I have a conjecture on government "services" that I think is better than "tech curse" and non-coincidental. Government workers will set their salaries to what is comparable to the upper end of their constituency. They (legislators, senior civil servants, lobbyist, various politicos) have to interface with these people professionally and often socially. At least, they desire to, and there's a strong desire to get as much parity as possible. That is, politicos will pay themselves to maintain status and "equality" with their market "counterparts".
So, in a place like California, where you have a massive pod of unusual wealth, this inequality is going to fuel further inequality because it creates a lot of pressure for public servants to rob the public piggy bank to keep up.
On the narcissitic presidents- Bush Jr. spent 7 of his 8 years as president at war. Obama spent all 8 years at war. Trump spent all 4 years at war. That is a lot more than 613 days for each of the three. Or is the researcher just counting all of Obama's and Trump's war as Bush's who started them in 2001?
I also wouldn't trust the narcissism claims themselves, though I might agree with the ranking of the lowest ones based on what I know about those men. Nixon never struck me as narcissitic, nor, really Johnson. The presidents who seem the most narcissitic to me were Clinton, Obama, and Trump.
There is a pop social psych book from 2016 called Take Pride by Jessica Tracy, rebranded in paperback in 2018 as Pride. It focuses on emotions more so than possible personality traits.
In the book Tracy dichotomously separates pride out into a good kind and a negative hubristic kind of pride. There isn't a lot of research outside her own work on pride and she falls back some on narcissism research and descriptions for negative pride for the book. In some of the Pride research small group competitions lead by hubristic leaders and non-hubristic leaders the only dimension the non-hubristic lead groups did better on was creativity. A lot of times the hubristic pride lead groups outcompeted or did equally well on other metrics. Assuming this is true and the ancestral small group environment shaped our cognitive architecture and personality dimensions these aspects are going no where and will continue to be expressed within those who want and try to attain leadership positions. Even if the poli-sci "research" linked to does correlate pretty well with narcissism trying to tie it to macro events of war and their duration strikes me as being incredibly similar to attempting to tie democrats or republicans to stock markets gains and losses and claiming one party is therefore better for the economy.
"I think California’s misgovernance and concentrated wealth are more of a coincidence than a causal story."
California has the least representation in their state government than any other state, on par with Federal Congressional representation. The less representation, the more corruption (b/c there's more power concentrated in the representatives, and thus easier to bribe/blackmail). That it has a large revenue "resource" makes it a bigger target.
"Concentrated wealth does not corrupt everyone—look at Norway after the discovery of North Sea oil. And you can have corruption and misgovernance without concentrated wealth—look at Chicago."
...What's the biggest difference between those two examples?
I guess I am an outlier on this score, too. I have never once cared what someone younger than me thought, just because they were younger. I neither seek nor desire validation from younger generations.
I think at least part of this is just a combination of cowardice and ideological capture. The administrators and the students may have a generational divide between them, but if they're all left wing ideologues, the former can't stand up to the latter without creating some coalitional fissures and leave people questioning their commitment to The Cause, especially if the latter are further left. There's also just run of the mill don't-rock-the-boat, shrink-from-conflict, let-me-keep-my-paycheck-please cowardice.
I would add that one feature of left-wing egalitarianism and communitarianism is that these people tend to be suspicious of hierarchies and the authority conveyed by them. Thus, you wonder why no one in higher ed seems to be able to wield any authority over the half-educated rabble they call students; it's because they were never comfortable doing so in the first place. Their ideological precommitments tell them it's unjust and illegitimate.
Resource curse: I thought this was also called the Dutch disease, which refers to a time when natural gas sources were discovered in the Netherlands. Other countries demanded Dutch currency to pay for gas imports. This made the Dutch currency rise in value and hurt the Netherlands' other export sectors. If a country has important natural resources to export, e.g., Saudi Arabia or Russia, their development will be curtailed by the currency drag caused by resource exports.
Government employees set their own salaries and benefits. This is the problem, not a "tech curse". The same thing, incidentally, pertains to upper corporate management- they set their own salary/benefit packages. The main difference I see is that government employees also set their own evaluation metrics. The private sector still has the market judge that for corporate workers, though in a less and less efficient way in this age of cheap debt.
Slade: There is a lot about the fiscal response to COVID that economists might object to: the PP and sector bailouts instead of a proper UI system that just replaces a portion of workers’ incomes lost in a recession and that relief should have been financed with taxation rather than a higher deficit, but the idea s spending a lot of money in a recession is hardly a recent “leftward” shift in professional opinion.
And on her both side- ism? Yeah! The Right wants to get rid of electoral democracy and is busy doing so; the Left want to abolish the filibuster.
I think a more typical Leftist view of Rightists (although not universal as I wish it were) is not that they are “evil” but that they see zero sun games in issues like immigration and integrating racial, gender expression, ethnic and religious minorities into the polity. when there are positive sum outcomes available.
"The tropes come in escalating stages. One is that the other side is irredeemably evil and out to destroy all that is good. A second is that our side is weak and overly beholden to procedural niceties, whereas our opponents are shameless about breaking the rules in their pursuit of power. The third, following from the other two, is that whatever it takes to win is justified; any institution standing in the way can be demolished; and doing any less amounts to cowardice and surrender."
But what if it's true?
Does the above not describe what happened with schools during COVID?
Does it not describe not allowing people to attend funerals at the same time your attending a George Floyd rally?
Is there any defense of Biden's student loan forgiveness that doesn't fall right in line with the above?
I could go on and on.
Maybe people feel this way because....the shoe fits.
If you want people to think that politics doesn't matter and they shouldn't really shouldn't care who wins, you can't mask two year olds.
I have a conjecture on government "services" that I think is better than "tech curse" and non-coincidental. Government workers will set their salaries to what is comparable to the upper end of their constituency. They (legislators, senior civil servants, lobbyist, various politicos) have to interface with these people professionally and often socially. At least, they desire to, and there's a strong desire to get as much parity as possible. That is, politicos will pay themselves to maintain status and "equality" with their market "counterparts".
So, in a place like California, where you have a massive pod of unusual wealth, this inequality is going to fuel further inequality because it creates a lot of pressure for public servants to rob the public piggy bank to keep up.
On the narcissitic presidents- Bush Jr. spent 7 of his 8 years as president at war. Obama spent all 8 years at war. Trump spent all 4 years at war. That is a lot more than 613 days for each of the three. Or is the researcher just counting all of Obama's and Trump's war as Bush's who started them in 2001?
I also wouldn't trust the narcissism claims themselves, though I might agree with the ranking of the lowest ones based on what I know about those men. Nixon never struck me as narcissitic, nor, really Johnson. The presidents who seem the most narcissitic to me were Clinton, Obama, and Trump.
On the traits of leaders:
There is a pop social psych book from 2016 called Take Pride by Jessica Tracy, rebranded in paperback in 2018 as Pride. It focuses on emotions more so than possible personality traits.
In the book Tracy dichotomously separates pride out into a good kind and a negative hubristic kind of pride. There isn't a lot of research outside her own work on pride and she falls back some on narcissism research and descriptions for negative pride for the book. In some of the Pride research small group competitions lead by hubristic leaders and non-hubristic leaders the only dimension the non-hubristic lead groups did better on was creativity. A lot of times the hubristic pride lead groups outcompeted or did equally well on other metrics. Assuming this is true and the ancestral small group environment shaped our cognitive architecture and personality dimensions these aspects are going no where and will continue to be expressed within those who want and try to attain leadership positions. Even if the poli-sci "research" linked to does correlate pretty well with narcissism trying to tie it to macro events of war and their duration strikes me as being incredibly similar to attempting to tie democrats or republicans to stock markets gains and losses and claiming one party is therefore better for the economy.
"I think California’s misgovernance and concentrated wealth are more of a coincidence than a causal story."
California has the least representation in their state government than any other state, on par with Federal Congressional representation. The less representation, the more corruption (b/c there's more power concentrated in the representatives, and thus easier to bribe/blackmail). That it has a large revenue "resource" makes it a bigger target.
"Concentrated wealth does not corrupt everyone—look at Norway after the discovery of North Sea oil. And you can have corruption and misgovernance without concentrated wealth—look at Chicago."
...What's the biggest difference between those two examples?
-=-
Covid 19 vaccine damage repair protocols:
https://davenarby.substack.com/p/covid-19-vaccine-damage-repair-protocol
I guess I am an outlier on this score, too. I have never once cared what someone younger than me thought, just because they were younger. I neither seek nor desire validation from younger generations.
I think at least part of this is just a combination of cowardice and ideological capture. The administrators and the students may have a generational divide between them, but if they're all left wing ideologues, the former can't stand up to the latter without creating some coalitional fissures and leave people questioning their commitment to The Cause, especially if the latter are further left. There's also just run of the mill don't-rock-the-boat, shrink-from-conflict, let-me-keep-my-paycheck-please cowardice.
I would add that one feature of left-wing egalitarianism and communitarianism is that these people tend to be suspicious of hierarchies and the authority conveyed by them. Thus, you wonder why no one in higher ed seems to be able to wield any authority over the half-educated rabble they call students; it's because they were never comfortable doing so in the first place. Their ideological precommitments tell them it's unjust and illegitimate.
Resource curse: I thought this was also called the Dutch disease, which refers to a time when natural gas sources were discovered in the Netherlands. Other countries demanded Dutch currency to pay for gas imports. This made the Dutch currency rise in value and hurt the Netherlands' other export sectors. If a country has important natural resources to export, e.g., Saudi Arabia or Russia, their development will be curtailed by the currency drag caused by resource exports.
Government employees set their own salaries and benefits. This is the problem, not a "tech curse". The same thing, incidentally, pertains to upper corporate management- they set their own salary/benefit packages. The main difference I see is that government employees also set their own evaluation metrics. The private sector still has the market judge that for corporate workers, though in a less and less efficient way in this age of cheap debt.
Slade: There is a lot about the fiscal response to COVID that economists might object to: the PP and sector bailouts instead of a proper UI system that just replaces a portion of workers’ incomes lost in a recession and that relief should have been financed with taxation rather than a higher deficit, but the idea s spending a lot of money in a recession is hardly a recent “leftward” shift in professional opinion.
And on her both side- ism? Yeah! The Right wants to get rid of electoral democracy and is busy doing so; the Left want to abolish the filibuster.
I think a more typical Leftist view of Rightists (although not universal as I wish it were) is not that they are “evil” but that they see zero sun games in issues like immigration and integrating racial, gender expression, ethnic and religious minorities into the polity. when there are positive sum outcomes available.
"The tropes come in escalating stages. One is that the other side is irredeemably evil and out to destroy all that is good. A second is that our side is weak and overly beholden to procedural niceties, whereas our opponents are shameless about breaking the rules in their pursuit of power. The third, following from the other two, is that whatever it takes to win is justified; any institution standing in the way can be demolished; and doing any less amounts to cowardice and surrender."
But what if it's true?
Does the above not describe what happened with schools during COVID?
Does it not describe not allowing people to attend funerals at the same time your attending a George Floyd rally?
Is there any defense of Biden's student loan forgiveness that doesn't fall right in line with the above?
I could go on and on.
Maybe people feel this way because....the shoe fits.
If you want people to think that politics doesn't matter and they shouldn't really shouldn't care who wins, you can't mask two year olds.
Agree about Thiel. Where do you come down on his most influential ideas more generally?