Some Links, 9/7/2025

Daniel Davies on Dan Wang; Nathan Witkin on elite radicalization; Lakshaya Jain on youth and political intensity; Kevin Erdmann's theory of everything going wrong

Daniel Davies writes.

The concept of “process knowledge” that Henry and Dan are talking about is, of course, British. Specifically, it was first observed in Sheffield, in the cutlery industry, in a famous passage from Marshall:

“When an industry has thus chosen a locality for itself, it is likely to stay there long: so great are the advantages which people following the same skilled trade get from near neighbourhood to one another. The mysteries of the trade become no mysteries; but are as it were in the air, and children learn many of them unconsciously. Good work is rightly appreciated, inventions and improvements in machinery, in processes and the general organization of the business have their merits promptly discussed: if one man starts a new idea, it is taken up by others and combined with suggestions of their own; and thus it becomes the source of further new ideas. And presently subsidiary trades grow up in the neighbourhood, supplying it with implements and materials, organizing its traffic, and in many ways conducing to the economy of its material.

Dan is Dan Wang, author of Breakneck. Henry is Henry Farrell, reviewing the book. Marshall is the great 19th century economist, Alfred Marshall. Marshall’s writing anticipates Paul Krugman’s work on agglomeration, for which Krugman was awarded a Nobel. All along, including in his Nobel lecture, Krugman properly cited and credited Marshall. Wang cites neither Krugman nor Marshall.

Nathan Witkin writes,

It is well-established in the research literature that our attention on social media gravitates toward content that is more emotionally extreme. Recent studies have found that posts that are sad, fearful, uncivil, morally and emotionally indignant, hostile towards out-groups, and negatively valenced in general spread much further than their more neutral counterparts.

This is consistent with my observation on the characteristics of the substack writers on politics with the most followers. Witkin points to research showing that that this is true on Twitter. He continues,

Robertson, del Rosario, and Van Bavel (2024) outline this group’s newfound influence in their recent paper “Inside the funhouse mirror factory: How social media distorts perceptions of norms.” It is worth quoting their analysis at length:

Online discussions are dominated by a surprisingly small, extremely vocal, and non-representative minority. Research on social media has found that, while only 3% of active accounts are toxic, they produce 33% of all content.

I clipped the rest of his quote. The end result:

social media has empowered a (relatively) small group of political influencers who, in response to the perverse incentives created by attentional negativity bias, have disseminated ideas that make people more angry, fearful, and extremist.

He distinguishes elite radicalization from ordinary party polarization.

contra much presumptive emphasis on polarization, online political content may decrease the intensity of Democrat or Republican party identification, not in spite of, but because it makes people more outraged about politics. That outrage, for instance, may make independents less likely to gravitate toward the Republican or Democratic party. It might also make those who are already party members dislike their party more, perhaps enough to leave it altogether. This would be consistent with the rising public distrust of both parties, the frequent infighting that now defines Democratic party politics, and the simmering tensions between the more nativist and more business and tech-oriented factions of the Republican party.

I would say that the Democrats now have a very large Mamdani wing, reducing the potential for the “abundance” movement to moderate the party. Similarly, MAGA has crowded out the libertarians and traditional conservatives from the Republican Party.

Speaking of (for) the disempowered moderate Democrats, Lakshaya Jain writes,

In our inaugural survey for The Argument, we sought to measure just how integral politics were to people’s lives and identities. When we asked participants whether it was ever acceptable to cut off a family member over their political views, 75% said no. When it came to the same question, but for friends, 70% also said no.

But beneath the surface-level consensus that close relationships should transcend politics lurk deep divides by both ideology and age. Young people, and especially young people who lean left, were much more likely to say it was acceptable to freeze out friends or family members.

I suspect two reasons for this tendency on the young left. First, young people are more likely to take their politics from social media. Second, young people on the left are more likely to be female, and the female approach to conflict within groups is to exclude rather than confront or tolerate.

Kevin Erdmann writes,

Over the course of the 20th century, our city leaders decided they didn’t want cities any more. From 1890 to 1960, the population of New York City increased from 1.5 million to just under 8 million. After the downzoning, growth stopped. New York City has roughly the same population today that it did in 1960.

Over the course of the last 100 years (Next year will be the 100 year anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that cities could consider apartments to be nuisances.), every city in America implemented similar plans, and so for the last several decades, in the aggregate, we are only able to build suburbs.

This is at the heart of every economic problem we have.

Let’s have a cage match between Erdmann and Joel Kotkin.

substacks referenced above:

@

The End of the American City

@

The Case Against Social Media is Stronger Than You Think

@

the brompton-ness of it all