks it makes socialism/crime/dysfunction inevitable, but others like Murray, Sailer, Kirkegaard, Jones, etc disagree. If Hanania could be convinced that demographics were destiny then he would oppose it.
Personally, I think Hanania's conversion relates more to how being pro-immigration is necessary for him to get access to mainstream revenue sources then a dispassionate review of the evidence.
4) On democracy it should be pretty obvious that people like Bryan and Hanania are very anti-democracy. In fact Hanania's conversion on immigration seems to relate to the idea that democracy can be easily subverted and is meaningless.
His solution to crime is Bukele. This is a man that enlisted the military to surround the legislator, entered with armed men, and told them to vote the way he wanted. When the Supreme Court objected to his moves he dismissed them. He's basically created a strongman dictatorship along the same lines Putin did, and using the same rhetoric (cleaning up the streets, etc).
I happen to support Bukele, but only because I think being ruled by a strongman (or strongmen) is inevitable for dysgenic countries. Bukele is superior to rule by gang kingpins, but it's not a great solution. You can't lament Jan 6th and love Bukele.
Being forced to choose between different kind of lawlessness is a bad choice to be put in. It is the kind of thing Charles Murray specifically warned about happening in The Bell Curve when he talked about immigration. Saying "we can solve crime if we empower a strongmen" is something I already knew but has a lot of issues. I'd prefer to just have a country of naturally law abiding Eugenicons that don't need a strongman to be kept in line.
Moreover, the entire idea that our system is superior to say the Chinese is based on the idea that democracy and checks and balances stops things like COVID in China from happening. But of course how did Bukele first come into conflict with the Supreme Court. When they told him that his draconian COVID lockdowns were unconstitutional and that he couldn't just grab random people off the street and throw them in concentration camps because they were outside when he didn't want them to be outside. The same issues with imprisoning anyone with a tattoo can also be used against anybody Bukele doesn't like for any reason. That's how strongmen work, it feels awesome when the do what you want and sucks when they don't.
With socialism it's the same story. Putting aside the empirically unsound "diversity induced social distrust will shrink government" argument, Hanania mostly seems to believe that the elite should just cut the government because Hanania makes a good argument and democracy is easy to subvert. His plan for entitlement reform is "lie about it and do it anyway".
Fair enough, but why hasn't it happened already? Why haven't a bunch of enlightened centrist reforms happened already. Could it be that democracy does impose limits on elite incentives and actions? Could it be that the demographics of democracy impact those limits and incentives. Does the deep blue-ening of the coasts and cities not show this? Does Reagan 2.0 (Romney) losing with a higher white vote share then Reagan 1.0 not show this?
And if we did do away with the limits and incentives of democracy on the elite, how do we not just replicate the situation in China? Isn't it a good thing in some cases that the elite is limited.
5) Anyway, my response to Eugenicons is that it's a great idea. I support most of what he lists, and the only real difference you're pointing out is that Eugenicons are more into voluntary action than involuntary (with the issue of immigration being complex).
If I were to point to a something the article gets at, Hanania has snearing contempt for whoever he decides is lower than him and a superiority complex. You can get a lot of the same stuff with a lot more humility and empathy from a Murray or Sailer, and I've always thought on Hanania as edge lord regurgitations of Sailer designed for click bait. If you want takes on this problem see here:
I don't begrudge Hanania doing what he has to do to make a good living. But I don't see him adding much to the conversation. His views on this stuff are pretty confused and contradictory and he doesn't really like having honest debates with those that disagree with him because doing so might expose these problems (and risk his revenue sources).
Bukele's crime fighting tactics is basically martial law. If a government finds itself in need of martial law, it almost always (barring cases such as natural disasters) indicates neglect or abuse of its duties by the government in the past, but that does not justify kicking the can down the road even further. The crucial difference between application of martial law by a good and a bad government is that a good government begins preparing for a withdrawal of martial law and a return to regular administration of justice immediately, and where the social fabric has degraded under the influence of lawlessness and disorder, that includes building it up through such acts as devolving some local powers to locals, with organizational and other help if necessary. A bad government, instead, applies itself to degrading the social fabric, because this will allow it to stay in power indefinitely. I don't know which category Bukele falls into.
We'll see. When the El Salvador Supreme Court noted that the constitution places a term limit on Bukele's presidency, Bukele simply packed the court and overruled the constitution so he could run for re-election.
The bottom line is you've got guys like Hanania on the one hand saying that Putin, Xi, etc are bad because they have total power and nobody can stop them from fucking up, and on the other hand calling on a Putin or Xi like figure in Bukele to override liberal democracy when it gets things wrong. It's a mess of a contradiction.
"Elites should have total power over society, but only when their views match my own."
Good summation, especially for those of us who don't follow everyone's twisting views.
"That's how strongmen work, it feels awesome when they do what you want and sucks when they don't" amused me because my husband uttered a similar formulation just a few weeks ago, "That's the problem with term limits, they're great when you don't like the guy and not so great when you do".
As to Lind, Murray noted that a "multi-racial working class" movement that was heavily Hispanic would take on Latin American strongman tendencies. High/low vs middle seems a natural tendency in politics but when "middle" is 100 IQ you get a very different kind of movement then when "middle" means some significantly lower IQ average.
Andrew Tate is the kind of movement Lind would get, not some salt of the earth 100 IQ Leave it to Beaver type.
"...that was heavily Hispanic would take on Latin American strongman tendencies."
Like, Trump? And he came via people who were precisely concerned with the Hispanification of America. Oddly enough he's been boosted in more recent years by that same Hispanificaiton.
If Michael Lind is a troll, Brains Chau’s snark-filled response is triply so. Beyond the thick layer of defensiveness and snark, Chau mischaracterizes Lind’s positions. Nowhere does Lind advocate for a pure populist Trumpian uprising. Lind doesn’t say that IQ and genes have no place, just that its role is overemphasized by “eugenicons” and the role of culture too often ignored. Lind doesn’t claim there is a “conspiracy,” just an increasing influence, which is surely true.
Chau vaguely dismisses Lind’s characterization of the more disturbing elements of the “eugenicon” platform with a wave of the hand, writing that though the points Lind mentions reflect ideas that really are being discussed, Lind “fails a Turing test” (because he doesn’t state them in a way that makes them sound palatable to a majority).
And finally, Chau dismisses Lind’s logic as starting from the conclusion (opposition to the disturbing policy ideas of the “eugenicons”) and working backwards - as if anyone willing to face “reality” would inevitably end up on the “eugenicon” side and be forced to accept its disturbing conclusions. This is absurd given the layers of unsupported pseudoscience (evolutionary psychology and dysgenic theory) that underlies the eugenicon platform, which pseudoscience Lind thoroughly decries in his essay.
“It may be that attitudes in these countries are not determined by past culture but instead by these migration patterns.”
I’m a little confused by this statement because it seems to suggest that the importance of migration contradicts the views of “deep roots” cultural economists.
But Garett Jones’ Culture Transplant is all about past culture adjusted for migration. It’s a refrain he returns to many times in the book--
“Over the last five centuries, for the world as a whole, it’s fair to summarize economic history this way: the more things change, the more they stay the same—but only when you adjust for migration.”
“Ancestral farming experience is a great predictor of modern prosperity, but only when you adjust for migration.”
“And together, the evidence we saw in chapter 1 for cultural persistence among the descendants of immigrants and the evidence we’ve seen in this chapter that centuries-old migration-adjusted SAT scores predict modern government quality add up to a consistent story that migration shapes government quality in somewhat predictable ways.”
I took Arnold to mean that, to the extent that those with college education tend to have different cultural traits than those without, a continual migration of the college educated outside a country will skew the cultural "average" say towards those without. So, imagine a USA where everyone with an Ivy League or similar education emigrated to Canada for a few decades. After your reverie, imagine what that does to US political culture. My guess is it pushes it towards the right, not only because those highly indoctrinated leftists leave, but because they no longer remain to be high status/power examples to others. All important positions would be occupied by rather different people; in a sense, the US elites that could get their kids into the most prestigious schools would then cease to be relevant within a generation as their kids go elsewhere, leaving the reins of the country to be taken up by some other group.
Now, that doesn't mean that the countries in question have any sort of cultural or political trends towards college education that the US shares. Maybe their colleges are slanted more right/conservative rather than left/progressive. It is worth considering, however, that if migration isn't relatively evenly distributed across the society but is highly concentrated in a specific class that it might radically alter the cultural and political evolution.
I understood that. I’m just making the point that while some scholars Alice Evans mentions don’t adjust for migration, it’s a very common practice in the deep roots cultural economics literature. I don’t take the evidence she presents as contradicting the importance of the past culture of peoples within a country for explaining cross-country differences.
That being said, I did find her post very worthwhile. I suspect that culture drives migration AND migration drives culture (they are not mutually exclusive), and she highlights some interesting parts of the picture Jones seems to abstract from.
But do the deep roots scholars take the types of migrants and their subcultures from the countries into account? My (very high level) browsing of the material suggested to me that they were looking at more monolithic cultures and assuming the migrants all had that culture, and less looking at subcultures within a group and country. I might be missing a lot though, as it isn’t really my area of interest.
I’m fairly convinced there is something to Jones story, for a few reasons at least.
1. Jones’ measures have high explanatory power and get stronger when you look at the past cultures of people rather than place
2. Immigrants several generations removed from their homeland still resemble their countrymen in cultural attitudes very closely, suggesting they do carry with them something from the places they left
3. Imperfect measurement makes Jones’ story stronger-- the “errors in the variables” problem in econometrics implies that robust relationships found with noisy measures are attenuated (stronger than they appear)
4. Similarly, if the least culturally similar people to their homelands tend to migrate that makes Jones story more compelling not less. If we still see the effect despite siphoning off the least representative people, a randomized experiment would probably show culture matters more strongly.
5. Alice Evans’ post leaves some significant puzzles even within a fairly narrow frame-- as principia points out in her comments the Baltics don’t fit well with her core claim:
“I think the Baltic quandary is worth thinking about, given that their population loss has been very high yet seem to be much more liberal than e.g. Bulgaria, Ukraine or Serbia. I doubt their emigrants have been less liberal, so something else is going on.”
More generally, I think this interview with Jones remains worth reading. He has thoughtful answers to a lot of the objections/exceptions I could come up with (e.g. American exceptionalism disproportionately pulled a lot of the most individualistic people from around the world -- similar to what Evans is talking about and relevant to point #4 --which may be why the measures Jones uses work great for most countries and for states within the US but not why the US is so different from other countries)
I am not saying the Jones story is right or wrong. I am just saying that culture isn’t monolithic, and that a country’s culture is, to outsiders, just the average of all the subcultures. If for example everyone in CA emigrated to Canada tomorrow, the average US culture would become more right wing, while Canada would maybe become more left wing or more right wing. It is hard to say with Canada. If ten years down the road the US seemed more right wing and Canada more left wing, how would our takeaway differ if the US was more right and Can more right?
Probably more at issue is whether different markers, like tertiary education, are proxies for the cultural attitudes described. I am not at all convinced that more education makes people more liberal; the modern western correlation seems more likely a result of people spending more time in school getting more indoctrination, not more education. There isn’t much education happening in schools and universities.
Points 3 and 4 I am going to have to spend some more time thinking on. I am very opposed to arguments that bad measurements make results stronger, primarily because it assumes measurement errors are symmetrical. Errors rarely seem to be. 4 is more compelling, but it suggests that maybe there is a dreaded third thing in action.
If say I have two countries, A and C, and A is 90% atheists while C is 90% Catholics, and a bunch of people move from C to A and next year finds A becoming 15% Catholic and C becoming 5% atheist, that looks like the migrants changed the culture. Yet upon closer examination we find that the vast majority of the migrants from C to A were in fact atheists, fleeing what they felt was oppression. What? Oh right, people sometimes change religion, and that was changing during that time, in both countries.
That isn’t t open and shut though, as the more detailed survey question level of cultural markers will remain. In the US we at least used to see this in intraparty differences, where eg democrats from rural areas were against gun control. So there is confusion between labels and issue or topic level beliefs.
On how hereditarianism intersects with conservative policy principles, Lind says the intersection is lower tax rates for higher earners. That doesn’t make sense even granting his premises. Assuming that the nuclear family is the unit of decision and that IQ correlated with earning power, the right policy response would be a higher tax rate on high earners coupled with a generous and uncapped child tax deduction (not credit). That would disincentivize work by both spouses instead of just one and would incentivize procreation by people with higher earning power. So either my thinking about how the policy would operate is off or the assertion that hereditarians favor lower tax rates for high incomes is factually incorrect or the hereditarians haven’t really been thorough in their thinking about policy effects. (Of course, as an anarchist, I’m for zero taxes. So this is a fight between two varieties for statists to me.)
"As far as I know, I never endorsed marijuana legalization."
I'm a long-time reader and thought a recent post of yours on marijuana legalization was somewhat out of character, so I checked the econlog archives on the above point. I didn't see either any full-throated endorsements or rejections of marijuana legalization, but the following two articles implied that you supported legalization. I didn't see any that implied the reverse.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2010/05/piggy_banking_a.html
In which you state you are figuratively part of a church of limited government, and then refer to other reasons for supporting marijuana legalization. The implication being that members of the church of limited government would support legalization for a different reason, that government should be limited.
http://www.econlib.org/gary-johnson-and-jeff-miron/
In which you state: "The challenge for libertarians is that many of our ideas have not crossed the threshold of legitimacy. Legalizing marijuana or seriously cutting back on future entitlements are treated as fringe, kooky ideas. Our challenge is to move our ideas out from the fringe and into the mainstream."
I recall an article, perhaps multiple, in which he said the libertarian party had no policy accomplishments in the last several decades except marijuana legalization which is “great if you’re into that”. [IIRC, paraphrasing]
Not exactly coming out against the policy, but it was clear in context he wasn’t excited about it.
Yea, it is funny come to think of it, but I had considered marijuana to one of Kling's odd cases of not favoring legalization; I always took it to be a result of being older and having kids, kind of a "I don't want my kids getting involved in that, so I prefer it be illegal" sort of deal. Not really banging a drum in either case, but against legalization if asked.
It's funny because I often find myself accused of saying or believing or even advocating things I am certain I have never done, at least in my adult life. I wonder how much the modern deluge of textual information tends to make us conflate writers in our mind, either forgetting who said what or flattening many different commentators down to "people who say this sort of thing." The end result being discussion and debate with people who aren't actually our present interlocutors, and leaving us saying "Wait, when the hell did I say that?!" a lot.
Advocating reliance on markets quite strongly suggests reliance on markets in (for example) marijuana.
"unequal outcomes would only become more painful and glaring" even though smaller. Does Dale really think that removing legal discrimination made things worse? Did MLK think it would lead to utopia?
It is hard to judge if race relations are worse now than in the pre-1960s- none of us are 100 years old.
However, race relations seem quite a bit worse to me today than they were 25 years ago. I would say that Ms. Dale is mostly correct.
Speaking as a not-quite-100-year-old I'm not sure either. But it does seem to me that pre-60s race relations in America is almost always framed in terms of the worst of that time. The stock image of Jim Crow is the one that usually gets trotted out (unsurprisingly given the let's-shock-you nature of mass media's narrative imperative). What gets eclipsed is that, in large parts of the country, attitudes were already very liberal.
Yesterday I took my kids to the brand new playground that was built at the historic black school (segregated). It's full of civil rights propaganda, though my kids are too young to notice and just like that it's full of state of the art play equipment.
Today for the first time I noticed that it had a profile of Angela Davis, whom I did not even know existed until she was mentioned on Chris Rufo's interview with Bryan Caplan. This is a literal terrorist and she's being held up as a hero on a children's playground.
What's interesting of course is that not even knowing who she was Angela Davis and her like are responsible for a lot of the propaganda that would later become school policy and curriculum on race in my kids K-12 school.
In Marfa, Texas a thoroughly unremarkable adobe building called the Blackwell school where - horrors! - the local taxpayers paid for Mexican and Mexican-American children to be taught until the 60s - is America's newest national park! Yes, the fun you will have there on your family road trip. Just imagine this - NPS is struggling with the dichotomy in visitation between the big popular parks, and the smaller, typically historical ones, that yet must be staffed - and still they think it's a good idea to turn this schoolhouse into ... a national park! Not a historic site with a plaque, but a unit of the national park system, staffed and interpreted, that will see half a dozen visitors a year, for ten minutes. I am prepared to guarantee two things - nobody gave any thought to this building, all these decades since it closed, as to its being a symbol of injustice in a town that historically never had but about 3000 people, and where very possibly virtually all the children were Mexican; and the folks who have perpetrated this absurdity are definitely, 100%, Anglo. Now that it's done, will there be folks come out of the woodwork, moaning their grievances about a school they probably never attended, or if they did so, perfectly happily?- of course! People are only too ready for such demagoguery. But the idea can only have originated with what the media now like to call a Karen.
I am guessing much the same is true of, say, the Biden administration's decision to pave over and develop an area of the the Grand Canyon South Rim - despite official admission that there would be no more development as generally agreed overmuch development was allowed to occur, given that the whole thing is served by a single spring down in the canyon, thus stealing water from wildlife - solely in order that "the tribes" (only one of which ever had a presence in the Grand Canyon, and which tribe owns the most beautiful part of it) can have their own separate entrance and visitors' center, so that they don't have to mingle with everyone else.
I don't blame the Indians. That's an idea that can only have originated in D.C., or Harvard or Yale.
This was the point I was trying to make.
Do you have a feel for the relative weight of different factors contributing to bad race relations? For example, some might say it's mostly empirical, that is, the experience of disappointment with continued inequality and a lack of the once hoped-for convergence. Others would say it is mostly socially constructed, for example, by continuous demonization and agitprop efforts by influential opinion-makers perpetually stoking the fires of bitter resentment. Some might say 50/50 between those two, or add in additional factors. What do you think?
I expect that the former is largely causal to the latter explanation. After the legal accomplishment of the stated goals of the civil rights movement, the relative positions and gaps didn't close. This created cognitive dissonance, and demanded an explanation as to why the racial leadership (using that term loosely) failed to achieve what it promised. Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton weren't going to say "Well, damn, I guess we were wrong!" So the cause of disparities had to be something deeper, but also intrinsically not the fault of those at the less desirable end of the disparity.
Enter "structural racism" and its ilk: secret, subtle and importantly unacknowledged racism that kept the relevant minorities down. A devil that lurks in the hearts and institutions of everyone not of the oppressed group, that is working tirelessly to keep the oppressed down, even without the knowledge or intent of the oppressor, and in fact in spite of their active attempts to promote the oppressed!
That's great if you are a leader who needs an excuse as to why their leadership never seems to improve anything. It is really terrible in terms of race relations, however, as it makes everyone outside your group (and many in it) the presumptive enemy. Effectively it makes impossible any coexistence because even those who claim to oppose the oppression are themselves unwitting oppressors. They just can't help it, their very existence keeps you down.
Why would that be a surprise? The assault of Abner Louima was reported in newspapers. The death of George Floyd was caught on video.
Well, I'm 81 and I'd say that race relations are better now than in 1960 (when my high school was legally segregated, and 1998.
After 1964 MLK seemed to move towards affirmative action, reparations, and broadly speaking a lot more socialism as the solution to unequal outcomes. In other words, he was no classic liberal just trying to get people equal rights.
It's unclear what would have happened if he had lived. Most of the other Civil Rights leaders became increasingly frustrated with the lack of black progress and became repulsive race hustlers. More "productive" attempts to alleviate the gap like education reform also failed.
Arnold: “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.”
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end.
Or, if you prefer the David Byrne, same as it ever was.
Here is what I wrote on Eugenicons:
I don't think there is too much daylight between what he outlines and Hanania, etc.
1) Eugenicons don't believe in forced sterilization, but they certainly believe in voluntary eugenics. And they would probably be in favor of trying to get poors to agree voluntarily to getting IUDs, abortions, etc. Many wouldn't object to linking state welfare to sterilization. No violation of the non-aggression principal there.
2) While they wouldn't force anyone to marry or prevent them from marrying, I think all would agree with the statement that pairings amongst the eugenic class creates eugenic offspring and those offspring create human progress. Hanania would look on that approvingly and Murray with trepidation, but they wouldn't dispute the facts.
3) View on dysgenic immigration are mixed in this group. Hanania has changed his mind on immigration because he no longer thinks it makes socialism/crime/dysfunction inevitable, but others like Murray, Sailer, Kirkegaard, Jones, etc disagree. If Hanania could be convinced that demographics were destiny then he would oppose it.
Personally, I think Hanania's conversion relates more to how being pro-immigration is necessary for him to get access to mainstream revenue sources then a dispassionate review of the evidence.
4) On democracy it should be pretty obvious that people like Bryan and Hanania are very anti-democracy. In fact Hanania's conversion on immigration seems to relate to the idea that democracy can be easily subverted and is meaningless.
His solution to crime is Bukele. This is a man that enlisted the military to surround the legislator, entered with armed men, and told them to vote the way he wanted. When the Supreme Court objected to his moves he dismissed them. He's basically created a strongman dictatorship along the same lines Putin did, and using the same rhetoric (cleaning up the streets, etc).
I happen to support Bukele, but only because I think being ruled by a strongman (or strongmen) is inevitable for dysgenic countries. Bukele is superior to rule by gang kingpins, but it's not a great solution. You can't lament Jan 6th and love Bukele.
Being forced to choose between different kind of lawlessness is a bad choice to be put in. It is the kind of thing Charles Murray specifically warned about happening in The Bell Curve when he talked about immigration. Saying "we can solve crime if we empower a strongmen" is something I already knew but has a lot of issues. I'd prefer to just have a country of naturally law abiding Eugenicons that don't need a strongman to be kept in line.
Moreover, the entire idea that our system is superior to say the Chinese is based on the idea that democracy and checks and balances stops things like COVID in China from happening. But of course how did Bukele first come into conflict with the Supreme Court. When they told him that his draconian COVID lockdowns were unconstitutional and that he couldn't just grab random people off the street and throw them in concentration camps because they were outside when he didn't want them to be outside. The same issues with imprisoning anyone with a tattoo can also be used against anybody Bukele doesn't like for any reason. That's how strongmen work, it feels awesome when the do what you want and sucks when they don't.
With socialism it's the same story. Putting aside the empirically unsound "diversity induced social distrust will shrink government" argument, Hanania mostly seems to believe that the elite should just cut the government because Hanania makes a good argument and democracy is easy to subvert. His plan for entitlement reform is "lie about it and do it anyway".
Fair enough, but why hasn't it happened already? Why haven't a bunch of enlightened centrist reforms happened already. Could it be that democracy does impose limits on elite incentives and actions? Could it be that the demographics of democracy impact those limits and incentives. Does the deep blue-ening of the coasts and cities not show this? Does Reagan 2.0 (Romney) losing with a higher white vote share then Reagan 1.0 not show this?
And if we did do away with the limits and incentives of democracy on the elite, how do we not just replicate the situation in China? Isn't it a good thing in some cases that the elite is limited.
5) Anyway, my response to Eugenicons is that it's a great idea. I support most of what he lists, and the only real difference you're pointing out is that Eugenicons are more into voluntary action than involuntary (with the issue of immigration being complex).
If I were to point to a something the article gets at, Hanania has snearing contempt for whoever he decides is lower than him and a superiority complex. You can get a lot of the same stuff with a lot more humility and empathy from a Murray or Sailer, and I've always thought on Hanania as edge lord regurgitations of Sailer designed for click bait. If you want takes on this problem see here:
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/links-to-consider-89
https://birdman.substack.com/p/hanania-still-sucks
I don't begrudge Hanania doing what he has to do to make a good living. But I don't see him adding much to the conversation. His views on this stuff are pretty confused and contradictory and he doesn't really like having honest debates with those that disagree with him because doing so might expose these problems (and risk his revenue sources).
Bukele's crime fighting tactics is basically martial law. If a government finds itself in need of martial law, it almost always (barring cases such as natural disasters) indicates neglect or abuse of its duties by the government in the past, but that does not justify kicking the can down the road even further. The crucial difference between application of martial law by a good and a bad government is that a good government begins preparing for a withdrawal of martial law and a return to regular administration of justice immediately, and where the social fabric has degraded under the influence of lawlessness and disorder, that includes building it up through such acts as devolving some local powers to locals, with organizational and other help if necessary. A bad government, instead, applies itself to degrading the social fabric, because this will allow it to stay in power indefinitely. I don't know which category Bukele falls into.
"I don't know which category Bukele falls into."
We'll see. When the El Salvador Supreme Court noted that the constitution places a term limit on Bukele's presidency, Bukele simply packed the court and overruled the constitution so he could run for re-election.
The bottom line is you've got guys like Hanania on the one hand saying that Putin, Xi, etc are bad because they have total power and nobody can stop them from fucking up, and on the other hand calling on a Putin or Xi like figure in Bukele to override liberal democracy when it gets things wrong. It's a mess of a contradiction.
"Elites should have total power over society, but only when their views match my own."
Good summation, especially for those of us who don't follow everyone's twisting views.
"That's how strongmen work, it feels awesome when they do what you want and sucks when they don't" amused me because my husband uttered a similar formulation just a few weeks ago, "That's the problem with term limits, they're great when you don't like the guy and not so great when you do".
"Pro-immigration" could mean many things, an intentionally poorly policed southern border or a Merit-based recruitment of world talent.
As to Lind, Murray noted that a "multi-racial working class" movement that was heavily Hispanic would take on Latin American strongman tendencies. High/low vs middle seems a natural tendency in politics but when "middle" is 100 IQ you get a very different kind of movement then when "middle" means some significantly lower IQ average.
Andrew Tate is the kind of movement Lind would get, not some salt of the earth 100 IQ Leave it to Beaver type.
"...that was heavily Hispanic would take on Latin American strongman tendencies."
Like, Trump? And he came via people who were precisely concerned with the Hispanification of America. Oddly enough he's been boosted in more recent years by that same Hispanificaiton.
If Michael Lind is a troll, Brains Chau’s snark-filled response is triply so. Beyond the thick layer of defensiveness and snark, Chau mischaracterizes Lind’s positions. Nowhere does Lind advocate for a pure populist Trumpian uprising. Lind doesn’t say that IQ and genes have no place, just that its role is overemphasized by “eugenicons” and the role of culture too often ignored. Lind doesn’t claim there is a “conspiracy,” just an increasing influence, which is surely true.
Chau vaguely dismisses Lind’s characterization of the more disturbing elements of the “eugenicon” platform with a wave of the hand, writing that though the points Lind mentions reflect ideas that really are being discussed, Lind “fails a Turing test” (because he doesn’t state them in a way that makes them sound palatable to a majority).
And finally, Chau dismisses Lind’s logic as starting from the conclusion (opposition to the disturbing policy ideas of the “eugenicons”) and working backwards - as if anyone willing to face “reality” would inevitably end up on the “eugenicon” side and be forced to accept its disturbing conclusions. This is absurd given the layers of unsupported pseudoscience (evolutionary psychology and dysgenic theory) that underlies the eugenicon platform, which pseudoscience Lind thoroughly decries in his essay.
“It may be that attitudes in these countries are not determined by past culture but instead by these migration patterns.”
I’m a little confused by this statement because it seems to suggest that the importance of migration contradicts the views of “deep roots” cultural economists.
But Garett Jones’ Culture Transplant is all about past culture adjusted for migration. It’s a refrain he returns to many times in the book--
“Over the last five centuries, for the world as a whole, it’s fair to summarize economic history this way: the more things change, the more they stay the same—but only when you adjust for migration.”
“Ancestral farming experience is a great predictor of modern prosperity, but only when you adjust for migration.”
“And together, the evidence we saw in chapter 1 for cultural persistence among the descendants of immigrants and the evidence we’ve seen in this chapter that centuries-old migration-adjusted SAT scores predict modern government quality add up to a consistent story that migration shapes government quality in somewhat predictable ways.”
I took Arnold to mean that, to the extent that those with college education tend to have different cultural traits than those without, a continual migration of the college educated outside a country will skew the cultural "average" say towards those without. So, imagine a USA where everyone with an Ivy League or similar education emigrated to Canada for a few decades. After your reverie, imagine what that does to US political culture. My guess is it pushes it towards the right, not only because those highly indoctrinated leftists leave, but because they no longer remain to be high status/power examples to others. All important positions would be occupied by rather different people; in a sense, the US elites that could get their kids into the most prestigious schools would then cease to be relevant within a generation as their kids go elsewhere, leaving the reins of the country to be taken up by some other group.
Now, that doesn't mean that the countries in question have any sort of cultural or political trends towards college education that the US shares. Maybe their colleges are slanted more right/conservative rather than left/progressive. It is worth considering, however, that if migration isn't relatively evenly distributed across the society but is highly concentrated in a specific class that it might radically alter the cultural and political evolution.
I understood that. I’m just making the point that while some scholars Alice Evans mentions don’t adjust for migration, it’s a very common practice in the deep roots cultural economics literature. I don’t take the evidence she presents as contradicting the importance of the past culture of peoples within a country for explaining cross-country differences.
That being said, I did find her post very worthwhile. I suspect that culture drives migration AND migration drives culture (they are not mutually exclusive), and she highlights some interesting parts of the picture Jones seems to abstract from.
But do the deep roots scholars take the types of migrants and their subcultures from the countries into account? My (very high level) browsing of the material suggested to me that they were looking at more monolithic cultures and assuming the migrants all had that culture, and less looking at subcultures within a group and country. I might be missing a lot though, as it isn’t really my area of interest.
I’m fairly convinced there is something to Jones story, for a few reasons at least.
1. Jones’ measures have high explanatory power and get stronger when you look at the past cultures of people rather than place
2. Immigrants several generations removed from their homeland still resemble their countrymen in cultural attitudes very closely, suggesting they do carry with them something from the places they left
3. Imperfect measurement makes Jones’ story stronger-- the “errors in the variables” problem in econometrics implies that robust relationships found with noisy measures are attenuated (stronger than they appear)
4. Similarly, if the least culturally similar people to their homelands tend to migrate that makes Jones story more compelling not less. If we still see the effect despite siphoning off the least representative people, a randomized experiment would probably show culture matters more strongly.
5. Alice Evans’ post leaves some significant puzzles even within a fairly narrow frame-- as principia points out in her comments the Baltics don’t fit well with her core claim:
“I think the Baltic quandary is worth thinking about, given that their population loss has been very high yet seem to be much more liberal than e.g. Bulgaria, Ukraine or Serbia. I doubt their emigrants have been less liberal, so something else is going on.”
More generally, I think this interview with Jones remains worth reading. He has thoughtful answers to a lot of the objections/exceptions I could come up with (e.g. American exceptionalism disproportionately pulled a lot of the most individualistic people from around the world -- similar to what Evans is talking about and relevant to point #4 --which may be why the measures Jones uses work great for most countries and for states within the US but not why the US is so different from other countries)
https://www.neonarrative.us/p/the-culture-transplant-an-interview#details
I am not saying the Jones story is right or wrong. I am just saying that culture isn’t monolithic, and that a country’s culture is, to outsiders, just the average of all the subcultures. If for example everyone in CA emigrated to Canada tomorrow, the average US culture would become more right wing, while Canada would maybe become more left wing or more right wing. It is hard to say with Canada. If ten years down the road the US seemed more right wing and Canada more left wing, how would our takeaway differ if the US was more right and Can more right?
Probably more at issue is whether different markers, like tertiary education, are proxies for the cultural attitudes described. I am not at all convinced that more education makes people more liberal; the modern western correlation seems more likely a result of people spending more time in school getting more indoctrination, not more education. There isn’t much education happening in schools and universities.
Points 3 and 4 I am going to have to spend some more time thinking on. I am very opposed to arguments that bad measurements make results stronger, primarily because it assumes measurement errors are symmetrical. Errors rarely seem to be. 4 is more compelling, but it suggests that maybe there is a dreaded third thing in action.
If say I have two countries, A and C, and A is 90% atheists while C is 90% Catholics, and a bunch of people move from C to A and next year finds A becoming 15% Catholic and C becoming 5% atheist, that looks like the migrants changed the culture. Yet upon closer examination we find that the vast majority of the migrants from C to A were in fact atheists, fleeing what they felt was oppression. What? Oh right, people sometimes change religion, and that was changing during that time, in both countries.
That isn’t t open and shut though, as the more detailed survey question level of cultural markers will remain. In the US we at least used to see this in intraparty differences, where eg democrats from rural areas were against gun control. So there is confusion between labels and issue or topic level beliefs.
As I said over at my place, Arnold: "I didn't think you'd renounced it either, but I 'felt your pain' in [the piece I quoted], I have to say."
I suspect we may be speaking somewhat at cross-purposes here ;)
On how hereditarianism intersects with conservative policy principles, Lind says the intersection is lower tax rates for higher earners. That doesn’t make sense even granting his premises. Assuming that the nuclear family is the unit of decision and that IQ correlated with earning power, the right policy response would be a higher tax rate on high earners coupled with a generous and uncapped child tax deduction (not credit). That would disincentivize work by both spouses instead of just one and would incentivize procreation by people with higher earning power. So either my thinking about how the policy would operate is off or the assertion that hereditarians favor lower tax rates for high incomes is factually incorrect or the hereditarians haven’t really been thorough in their thinking about policy effects. (Of course, as an anarchist, I’m for zero taxes. So this is a fight between two varieties for statists to me.)
That Michael Lind essay is in Sohrab Ahmari's Compact magazine. A better version of this position comes from Ahmari himself, in his new book Tyranny, Inc. I have not yet read this book, nor do I place myself in the Ahmari camp, but I found his recent discussion with Bob Wright of interest: https://open.substack.com/pub/nonzero/p/tyranny-inc-robert-wright-and-sohrab?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=jzqk