"I long for order. I think that many people share that longing. I don’t think that they want to re-elect a President Biden who cannot restrain the disorderly wing in his own party. I do not think that most people feel that Mr. Trump represents their idea of order."
The time is right, as never before in my life, for a new party. There's enough low-hanging political fruit, such as the desire for order that Mr. Kling cites, for a sane party to become instantly viable.
Maybe a new primary system would do a lot of the work of a new party. I think most Americans gravitate to moderate clusters on the current 2-party axis, but primary voters tend to be more extreme/expressive in their voting, more concerned with unending order rather than maintaining it. So we wind up with the rematch most people say they didn't want. Maybe the dynamics of a better primary system would allow for better coalition building in governance.
Jonah Goldberg—I'm sure many others agree with him—has called for Republicans to return to the "smoke-filled rooms" of yesteryear, in which party officials would choose the nominees for president and vice president. That seems to me a method more likely than even a reformed primary system to produce a nominee for whom I could vote.
Not by rhetoric, but by policy. Taxing, spending, immigration, crime, morality, abortion, gays, globalized free trade (incl. with commies).
He's actually a fiery, hot-air speaking moderate, as many critics occasionally mention to denigrate his achievement. A list of centrist policies to contrast between Trump Biden would show a pretty centrist Trump.
Agreed the time may be right and many Americans are highly dissatisfied with the performance (and I say that word with theater in mind) of the two dominant parties. But is there the will and leadership present to overcome the structural advantages, and status quo, that the existing donkeys and elephants possess? And the entrenched tribalism of their constituents? We're talking a sustained, well-organized effort driven by a broad-based coalition of dedicated citizens committed to pluralism, constitutional principles, and the revitalization of American democracy. A tall order, but not impossible.
Actually, this just recently happened. It is exactly what Trump did. They might still be called Republicans but it is very much a new party.
I'm definitely a bit to the right of Bill Clinton but I'd be ecstatic if someone like him took over the Dems right now. Maybe I'd be even more unhappy with Congress (that became more Dem on coattails) but I'm near certain I'd like him better than the two current choices.
As far as a third party, Romney and Weld are the only two who even come to mind but I suppose there's a long list who would at least be marginally better than the current two. Haley definitely goes in that list. (note: I'd still take Biden over any of the other Dem candidates in 2020 but wonder if Hillary might be marginally better than Biden. Probably not..)
I can imagine Romney as the elder statesman of the new party, but he's too old to run for president again. From what I know of him, Ben Sasse would be a good choice.
In general, doing what polls show most Americans want, with the platform stated clearly and unapologetically. A few sample policies below. PLEASE NOTE: I don't necessarily agree with any of them.
Order, as mentioned above. Keep streets free of crime, and imprison protestors who block traffic, threaten businesses and citizens, etc.
Abortion legal until the third trimester, then illegal except in cases of rape or incest, or when the mother's life is at stake.
No to reparations and DEI.
Yes to school choice.
Keep taxation progressive, with only small changes if any, but talk constantly about how much high earners pay, how little low earners pay (net), and how much better the economy would function with lower top rates, lower capital-gains tax rates (or none), and lower corporate tax rates (or none). Don't force; instead, wherever possible, persuade, then follow. (That last sentence is my guiding thought.)
Abandon the effort toward Net Zero and any mandated switch to EVs, wind, or solar.
On health insurance, small changes, e.g., encourage bare-bones plans and allow purchase across state lines. More shifts toward the free market if, but only if, the public appear favorably inclined. (Persuade, then follow.)
"Transmen aren't men. Transwomen aren't women."
Encourage and defend the use of standardized tests by companies in choosing employees, so kids no longer feel they must attend college to obtain good jobs. (Might require reversal of Griggs vs. Duke Power Co.)
"Racial disparities don't always mean racism."
I could come up with more.
On some subjects I don't know the general opinion, and I won't guess because I would probably substitute my own views.
I would argue it's some combination of Romney Republican, Manchin Democrat, and maybe a bit of BClinton. I list two Dems but would prefer it closer to Romney. If you've heard Bill Maher speak against the woke, a little of that would make me happy but maybe that's asking too much. Better if this third party isn't in any way caustic.
Too late, Trump has already taken over the Republican party to be a MAGA workers America first party. Hated by elite snob Democrats, and dis- liked by Never Trump Republicans who will again become important in 2028. Maybe. Trump's Rep party is the new party you say you want, quite different from the Bush or Romney 'good loser' party of 2012 & before. Wait, not THIS new party.
61 mil. votes in 2016, 74 mil. in 2020. Biggest increase in votes ever. Likely to be more in 2024. Despite him being older and less sharp.
If a leader with a better plan can't start a faction in a major party, and win over that party, that leader certainly ain't gonna win, no way, no how.
Tho you can vote RFK jr. If you want to.
Low info loyalists will vote Dem or Rep as usual, as will most party members.
What data are you looking at that support this conclusion? Most types of urban crime are in fact down when looking at 2023 vs 2022 figures. There are exceptions, like car theft, and there are cases where crime is still above 2019 levels, but the present trend is overall not consistent with that statement AFAICT.
The report you linked shows a big increase in crime from 2019 to now, with a more mixed record in the last year or so.
In a way it’s kind of like talk about inflation. It’s slowed compared to a year or two ago, but it’s not great and the last four years put together are not good.
I suspect crime will improve in many ways as the Floyd insanity burns itself out, but perceptions of crime mostly reflect a sense that they are worse then the before Floyd times.
More generally, people who talk about crime will often say “well it’s not as bad as the 1990s crack wars”, but the reference point in many people’s heads is the before times (pre 1965) or many modern low crime countries today.
There is a general sense that crime could be turned off basically overnight at will, but there is a lack of will (see bukele or newsome cleaning up SF for Xi visit).
Finally, I think people include general social disorder in “crime”. Junkies shouting at people. Needles. Protestors. I have heard Arnold’s complaint about NYC smelling like pot everywhere from multiple people.
I agree that people mentally lump in social disorder in with crime, even when it does not actually pose a risk to their physical safety. Many rural red state counties have higher homicide rates than NYC or SF, but people look at the latter and it subjectively feels less safe to them -- that's an understandable bias, but it is a bias.
Most Americans don't remember pre-1965 nor do they care much about other countries, so those comparisons seem less likely to be salient. It is instructive to look at the long-term homicide rate graphs for the US and other Anglosphere countries that have good records: you see that
(a) the 2023 rate, 5.3 per 100k, is in fact identical to the 2017 figure and only slightly above 5.0 for 2019
(b) the lowest it ever got in the 20th century was around 4-4.5 in the 50s, still not a huge diff from today; and pre-WW2 rates were well above current figures
(c) across all that time, as policies and people changed, the US rate has always been far higher than it's Anglosphere peers
All of which should make one pessimistic that it could be just shut down if "we only had the will". I see that as a right wing version of the technocratic left wing belief that we could fix bad health outcomes or educational outcomes if the government really wanted to do that-- in all those cases things are less amenable to systemic government control than people would like to believe.
"All of which should make one pessimistic that it could be just shut down if 'we only had the will."
Come on man; you've got to be joking with this line. There's no difference between "will" and "policy" and changes in policy cause changes in behavior, as any small child knows is true.
If we can have the will to undo law enforcement and watch crime go up, then we can have the will to start enforcing the law again and make it go back down. Duh! "Well, I decided to stop dieting and exercising and I gained a bunch of weight. I'm pessimistic that I could just lose it again if only I had the will." Totally ridiculous. In 100 years we've gone from "Spirit of Progress - There's nothing we (i.e., the state) can't do if we put our minds and hearts into it!" to "Aw shucks, despite all this extra wealth and tech, there's just nothing we can do, guess we have no choice but to live this way, and we'll all just have to learn to cope with this crap and try to console each other with childish illusions about this being the best of all possible worlds."
Migrant flows to the border fluctuate by hundreds of percent depending on whether there's actually any will to control them or not. Oh, but will can't matter, so I guess we can't believe our lying eyes and the complaints of Deep Blue city leaders are hallucinations.
Crime skyrocketed then collapsed in NYC due to a change - and then change back - in 'will', i.e., leadership and policy. Bukele has utterly transformed life in El Salvador - practically overnight so far as major societal trends go - from the most the most to least murderous place in the Western Hemisphere, because his administration "had the will", and he won reelection in a landslide and even the usual critics of the things he had to do to get it done have had to confess that the results are so spectacular that it's hard to argue that even harsh tactics weren't justified necessities.
Carjackings are up by hundreds of percent in many cities in just a few years because the political leadership and police lost the will to do anything about it but reluctantly fill in the blanks on insurance forms, and because it's an election year some local governments have finally seen the light about the need to do something to put a lid on stuff getting out of control, and are suddenly rediscovering the will to pass crime reform bills to, you know, start arresting lawbreakers again. I guess they are all total idiots in thinking any of that could accomplish anything, because, after all, that would mean "having the will" matters.
In the US Capital, anytime the administration actually gets serious about identifying the perpetrator of any incident they care about - for instance related to national security, politics, or having gone over the line and annoyed a VIP - then you may have noticed there is actually no difficulty whatsoever in quickly tracking them down and arresting them using the mountain of data from pervasive cameras, vehicle tracking systems, sensors, cell-phone data, facial-recognition and other surveillance tools, etc. to figure out who they are, what their movements were, and where they can be found. There are no longer any meaningful legal, technological, fiscal, or manpower resource limitations to scaling these efforts all the way to Full China if the powers that be wanted to, i.e., "had the will", but they don't want to.
Ok, let's assume zero is impossible and Reduction=erf(Effort). It just doesn't matter to any practical question of policy if we're nowhere close to plateau. So the question is, what's the elasticity? Nicholas is saying it's low, while I'm saying it's high.
The homicide rate is more or less a measurement of how often blacks are killing each other. There were essentially two waves of BLM driven homicide increases. One in 2015 that was more localized (st Louis, Baltimore) and the Floyd era that was more broadly national.
As Steve sailer noted, you can even see the change in black behavior in traffic fatalities at the same time, there just seemed to be a general sense that blacks could do whatever they wanted.
I myself experience the 2015 Baltimore variety. I can report that the city really went into a downward spiral after that which hasn’t stopped. Areas that used to be safe are not safe anymore and residents continue to flee. I was a victim of crime at least a dozen times when I lived in the city (mostly breaking into my car) but only ever reported it the first time (and was informed nothing would be done about it). I once had a group of black youths chase after me to try and steal my bike but luckily I got away before they grabbed me. Another white guy on a bike wasn’t so lucky and got murdered.
I’m aware that there is a lot of black homicide in the American south, but it seems ridiculous to blame that on “red states”. The people doing the murdering are black Democratic voters, they just don’t have the numbers to win their state elections. The American south remains very high in black % of the population.
Getting away from murder, Charles Murray makes the case that there was a drawback in so called “broken windows policing” that slowly bore fruit in what we see today in our large cities.
When I say there is a solution, I’m well aware that it’s a political no go because of the sacredness of blacks.
P.s. one thing to keep in mind on homicide stats is that trauma care has vastly lowered death rates from injury. The same gunshot wound that would kill before the Vietnam war now kills only 20% as often.
In the spirit of forumposter123's post below, if people stop reporting crimes because "it's not going to do any good", the actual increase in crime will be less than the reported rate. Of course, that doesn't really apply to homicides.
The “rural red state county” talking point is so transparently a metric of something other than “redness” or “ruralness” that it can seem like those bringing it up, are wishing to make a point they are too polite to make.
I look at major chains closing stores in American cities because the rampant theft makes it unprofitable to keep them open. You can show your government charts. I will go with the opinion of those with their own skin in the game who walk away from American urban communities because the governments of those communities make it unprofitable to do business.
Retail theft *may* be rising; that is one case where low and variable reporting rates actually make it hard to tell. But:
1. one should always be wary of drawing monocausal conclusions in a situation with obvious large confounders (in person chain retail is doing worse than usual for other reasons, e.g. online shopping)
2. retail theft is bad but is not the same as rising general crime-- and "government charts" on violent crime in particular tend to be quite reliable.
Most types of urban crime may indeed be slightly down when looking at 2023 vs 2022 figures - Krugman tweeted a graph of FBI data the other day, showing violent crime rate for US overall having declined from almost 400/100,000 to about 350/100,000 - but American urban crime rates are still _two orders of magnitude_ (that's 100x) above those of really safe countries such as Japan, where parents can let their grade school children ride the subway and walk to school and back. Krugman resorted to cutting off the base from his graph to make the change look much bigger than it really is, and included no data points for either American cities or international ones for a fair comparison. See pictures here: https://twitter.com/CandideIII/status/1765403405802254491
Forgive me if this comes across as pedantic, but I think it's worth pushing on because there is a decades-long trend of people believing crime rates are going up even when they go down, and if we are going to have a discussion about how social order is faring, it ought to be a reality-based one.
DC has a system that counts gunshot incidents. I'll get to the data in a bit, but first some big picture history which an indispensable to its accurate interpretation.
In the years after WWII DC was a nice place to live, though second-tier as a city. It had a large black population dependent on either government jobs or handouts for historical reasons (see "Up From Slavery" Chapter 5.) The dependency didn't matter because the American establishment hadn't yet lost its collective mind and tended to be quite adept at controlling crime and making urban areas pleasant and safe places to live, though much poorer and technologically limited than we are today.
Fast forward to the the 80s and 90s and lots of DC was dangerous urban ghetto that tourists were advised to avoid, with lots of poverty, drug use, crime, and violence. But other trends were happening at the same time. A number of trends both national and local combined to turn the situation around in some parts of the city in a process of gradual but sustained improvement, to the point that they are practically unrecognizable today. There was a huge police hiring push starting in the late 80's, and of course a big problem today is that those guys all recently retired and its been difficult to replace them especially with officers of the same competence (they ended up hiring a bunch of old retirees back for 5-year terms, and those guys did not chase anyone down on foot.) Still, the 2000s and 2010s were particularly positive in ways that interacted with what was going on in the housing market, and one can identify 2018-19 as "peak DC".
DC has a system to count and locate all gunshot incidents. Here is what the number of annual incidents looks like.
2014: 9638
2015: 7953
2016: 5873
2017: 4883
2018: 4653
2019: 6717
2020: 14068
2021: 8339
2022: 7123
2023: 8693
You can see the steady improvement from 2014 to 2018. What happened in 2019? Starting in 2017, you might say the DC Council, with encouragement from the ACLU, "lost the will" to keep prosecuting the usual suspects for the usual transgressions so they started going - get this - soft on crime. E.g., they decriminalized turnstile-jumping and fare-evasion on the metro in November 2018, "because race". (Fast forward 5 years, who could have predicted that they've recently had to retrofit the machines with stuff that makes it harder to jump or double-up, even though that was unnecessary for 40 years?)
What actually happened in just as things were dramatically improving with more effective policing in the mid 2010s, the left was turning against policing again, in a way that had a strongly racialized flavor that was also politically useful. The national political-and-media reaction to death of Michael Brown in Ferguson in August 2014 provides a good example of the playbook and proved a preview of things to come. With Obama administration encouragement, DC was among many cities that leveraged these sentiments to pull back policing by means of the "Police Complaint Board" series of reports, the recommendations of which started to get implemented and have an impact in mid 2018.
But then we got the annus horribilis of 2020 which despite everybody supposed to be on lockdown because of covid, more than doubled the gunshot incidents. Mostly the cops got locked down. CDC didn't stop the spread, and MPD didn't stop the lead. The emergency police reform bill reset the effective level of policing noticeably downward.
Which is why even after the dust settled in 2021, gunshot incidents are "down" from civil-breakdown levels to being only 50-80% higher than what was achieved before the re-softening. Carjacking are another story - DC drives could only dream of the pipedream fantasy of there only being 80% more carjackings than there were in 2018.
Which is why even the DC Council and Mayor Bowser had to get their acts together in an election year and undo a lot of the non-enforcement insanity of the last several years in the recent crime bill. The trouble is, the damage has been done, and the police have been hollowed out, demoralized, and don't trust the politicians to have their back and not throw them under the bus again in the event of any controversy. Do you want to bet good money that gunshot events will go back under 7,000 in 2024?
Luciaphile makes a good point. And to extend it a little -- some of the places with the worst crime have prosecutors who refuse to prosecute many types of crime. So how good are the crime statistics in places like that? One would think that many crimes would go unreported if they won't be prosecuted anyway.
Underreporting of relatively minor property crimes may be a factor-- it's almost by definition hard to tell-- but for violent crimes and especially for homicides that is unlikely, and those are down, and *usually* other crimes are correlated with those.
It's possible for there to simultaneously be an increase in visible indicators of social disorder and a decrease in major crimes, so that people are actually materially safer in the ways that matter most, but nonetheless understandably feel less safe. We shouldn't dismiss that feeling; it probably has real morale and social trust effects distinct from the effects of actual violence! But we also shouldn't overindex on it.
There are lots of areas of my hometown where I wouldn’t go. They are enclaves (not for the wealthy, they have their own). The neighborhood where my father grew up, for instance. I noticed in the paper some of the locals there were trying to become one of the city’s “no lying down” districts, a designation that would permit them to reclaim their sidewalks from people using drugs, or just doing their sleeping there.
Not because I’d be afraid to walk around there. Not belonging to a certain world gives you a kind of armor. I am part of no feuds, I don’t owe anyone any drug money. Does someone want to steal my old iPhone SE? Theirs is probably better …
But the parents in the area, recalling that an 11 yo child was shot to death walking home from school, by one of those sidewalk squatters, probably feel differently about it than I do. They may be indexing, incorrectly, off that one incident, instead of being content to have gotten off so lightly and reminding themselves, as they step out into the street, that crime is down.
I feel very safe all the time. Even when I experience urban disorder - say, walking along the downtown jogging trail around the lake, in my old town, past encampments with generators and old recliners, even TVs blaring where once there was a patch of green nature, a fellow screaming at me to “suck his cock.” Do you imagine I feel any fear? Good Lord, no. A disinclination to return? To go there at all, somewhere it was commonplace to go? Sure. Does my disfavoring the place, just infinitesimally, for aesthetic reasons make it less safe, in concert with others making the same choice? The random stabbers cause some problems, true, but it’s absolutely as you say: dwarfed by the sheer number of people still enjoying the trail, evading lunatic stabbers.
I’m too old to care what happens to me, and for the most part I stay in my bubble.
I wouldn’t take my feelings about crime, to be the measure of anything more than successful retreat from America.
I wonder about changes in crime. The TVs are often nailed to the wall or otherwise a pain to remove: that was the thing when I was a kid, coming home and finding the TV gone.
Less so people banging on the door or window at night. That’s something people faithfully post on Nextdoor, but it doesn’t interest the police.
Meanwhile, when I was a kid, there was no such crime as stealing Amazon packages.
The whole family got a package maybe 3x a year. Usually a gift from a relative. Is every porch piracy reported and entering the property crime statistics?
Ditto mail. I don’t think it had occurred to anyone to steal mail, but now it’s in the news regularly, or complained about on Nextdoor.
You didn’t used to see people ****ing and ****ing in the street as you drove by, but now that’s a fairly routine occurrence, and I assume it mostly goes unreported. It would have amounted to a disturbance of the peace once upon a time.
Your statement: "given executives in charge of the “magnificent seven” (Microsoft, Alphabet/Google, Meta/Facebook, Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, and Tesla) enormous power to determine the path of innovation." is only partially true. I am viewing the innovation problem more from the trenches viewpoint and know some friends in both the Angle Investing and VC worlds. I was also an innovator in my area of recycled aquaculture systems, having led the way since the early 1970s.
Your "7" often just picks for massive funding buying out the VC winners, where they contributed fractions for future innovations. Much of innovation is not the starting idea but the evolution of that idea into reality. Evolution by its reality is absolutely dependent upon failure to determine which branches to follow, if any. Without death, natural evolution can't work.
An example comes to mind from a relative who was appointed by a VC to be comptroller of one of their start-ups. This one had a great idea and worked at the breadboard level with very broadband transmissions. Money had flowed in from your "7" and top Japanese and Korean companies with the objective of going from the breadboard to real chips small enough to be used in home devices. It sounds simple, but wasn't and they faced the question of continuing until the money pile was gone (many more years) trying to find a way around some critical problems related to absolute sizes or junking the project and killing the start-up. My cousin killed it and gave the money back to the investors moving onto projects that did fly.
I have never seen this happen in a government funded innovation program. They always spend every dime and promise a solution that never comes. An excellent example would be the "algae to Oil" program that the Feds created with tens of millions of dollars for "research". From the data on a similar program during the 1970s oil price jump, we had scientific data showing it could no work economically. I was working on the mass cultivation of algae at the time and knew that it was economically impossible by about an order of magnitude out of the ball park. Any innovation in bio-reactors and related technology that got it in the economic ball park could also drop the cost of sewerage treatment and water recycling by a huge amount opening a trillion dollar world market. Innovators have been heavy in these areas for a century and have mined most options even theoretically possible.
The only risk from the "7" are buying up good ideas and killing them when they could create competition. However, competition for one of the "7" is not the same as the others and everyones vision of the future is hazy as best. The threat killing innovation by the "7" is small relative to the threat posed by the government "innovation" monopolies with their teams of experts who never created a start-up or paid the cost of a "brilliant" idea failing. Their experts are smart people, but lacking real skin-in-the game alters their decision making relative to AI or VC or individual investors.
However, these experts never get the thrill of bidding on a contract using a new design that has never been proved (just bits, pieces, and theory with lots of math) and giving a performance guarantee then building it and shipping it to the customer and getting it working at specification in 4 hrs.
Often the winner of the innovation grants depend more politics than technical merit. For example, there was a problem with leaky underground gasoline tanks leaking a government mandated gasoline additive MTBE into ground water. Aside from the political panic of contaminating drinking water, this chemical can be tasted at very low levels of 40 parts per billion (ppb) in water and the EPA had a program for innovation grants to remove this material from ground waters. I had already developed a pilot scale fluidized bed bioreactor at 20 gpm that could economically remove MTBE down to less than 2 ppb (detection limit) and submitted a proposal along with several others. I lost the completion and the proposal that won had a design error that I knew from experience could cause failure and a very slow (months) biological restart. Talking with researchers testing that design from UC Berkeley it did fail. We spent our own money making making a commercial skid mounted automated design and ended up cleaning up the problem in California and several other states. Gas station owners bought the best design (could convert the MTBE into CO2 and H2O going in at 2,000 ppb and exiting at < 2 ppb in a single pass with a 15 minute contact time with no activated carbon consumption) and the government design only when into government sites where cost didn't and their performance wasn't as reliable (the higher their costs the more money from law suits by the cities).
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” ― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
Since good times created weak men and if weak men create hard times, I think we are on the cusp of the "hard times" being created. We have eaten our seed corn and the long, dark dying time winter is nigh.
Ok. Too pessimistic for me. While there's always a risk of things being truly awful, I don't think we are anywhere close to that and don't see that we are likely to get appreciably closer. Ukraine, Gaza, and Venezuela are awful. Russia, most or all of Africa, and some other countries are also near or in that state. That said, the number in extreme poverty or starving are way down. And lines of people trying to get into the US suggests things aren't so awful here.
Either I don't know what you mean by seed corn or I totally disagree that has happened.
My pessimism revolves around the things I care about, which as I am a misanthrope, comfortable with self-loathing, are not people. Nonetheless, it is plain to me that on humanist grounds, the refusal to reckon honestly with the world, is immoral.
There’s an attribution error.
There’s a tendency on the right to trot out “whoever is fertile will be the winners”. This is true, and not trivially so; but it elides what it is they will win.
The world as we know it is so because productive people were productive. It is not so because unproductive people were productive.
20th century population growth celebrated as “success” without regard to this truth, is setting the stage for a humanitarian disaster.
Oxford has long had a degree majoring in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE). Justice lies at the center. Each society makes its own trade-offs among these.
Basic respect comes from recognizing ourselves in others (the Golden Rule). The UN Declaration of Human Rights is Socialism 101 (take from the rich to give to the poor). Investing in unproductive sectors while taxing the productive yields Eurosclerosis. Eventually, creditors will lose, as they have every time.
The only root cause solution I can see is to re-limit government with a new constitution based on voter pays direct democracy. Per Martin Gurri, industrial age governments are no longer fit for purpose.
If your big problem with the trans movement is its anti grandchild agenda, does that mean you also have a problem with ordinary homosexuality? Gay people are also much less into having kids.
"In contrast to markets, people are more likely to overestimate than underestimate" the government's ability to solve problems. While true in most places (U.S., Europe, China, and many others), this phenomenon is not a logical necessity. I conjecture that the causes are fear or risk aversion on the one hand, and ignorance of economic principles on the other. The latter in principle is a solvable problem. Concerning the former, de gustibus non disputatum.
> Finally, and most worrisome of all, I see the moral/intellectual order in tatters.
Me too! Case in point:
> Niall Ferguson has resurrected the phrase Treason of the Intellectuals. Not in that essay, but on YouTube, Ferguson has been outspoken on the alliance between the progressive left and radical Islam, **which share a common hatred of Jews in particular and western civilization in general**.
Indeed, the liberty to engage in positive-sum games is the root of human flourishing.
Unfortunately, the timocracy formulated at the Philadelphia convention was a zero sum game: The spirit of the US constitution can be summarized in Hamilton’s erroneous dictum “Give all the power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all the power to the few, they will oppress the many.” Hamilton much preferred the latter and so we see that the heart of the Federalist Papers (30 to 37)
is a justification for unrestrained federal taxation. Hamilton saw taxation as a means to incur additional national debt, which he considered a blessing, and the United States would be in deeper when he quit his post as Treasury Secretary than the day he assumed it. Hamilton founded the Bank of New York in 1784 which made the first loan to the United States in the Washington presidency. Self-dealing and unethical enrichment thus has been the “order” of the United States since ratification of the second constitution:
“Prospering immediately, the bank began a string of consecutive dividend payments never to be broken. It was also helpful that its young founder, Hamilton, became the secretary of the treasury of the United States in 1789, fostering a long intimacy between the bank and both state and national governments. Hamilton relied on “his bank” to perform services useful to the new and struggling government, such as loaning it $200,000 in 1789, and two years later buying up large quantities of government bonds to keep their price from falling sharply. In return, as secretary of the treasury, Hamilton did his best to protect the bank during difficult times, fighting to keep government funds in the bank even after the new Bank of the United States (also his creation) established a branch in New York. In this he was ultimately not successful, but it is clear that the bank enjoyed what would now be considered unethical treatment at the hands of its founder.”
And Hamilton saw the threat of a US Navy as a weapon that would promote international trade.
This order seems to work rather well when the establishment imposes laws that are mild, foregoes self enrichment through war mongering, and maintains taxation and debt that are not excessive. In such increasingly rare times, ordinary people have been more or less free to go about their business of playing positive sum games. The establishment crosses the line, however, when its looting begins to exceed the transaction costs of unifying the masses of unconnected commoners. It is at such time that the great moments of institutional improvement occur.
The first populist president Andrew Jackson knew the score. In vetoing a bill to recharter the Bank of the United States he wrote:
“If our Government must sell monopolies, it would seem to be its duty to take nothing less than their full value, and if gratuities must be made once in fifteen or twenty years let them not be bestowed on the subjects of a foreign government nor upon a designated and favored class of men in our own country. It is but justice and good policy, as far as the nature of the case will admit, to confine our favors to our own fellow-citizens, and let each in his turn enjoy an opportunity to profit by our bounty. In the bearings of the act before me upon these points I find ample reasons why it should not become a law.”
And the populist Jackson succeeded in paying off the federal debt:
“Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, was suspicious of banks and did not trust the paper money they issued. In 1837, he liquidated the Second Bank of the United States, returning the government’s original investment plus a profit.
This resulted in a huge government surplus of funds. (In 1835, the $17.9 million budget surplus was greater than the total government expenses for that year.) By January of 1835, for the first and only time, all of the government’s interest-bearing debt was paid off. Congress distributed the surplus to the states (many of which were heavily in debt). The Jackson administration ended with the country almost completely out of debt!
This resulted in a huge government surplus of funds. (In 1835, the $17.9 million budget surplus was greater than the total government expenses for that year.) By January of 1835, for the first and only time, all of the government’s interest-bearing debt was paid off. Congress distributed the surplus to the states (many of which were heavily in debt).”
Jackson’s opposition to debt financed foreign military adventures and fiat money call to mind the great populist Prime Minister William Gladstone whose reforms took on an excessively abusive establishment and led to his four separate administrations.
So in this light, Dr. Kling makes an astute point: neither Democrats or Republicans have anything to offer. As has historically been the case, populism is progress. Vote Kennedy.
What is the nature of this piece? It resembles a diary entry or memento in a memoir, so I will take off my intellectual hat and tell Arnold: I hear you; I see you’re concerned about the future. That’s reasonable. But you might ask how your readers feel about the future? We’re probably more upbeat and less concerned about the future. I think you should be less worried and more positive. Things are going to work out. These societal problems are necessary in order to promote learning. Without pain, people won’t listen. I’m grateful for problems and crises to come. These are opportunities for teachers to teach and learners to learn. Never let a crisis go to waste. Let’s have our policy proposals polished and ready to be marketed. A lot depends on us. Gen X and Millennials are prepared. Look around you. See Rob over there. See Coleman over these. See John, and Richard, and Christopher. Bryan has been ready for a long time. You’ll see. Leaders will rise up. Truth will emerge to the extent of our preparation and willingness to work. We have momentum and truth on our side. Stay safe and enjoy the ride.
I am reminded of the line by Hayek (which I am only roughly paraphrasing): When I look to the future I am pessimistic, but when I look to the past I am optimistic.
My pessimism stems from the possibility that there is a lot of pain and damage that will be done before people learn, if they do, and it might take a long time. It seems entirely possible that liberty and justice are, like wealth, not at all the default states of man, and thus we may backslide in such a way that takes centuries to dig out of. It took ~1500 years for the population of Rome to recover after the fall, for instance.
Beautiful comment. This is my view too. In the medium run - disaster. But the disaster is necessary to shake off the intellectual baggage so that something new can emerge that will be even grander than anything we have seen yet. This is the pattern both of history and prophecy.
Good. I would say, ponder the future but don’t dwell on it. Today and tomorrow will be good. It’s important to focus on personal accountability by asking questions like “What can I do today to improve my family’s situation?” Also it’s important to think about our finitude. How shall we live in order to die well? Start at the end, thinking about death and then figure out what to do today.
While I like the Hayek quote, I don't think Hammer's pessimism in any way follows from it. I found his comment incredibly pessimistic. While catastrophe is always possible, I think the odds are massively against it. There is always "damage" of one sort or another. That is inherent in being human. But that doesn't mean things are bad or headed toward something like the fall of Rome. Ignoring the pandemic blip, things are better than they were a few years back and they will almost certainly be better a few years from now.
I like your perspective far better but I'd note that focusing on how to "live in order to die well" is too focused on the future. The road(s) taken to get there are at least as important as the destination.
I wonder if the pessimism here is due to the commenters getting up there in age. Maybe they are disconnected from young leaders, young people of character and are mostly exposed to bad news and young losers. Too much news, not enough positive in person observations.
Worrying is overrated as most worries never materialize. I'm a gen-X kid who grew up practicing diving under my desk at school because the USSR might attack. Then 1989 arrived and the USSR was no more. On the other hand, history shows there are plenty of times when people should have worried. Europeans in the early 1930s should have been more worried. Americans in 2020 should have been less worried about getting sick and more worried about government Totalitarianism and the social virus of panic and bad information.
The challenge is to worry about the right things all while being hopeful and wise. Making good decisions matters a lot in avoiding bad outcomes. It seems to me and perhaps to Arnold Kling that in this particular moment of time not only are bad decisions being made, but those at the head of government and institutions are enthusiastic about making bad decisions. This cannot turn out well!
But you are correct that a portion of the population will always thrive and another portion of the population will muddle through. And the portion of the population that withers will be exploited by the politicians to justify more harmful policies and bad choices.
Gen-X is a mixed lot. From that group we have many wise conservative voices and pundits. But, as you write, Gen-X parents produced the subsequent generation of kids who are seemingly captivated by the need for social conformity and who are consequently pulled to chase every bad idea that crosses their paths.
My view is Gen-X was the last generation of free-range kids. But many, due to the explosion of bad ideas in academic psychology, drew the conclusion that being free-range and having to learn the ropes of life on their own was a bad thing. So they determined to hover over their kids and protect them from trials.
And here we are 30+ years later with a group of young adults who are depressed and neurotic and dependent on the assurance of others - which creates a massive social demand for conformity to what "experts" say.
"I long for order. I think that many people share that longing. I don’t think that they want to re-elect a President Biden who cannot restrain the disorderly wing in his own party. I do not think that most people feel that Mr. Trump represents their idea of order."
The time is right, as never before in my life, for a new party. There's enough low-hanging political fruit, such as the desire for order that Mr. Kling cites, for a sane party to become instantly viable.
Maybe a new primary system would do a lot of the work of a new party. I think most Americans gravitate to moderate clusters on the current 2-party axis, but primary voters tend to be more extreme/expressive in their voting, more concerned with unending order rather than maintaining it. So we wind up with the rematch most people say they didn't want. Maybe the dynamics of a better primary system would allow for better coalition building in governance.
Jonah Goldberg—I'm sure many others agree with him—has called for Republicans to return to the "smoke-filled rooms" of yesteryear, in which party officials would choose the nominees for president and vice president. That seems to me a method more likely than even a reformed primary system to produce a nominee for whom I could vote.
The primaries have consistently chosen the more centrist candidate.
Hillary vs Bernie
Biden vs Warren
Trump vs Bush III/Some Neocon
Kamella Harris was rejected by the primary but chosen by party insiders. Party insiders are typically worse than primary candidates.
The real problem is that most of the people you want to be president are too smart to want to be president.
I get that Trump isn't exactly conservative but it seems wrong to suggest he is in any way centrist. I would argue Haley is more centrist than T.
Not by rhetoric, but by policy. Taxing, spending, immigration, crime, morality, abortion, gays, globalized free trade (incl. with commies).
He's actually a fiery, hot-air speaking moderate, as many critics occasionally mention to denigrate his achievement. A list of centrist policies to contrast between Trump Biden would show a pretty centrist Trump.
*Upending, not unending
Agreed the time may be right and many Americans are highly dissatisfied with the performance (and I say that word with theater in mind) of the two dominant parties. But is there the will and leadership present to overcome the structural advantages, and status quo, that the existing donkeys and elephants possess? And the entrenched tribalism of their constituents? We're talking a sustained, well-organized effort driven by a broad-based coalition of dedicated citizens committed to pluralism, constitutional principles, and the revitalization of American democracy. A tall order, but not impossible.
Actually, this just recently happened. It is exactly what Trump did. They might still be called Republicans but it is very much a new party.
I'm definitely a bit to the right of Bill Clinton but I'd be ecstatic if someone like him took over the Dems right now. Maybe I'd be even more unhappy with Congress (that became more Dem on coattails) but I'm near certain I'd like him better than the two current choices.
As far as a third party, Romney and Weld are the only two who even come to mind but I suppose there's a long list who would at least be marginally better than the current two. Haley definitely goes in that list. (note: I'd still take Biden over any of the other Dem candidates in 2020 but wonder if Hillary might be marginally better than Biden. Probably not..)
I can imagine Romney as the elder statesman of the new party, but he's too old to run for president again. From what I know of him, Ben Sasse would be a good choice.
Was that intended as sarcasm? Romney is younger than T and B.
I don't know Sasse. Maybe he's similar to Crenshaw in that both say smart things but they are completely untested.
Not sarcasm. They're all too old.
Maybe I should clarify that I doubt an effective new party could arise in time to make a serious run this year. I'm thinking of '28.
Will and leadership can be generated, but it will not necessarily manifest on its own.
Avoiding ideological illusions like "the revitalization of American democracy" might perhaps be a good idea.
I know nothing of retail politics, so I don't know whether it's feasible, but I'm sure the demand exists.
Describe the politics of this desired for third party.
In general, doing what polls show most Americans want, with the platform stated clearly and unapologetically. A few sample policies below. PLEASE NOTE: I don't necessarily agree with any of them.
Order, as mentioned above. Keep streets free of crime, and imprison protestors who block traffic, threaten businesses and citizens, etc.
Abortion legal until the third trimester, then illegal except in cases of rape or incest, or when the mother's life is at stake.
No to reparations and DEI.
Yes to school choice.
Keep taxation progressive, with only small changes if any, but talk constantly about how much high earners pay, how little low earners pay (net), and how much better the economy would function with lower top rates, lower capital-gains tax rates (or none), and lower corporate tax rates (or none). Don't force; instead, wherever possible, persuade, then follow. (That last sentence is my guiding thought.)
Abandon the effort toward Net Zero and any mandated switch to EVs, wind, or solar.
On health insurance, small changes, e.g., encourage bare-bones plans and allow purchase across state lines. More shifts toward the free market if, but only if, the public appear favorably inclined. (Persuade, then follow.)
"Transmen aren't men. Transwomen aren't women."
Encourage and defend the use of standardized tests by companies in choosing employees, so kids no longer feel they must attend college to obtain good jobs. (Might require reversal of Griggs vs. Duke Power Co.)
"Racial disparities don't always mean racism."
I could come up with more.
On some subjects I don't know the general opinion, and I won't guess because I would probably substitute my own views.
I would argue it's some combination of Romney Republican, Manchin Democrat, and maybe a bit of BClinton. I list two Dems but would prefer it closer to Romney. If you've heard Bill Maher speak against the woke, a little of that would make me happy but maybe that's asking too much. Better if this third party isn't in any way caustic.
To be more specific- what policies would a Romney/Manchin/Clinton President bring to the table that aren't on offer right now by both major parties?
TPP? not leaving Afghanistan completely?
On the right, not continuing support of Ukraine against Russia seems insane to me.
On the left, much or all of the new spending seems insane to me.
And what policies are those?
Too late, Trump has already taken over the Republican party to be a MAGA workers America first party. Hated by elite snob Democrats, and dis- liked by Never Trump Republicans who will again become important in 2028. Maybe. Trump's Rep party is the new party you say you want, quite different from the Bush or Romney 'good loser' party of 2012 & before. Wait, not THIS new party.
61 mil. votes in 2016, 74 mil. in 2020. Biggest increase in votes ever. Likely to be more in 2024. Despite him being older and less sharp.
If a leader with a better plan can't start a faction in a major party, and win over that party, that leader certainly ain't gonna win, no way, no how.
Tho you can vote RFK jr. If you want to.
Low info loyalists will vote Dem or Rep as usual, as will most party members.
"Time for a new party" plays into the same hand - it is time for a rewrite of the entire underlying, sub-perceptual system.
"Urban crime appears to be headed up"
What data are you looking at that support this conclusion? Most types of urban crime are in fact down when looking at 2023 vs 2022 figures. There are exceptions, like car theft, and there are cases where crime is still above 2019 levels, but the present trend is overall not consistent with that statement AFAICT.
Source: https://counciloncj.org/year-end-2023-crime-trends/
The report you linked shows a big increase in crime from 2019 to now, with a more mixed record in the last year or so.
In a way it’s kind of like talk about inflation. It’s slowed compared to a year or two ago, but it’s not great and the last four years put together are not good.
I suspect crime will improve in many ways as the Floyd insanity burns itself out, but perceptions of crime mostly reflect a sense that they are worse then the before Floyd times.
More generally, people who talk about crime will often say “well it’s not as bad as the 1990s crack wars”, but the reference point in many people’s heads is the before times (pre 1965) or many modern low crime countries today.
There is a general sense that crime could be turned off basically overnight at will, but there is a lack of will (see bukele or newsome cleaning up SF for Xi visit).
Finally, I think people include general social disorder in “crime”. Junkies shouting at people. Needles. Protestors. I have heard Arnold’s complaint about NYC smelling like pot everywhere from multiple people.
I agree that people mentally lump in social disorder in with crime, even when it does not actually pose a risk to their physical safety. Many rural red state counties have higher homicide rates than NYC or SF, but people look at the latter and it subjectively feels less safe to them -- that's an understandable bias, but it is a bias.
Most Americans don't remember pre-1965 nor do they care much about other countries, so those comparisons seem less likely to be salient. It is instructive to look at the long-term homicide rate graphs for the US and other Anglosphere countries that have good records: you see that
(a) the 2023 rate, 5.3 per 100k, is in fact identical to the 2017 figure and only slightly above 5.0 for 2019
(b) the lowest it ever got in the 20th century was around 4-4.5 in the 50s, still not a huge diff from today; and pre-WW2 rates were well above current figures
(c) across all that time, as policies and people changed, the US rate has always been far higher than it's Anglosphere peers
All of which should make one pessimistic that it could be just shut down if "we only had the will". I see that as a right wing version of the technocratic left wing belief that we could fix bad health outcomes or educational outcomes if the government really wanted to do that-- in all those cases things are less amenable to systemic government control than people would like to believe.
"All of which should make one pessimistic that it could be just shut down if 'we only had the will."
Come on man; you've got to be joking with this line. There's no difference between "will" and "policy" and changes in policy cause changes in behavior, as any small child knows is true.
If we can have the will to undo law enforcement and watch crime go up, then we can have the will to start enforcing the law again and make it go back down. Duh! "Well, I decided to stop dieting and exercising and I gained a bunch of weight. I'm pessimistic that I could just lose it again if only I had the will." Totally ridiculous. In 100 years we've gone from "Spirit of Progress - There's nothing we (i.e., the state) can't do if we put our minds and hearts into it!" to "Aw shucks, despite all this extra wealth and tech, there's just nothing we can do, guess we have no choice but to live this way, and we'll all just have to learn to cope with this crap and try to console each other with childish illusions about this being the best of all possible worlds."
Migrant flows to the border fluctuate by hundreds of percent depending on whether there's actually any will to control them or not. Oh, but will can't matter, so I guess we can't believe our lying eyes and the complaints of Deep Blue city leaders are hallucinations.
Crime skyrocketed then collapsed in NYC due to a change - and then change back - in 'will', i.e., leadership and policy. Bukele has utterly transformed life in El Salvador - practically overnight so far as major societal trends go - from the most the most to least murderous place in the Western Hemisphere, because his administration "had the will", and he won reelection in a landslide and even the usual critics of the things he had to do to get it done have had to confess that the results are so spectacular that it's hard to argue that even harsh tactics weren't justified necessities.
Carjackings are up by hundreds of percent in many cities in just a few years because the political leadership and police lost the will to do anything about it but reluctantly fill in the blanks on insurance forms, and because it's an election year some local governments have finally seen the light about the need to do something to put a lid on stuff getting out of control, and are suddenly rediscovering the will to pass crime reform bills to, you know, start arresting lawbreakers again. I guess they are all total idiots in thinking any of that could accomplish anything, because, after all, that would mean "having the will" matters.
In the US Capital, anytime the administration actually gets serious about identifying the perpetrator of any incident they care about - for instance related to national security, politics, or having gone over the line and annoyed a VIP - then you may have noticed there is actually no difficulty whatsoever in quickly tracking them down and arresting them using the mountain of data from pervasive cameras, vehicle tracking systems, sensors, cell-phone data, facial-recognition and other surveillance tools, etc. to figure out who they are, what their movements were, and where they can be found. There are no longer any meaningful legal, technological, fiscal, or manpower resource limitations to scaling these efforts all the way to Full China if the powers that be wanted to, i.e., "had the will", but they don't want to.
There's a big difference between "reduce crime" and "shut it down". The first is possible. The second isn't.
Ok, let's assume zero is impossible and Reduction=erf(Effort). It just doesn't matter to any practical question of policy if we're nowhere close to plateau. So the question is, what's the elasticity? Nicholas is saying it's low, while I'm saying it's high.
I like that way of framing it.
The homicide rate is more or less a measurement of how often blacks are killing each other. There were essentially two waves of BLM driven homicide increases. One in 2015 that was more localized (st Louis, Baltimore) and the Floyd era that was more broadly national.
As Steve sailer noted, you can even see the change in black behavior in traffic fatalities at the same time, there just seemed to be a general sense that blacks could do whatever they wanted.
I myself experience the 2015 Baltimore variety. I can report that the city really went into a downward spiral after that which hasn’t stopped. Areas that used to be safe are not safe anymore and residents continue to flee. I was a victim of crime at least a dozen times when I lived in the city (mostly breaking into my car) but only ever reported it the first time (and was informed nothing would be done about it). I once had a group of black youths chase after me to try and steal my bike but luckily I got away before they grabbed me. Another white guy on a bike wasn’t so lucky and got murdered.
I’m aware that there is a lot of black homicide in the American south, but it seems ridiculous to blame that on “red states”. The people doing the murdering are black Democratic voters, they just don’t have the numbers to win their state elections. The American south remains very high in black % of the population.
Getting away from murder, Charles Murray makes the case that there was a drawback in so called “broken windows policing” that slowly bore fruit in what we see today in our large cities.
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/The-Collapse-of-Broken-Windows-2013-22-FINAL.pdf?x91208
When I say there is a solution, I’m well aware that it’s a political no go because of the sacredness of blacks.
P.s. one thing to keep in mind on homicide stats is that trauma care has vastly lowered death rates from injury. The same gunshot wound that would kill before the Vietnam war now kills only 20% as often.
In the spirit of forumposter123's post below, if people stop reporting crimes because "it's not going to do any good", the actual increase in crime will be less than the reported rate. Of course, that doesn't really apply to homicides.
The “rural red state county” talking point is so transparently a metric of something other than “redness” or “ruralness” that it can seem like those bringing it up, are wishing to make a point they are too polite to make.
I look at major chains closing stores in American cities because the rampant theft makes it unprofitable to keep them open. You can show your government charts. I will go with the opinion of those with their own skin in the game who walk away from American urban communities because the governments of those communities make it unprofitable to do business.
Retail theft *may* be rising; that is one case where low and variable reporting rates actually make it hard to tell. But:
1. one should always be wary of drawing monocausal conclusions in a situation with obvious large confounders (in person chain retail is doing worse than usual for other reasons, e.g. online shopping)
2. retail theft is bad but is not the same as rising general crime-- and "government charts" on violent crime in particular tend to be quite reliable.
Most types of urban crime may indeed be slightly down when looking at 2023 vs 2022 figures - Krugman tweeted a graph of FBI data the other day, showing violent crime rate for US overall having declined from almost 400/100,000 to about 350/100,000 - but American urban crime rates are still _two orders of magnitude_ (that's 100x) above those of really safe countries such as Japan, where parents can let their grade school children ride the subway and walk to school and back. Krugman resorted to cutting off the base from his graph to make the change look much bigger than it really is, and included no data points for either American cities or international ones for a fair comparison. See pictures here: https://twitter.com/CandideIII/status/1765403405802254491
See also: https://www.police1.com/crime-reduction/it-is-historic-u-s-sees-dramatic-drop-in-homicides-violent-crime-in-2023, a separate study reaching broadly similar conclusions.
Forgive me if this comes across as pedantic, but I think it's worth pushing on because there is a decades-long trend of people believing crime rates are going up even when they go down, and if we are going to have a discussion about how social order is faring, it ought to be a reality-based one.
DC has a system that counts gunshot incidents. I'll get to the data in a bit, but first some big picture history which an indispensable to its accurate interpretation.
In the years after WWII DC was a nice place to live, though second-tier as a city. It had a large black population dependent on either government jobs or handouts for historical reasons (see "Up From Slavery" Chapter 5.) The dependency didn't matter because the American establishment hadn't yet lost its collective mind and tended to be quite adept at controlling crime and making urban areas pleasant and safe places to live, though much poorer and technologically limited than we are today.
Fast forward to the the 80s and 90s and lots of DC was dangerous urban ghetto that tourists were advised to avoid, with lots of poverty, drug use, crime, and violence. But other trends were happening at the same time. A number of trends both national and local combined to turn the situation around in some parts of the city in a process of gradual but sustained improvement, to the point that they are practically unrecognizable today. There was a huge police hiring push starting in the late 80's, and of course a big problem today is that those guys all recently retired and its been difficult to replace them especially with officers of the same competence (they ended up hiring a bunch of old retirees back for 5-year terms, and those guys did not chase anyone down on foot.) Still, the 2000s and 2010s were particularly positive in ways that interacted with what was going on in the housing market, and one can identify 2018-19 as "peak DC".
DC has a system to count and locate all gunshot incidents. Here is what the number of annual incidents looks like.
2014: 9638
2015: 7953
2016: 5873
2017: 4883
2018: 4653
2019: 6717
2020: 14068
2021: 8339
2022: 7123
2023: 8693
You can see the steady improvement from 2014 to 2018. What happened in 2019? Starting in 2017, you might say the DC Council, with encouragement from the ACLU, "lost the will" to keep prosecuting the usual suspects for the usual transgressions so they started going - get this - soft on crime. E.g., they decriminalized turnstile-jumping and fare-evasion on the metro in November 2018, "because race". (Fast forward 5 years, who could have predicted that they've recently had to retrofit the machines with stuff that makes it harder to jump or double-up, even though that was unnecessary for 40 years?)
What actually happened in just as things were dramatically improving with more effective policing in the mid 2010s, the left was turning against policing again, in a way that had a strongly racialized flavor that was also politically useful. The national political-and-media reaction to death of Michael Brown in Ferguson in August 2014 provides a good example of the playbook and proved a preview of things to come. With Obama administration encouragement, DC was among many cities that leveraged these sentiments to pull back policing by means of the "Police Complaint Board" series of reports, the recommendations of which started to get implemented and have an impact in mid 2018.
But then we got the annus horribilis of 2020 which despite everybody supposed to be on lockdown because of covid, more than doubled the gunshot incidents. Mostly the cops got locked down. CDC didn't stop the spread, and MPD didn't stop the lead. The emergency police reform bill reset the effective level of policing noticeably downward.
Which is why even after the dust settled in 2021, gunshot incidents are "down" from civil-breakdown levels to being only 50-80% higher than what was achieved before the re-softening. Carjacking are another story - DC drives could only dream of the pipedream fantasy of there only being 80% more carjackings than there were in 2018.
Which is why even the DC Council and Mayor Bowser had to get their acts together in an election year and undo a lot of the non-enforcement insanity of the last several years in the recent crime bill. The trouble is, the damage has been done, and the police have been hollowed out, demoralized, and don't trust the politicians to have their back and not throw them under the bus again in the event of any controversy. Do you want to bet good money that gunshot events will go back under 7,000 in 2024?
Luciaphile makes a good point. And to extend it a little -- some of the places with the worst crime have prosecutors who refuse to prosecute many types of crime. So how good are the crime statistics in places like that? One would think that many crimes would go unreported if they won't be prosecuted anyway.
Underreporting of relatively minor property crimes may be a factor-- it's almost by definition hard to tell-- but for violent crimes and especially for homicides that is unlikely, and those are down, and *usually* other crimes are correlated with those.
It's possible for there to simultaneously be an increase in visible indicators of social disorder and a decrease in major crimes, so that people are actually materially safer in the ways that matter most, but nonetheless understandably feel less safe. We shouldn't dismiss that feeling; it probably has real morale and social trust effects distinct from the effects of actual violence! But we also shouldn't overindex on it.
There are lots of areas of my hometown where I wouldn’t go. They are enclaves (not for the wealthy, they have their own). The neighborhood where my father grew up, for instance. I noticed in the paper some of the locals there were trying to become one of the city’s “no lying down” districts, a designation that would permit them to reclaim their sidewalks from people using drugs, or just doing their sleeping there.
Not because I’d be afraid to walk around there. Not belonging to a certain world gives you a kind of armor. I am part of no feuds, I don’t owe anyone any drug money. Does someone want to steal my old iPhone SE? Theirs is probably better …
But the parents in the area, recalling that an 11 yo child was shot to death walking home from school, by one of those sidewalk squatters, probably feel differently about it than I do. They may be indexing, incorrectly, off that one incident, instead of being content to have gotten off so lightly and reminding themselves, as they step out into the street, that crime is down.
I feel very safe all the time. Even when I experience urban disorder - say, walking along the downtown jogging trail around the lake, in my old town, past encampments with generators and old recliners, even TVs blaring where once there was a patch of green nature, a fellow screaming at me to “suck his cock.” Do you imagine I feel any fear? Good Lord, no. A disinclination to return? To go there at all, somewhere it was commonplace to go? Sure. Does my disfavoring the place, just infinitesimally, for aesthetic reasons make it less safe, in concert with others making the same choice? The random stabbers cause some problems, true, but it’s absolutely as you say: dwarfed by the sheer number of people still enjoying the trail, evading lunatic stabbers.
I’m too old to care what happens to me, and for the most part I stay in my bubble.
I wouldn’t take my feelings about crime, to be the measure of anything more than successful retreat from America.
I wonder about changes in crime. The TVs are often nailed to the wall or otherwise a pain to remove: that was the thing when I was a kid, coming home and finding the TV gone.
Less so people banging on the door or window at night. That’s something people faithfully post on Nextdoor, but it doesn’t interest the police.
Meanwhile, when I was a kid, there was no such crime as stealing Amazon packages.
The whole family got a package maybe 3x a year. Usually a gift from a relative. Is every porch piracy reported and entering the property crime statistics?
Ditto mail. I don’t think it had occurred to anyone to steal mail, but now it’s in the news regularly, or complained about on Nextdoor.
You didn’t used to see people ****ing and ****ing in the street as you drove by, but now that’s a fairly routine occurrence, and I assume it mostly goes unreported. It would have amounted to a disturbance of the peace once upon a time.
Your statement: "given executives in charge of the “magnificent seven” (Microsoft, Alphabet/Google, Meta/Facebook, Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, and Tesla) enormous power to determine the path of innovation." is only partially true. I am viewing the innovation problem more from the trenches viewpoint and know some friends in both the Angle Investing and VC worlds. I was also an innovator in my area of recycled aquaculture systems, having led the way since the early 1970s.
Your "7" often just picks for massive funding buying out the VC winners, where they contributed fractions for future innovations. Much of innovation is not the starting idea but the evolution of that idea into reality. Evolution by its reality is absolutely dependent upon failure to determine which branches to follow, if any. Without death, natural evolution can't work.
An example comes to mind from a relative who was appointed by a VC to be comptroller of one of their start-ups. This one had a great idea and worked at the breadboard level with very broadband transmissions. Money had flowed in from your "7" and top Japanese and Korean companies with the objective of going from the breadboard to real chips small enough to be used in home devices. It sounds simple, but wasn't and they faced the question of continuing until the money pile was gone (many more years) trying to find a way around some critical problems related to absolute sizes or junking the project and killing the start-up. My cousin killed it and gave the money back to the investors moving onto projects that did fly.
I have never seen this happen in a government funded innovation program. They always spend every dime and promise a solution that never comes. An excellent example would be the "algae to Oil" program that the Feds created with tens of millions of dollars for "research". From the data on a similar program during the 1970s oil price jump, we had scientific data showing it could no work economically. I was working on the mass cultivation of algae at the time and knew that it was economically impossible by about an order of magnitude out of the ball park. Any innovation in bio-reactors and related technology that got it in the economic ball park could also drop the cost of sewerage treatment and water recycling by a huge amount opening a trillion dollar world market. Innovators have been heavy in these areas for a century and have mined most options even theoretically possible.
The only risk from the "7" are buying up good ideas and killing them when they could create competition. However, competition for one of the "7" is not the same as the others and everyones vision of the future is hazy as best. The threat killing innovation by the "7" is small relative to the threat posed by the government "innovation" monopolies with their teams of experts who never created a start-up or paid the cost of a "brilliant" idea failing. Their experts are smart people, but lacking real skin-in-the game alters their decision making relative to AI or VC or individual investors.
However, these experts never get the thrill of bidding on a contract using a new design that has never been proved (just bits, pieces, and theory with lots of math) and giving a performance guarantee then building it and shipping it to the customer and getting it working at specification in 4 hrs.
Often the winner of the innovation grants depend more politics than technical merit. For example, there was a problem with leaky underground gasoline tanks leaking a government mandated gasoline additive MTBE into ground water. Aside from the political panic of contaminating drinking water, this chemical can be tasted at very low levels of 40 parts per billion (ppb) in water and the EPA had a program for innovation grants to remove this material from ground waters. I had already developed a pilot scale fluidized bed bioreactor at 20 gpm that could economically remove MTBE down to less than 2 ppb (detection limit) and submitted a proposal along with several others. I lost the completion and the proposal that won had a design error that I knew from experience could cause failure and a very slow (months) biological restart. Talking with researchers testing that design from UC Berkeley it did fail. We spent our own money making making a commercial skid mounted automated design and ended up cleaning up the problem in California and several other states. Gas station owners bought the best design (could convert the MTBE into CO2 and H2O going in at 2,000 ppb and exiting at < 2 ppb in a single pass with a 15 minute contact time with no activated carbon consumption) and the government design only when into government sites where cost didn't and their performance wasn't as reliable (the higher their costs the more money from law suits by the cities).
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” ― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
Where are we in that cycle now?
Since good times created weak men and if weak men create hard times, I think we are on the cusp of the "hard times" being created. We have eaten our seed corn and the long, dark dying time winter is nigh.
Ok. Too pessimistic for me. While there's always a risk of things being truly awful, I don't think we are anywhere close to that and don't see that we are likely to get appreciably closer. Ukraine, Gaza, and Venezuela are awful. Russia, most or all of Africa, and some other countries are also near or in that state. That said, the number in extreme poverty or starving are way down. And lines of people trying to get into the US suggests things aren't so awful here.
Either I don't know what you mean by seed corn or I totally disagree that has happened.
My pessimism revolves around the things I care about, which as I am a misanthrope, comfortable with self-loathing, are not people. Nonetheless, it is plain to me that on humanist grounds, the refusal to reckon honestly with the world, is immoral.
There’s an attribution error.
There’s a tendency on the right to trot out “whoever is fertile will be the winners”. This is true, and not trivially so; but it elides what it is they will win.
The world as we know it is so because productive people were productive. It is not so because unproductive people were productive.
20th century population growth celebrated as “success” without regard to this truth, is setting the stage for a humanitarian disaster.
Y’all don’t like what you see in Gaza?
My god.
Ya like taking my privacy away....surveillance capitalism.
Never show fear or disgust around criminals.
They now rule the West.
So stop dreading anything in writing, Sir.
Not that you’re wrong, but these things happen from time to time.
I wish I was more optimistic that US state capacity will hold things together.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/an-american-civil-war
I think the biggest problem we have is the capture of policy-making by people who are more interested in left/right theater than actual solutions.
Alas, so many of them think the things they theatrically argue about actually are the solutions. They sincerely believe it.
Oxford has long had a degree majoring in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE). Justice lies at the center. Each society makes its own trade-offs among these.
Basic respect comes from recognizing ourselves in others (the Golden Rule). The UN Declaration of Human Rights is Socialism 101 (take from the rich to give to the poor). Investing in unproductive sectors while taxing the productive yields Eurosclerosis. Eventually, creditors will lose, as they have every time.
The only root cause solution I can see is to re-limit government with a new constitution based on voter pays direct democracy. Per Martin Gurri, industrial age governments are no longer fit for purpose.
If your big problem with the trans movement is its anti grandchild agenda, does that mean you also have a problem with ordinary homosexuality? Gay people are also much less into having kids.
"In contrast to markets, people are more likely to overestimate than underestimate" the government's ability to solve problems. While true in most places (U.S., Europe, China, and many others), this phenomenon is not a logical necessity. I conjecture that the causes are fear or risk aversion on the one hand, and ignorance of economic principles on the other. The latter in principle is a solvable problem. Concerning the former, de gustibus non disputatum.
> Finally, and most worrisome of all, I see the moral/intellectual order in tatters.
Me too! Case in point:
> Niall Ferguson has resurrected the phrase Treason of the Intellectuals. Not in that essay, but on YouTube, Ferguson has been outspoken on the alliance between the progressive left and radical Islam, **which share a common hatred of Jews in particular and western civilization in general**.
This is surely intellectual "order" of some sort.
Indeed, the liberty to engage in positive-sum games is the root of human flourishing.
Unfortunately, the timocracy formulated at the Philadelphia convention was a zero sum game: The spirit of the US constitution can be summarized in Hamilton’s erroneous dictum “Give all the power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all the power to the few, they will oppress the many.” Hamilton much preferred the latter and so we see that the heart of the Federalist Papers (30 to 37)
is a justification for unrestrained federal taxation. Hamilton saw taxation as a means to incur additional national debt, which he considered a blessing, and the United States would be in deeper when he quit his post as Treasury Secretary than the day he assumed it. Hamilton founded the Bank of New York in 1784 which made the first loan to the United States in the Washington presidency. Self-dealing and unethical enrichment thus has been the “order” of the United States since ratification of the second constitution:
“Prospering immediately, the bank began a string of consecutive dividend payments never to be broken. It was also helpful that its young founder, Hamilton, became the secretary of the treasury of the United States in 1789, fostering a long intimacy between the bank and both state and national governments. Hamilton relied on “his bank” to perform services useful to the new and struggling government, such as loaning it $200,000 in 1789, and two years later buying up large quantities of government bonds to keep their price from falling sharply. In return, as secretary of the treasury, Hamilton did his best to protect the bank during difficult times, fighting to keep government funds in the bank even after the new Bank of the United States (also his creation) established a branch in New York. In this he was ultimately not successful, but it is clear that the bank enjoyed what would now be considered unethical treatment at the hands of its founder.”
(https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/economics-business-and-labor/businesses-and-occupations/bank-new-york-company-inc )
And Hamilton saw the threat of a US Navy as a weapon that would promote international trade.
This order seems to work rather well when the establishment imposes laws that are mild, foregoes self enrichment through war mongering, and maintains taxation and debt that are not excessive. In such increasingly rare times, ordinary people have been more or less free to go about their business of playing positive sum games. The establishment crosses the line, however, when its looting begins to exceed the transaction costs of unifying the masses of unconnected commoners. It is at such time that the great moments of institutional improvement occur.
The first populist president Andrew Jackson knew the score. In vetoing a bill to recharter the Bank of the United States he wrote:
“If our Government must sell monopolies, it would seem to be its duty to take nothing less than their full value, and if gratuities must be made once in fifteen or twenty years let them not be bestowed on the subjects of a foreign government nor upon a designated and favored class of men in our own country. It is but justice and good policy, as far as the nature of the case will admit, to confine our favors to our own fellow-citizens, and let each in his turn enjoy an opportunity to profit by our bounty. In the bearings of the act before me upon these points I find ample reasons why it should not become a law.”
(https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ajveto01.asp )
And the populist Jackson succeeded in paying off the federal debt:
“Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, was suspicious of banks and did not trust the paper money they issued. In 1837, he liquidated the Second Bank of the United States, returning the government’s original investment plus a profit.
This resulted in a huge government surplus of funds. (In 1835, the $17.9 million budget surplus was greater than the total government expenses for that year.) By January of 1835, for the first and only time, all of the government’s interest-bearing debt was paid off. Congress distributed the surplus to the states (many of which were heavily in debt). The Jackson administration ended with the country almost completely out of debt!
This resulted in a huge government surplus of funds. (In 1835, the $17.9 million budget surplus was greater than the total government expenses for that year.) By January of 1835, for the first and only time, all of the government’s interest-bearing debt was paid off. Congress distributed the surplus to the states (many of which were heavily in debt).”
Jackson’s opposition to debt financed foreign military adventures and fiat money call to mind the great populist Prime Minister William Gladstone whose reforms took on an excessively abusive establishment and led to his four separate administrations.
So in this light, Dr. Kling makes an astute point: neither Democrats or Republicans have anything to offer. As has historically been the case, populism is progress. Vote Kennedy.
What is the nature of this piece? It resembles a diary entry or memento in a memoir, so I will take off my intellectual hat and tell Arnold: I hear you; I see you’re concerned about the future. That’s reasonable. But you might ask how your readers feel about the future? We’re probably more upbeat and less concerned about the future. I think you should be less worried and more positive. Things are going to work out. These societal problems are necessary in order to promote learning. Without pain, people won’t listen. I’m grateful for problems and crises to come. These are opportunities for teachers to teach and learners to learn. Never let a crisis go to waste. Let’s have our policy proposals polished and ready to be marketed. A lot depends on us. Gen X and Millennials are prepared. Look around you. See Rob over there. See Coleman over these. See John, and Richard, and Christopher. Bryan has been ready for a long time. You’ll see. Leaders will rise up. Truth will emerge to the extent of our preparation and willingness to work. We have momentum and truth on our side. Stay safe and enjoy the ride.
I am reminded of the line by Hayek (which I am only roughly paraphrasing): When I look to the future I am pessimistic, but when I look to the past I am optimistic.
My pessimism stems from the possibility that there is a lot of pain and damage that will be done before people learn, if they do, and it might take a long time. It seems entirely possible that liberty and justice are, like wealth, not at all the default states of man, and thus we may backslide in such a way that takes centuries to dig out of. It took ~1500 years for the population of Rome to recover after the fall, for instance.
Beautiful comment. This is my view too. In the medium run - disaster. But the disaster is necessary to shake off the intellectual baggage so that something new can emerge that will be even grander than anything we have seen yet. This is the pattern both of history and prophecy.
Good. I would say, ponder the future but don’t dwell on it. Today and tomorrow will be good. It’s important to focus on personal accountability by asking questions like “What can I do today to improve my family’s situation?” Also it’s important to think about our finitude. How shall we live in order to die well? Start at the end, thinking about death and then figure out what to do today.
While I like the Hayek quote, I don't think Hammer's pessimism in any way follows from it. I found his comment incredibly pessimistic. While catastrophe is always possible, I think the odds are massively against it. There is always "damage" of one sort or another. That is inherent in being human. But that doesn't mean things are bad or headed toward something like the fall of Rome. Ignoring the pandemic blip, things are better than they were a few years back and they will almost certainly be better a few years from now.
I like your perspective far better but I'd note that focusing on how to "live in order to die well" is too focused on the future. The road(s) taken to get there are at least as important as the destination.
I agree it’s very pessimistic, and it as 8 Likes here at the end of the day. Maybe this isn’t the right blog for me.
I just finished reading L.S. Dugdale’s The Art of Dying. I’ll post about it.
The pessimism in this substack, Kling and commenters, often bothers me but there's too much else I like.
I wonder if the pessimism here is due to the commenters getting up there in age. Maybe they are disconnected from young leaders, young people of character and are mostly exposed to bad news and young losers. Too much news, not enough positive in person observations.
Scott,
Worrying is overrated as most worries never materialize. I'm a gen-X kid who grew up practicing diving under my desk at school because the USSR might attack. Then 1989 arrived and the USSR was no more. On the other hand, history shows there are plenty of times when people should have worried. Europeans in the early 1930s should have been more worried. Americans in 2020 should have been less worried about getting sick and more worried about government Totalitarianism and the social virus of panic and bad information.
The challenge is to worry about the right things all while being hopeful and wise. Making good decisions matters a lot in avoiding bad outcomes. It seems to me and perhaps to Arnold Kling that in this particular moment of time not only are bad decisions being made, but those at the head of government and institutions are enthusiastic about making bad decisions. This cannot turn out well!
But you are correct that a portion of the population will always thrive and another portion of the population will muddle through. And the portion of the population that withers will be exploited by the politicians to justify more harmful policies and bad choices.
Gen-X is a mixed lot. From that group we have many wise conservative voices and pundits. But, as you write, Gen-X parents produced the subsequent generation of kids who are seemingly captivated by the need for social conformity and who are consequently pulled to chase every bad idea that crosses their paths.
My view is Gen-X was the last generation of free-range kids. But many, due to the explosion of bad ideas in academic psychology, drew the conclusion that being free-range and having to learn the ropes of life on their own was a bad thing. So they determined to hover over their kids and protect them from trials.
And here we are 30+ years later with a group of young adults who are depressed and neurotic and dependent on the assurance of others - which creates a massive social demand for conformity to what "experts" say.
It is being funded with general government debt, not tax payers.