Dorian Abbot on merit, fairness, and equity; Scott Alexander on susceptibility to conspiracy theories; Richard Samuelson on civil rights; Bari Weiss and Larry Summers
"Good research into the wrong question." Right, and many other commenters pointed out the same thing. Scott seemed uncharacteristically tone deaf and overly literal on what Chesterton was getting at with that one*. It's probably because Scott's an atheist, LW-Rationalist, etc.
Adherents of secular ideologies think their ideologies are 'objectively true' or 'science': derived as opposed to revealed, facts instead of opinions or superstitions or groupthink conformism. They tend to overlook their intellectual dependency on arbitrary metaphysical constructs (NB to LW-Rationalists, you can't just chant "The Sequences!" as if that deals with the issue, it doesn't.)
Adherents of traditional religions can notice the same patterns of individual and social psychology that tend to feedback into the evolution of secular ideology and its various real-life communities and institutions, and thus can appreciate the obvious "religiousness" of it, despite the secularist protests to the contrary.
In the weak version of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, merely having and practicing the use of names to convey certain ideas or phenomena helps one to incorporate those conceptual categories as significant factors in one's world-model and makes it easier to notice examples in one's observations. If you only see in the visual range, you can't find other people at night further than a stone's throw. If you can see into the infrared, you can spot them clear as day a mile away. A religious person's theology typically has a whole mini-lexicon of such words to describe his own experience and observations of religious attitudes and life, and can use his infrared to see them in the secular ideology too.
Chesterton wrote from 1900 to 1936, a period of war and extreme ideological churn and what was effectively the suicide of Old Europe. Traditional religions and political ideologies were definitively displaced by the three modernist rivals of progressivism, communism, and fascism. He saw firsthand how when the forest built by tradition over millennia was cut down, all manner of noxious weeds would quickly fill the vacuum and take over the newly unexploited resource of souls adrift. Back when Nietzscheanism, Eugenics, and Socialism were at the height of their popularity for Western elites, he stood adamantly against all, indeed, one of his earlier works was, "Eugenics and Other Evils." Few of his contemporary public intellectuals saw it that way until after WWII.
*Handle's First Law is: "All the best quotes are apocryphal." Consistent with HFL, no one can actually find a clear example of Chesterton saying or writing this 'quote'. Closest anyone can get is that it seems exactly the kind of thing he would say, and that the earliest mentions of it by his fans were probably instances of them independently combining several other similar sayings and perhaps subconsciously applying some artistic license into similar pithy aphorisms, and repeating them with slight mutations until hitting on a particularly poetic and memorable expression.
I chafe at the characterization in your second-last paragraph (perhaps it's just you saying how Chesterton saw it). For one thing, 20th century Anglicanism was just about the most moderate, temperate form of traditional Christianity that ever existed; it was far from the norm. In fact, Christians spend most of the 16th-17th century burning the forest down over and over again. Pre-modern Christianity could inspire within it radical ideologies that could rival communism and fascism in their sweeping brutality. The idea that modern 'secular' (fascism, if not keen on orthodox Christianity, wasn't really secular) extremist ideas came from an unmooring caused by the loss of Christianity requires one to be very specific in choosing which Christians to use as a point of comparison.
A religion becomes moderate the same way a formerly dangerous animal becomes moderate, because it was tamed or domesticated by something more powerful.
Anglicanism became so moderate that it ceased to stir mens souls, certainly not in comparison to the influence of and human energies unleashed by those rivals. In the US version of Episcopalianism, church had by then become mostly a club one joined for purposes of networking and climbing the social ladder, and thus something one dropped as soon as the costs exceeded the benefits. Same was true for Lutheran churches in Central Europe in the early 19th century. In the UK, it became moderate because remaining non-moderate would have struck most influential people at that time (and long before) as completely ridiculous. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis and the few others were almost alone among their class and knew it as it left that unmistakable imprint on their writing in content and style.
In the UK, "no religious affiliation" reached plurarilty over 'Any Kind of Christian' a decade ago. The percent of British who even call themselves Anglican has dropped into the single digits. If you restrict to native-born or with British ethnic heritage who are 18-30 and attend even once a month you are looking for needles in a haystack, same goes for Catholics, and for Presbyterians or Methodists of that sort, there are unverified rumors of occasional sightings but the consensus position is that those denominations had their "children of men" moment decades ago and young ones have gone extinct. A very hot and extremely plentiful kind of real estate offering is for "redundant chuches" which people are desecrating, oh, excuse me, I mean, converting into homes and airbnbs and so forth. (Actually, it's technically the church leadership itself which officially performs the desecration process. Last one out the door, please turn off the lights.) Scandinavia earlier and worse than that. I could talk about what happened to Ireland, but I've already reached my quota of tears for today.
Note: I say all this as someone who finds the above facts to be tragic, but there's no sense in denying either them or the long historical trend which led inexorably and predicably to this point.
When Nietzsche wrote "God is Dead" in 1882, he was stating what most of his readers already accepted as what had been obviously true for the majority of (especially Western) European elites and intellectuals for over a century, which cuts off the head of the status snake and makes any religion a "walking dead" institution with, apparently, about ten generations left to go, if you're lucky. Marx wrote that "opium of the masses" line in 1843, and don't get me started on the French Revolution. To the extent things are different in other places in the broader EuroSphere, it's only by virtue of being a generation or two behind in the overall trend for peculiar local reasons.
Christianity among Europeans in developed countries was like Wile E Coyote having just run over the cliff. It was still floating a little for a long time, especially in the outlier of the US, but at some point he looked down and started falling though he has not hit rock bottom yet. If he has an acme parachute, he had better pull the ripcord asap.
Re: "I continue to favor a low UBI at a national level (not enough income to live on), with local governments and charities filling in gaps for people who cannot work or who have very expensive illnesses. [...] If you think that a UBI would discourage people from working, then you should oppose our current welfare programs even more strongly. They impose a much higher tax rate on the earnings of the working poor."
At the embedded link, Arnold suggests a low UBI = $2,500 per person. By definition, this UBI isn't means-tested -- It's universal. It would cost $2,500 x USpopulation = $825 billion. This sum is roughly equivalent to current US spending on Medicare ($770 billion). It also roughly equivalent to the sum of current US Federal-and-States spending on Medicaid ($760 billion) and US spending on Social Security Disability Insurance payments ($150 billion).
A low UBI is very expensive.
Moreover, voters/lawmakers would never trade Medicaid-and-SSDI for a low UBI. (If I understand correctly, Arnold's idea is that municipalities and charities would replace Medicaid and SSDI.)
My intuition is that it would be better to adjust the phase-outs of means-tested benefits, in order to reduce work disincentives, than to replace means-tested benefits with UBI.
Compare Hilary Hoynes & Jesse Rothstein, "Universal Basic Income in the United States and Advanced Countries," Annual Review of Economics 2019, un-gated PDF at the link below:
We discuss the potential role of universal basic incomes (UBIs) in advanced countries. A feature of advanced economies that distinguishes them from developing countries is the existence of well-developed, if often incomplete, safety nets. We develop a framework for describing transfer programs that is flexible enough to encompass most existing programs as well as UBIs, and we use this framework to compare various UBIs to the existing constellation of programs in the United States. A UBI would direct much larger shares of transfers to childless, non-elderly, non-disabled households than existing programs, and much more to middle-income rather than poor households. A UBI large enough to increase transfers to low-income families would be enormously expensive. We review the labor supply literature for evidence on the likely impacts of a UBI. We argue that the ongoing UBI pilot studies will do little to resolve the major outstanding questions."
Hoynes & Rothstein also identify a disturbing pattern in take-up of benefits. The neediest (the bottom ten percent) have low take-up. I conjecture that chaotic lives, mental illness, deep addiction, and perhaps remote bureaucracies thwart social workers for this cohort. One might argue that a low UBI would have higher take-up among the neediest. But it seems implausible that a low UBI would remedy the crippling dysfunctions of this neediest cohort.
The issue with UBI in our context is that the U and the B are at odds.
"Universal" has a clean meaning. "Basic" does not. Go ahead, try to make some common-sense proposal for a definition of "Basic". Then, as fast as you can, take cover.
That's one reason why conversations about "UBI" degenerate into messes, because there *is* no 'B'.
There is B(you) and B(me) and B(him) and B(her), and so forth, with another dimension for time, since B(him, right now) could be different from the opinion of B(him, a year from now). If there's no B, there's no UBI either. When Arnold talks about UBI, he is including his own version of 'Basic', but there are big qualitative differences in different magnitudes of 'Basic' such that allowing them to vary across that wide range means people think they are talking about the same general idea or social vision when they're not. Arnold says "UBI" at B lower than survival, while Freddie DeBoer says "UBI" at B high enough to sustain a life of leisure and pursuit of intellectual interests, maybe even in NYC.
Unless there is some politically stable way for the country to reach a long-term consensus on a low level of "Basic" and which prevents all the other welfare programs from reincarnating, then we can't afford "Universal".
The only way to make "Basic" affordable is to *define* it in terms of affordability, say, maybe as a fixed percent of GDP or tax revenues or something like that.
But in that case, one should call it "Money Everyone Gets Affordably" (MEGA). If someone says they support MEGA but not any UBI higher than that, then that's an idea one can discuss without drowning in a swamp of confusion and passing by each other's arguments like ships in the night.
Thanks for your insightful comment about rhetorical ambiguity of "UBI." Bryan Caplan likes to say that politics is about what *sounds* good. You point out that vague verbiage can amplify the audience of what sounds good.
Your MEGA idea partly clarifies the discussion, but the term "affordably" stacks the deck.
In my comment, I should have clarified that Arnold would replace (a) means-tested welfare programs with a low UBI, and (b) Medicaid/SSDI with municipal funding and private charity.
Let's set aside Medicaid/SSDI for a moment, since Arnold has a separate plan for them.
Hoynes and Rothstein show that means-tested welfare programs excluding Medicaid/SSDI -- i.e., TANF, SSI/Elderly, SSI/Children, School meals, WIC, and Section 8/Public housing -- cost roughly $130 billion in 2017. They also show that in-work credits -- EITC and CTC -- cost roughly the same amount in 2017: $125 billion. (See table at p. 942 of their article.) Thus means-tested welfare (excluding Medicaid/SSDI) and in-work credits, taken together, amounted to roughly $255 billion in 2017.
Thus a low UBI would cost more than twice as much as the sum of means-tested welfare and in-work credits. The difference approaches half a trillion dollars.
Is it affordable to add half a trillion dollars to the budget, by replacing means-tested welfare and in-work credits with a low UBI?
Is it helpful to the poor to reduce their subsidy by replacing the targeted, means-tested programs with a low UBI for everyone?
Or would a low UBI be an additional program, similar in magnitude to Medicare or Medicaid, with other welfare programs (TANF, EITC, etc) still in place? Again, affordability is not clear-cut.
You're getting to the heart of the matter which is that "welfare" when you get right down to it is mainly about free medical care (and free public school). This only gets bigger and bigger every year.
If you're not going to touch Eds and Meds, you aren't really touching anything.
And of course it creates a huge marginal tax on households, including going all the way up to something like four times the poverty level because of Obamacare subsidies.
Such in kind services are not provided universally or equally. For some they are effectively worthless. For others they provide a lot more value than a per capita view would indicate. And of course it scales with households, a single mother with three bastards gets four times as much Medicaid as a single women without kids.
And of course the providers of Eds and Meds, lots and lots of middle class teachers and nurses, like the system the way it is.
Which is why I say that welfare reform, healthcare reform, and education reform are all the same thing.
The political problem with any scheme which amounts to just giving people money is that it doesn't lend itself to any non-arbitrary limiting principle and thus politicians can always promise to give people even more money, which sets up a bidding war that the left always wins. Like the line of quotes originating with Lord Beaverbrook, once you concede the principle, everything else is haggling over price, and the left will always raise the offer higher than the right.
Re your pro-UBI points on work disincentives from present-day benefits cutoffs, I wonder how much these effects are reduced by people's ignorance of the way the benefits work. It could be that many people are ignorant of what the effective tax rate on them is. Entitlement eligibility is pretty complicated.
I'm pro-UBI for a variety of reasons, but I'd want to hear more before granting that this one has as much force as you think.
Larry is likely both right and significantly wrong on inflation, in the same way Arnold is, as Bari asks why he was right about inflation:
"The secret sauce of economics is arithmetic. After I did the arithmetic, it looked to me like the amount of water we were putting in the bathtub was far bigger than the capacity of the bathtub. But I didn’t know exactly what the capacity of the bathtub would be. I thought there might be various kinds of bottlenecks. But even if all that went well, I thought we were overstimulating the economy. So I forecasted that we’d have excessive inflation. "
Nobody ever knows the bathtub capacity. (Bathtub capacity is a good phrase, we should use it more!)
"It had been 40 years since we’d had inflation. " << this is true about normal folk Consumer Price Index inflation. But it's false about Investor Price Index inflation - which we don't directly measure, but look at the prices investors have been paying for investments: houses (in good areas) going WAY up, profitable stocks UP, art UP, Bitcoin & other fiat crypto coins UP (& down & up &...).
The money printing has been causing huge Investor Price Index inflation, but it hasn't been called that -- but it makes the gulf of wealth between the investor haves and the consuming non-investor have-nots much larger.
Also, higher energy prices look like inflation.
Within a couple of years of moderate Fed rate increases, the US CPI inflation will go back down and we'll again be seeing asset inflation to make the rich richer faster.
"Good research into the wrong question. I don't think that conspiracy theories are my main worry. I worry about all-consuming ideologies, like Marxism. Do non-believers need an all-consuming ideology, and is such an ideology more dangerous than a religion? My own view is that religion need not be an all-consuming ideology, and in fact it may help insulate people from adopting an all-consuming ideology."
+1
In fact one of the tests of a religion lasting is that it can do just that.
I think that perhaps some of the contradictions and wasted ritual are in fact good ways to defuse totalitizing tendencies. The New Testament in fact emphasizes not turning to extremism in a very extreme political environment, but without giving into nihilism.
Good comment. I think of things this way: we all need what might be called a paradigm, a heuristic, or an interpretive framework with which to understand the world and ourselves. Otherwise, it would be a "blooming, buzzing confusion," in William James's words. The notion that there is such a thing as a purely objective rationalistic viewpoint is mistaken; embodied in even that are numerous assumptions that are a matter of faith. The problem with the traditional Western religions was that when they devolved into a secularized form and discarded the deity, the hereafter, and any notion of man's fallibility, they were replaced with a dangerous eschaton, the idea of bringing about a utopian universal civilization here on earth. Hence the "all-consuming ideologies."
Perhaps the ancient Greek pagan religion was best - no salvational content, but it did provide moral constraint (the gods would punish hubris) and community solidarity.
Um, Christianity isn't exactly a good example of ritual defusing totalitarian tendencies, not for the first 19 centuries of its existence at least. The Anglo-American experience of Christianity usually being amenable to non-authoritarian rule was the exception. In most of Europe - especially the Catholic parts - Christianity only begrudgingly abandoned theocratic monarchism after being beaten into submission by anti-clerical nationalists like Cavour.
Freud considered the fact that religious people were generally more happy than the population at large, and decided that, for the individual believer, religion served as a one big neurosis that neutralised a host of smaller neuroses, and so helped the patient better manage his life.
"a strict meritocratic framework where every candidate is treated equally and fairly."
if population groups dont have avg genetic ability/talents/etc. (which seems obviously true), then this will result in very disparate outcomes. like almost all NFL cornerbacks being of west african background. or a significant overrepresentation of ashkenazi jews in fortune 500 ceos and media companies. or asian americans in math olympiads team.
whether a supposed 'liberal' democracy can withstand such truths remains an open question.
I wish BW had asked Summers how he gets from "overstimulating the economy" to "inflation." What was the role of Fed "mistakes?" Did the overstimulation lead to the Fed's mistakes? Would the same Fed mistakes have led to the same inflation even without the "overstimulation?" I wish I understood his model.
Everything else is just (not nearly common enough) common sense.
"Jim Crow forced us to suspend the presumption that private companies and institutions would make good-faith efforts to work through such tough cases (or even easy ones with regard to race)"
I am sure bus companies wanted to build two waiting rooms. Jim Crow = government laws and the force of the gun in the hands of people who know best what is good for someone else using OPM (other peoples money). Government monopoly institutions are the disease.
A low UBI fails to end poverty for those who need it, but encourages less work by the lazy but capable workers who only work enough to pay for their vices.
Note that Larry wants " to give people and their children a policy framework that makes for the most meaningful lives possible." Meaning comes from self-accomplishment, leading to self-respect - from work. In Rob Henderson's note on morals leading to self-respect, there are thieves who derive self-respect from being good thieves. There are gigolo & con men types who get self-respect by lying to women so as to live by sex & flattery, rather than other work.
I genuinely don't understand why so many smart folk, including Charles Murray and Arnold Kling, support UBI rather than improving job guarantee programs and more local, individualized, and even personalized (Data base of welfare receivers!) benefits and life coaching. How should low-IQ folk live? Lazy, careless, reckless, uncaring, thoughtless - but fun loving? When given freedom to do, they do stupid things causing problems that "somebody" has to pay for, but it won't be them since they don't have money, and will never have money - cause whenever they get money, they consume it.
I know people like that, knew in the US.
In many ways, religion pushes such folk to "conform" to social norms that require weekly work, tho allow Friday and/or Saturday night drunken irresponsibility - but after a week of some kind of work somewhere.
My stronger opposition to UBI over the current mess is that UBI is the most discussed alternative to a job guarantee for reforming or replacing the current welfare mess. One of the key reforms of the current mess is for means tested programs to have some 100% - 90% - 80% ... 20% - 10% - 0 steps, so that as a poor person makes a little more money, their benefit is only slightly reduced, no 100% on or off.
'More people need to understand the basic economics of the universal basic income'- regarding your link, this analysis only holds if you make all the mistakes of the GDP factory model, which surprises me. Cost of living isn't constant in the US, what is a 'not livable level of support' in NYC is 'never have to work again' money in Appalachia. Economic dynamism requires that people move from low productivity areas to high productivity areas, but if moving from low to high requires giving up a large portion of your UBI income then that will have the same effects as a high marginal tax rate. Its a high effort/low reward move. There is no level of UBI which will have a notable impact for the poor in San Francisco where sharing a small apartment might still cost you $2,000 a month that won't also be so much that it can't buy a house in the low value regions. $1,000 a month UBI only will eat up half your rent in SF, but will cover a mortgage payment including property taxes and insurance with some left over in a lot of the low productivity regions of the country, or you could live in a trailer park and have $600 a month left over to spend on food, utilities and negative value recreational activities.
Do we want poor unproductive people moving to crowded expensive cities where they are in the way of the productive people and taking up valuable space?
Do we really want to provide Medicare and Medicaid to these people at NYC prices rather than WV prices?
I'm skeptical that these people become more productive when they move to expensive areas. I think they are just in the way. If you go to Tokyo where they don't have cheap labor they just replace it is technology and organizational substitutes to get the job done.
To the extent that the underclass left the productive cities to live in the hinterlands where providing their basic needs was cheaper it would probably increase human welfare.
"To the extent that the underclass left the productive cities to live in the hinterlands where providing their basic needs was cheaper it would probably increase human welfare."
Eh, I don't know. That's life on an Indian Reservation. Because of all the various subsidies they get, those have been a kind of long-term experiment in 'UBI' that no one likes to bring up in UBI discussions. Pro-UBI doesn't want to concede that things ended up on Reservations the way anti-UBI people fear they'd end up for a big chunk of the non-Indian population (West Virginia Squared), and anti-UBI don't want to mention it because they'd be smeared as racists.
Whether the contemporary Reservation system is on net good for welfare of the Indians, or for the people living in other places without those Indians, depends on how you make such judgments. The revealed preferences of people free to leave is a kind of Panglossian answer to the question, but it strikes most people as inadequate and contrary to their intuitions.
I've spent a little time on a Reservation and from my own point of view it looks like a pretty miserable and a degraded form of existence and a waste of human lives.
What usually happens with these UBI discussions is that the pro and anti sides tend to talk past each other. UBI opponents tend to think UBI is special and consider its potential impacts without regard to the current system. UBI proponents will reject this consideration in isolation and insist on a comparative analysis relative to the existing welfare system, which produces similar human effects and is often just as bad and in some ways even worse.
The truth is somewhere in between. You know the expression, "Victim of its own success"? The American welfare system is the opposite, "Saved by its shortcomings."
The very fact that interacting with the welfare system is frustrating, burdensome, annoying, and often humiliating helps keep the fire to the feet of some marginal cases who would otherwise fall and stay into it. They very fact that anytime one needs to go to some place that tends to serve welfare beneficiaries, one is surrounded by the other welfare beneficiaries, often low-status, dangerous, behaviorally repulsive and a bad influence, also puts the fear of God into some exhausted and desperate soul tempted to stop treading water at the level just above.
As soon as these things becomes easy, commonplace, normalized and unobjectionable without a hit to one's sense of status or dignity, then it's a quick descent into some de-facto mini-Reservation of a ghetto or other gloomy enclave.
UBI proponents see these shortcomings of the existing welfare system as bugs that a UBI could fix, but opponents understand them to be features that a UBI would destroy.
I agree with the whole post, but I'm not convinced ghettos in expensive cities are better then Indian Reservations on net. I'm willing to agree both are pretty horrid, but one didn't break into my car every time I parked anywhere close to it.
If a ghetto is sitting on potentially highly valuable urban real estate it's because the government is keeping it that way in a manner distinct from sending people subsidies, and from which we can infer that those who control government find this status of affairs highly beneficial to their interests and want things to stay that way.
Those people have a vested interest in preventing any potential UBI scheme from changing that aspect of the status quo, which means that the whole idea of a UBI scheme as a superior replacement for all the other programs and distortions is politically non-viable. Unless you could somehow buy all those politicians off in one big push, rapidly creating facts on the ground that would be too difficult for their successors to reverse. That might be do-able, politicians come cheap.
Do we want poor unproductive people moving to cities? Yes. This is the story of the industrial revolution and the largest wealth gains in history. People move where the jobs are, where labor and capital can combine. A marginal farmer on poor land can make more as a factory worker attached to developed capital. Labor is a resource.
We are talking subsidized behavior either way in this context. Subsidizing people in cheap rural areas with limited capital/infrastructure is going to have its own set of issues. I'm for neither set of subsidies, but at least one of them resembles a level of dynamism, while the other has no outs for many of its constituents.
Cities don't have factories anymore. What few factories we have are extremely automated and generally get located in low cost areas outside of the more expensive cities.
Not seeing it. The GDP/capita in the suburbs and often exurbs is higher than many city centers. And the cities themselves concentrate their productivity in to certain parts of the city. The Bronx has a median household income of $38k, it contributes little to the productivity of Manhattan.
What you think of as "productive" is some office buildings that people commute into. The productivity belongs to the people and would follow them wherever they go. The homeless they pass in the street are not aiding them in being more productive.
What is the downside of a higher EITC compared to the UBI? I fee the same way about a work requirement that is not administratively default to show compliance with. It could not substitutive for assistance to people that really cannot work or whom we do not wish to encourage to work (some amount of parental/family leave, but why not?
"Jim Crow forced us to suspend the presumption that private companies and institutions would make good-faith efforts to work through such tough cases (or even easy ones with regard to race). "
I don't subscribe and wish I could see the rest of the argument but this seems to go down a familiar path that I think is wrong. What if we made the opposite assumption that Jim Crow was, as is the case with much legislation, the work of a small minority that benefited greatly from it and so had a vested interest in its creation and maintenance, with the costs born by a diffuse majority that was initially difficult to organize against it? I think I agree with you, Arnold, that we went sideways in not viewing the purpose of Civil Rights activities and legislation as primarily removing *government enforced* discrimination which begat the pernicious assumption that rather than being the expression of a mass of people that didn't believe in segregation legal action is what changed people's minds.
Jim Crow was supported by the majority of white people because it clearly increased their well being.
The Northern private equivalent that was outlaws by the Fair Housing Act similarly had a ton of white demand from regular people rather than some small elite. The rich know that underclass blacks can't afford the houses in their neighborhoods, ordinary whites needed an HOA contract to keep them out.
"Good research into the wrong question." Right, and many other commenters pointed out the same thing. Scott seemed uncharacteristically tone deaf and overly literal on what Chesterton was getting at with that one*. It's probably because Scott's an atheist, LW-Rationalist, etc.
Adherents of secular ideologies think their ideologies are 'objectively true' or 'science': derived as opposed to revealed, facts instead of opinions or superstitions or groupthink conformism. They tend to overlook their intellectual dependency on arbitrary metaphysical constructs (NB to LW-Rationalists, you can't just chant "The Sequences!" as if that deals with the issue, it doesn't.)
Adherents of traditional religions can notice the same patterns of individual and social psychology that tend to feedback into the evolution of secular ideology and its various real-life communities and institutions, and thus can appreciate the obvious "religiousness" of it, despite the secularist protests to the contrary.
In the weak version of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, merely having and practicing the use of names to convey certain ideas or phenomena helps one to incorporate those conceptual categories as significant factors in one's world-model and makes it easier to notice examples in one's observations. If you only see in the visual range, you can't find other people at night further than a stone's throw. If you can see into the infrared, you can spot them clear as day a mile away. A religious person's theology typically has a whole mini-lexicon of such words to describe his own experience and observations of religious attitudes and life, and can use his infrared to see them in the secular ideology too.
Chesterton wrote from 1900 to 1936, a period of war and extreme ideological churn and what was effectively the suicide of Old Europe. Traditional religions and political ideologies were definitively displaced by the three modernist rivals of progressivism, communism, and fascism. He saw firsthand how when the forest built by tradition over millennia was cut down, all manner of noxious weeds would quickly fill the vacuum and take over the newly unexploited resource of souls adrift. Back when Nietzscheanism, Eugenics, and Socialism were at the height of their popularity for Western elites, he stood adamantly against all, indeed, one of his earlier works was, "Eugenics and Other Evils." Few of his contemporary public intellectuals saw it that way until after WWII.
*Handle's First Law is: "All the best quotes are apocryphal." Consistent with HFL, no one can actually find a clear example of Chesterton saying or writing this 'quote'. Closest anyone can get is that it seems exactly the kind of thing he would say, and that the earliest mentions of it by his fans were probably instances of them independently combining several other similar sayings and perhaps subconsciously applying some artistic license into similar pithy aphorisms, and repeating them with slight mutations until hitting on a particularly poetic and memorable expression.
I chafe at the characterization in your second-last paragraph (perhaps it's just you saying how Chesterton saw it). For one thing, 20th century Anglicanism was just about the most moderate, temperate form of traditional Christianity that ever existed; it was far from the norm. In fact, Christians spend most of the 16th-17th century burning the forest down over and over again. Pre-modern Christianity could inspire within it radical ideologies that could rival communism and fascism in their sweeping brutality. The idea that modern 'secular' (fascism, if not keen on orthodox Christianity, wasn't really secular) extremist ideas came from an unmooring caused by the loss of Christianity requires one to be very specific in choosing which Christians to use as a point of comparison.
A religion becomes moderate the same way a formerly dangerous animal becomes moderate, because it was tamed or domesticated by something more powerful.
Anglicanism became so moderate that it ceased to stir mens souls, certainly not in comparison to the influence of and human energies unleashed by those rivals. In the US version of Episcopalianism, church had by then become mostly a club one joined for purposes of networking and climbing the social ladder, and thus something one dropped as soon as the costs exceeded the benefits. Same was true for Lutheran churches in Central Europe in the early 19th century. In the UK, it became moderate because remaining non-moderate would have struck most influential people at that time (and long before) as completely ridiculous. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis and the few others were almost alone among their class and knew it as it left that unmistakable imprint on their writing in content and style.
In the UK, "no religious affiliation" reached plurarilty over 'Any Kind of Christian' a decade ago. The percent of British who even call themselves Anglican has dropped into the single digits. If you restrict to native-born or with British ethnic heritage who are 18-30 and attend even once a month you are looking for needles in a haystack, same goes for Catholics, and for Presbyterians or Methodists of that sort, there are unverified rumors of occasional sightings but the consensus position is that those denominations had their "children of men" moment decades ago and young ones have gone extinct. A very hot and extremely plentiful kind of real estate offering is for "redundant chuches" which people are desecrating, oh, excuse me, I mean, converting into homes and airbnbs and so forth. (Actually, it's technically the church leadership itself which officially performs the desecration process. Last one out the door, please turn off the lights.) Scandinavia earlier and worse than that. I could talk about what happened to Ireland, but I've already reached my quota of tears for today.
Note: I say all this as someone who finds the above facts to be tragic, but there's no sense in denying either them or the long historical trend which led inexorably and predicably to this point.
When Nietzsche wrote "God is Dead" in 1882, he was stating what most of his readers already accepted as what had been obviously true for the majority of (especially Western) European elites and intellectuals for over a century, which cuts off the head of the status snake and makes any religion a "walking dead" institution with, apparently, about ten generations left to go, if you're lucky. Marx wrote that "opium of the masses" line in 1843, and don't get me started on the French Revolution. To the extent things are different in other places in the broader EuroSphere, it's only by virtue of being a generation or two behind in the overall trend for peculiar local reasons.
Christianity among Europeans in developed countries was like Wile E Coyote having just run over the cliff. It was still floating a little for a long time, especially in the outlier of the US, but at some point he looked down and started falling though he has not hit rock bottom yet. If he has an acme parachute, he had better pull the ripcord asap.
Re: "I continue to favor a low UBI at a national level (not enough income to live on), with local governments and charities filling in gaps for people who cannot work or who have very expensive illnesses. [...] If you think that a UBI would discourage people from working, then you should oppose our current welfare programs even more strongly. They impose a much higher tax rate on the earnings of the working poor."
At the embedded link, Arnold suggests a low UBI = $2,500 per person. By definition, this UBI isn't means-tested -- It's universal. It would cost $2,500 x USpopulation = $825 billion. This sum is roughly equivalent to current US spending on Medicare ($770 billion). It also roughly equivalent to the sum of current US Federal-and-States spending on Medicaid ($760 billion) and US spending on Social Security Disability Insurance payments ($150 billion).
A low UBI is very expensive.
Moreover, voters/lawmakers would never trade Medicaid-and-SSDI for a low UBI. (If I understand correctly, Arnold's idea is that municipalities and charities would replace Medicaid and SSDI.)
My intuition is that it would be better to adjust the phase-outs of means-tested benefits, in order to reduce work disincentives, than to replace means-tested benefits with UBI.
Compare Hilary Hoynes & Jesse Rothstein, "Universal Basic Income in the United States and Advanced Countries," Annual Review of Economics 2019, un-gated PDF at the link below:
https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/Hoynes-Rothstein-annurev-economics-080218-030237.pdf
Here is the abstract:
"Abstract
We discuss the potential role of universal basic incomes (UBIs) in advanced countries. A feature of advanced economies that distinguishes them from developing countries is the existence of well-developed, if often incomplete, safety nets. We develop a framework for describing transfer programs that is flexible enough to encompass most existing programs as well as UBIs, and we use this framework to compare various UBIs to the existing constellation of programs in the United States. A UBI would direct much larger shares of transfers to childless, non-elderly, non-disabled households than existing programs, and much more to middle-income rather than poor households. A UBI large enough to increase transfers to low-income families would be enormously expensive. We review the labor supply literature for evidence on the likely impacts of a UBI. We argue that the ongoing UBI pilot studies will do little to resolve the major outstanding questions."
Hoynes & Rothstein also identify a disturbing pattern in take-up of benefits. The neediest (the bottom ten percent) have low take-up. I conjecture that chaotic lives, mental illness, deep addiction, and perhaps remote bureaucracies thwart social workers for this cohort. One might argue that a low UBI would have higher take-up among the neediest. But it seems implausible that a low UBI would remedy the crippling dysfunctions of this neediest cohort.
The issue with UBI in our context is that the U and the B are at odds.
"Universal" has a clean meaning. "Basic" does not. Go ahead, try to make some common-sense proposal for a definition of "Basic". Then, as fast as you can, take cover.
That's one reason why conversations about "UBI" degenerate into messes, because there *is* no 'B'.
There is B(you) and B(me) and B(him) and B(her), and so forth, with another dimension for time, since B(him, right now) could be different from the opinion of B(him, a year from now). If there's no B, there's no UBI either. When Arnold talks about UBI, he is including his own version of 'Basic', but there are big qualitative differences in different magnitudes of 'Basic' such that allowing them to vary across that wide range means people think they are talking about the same general idea or social vision when they're not. Arnold says "UBI" at B lower than survival, while Freddie DeBoer says "UBI" at B high enough to sustain a life of leisure and pursuit of intellectual interests, maybe even in NYC.
Unless there is some politically stable way for the country to reach a long-term consensus on a low level of "Basic" and which prevents all the other welfare programs from reincarnating, then we can't afford "Universal".
The only way to make "Basic" affordable is to *define* it in terms of affordability, say, maybe as a fixed percent of GDP or tax revenues or something like that.
But in that case, one should call it "Money Everyone Gets Affordably" (MEGA). If someone says they support MEGA but not any UBI higher than that, then that's an idea one can discuss without drowning in a swamp of confusion and passing by each other's arguments like ships in the night.
Handle,
Thanks for your insightful comment about rhetorical ambiguity of "UBI." Bryan Caplan likes to say that politics is about what *sounds* good. You point out that vague verbiage can amplify the audience of what sounds good.
Your MEGA idea partly clarifies the discussion, but the term "affordably" stacks the deck.
In my comment, I should have clarified that Arnold would replace (a) means-tested welfare programs with a low UBI, and (b) Medicaid/SSDI with municipal funding and private charity.
Let's set aside Medicaid/SSDI for a moment, since Arnold has a separate plan for them.
Hoynes and Rothstein show that means-tested welfare programs excluding Medicaid/SSDI -- i.e., TANF, SSI/Elderly, SSI/Children, School meals, WIC, and Section 8/Public housing -- cost roughly $130 billion in 2017. They also show that in-work credits -- EITC and CTC -- cost roughly the same amount in 2017: $125 billion. (See table at p. 942 of their article.) Thus means-tested welfare (excluding Medicaid/SSDI) and in-work credits, taken together, amounted to roughly $255 billion in 2017.
Thus a low UBI would cost more than twice as much as the sum of means-tested welfare and in-work credits. The difference approaches half a trillion dollars.
Is it affordable to add half a trillion dollars to the budget, by replacing means-tested welfare and in-work credits with a low UBI?
Is it helpful to the poor to reduce their subsidy by replacing the targeted, means-tested programs with a low UBI for everyone?
Or would a low UBI be an additional program, similar in magnitude to Medicare or Medicaid, with other welfare programs (TANF, EITC, etc) still in place? Again, affordability is not clear-cut.
You're getting to the heart of the matter which is that "welfare" when you get right down to it is mainly about free medical care (and free public school). This only gets bigger and bigger every year.
If you're not going to touch Eds and Meds, you aren't really touching anything.
And of course it creates a huge marginal tax on households, including going all the way up to something like four times the poverty level because of Obamacare subsidies.
Such in kind services are not provided universally or equally. For some they are effectively worthless. For others they provide a lot more value than a per capita view would indicate. And of course it scales with households, a single mother with three bastards gets four times as much Medicaid as a single women without kids.
And of course the providers of Eds and Meds, lots and lots of middle class teachers and nurses, like the system the way it is.
Which is why I say that welfare reform, healthcare reform, and education reform are all the same thing.
The political problem with any scheme which amounts to just giving people money is that it doesn't lend itself to any non-arbitrary limiting principle and thus politicians can always promise to give people even more money, which sets up a bidding war that the left always wins. Like the line of quotes originating with Lord Beaverbrook, once you concede the principle, everything else is haggling over price, and the left will always raise the offer higher than the right.
Re your pro-UBI points on work disincentives from present-day benefits cutoffs, I wonder how much these effects are reduced by people's ignorance of the way the benefits work. It could be that many people are ignorant of what the effective tax rate on them is. Entitlement eligibility is pretty complicated.
I'm pro-UBI for a variety of reasons, but I'd want to hear more before granting that this one has as much force as you think.
Larry is likely both right and significantly wrong on inflation, in the same way Arnold is, as Bari asks why he was right about inflation:
"The secret sauce of economics is arithmetic. After I did the arithmetic, it looked to me like the amount of water we were putting in the bathtub was far bigger than the capacity of the bathtub. But I didn’t know exactly what the capacity of the bathtub would be. I thought there might be various kinds of bottlenecks. But even if all that went well, I thought we were overstimulating the economy. So I forecasted that we’d have excessive inflation. "
Nobody ever knows the bathtub capacity. (Bathtub capacity is a good phrase, we should use it more!)
"It had been 40 years since we’d had inflation. " << this is true about normal folk Consumer Price Index inflation. But it's false about Investor Price Index inflation - which we don't directly measure, but look at the prices investors have been paying for investments: houses (in good areas) going WAY up, profitable stocks UP, art UP, Bitcoin & other fiat crypto coins UP (& down & up &...).
The money printing has been causing huge Investor Price Index inflation, but it hasn't been called that -- but it makes the gulf of wealth between the investor haves and the consuming non-investor have-nots much larger.
Also, higher energy prices look like inflation.
Within a couple of years of moderate Fed rate increases, the US CPI inflation will go back down and we'll again be seeing asset inflation to make the rich richer faster.
"Good research into the wrong question. I don't think that conspiracy theories are my main worry. I worry about all-consuming ideologies, like Marxism. Do non-believers need an all-consuming ideology, and is such an ideology more dangerous than a religion? My own view is that religion need not be an all-consuming ideology, and in fact it may help insulate people from adopting an all-consuming ideology."
+1
In fact one of the tests of a religion lasting is that it can do just that.
I think that perhaps some of the contradictions and wasted ritual are in fact good ways to defuse totalitizing tendencies. The New Testament in fact emphasizes not turning to extremism in a very extreme political environment, but without giving into nihilism.
Good comment. I think of things this way: we all need what might be called a paradigm, a heuristic, or an interpretive framework with which to understand the world and ourselves. Otherwise, it would be a "blooming, buzzing confusion," in William James's words. The notion that there is such a thing as a purely objective rationalistic viewpoint is mistaken; embodied in even that are numerous assumptions that are a matter of faith. The problem with the traditional Western religions was that when they devolved into a secularized form and discarded the deity, the hereafter, and any notion of man's fallibility, they were replaced with a dangerous eschaton, the idea of bringing about a utopian universal civilization here on earth. Hence the "all-consuming ideologies."
Perhaps the ancient Greek pagan religion was best - no salvational content, but it did provide moral constraint (the gods would punish hubris) and community solidarity.
Um, Christianity isn't exactly a good example of ritual defusing totalitarian tendencies, not for the first 19 centuries of its existence at least. The Anglo-American experience of Christianity usually being amenable to non-authoritarian rule was the exception. In most of Europe - especially the Catholic parts - Christianity only begrudgingly abandoned theocratic monarchism after being beaten into submission by anti-clerical nationalists like Cavour.
Freud considered the fact that religious people were generally more happy than the population at large, and decided that, for the individual believer, religion served as a one big neurosis that neutralised a host of smaller neuroses, and so helped the patient better manage his life.
"a strict meritocratic framework where every candidate is treated equally and fairly."
if population groups dont have avg genetic ability/talents/etc. (which seems obviously true), then this will result in very disparate outcomes. like almost all NFL cornerbacks being of west african background. or a significant overrepresentation of ashkenazi jews in fortune 500 ceos and media companies. or asian americans in math olympiads team.
whether a supposed 'liberal' democracy can withstand such truths remains an open question.
I wish BW had asked Summers how he gets from "overstimulating the economy" to "inflation." What was the role of Fed "mistakes?" Did the overstimulation lead to the Fed's mistakes? Would the same Fed mistakes have led to the same inflation even without the "overstimulation?" I wish I understood his model.
Everything else is just (not nearly common enough) common sense.
"Jim Crow forced us to suspend the presumption that private companies and institutions would make good-faith efforts to work through such tough cases (or even easy ones with regard to race)"
I am sure bus companies wanted to build two waiting rooms. Jim Crow = government laws and the force of the gun in the hands of people who know best what is good for someone else using OPM (other peoples money). Government monopoly institutions are the disease.
A low UBI fails to end poverty for those who need it, but encourages less work by the lazy but capable workers who only work enough to pay for their vices.
Note that Larry wants " to give people and their children a policy framework that makes for the most meaningful lives possible." Meaning comes from self-accomplishment, leading to self-respect - from work. In Rob Henderson's note on morals leading to self-respect, there are thieves who derive self-respect from being good thieves. There are gigolo & con men types who get self-respect by lying to women so as to live by sex & flattery, rather than other work.
I genuinely don't understand why so many smart folk, including Charles Murray and Arnold Kling, support UBI rather than improving job guarantee programs and more local, individualized, and even personalized (Data base of welfare receivers!) benefits and life coaching. How should low-IQ folk live? Lazy, careless, reckless, uncaring, thoughtless - but fun loving? When given freedom to do, they do stupid things causing problems that "somebody" has to pay for, but it won't be them since they don't have money, and will never have money - cause whenever they get money, they consume it.
I know people like that, knew in the US.
In many ways, religion pushes such folk to "conform" to social norms that require weekly work, tho allow Friday and/or Saturday night drunken irresponsibility - but after a week of some kind of work somewhere.
My stronger opposition to UBI over the current mess is that UBI is the most discussed alternative to a job guarantee for reforming or replacing the current welfare mess. One of the key reforms of the current mess is for means tested programs to have some 100% - 90% - 80% ... 20% - 10% - 0 steps, so that as a poor person makes a little more money, their benefit is only slightly reduced, no 100% on or off.
'More people need to understand the basic economics of the universal basic income'- regarding your link, this analysis only holds if you make all the mistakes of the GDP factory model, which surprises me. Cost of living isn't constant in the US, what is a 'not livable level of support' in NYC is 'never have to work again' money in Appalachia. Economic dynamism requires that people move from low productivity areas to high productivity areas, but if moving from low to high requires giving up a large portion of your UBI income then that will have the same effects as a high marginal tax rate. Its a high effort/low reward move. There is no level of UBI which will have a notable impact for the poor in San Francisco where sharing a small apartment might still cost you $2,000 a month that won't also be so much that it can't buy a house in the low value regions. $1,000 a month UBI only will eat up half your rent in SF, but will cover a mortgage payment including property taxes and insurance with some left over in a lot of the low productivity regions of the country, or you could live in a trailer park and have $600 a month left over to spend on food, utilities and negative value recreational activities.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4-Eight-Candy-Ln-Falling-Waters-WV-25419/2062943961_zpid/
Do we want poor unproductive people moving to crowded expensive cities where they are in the way of the productive people and taking up valuable space?
Do we really want to provide Medicare and Medicaid to these people at NYC prices rather than WV prices?
I'm skeptical that these people become more productive when they move to expensive areas. I think they are just in the way. If you go to Tokyo where they don't have cheap labor they just replace it is technology and organizational substitutes to get the job done.
To the extent that the underclass left the productive cities to live in the hinterlands where providing their basic needs was cheaper it would probably increase human welfare.
"To the extent that the underclass left the productive cities to live in the hinterlands where providing their basic needs was cheaper it would probably increase human welfare."
Eh, I don't know. That's life on an Indian Reservation. Because of all the various subsidies they get, those have been a kind of long-term experiment in 'UBI' that no one likes to bring up in UBI discussions. Pro-UBI doesn't want to concede that things ended up on Reservations the way anti-UBI people fear they'd end up for a big chunk of the non-Indian population (West Virginia Squared), and anti-UBI don't want to mention it because they'd be smeared as racists.
Whether the contemporary Reservation system is on net good for welfare of the Indians, or for the people living in other places without those Indians, depends on how you make such judgments. The revealed preferences of people free to leave is a kind of Panglossian answer to the question, but it strikes most people as inadequate and contrary to their intuitions.
I've spent a little time on a Reservation and from my own point of view it looks like a pretty miserable and a degraded form of existence and a waste of human lives.
What usually happens with these UBI discussions is that the pro and anti sides tend to talk past each other. UBI opponents tend to think UBI is special and consider its potential impacts without regard to the current system. UBI proponents will reject this consideration in isolation and insist on a comparative analysis relative to the existing welfare system, which produces similar human effects and is often just as bad and in some ways even worse.
The truth is somewhere in between. You know the expression, "Victim of its own success"? The American welfare system is the opposite, "Saved by its shortcomings."
The very fact that interacting with the welfare system is frustrating, burdensome, annoying, and often humiliating helps keep the fire to the feet of some marginal cases who would otherwise fall and stay into it. They very fact that anytime one needs to go to some place that tends to serve welfare beneficiaries, one is surrounded by the other welfare beneficiaries, often low-status, dangerous, behaviorally repulsive and a bad influence, also puts the fear of God into some exhausted and desperate soul tempted to stop treading water at the level just above.
As soon as these things becomes easy, commonplace, normalized and unobjectionable without a hit to one's sense of status or dignity, then it's a quick descent into some de-facto mini-Reservation of a ghetto or other gloomy enclave.
UBI proponents see these shortcomings of the existing welfare system as bugs that a UBI could fix, but opponents understand them to be features that a UBI would destroy.
I agree with the whole post, but I'm not convinced ghettos in expensive cities are better then Indian Reservations on net. I'm willing to agree both are pretty horrid, but one didn't break into my car every time I parked anywhere close to it.
If a ghetto is sitting on potentially highly valuable urban real estate it's because the government is keeping it that way in a manner distinct from sending people subsidies, and from which we can infer that those who control government find this status of affairs highly beneficial to their interests and want things to stay that way.
Those people have a vested interest in preventing any potential UBI scheme from changing that aspect of the status quo, which means that the whole idea of a UBI scheme as a superior replacement for all the other programs and distortions is politically non-viable. Unless you could somehow buy all those politicians off in one big push, rapidly creating facts on the ground that would be too difficult for their successors to reverse. That might be do-able, politicians come cheap.
Do we want poor unproductive people moving to cities? Yes. This is the story of the industrial revolution and the largest wealth gains in history. People move where the jobs are, where labor and capital can combine. A marginal farmer on poor land can make more as a factory worker attached to developed capital. Labor is a resource.
"Moving to" is not "Subsidized occupation of".
We are talking subsidized behavior either way in this context. Subsidizing people in cheap rural areas with limited capital/infrastructure is going to have its own set of issues. I'm for neither set of subsidies, but at least one of them resembles a level of dynamism, while the other has no outs for many of its constituents.
Cities don't have factories anymore. What few factories we have are extremely automated and generally get located in low cost areas outside of the more expensive cities.
Cities are still where capital congregates and where productivity is higher.
Not seeing it. The GDP/capita in the suburbs and often exurbs is higher than many city centers. And the cities themselves concentrate their productivity in to certain parts of the city. The Bronx has a median household income of $38k, it contributes little to the productivity of Manhattan.
What you think of as "productive" is some office buildings that people commute into. The productivity belongs to the people and would follow them wherever they go. The homeless they pass in the street are not aiding them in being more productive.
What is the downside of a higher EITC compared to the UBI? I fee the same way about a work requirement that is not administratively default to show compliance with. It could not substitutive for assistance to people that really cannot work or whom we do not wish to encourage to work (some amount of parental/family leave, but why not?
"Jim Crow forced us to suspend the presumption that private companies and institutions would make good-faith efforts to work through such tough cases (or even easy ones with regard to race). "
I don't subscribe and wish I could see the rest of the argument but this seems to go down a familiar path that I think is wrong. What if we made the opposite assumption that Jim Crow was, as is the case with much legislation, the work of a small minority that benefited greatly from it and so had a vested interest in its creation and maintenance, with the costs born by a diffuse majority that was initially difficult to organize against it? I think I agree with you, Arnold, that we went sideways in not viewing the purpose of Civil Rights activities and legislation as primarily removing *government enforced* discrimination which begat the pernicious assumption that rather than being the expression of a mass of people that didn't believe in segregation legal action is what changed people's minds.
Jim Crow was supported by the majority of white people because it clearly increased their well being.
The Northern private equivalent that was outlaws by the Fair Housing Act similarly had a ton of white demand from regular people rather than some small elite. The rich know that underclass blacks can't afford the houses in their neighborhoods, ordinary whites needed an HOA contract to keep them out.