Noah Smith and Vitalik Buterin; John O'Sullivan on Matt Continetti; Robert Barro on inflation; Eric Kaufmann on the political gender gap; Rob Henderson on human aggression
Re the O'Sullivan quote on President Trump, Trump never urged "that the transfer of power be blocked." His position regarding the counting of electoral votes was that there had been a great deal of obvious fraud and that the state legislatures, which under the Constitution are the sole authority on the validity of their electoral votes, should be consulted on that question. In other words, it was their responsibility to determine their electoral votes. This had not happened because Democratic Party governors in key states had not called their legislatures back into session to make such a determination.
President Trump advocated that VP Pence send the matter back to the states for a brief period so that determination could be made. One can argue about Pence's authority to do that, but it cannot be said that President Trump urged "the transfer of power be blocked."
Barro: May be onto something, but if he could just explain the interaction of the deficit and the Fed's supposed targeting. Until someone does, I still say the Fed just made a mistake in judging the inflation impact of its instrument settings given conditions: labor supply recovery, supply chain constraints. It know that some above average target inflation was needed on account of these ("temporary") factors, but their ex ante accommodation was too much.
"that some above average target inflation was needed on account of these ("temporary") factors"
Could you please clarify that? Do you mean the inflation was necessary to help correct said factors, or inflation was necessary because of those factors?
I mean that when some above average supply shocks arise there needs to be some above average* changes in relative prices to preserve maximum output. If some prices cannot adjust downward, then having others with an above average adjustment will mean that the average level will need to rise by an above average amount. A perfect central bank will want to set its policy instruments to allow this (temporary, while the relative prices adjust) above average change in average prices. I'm saying that the Fed in mid 2021 was imperfect.
* I take it that the Fed's average target rate of inflation is set to optimize for average supply shocks. And to be clear demand shocks to particular commodities could work the same way.
A common explanation of Trump's appeal, but it does not answer the question of where the idea that elites believe nd feel all the things that are attributed to them comes from. Example: I cannot think of anyone that actually favors "open borders."
"I cannot think of anyone that actually favors 'open borders.'"
This is because you continually insist on pretending that words matter more than actions in defining the political stance of those in elected office. Of course few politician say they support open borders, this is why people with integrity and/or IQs in the triple digit range don't listen to the words, but instead pay attention to what they actually vote for and do once in office.
OK. Who has tried to eliminate all control of borders? I think there are big differences in how much and what kinds of effort should go into preventing people without visas from crossing into and remaining inside the borders of the United States, but who wants zero effort?
The southern border is open, Thomas- essentially no one captured crossing it is sent back since January 2021- they are given a court date and released inside the border. To deny this obvious fact makes one look dishonest, Thomas. Stop it.
Partly that is my point about not having the right kind of border controls. we need resources to make those court dates immediate so that the vast majority who will not be fond to be eligible for asylum ARE sent back. But even the delayed court date system is hardly "open." Why use that misleading language instead of talking about whatever kind of immigration control you think best?
LOL! The court dates don't matter, Thomas. They still aren't sent back even if they show up for adjudication. The policy now in place is to approve asylum for anyone who isn't a proven hardened criminal. They aren't being sent back whether they show up for the court date or not- that is my point.
However, keep pretending to argue in good faith, you make me laugh every time I read one of your comments.
Then that is the rub. People who are fairly adjudicated as not eligible for asylum should be sent back. And the knowledge that will happen should in fact discourage bogus claims. So what you oppose is a particular sub-optimal way of doing border immigration control. Opposing 'open borders" does not convey what you mean. Why confuse the issue?
No Democrats are honest about "open borders" - because so often Democrats lie.
For many folks, if a border restriction does not stop illegal aliens from entering, by the thousands, that is functionally an open border, no matter that there are some places which are fenced, and some border controls.
Democrats who oppose building a Wall to stop illegals are de facto supporting open borders, as are those who oppose fast-to-immediate deportation of those who illegally cross the border.
I support higher legal immigration, but also a Wall, and immediate deportation of all illegals.
I can only speak for myself. The law says we adjudicate claims of asylum. If they are invalid we should deport those Without invalid claims. The wall was a piece of infrastructure of low cost effectiveness and irrelevant to the case of asylum seekers The cost benefit of those who entered without a visa rises with the time the person has been here. At some point we should let them stay
Really? I can think of someone off the top of my head who wrote a book called "Open Borders" which argues for open borders. Granted, I don't think he is exactly who O'Sullivan has in mind, but it isn't exactly a corner case. Maybe 70-90% open borders is more common, but there are definitely people on the "much more immigration than we have now" side. Some seem to currently be in office.
Would that be Caplan? Yes, I found that book quite annoying becasue -- typical of the Libertarian inclined -- he did not attempt to show that his degree of openness was actually optimal, just that there are great benefits to greater immigration. And therefore -- the source of my annoyance -- undercut the argument for pragmatically greater openness.
I'm sorry, your complaint with Caplan's book is that he he doesn't argue that 100% open borders is optimal, but that a greater amount of openness than we have is really beneficial, and therefore he undercuts the argument for greater openness for pragmatic reasons?
I am not sure I am parsing your comment correctly.
No. My complaint is that he does not seem to consider the idea that more immigration (but maybe less than no restrictions at all) could be optimal. I do not think the argument for no restriction at all is either correct or even very useful for getting us toward more immigration. Maybe 'annoyance" was too strong. :)
One thing I find puzzling about Tyler’s view that wokeness has peaked is that he so often pairs it with the assertion that wokeness is kinda good actually and Saudia Arabia needs more wokeness on the margin. In his (very good) conversation with Brian Chau, he also seems to feel like Brian needs to become more woke.
This makes me feel that Tyler has some weird conception of what it means for wokeness to peak and that he’s actually baking in some pretty large future increases in wokeness as though they had already happened. Maybe he thinks that the elements of wokeness he happens to like will detach from the original movement and continue to fill the globe while the rest recedes and in that sense it won’t really be wokeness that has increased but liberalism. If so he’s talking about something quite different from most people debating the question.
Saying Saudi Arabia needs wokeness is a classic Motte and Bailey fallacy.
Saudi Arabia needs less repression (of women, minorities, gays, dissenters etc). That's not something that should reasonably seen as a "woke" position, because it's a position shared by 99% of the rest of people in the Western world.
Saudi Arabia needs more individual freedom and less persecution of the weak by the strong. Wokeness being consciously anti-individual and pro persecution is the last thing it needs.
You are exactly right. Wokeness is anti-individual, pro-persecution, pro-repression of dissent, pro-"everyone who doesn't agree can and should die." Regimes like Saudi Arabia or the USSR, the CCP, etc. are also. The only difference is their ideas on who should rule and who should be persecuted, repressed and killed.
Saudi Arabia would benefit by being ruled by any random 1000 Floridians more than by any 1000 random people from Portland, LA, San Fran, or Seattle. The former seem to have a much better grasp of getting along, live and let live, maybe don't repress thy neighbor than the latter.
I don't know if this is Tyler's view because he can be hard to parse at times with regard to things like this, but if wokeness is an outgrowth of a specific brand of American protestantism then whatever can check religious revivals throughout American history can possible check this, or maybe already has started to. Tyler's knowledge and views on religion are probably better informed than anyone I could think of. A view of wokeness as religious in nature or quasi religious is somewhat close to John McWhorter and Antonio García Martínez as well. Whether wokeness is a religion or not it uses aspects of religion in the same way or is an outgrowth of a specific brand or brands of protestantism. As woke is also fused with capitalism and corporatism now it is also a cultural export of America and as the cultural exporting hegemon of the world the wokening of the world may have some level of inevitability. The point that Brian seems to make at the end after Tyler is off air is that woke plus non-protestantism is going to be even worse. I think it could go either way, but the assumption by Tyler seems to be that woke without protestantism behind it is going to be a net positive in a lot of places.
Possibly, but with a law like that whose goal is enforcing fairness, if it isn't being applied fairly it is a bad law. The goal might be good, but quite possibly something under the hood just isn't working right, or the premise is flawed in some important way.
In a broad sense, we should also assume that laws won't be applied fairly, humans being humans, and try to work around that. That's the case for very clear cut laws, with as little wiggle room as possible for unfair interpretations. I don't know that Title IX really does that, either.
It seems to me we passed a law designed to address some form of measured unfairness, and ended up with slightly more measured unfairness in the other direction. That suggests the law wasn't well conceived to do its job.
Not even just primates, dolphins and orcas are total bastards, too.
The most one can say is that sort of violence is unique to fairly intelligent creatures, which isn't a huge group, but it isn't just humans, either. People who make those claims don't know much about other species, and it makes me think they don't know much about humans, either.
Not even that. Chicks will mob and peck to death any who eats out of the pecking order. I don’t think group violence has anything to do with humanity or intelligence, it’s just nature. The challenge for humans is to rise above the level of nature.
Right? It seems like a certain level of intelligence opens you up to moral action in both directions. Or at least what looks like moral action to us; possibly other animals are open to it as well and either hide it better, or just tend their own gardens and don't get involved :)
My guess is that once animals get to a certain threshold they can start taking a deeper interest in things besides food/safety/tools, and start caring about fun and interest in other categories of things. Categories like "This thing is cute and pleasant, so I will consider it a tool for making 'pleasant', and it is mine and I will protect it." (Thinking of Koko the gorilla's kittens there.) Other things can just be tools for "fun to mess with" or "dealing with a future competition problem now". Those don't seem so nice to humans in the end.
That jibes with observation, big cats (in captivity) will play with balls like housecats & chase lasers (up to the size of lions anyway), dolphins will play making bubbles, and orca will... "play" with penguins (in a murderball sort of way).
I think that once you get a certain amount of mental horsepower (and usually very painful experience) you realize you've got an higher-mind taking a wild ride on a monkey-mind. Then it's a lifelong pursuit of training the monkey mind to calm the fuck down so higher-mind can indulge in self-actualization. IMO we're only scratching the surface of what self-actualizing a human actually entails.
Dolphins also abuse the hell out of porpoises, apparently just because they feel like it, or hate porpoises. They are also disturbingly rapey in an interspecies kinda way, although that's a lot more common in nature than most people realize, or want to realize.
I think you nail it on the monkey++ brain point. A lot of tension for humans seems to be between the things that make the higher brain happy and the things that make the monkey brain happy, because they are often in conflict. That's one of those things that bothers me when people talk about how humans are the most violent animals. I always think "Put 35 humans on a bus and send them across town for a bumpy ride, and chances are really good 35 humans will get out the other side. Put 35 chimps on a bus and send them on the same bumpy ride, and if you add up all the fractional parts you might have 30 on the other side."
"That's one of those things that bothers me when people talk about how humans are the most violent animals."
I'll put big money that whoever says that has poor monkey-mind control, doesn't lift, doesn't train in hand to hand, and is projecting. Who's making book on this action?
"“coalitionary proactive aggression,” is human only - dependent on language to allow the not-quite alpha males to successfully conspire to topple & execute the tyrant/ bully/ too-aggressive male. A key step in the self-domestication of humans, one that seems to be continuing tho it might be getting a bit side tracked.
It's a GREAT book (The Goodness Paradox), and Rob's review is excellent. It's better than Humankind, or Sapiens, and is up there with Guns, Germs, & Steel.
" is human only - dependent on language to allow the not-quite alpha males to successfully conspire to topple & execute the tyrant/ bully/ too-aggressive male. "
Pretty sure chimps do this as well, but it's usually spectacularly (and horrifical) violent - or is the point humans manage to do this w/o literally tearing the overbearing alpha a new asshole?
Re the O'Sullivan quote on President Trump, Trump never urged "that the transfer of power be blocked." His position regarding the counting of electoral votes was that there had been a great deal of obvious fraud and that the state legislatures, which under the Constitution are the sole authority on the validity of their electoral votes, should be consulted on that question. In other words, it was their responsibility to determine their electoral votes. This had not happened because Democratic Party governors in key states had not called their legislatures back into session to make such a determination.
President Trump advocated that VP Pence send the matter back to the states for a brief period so that determination could be made. One can argue about Pence's authority to do that, but it cannot be said that President Trump urged "the transfer of power be blocked."
Holy cow.
Barro: May be onto something, but if he could just explain the interaction of the deficit and the Fed's supposed targeting. Until someone does, I still say the Fed just made a mistake in judging the inflation impact of its instrument settings given conditions: labor supply recovery, supply chain constraints. It know that some above average target inflation was needed on account of these ("temporary") factors, but their ex ante accommodation was too much.
"that some above average target inflation was needed on account of these ("temporary") factors"
Could you please clarify that? Do you mean the inflation was necessary to help correct said factors, or inflation was necessary because of those factors?
I mean that when some above average supply shocks arise there needs to be some above average* changes in relative prices to preserve maximum output. If some prices cannot adjust downward, then having others with an above average adjustment will mean that the average level will need to rise by an above average amount. A perfect central bank will want to set its policy instruments to allow this (temporary, while the relative prices adjust) above average change in average prices. I'm saying that the Fed in mid 2021 was imperfect.
* I take it that the Fed's average target rate of inflation is set to optimize for average supply shocks. And to be clear demand shocks to particular commodities could work the same way.
John O'Sullivan
A common explanation of Trump's appeal, but it does not answer the question of where the idea that elites believe nd feel all the things that are attributed to them comes from. Example: I cannot think of anyone that actually favors "open borders."
"I cannot think of anyone that actually favors 'open borders.'"
This is because you continually insist on pretending that words matter more than actions in defining the political stance of those in elected office. Of course few politician say they support open borders, this is why people with integrity and/or IQs in the triple digit range don't listen to the words, but instead pay attention to what they actually vote for and do once in office.
OK. Who has tried to eliminate all control of borders? I think there are big differences in how much and what kinds of effort should go into preventing people without visas from crossing into and remaining inside the borders of the United States, but who wants zero effort?
The southern border is open, Thomas- essentially no one captured crossing it is sent back since January 2021- they are given a court date and released inside the border. To deny this obvious fact makes one look dishonest, Thomas. Stop it.
Partly that is my point about not having the right kind of border controls. we need resources to make those court dates immediate so that the vast majority who will not be fond to be eligible for asylum ARE sent back. But even the delayed court date system is hardly "open." Why use that misleading language instead of talking about whatever kind of immigration control you think best?
LOL! The court dates don't matter, Thomas. They still aren't sent back even if they show up for adjudication. The policy now in place is to approve asylum for anyone who isn't a proven hardened criminal. They aren't being sent back whether they show up for the court date or not- that is my point.
However, keep pretending to argue in good faith, you make me laugh every time I read one of your comments.
Then that is the rub. People who are fairly adjudicated as not eligible for asylum should be sent back. And the knowledge that will happen should in fact discourage bogus claims. So what you oppose is a particular sub-optimal way of doing border immigration control. Opposing 'open borders" does not convey what you mean. Why confuse the issue?
No Democrats are honest about "open borders" - because so often Democrats lie.
For many folks, if a border restriction does not stop illegal aliens from entering, by the thousands, that is functionally an open border, no matter that there are some places which are fenced, and some border controls.
Democrats who oppose building a Wall to stop illegals are de facto supporting open borders, as are those who oppose fast-to-immediate deportation of those who illegally cross the border.
I support higher legal immigration, but also a Wall, and immediate deportation of all illegals.
I can only speak for myself. The law says we adjudicate claims of asylum. If they are invalid we should deport those Without invalid claims. The wall was a piece of infrastructure of low cost effectiveness and irrelevant to the case of asylum seekers The cost benefit of those who entered without a visa rises with the time the person has been here. At some point we should let them stay
Really? I can think of someone off the top of my head who wrote a book called "Open Borders" which argues for open borders. Granted, I don't think he is exactly who O'Sullivan has in mind, but it isn't exactly a corner case. Maybe 70-90% open borders is more common, but there are definitely people on the "much more immigration than we have now" side. Some seem to currently be in office.
Would that be Caplan? Yes, I found that book quite annoying becasue -- typical of the Libertarian inclined -- he did not attempt to show that his degree of openness was actually optimal, just that there are great benefits to greater immigration. And therefore -- the source of my annoyance -- undercut the argument for pragmatically greater openness.
I'm sorry, your complaint with Caplan's book is that he he doesn't argue that 100% open borders is optimal, but that a greater amount of openness than we have is really beneficial, and therefore he undercuts the argument for greater openness for pragmatic reasons?
I am not sure I am parsing your comment correctly.
No. My complaint is that he does not seem to consider the idea that more immigration (but maybe less than no restrictions at all) could be optimal. I do not think the argument for no restriction at all is either correct or even very useful for getting us toward more immigration. Maybe 'annoyance" was too strong. :)
One thing I find puzzling about Tyler’s view that wokeness has peaked is that he so often pairs it with the assertion that wokeness is kinda good actually and Saudia Arabia needs more wokeness on the margin. In his (very good) conversation with Brian Chau, he also seems to feel like Brian needs to become more woke.
This makes me feel that Tyler has some weird conception of what it means for wokeness to peak and that he’s actually baking in some pretty large future increases in wokeness as though they had already happened. Maybe he thinks that the elements of wokeness he happens to like will detach from the original movement and continue to fill the globe while the rest recedes and in that sense it won’t really be wokeness that has increased but liberalism. If so he’s talking about something quite different from most people debating the question.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/09/my-podcast-with-brian-chau.html
Saying Saudi Arabia needs wokeness is a classic Motte and Bailey fallacy.
Saudi Arabia needs less repression (of women, minorities, gays, dissenters etc). That's not something that should reasonably seen as a "woke" position, because it's a position shared by 99% of the rest of people in the Western world.
Saudi Arabia needs more individual freedom and less persecution of the weak by the strong. Wokeness being consciously anti-individual and pro persecution is the last thing it needs.
You are exactly right. Wokeness is anti-individual, pro-persecution, pro-repression of dissent, pro-"everyone who doesn't agree can and should die." Regimes like Saudi Arabia or the USSR, the CCP, etc. are also. The only difference is their ideas on who should rule and who should be persecuted, repressed and killed.
Saudi Arabia would benefit by being ruled by any random 1000 Floridians more than by any 1000 random people from Portland, LA, San Fran, or Seattle. The former seem to have a much better grasp of getting along, live and let live, maybe don't repress thy neighbor than the latter.
I don't know if this is Tyler's view because he can be hard to parse at times with regard to things like this, but if wokeness is an outgrowth of a specific brand of American protestantism then whatever can check religious revivals throughout American history can possible check this, or maybe already has started to. Tyler's knowledge and views on religion are probably better informed than anyone I could think of. A view of wokeness as religious in nature or quasi religious is somewhat close to John McWhorter and Antonio García Martínez as well. Whether wokeness is a religion or not it uses aspects of religion in the same way or is an outgrowth of a specific brand or brands of protestantism. As woke is also fused with capitalism and corporatism now it is also a cultural export of America and as the cultural exporting hegemon of the world the wokening of the world may have some level of inevitability. The point that Brian seems to make at the end after Tyler is off air is that woke plus non-protestantism is going to be even worse. I think it could go either way, but the assumption by Tyler seems to be that woke without protestantism behind it is going to be a net positive in a lot of places.
With regard to gender gaps, political corrrectness, and wokeness this also seems a relevent piece of information:
"The gender gap in four-year degree completion is actually wider today (15%) than it was in 1972 when Title IX was passed (13%) and @michaelshermer was in college." - https://twitter.com/RichardvReeves/status/1562875289339719681
13 percent more men than women to 15 percent more women than men over the last 50 years.
Repeal Title IX?
Or maybe just apply it fairly?
Possibly, but with a law like that whose goal is enforcing fairness, if it isn't being applied fairly it is a bad law. The goal might be good, but quite possibly something under the hood just isn't working right, or the premise is flawed in some important way.
In a broad sense, we should also assume that laws won't be applied fairly, humans being humans, and try to work around that. That's the case for very clear cut laws, with as little wiggle room as possible for unfair interpretations. I don't know that Title IX really does that, either.
It seems to me we passed a law designed to address some form of measured unfairness, and ended up with slightly more measured unfairness in the other direction. That suggests the law wasn't well conceived to do its job.
"This type of violence is unique to humans."
More accurately, higher primates (chimpanzees, etc.).
Not even just primates, dolphins and orcas are total bastards, too.
The most one can say is that sort of violence is unique to fairly intelligent creatures, which isn't a huge group, but it isn't just humans, either. People who make those claims don't know much about other species, and it makes me think they don't know much about humans, either.
Not even that. Chicks will mob and peck to death any who eats out of the pecking order. I don’t think group violence has anything to do with humanity or intelligence, it’s just nature. The challenge for humans is to rise above the level of nature.
True, but remember birds are just one step up from dinosaurs and don't have the same group dynamics as mammals.
Agree humans job is to tame and harness the monkey-mind to serve the higher human-mind.
Weird how both groups can also be incredibly kind also, even to other species.
Right? It seems like a certain level of intelligence opens you up to moral action in both directions. Or at least what looks like moral action to us; possibly other animals are open to it as well and either hide it better, or just tend their own gardens and don't get involved :)
My guess is that once animals get to a certain threshold they can start taking a deeper interest in things besides food/safety/tools, and start caring about fun and interest in other categories of things. Categories like "This thing is cute and pleasant, so I will consider it a tool for making 'pleasant', and it is mine and I will protect it." (Thinking of Koko the gorilla's kittens there.) Other things can just be tools for "fun to mess with" or "dealing with a future competition problem now". Those don't seem so nice to humans in the end.
That jibes with observation, big cats (in captivity) will play with balls like housecats & chase lasers (up to the size of lions anyway), dolphins will play making bubbles, and orca will... "play" with penguins (in a murderball sort of way).
I think that once you get a certain amount of mental horsepower (and usually very painful experience) you realize you've got an higher-mind taking a wild ride on a monkey-mind. Then it's a lifelong pursuit of training the monkey mind to calm the fuck down so higher-mind can indulge in self-actualization. IMO we're only scratching the surface of what self-actualizing a human actually entails.
Dolphins also abuse the hell out of porpoises, apparently just because they feel like it, or hate porpoises. They are also disturbingly rapey in an interspecies kinda way, although that's a lot more common in nature than most people realize, or want to realize.
I think you nail it on the monkey++ brain point. A lot of tension for humans seems to be between the things that make the higher brain happy and the things that make the monkey brain happy, because they are often in conflict. That's one of those things that bothers me when people talk about how humans are the most violent animals. I always think "Put 35 humans on a bus and send them across town for a bumpy ride, and chances are really good 35 humans will get out the other side. Put 35 chimps on a bus and send them on the same bumpy ride, and if you add up all the fractional parts you might have 30 on the other side."
"That's one of those things that bothers me when people talk about how humans are the most violent animals."
I'll put big money that whoever says that has poor monkey-mind control, doesn't lift, doesn't train in hand to hand, and is projecting. Who's making book on this action?
"“coalitionary proactive aggression,” is human only - dependent on language to allow the not-quite alpha males to successfully conspire to topple & execute the tyrant/ bully/ too-aggressive male. A key step in the self-domestication of humans, one that seems to be continuing tho it might be getting a bit side tracked.
It's a GREAT book (The Goodness Paradox), and Rob's review is excellent. It's better than Humankind, or Sapiens, and is up there with Guns, Germs, & Steel.
" is human only - dependent on language to allow the not-quite alpha males to successfully conspire to topple & execute the tyrant/ bully/ too-aggressive male. "
Pretty sure chimps do this as well, but it's usually spectacularly (and horrifical) violent - or is the point humans manage to do this w/o literally tearing the overbearing alpha a new asshole?