On the question of manufactured homes, Construction Physics did a good two part series on their rise and fall a year or so back. Quite interesting. He spends a lot of time going into the theories of decline.
I think that the key reason manufactured homes became less popular is that they were considered super low status. Although some more modern manufactured homes are essentially parts of a house pre built, especially in the first 3/4 of the 20th century manufactured home meant "mobile home", which meant "trailer park." Even growing up in a relatively poor region, trailer parks were considered highly undesirable by everyone, and extremely low status.
"Comparing like for like, the cost-per-square-foot of a manufactured home is somewhere around 10-35% less than the cost of a site-built home."
This just isn't a lot of money. Keep in mind that building costs aren't even a majority of total home costs in many areas. My own home was under 50% labor and materials when they gave me the breakdown.
A house isn't about walls and doors, its about neighbors and location.
What would seem to make the most sense is prefab parts of homes. If you could build 60% of the house somewhere else, then put them together with perhaps a second story on site, that might make sense.
I see a lot of partial-prefab barns and garages like that on a smaller scale. The roof structures come on a truck all put together, as well as the wall segments (8' lengths) and then they are just put together into the right shape. Something like that, but with maybe entire 12x40' room sections might make a lot of sense.
But then, as Forumposter pointed out, a lot of the cost of building isn't the stuff and labor. For getting a workshop over 499 sq feet built on my property I need to get all kinds of water run-off studies and other crap. If I lived out where I grew up I would have already had the thing completed, but it will probably be a year before I can get all the permitting and studies completed. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the big reasons for the drop in building productivity is due to where people are building more: more suburban to urban residents means more restrictions on building possibilities, even with a fixed range of regulatory states.
That's a fair point, although I don't know that many of the factory workers wouldn't be immigrants as well. The total cost percentages might not be all that different, a few percentage points maybe? I wouldn't want to bet.
I don’t know about Tyson, but I do know that Cargill’s supply chain system still runs on paper receipts and documents for the most part, so... could be anything. Depends on how well the bureaucracy works and how many temp workers (who are vetted by the temp agency) get used, along with how well fake identification is competing with government rules. I know many companies are relying heavily on temp workers for production ; I don’t t know but have heard that faking legal status isn’t terribly difficult.
I read recently about the horrific death of a 16 year-old boy tangled in the machinery of a poultry processing plant in Mississippi - the news stories said "he moved here from Guatemala" apparently unwilling to use the word "immigrated". I was curious and looked up the company. They process 2 million birds a week. (Do y'all never tire of eating so much chicken?) Interestingly, though, when you click on "Jobs" the website, theretofore about chicken processing, goes to a page of job openings for the transportation side of the business only, as if elves do the work inside the plant.
"While [X] may have shed his [Y] pose, in another way I am afraid that he is the same person. That person craves an audience......When you crave an audience too much, you become a performative pundit. What you write is not exactly who you are. Maybe you don’t even know who you are."
Never mind about the particular case in point here (Hanania), I thought this was very well observed - as a psychological insight. Took the words out of my own mouth.
I don't dispute this, though I can't imagine many professional writers who don't crave an audience. And I hold no brief for Hanania, whose thoughts I have only read on a couple of occasions when others have linked them for discussion; in other words I am not very familiar with his worldview (seems a little Curtis Yarvin-ish?). There is a long tradition of the provocateur with a pen, however, and you pretty much have to take it or leave it - the tradition, I mean.
What I object to - oh, how to say it without getting back a moronic "ah, then you are the racist we have been hunting!" - what I object to is the special status of "racism" as the only remaining sin. There is really nothing else that he could even be accused of, that would be remotely in the same ballpark. And yet, we all know that there are worse things - than racism. But we have to pretend.
Racism is ill-defined, of course; it's whatever people need it to be, at the moment. In its most real manifestation, it's probably deeply wired into all people. But then in that most real manifestation, it is generally at its worst when coupled with other traits (that are not sins - since there are no other sins). Thus - in the South, everyone knows it was and remains the poor whites ("trash") that were most racist. And yet one is not even allowed to utter that - because it conflicts with our still-Marxist notions about class.
I should add, in reluctant defense of Southern poor whites, that they are simultaneously the most likely people in the country to display the greatest evidence of non-racism, which is marrying or mating with those of a different race (but American). Far more likely, I would guess, than anybody in the American academy social network.
As I explained above, my initial comment was not in any way related to the 'issue' of racism. But for, what it's worth, it is my opinion that modern Western white men and women are typically the least racist people in the modern world - and by far.
I think you might have misunderstood me here. My comment had nothing particularly to do with racism - neither one way or the other - nor any other specific issue. Rather, I was agreeing with (what I took to be) Arnold Kling's slight suspicion of people who lurch from being opinionated in one way and then equally opinionated in another. Of course we all evolve as we age and experience modifies the way we see the world. But my instinct is that only happens up to a point. Many people (and I am one) have a slight suspicion of people's 'road to Damascus' conversions and I thought Kling expressed this eloquently.
Going off on a tangent, did you ever see my reply to your reply to my comment (Aug 7) on Kling's "Panic of the Managerial Class" post? I would be interested in your thoughts on that?
I call it the Jane Fonda mentality. Whatever Jane believes at any moment in time is what she abso-fucking-lutely believes with all her heart and soul. Then when she switches, sometimes 180 degrees, she switches without a beat and that's what she believes.
Diane Ravitch is my favorite education example of this. When she was a reformer, teachers were the enemy. Then she flipped, and now reformers are the enemy. And yes, Hanania is the same way.
This is good. This is why I find it hard to believe those people, because they don't show some logical way they evolved from belief X to belief Y - instead of PR/popularity contest/tribal loyalty reasons. Changing your beliefs is fine, but you have to show why the new beliefs you arrived at don't have the same flaws you left the previous ones for, and decent reasons why you didn't see them originally.
I'm not sure about pensions, but I'm pretty fucking sure that all teachers don't give a shit about CalSTRS. And I haven't been a teacher long enough to care in the slightest what my pension is, whatever state it's in.
What I am sure about is that Diane Ravitch wants teachers' pensions to be very high, and I just said I think she's a fucking hack. But it's pretty clear you don't understand much, so find a two year old and have her read my comment aloud slowly, until you manage to grasp the point.
Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to attack your comment. I was just referring to the idea that one must moderate, there is such a thing as going too far - which I believe in practice, if not entirely in principle, because I am timid myself and personally find manners more pleasing than the lack thereof - when in fact there seems to be chiefly only one way of going too far. And as far as I can tell, the guy who treads the edge on that most often is Sailer - and yet if you have limited time, he's the guy most worth reading on cultural topics. I think when you start out reading Sailer, you think - if he only he'd dial it back - he could be mainstream. But as you read more, you realize - no, he couldn't be and do you really want him to be. But he's an entertaining writer, particularly a critic, which makes up for a lot; and I don't know that Hanania is. In a way, though, Hanania is kind of - well, Hanania could stand in for a lot of people. We've shaken off all our moral foundations, lost souls completely at sea (as our embarrassing hormonal shifts on Ukraine make clear); the modern world befuddles us unless for some reason we have been granted the presence in our lives of someone with real wisdom (rare). Hanania's process of becoming is probably no more confused than that of anyone else, left or right - but his exhibitionism makes it seem so.
I will look back at that other thread, re my conservatism which has but one marker: conservation (what else could it be, to an intelligent person in 2023? In 1993? In 1973? etc). That something so obvious was lost, is baffling to me and so I consider it must have been essentially an evil, a manipulation by ideologues: bad people. I think I grasped that you live in the UK and - there's really no way for you to understand what it is like here. I'm not saying you're a toy country, not at all - but y'all accept certain norms, that here are not first principles at all, are even turned upside down into negatives.
I find your comments both intriguing and - at the same time - a bit head-scratching. For example: "you live in the UK and - there's really no way for you to understand what it is like here." Are you not aware that the UK has all the cultural malaise that you hate in the US....the only difference being that it is even further down the track!? Can I persuade you to add Slouching Towards Bethlehem: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/ to your other 3 Substack reads. I think you would find it most interesting (and it's a freeone).
I will do that. No, I am aware of what's going on in the mother country: we "alt-righters" thive, probably unwisely, on our morning Daily Dystopia Bulletin. Somehow I think you may have an underlying resilience, though, that we do not, for historical reasons. I'm probably wrong about that too. No, re America, I am speaking only of the visual environment, both with respect to the places we live and the natural world. Of course, to me, it is vital and deep and explanatory, not merely symptomatic ...
But I know that even referencing it betrays a dorky earnestness on the internet - which really tells you how far we've fallen in the past sixty years.
It is not a compelling topic like, say, the Barbie movie.
There's a sweet spot, somewhere between Tyler Cowen on one end and Hanania on the other, where you say enough about the topics of the moment to be relevant without saying so much, and so strongly, as to be ridiculous.
'When I get a lot of positive reinforcement for a post that I think is probably giving people more of a dopamine hit than insight, I experience regret.'
Concerning social media identification I am conflicted on using my actual identity in my web comments & publishing. There is currently no professional benefit in using my true identity so I have chosen to use an alias. This is not to allow me anonymity to be a jerk online. Rather, if there is only downside risk to publicly participating in Social Media, why should I entertain that risk?
There is also the modesty factor. I am a very private person and I am not comfortable in gaining a public reputation. Ii concerns me that I could be seen by others as the guy who wrote opinion "X". I want to be judged for who I am, not by what others say and think about me. Those who publicly enter the media space have to deal with many people viewing them in ways they do not care to be considered.
Hanania has made the decision to be a professional pundit. Perhaps at some point his intensity will slack. What will endure will be the impressions he has made and not all of them are positive.
Now retired, I decided over a decade ago to use my real name* - but have slightly censored / moderated my written opinions to sometimes be less extreme. My wife ran for office as a Christian Democrat (in Slovakia), so I didn't quite emphasize how much I was against the false PC/Woke bs of
a) men & women are the same, and
b) blacks & whites have the same potential IQs.
I support Truth, as well as Objective Truth, and the truth is that Reality is unfair. That's not the same as an injustice that the gov't can rectify.
Anyway, I don't think Hanania should be cancelled for his views in the abstract, but Hanania himself has spent quite a lot of time lately talking about how he hates anons and they should be cancelled for their views, so stones from glass houses and all. Whatever happens happens. The world would not miss edgelord regurgitations of Steve Sailer.
That last sentence sums it up pretty well for me. Hanania always strikes me as a teenage edgelord looking for attention, but with a somewhat more advanced reading list. I can never tell if he is sincere or not; if he is always sincere he is a monster, and if he is always joking he is an idiot. The only consistent intention that matches his writing is that he is desperately looking for attention, and will say anything to get it.
I like and read Steve Sailer - whose data seems very accurate and true, tho also anti-woke. Arnold doesn't like Steve's snarky style, but I think it's less bad and yet also more sincere than Hanania; tho I sometimes wish he would try some anon substack with same ideas said deliberately in a more moderate way / more sadly regretting at reality not being fair.
Given the strength of the critiques from geneticists like Reich and Harden, confident belief that IQ differences between the population groups fit the stereotypes of the races does indeed seem like a strong sign of biased thinking. Mathias himself probably holds the opposite view for dumb reasons, and might even be a denialist about genetics, but that doesn't make his low opinion of Hanania wrong.
From what I've seen Hanania likes to assert these "harsh facts" with a sense of glee that would be pretty gross even if his opinions accorded with the evidence.
But I basically don't support cancellation under any circumstances, if my favorite pizza place were run by Taliban supporters I would still happily patronize them.
All I can say is I'm at the point where I find the genetic argument overwhelming and also find the psychological argument of why people won't find the genetic argument overwhelming also overwhelming (but not because its false).
I share many of your low opinions of Hanania, but not because he believes in genes and IQ. I agree he has a sense of glee about inflicting pain on whoever he considers his outgroup at the moment. One day its browns and the next day its whites, but its the same attitude.
Still, you could get many (not all) of the same conclusions without the sneering from a classy empathetic fellow like Charles Murray.
I don't think anyone who hasn't read Who We Are And How We Got Here should consider themselves qualified to have a firm opinion on this question. Unless you're a geneticist yourself. The hereditarian right has an echo chamber of its own.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. I understand you, like many other otherwise decent people, are not capable of accepting this and no amount of data will be convincing. A lot of people believe a lot of things I find crazy and I know I can’t change their mind because they believe what they believe for non-truth reasons. It’s human.
I’ve spent enough time reading “takedowns” of the hereditarian argument I found unconvincing and repetitive that unless we get some new real world data the most likely base assumption is that it’s just a regurgitation of the same old talking points.
When I deal with someone that doesn’t accept heredity I just assume that they will have a broken worldview and sometimes what we are discussing can’t get past that point if it’s too salient to the topic.
Thanks for the link. I read Hanania stuff, tried to understand why everyone was so upset at him, and could not figure it out. Bird Man explained it really well
"But beyond the dirt that he digs up, Mathias seems to think that one should be shocked that anyone believes that there are average IQ differences between races."
Are you serious? This is a fireable offense anywhere in the known US universe.
In fact, though, what should hurt Hanania but probably won't is his profound hypocrisy, his 180 degree flips on items carefully selected to win approval, and his sock puppetry.
He called his long diatribe against pseudonymous writing "self-veiled criticism". Oh, please. It's hypocrisy.
He was an immigration restrictionist and is now close to open borders? Yeah, no. One of those is fake.
And creating additional userids to chime in with approval? He should be asked every day whether he's still doing that.
Worst of all, he wrote a fucking apology and all the usual suspects who would usually castigate people for this kind of hypocrisy are just ignoring the entire subject or worse (cf David Frum) praising him.
I can't stand Hanania; he's pulled a group of opinions from what used to be called a Chinese menu and regurgitates what others have said with some outrageous cant to win attention and approval and substitutes that for original thought.
I think the real question is who does he know? He got a GED, went to a state college, then suddenly got into University of Chicago for law school and UCLA for a pHD and was instantly published. Who paid for all that? Who's paying him now? I suspect the answers to those questions are related to why he's apparently skating this. I don't approve of cancelling, and in this case Hanania's most objectionable opinions were mostly things he said under his own name. But he's a loathsome fuck.
I find Hanania's repudiation of some of his prior ideas mostly genuine - but he isn't totally clear on what ideas he's changed so much as generally accepting that he was clickbait / cancelbait (my words).
Arnold is also right - he remains dedicated to being in the spotlight, craving it - thus a "performative pundit".
Steve notes that Richard has a book coming out. If it takes aim at the terrible "disparate impact" interpretation of Civil Rights, then it's book sorely needed.
Having a talked-about book and being somewhat controversial is needed to get on the radar screen of a mass audience. Richard, today, has many good things to say, which he says in often interesting ways. Tho also arrogantly and with seeming contempt for those who disagree, as one of his commenters reminds us.
I'm glad to disagree, seldom but politely, with Arnold on his blog.
Please, please, Dr. Kling-- From you I really expect a more nuanced treatment of TV bundling than that sophomoric and very misleading "Chris Dixon Two Channel Cable TV Bundling Model." It should not be news to you that "cable TV" bundling/price-discrimination as actually practiced in the USA did NOT benefit all or even most consumers.
In real life, cable/satellite-TV bundling both (a) transferred consumer surplus to the vendors giving them "supracompetitive profits", and (b) produced noticeable deadweight loss. The reason is first that "...if buyers incur firm specific costs or have shop specific tastes then competitive mixed bundling lowers consumer surplus overall and raises profits - the same is true of competitive volume discounts," as explained by John Thanassoulis in University of Oxford Department of Economics Discussion Paper #263 (May 2006) available at https://web.archive.org/web/20170809042042if_/https://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/Research/wp/pdf/paper263.pdf
Cable TV economics (note: NOT "Internet video streaming" which is new and different) were well-understood by 2006. Consumers in the USA had typically 1 (cable), sometimes 2 or 3 (with satellite), very rarely 4 (add another cable) choices of "MVD" (cable/satellite-TV) provider. In those days all MVD providers offered mostly the same channels, but their bundling schemes were constructed to assure that most consumers could not afford to connect to more than one MVD even when it was technically possible for them. That let providers overcharge "smaller" customers (see the paper) for bundles. It also meant they used multiple bundles or "tiering" to extract extra surplus from a few customers with relatively inelastic demand for specific channels while imposing a lot of deadweight loss on other less obsessive customers.
The economics of Internet streaming video (VOD) are different because streaming providers do not offer the same programs ("channels" are obsolete) and consumers have more choice of streaming providers than they ever did of "cable TV" providers.
I don't think it detracts from the point, but the consumer surplus comes from the (arbitrary?) 10% discount, and of course 10% of $10 is less than 10% of $13. But it's not clear that the sports lover wants to pay $11.70 instead of $10. Maybe there are budget constraints. The extra 30 cents of surplus costs $1.70.
There is a separate interesting aspect to this scenario, in that a single person can (typically) only watch one channel at a time. Of course now there are multiple televisions per household and there is no guarantee anyone is watching even if they are displaying content. Likewise, it's not clear if there is a marginal cost to delivering a watchable stream to the viewer. Broadcast TV and Netflix have very different distribution models.
Dixon's piece on bundling came to mind when I read a NY Times piece on skiplagging today. Banning skiplagging is a perhaps extreme form of bundling, which seems more objectionable than most because it actually restricts the buyer's conduct to prevent them from using only a subset of the bundle. Surely price discrimination must be at the heart of it, as it is with all things related to airline pricing, but the discrimination mechanism seems more obscure than for other price variations like charging more to buy a ticket at the last minute.
Is there a good concrete explanation somewhere like Dixon's, with sample prices, marginal and fixed costs, and willingnesses to pay, explaining why it would benefit airlines, and/or why it might increase consumer surplus, to ban skiplagging? Most of the articles I've read gesture at airline pricing complexity as an explanation but don't really think it through.
I suggest airlines' dislike of skiplagging is easy to understand. Here's a simple model and it doesn't even need numbers! Suppose you wish to fly from San Francisco to Charleston. Two airlines compete for your business, but each requires a stop in in a different hub which it dominates, say Chicago and Dallas. For the SFO-CHS flight overall the airlines are competing for your business and will price accordingly. But if you wished to fly SFO-ORD or SFO-DFW only, the airlines would NOT compete with each other (each dominates one of those cities) and would demand a high monopolistic price from you. If "skiplagging" were permitted you could obtain "virtual" competition for a flight to any midwestern hub where the dominant airline desired to exercise monopoly pricing power. Such virtual competition arises as follows: for the competitive SFO-XXX-CHS trip each airline prices its SFO-XXX segment near cost (because the SFO-CHS trip is competitive so neither airline can take a supracompetitive profit on the whole trip). For any specific SFO-XXX trip, though, one airline wants a price far above cost (monopoly profit) because the other is not competing. If you buy a flight from SFO to CHS and get off at XXX you will deprive one airline (or the other, the cases are symmetrical) of a monopoly profit because the airline that sold you your ticket believed it was competing to carry you to CHS rather than holding you up for a monopolistically-priced ride to XXX.
Of course actual pricing schemes are more complicated in many instances because there may be more than two airlines and more than two schedules involved, but honestly the whole thing boils down to what I just described. For many possible itineraries there are no "hidden city" bargains available. Whenever you find one, you have also found an example of weak competition for simple trips to the city you are tempted to "skiplag" into.
When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s I used to see mobile homes being shipped all the time, but I rarely see that today. Additionally, I would often see the double-wide homes shipped and put on a real foundation that would look like stick-built home. Don't see that often today, either.
No one is more provincial than I am, so I can't say for sure how many mobile homes lie in the orbit of the East Coast pundits who have lately begun touting them as the solution we forgot. But in my state mobile homes especially in semi-rural areas are pretty much the norm, and they have aged so, so badly. Sure, partly it's who they house. The counterfactual where they had a real house, can kind of be guessed.
I feel like the folks like Tabarrok and Cowen and Kling who wonder where have all the mobile homes gone - don't spend much time on the road, in the car.
That said, the newer ones they are turning out - at least in their fresh early days - look pretty nice on the exterior, in beachy colors. I would say, to me, they are aesthetically far more pleasing than a Lennar home. I'm still unclear how easy they are to repair, and to personalize. Like, what if you want a built-in bookshelf? What if you dent the interior wall?
As somebody who's been house-hunting more or less since the pandemic, a quick and easy way to reject a property is the nearby presence of a burnt-out trailer *that people have thrown a tarp over and are still living in*. A common sight, as are old abandoned single-wides generally. They don't ever get moved, they remain as large litter. Maybe it's unfair to judge the industry for Americans' general inability to maintain things, but there it is. Mobile homes are the property value killers.
It's a shame. I like the minimalist aesthetic and I hate a garage-with-rear-attached house, huge largely due to high empty voids and drywall in weird not-meeting-the-ceiling configurations like a stage set.
Anecdote: there was an old farm house on my brother's weekend place. They used it for years, actually, until they built a guesthouse, but never fixed it up. I don't think his wife and daughters much liked it. Probably dated from about 1880. It had actually been moved there from somewhere nearby long before he bought the property, which I detected because the way it sat vis-a-vis the road was not quite right. Eventually he built a nice Chip-and-Jo style main house, and put the old house up on Craigslist. It sold pretty much immediately, for $30,000, although the months-long process of getting all of it moved* ($60k: the buyer started by removing the second story, which I guess they didn't want, and then there was a long delay and some question about the route, during which time it was rained in) led to some stress.
Now the thing - refurbished, longleaf pine duly emphasized - sits on five acres outside Cute Town in the next county, listed at a mil nine.
Hard to imagine a mobile home having such a third life.
*The old foundations, in my view, would make a cool raised bed garden.
Honestly, it's all Chip-and-Jo down here, right now. That's the way it goes, the builders all do one thing for about ten years. It's not clear you could even ask for anything different, without spending an enormous sum. His house seems very comfortable, and mercifully his wife has pretty good taste and is not going to be hanging a sign that says "Fresh Eggs" in the kitchen.
When I was a kid a subsidized housing complex was built not far away. It was two story town homes using manufactured units. That would seem the best possible use. Lower cost and they didn't look bad at all but I wonder how maintenance issues compare. That is the big question. I was last in the area three years ago and may never get back again. I wish I had looked to see how they are doing after 45+ years.
On the question of manufactured homes, Construction Physics did a good two part series on their rise and fall a year or so back. Quite interesting. He spends a lot of time going into the theories of decline.
Part 1 is here https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-mobile-home .
I think that the key reason manufactured homes became less popular is that they were considered super low status. Although some more modern manufactured homes are essentially parts of a house pre built, especially in the first 3/4 of the 20th century manufactured home meant "mobile home", which meant "trailer park." Even growing up in a relatively poor region, trailer parks were considered highly undesirable by everyone, and extremely low status.
"Comparing like for like, the cost-per-square-foot of a manufactured home is somewhere around 10-35% less than the cost of a site-built home."
This just isn't a lot of money. Keep in mind that building costs aren't even a majority of total home costs in many areas. My own home was under 50% labor and materials when they gave me the breakdown.
A house isn't about walls and doors, its about neighbors and location.
I grew up about half a mile from a trailer park and had to ride the bus to school with its juvenile denizens; its low status was richly deserved.
What would seem to make the most sense is prefab parts of homes. If you could build 60% of the house somewhere else, then put them together with perhaps a second story on site, that might make sense.
I see a lot of partial-prefab barns and garages like that on a smaller scale. The roof structures come on a truck all put together, as well as the wall segments (8' lengths) and then they are just put together into the right shape. Something like that, but with maybe entire 12x40' room sections might make a lot of sense.
But then, as Forumposter pointed out, a lot of the cost of building isn't the stuff and labor. For getting a workshop over 499 sq feet built on my property I need to get all kinds of water run-off studies and other crap. If I lived out where I grew up I would have already had the thing completed, but it will probably be a year before I can get all the permitting and studies completed. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the big reasons for the drop in building productivity is due to where people are building more: more suburban to urban residents means more restrictions on building possibilities, even with a fixed range of regulatory states.
That's a fair point, although I don't know that many of the factory workers wouldn't be immigrants as well. The total cost percentages might not be all that different, a few percentage points maybe? I wouldn't want to bet.
I don’t know about Tyson, but I do know that Cargill’s supply chain system still runs on paper receipts and documents for the most part, so... could be anything. Depends on how well the bureaucracy works and how many temp workers (who are vetted by the temp agency) get used, along with how well fake identification is competing with government rules. I know many companies are relying heavily on temp workers for production ; I don’t t know but have heard that faking legal status isn’t terribly difficult.
I read recently about the horrific death of a 16 year-old boy tangled in the machinery of a poultry processing plant in Mississippi - the news stories said "he moved here from Guatemala" apparently unwilling to use the word "immigrated". I was curious and looked up the company. They process 2 million birds a week. (Do y'all never tire of eating so much chicken?) Interestingly, though, when you click on "Jobs" the website, theretofore about chicken processing, goes to a page of job openings for the transportation side of the business only, as if elves do the work inside the plant.
"While [X] may have shed his [Y] pose, in another way I am afraid that he is the same person. That person craves an audience......When you crave an audience too much, you become a performative pundit. What you write is not exactly who you are. Maybe you don’t even know who you are."
Never mind about the particular case in point here (Hanania), I thought this was very well observed - as a psychological insight. Took the words out of my own mouth.
I don't dispute this, though I can't imagine many professional writers who don't crave an audience. And I hold no brief for Hanania, whose thoughts I have only read on a couple of occasions when others have linked them for discussion; in other words I am not very familiar with his worldview (seems a little Curtis Yarvin-ish?). There is a long tradition of the provocateur with a pen, however, and you pretty much have to take it or leave it - the tradition, I mean.
What I object to - oh, how to say it without getting back a moronic "ah, then you are the racist we have been hunting!" - what I object to is the special status of "racism" as the only remaining sin. There is really nothing else that he could even be accused of, that would be remotely in the same ballpark. And yet, we all know that there are worse things - than racism. But we have to pretend.
Racism is ill-defined, of course; it's whatever people need it to be, at the moment. In its most real manifestation, it's probably deeply wired into all people. But then in that most real manifestation, it is generally at its worst when coupled with other traits (that are not sins - since there are no other sins). Thus - in the South, everyone knows it was and remains the poor whites ("trash") that were most racist. And yet one is not even allowed to utter that - because it conflicts with our still-Marxist notions about class.
I should add, in reluctant defense of Southern poor whites, that they are simultaneously the most likely people in the country to display the greatest evidence of non-racism, which is marrying or mating with those of a different race (but American). Far more likely, I would guess, than anybody in the American academy social network.
As I explained above, my initial comment was not in any way related to the 'issue' of racism. But for, what it's worth, it is my opinion that modern Western white men and women are typically the least racist people in the modern world - and by far.
I think you might have misunderstood me here. My comment had nothing particularly to do with racism - neither one way or the other - nor any other specific issue. Rather, I was agreeing with (what I took to be) Arnold Kling's slight suspicion of people who lurch from being opinionated in one way and then equally opinionated in another. Of course we all evolve as we age and experience modifies the way we see the world. But my instinct is that only happens up to a point. Many people (and I am one) have a slight suspicion of people's 'road to Damascus' conversions and I thought Kling expressed this eloquently.
Going off on a tangent, did you ever see my reply to your reply to my comment (Aug 7) on Kling's "Panic of the Managerial Class" post? I would be interested in your thoughts on that?
I call it the Jane Fonda mentality. Whatever Jane believes at any moment in time is what she abso-fucking-lutely believes with all her heart and soul. Then when she switches, sometimes 180 degrees, she switches without a beat and that's what she believes.
Diane Ravitch is my favorite education example of this. When she was a reformer, teachers were the enemy. Then she flipped, and now reformers are the enemy. And yes, Hanania is the same way.
This is good. This is why I find it hard to believe those people, because they don't show some logical way they evolved from belief X to belief Y - instead of PR/popularity contest/tribal loyalty reasons. Changing your beliefs is fine, but you have to show why the new beliefs you arrived at don't have the same flaws you left the previous ones for, and decent reasons why you didn't see them originally.
I'm not sure about pensions, but I'm pretty fucking sure that all teachers don't give a shit about CalSTRS. And I haven't been a teacher long enough to care in the slightest what my pension is, whatever state it's in.
What I am sure about is that Diane Ravitch wants teachers' pensions to be very high, and I just said I think she's a fucking hack. But it's pretty clear you don't understand much, so find a two year old and have her read my comment aloud slowly, until you manage to grasp the point.
Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to attack your comment. I was just referring to the idea that one must moderate, there is such a thing as going too far - which I believe in practice, if not entirely in principle, because I am timid myself and personally find manners more pleasing than the lack thereof - when in fact there seems to be chiefly only one way of going too far. And as far as I can tell, the guy who treads the edge on that most often is Sailer - and yet if you have limited time, he's the guy most worth reading on cultural topics. I think when you start out reading Sailer, you think - if he only he'd dial it back - he could be mainstream. But as you read more, you realize - no, he couldn't be and do you really want him to be. But he's an entertaining writer, particularly a critic, which makes up for a lot; and I don't know that Hanania is. In a way, though, Hanania is kind of - well, Hanania could stand in for a lot of people. We've shaken off all our moral foundations, lost souls completely at sea (as our embarrassing hormonal shifts on Ukraine make clear); the modern world befuddles us unless for some reason we have been granted the presence in our lives of someone with real wisdom (rare). Hanania's process of becoming is probably no more confused than that of anyone else, left or right - but his exhibitionism makes it seem so.
I will look back at that other thread, re my conservatism which has but one marker: conservation (what else could it be, to an intelligent person in 2023? In 1993? In 1973? etc). That something so obvious was lost, is baffling to me and so I consider it must have been essentially an evil, a manipulation by ideologues: bad people. I think I grasped that you live in the UK and - there's really no way for you to understand what it is like here. I'm not saying you're a toy country, not at all - but y'all accept certain norms, that here are not first principles at all, are even turned upside down into negatives.
I find your comments both intriguing and - at the same time - a bit head-scratching. For example: "you live in the UK and - there's really no way for you to understand what it is like here." Are you not aware that the UK has all the cultural malaise that you hate in the US....the only difference being that it is even further down the track!? Can I persuade you to add Slouching Towards Bethlehem: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/ to your other 3 Substack reads. I think you would find it most interesting (and it's a freeone).
I will do that. No, I am aware of what's going on in the mother country: we "alt-righters" thive, probably unwisely, on our morning Daily Dystopia Bulletin. Somehow I think you may have an underlying resilience, though, that we do not, for historical reasons. I'm probably wrong about that too. No, re America, I am speaking only of the visual environment, both with respect to the places we live and the natural world. Of course, to me, it is vital and deep and explanatory, not merely symptomatic ...
But I know that even referencing it betrays a dorky earnestness on the internet - which really tells you how far we've fallen in the past sixty years.
It is not a compelling topic like, say, the Barbie movie.
Talking visual dystopia, you might find this one interesting: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2018/12/the-dystopia-we-made
It's not one I've put in my Substack (yet) but will do in due course.
There's a sweet spot, somewhere between Tyler Cowen on one end and Hanania on the other, where you say enough about the topics of the moment to be relevant without saying so much, and so strongly, as to be ridiculous.
This reply made Arnold briefly happy, and then sad.
Eh?
'When I get a lot of positive reinforcement for a post that I think is probably giving people more of a dopamine hit than insight, I experience regret.'
It was a joke.
Arnold is just plain thrilled by all this. Trust me....I know!
Concerning social media identification I am conflicted on using my actual identity in my web comments & publishing. There is currently no professional benefit in using my true identity so I have chosen to use an alias. This is not to allow me anonymity to be a jerk online. Rather, if there is only downside risk to publicly participating in Social Media, why should I entertain that risk?
There is also the modesty factor. I am a very private person and I am not comfortable in gaining a public reputation. Ii concerns me that I could be seen by others as the guy who wrote opinion "X". I want to be judged for who I am, not by what others say and think about me. Those who publicly enter the media space have to deal with many people viewing them in ways they do not care to be considered.
Hanania has made the decision to be a professional pundit. Perhaps at some point his intensity will slack. What will endure will be the impressions he has made and not all of them are positive.
Now retired, I decided over a decade ago to use my real name* - but have slightly censored / moderated my written opinions to sometimes be less extreme. My wife ran for office as a Christian Democrat (in Slovakia), so I didn't quite emphasize how much I was against the false PC/Woke bs of
a) men & women are the same, and
b) blacks & whites have the same potential IQs.
I support Truth, as well as Objective Truth, and the truth is that Reality is unfair. That's not the same as an injustice that the gov't can rectify.
"Mathias seems to think that one should be shocked that anyone believes that there are average IQ differences between races."
Because we swim in this ocean I think we sometimes forget that stating this under ones own name would be a fireable offense for 99% of people.
"I did not find his self-analysis convincing."
I find the conversion convincing in a self delusional sort of way as you note. I can't put it better then this:
https://birdman.substack.com/p/hanania-still-sucks
Anyway, I don't think Hanania should be cancelled for his views in the abstract, but Hanania himself has spent quite a lot of time lately talking about how he hates anons and they should be cancelled for their views, so stones from glass houses and all. Whatever happens happens. The world would not miss edgelord regurgitations of Steve Sailer.
That last sentence sums it up pretty well for me. Hanania always strikes me as a teenage edgelord looking for attention, but with a somewhat more advanced reading list. I can never tell if he is sincere or not; if he is always sincere he is a monster, and if he is always joking he is an idiot. The only consistent intention that matches his writing is that he is desperately looking for attention, and will say anything to get it.
Dammit. The two of you have made me curious now.
It's Miller time. :D
I like and read Steve Sailer - whose data seems very accurate and true, tho also anti-woke. Arnold doesn't like Steve's snarky style, but I think it's less bad and yet also more sincere than Hanania; tho I sometimes wish he would try some anon substack with same ideas said deliberately in a more moderate way / more sadly regretting at reality not being fair.
Given the strength of the critiques from geneticists like Reich and Harden, confident belief that IQ differences between the population groups fit the stereotypes of the races does indeed seem like a strong sign of biased thinking. Mathias himself probably holds the opposite view for dumb reasons, and might even be a denialist about genetics, but that doesn't make his low opinion of Hanania wrong.
From what I've seen Hanania likes to assert these "harsh facts" with a sense of glee that would be pretty gross even if his opinions accorded with the evidence.
But I basically don't support cancellation under any circumstances, if my favorite pizza place were run by Taliban supporters I would still happily patronize them.
All I can say is I'm at the point where I find the genetic argument overwhelming and also find the psychological argument of why people won't find the genetic argument overwhelming also overwhelming (but not because its false).
I share many of your low opinions of Hanania, but not because he believes in genes and IQ. I agree he has a sense of glee about inflicting pain on whoever he considers his outgroup at the moment. One day its browns and the next day its whites, but its the same attitude.
Still, you could get many (not all) of the same conclusions without the sneering from a classy empathetic fellow like Charles Murray.
I don't think anyone who hasn't read Who We Are And How We Got Here should consider themselves qualified to have a firm opinion on this question. Unless you're a geneticist yourself. The hereditarian right has an echo chamber of its own.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. I understand you, like many other otherwise decent people, are not capable of accepting this and no amount of data will be convincing. A lot of people believe a lot of things I find crazy and I know I can’t change their mind because they believe what they believe for non-truth reasons. It’s human.
I’ve spent enough time reading “takedowns” of the hereditarian argument I found unconvincing and repetitive that unless we get some new real world data the most likely base assumption is that it’s just a regurgitation of the same old talking points.
When I deal with someone that doesn’t accept heredity I just assume that they will have a broken worldview and sometimes what we are discussing can’t get past that point if it’s too salient to the topic.
Thanks for the link. I read Hanania stuff, tried to understand why everyone was so upset at him, and could not figure it out. Bird Man explained it really well
"But beyond the dirt that he digs up, Mathias seems to think that one should be shocked that anyone believes that there are average IQ differences between races."
Are you serious? This is a fireable offense anywhere in the known US universe.
In fact, though, what should hurt Hanania but probably won't is his profound hypocrisy, his 180 degree flips on items carefully selected to win approval, and his sock puppetry.
He called his long diatribe against pseudonymous writing "self-veiled criticism". Oh, please. It's hypocrisy.
He was an immigration restrictionist and is now close to open borders? Yeah, no. One of those is fake.
And creating additional userids to chime in with approval? He should be asked every day whether he's still doing that.
Worst of all, he wrote a fucking apology and all the usual suspects who would usually castigate people for this kind of hypocrisy are just ignoring the entire subject or worse (cf David Frum) praising him.
I can't stand Hanania; he's pulled a group of opinions from what used to be called a Chinese menu and regurgitates what others have said with some outrageous cant to win attention and approval and substitutes that for original thought.
I think the real question is who does he know? He got a GED, went to a state college, then suddenly got into University of Chicago for law school and UCLA for a pHD and was instantly published. Who paid for all that? Who's paying him now? I suspect the answers to those questions are related to why he's apparently skating this. I don't approve of cancelling, and in this case Hanania's most objectionable opinions were mostly things he said under his own name. But he's a loathsome fuck.
I find Hanania's repudiation of some of his prior ideas mostly genuine - but he isn't totally clear on what ideas he's changed so much as generally accepting that he was clickbait / cancelbait (my words).
Arnold is also right - he remains dedicated to being in the spotlight, craving it - thus a "performative pundit".
Unlike Steve Sailor, who merely notices things he thinks are true tho especially unWoke. He mentions the 12 year difference between Hanania now and his pseudonym QAnon-ish Hoste. https://www.unz.com/isteve/richard-hananias-the-origins-of-woke-civil-rights-law-corporate-america-and-the-triumph-of-identity-politics/
Steve notes that Richard has a book coming out. If it takes aim at the terrible "disparate impact" interpretation of Civil Rights, then it's book sorely needed.
Gail Heriot's paper is too dry & academic: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3482015
Having a talked-about book and being somewhat controversial is needed to get on the radar screen of a mass audience. Richard, today, has many good things to say, which he says in often interesting ways. Tho also arrogantly and with seeming contempt for those who disagree, as one of his commenters reminds us.
I'm glad to disagree, seldom but politely, with Arnold on his blog.
Please, please, Dr. Kling-- From you I really expect a more nuanced treatment of TV bundling than that sophomoric and very misleading "Chris Dixon Two Channel Cable TV Bundling Model." It should not be news to you that "cable TV" bundling/price-discrimination as actually practiced in the USA did NOT benefit all or even most consumers.
In real life, cable/satellite-TV bundling both (a) transferred consumer surplus to the vendors giving them "supracompetitive profits", and (b) produced noticeable deadweight loss. The reason is first that "...if buyers incur firm specific costs or have shop specific tastes then competitive mixed bundling lowers consumer surplus overall and raises profits - the same is true of competitive volume discounts," as explained by John Thanassoulis in University of Oxford Department of Economics Discussion Paper #263 (May 2006) available at https://web.archive.org/web/20170809042042if_/https://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/Research/wp/pdf/paper263.pdf
Cable TV economics (note: NOT "Internet video streaming" which is new and different) were well-understood by 2006. Consumers in the USA had typically 1 (cable), sometimes 2 or 3 (with satellite), very rarely 4 (add another cable) choices of "MVD" (cable/satellite-TV) provider. In those days all MVD providers offered mostly the same channels, but their bundling schemes were constructed to assure that most consumers could not afford to connect to more than one MVD even when it was technically possible for them. That let providers overcharge "smaller" customers (see the paper) for bundles. It also meant they used multiple bundles or "tiering" to extract extra surplus from a few customers with relatively inelastic demand for specific channels while imposing a lot of deadweight loss on other less obsessive customers.
The economics of Internet streaming video (VOD) are different because streaming providers do not offer the same programs ("channels" are obsolete) and consumers have more choice of streaming providers than they ever did of "cable TV" providers.
On bundling:
I don't think it detracts from the point, but the consumer surplus comes from the (arbitrary?) 10% discount, and of course 10% of $10 is less than 10% of $13. But it's not clear that the sports lover wants to pay $11.70 instead of $10. Maybe there are budget constraints. The extra 30 cents of surplus costs $1.70.
There is a separate interesting aspect to this scenario, in that a single person can (typically) only watch one channel at a time. Of course now there are multiple televisions per household and there is no guarantee anyone is watching even if they are displaying content. Likewise, it's not clear if there is a marginal cost to delivering a watchable stream to the viewer. Broadcast TV and Netflix have very different distribution models.
Dixon's piece on bundling came to mind when I read a NY Times piece on skiplagging today. Banning skiplagging is a perhaps extreme form of bundling, which seems more objectionable than most because it actually restricts the buyer's conduct to prevent them from using only a subset of the bundle. Surely price discrimination must be at the heart of it, as it is with all things related to airline pricing, but the discrimination mechanism seems more obscure than for other price variations like charging more to buy a ticket at the last minute.
Is there a good concrete explanation somewhere like Dixon's, with sample prices, marginal and fixed costs, and willingnesses to pay, explaining why it would benefit airlines, and/or why it might increase consumer surplus, to ban skiplagging? Most of the articles I've read gesture at airline pricing complexity as an explanation but don't really think it through.
I suggest airlines' dislike of skiplagging is easy to understand. Here's a simple model and it doesn't even need numbers! Suppose you wish to fly from San Francisco to Charleston. Two airlines compete for your business, but each requires a stop in in a different hub which it dominates, say Chicago and Dallas. For the SFO-CHS flight overall the airlines are competing for your business and will price accordingly. But if you wished to fly SFO-ORD or SFO-DFW only, the airlines would NOT compete with each other (each dominates one of those cities) and would demand a high monopolistic price from you. If "skiplagging" were permitted you could obtain "virtual" competition for a flight to any midwestern hub where the dominant airline desired to exercise monopoly pricing power. Such virtual competition arises as follows: for the competitive SFO-XXX-CHS trip each airline prices its SFO-XXX segment near cost (because the SFO-CHS trip is competitive so neither airline can take a supracompetitive profit on the whole trip). For any specific SFO-XXX trip, though, one airline wants a price far above cost (monopoly profit) because the other is not competing. If you buy a flight from SFO to CHS and get off at XXX you will deprive one airline (or the other, the cases are symmetrical) of a monopoly profit because the airline that sold you your ticket believed it was competing to carry you to CHS rather than holding you up for a monopolistically-priced ride to XXX.
Of course actual pricing schemes are more complicated in many instances because there may be more than two airlines and more than two schedules involved, but honestly the whole thing boils down to what I just described. For many possible itineraries there are no "hidden city" bargains available. Whenever you find one, you have also found an example of weak competition for simple trips to the city you are tempted to "skiplag" into.
When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s I used to see mobile homes being shipped all the time, but I rarely see that today. Additionally, I would often see the double-wide homes shipped and put on a real foundation that would look like stick-built home. Don't see that often today, either.
No one is more provincial than I am, so I can't say for sure how many mobile homes lie in the orbit of the East Coast pundits who have lately begun touting them as the solution we forgot. But in my state mobile homes especially in semi-rural areas are pretty much the norm, and they have aged so, so badly. Sure, partly it's who they house. The counterfactual where they had a real house, can kind of be guessed.
I feel like the folks like Tabarrok and Cowen and Kling who wonder where have all the mobile homes gone - don't spend much time on the road, in the car.
That said, the newer ones they are turning out - at least in their fresh early days - look pretty nice on the exterior, in beachy colors. I would say, to me, they are aesthetically far more pleasing than a Lennar home. I'm still unclear how easy they are to repair, and to personalize. Like, what if you want a built-in bookshelf? What if you dent the interior wall?
As somebody who's been house-hunting more or less since the pandemic, a quick and easy way to reject a property is the nearby presence of a burnt-out trailer *that people have thrown a tarp over and are still living in*. A common sight, as are old abandoned single-wides generally. They don't ever get moved, they remain as large litter. Maybe it's unfair to judge the industry for Americans' general inability to maintain things, but there it is. Mobile homes are the property value killers.
It's a shame. I like the minimalist aesthetic and I hate a garage-with-rear-attached house, huge largely due to high empty voids and drywall in weird not-meeting-the-ceiling configurations like a stage set.
Anecdote: there was an old farm house on my brother's weekend place. They used it for years, actually, until they built a guesthouse, but never fixed it up. I don't think his wife and daughters much liked it. Probably dated from about 1880. It had actually been moved there from somewhere nearby long before he bought the property, which I detected because the way it sat vis-a-vis the road was not quite right. Eventually he built a nice Chip-and-Jo style main house, and put the old house up on Craigslist. It sold pretty much immediately, for $30,000, although the months-long process of getting all of it moved* ($60k: the buyer started by removing the second story, which I guess they didn't want, and then there was a long delay and some question about the route, during which time it was rained in) led to some stress.
Now the thing - refurbished, longleaf pine duly emphasized - sits on five acres outside Cute Town in the next county, listed at a mil nine.
Hard to imagine a mobile home having such a third life.
*The old foundations, in my view, would make a cool raised bed garden.
"Eventually he built a nice Chip-and-Jo style main house"
A "Fixer-Upper" fan, huh?
Honestly, it's all Chip-and-Jo down here, right now. That's the way it goes, the builders all do one thing for about ten years. It's not clear you could even ask for anything different, without spending an enormous sum. His house seems very comfortable, and mercifully his wife has pretty good taste and is not going to be hanging a sign that says "Fresh Eggs" in the kitchen.
When I was a kid a subsidized housing complex was built not far away. It was two story town homes using manufactured units. That would seem the best possible use. Lower cost and they didn't look bad at all but I wonder how maintenance issues compare. That is the big question. I was last in the area three years ago and may never get back again. I wish I had looked to see how they are doing after 45+ years.