Thomas Sowell

Affirmative Guilt-Gradient and the Overton Window in Identity-Based Pedagogy

Vishnu Modur Culture, Current Events, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday, I came across this scoop on Twitter; New York Post and several other blogs have since reported it.

Regardless of this scoop’s veracity, the chart of Eight White identities has been around for some time now, and it has influenced young minds. So, here is my brief reflection on such identity-based pedagogy:

As a non-white resident-alien, I understand the history behind the United States’ racial sensitivity in all domains today. I also realize how zealous exponents of diversity have consecrated schools and university campuses in the US to rid the society of prevalent racial power-structures. Further, I appreciate the importance of people being self-critical; self-criticism leads to counter-cultures that balance mainstream views and enable reform and creativity in society. But I also find it essential that critics of mainstream culture don’t feel morally superior to enforce just about any theoretical concept on impressionable minds. Without getting too much into the right vs. left debate, there is something terribly sad about being indoctrinated at a young age —regardless of the goal of social engineering— to accept an automatic moral one-‘downmanship’ for the sake of the density gradient of cutaneous melanin pigment. Even though I’m a brown man from a colonized society, this kind of extreme ‘white guilt’ pedagogy leaves me with a bitter taste. And in this bitter taste, I have come to describe such indoctrination as “Affirmative Guilt-Gradient.”

You should know there is something called the Overton Window, according to which concepts grow larger when their actual instances and contexts grow smaller. In other words, well-meaning social interventionistas easily view each new instance in the decreasingly problematic context of the problem they focus on with the same lens as they consider the more significant problem. This leads to unrealistic enlargement of academic concepts that are then shoved down the throats of innocent, impressionable school kids who will take them as objective realities instead of subjective conceptual definitions overlaid on one legitimate objective problem.

I find the scheme of Eight White identities a symptom of the shifting Overton Window.

According to Thomas Sowell, there is a whole class of academics and intellectuals of social engineering who believe that when the world doesn’t reconcile to their pet theories, that shows something is wrong with the world, not their theories. If we are to project Thomas Sowell’s observation on this episode of “Guilt-Gradient,” it is perfectly reasonable to expect many white kids and their parents to refuse to adopt these theoretically manufactured guilt-gradient identities. We can then —applying Sowell’s observation—predict academics to declare that opposition to the “Guilt Gradient” is evidence for many covert white supremacists in the society who will not change. Such stories may then get blown up in influential Op-Eds, leading to the magnification of a simple problem, soon to be misplaced in the clutter of naïve supporters of such theories, the progressive vote-bank, and hard-right polemics.

We should all acknowledge that attachment to any identity—be it majority or minority—is by definition NOT a hatred for an outgroup. Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University, Ashley Jardina, in her noted research on the demise of white dominance and threats to white identity, concludes, “White identity is not, a proxy for outgroup animus. Most white identifiers do not condone white supremacism or see a connection between their racial identity and these hate-groups. Furthermore, whites who identify with their racial group become much more liberal in their policy positions than when white identity is associated with white supremacism.” Everybody has a right to associate with their identity, and equating one’s association with an ethnic majority identity is not automatically toxic. I feel it is destructive to view such identity associations as inherently toxic because it is precisely this sort of warped social engineering that results in unnecessary political polarization; the vicious cycle of identity-based tinkering is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hence, recognizing the Overton Window at play in such identity-based pedagogy is a must if we have to make progress. We shouldn’t be tricked into assuming that the non acceptance of the Affirmative Guilt Gradient is a sign of our society’s lack of progress.

Finally, I find it odd that ideologues who profess “universalism” and international identities choose schools and universities to keep structurally confined, relative identities going by adding excessive nomenclature so they can apply interventions that are inherently reactionary. However, isn’t ‘reactionary’ a pejorative these ideologues use on others?

Necessity constrains even the gods

Kevin Kallmes Liberty , , , , , ,

I was recently talking to my cofounder about the concept of “fuck-you” money. “Fuck-you” money is the point at which you no longer need to care what other people think, you can fund what you want without worrying about ending up broke–so long as you recognize the power of necessity.

It reminded me of three things I have read before. One is from the brilliant economist and historian Thomas Sowell, who wrote in The Conflict of Visions that ideological divides often crop on the disagreement between “constrained” and “unconstrained” visions of the world and humanity. Effectively, the world contains some who recognize that humans have flaws that culture has helped us work through, but that we should be grateful for the virtues handed to us and understand that utopianism is dangerous self-deception. But it contains many others who see all human failings stemming from social injustices, since in nature, humans have no social problems. Those who line up behind Hobbes fight those who believe, still, the noble savage and Rousseau’s perfect state of nature. To me, this divide encapsulates the question of, did necessity emerge before human society? And if so, does it still rule us?

I know what the wisdom of antiquity says. The earliest cosmogonies–origin stories of the gods–identify Ananke (Necessity) as springing forth from the Earth herself, before the gods, and restricting even them. This story was passed on to Greek thinkers like Plato (Republic) and playwrites like Euripides (Alcestis), who found human government and the fate of heroes to also be within the tragic world of necessity first, all else second.

Lastly, this reminds me of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Anti-Fragile. He points out that the first virtue is survival, and that optionality is pure gain. Until you address necessity, your optionality–your choices and your chances–are fundamentally limited. As an entrepreneur who literally lives the risk of not surviving, I do not need to be convinced. Necessity rules even the gods, and it certainly rules those with “fuck-you” money. But it rules me even more. I am ruled by the fear that I may fail my family, myself, and my company at the Maslow’s level of survival. Those with “fuck-you” money at least have moved to the level where they have chances to fail society. And the lesson from history, from mythology, and from surviving in the modern economy, is not that one should just be resigned to reaching one’s limits. It is to strive to reach the level where you are pushing them, and the whole time to recognize the power of Necessity.

The Deleted Clause of the Declaration of Independence

Kevin Kallmes Books, Culture, History, Law, Liberty, Philosophy, Politics , , , , , , ,

As a tribute to the great events that occurred 241 years ago, I wanted to recognize the importance of the unity of purpose behind supporting liberty in all of its forms. While an unequivocal statement of natural rights and the virtues of liberty, the Declaration of Independence also came close to bringing another vital aspect of liberty to the forefront of public attention. As has been addressed in multiple fascinating podcasts (Joe Janes, Robert Olwell), a censure of slavery and George III’s connection to the slave trade was in the first draft of the Declaration.

Thomas Jefferson, a man who has been criticized as a man of inherent contradiction between his high morals and his active participation in slavery, was a major contributor to the popularizing of classical liberal principles. Many have pointed to his hypocrisy in that he owned over 180 slaves, fathered children on them, and did not free them in his will (because of his debts). Even given his personal slaves, Jefferson made his moral stance on slavery quite clear through his famous efforts toward ending the transatlantic slave trade, which exemplify early steps in securing the abolition of the repugnant act of chattel slavery in America and applying classically liberal principles toward all humans. However, this very practice may have been enacted far sooner, avoiding decades of appalling misery and its long-reaching effects, if his (hypocritical but principled) position had been adopted from the day of the USA’s first taste of political freedom.

This is the text of the deleted Declaration of Independence clause:

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.  And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another..”

The second Continental Congress, based on hardline votes of South Carolina and the desire to avoid alienating potential sympathizers in England, slaveholding patriots, and the harbor cities of the North that were complicit in the slave trade, dropped this vital statement of principle

The removal of the anti-slavery clause of the declaration was not the only time Jefferson’s efforts might have led to the premature end of the “peculiar institution.” Economist and cultural historian Thomas Sowell notes that Jefferson’s 1784 anti-slavery bill, which had the votes to pass but did not because of a single ill legislator’s absence from the floor, would have ended the expansion of slavery to any newly admitted states to the Union years before the Constitution’s infamous three-fifths compromise. One wonders if America would have seen a secessionist movement or Civil War, and how the economies of states from Alabama and Florida to Texas would have developed without slave labor, which in some states and counties constituted the majority.

These ideas form a core moral principle for most Americans today, but they are not hypothetical or irrelevant to modern debates about liberty. Though America and the broader Western World have brought the slavery debate to an end, the larger world has not; though countries have officially made enslavement a crime (true only since 2007), many within the highest levels of government aid and abet the practice. 30 million individuals around the world suffer under the same types of chattel slavery seen millennia ago, including in nominal US allies in the Middle East. The debates between the pursuit of non-intervention as a form of freedom and the defense of the liberty of others as a form of freedom have been consistently important since the 1800’s (or arguably earlier), and I think it is vital that these discussions continue in the public forum. I hope that this 4th of July reminds us that liberty is not just a distant concept, but a set of values that requires constant support, intellectual nurturing, and pursuit.

For more underrecognized history surrounding the founding of America, see my Before the Fourth series!

Look Who’s Practicing Trickle-Down Economics

Warren Gibson Economics, Politics , , , , , ,

Thomas Sowell is one of the clearest contemporary thinkers on economic and political issues, both as a theoretician and a commentator on current events. His recent piece on “Tax Cuts for the Rich and Trickle-Down Theory” is an excellent example. In it, he shows how tax rate cuts for the highest earners can actually increase the tax revenue collected from that group. He also recalls challenging his readers to name a single economist who advocated a “trickle-down” theory of economics. No one did so.

Trickle-down is the idea that when the highest income-earners keep more of their income, some of their spending will eventually reach lower-income workers. Their purchases of luxury items will bolster employment in the production of those items. Leftists are fond of setting up this theory and then attacking it on the grounds that the benefits to the wealthiest overshadow the benefits that trickle down to those at the bottom. Government spending cuts hurt low-income people the most. Therefore, they say, tax cuts for the highest earners are a disguised scheme to siphon yet more wealth from the bottom to the top.

The “trickle down” phrase has been around at least since the 1930’s and was restated recently by the current White House occupant when he attacked what he called “The economic philosophy which says we should give more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.”

Does the theory make sense? First off, it ignores the morality of the situation. As T. J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, puts it, “I’m proud of my wealth. I earned it.” He explains how increased income taxes will not reduce his personal consumption but will instead reduce his investments in Silicon Valley startups and his charitable activities. Just what is the benefit, he asks, in taking money away from these uses and giving it instead to programs like Cash for Clunkers or Solyndra?

Secondly, trickle-down theory ignores the fact that high-income people like T. J. tend to invest a greater portion of their marginal income. Capital accumulation is the key to higher worker productivity and thus higher wages and higher standards of living.

There is actually one institution that does practice trickle-down economics. That would be the Federal Reserve System. The Fed recently announced its QE3 program under which it will purchase $40 billion of mortgage-backed securities each month for an indefinite period of time. One aim of this program is to push down long-term interest rates and thereby encourage businesses to borrow. But those rates are already historically low. Can we really expect further cuts to have any significant stimulative effect given the current high level of regime uncertainty?

The other purpose mentioned by Chairman Bernanke is to keep the stock and bond markets propped up. The idea is to pump up the “wealth effect.” This is the idea that when people who see increases in the market value of their holdings of investment or real estate, they will be more inclined to spend, even with unchanged income. Their spending will then trickle down into the economy. As an investor I ought to say thanks but as a citizen I would say to the leftists, look to the Fed to find a real example of exploitative trickle-down economics.