"If you’re anti-woke, the arguments come across as so poorly formulated and illogical that you end up discussing motives."
If you read Plato with a critical eye you will find that it's always been quite possible for a brilliant mind to accept poorly formulated and illogical arguments.
Rather than saying that woke people have a system of thought designed to undermine evidence, as Warby suggests, I think it's more accurate to say that there are two subgroups of the movement. Some woke intellectuals are like Spivak or Kendi and these ones fit Warby's description. Others like Adam Grant or Claudine Gay are quite rigorous about evidence in a way, but too credulous about accepting expert consensus and politically biased research.
The same goes on the anti woke side by the way. There's a certain faction of people like Brett Weinstein, James Lindsay and Scott Adams who indulge in conspiracy theories and postmodern dismissal of objective evidence. And there are others who treat obviously biased research from people like Sailer or Kirkegaard as deserving of uncritical acceptance.
I want to put in here that I am enjoying your "macro memoir". I appreciate its straightforward clarity; must have been harder to produce than it might seem. I move through it a little at a time googling the various econ fashions as I go, having taken no econ class, ever. I think it would be a useful exercise if more professional pundits made themselves go through a similar exercise, detailing the evolution of their thinking.
Re: "when I look at the progressive beliefs that I could echo in order to be a member in good standing of my social class, I think: nope, not me."
Arnold, Is there any social class that would be a good fit for you? To put it another way, channeling Grouch Marx: Is there any club you would want to belong to, that would have you as a member?
My impression is that if you were to transport present Kling back 40 years he would be a respected intellectual influencer for high status Reagan Republicans and fit in well and happily in that class of similar influencers. There's been far too much water under the bridge since then, though.
"I may have inherited what I am calling an outsider mindset from my father."....Me too I think.
"My own father was disdainful of both Progressivism and Capitalism but, in 50s, 60s and 70s Britain, such attitudes were rare even among Tories. My own teenage political stirrings - in the time of Labour Party politics and All You Need is Love youth culture - were a mixed bag. On the one hand society’s need for ‘Equality’ seemed axiomatic to me but, on the other hand, most everyone who talked about it (both politicians and my own teenage peers) struck me as have-your-cake-and-eat-it merchants. Then there was university and the instinctive sense that not being ‘on the Left’ would be really bad for your love life........Fast forward to career, marriage and children and, for several years, politics - Lefty or otherwise - was very low on my mental horizon. Then in the early Thatcher 80s - to the dismay of everyone around me - I emerged from my Progressive chrysalis as the small-c armchair conservative that I remain to this day." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
When interpreting survey results like the ones Henderson cites, I think you need to correct for the cheap talk effect. Namely, if a policy stands no realistic chance of actually being enacted, and everyone knows that so nobody is going to spend time and energy advocating for it, BUT saying you're for it still makes people feel morally righteous, then the % in favor on a survey is going to overestimate the real percentage who would seriously support it.
This is, for example, true of outlandishly restrictive anti-climate change policies. Henderson is directionally correct that elites are more concerned than the median voter about climate change and more genuinely willing to support relatively modest/incremental measures like carbon taxes. But, as someone whose social circle is composed mostly of left-wing elite members, I can guarantee you that you would not get 89% of that circle in favor, or even a majority in favor, of actual rationing or bans on flights, meat eating, etc if that were ever seriously proposed. The bans that have gotten elite-majority support, e.g. for gas stoves, are precisely those that are not perceived as significantly changing anyone's lifestyle.
Fair point, but even endorsing these ideas on a rhetorical level is troubling to me. It reveals a certain sense of entitlement and an authoritarian inclination that the rest of us probably ought not ignore.
"Perceived" does a lot of work there, Nicholas, as does "relatively modest/incremental". One can incrementally do a lot of really drastic changes as any frog in a boiling pot will fail to understand.
Well, that's kind of my point: that in the real world, bad elite driven environmental policy looks like the Energiewende, not like some dystopian novel where you need a special Essential Purpose Permit to get on a plane.
California was once a guide to aspiration: prosperity, palm trees and orange groves and cool houses for the middle class, "swimming pools ... movie stars". I see that the first attempt at air pollution control was enacted in Los Angeles in 1947. I see that Ronald Reagan (only a radical in certain lights) signed the legislation creating the state air control board in 1967.
I am not sure if it is simply that some people are not old enough to remember the actual environmental movement and its wide support.
But whether or no, you have to understand that something like pollution control was a sign of affluence. Of the dream. "We can afford to clean up our air. We don't have to live like this."
For it now to be presented as an impoverishing thing, a goal that actively impoverishes, seems to ignore the reality of what actually did impoverish California - to the point that clean air measures would be seen as a luxury, a folly.
I am not speaking to the specifics of whatever new rules are coming down the pike - just pointing out that Rush Limbaugh-esque harping on e.g. environmental legislation - is *not the rhetorical win* people think it is.
It reminds me of the "market urbanists" in my old town who resented the open space laboriously assembled, for wildlife reasons, in our county. They wished it had been houses for the people not yet here. They actually wished that at the same time they decried sprawl. They couldn't help this contradiction. Their ideology told them the "good people" were immigrants, "bad people" were incumbents (especially older people); and that the open space had been locked up by Boomers (and older, but of course people seem to have lost the plot on what a Boomer is) who cared about the environment, which meant not about immigrants and brown people generally.
Rather, the rhetoric around environmental protection is basically an acquiescence that we can't have or hope for what our grandparents had. We can't have that because our betters gave it away - and then pointed to, I dunno, wolves or something as being at fault.
"We can't have an environmental movement anymore" - plays into the hands of people who never cared about it in the first place, because all they cared about was artifically re-engineering the society that cared about air pollution in 1967, by moving as many people into the country as they possibly could, who would care about material things and little else.
As for algebra in middle schools - it is difficult to imagine that our co-commenter's lefty friends attend any of the school districts where algebra was scrapped. You would need a time machine to find anyone with children in the affected districts who cared about that.
The problem is that the environmental movement has been almost entirely taken over by the climate movement. There are so many examples now of things that they are pushing for that are bad for the environment but, at least in theory, would help with global warming. A few examples that spring immediately to mind are wind turbines that kill a lot of birds, offshore wind turbines that are killing whales, and the huge amount of mining that would be required for wind and solar power -- especially if they are to be supported by lithium-ion batteries.
I forgot to add this: environmentalists are not "allowed" to go against the climate cult. If bird advocates are against wind turbines, that's just too bad. They are ignored. I'm sure there are other examples, but that's what I can think of right now.
No, the problem is that *your mind* has been taken over by the internet and the media. The environmental movement rolls along as it ever has, albeit declining for demographic reasons. The over-emphasis on climate change sucks up the air in most rooms, and *some* funding - although the clever figure out ways to use it such that it serves traditional conservation goals, such as "Blue Carbon" funding easements to protect the Texas coast - but if you are serious in what you say, it should be easy for you to figure out where conservation is happening, who is doing it, and how to support it. I am ill today from getting shingles shot #2 so can't go over this ground - again and again - but I suggest you look at the Wikipedia page for the Recovering America's Wildlife Act. If you are a GOPer and claim an interest in conservation, contact your member, or any R members.
If you are in earnest. If you are not - like the GOP, climate is a bogeyman they use as cover while opposing nearly all conservation measures, and attempting to roll back the ESA (I guess they have no real attachment to physical America, not even sure many of them are duckhunters anymore) - e.g. some R yahoo is holding up willing-seller additions to national parks with the cloud cuckoo idea that every acre added to federal land, must be matched by an acre removed (!) then apologies for mentioning it.
RAWA has about as minimal an amount of wokery as possibly any legislation you'll see this decade. The tribal stuff plays that role, to be sure, but then the tribes do hold a lot of land.
And it's a far better sop than the Biden administration's decision to *build another structure on the overbuilt South Rim which as a whole gets its water from a single spring that directly takes from wildlife* - that sop being a special, separate Grand Canyon visitors' center and entrance for "the tribes". Now I don't mean to suggest that "the tribes" generally came up with this colossally stupid idea.
I don't see how any of this goes against what I said. What do you think is the ratio of climate activism to other environmental activism? 10 to 1? 100 to 1?
My sympathy on the shingles shot, by the way. First and second shots both clobbered me for a couple of days.
You're confusing activism, which for a group like the Nature Conservancy or the Conservation Fund is strictly scrutinized and limited due to its tax status, and the work of conservation.
I'd love to return to the golden age of environmental activism. Would you? That ship sailed long before climate change became a constant byword.
Even as the Biden administration has made funding available for old-school preservation, there's a realization that it is mostly too late. In many instances, there's nowhere to spend it.
The fact that such a group's staff do believe in climate change - especially in relation to factors that may or may not interest you on their own grounds, e.g. species' decline (all migratory birds in decline) - while you do not, is immaterial.
If so it’s because we are unserious about it and choose not to make it an issue with those countries, having played such a part particularly in China’s degradation. But the idea that you would have said, in 1967 - this is the last word in environmental legislation - even though we’re going to deliberately add 25 million people to the state of California, there will be no changes, refinements, in pollution law over the next 50 years, no further talk of the environment - is ridiculous.
Very well said Arnold. “That perhaps explains my attraction to libertarian thinking. But in terms of personal conduct, I am very conservative (no drinking, no recreational drugs, one marriage), so that was bound to blend into my political outlook eventually.”
I describe my myself similarly. When it comes to government and the wider society I’m libertarian. When it comes to my family and my community I’m conservative. My problem with many socialists and progressives is that they simply won’t leave my family alone. My framework allows them to create communes and live out their socialists and progressive dreams, but they do not respect my family and our rights to live out our dreams. This is why I started Substacking heavily about the definition of religion in the context of First Amendment. I believe we need to broaden the scope of the meaning of religion to include education and all means of learning.
Arnold describes his "outsider" mindset: "resentful of authority, not willing to adopt a set of beliefs just to get along. In psychometric terms, low on agreeableness." One shouldn't simply resent authority per se. Authority is defined as the moral (or legal) right to control, i.e., power accepted as legitimate. No society can exist without authority; the question is whether it is justly exercised and limited to situations where necessary. For example, it is pointless to resent the rule (authority) that we drive on the right. But instead we have an arrogant power mad technocratic incompetent and corrupt elite that meddles in everything. To rightfully resent this does not make one low on the Big Five trait of Agreeableness. Pardon the personal reference, but I share this attitude, yet have been rated on the Understand Myself personality assessment (see www.understandmyself.com) as above average on that trait.
I wrote about the supposed support for strict rationing of flying some time ago:
"The results of [the] poll seemed to imply that 41% of the French population is in favor of limiting everyone to having four air flights in their entire life".
I have very definitely outsider views relative to standard Progressive ones and this is easy enough to understand in someone who grew up in the ‘50s in a small East Texas town with two parents without completed college degrees.
Still, I feel even MORE of an outsider to the standard anti-Progressive views. _My_ form of conservatism is to hark back to the spirit of WJ Clinton-ism, “true” neoliberalism. The goal being rapid, inclusive growth, using markets to achieve social goals. As a bit of caricature, I have (much later) developed a slogan to go on the banners at the kind of protest march I’d like to attend:
“We demand more mutually beneficial transactions between consenting adults (many of whom will have recently migrated to the US) in goods and services produced and consumed with no un-Pigou taxed/subsidized (or regulatory equivalents) negative/positive externalities with some of the benefits of these transactions subject to progressive consumption taxes for redistribution to (otherwise) low consumption people.”
The truly radical part of this being the Pigou taxes/regulations: firearms, CO2 net emissions, vehicle congestion, land use restrictions and building codes, merit-based immigration.
Good note about “virtuous victims” - how victims actions are considered more virtuous than he same actions by non victims. Victimhood increases righteousness.
For me, it’s The Quest For Moral Superiority. The book I’d most want to write if I could write one.
My own unstable young life of divorce, custody battles, growing up with father & stepfather & 8 different schools by 8th grade, until divorce and family split with 3 sisters & stepsister going with their mothers, I going with grandparents, who continued supporting their alcoholic son, some.
Then I went to the Naval Academy, since I thought the discipline would be good for me, but left for Stanford after 2 years. More similar to Rob than to Arnold. No surprise that military meritocracy, plus lots of rules, is so often the route taken by troubled boys who then turn out pretty successful.
Having a happy marriage (30 years in Oct), plus 4 kids & now 3 grandkids is a big success for me. Family stability is more important than differences in 3 middle income quintiles (20-40, 40-60, 60-80). Rob doesn’t mention H Biden’s drug & sex crimes, but Hunter’s a good example of a spoiled rich brat getting away with crimes most folk would go to jail for. Most Dems think … about Trump mean tweets or anything other than the Bidens as real people they vote for.
Rob includes info about his DC AEI book tour appearance.
Has Arnold ordered or gotten a review copy of Troubled?
In my tribe indeed - I have what I call an “outsider” mindset, one that I can sense in many of the people who comment on this blog: resentful of authority, not willing to adopt a set of beliefs just to get along. In psychometric terms, low on agreeableness.
Arnold's mindset resonates with me. I too resist political labels and tribal affiliations. The downside is that it's difficult to socially navigate a world in which everyone seems to be either aggressively conservative or aggressively liberal.
So just one observation reading Rob Henderson's post. Asuch as I value his opinions, I question the accuracy of the Rasussen survey he cites. I looked at the survey webpage, and it was an online survey of about 1,000 "elite-plus" graduates. I would meet this definition, and I assume that a fair number of this blog's readers would also. However, I would never-ever participate in a survey like this, because I would not see it being worth the time. I wonder if the survey results accurately portray the views of the elites. If I had to guess, I would say YES, but not to the overwhelming degree indicated by the survey. But I'd still be guessing.
"If you’re anti-woke, the arguments come across as so poorly formulated and illogical that you end up discussing motives."
If you read Plato with a critical eye you will find that it's always been quite possible for a brilliant mind to accept poorly formulated and illogical arguments.
Rather than saying that woke people have a system of thought designed to undermine evidence, as Warby suggests, I think it's more accurate to say that there are two subgroups of the movement. Some woke intellectuals are like Spivak or Kendi and these ones fit Warby's description. Others like Adam Grant or Claudine Gay are quite rigorous about evidence in a way, but too credulous about accepting expert consensus and politically biased research.
The same goes on the anti woke side by the way. There's a certain faction of people like Brett Weinstein, James Lindsay and Scott Adams who indulge in conspiracy theories and postmodern dismissal of objective evidence. And there are others who treat obviously biased research from people like Sailer or Kirkegaard as deserving of uncritical acceptance.
I want to put in here that I am enjoying your "macro memoir". I appreciate its straightforward clarity; must have been harder to produce than it might seem. I move through it a little at a time googling the various econ fashions as I go, having taken no econ class, ever. I think it would be a useful exercise if more professional pundits made themselves go through a similar exercise, detailing the evolution of their thinking.
Re: "when I look at the progressive beliefs that I could echo in order to be a member in good standing of my social class, I think: nope, not me."
Arnold, Is there any social class that would be a good fit for you? To put it another way, channeling Grouch Marx: Is there any club you would want to belong to, that would have you as a member?
My impression is that if you were to transport present Kling back 40 years he would be a respected intellectual influencer for high status Reagan Republicans and fit in well and happily in that class of similar influencers. There's been far too much water under the bridge since then, though.
"I may have inherited what I am calling an outsider mindset from my father."....Me too I think.
"My own father was disdainful of both Progressivism and Capitalism but, in 50s, 60s and 70s Britain, such attitudes were rare even among Tories. My own teenage political stirrings - in the time of Labour Party politics and All You Need is Love youth culture - were a mixed bag. On the one hand society’s need for ‘Equality’ seemed axiomatic to me but, on the other hand, most everyone who talked about it (both politicians and my own teenage peers) struck me as have-your-cake-and-eat-it merchants. Then there was university and the instinctive sense that not being ‘on the Left’ would be really bad for your love life........Fast forward to career, marriage and children and, for several years, politics - Lefty or otherwise - was very low on my mental horizon. Then in the early Thatcher 80s - to the dismay of everyone around me - I emerged from my Progressive chrysalis as the small-c armchair conservative that I remain to this day." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
When interpreting survey results like the ones Henderson cites, I think you need to correct for the cheap talk effect. Namely, if a policy stands no realistic chance of actually being enacted, and everyone knows that so nobody is going to spend time and energy advocating for it, BUT saying you're for it still makes people feel morally righteous, then the % in favor on a survey is going to overestimate the real percentage who would seriously support it.
This is, for example, true of outlandishly restrictive anti-climate change policies. Henderson is directionally correct that elites are more concerned than the median voter about climate change and more genuinely willing to support relatively modest/incremental measures like carbon taxes. But, as someone whose social circle is composed mostly of left-wing elite members, I can guarantee you that you would not get 89% of that circle in favor, or even a majority in favor, of actual rationing or bans on flights, meat eating, etc if that were ever seriously proposed. The bans that have gotten elite-majority support, e.g. for gas stoves, are precisely those that are not perceived as significantly changing anyone's lifestyle.
Fair point, but even endorsing these ideas on a rhetorical level is troubling to me. It reveals a certain sense of entitlement and an authoritarian inclination that the rest of us probably ought not ignore.
"Perceived" does a lot of work there, Nicholas, as does "relatively modest/incremental". One can incrementally do a lot of really drastic changes as any frog in a boiling pot will fail to understand.
Well, that's kind of my point: that in the real world, bad elite driven environmental policy looks like the Energiewende, not like some dystopian novel where you need a special Essential Purpose Permit to get on a plane.
And if you wanted to institute an "Essential Purpose Permit", how would you go about it? It certainly wouldn't be in step #1.
California was once a guide to aspiration: prosperity, palm trees and orange groves and cool houses for the middle class, "swimming pools ... movie stars". I see that the first attempt at air pollution control was enacted in Los Angeles in 1947. I see that Ronald Reagan (only a radical in certain lights) signed the legislation creating the state air control board in 1967.
I am not sure if it is simply that some people are not old enough to remember the actual environmental movement and its wide support.
But whether or no, you have to understand that something like pollution control was a sign of affluence. Of the dream. "We can afford to clean up our air. We don't have to live like this."
For it now to be presented as an impoverishing thing, a goal that actively impoverishes, seems to ignore the reality of what actually did impoverish California - to the point that clean air measures would be seen as a luxury, a folly.
I am not speaking to the specifics of whatever new rules are coming down the pike - just pointing out that Rush Limbaugh-esque harping on e.g. environmental legislation - is *not the rhetorical win* people think it is.
It reminds me of the "market urbanists" in my old town who resented the open space laboriously assembled, for wildlife reasons, in our county. They wished it had been houses for the people not yet here. They actually wished that at the same time they decried sprawl. They couldn't help this contradiction. Their ideology told them the "good people" were immigrants, "bad people" were incumbents (especially older people); and that the open space had been locked up by Boomers (and older, but of course people seem to have lost the plot on what a Boomer is) who cared about the environment, which meant not about immigrants and brown people generally.
Rather, the rhetoric around environmental protection is basically an acquiescence that we can't have or hope for what our grandparents had. We can't have that because our betters gave it away - and then pointed to, I dunno, wolves or something as being at fault.
"We can't have an environmental movement anymore" - plays into the hands of people who never cared about it in the first place, because all they cared about was artifically re-engineering the society that cared about air pollution in 1967, by moving as many people into the country as they possibly could, who would care about material things and little else.
As for algebra in middle schools - it is difficult to imagine that our co-commenter's lefty friends attend any of the school districts where algebra was scrapped. You would need a time machine to find anyone with children in the affected districts who cared about that.
The problem is that the environmental movement has been almost entirely taken over by the climate movement. There are so many examples now of things that they are pushing for that are bad for the environment but, at least in theory, would help with global warming. A few examples that spring immediately to mind are wind turbines that kill a lot of birds, offshore wind turbines that are killing whales, and the huge amount of mining that would be required for wind and solar power -- especially if they are to be supported by lithium-ion batteries.
I forgot to add this: environmentalists are not "allowed" to go against the climate cult. If bird advocates are against wind turbines, that's just too bad. They are ignored. I'm sure there are other examples, but that's what I can think of right now.
No, the problem is that *your mind* has been taken over by the internet and the media. The environmental movement rolls along as it ever has, albeit declining for demographic reasons. The over-emphasis on climate change sucks up the air in most rooms, and *some* funding - although the clever figure out ways to use it such that it serves traditional conservation goals, such as "Blue Carbon" funding easements to protect the Texas coast - but if you are serious in what you say, it should be easy for you to figure out where conservation is happening, who is doing it, and how to support it. I am ill today from getting shingles shot #2 so can't go over this ground - again and again - but I suggest you look at the Wikipedia page for the Recovering America's Wildlife Act. If you are a GOPer and claim an interest in conservation, contact your member, or any R members.
If you are in earnest. If you are not - like the GOP, climate is a bogeyman they use as cover while opposing nearly all conservation measures, and attempting to roll back the ESA (I guess they have no real attachment to physical America, not even sure many of them are duckhunters anymore) - e.g. some R yahoo is holding up willing-seller additions to national parks with the cloud cuckoo idea that every acre added to federal land, must be matched by an acre removed (!) then apologies for mentioning it.
RAWA has about as minimal an amount of wokery as possibly any legislation you'll see this decade. The tribal stuff plays that role, to be sure, but then the tribes do hold a lot of land.
And it's a far better sop than the Biden administration's decision to *build another structure on the overbuilt South Rim which as a whole gets its water from a single spring that directly takes from wildlife* - that sop being a special, separate Grand Canyon visitors' center and entrance for "the tribes". Now I don't mean to suggest that "the tribes" generally came up with this colossally stupid idea.
I don't see how any of this goes against what I said. What do you think is the ratio of climate activism to other environmental activism? 10 to 1? 100 to 1?
My sympathy on the shingles shot, by the way. First and second shots both clobbered me for a couple of days.
You're confusing activism, which for a group like the Nature Conservancy or the Conservation Fund is strictly scrutinized and limited due to its tax status, and the work of conservation.
I'd love to return to the golden age of environmental activism. Would you? That ship sailed long before climate change became a constant byword.
Even as the Biden administration has made funding available for old-school preservation, there's a realization that it is mostly too late. In many instances, there's nowhere to spend it.
The fact that such a group's staff do believe in climate change - especially in relation to factors that may or may not interest you on their own grounds, e.g. species' decline (all migratory birds in decline) - while you do not, is immaterial.
If so it’s because we are unserious about it and choose not to make it an issue with those countries, having played such a part particularly in China’s degradation. But the idea that you would have said, in 1967 - this is the last word in environmental legislation - even though we’re going to deliberately add 25 million people to the state of California, there will be no changes, refinements, in pollution law over the next 50 years, no further talk of the environment - is ridiculous.
Very well said Arnold. “That perhaps explains my attraction to libertarian thinking. But in terms of personal conduct, I am very conservative (no drinking, no recreational drugs, one marriage), so that was bound to blend into my political outlook eventually.”
I describe my myself similarly. When it comes to government and the wider society I’m libertarian. When it comes to my family and my community I’m conservative. My problem with many socialists and progressives is that they simply won’t leave my family alone. My framework allows them to create communes and live out their socialists and progressive dreams, but they do not respect my family and our rights to live out our dreams. This is why I started Substacking heavily about the definition of religion in the context of First Amendment. I believe we need to broaden the scope of the meaning of religion to include education and all means of learning.
Arnold describes his "outsider" mindset: "resentful of authority, not willing to adopt a set of beliefs just to get along. In psychometric terms, low on agreeableness." One shouldn't simply resent authority per se. Authority is defined as the moral (or legal) right to control, i.e., power accepted as legitimate. No society can exist without authority; the question is whether it is justly exercised and limited to situations where necessary. For example, it is pointless to resent the rule (authority) that we drive on the right. But instead we have an arrogant power mad technocratic incompetent and corrupt elite that meddles in everything. To rightfully resent this does not make one low on the Big Five trait of Agreeableness. Pardon the personal reference, but I share this attitude, yet have been rated on the Understand Myself personality assessment (see www.understandmyself.com) as above average on that trait.
I wrote about the supposed support for strict rationing of flying some time ago:
"The results of [the] poll seemed to imply that 41% of the French population is in favor of limiting everyone to having four air flights in their entire life".
https://www.mangosorbananas.com/p/if-they-say-it-on-twitter-it-must
I have very definitely outsider views relative to standard Progressive ones and this is easy enough to understand in someone who grew up in the ‘50s in a small East Texas town with two parents without completed college degrees.
Still, I feel even MORE of an outsider to the standard anti-Progressive views. _My_ form of conservatism is to hark back to the spirit of WJ Clinton-ism, “true” neoliberalism. The goal being rapid, inclusive growth, using markets to achieve social goals. As a bit of caricature, I have (much later) developed a slogan to go on the banners at the kind of protest march I’d like to attend:
“We demand more mutually beneficial transactions between consenting adults (many of whom will have recently migrated to the US) in goods and services produced and consumed with no un-Pigou taxed/subsidized (or regulatory equivalents) negative/positive externalities with some of the benefits of these transactions subject to progressive consumption taxes for redistribution to (otherwise) low consumption people.”
The truly radical part of this being the Pigou taxes/regulations: firearms, CO2 net emissions, vehicle congestion, land use restrictions and building codes, merit-based immigration.
This is the best Substack that exists because it cuts to the underlying cause and effect dynamics, with the focus on cause.
Sometimes I think we are living in political or social times simply because we can afford silly ideas and still eat.
But the human brain may not be well equipped to do objective independent analysis, the world may be understood by and large in relative terms.
Everyone is walking around panicking that others agree with their worldview.
Thank god to be otherwise.
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/luxury-beliefs-that-only-the-privileged
Good note about “virtuous victims” - how victims actions are considered more virtuous than he same actions by non victims. Victimhood increases righteousness.
For me, it’s The Quest For Moral Superiority. The book I’d most want to write if I could write one.
My own unstable young life of divorce, custody battles, growing up with father & stepfather & 8 different schools by 8th grade, until divorce and family split with 3 sisters & stepsister going with their mothers, I going with grandparents, who continued supporting their alcoholic son, some.
Then I went to the Naval Academy, since I thought the discipline would be good for me, but left for Stanford after 2 years. More similar to Rob than to Arnold. No surprise that military meritocracy, plus lots of rules, is so often the route taken by troubled boys who then turn out pretty successful.
Having a happy marriage (30 years in Oct), plus 4 kids & now 3 grandkids is a big success for me. Family stability is more important than differences in 3 middle income quintiles (20-40, 40-60, 60-80). Rob doesn’t mention H Biden’s drug & sex crimes, but Hunter’s a good example of a spoiled rich brat getting away with crimes most folk would go to jail for. Most Dems think … about Trump mean tweets or anything other than the Bidens as real people they vote for.
Rob includes info about his DC AEI book tour appearance.
Has Arnold ordered or gotten a review copy of Troubled?
short Henderson:
managers got to manage
the managerial class supports those policies that give them more power
Arnold, did you ever know a guy in the '70's in St. Louis named Jack Kopeck?
No. I went away to college in 1971, and have only returned for visits.
In my tribe indeed - I have what I call an “outsider” mindset, one that I can sense in many of the people who comment on this blog: resentful of authority, not willing to adopt a set of beliefs just to get along. In psychometric terms, low on agreeableness.
Arnold's mindset resonates with me. I too resist political labels and tribal affiliations. The downside is that it's difficult to socially navigate a world in which everyone seems to be either aggressively conservative or aggressively liberal.
So just one observation reading Rob Henderson's post. Asuch as I value his opinions, I question the accuracy of the Rasussen survey he cites. I looked at the survey webpage, and it was an online survey of about 1,000 "elite-plus" graduates. I would meet this definition, and I assume that a fair number of this blog's readers would also. However, I would never-ever participate in a survey like this, because I would not see it being worth the time. I wonder if the survey results accurately portray the views of the elites. If I had to guess, I would say YES, but not to the overwhelming degree indicated by the survey. But I'd still be guessing.