Progressive is to Conservative as "Irrationally Fair" is to "Rationally Unfair".
'Fair' in the group outcome parity sense, anyway. That is "Treating people differently, because people are different."
For 'fair' in the individualized deserts sense, Classically Liberal processes and systems are "Rationally Fair", "Treating people the same, despite their differences, when the differences are irrelevant." I.e., justice, 'colorblind', meritocratic, due process, fair play, equal opportunity, good sportsmanship, equal rights under rule of law, etc.
Human convergence is an additional assumption needed to pretend that irrationally fair policies are rational. But it's wrong.
The assumption that people will assimilate with respect to values is not akin to the assumption that there are no gifted children. That's an extremely farfetched analogy. Give me a kid from any ethnicity or even intelligence level, and with the right circumstances, you can raise him to be a Muslim, a Protestant, a communist, or an orthodox Jew. The same isn't true of making him a physicist. I would say that's rather obvious. What values you believe in is mostly determined by your cultural mileu. As long as the people to be assimilated are small in number relative to the culture they're being assimilated into, there's little change of retaining much of a distinct culture indefinitely.
When an allocative rule, criterion, process, or decision has disparate impact across salient groups, people naturally wonder: Is the rule/criterion/process/decision-making unfair?
Analysis quickly gets complicated. Is opportunity open? Are allocators prone to irrational bias? Do allocators engage in statistical discrimination? Do background social disadvantages limit opportunity? Does disparate impact correlate with differences in natural ability? Does disparate impact correlate with differences in preferences?
As a thought experiment, imagine a limit case: If a society achieves full equality of opportunity and eliminates allocator biases, then any disparate impact across salient groups would be caused by (a) differences in ability or (b) differences in preferences.
There is a norm against the idea of group differences in ability, given that society hasn't achieved full equality of opportunity and hasn't eliminated allocator biases.
My intuition is that fewer people have strong norms against the idea of differences in preferences, especially between men and women.
Consider, for example, research by Ángel Cuevas, Rubén Cuevas, Klaus Desmet, Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín, "The Gender Gap in Preferences: Evidence from 45,397 Facebook Interests," NBER Working Paper No. 29451 (November 2021):
The authors find that countries that have achieved more equality between men and women also exhibit greater differences in preferences between men and women, in "gender-related interests":
Here are some excerpts:
"This paper uses information on the frequency of 45,397 Facebook interests to study how the difference in preferences between men and women changes with a country's degree of gender equality. For preference dimensions that are systematically biased toward the same gender across the globe, differences between men and women are larger in more gender-equal countries. In contrast, for preference dimensions with a gender bias that varies across countries, the opposite holds. This finding takes an important step toward reconciling evolutionary psychology and social role theory as they relate to gender. [...]
Facebook interests constitute a bottom-up revealed measure of preferences, covering whatever users find interesting, rather than what social scientists deem important. [...]
We argue that for preferences to be innate, they must display a systematic bias toward the same gender across the globe. As such, we can interpret our gender-related interests as potentially innate. In contrast, non-gender-related interests display a gender bias that varies across countries, and must hence be socially constructed. Using this interpretation, our findings are consistent with the predictions of both theories: in more gender-equal countries, differences between men and women are larger for innate (gender-related) preferences and smaller for socially constructed (non-gender-related) interests. [...]
[...] we differentiate between gender-related and non-gender-related interests. We say that an interest is gender-related if it displays a systematic bias toward the same gender across the globe. More specifically, if in more than 90% of countries an interest is more prevalent among the same gender, then we refer to it as gender-related. For example, 'cosmetics' and 'motherhood' are universally more common among women, whereas 'motorcycles' and 'Lionel Messi' are universally more common among men. Conversely, we say that an interest is non-gender-related if its gender bias varies across countries. More specifically, if an interest is more common among men in at least 30% of countries and more common among women in at least another 30% of countries, then we refer to it as non-gender-related. For example, 'world heritage site' and 'physical fitness' do not display a systematic gender bias across the globe."
We would not be here if there were no biological variation for natural selection to act on. As Savoy Brown once sang, "now wouldn't be a real drag if we were all the same."
One quibble with the assumption on convergence vis a vis immigration and assimilation: "Libertarians and progressives who support expanded immigration are implicitly making a convergence assumption. Libertarians assume that immigrants will converge on libertarian values. Progressives assume that immigrants will converge on progressive values. They cannot both be right."
This is right in some cases re: immigration advocates, but I think others (including myself to some extent) don't necessarily think a convergence assumption is correct and yet still support expanded immigration even if it means values may diverge from my wishes or the status quo. This could be for a variety of reasons (growth and its benefits, moral question of telling someone to stay somewhere much worse, and many others).
I do agree though, that a new immigrant can't converge on both progressive and libertarian values. But different ones can go either way, which is a much more accurate way to think about it.
We hesitate to embrace a notion like “convergence” without some clearer explication of its drivers. The statement that “What I call the convergence assumption is the assumption that everyone is fundamentally the same, so that it is more natural to expect people to develop the same skills and adopt the same values than for divergence to persist.” appears to conflate the sociological notion of ”convergence with the religiously derived notion of equality before the law. The two notions are distinct. The latter notion, irrelevant today, found its culmination in the united States Declaration as “all men are created equal.” This derived from the Puritans who taught that Christ died on the Cross for all men and thus (in William Haller’s words) “grace was vouchsafed to all who did not voluntarily reject it, that if not every man them the multitude of men were saved from the law ny the atonement of our Lord, that all men were born naturally born free and equal.” Rabbinic scholars
possibly might even argue that this puts all people before God equally as stated in the Mishah: “Righteous people of all nations have a share in the world to come.” But at any rate, this notion of belief in equality has nothing to do with the concept of convergence as an outcome deriving from various economic drivers that is commonly bandied about in the academic literature.
Clark Kerr (talk about a “cancel culture” blasts from the past: https://web.archive.org/web/20060513190820/http://sfgate.com/news/special/pages/2002/campusfiles/ ) first posited the idea of convergence in 1960 in Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth. The basic concept but using the vocabulary of political science, in particular the ceiling on progress imposed by “the iron triangle, clientelism, and ethnic patronage.”We do not pretend that anything we assert here is new and concur with Kerr who observed: “One of the most distressing tasks of a university president is to pretend that the protest and outrage of each new generation of undergraduates is really fresh and meaningful. In fact, it is one of the most predictable controversies that we know. The participants go through a ritual of hackneyed complaints, almost as ancient as academe, while believing that what is said is radical and new.”
Starting with Kerr’s concept of convergence, the primary driver is the erosion of the dynastic elite relative to the hereditary elite (very similar to Martin Gurri decades later). Page 287 of Industrialism and Industrial Man sets out the basic process:
“Eroosion of the Dynastic Elite. Where the dynastic elite governs ineffectually, as it frequently has done, the country will, in modem times, shift either to nationalist or revolutionary intellectual leadership. If it governs effectively, however, it is also subject to changes. As industrialization proceeds, the hereditary elite expands, recruiting new members from lower strata in its society and particularly by the process of selection through the mechanisms of higher education. It becomes less of a class apart. Also, industrialization requires a great deal of mobility in the labor force, from one occupational level to another, from one area to another, from one enterprise to another. This tends to break down the paternal plant community as does the growth of social services provided by other institutions than the enterprise. Class lines are softened. The political parties of the working class and the labor organizations become gradually less ideological, although this can take a long time and involve many conflicts between the traditionalists and the revisionists. Both the managerial and working classes converge toward the upper and lower ranges of the middle class in their habits and beliefs. Tradition and status mean less; competition and contracts mean more. The worker becomes more independent and the manager more professional. Attitudes toward industrial conflict also have softened. The labor organizations come to share more of the rule-making authority.”
So it is not just a matter of belief in equality: it is about the convergence towards the virtuous bourgeois of which Dierdre McClosekey writes.
We must turn to political science to understand how the USA went off the rails from this happy convergence and into its current hopeless miring in a fetid cultural squalor with no future other than continued stagnation and decay. The major instituttions of the USA have devolved into their dynastic dead end states because they, like the very similar dead ended cockroaches, have evolved to quickly survive any deadly threat, like new poisons, and thus face no pressure to improve and progress into higher organisms, only to scuttle about in the darkness for all eternity. The super powers driving this stagnation are the original iron triangle of politicians, bureaucracies, and interest groups, fortified and reinforced with ethnic patronage, clientelism, and extra-governmental authorities like licensing and accreditation boards. Once a nation falls into the resulting “ethnic patronage democracy” trap it is impossible to break and no real progress is possible going forward. The literature is quite large on the experience with ethnic demands in patronage democracies with writers including Kanchan Chandra, Haroun Adumu, Robert Kearney, Daniel Posner, and many other making contributions. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to progress in the USA is the nationalistic head in the sand approach of both the peasantry and the aristocracy in acknowledging that the system is indeed broke. But perhaps Clark Kerr summed up the current situation best by analogy. When asked why the universities exist, he replied that they exist to provide students an opportunity to have sex, alumni to have sports teams, and for faculty to have parking spots. Nothing has changed in the decades since and a similar story can be said about just every other institution in the land.
Karl Ove Knausgaard had a great quote about the unequal distribution of talent in Book Six of My Struggle (page 748). His point is that no matter how much we try to pretend everyone is the same, we are not the same, if only because of these two characteristics.
"Charisma is one of the two great transcendental forces in the social world; beauty is the other. They are forces seldom talked about, since both issue from the individual, neither may be learned or acquired, and in a democracy, where everyone is meant to be considered equal and where all relationships are meant to be just, such properties cannot be accorded value, though all of us are aware of them and of how much they mean. Moreover we attach value in our human sphere to that which is made, produced, or formulated, not to what is merely there to begin with; in other words, what is made, produced, or formulated is important, and what is merely there to begin with is not."
Our nomenclature has, unfortunately, morphed over the years, so it's difficult to keep a scorecard nowadays. "Liberal" used to refer to what we now call "classical liberal," until it then referred to left-of-center, (old) progressive, silk-stockinged Manhattanites. Then 20th Century liberalism became pejorative - remember the "L" word? - so the left-of-center started calling itself "Progressive." The Progressive label used to refer to reformers such as Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, the Muckrakers such as Jacob Riis, Ida Tarbell and others, and the Urban Reformers such as Jane Addams. Now, of course, "Progressive" refers to a wholly different school of thought, essentially democratic socialists, as opposed to social democrats.
But back to the topic at hand: "When we acknowledge genetic and cultural differences, what is the meaning of equality?" Progressives - the new Progressives - wouldn't acknowledge differences in the first place. They have altered the meaning of "equality" and "equity." Equity, used to mean something like a "level playing field," or equality of *opportunity* but not necessarily of outcomes. Now, equality of outcomes appears to be the New Progressives' objective. Of course, that is a recipe for mediocrity. No one, not even New Progressives, would see a doctor or dentist they knew to be mediocre. No one, not even New Progressives, would pay for entertainment unless the actors, athletes, musicians, and singers they were watching were the very best. I don't know precisely where Progressives would draw the line about acknowledging differences. But draw the line they do. We all draw the line somewhere.
I prefer to think of this as the "convergence approximation". It's a heuristic for identifying major investment opportunities, that has had many huge successes over the past century. And like many investing rules of thumb, it's a sort of victim of its own success; today's unmet needs and wants are the ones that remain in an environment where practically all good opportunities of this type are already being pursued.
Part of the problem is that convergence is still right for libertarians when it comes to things like the moral worth of every human. When putting a gifted child into gifted education, it FEELS like we are according greater moral worth to that child. That isn’t actually true, but the feeling misleads us.
Arnold, I was thinking about replying to your earlier post that started down this path, but I thought it would open too many cans to be dealt with sensibly and without simply inflaming passions. However, here, you are getting to the heart of many matters, so I guess there aren't cans left to open. Here I will try to open some that may prove helpful; I would guess you are aware of many of the ideas but have not integrated them into recent writings.
First, to beneficially work in this overall space, I recommend you explicitly consider multi-scalar models. For example, not only are individual people different - and usefully, beneficially so - but families and communities and regions are necessarily different. Some of this arises from differences in the material conditions presented locally and regionally. Some of the difference is path-dependent through time. Some of the differences are emergent top down and bottom up.
As you have said - the best solutions will often not converge across diverse people, diverse communities. There is a limit to generalizable expertise and the borrowing of 'best practices.'
As you mentioned earlier, there is something called 'local knowledge.' There is also embodied and tacit knowledge. Some isn't communicated for reasons of volume, some isn't communicated because it is incommunicable, some because it is literally subconscious. These are each important and meaningful, not only for personal growth, knowledge, and well-being, but also for community growth, knowledge, and well-being.
Knowledge that cannot be communicated is private knowledge. Knowledge can be private at the personal or community levels.
A huge element of personal liberty that many 'libertarians' fail to perceive is the liberty to shape one's local community. Self-determination is not the freedom of every individual in a community to behave exactly as they please; but the freedom of a community to shape itself internally, largely independent of other communities. Multi-scalar thinking reveals that this compromises the 'individual liberties' of the community members; a community may be free to be a dictatorship. Communities of communities, and so on; liberty of each requiring compromises.
Optimization of the whole system requires suboptimization of subsystems. Similarly, optimization at lower levels will sub-optimize the emergent whole; certainly in the eyes of those who believe they represent the good of the whole...
Experiments work 'to a point.' Calling something an 'experiment' implies that the conclusions can generalize. Personal/local experimentation can deal with implicit knowledge but runs into problems with path dependence (baseline shifts). Local experiments may generalize over a range of localities, but represents none of them entirely. Selection/diversity balance is a very large and complex subject in itself, but evolutionary biology provides at least some of the constructs to make sense of how communities can experiment across complex landscapes to find solutions which are partially in common; and also how maladaption occurs at frontiers (source/sink dynamics).
The main thrust of Specialization and Trade is that the extreme case of treating all goods as fungible and all people as fungible is a disaster; only worth pursuing as a theoretical construct for a brief time, and conditioned on limited computation. The other extreme, everyone as individual and every good - and transaction - as unique - is basically intractable, but makes for a much better conceptual/theoretical starting point to understand even macroeconomics. Equally profound reorientation will be required to remediate a range of historical political theories; and the hardest thing to do will be to see when political theory itself needs to be effectively localized.
“It is hard to get a man to understand something upon which his salary depends on him not understanding it.”
If we were to admit that human psychology is largely heritable and immutable after birth (and we have no idea how to affect the part that is not heritable) then vast swathes of society relating to education, homeschool, raising children, child care, social work, psychology, job interviews, HR, employee selection, job performance, etc would need to be completely reconsidered. There are just too many people that benefit (money and self-image) from the convergence assumption in human psychology to question it in polite company.
IMO the equality axiom is central to wokeism/progressivism, as I explain here: https://medium.com/me/stats/post/d0c74656602f. This of course doesn't mean people of other political leanings don't share this belief, libertarians being a prime example.
This reminds me of something I read by Ludwig Lachmann recently:
"Can all plans succeed?, we realise that the answer, obvious as it may be, holds consequences most dangerous to any notion of macro-economic equilibrium. Walras's Law teaches us that there can be no equilibrium of the economic system as a whole without equilibrium in every market. There can be no market equilibrium without equilibrium of each individual trading in it"
Progressive is to Conservative as "Irrationally Fair" is to "Rationally Unfair".
'Fair' in the group outcome parity sense, anyway. That is "Treating people differently, because people are different."
For 'fair' in the individualized deserts sense, Classically Liberal processes and systems are "Rationally Fair", "Treating people the same, despite their differences, when the differences are irrelevant." I.e., justice, 'colorblind', meritocratic, due process, fair play, equal opportunity, good sportsmanship, equal rights under rule of law, etc.
Human convergence is an additional assumption needed to pretend that irrationally fair policies are rational. But it's wrong.
The assumption that people will assimilate with respect to values is not akin to the assumption that there are no gifted children. That's an extremely farfetched analogy. Give me a kid from any ethnicity or even intelligence level, and with the right circumstances, you can raise him to be a Muslim, a Protestant, a communist, or an orthodox Jew. The same isn't true of making him a physicist. I would say that's rather obvious. What values you believe in is mostly determined by your cultural mileu. As long as the people to be assimilated are small in number relative to the culture they're being assimilated into, there's little change of retaining much of a distinct culture indefinitely.
When an allocative rule, criterion, process, or decision has disparate impact across salient groups, people naturally wonder: Is the rule/criterion/process/decision-making unfair?
Analysis quickly gets complicated. Is opportunity open? Are allocators prone to irrational bias? Do allocators engage in statistical discrimination? Do background social disadvantages limit opportunity? Does disparate impact correlate with differences in natural ability? Does disparate impact correlate with differences in preferences?
As a thought experiment, imagine a limit case: If a society achieves full equality of opportunity and eliminates allocator biases, then any disparate impact across salient groups would be caused by (a) differences in ability or (b) differences in preferences.
There is a norm against the idea of group differences in ability, given that society hasn't achieved full equality of opportunity and hasn't eliminated allocator biases.
My intuition is that fewer people have strong norms against the idea of differences in preferences, especially between men and women.
Consider, for example, research by Ángel Cuevas, Rubén Cuevas, Klaus Desmet, Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín, "The Gender Gap in Preferences: Evidence from 45,397 Facebook Interests," NBER Working Paper No. 29451 (November 2021):
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29451/w29451.pdf
The authors find that countries that have achieved more equality between men and women also exhibit greater differences in preferences between men and women, in "gender-related interests":
Here are some excerpts:
"This paper uses information on the frequency of 45,397 Facebook interests to study how the difference in preferences between men and women changes with a country's degree of gender equality. For preference dimensions that are systematically biased toward the same gender across the globe, differences between men and women are larger in more gender-equal countries. In contrast, for preference dimensions with a gender bias that varies across countries, the opposite holds. This finding takes an important step toward reconciling evolutionary psychology and social role theory as they relate to gender. [...]
Facebook interests constitute a bottom-up revealed measure of preferences, covering whatever users find interesting, rather than what social scientists deem important. [...]
We argue that for preferences to be innate, they must display a systematic bias toward the same gender across the globe. As such, we can interpret our gender-related interests as potentially innate. In contrast, non-gender-related interests display a gender bias that varies across countries, and must hence be socially constructed. Using this interpretation, our findings are consistent with the predictions of both theories: in more gender-equal countries, differences between men and women are larger for innate (gender-related) preferences and smaller for socially constructed (non-gender-related) interests. [...]
[...] we differentiate between gender-related and non-gender-related interests. We say that an interest is gender-related if it displays a systematic bias toward the same gender across the globe. More specifically, if in more than 90% of countries an interest is more prevalent among the same gender, then we refer to it as gender-related. For example, 'cosmetics' and 'motherhood' are universally more common among women, whereas 'motorcycles' and 'Lionel Messi' are universally more common among men. Conversely, we say that an interest is non-gender-related if its gender bias varies across countries. More specifically, if an interest is more common among men in at least 30% of countries and more common among women in at least another 30% of countries, then we refer to it as non-gender-related. For example, 'world heritage site' and 'physical fitness' do not display a systematic gender bias across the globe."
We would not be here if there were no biological variation for natural selection to act on. As Savoy Brown once sang, "now wouldn't be a real drag if we were all the same."
One quibble with the assumption on convergence vis a vis immigration and assimilation: "Libertarians and progressives who support expanded immigration are implicitly making a convergence assumption. Libertarians assume that immigrants will converge on libertarian values. Progressives assume that immigrants will converge on progressive values. They cannot both be right."
This is right in some cases re: immigration advocates, but I think others (including myself to some extent) don't necessarily think a convergence assumption is correct and yet still support expanded immigration even if it means values may diverge from my wishes or the status quo. This could be for a variety of reasons (growth and its benefits, moral question of telling someone to stay somewhere much worse, and many others).
I do agree though, that a new immigrant can't converge on both progressive and libertarian values. But different ones can go either way, which is a much more accurate way to think about it.
We hesitate to embrace a notion like “convergence” without some clearer explication of its drivers. The statement that “What I call the convergence assumption is the assumption that everyone is fundamentally the same, so that it is more natural to expect people to develop the same skills and adopt the same values than for divergence to persist.” appears to conflate the sociological notion of ”convergence with the religiously derived notion of equality before the law. The two notions are distinct. The latter notion, irrelevant today, found its culmination in the united States Declaration as “all men are created equal.” This derived from the Puritans who taught that Christ died on the Cross for all men and thus (in William Haller’s words) “grace was vouchsafed to all who did not voluntarily reject it, that if not every man them the multitude of men were saved from the law ny the atonement of our Lord, that all men were born naturally born free and equal.” Rabbinic scholars
possibly might even argue that this puts all people before God equally as stated in the Mishah: “Righteous people of all nations have a share in the world to come.” But at any rate, this notion of belief in equality has nothing to do with the concept of convergence as an outcome deriving from various economic drivers that is commonly bandied about in the academic literature.
Clark Kerr (talk about a “cancel culture” blasts from the past: https://web.archive.org/web/20060513190820/http://sfgate.com/news/special/pages/2002/campusfiles/ ) first posited the idea of convergence in 1960 in Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth. The basic concept but using the vocabulary of political science, in particular the ceiling on progress imposed by “the iron triangle, clientelism, and ethnic patronage.”We do not pretend that anything we assert here is new and concur with Kerr who observed: “One of the most distressing tasks of a university president is to pretend that the protest and outrage of each new generation of undergraduates is really fresh and meaningful. In fact, it is one of the most predictable controversies that we know. The participants go through a ritual of hackneyed complaints, almost as ancient as academe, while believing that what is said is radical and new.”
Starting with Kerr’s concept of convergence, the primary driver is the erosion of the dynastic elite relative to the hereditary elite (very similar to Martin Gurri decades later). Page 287 of Industrialism and Industrial Man sets out the basic process:
“Eroosion of the Dynastic Elite. Where the dynastic elite governs ineffectually, as it frequently has done, the country will, in modem times, shift either to nationalist or revolutionary intellectual leadership. If it governs effectively, however, it is also subject to changes. As industrialization proceeds, the hereditary elite expands, recruiting new members from lower strata in its society and particularly by the process of selection through the mechanisms of higher education. It becomes less of a class apart. Also, industrialization requires a great deal of mobility in the labor force, from one occupational level to another, from one area to another, from one enterprise to another. This tends to break down the paternal plant community as does the growth of social services provided by other institutions than the enterprise. Class lines are softened. The political parties of the working class and the labor organizations become gradually less ideological, although this can take a long time and involve many conflicts between the traditionalists and the revisionists. Both the managerial and working classes converge toward the upper and lower ranges of the middle class in their habits and beliefs. Tradition and status mean less; competition and contracts mean more. The worker becomes more independent and the manager more professional. Attitudes toward industrial conflict also have softened. The labor organizations come to share more of the rule-making authority.”
So it is not just a matter of belief in equality: it is about the convergence towards the virtuous bourgeois of which Dierdre McClosekey writes.
We must turn to political science to understand how the USA went off the rails from this happy convergence and into its current hopeless miring in a fetid cultural squalor with no future other than continued stagnation and decay. The major instituttions of the USA have devolved into their dynastic dead end states because they, like the very similar dead ended cockroaches, have evolved to quickly survive any deadly threat, like new poisons, and thus face no pressure to improve and progress into higher organisms, only to scuttle about in the darkness for all eternity. The super powers driving this stagnation are the original iron triangle of politicians, bureaucracies, and interest groups, fortified and reinforced with ethnic patronage, clientelism, and extra-governmental authorities like licensing and accreditation boards. Once a nation falls into the resulting “ethnic patronage democracy” trap it is impossible to break and no real progress is possible going forward. The literature is quite large on the experience with ethnic demands in patronage democracies with writers including Kanchan Chandra, Haroun Adumu, Robert Kearney, Daniel Posner, and many other making contributions. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to progress in the USA is the nationalistic head in the sand approach of both the peasantry and the aristocracy in acknowledging that the system is indeed broke. But perhaps Clark Kerr summed up the current situation best by analogy. When asked why the universities exist, he replied that they exist to provide students an opportunity to have sex, alumni to have sports teams, and for faculty to have parking spots. Nothing has changed in the decades since and a similar story can be said about just every other institution in the land.
Karl Ove Knausgaard had a great quote about the unequal distribution of talent in Book Six of My Struggle (page 748). His point is that no matter how much we try to pretend everyone is the same, we are not the same, if only because of these two characteristics.
"Charisma is one of the two great transcendental forces in the social world; beauty is the other. They are forces seldom talked about, since both issue from the individual, neither may be learned or acquired, and in a democracy, where everyone is meant to be considered equal and where all relationships are meant to be just, such properties cannot be accorded value, though all of us are aware of them and of how much they mean. Moreover we attach value in our human sphere to that which is made, produced, or formulated, not to what is merely there to begin with; in other words, what is made, produced, or formulated is important, and what is merely there to begin with is not."
Our nomenclature has, unfortunately, morphed over the years, so it's difficult to keep a scorecard nowadays. "Liberal" used to refer to what we now call "classical liberal," until it then referred to left-of-center, (old) progressive, silk-stockinged Manhattanites. Then 20th Century liberalism became pejorative - remember the "L" word? - so the left-of-center started calling itself "Progressive." The Progressive label used to refer to reformers such as Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, the Muckrakers such as Jacob Riis, Ida Tarbell and others, and the Urban Reformers such as Jane Addams. Now, of course, "Progressive" refers to a wholly different school of thought, essentially democratic socialists, as opposed to social democrats.
But back to the topic at hand: "When we acknowledge genetic and cultural differences, what is the meaning of equality?" Progressives - the new Progressives - wouldn't acknowledge differences in the first place. They have altered the meaning of "equality" and "equity." Equity, used to mean something like a "level playing field," or equality of *opportunity* but not necessarily of outcomes. Now, equality of outcomes appears to be the New Progressives' objective. Of course, that is a recipe for mediocrity. No one, not even New Progressives, would see a doctor or dentist they knew to be mediocre. No one, not even New Progressives, would pay for entertainment unless the actors, athletes, musicians, and singers they were watching were the very best. I don't know precisely where Progressives would draw the line about acknowledging differences. But draw the line they do. We all draw the line somewhere.
I prefer to think of this as the "convergence approximation". It's a heuristic for identifying major investment opportunities, that has had many huge successes over the past century. And like many investing rules of thumb, it's a sort of victim of its own success; today's unmet needs and wants are the ones that remain in an environment where practically all good opportunities of this type are already being pursued.
Part of the problem is that convergence is still right for libertarians when it comes to things like the moral worth of every human. When putting a gifted child into gifted education, it FEELS like we are according greater moral worth to that child. That isn’t actually true, but the feeling misleads us.
Arnold, I was thinking about replying to your earlier post that started down this path, but I thought it would open too many cans to be dealt with sensibly and without simply inflaming passions. However, here, you are getting to the heart of many matters, so I guess there aren't cans left to open. Here I will try to open some that may prove helpful; I would guess you are aware of many of the ideas but have not integrated them into recent writings.
First, to beneficially work in this overall space, I recommend you explicitly consider multi-scalar models. For example, not only are individual people different - and usefully, beneficially so - but families and communities and regions are necessarily different. Some of this arises from differences in the material conditions presented locally and regionally. Some of the difference is path-dependent through time. Some of the differences are emergent top down and bottom up.
As you have said - the best solutions will often not converge across diverse people, diverse communities. There is a limit to generalizable expertise and the borrowing of 'best practices.'
As you mentioned earlier, there is something called 'local knowledge.' There is also embodied and tacit knowledge. Some isn't communicated for reasons of volume, some isn't communicated because it is incommunicable, some because it is literally subconscious. These are each important and meaningful, not only for personal growth, knowledge, and well-being, but also for community growth, knowledge, and well-being.
Knowledge that cannot be communicated is private knowledge. Knowledge can be private at the personal or community levels.
A huge element of personal liberty that many 'libertarians' fail to perceive is the liberty to shape one's local community. Self-determination is not the freedom of every individual in a community to behave exactly as they please; but the freedom of a community to shape itself internally, largely independent of other communities. Multi-scalar thinking reveals that this compromises the 'individual liberties' of the community members; a community may be free to be a dictatorship. Communities of communities, and so on; liberty of each requiring compromises.
Optimization of the whole system requires suboptimization of subsystems. Similarly, optimization at lower levels will sub-optimize the emergent whole; certainly in the eyes of those who believe they represent the good of the whole...
Experiments work 'to a point.' Calling something an 'experiment' implies that the conclusions can generalize. Personal/local experimentation can deal with implicit knowledge but runs into problems with path dependence (baseline shifts). Local experiments may generalize over a range of localities, but represents none of them entirely. Selection/diversity balance is a very large and complex subject in itself, but evolutionary biology provides at least some of the constructs to make sense of how communities can experiment across complex landscapes to find solutions which are partially in common; and also how maladaption occurs at frontiers (source/sink dynamics).
The main thrust of Specialization and Trade is that the extreme case of treating all goods as fungible and all people as fungible is a disaster; only worth pursuing as a theoretical construct for a brief time, and conditioned on limited computation. The other extreme, everyone as individual and every good - and transaction - as unique - is basically intractable, but makes for a much better conceptual/theoretical starting point to understand even macroeconomics. Equally profound reorientation will be required to remediate a range of historical political theories; and the hardest thing to do will be to see when political theory itself needs to be effectively localized.
“It is hard to get a man to understand something upon which his salary depends on him not understanding it.”
If we were to admit that human psychology is largely heritable and immutable after birth (and we have no idea how to affect the part that is not heritable) then vast swathes of society relating to education, homeschool, raising children, child care, social work, psychology, job interviews, HR, employee selection, job performance, etc would need to be completely reconsidered. There are just too many people that benefit (money and self-image) from the convergence assumption in human psychology to question it in polite company.
IMO the equality axiom is central to wokeism/progressivism, as I explain here: https://medium.com/me/stats/post/d0c74656602f. This of course doesn't mean people of other political leanings don't share this belief, libertarians being a prime example.
I see "Idiocracy" as prophecy, not satire.
This reminds me of something I read by Ludwig Lachmann recently:
"Can all plans succeed?, we realise that the answer, obvious as it may be, holds consequences most dangerous to any notion of macro-economic equilibrium. Walras's Law teaches us that there can be no equilibrium of the economic system as a whole without equilibrium in every market. There can be no market equilibrium without equilibrium of each individual trading in it"