Links to Consider, 9/9

Frank Furedi on Democracy; Roland Fryer on measuring discrimination; Robin Hanson on social norms and population decline; Aaron Renn on building institutions

Frank Furedi writes,

Fareed Zakaria, a leading critic of populist democracy explicitly endorses the idea that liberalism is logically superior to democracy. He contends that democracy is about procedures to select a government, whereas liberalism is about the promotion of goals such as the protection of individual autonomy, individual liberty and constitutionalism[ix]. According to this schema liberalism is endowed with a normative content, whereas democracy possesses only procedural qualities.

As we shall see, I take a view that is the direct opposite of Zakaria. To understand why, we must first appreciate that how we view democracy depends on how we regard human beings and their potential for development, for exercising self-rule and for taking responsibility for their community and fellow human beings. For anti-democrats, most humans lack the moral and intellectual resources necessary to trust them with determining the future direction of their society. But from where I see it, to put it simply, it is only through living democratically that people develop their potential to become authors of their own lives and create a society based on genuine solidarity.

I am not with Furedi in this debate. I think that once you take an autonomous, well-functioning adult and put him in a voting booth, he will act like a 4-year-old. My view of voters is: love the sinner, hate the sin.

In terms of political philosophy, I am much in favor of Constitutional limits on government powers and Madisonian checks and balances. If we still had those going for us, sinners could not do much damage. Without those constraints, we are stuck with the consequences of Fear Of Others’ Liberty.

In a Russ Roberts podcast, Roland Fryer says,

But, if you find that, after accounting for education, and job experience, and a measure of skill, there's still a big disparity in hiring: well, that residual, is that discrimination or is that because we didn't have enough data to make better comparisons? Right?

In statistical parlance, we'd say, is that residual discrimination or is it mismeasured x's? Right? In layman's terms, what we're saying is: did you measure education in the appropriate way? Do you have a really great measure of skills, or is it noisy? And that matters.

I like to emphasize that residual variance is just residual variance. Instead, if a social scientist says, “I controlled for everything else, so the residual variance has to be ___,” that is an unwarranted inference. For example, suppose you use years of education to predict people’s incomes, and a lot of income differences remain unexplained. You may choose to label this residual variance as “luck” or “discrimination” or “grit.” But it is none of those things. It is just residual variance.

Robin Hanson writes,

Fertility would also be easier to achieve if we better arranged to have grandparents use their time and money to help with parenting. However, we tend to think less of both grandparents and parents who seek this arrangement. Such grandparents are seen as pushy and controlling, while such parents are seen as dependent and immature. These perceptions make it hard to coordinate on such help, such as via living near each other, grandparents saving up beforehand, and parents counting on such resources when they need them. 

Over the centuries, as the importance of family clans have declined, we have spent less time with our families, and more time with our friends, co-workers, and neighbors. This has cut the amount of time that young adults spend around their kid relatives together with other adults. And this has made it harder to impress other adults with how well suited one is to interacting with kids. So when we try to impress potential mates, we focus more on our hobbies and careers, and less on our parenting-adjacent abilities. Which makes it harder to prioritize parenting. 

He goes through a whole litany of cultural trends that he sees as leading to a lower birth rate. Some of the essay is too politically incorrect to be quoted here.

Aaron Renn writes,

It strikes me that in a world that is corrosive of institutions, any new institutions that hope to last, much less have a counter-cultural effect, must embed some degree of antagonism toward mainstream culture and the state into its DNA. This does not necessarily mean hatred or hostility towards those institutions or people. But there must be some definition of the institution and its culture that positions it in opposition to that.

…but oppositional DNA has a tendency to lead to a negative identity. That is, it creates an identity that is rooted in what you are against rather than what you are for.

Among the many problems of a negative identity is that it leaves an institution in a defensive role against an expansionary opponent, an almost sure recipe for losing. And it roots your own sense of identity in the very thing you claim to oppose.

Groups like the Amish or Hasidic Jews have a strong sense of what they are for, not just what they are against. Hence I don’t think they have fallen prey to negative identity. At the same time, they are also separatist sects. That’s not practical for most people.

I think that the best way to live nowadays is as a family in a neighborhood with strong, rooted families. A neighborhood where kids get together outside and at each others’ houses, without the parents planning play dates. This may shock those of you under 40, but when I was growing up the notion of a “play date” had not been invented. We played with no adult instigation or supervision. We were just kids who did not know any better than to play among ourselves.

The term “play date” probably was invented around the time we had children, but we didn’t use the concept, because we were lucky enough to have a neighborhood where our kids just got together on their own. Unfortunately, as adults, our daughters need play dates for their children.

Institutional support for neighborhood communities can be found in Orthodox Jewry, which forbids the use of an automobile on the sabbath. That forces families to live within walking distance of the synagogue, and hence within walking distance of one another.

If you want your church to be a community-building institution, you might suggest instituting a norm against driving on the sabbath.

Substacks referenced above:

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Building Counter-Institutions

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Escalating Signals Cut Fertility