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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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/
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.