The Great American Racial Awakening (Part Three): “It Wasn’t Me!” and Something to be Done.

Jacques Delacroix Culture, Current Events , , ,

American society, American whites, non-black minorities, and even some African Americans, have not fully absorbed the fact that American slavery was a long story of atrocities. It was also an endeavor of mass rape, as the light skin color of many African Americans demonstrates. (It was rape by definition; human “property” does not have the ability to give consent.) Soon after the abolition of slavery, incapacitating legally defined inferior treatment of black Americans descended on much of the country. In the South – the historical home of slavery – extra-judicial murder was frequent enough to keep many blacks timid and in partial subjection; sometimes, the resort to intimidation rose to mass murder. Incidentally, this forgetfulness is why I am glad that National Geographic, first, and Pres. Biden second, recently chose to showcase the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. Whatever the latter’s real motivation, that may be the first good thing he did.

Of course, the question should arise, must arise, of responsibility regarding both slavery and segregation. This for two reasons. First, long lasting acts of inhumanity should not go un-described lest ignorance do harm in the next generations. Second, the treatment of African Americans was, for centuries so spectacularly at variance with long standing Anglo-American tradition that some sort of explanation is required. But there can be no explanation, of course without a recognition of who the actors were, of their identification. In fact, there are voices among the pushers of Wokeness claiming that all whites are guilty by definition. (I choose my words with here care.) “It wasn’t me; I wasn’t even here,” reply many white conservatives. Below is an examination of the white case I know best, mine,

I am immigrant. I landed in the US as an adult for good in 1963. It was too late to contribute much to racial segregation. If one of my approximately 30 family antecedents since 1865 had made it to American shores before me, I think the news would have reached me through family lore. So, I am almost certainly innocent on the account of aiding segregation, including trans-generationally innocent. Slavery is another issue.

Assessing my antecedents’ possible contributions to slavery is more dicey because of the greater remoteness in time but, especially, because of the multiplicity of family lines one would have to follow. (I think that to arrive even at 1800, one would have to research up to 64 linkages.) It seems that both sides of my family going back to my great-great-grandparents at least come from eastern and northern France, hundreds of mile from the western coast slaving ports. This does not exclude the possibility that one young man or other among those who sired me found his way there and signed up for a slaving voyage or two without leaving a record worthy of notice. There is also no obvious record of anyone with my last name, or my mother’s maiden name being a slave owner in America. This leaves open the possibility that some of the other branches with different surnames reached here and held slaves. As they say, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Still, on the whole, my antecedents are less likely to have profited from slavery than many, many people of coastal African descent, for example. Late into the 19th century, for example, the economy of the west African kingdom of Benin was centered on slave trading, including feeding the remaining cross-Atlantic trade. It would be surprising if some descendants of American slaves or some recent Nigerian immigrants were not also descendants of Benin slavers. Also, take the Kenyan Obamas, for example, with their Arabized first names… (“Barack” means “blessed,” in Arabic, a pious way to say “luck,” or “lucky;” and the aunt the president would not acknowledge was named “Zeituna,” Arabic for “Olive.” No olives grow in Kenya, I am sure. So, why “Olive”?) How did these names happen given that they are not Muslims? Could it be that the older Obamas were involved with the Arab slave traders of Africa’s east coast (who plied their trade much longer than anyone based in America)?

This mindless genealogical excursion is coming to an end, finally. There was a point to it though. It is this: It’s easy enough for many, possibly for most white Americans to argue that they should not be held to account either for slavery or for racial segregation because they were not here, in America, when those happened. What’s more, it’s likely that none of their ancestors were. The immigrant (legal, I hope) who landed yesterday from Russia certainly can make that claim, same as I do. It seems to me that the claim is largely irrelevant. In fact, and thinking realistically and cynically, if we looked for culpability through blood lines, we shouldn’t be surprised to find that the average African American of today is more related to slave owners of the past than is the average white American. (This speculation is based on the pretty good assumption that most of today’s white Americans trace all their American ancestry to post-1863 immigration.)

Thus my point here is not that American conservatives should wallow forever in useless guilt (like a liberal wimpette) because of some supposed culpability based on race. Neither do I think that they should help feed – by supporting this claim – a sense of impunity among black criminals preying mostly on innocent African Americans. Nor do I suggest that my fellow conservatives should yield to any of the endless, diffuse race-based blackmails filling our media today (in 2021). My point rather is that we, Americans, including, and especially American conservatives, should fix what we can. I explain the ethical reason why we must do so below.

Yesterday’s immigrant, and I, and most Americans probably, live, exist, some thrive, in part thanks to the existence of a federal state that guarantees our safety from exterior threats. It’s the same federal state that makes possible a certain peacefulness, a degree of predictability of daily life without which we couldn’t even contemplate the pursuit of happiness. The fact that it does so with a heavy hand and at a high cost that I often deplore, does not change the basic fact that it does. If your libertarian beliefs make it difficult to think of this, look at Nigeria for the past ten years and at Mexico during its current elections (June 2021). However, the same federal state, in a straight historical line again, the very same federal state, engaged without discontinuity, in slave catching for fifty or one hundred years. It went on until the very eve of the Civil War. I don’t mean that the Federal Government went hunting for slaves in Africa but that it cooperated in returning runaway slaves to their owners. The practice was thunderously re-affirmed as late as 1857 in the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott Decision. For all, we know, slavery as a regional economic system might have collapsed early if the long boundary between free and slave states had been one great big open door devoid of federal interference.

It seems to me that there is no way to affirm honestly: Yes, I am appreciative for the benefits I derive from the Federal Government but I am in no way responsible for any of its past actions. Rather, I think, the following conservative principle must prevail:

The Federal Government is my servant; I am responsible to repair what my servant damaged.

I hasten to say that I don’t know how to compensate anyone for the great physical and emotional damage slavery and then, segregation inflicted on their ancestors. I confess this while noting that financial compensation for pain and suffering stands right in the middle of the mainstream of Anglo-American legal tradition. I want to focus instead on something more tangible: income.

Money often comes down through the generations. It also often fails to so come down, it’s true. This is a complicated matter. What is sure is that if the ancestor has not money, the descendant will not inherit his money. If the ancestor has no money to transmit because he is lazy, a drunkard, a whore-monger, or even simply handicapped, it’s not really any of my business as a citizen of this federal state. If, on the other hand, the descendant inherits nothing because of something my servant did to his ancestor, it’s clearly my responsibility to try and do something about it.

An unresolved concrete matter from both slavery and segregation is one of unpaid wages, and of income that could not be realized in part because of the actions of the Federal Government. I mean, my Federal Government, yesterday’s immigrant’s Federal Government, and also my Hispanic neighbors’ Federal Government. I think we all owe some compensation to our fellow citizens who have slave ancestors. (I am also ignoring here the possibility that segregation adversely affected black immigrants, people with no US slave background, because, I think, there were hardly any until recently. In general, I am skeptical of immigrants’ claims, as I indicated earlier.)

Forty-five years ago, economists Fogel and Engerman showed in Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery that slavery could fairly rigorously be subjected to conventional quantitative economic analysis, including if memory is correct, that of wage equivalencies. (The fact that the book soon became controversial only means to me that many readers don’t know how to read figures, or don’t care to.) It shouldn’t be beyond the power of modern economists to give us a rough estimate of the wages slaves would have been paid if they had not been slaves. The figure might seem surprisingly low, incidentally, because slaves were housed and fed, after a fashion, and housing and food constituted the two main recurring expenses of unskilled free workers.

Whatever the case may be, Americans in general, or just conservatives, could announce an overall amount of wages owed to slaves and, separately, of potential income black citizens lost to segregation, both augmented by accumulated interest. Proposals for discharging this collective debt should be submitted to broad public discussion. Ideally, personally, I would prefer a single payment or partial payments spread over how long it would take all made to those contemporary citizens who can show slave ancestry in the US. Since I have no illusion that any method of direct payment to individuals would have any chance of being accepted because of ambient puritanism, my fallback position would be educational/ training grants awarded to any descendant of slaves upon reaching legal maturity. I like this solution because there is good evidence that education is a reliable income and wealth multiplier. Enhanced education/training thus creates -however slight – the possibility that American society might leave that particular portion of a more general problem behind forever. Help with down payment on real estate would also probably be favored by many and for the same reason. (It seems that owning a house is the main mean of saving for most Americans.) There are many other possibilities.

Ideally, the funds for this historical compensation would come from a voluntary levy, from a subscription (a method for financing public goods not tried often enough in my view). African Americans with slave ancestors and ancestors hurt by segregation number no more than 45 million. My back-of-the envelop suggests that if everyone else reserved 1 % of his income for slavery and segregation reparation that particular debt might be extinguished in less than a lifetime. (Just a general idea; my calculations are not to be trusted literally, of course) Failing a voluntary levy, a new dedicated federal tax could accomplish the same end, of course.

Do I hope that this kind of limited compensation to the descendants of slaves could be managed in a fair, organized, decent way? Not really. I think though that it could put a damper on the present liberal temptation to replay the whole long, disastrous War on Poverty of Pres. Johnson. It would point to another way to deal with a festering wound. In any case, the inability to describe how a mission ought to be conducted should never stop us from admitting openly, even announcing, that the mission is necessary. The main virtue of this proposal would be to free to some extent those who contribute from the moral servitude resulting form our having servitude imposed on others with the help of our servant, the federal state. Acting in good faith toward other individuals is its own reward. It may even inspire others.

Beyond this, I think the Woke culture is going to collapse soon under the weight of its own ridiculousness. In the meantime, it will have ruined the careers of a few important people, including highly visible liberals who did not have sufficient alertness to duck in good time and to offer proof of their virtuousness without being asked. Even academia will regain its senses eventually though it will take some time because it’s so well protected from reality. I am betting that what will be left of this (2020-2021) societal frisson of righteousness will be the empty and therefore poisonous word “equity.” It will no doubt be used and used again until it ends exhibited in the pantheon where the Left keeps the equally empty and equally poisonous terms: the “rich,” and “fair share.” We may not prevent this but we, conservatives can keep the voice of sanity alive.

I conclude by affirming to my possibly scandalized conservative friends that nothing in this three-part essay alters my view of the broader American political context of today (2021). Pres. Biden’s administration is the worst in my long lifetime. Like everything that dampens economic growth, its policies will turn out to be especially noxious for African Americans. And liberals and progressives will blame our “selfishness,” of course.

Libertarianism and the new generation

Brandon Christensen Culture , ,

Computer use as an adult: check my bills, check my savings, look at pricing for home improvements, check the scores, send & answer emails, read blogs if I’m lucky.

Has there been any foundational libertarian academic work done in the last 35 years? I mean, when I was in college, you read Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Mises, and Nozick. These were the people you read if you wanted to familiarize yourself with common libertarian sentiment on questions of public policy (“economics”), ethics, foreign affairs, and cultural shifts.

What do the kids read nowadays? I’m in favor of overhauling the canon. I’d keep Nozick and Rand, but whose work should we consult on matters of public policy (“economics”) and foreign affairs? I think I’m going to have to be the one who answers the foreign affairs question, but what about econ? Whose work is the new Mises/Friedman? Whose going to overtake Rothbard and come up with a libertarian manifesto for a new generation?

Has our time come and gone already? If we don’t need new voices and fresh perspectives, then we’ve already lost the war of ideas.

The Great American Racial Awakening (Part Two): “Get over it!”

Jacques Delacroix Culture, Current Events , , ,

For most of my fifty-plus years living in this country, I have thought that white Americans have not digested the facts of slavery beyond the most basic level. I think they have avoided emoting about them and also about the much nearer-in-time ninety years of segregation in some of the country, at least. (Reading the memoirs of traveling black Jazz musicians led me to believe that segregation was not just in the South. They tell how on arriving in a new town anywhere in the country, the first thing they did was inquire about lodging accepting blacks if arrangements had done been made in advance.)

It’s hard to tell what liberals know and feel about the country’s racial history broadly defined. First, since most of them vote Democrat, they have an internal conflict of interest that must stand in the way of both clarity of mind and of sincerity of expression. Historically, their party is the party of unfailing support for slavery and then, it morphed into the party of racial segregation. I don’t know how you deal with this on an individual level. Second, I find it personally hard to tell what really moves liberals because many are the kind of people who tear up at the violent spectacle of three puppies wrestling in their containment basket.

I am pretty familiar however with my fellow conservatives’ expressed views of the whole matter. (Of course, I don’t know what they feel their hearts of hearts.) Three responses keep coming up. The first is a reference to the hundreds of thousand dead of the Civil War, implying it was payment enough for the evils of slavery. No, I am sorry, the Civil War only stopped the evil of slavery. It did not make up for it. It did not stop the transmission of its perverse effects through the generations. I does not help that some conservatives include the Confederate dead who gave their lives in defense of slavery even if it was not always clear to them.

The second common response is a nonchalant: “Get over it; it was long time ago.” That’s not a reasonable response, I believe, as a conservative, specifically. I think many good things, and many bad things, come down through families, even from ancestors way back. My own narrow experience tells me that it’s so. My paternal grandfather was killed in WWI, in 1916, exactly, twenty-six years before I was born. That’s more than one hundred years ago. My mother was thus brought up in an all-female family. Had that not been the case, she would have raised her own children differently, I think. Note that I don’t say, “better” because, I don’t know. It’s just that she would have been a different person herself, a different woman. Again, I am only trying to make the point that family experiences reach far forward in time.

I knew my maternal grandmother well. Though there were merrier aspects to her personality (as I recount in my book, I Used to be French…..) she was a mostly silent presence for all the time I knew her. I don’t know that she may have a had a wealth of experience, or simply stories, she would otherwise have shared with me. I was brought up without a grandfather. (There was an other one but alcoholism had made him dysfunctional.) Had I had a grandpa, I am certain I would have been a different man, a nicer one. Incidentally, I only came to realize this clearly when I became a grandfather myself, a very distinctive and nurturing role. If the repercussions of the simple and common fact of not having a grandfather can be carried across a hundred-plus years, I tell myself, imagine the cumulative, tenacious effect of having had all slave predecessors for hundreds years. In my book, it’s not that consequences of slavery might live on today among African Americans, it’s that they surely do. It seems to me that this is hardly open for discussion. (Though w you should feel free to argue with me on this point.)

Another detour is in order here. I am only discussing the burden of the majority of black Americans who do have slave ancestors. The implied moral calculus is not relevant to the large and growing minority of black Americans who are immigrants and children of immigrants. (The fact that their numbers are increasing fast, in itself, speaks volumes.) Don’t like it here for whatever reason? Go back to Jamaica; go back to Nigeria; go back to Haiti. This calculus also does not concern the invented category “Hispanics.” Except for the special case of Puerto Ricans, they are also practically all immigrants and descendants of immigrants. They have no right to complain just because heir parents or other ancestors had the good sense to cross the border, often at great cost and at great risk, so they could enjoy a standard of living and a freedom vastly superior to those they left behind. In most cases, such American Hispanics are entitled to citizenship in their ancestral land or, they can regain it easily. Even Puerto Ricans, whose country the US annexed without consultation, have the latitude to go home where they are unlikely to be exposed to racism. All those so-called minorities can thus easily avoid current alleged white American racism and, to the extent that they carry a special burden, it’s because of choices their own antecedents made. It seems to me none has any right to blame America nor to expect favored treatment on this account.

Expecting the descendants of slaves to “get over it,” is not reasonable, as I said. The likelihood is quite high that the adverse consequences of slavery have followed their ancestors, their parents through the years like a pig moving through a python. There is not particular ground to believe that these negative effects must automatically become diluted over time. This assessment is possible (and, I think, only fair) irrespective of whether we know what to to about it. Recognizing that a problem exists does not require that one know its solution.

In the next and last installments of this three-part essay, I will look at resolutions after introducing the third common attitude of conservatives: “It wasn’t me.”

The Great American Racial Awakening: A Conservative Approach (Part One)

Jacques Delacroix Culture, Current Events , ,

When the so-called progressive forces opened America wide to everything black after the police murder of George Floyd, I feared the worst. I thought I would be daily embarrassed by an endless parade of black affirmative action wonders. I was thinking of mediocre or frankly bad African American actors, would-be pundits, pseudo-intellectuals, and demagogues promoted solely because of their race in an act of mendacious collective contrition. (And it’s true that the Democratic Party, the current home of “progressives,” has a lot to be contrite about, going back to its foundation.) I had learned that fear from thirty years in academia, of course, as well as from the continuing demonstration of lack of acumen of the media in staging again and again Al (“Honest”) Sharpton and the seemingly immortal Reverend Jackson.

Here, a detour is in order. What I saw in academia was not the admission, or hiring or promotion of wholly incompetent individuals because of their race (except one time). What I witnessed instead was the fact that people who were qualified overall, were given a solid bump up because of their race. In the last academic hiring in which I was involved, for example, the favored job candidate was more than qualified, rather overqualified for my department, in fact. At 28, she was hired at the same salary I had achieved after twenty years. She was black, of course. Not good for race relations! End of detour.

To my great and pleasant surprise, this obvious orgy of promotion of the embarrassingly incompetent but racially endowed is not most of what happened in the past year. Instead, I began seeing more black faces and hearing more black voices in the English language media I normally follow. This happened without any loss of average quality. In the inside “culture and lifestyle” pages of my daily Wall Street Journal, for example, plays and movies by black authors and directors were reviewed instead of the usual whites’. I found nothing shameful there; in fact, it was a little bit refreshing. Whether this speaks to the quality of black culture producers or to the ordinary mediocrity of the WSJ inside pages, I am not sure. My point is that the descent into the intolerable I had feared and expected did not happen.

On the other hand, and as might be expected, National Public Radio crawled forward and backward to be ahead of the game and to do more for black authors, and black everything, and black everywhere, than anyone else. But in doing so, NPR fulfills all my usual expectation rather than my specific post-Floyd killing expectations. NPR is often unbearable because of its piousness, both sincere and contrived. And, I am well informed about this because I listen to NPR every weekend, have for years. First, it’s good for my moral character, like a cold shower upon getting up in the morning. Second, I want to be well informed about my enemies’ thinking and NPR gives me this in the most concentrated, efficient form possible. In addition, I frankly like a few of its weekly narrative offerings, such as “How I Built It” and the “Moth Radio Hour.”

To my mind, the Great American Racial Awakening is all pretty superficial. I think (I intuit) that few deep transformations will afflict it. My mind says, “Don’t panic!”

My optimism is rooted in the belief that the more grotesques forms of the new consciousness are going to be sloughed off naturally. For example, I am betting what within a short time, a combination of state actions, school board reactions, and quiet teachers’ rejections is going to push into oblivion the delirious statement that mathematics is “racist.” “Critical Race Theory,” that the schools are supposedly forced to teach, does not worry me much because no one knows what it is, not even those who are cramming it down our throats. (Perhaps two dozens academics really know what it is. They don’t matter.) I think it’s only a fancy word standing for a certain brand of historical revisionism. It seems to me it’s an attempt to make Americans re-focus and look at their history from a different angle. I will address this re-focusing in my next installment. I will do it explicitly as a conservative.

Some Monday Links

Michalis Trepas Links , , , , , ,

Beyond the Nation-State (Boston Review)

The Failure of a Socialist Dreamer (Law & Liberty)

A New Guild System (The Hedgehog Review)

Our (Mis)represented Digital Rights (CIGI)

Wat’s On my mind: tax and subsidy impacts

Derrill Watson Economics , , ,

I’ve been reading through some recent (2021 and 2015) papers on the impacts of various tax and subsidy changes. Here is a short review of the latest to be learned from the research. My  tl;dr takeaway is that taxes and subsidies are less distorting than my priors expect. Unless otherwise stated, all papers are in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.

“Complex Tax Incentives” by Abeler and Jäger 2015 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/pol.20130137). They run an experiment where subjects do some work for pay and compare how their subjects respond to changes in income taxes. If the tax structure is simple, higher taxes mean less effort; if the tax structure is complex (with 22 different rules determining the optimal level of work), subjects make smaller adjustments to their effort and some don’t react at all. Most of the average impact is from the people who don’t react at all, who also tend to have lower cognitive ability.

“Unemployment Insurance Generosity and Aggregate Employment” by Boone et al 2021 (https://doi.org/10.1257/pol.20160613). During the Great Recession, a number of states changed the maximum benefit an unemployed worker could receive. They compare neighboring counties in different states and find that higher unemployment insurance benefits had very small impacts on aggregate employment. They also point out flaws in previous work by Hagedorn and co-authors who had found much larger impacts.

The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management in 2015 sponsored a point/counterpoint debate on this overall topic as well. Moffitt comes down on the side that most of the programs in the US safety net have been shown to have very small labor disincentives – with SNAP (food stamps) close to 0, extending unemployment benefits by one week increases average unemployment spells by 1/10 of a week, and EITC increasing work, though housing subsidies reduce employment by 4 percentage points. Mulligan, on the other hand, argues that ACA is effectively a 20% marginal income tax on those who are affected by it and that social programs responding to the Great Recession reduce the rewards to working by about 12%.

“Asymmetric Incentives in Subsidies: Evidence from a Large-Scale Electricity Rebate Program” by Ito in 2015 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/pol.20130397). Voters tend to prefer receiving subsidies for reducing bad behavior than being taxed for it. California set up an electricity rebate program where, if you reduced your electricity usage by 20% in the summer of 2005, you would get a 20% rebate each month. It turns out that Californians living on the coast reduced their electricity usage, but folks living inland where it warmer and they use more electricity for air conditioning did not.

“How is Tax Policy Conducted Over the Business Cycle” by Vegh and Vuletin in 2015 (http://dx.doi.org/10.,1257/pol.20120218). They compile a dataset of 60 countries from 1960-2009 and their marginal tax rates for VAT, corporate, and personal income taxes. They find that: tax rates are “more volatile in developing countries than in industrial economies” and “tax policy is acyclical in industrial countries and mostly procyclical in developing countries”. This matches the fact that government spending tends to be procyclical in developing countries and countercyclical in industrial economies.

“Do People Respond to the Mortgage Interest Deduction? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Denmark” by Gruber, Jensen, and Kleven in 2021 (https://doi.org/10.1257/pol.20170366). In 1986-87 Denmark significantly decreased the tax break high and middle-income households receive in paying mortgage interest. Over the following years, they find that “a tightly estimated and robust ZERO EFFECT of tax subsidies ON HOMEOWNERSHIP for high- and middle-income households,” but that average house SIZES and PRICES decrease significantly [emphasis mine]. Low-income households, however, had only a very small change in their eligibility, so one would not expect there to be a large difference. So the paper cannot address whether the deduction encourages homeownership for poorer households. It does suggest that a cap on the deduction would reduce deficits without much cost in ownership rates.

“The Macroeconomic Effects of Income and Consumption Tax Changes” by Nguyen, Onnis, and Rossi in 2021 (https://doi.org/10.1257/pol/20170241). From 1970-1997 the UK shifted their tax burden from income taxes (70% to 55% of revenue) to consumption taxes (15% to 35%). They have some good news: as theory predicts, consumption taxes are less distortionary and so the move increases GDP, consumption, and investment. Further, government spending shrinks. I’m not entirely convinced by their identification strategy, based on identifying exogenous changes in “a narrative measure of consumption and income tax liabilites changes” [sic]. But at least the arrows are all in the right direction.

“Income, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Infant Health” by Hoynes, Miller, and Simon in 2015 (https://dx.doi.org/10.1257/pol.20120179). They find that higher EITC payments reduce the probability that a baby will be low birthweight, both because families are able to get more prenatal care and because they smoke less. This is the only paper of the set that has an economically-large impact of tax policy changes.

“Heterogeneous Workers and Federal Income Taxes in a Spatial Equilibrium” by Colas and Hutchinson in 2021 (https://doi.org/10.1257/pol/20180529). Some places are simultaneously more expensive to live in and more productive work environments, and thus they tend to pay workers more there to compensate. But if you have a progressive income tax code, that will tax people more for living in expensive places. It seems reasonable to assume that higher-productivity (higher-income) individuals will also be more mobile, so they will be more likely to move to lower-productivity/lower-wage places to escape the progressive income tax. But moving high-productivity people to lower-productivity places also impacts wages and rents for everyone else. They find that these deadweight losses amount to 0.25% of GDP, mostly from the federal income tax (0.14%), with state income taxes (0.07%) and payroll taxes (0.04%) the rest. Moving to a flat tax would reduce these distortions to 0.16% of GDP. Adjusting income taxes by a location-based cost of living index would reduce it to 0.09% of GDP, but also make poorer people worse off.

Some Monday Links

Michalis Trepas Links , , , , ,

Propagating Propaganda: Franklin Barrett’s Red, White, and Blue Liberty Bond Carp (The Public Domain Review)

Science has become a cartel (Unherd)

The Ghost of Arthur Burns (Project Syndicate)

Tuesday night Orwell

Brandon Christensen History , , , ,

This comes from Michalis’ always excellent “Monday links” series:

There was a deep difference, though, between Burnham and Orwell, which Menand mentions but doesn’t make enough of. They were both notably tough-minded; that is, they shared an intense dislike of cant and wishful thinking. But Burnham was a thoroughgoing nihilist: he thought that all ideals were sentimental rubbish, that lasting peace was a pipedream, and that power was the only reality in politics. Orwell, on the other hand—though in Nineteen Eighty-Four he portrayed nihilism more brilliantly than anyone else ever has or, probably, ever will—was nevertheless the most idealistic of men, with solidarity and generosity seemingly written into his source code. 

This is from George Scialabba, a noted and popular American critic. Good find, Michalis, and the Cold War era is crazy. We’re just starting to scratch the surface of the details, but it seems like Cold War-era politics were way more divisive than they were today (Scialabba, for example, can’t help but insult his political enemies in this piece). Which is strange, because today’s pundits and politicians are always harping on and on about how we need to come together and stop being so divisive…

Some Monday Links

Michalis Trepas Links , , , , ,

Will We Ever Get Beyond The Nation-State? (Noema)

Free and Worldly (The Baffler)

The utopian 1920s scheme for five global superstates (Big Think)

Supranational (political) entrepreneurs

Brandon Christensen Links , , , , , , , , ,

[…] the basis of the functional (Coasian) theory of international regimes advanced by Robert Keohane: If interstate transaction costs were very low, relative to the gains at stake for each actor, decentralized negotiation among voluntary actors with property rights would generate efficient outcomes. In summary, we may define informal supranational entrepreneurship as exploitation by international officials of asymmetrical control over scarce information or ideas to influence the outcomes of multilateral negotiations through initiation, mediation, and mobilization. […] Most existing studies of entrepreneurship fail to address this central puzzle. They focus on characteristics of supranational entrepreneurs and their actions, not the nature of alternatives.

The link (pdf) is here, and it’s a good read despite the jargon. You’ll notice that neither the Federalist Papers nor Hayek are cited in the piece. Libertarians have a chance to become relevant again in international affairs, if only they came to re-embrace the ideas of Madison, Smith, and Hayek, by abandoning non-interventionism and alliance free-riding and recognizing that federation is both a foreign policy and a type of government.

State formation in Korea and Japan

Brandon Christensen History , , , , , ,

State formation in Korea and Japan occurred a thousand years before it did in Europe, and it occurred for reasons of emulation and learning, not bellicist competition. Korea and Japan emerged as states between the 4th and 8th centuries CE and existed for centuries thereafter with centralized bureaucratic control defined over territory and administrative capacity to tax their populations, field large militaries, and provide extensive public goods. They created these institutions not to wage war or suppress revolt – the longevity of dynasties in these countries is evidence of both the peacefulness of their region and their internal stability. Rather, Korea and Japan developed state institutions through emulation and learning from China. State formation in historical East Asia occurred under a hegemonic system in which war was relatively rare, not under a balance of power system with regular existential threats. Why? We focus here on diffusion through a combination of emulation and learning: domestic elites copied Chinese civilization for reasons of prestige and domestic legitimacy.

This is good, and it comes out of the most interesting journal in international relations today, but it doesn’t quite do it for me. I think China’s imperialism was far looser than contemporary scholars imagine, especially as China spread territorially outside of its cultural hearth. I think China’s imperial sovereigns were more akin to Emperors in the Holy Roman Empire than, say, Louis XIV. I do think that Japan and Korea mimicked China, which is exactly why both countries had relatively decentralized political systems up until the 19th and 20th centuries.

Contemporary scholarship has a soft spot for pre-modern (before 1500 AD) non-Western state systems, so you get stuff like this. Again, this is a great article, and you should read it right now, but I don’t buy it. I don’t think Japan and Korea were states that existed for centuries “with centralized bureaucratic control defined over territory and administrative capacity to tax their populations, field large militaries, and provide extensive public goods.” That’s too rich for my blood. There were cultural hearths and polities in Japan and Korea that tried to mimic China, but sovereignty was still far too fractal until the Europeans arrived with their formal imperialism. See this piece for an example of why I’m skeptical of the author’s claims.

James Madison continues to be underrated

Brandon Christensen Religion , , , ,

d) While ethnic and linguistic fractionalization are associated with negative outcomes in terms of quality of government, religious fractionalization is not; in fact, if anything, this measure displays a positive correlation with measures of good governance. This is because measured religious fractionalization tends to be higher in more tolerant and free societies, like the United States, which in fact displays one the of the highest level of religious fractionalization. This result has no bearing, however, on the question of whether certain religious denominations are correlated with better politico-economic outcomes, an issue recently explored by Barro and McLeary (2002).

Woah. Here’s more:

Whether societal conflict is the result of fractionalization or polarization is largely an unresolved question in theory, calling for empirical work. The discussion of whether a country with many relatively small groups is more or less stable than one with only two equally sized groups is an old one, and goes back at least to Madison in the Federalist Papers of 1788 (nos. 10 and 11 see Hamilton et al., 1911). Without much of a stretch of Madison’s views, one can argue that a polarization measure is, according to him, the appropriate concept to capture heterogeneity.

Read the whole thing here (pdf).

Monday’s Reserved Judgements (and Satisficing Hopes)

Michalis Trepas Culture, Economics, Law, Links , , , , , , , ,

Or, some Monday links on central banks, manners over matters and hard-boiled decisions

That bond salesman from the Jazz Age was right. Reserving judgement, at least sometimes, allows for a fairer outcome. Take for example the Brick film (2005), a neo-noir detective story set in a modern Southern California high school. Here in Greece it made some ripples, then it was forsaken for good. Not sure about its status in the US or elsewhere, but “overlooked”/ “underrated” seem to go with it in web searches. I agree now, but when I first watched it, its brilliance was lost to me ( and no, it was not allegedly “ahead of its time”, as some lame progressive metal bands of late 90s hilariously asserted when they zeroed in sales…).

The theatrical release poster – source

The film’s peculiarity was obvious from the titles. A couple of gals left the theater like 10’ in. My company and I were baffled for most part, by the gritty atmosphere. And I have not even begun with the dialogue. The language was something from off the map. As late Roger Ebert noted:

These are contemporary characters who say things like, “I got all five senses and I slept last night. That puts me six up on the lot of you.” Or, “Act smarter than you look, and drop it.”

You see, the whole thing was intended to serve tropes, archetypes and mannerisms from the hard-boiled fiction of 1920s-30s. A manly man vs crime and (corrupted) government, and so on and so forth. We went there, un-f-believably how, clueless about all these. We did, however, make a recurring joke from the following lines:

Brendan: You and Em were tight for a bit. Who’s she eating with now?
Kara: Eating with?
Brendan: Eating with. Lunch. Who.

Seen in this light, everything made sense to my gusto. Anyway, seems that reserving judgements not only does better assessments, but also protects the lazy unaware.

Now, I have previously indicated that I have a soft spot for the “technology of collective decisions” that are central banks. I usually reserve my judgements on them, too. This comment summarises recent developments, including a few interesting links:

In which the Rich Get Richer (Economic Principals)

A new paper by Carola Binder examines central bank independence vis-à-vis a technocratic – populist merge in the age of digital media:

Technopopulism and Central Banks (Alt – M)

The author argues that central banks, supposedly the bastions of technocratic approach, tend to “respond” (i.e. be nudged by and directly appeal) to a perceived “will of the people”, as it is expressed on-line or via events like the “FED Listens” series. This bend acts as a claim to legitimacy and accountability, in exchange of trust and extended discretion, leading to a self-reinforcing circle almost beyond the democratic election process. In other words, not quite the “Bastilles” contra “modern Jacobinism” (to remember how Wilhelm Röpke deemed independent central banks in 1960). A way out could be made, concludes the author, by introducing of a rule-based monetary policy.

Central banks, as institutional arrangements developed mostly during the 20th century, share a common mojo and tempo with the FED. They gradually assumed more independence, and since the emergence of modern financial markets, (even more) power. This rise has been accompanied by increasing obligations in transparency and accountability, fulfilled through an ever-expanding volume of communication in terms of hearings, testimonies, minutes, speeches etc. This communication also plays a role in shaping economic actors’ expectations, a major insight that transformed our understanding of macroeconomic outcomes. Andy Haldane talks all these, along with other delicious bits, in an excellent speech from 2017 (his speeches have generally been quite something):

A Little More Conversation A Little Less Action (Bank of England)

Plot twist: The endeavor of more communication has a so-so record in clarity, as documented by the rising number of “education years” needed to follow and understand central banks’ messages. The same trend goes for the pylons of rule of law, the supreme courts, at least in Europe. We certainly have come a long way since that time at the 70s, when a former Greek central bank Governor likened monetary decisions to a Talmudic text, ok, but we are not there yet.

As a parting shot, let us return just over a year back, when the German Federal Constitutional Court delivered a not exactly reserved decision (5 May 2020) about the European Central Bank’s main QE program. The FCC managed to:

  • scold the top EU Court for flawed reasoning and overreach in confirming the legality of the program in Dec 2018 (the FCC had stayed proceedings and referred the case to the Court of Justice of the EU, for a preliminary ruling in Jul 2017. Europe’s top courts are not members of the Swift Justice League, apparently).
  • indirectly demand justifications from ECB, which is beyond its jurisdiction as an independent organ of EU law, by
  • warning the German public bodies that implement ECB acts to observe their constitutional duties, while
  • effectively not disrupting the central bank’s policy.

Notorious FCC, aka Bundesverfassungsgericht – source

The judicial b-slapping provoked much outcry and theorising, but little more, at least saliently. The matter was settled by some good-willed, face-saving gestures from all institutions involved, while it probably gave a push to the Franco-German axis, to finally proceed in complementing monetary policy measures with the EU equivalent of a generous fiscal package. The rift between the EU and the German (in this case, but others could follow) respective legal orders may never be undone, though. If anyone feels like delving deeper into the EU constellation, here is a fresh long slog:

Constitutional pluralism and loyal opposition (ICON Journal)

I don’t. But then again, maybe I will act smarter than I look.

“Libertarianism and international violence”

Brandon Christensen Politics , , , ,

An oldie but goodie from RJ Rummel:

Based on theory and previous results, three hypotheses are posed:

1. Libertarian states have no violence between themselves.

2. The more libertarian two states, the less their mutual violence.

3. The more libertarian a state, the less its foreign violence.

These hypotheses are statistically tested against scaled data on all reported international conflict for 1976 to 1980; and where appropriate, against a list of wars from 1816 to 1974, and of threats and use of force from 1945 to 1965. The three hypotheses are found highly significant. Tests were also made for contiguity as an intervening variable and were negative. Finally, two definitions of “libertarian” are tested, one involving civil liberties plus political rights, the other adding in economic freedom. Both are highly positive, but economic freedom is also found to make a significant added reduction in the level of violence for a state overall or between particular states.

Here’s the link, and this turned into an article in Journal for Conflict Resolution. I think he’s wrong. I think it’s a shame that this argument is cited as an example of libertarian thought in international relations, or at least that it’s still cited as The Libertarian Example. It was good when it came out during the Cold War (in 1983). But it’s soooo Westphalian. Trying to bring Philadelphian sovereignty back into the picture is a tough slog.

From the Comments: India and misunderstanding socialism

Brandon Christensen Current Events ,

This is from Jacques, who is responding to Tridivesh’s recent piece on vaccine apartheid:

I don’t like your title. US firms and other firms based in the West have managed to produce enough vaccines to vaccinate all of the citizens of their respective countries. Governments (democratically elected governments) have decided that the vaccines should be reserved for their own citizens first. That decision might be attacked because it’s a form of govt seizure but it’s not apartheid. India has one of the largest pharmaceutical industries in the world. That its government has not been able to provide vaccines even minimally for the Indian people is the Indian government’s fault and more broadly, traceable to the fact that Indian society is a mess. As anyone a little observant who lives in the US can tell, there is no shortage of intelligent and energetic Indians ( I live near Silicone Valley myself). India is a mess largely because of a systemic issues of its own making. My former Silicone Valley Indian colleagues are mostly complicit. The central problem is Indians’ addiction to what they think is socialism, in reality, mostly crony capitalism and a stupefying government bureaucracy. I would like that, I am hoping that, this dreadful crisis will prompt many Indians to reconsider. I am not optimistic though. No, I didn’t read your essay because of its offensive and mendacious title. PS I am married to an Indian woman. I spent more time in India than the average casual visitor. I like India.