Reform, Regulation, and the Liberaltarian Turn*
Peter writes:
Well, one possibility is that the right uses social issues and national defense not as wedge issues but as ways of gaining the trust of the middle class, and then learns how to govern on the domestic front in a way that’s roughly acceptable to the middle and lower-middle class. Libertarians won’t like this much, and those on the far left will of course be frustrated, but there’s at least a potential for a coalition there.
I don’t think this is Peter’s intention, but this is how some would characterize the reformist politics advanced by Yuval, Ramesh, Ross, yours truly, and a number of others. And I think it’s not an entirely sound characterization. In Grand New Party, Ross and I spend a good deal of time talking about frameworks that are pro-market and thus opposed to corporate collusion and the cozy big government-big business axis that libertarians rightly and adamantly oppose. Peter suggests that conservatives choose healthcare as the first domain of an anti-corporate turn. That’s an area we cover at length, and I think Peter will (mostly) like it. I’d caution only that the history of the politics of deregulation offers some valuable insights — frankly, Ted Kennedy and Stephen Breyer were smarter about deregulation than the Reagan White House, and the differences in their respective approaches are highly instructive.
My main concern is framing a pro-market politics that connects with a broad majority of voters because, like Virginia Postrel, I am a dynamist — a believer in an open, creative culture undergirded by an open, creative economy. And like Will Wilkinson, I think Hayek’s understanding of the welfare state was right. In fact, I was particularly struck by this post, in which Will and I achieve near-total consensus.
At this point, I’m not sure where I really stand, though I think I’m tilting in favor of Heckmanesque early childhood programs as part of the liberaltarian package, which also would include wage subsidies and beefed-up unemployment benefits together with a radical deregulation of the labor market and the economy at large.
The main difference between the two of us is, as Will noted, is that I’m far more accepting of, or even friendly to, conservative moral intuitions, whether or not I share them. I think that’s right. Also, Will is more coherent than I am, but that goes without saying.
What Will calls liberaltarian welfare statism was a key part of my political self-definition. Michael Lind was the first person who introduced me to the idea that Hayek defended the idea of a basic social minimum, and that piqued my interest in the pro-market right. I first encountered the Heckman-Carneiro work on human capital development in 2003, which I then pressed upon anyone who’d listen. I read Edmund Phelps’s Rewarding Work around the same time I read Christopher Jencks’s brilliant The Homeless, still one of the best books I’ve ever read. Though neither Phelps nor Jencks can be described as conservatives — certainly not Jencks, who is probably my favorite egalitarian liberal — I think both books accelerated my undergraduate self-understanding from the political left to the political right, which is, biographically speaking, a little off. I think most campus conservatives are motivated by what they perceive as political correctness run amok, etc., but that sort of thing never exercised me all that much. But what both the Jencks book and the Phelps book do is complicate an overfamiliar picture: the plight of the homeless is not, as Jencks explains, is real, but it doesn’t work the way most of us think it works. Similarly, Phelps explains that economic exclusion is the main driver of poverty. These are powerful ideas, which are entirely compatible with a certain kind of center-left reformism. The trouble is that center-left reformists are, in my experience, too dismissive of the agency of individuals. I realize that this is a pretty sweeping claim!
This past weekend I spent a lot of time both with elite-educated, ambitious young people at a wedding full of unfamiliar people and also with a few people working in tourist-dependent sectors who’ve been buffeted by the economic downturn. I hesitate to talk about my conversations in too much detail, because I know we tend to see things through prisms that interpret evidence to reinforce what we already “know” to be true. I obviously don’t “know” a damn thing about any of these people, in any profound sense. Yet my family was pretty chameleon-like, and spent a good deal of time at various points along the economic spectrum, so I like to think that I’m unsentimental and good at absorbing social data osmotically. Let’s just say that I was struck by the particular facts of the individual stories I kept coaxing out of people, and by how values informed life choices. That is, a taste for freedom and autonomy led to more risk-taking and thus to sharper fluctuations in economic outcomes. The quality that propelled some people forward, affluent and less-affluent, was a sense of having control over one’s life.
Is this sense of autonomy a fiction? I don’t doubt that it could be, though of course my instinct (as a paradigmatic anarchist and Posner-aping nonconformist) is that it’s not. But I certainly sense that it is at the very least a useful, happy-making fiction, and that it ought to be cultivated.
I’m in the Bay Area during what is likely the most beautiful week of the year. Everyone tells me that I shouldn’t be misled into believing that the weather is generally like this, and I feel correspondingly very fortunate.
- Let me just note that the title of this post is truly miserable.
Reihan — I probably should’ve made it clear that I didn’t mean that paragraph as a characterization of your ideas.
Instead, I was describing a possible future (how likely? I don’t know!) in which the GOP more or less gives up the hard-line limited government mantra, aims a few policies at the middle class, and somehow muddles through without a total meltdown. This makes them semi-competitive (though not necessarily totally successful) again within a few years, but, as I said, pushes the libertarians out and continues to frustrate those further to the left. This might include some nods toward your preferred style of politics, and possibly even a few genuine practitioners of it, but it wouldn’t, I think, be the same thing.
Nor did I mean to suggest that you and Ross are in favor of corporate collusion. But if the GOP implodes over the next few years, as I think is possible, Democratic legislators will, I think, almost certainly develop very cozy relationships with big corporations (even more so than the already very cozy relationship the GOP now has with business) — creating an opening for the right down the road.
— Peter Suderman · Jun 11, 08:44 PM · #
“My main concern is framing a pro-market politics that connects with a broad majority of voters”
But this is a big, big problem! The market does not especially like traditionalist social structures or moral codes. The market does not like traditionalism in market activity. The market really doesn’t like restrictions on immigration and international trade. The market comes not to bring peace, but the sword!
Overall, I’d say the socially conservative lower middle class are the demographic group least predisposed to accept free market framing. You could glue a lot of things together for a long time with simple anti-communism, but there’s no more evil empire and I don’t think they even make new Socialists anymore, and sooner or later Mike Huckabee and Jim Webb are going to find they have a lot more in common with each other than either does with Mike Bloomberg.
— Trevor · Jun 11, 08:48 PM · #
The fallacy of liberaltarianism was deftly skewered by Allan Bloom in his American Political Science Review article on A Theory of Justice:
“With respect to ends, government for Rawls must laisser faire; with respect to the means to the ends, it must beaucoup faire.”
Or, to put it another way: you can’t have you subjective value theory of cake and one you can eat, too.
— Chris · Jun 11, 09:06 PM · #
By the way, don’t put too much stock in James Heckman’s angry 1995 review of “The Bell Curve” in Reason. He’s spent the last dozen years trying to prove Herrnstein and Murray empirically wrong and his review right, but it’s been very frustrating for him as the evidence comes in.
— Steve Sailer · Jun 11, 09:28 PM · #
I don’t think Control Over One’s Life is a happy-making fiction. I think people learn, at a young age, that they either Have It, or they Don’t Have It. So those who believe it frequently believe it because it’s true, and those who don’t believe it do so because it’s not true.
It’s also relative – if lives are interdependent, and I control my life, and therefore some of the lives around me, that means they don’t have Control Over One’s Life.
— bcg · Jun 11, 09:29 PM · #
Sailer is truly amazing. A true, one-trick pony. All roads lead to stupid black people, in his world. There is no other issue.
But, no! He’s not racist! His utter obsession with proving that most black people are unintelligent isn’t motivated by actual racial animus at all, and accusing him of such is deeply unserious and unfair. Cause, you know… he seems like a nice guy.
— Lifafa Das · Jun 11, 10:38 PM · #
You need to stop writing posts like this. What else am I going to be thinking about for the rest of the day?
I couldn’t be more in agreement with you. Particularly, Will’s vision of the libertarian welfare state, and your cooptation of the “dynamist” label strike extremely close to home for me — more than your appeals to a Cameron-style American Christian Democracy, which leave me pretty cold, as European Christian Democracy is, in effect, little more than Social Democracy lite.
Maybe I’ve said this before on here, but few things have influenced my political outlook more than Nico Colchester’s brilliant FT editorial on “crunchy” vs. “soggy” systems. The “problem” (at least from a politics point of view) with a dynamist outlook is that a crunchy system creates big failures as well as big successes — Bear Stearnses as well as Googles. A dynamist outlook requires an acceptance of failures, and big failures, as well as an emphasis on dynamism (this is why European economies have so many troubles adapting — fear of failure).
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a safety net, of course, but what I am saying is that the basic, post-WWII postulate of social democracy, that people need to be sheltered from big changes, and especially those brought about by market forces, is wrong. There should be a safety net, but the emphasis shouldn’t be on how to protect people, it should be on the dynamism first and the safety net second. Or to put another way, we should have the most social protection we can afford without hobbling economic and social dynamism. Which is a self-evident point. So I’ll shut up now.
(Of course this is an European perspective: here the most obvious avenue of reform is to get us some of that dynamism; from an American perspective, you already see plenty enough dynamism, and what is obvious is how to reform the dysfunctional American welfare state.)
— PEG · Jun 12, 08:49 AM · #
Will’s been on a tear this month of the kind that seems to satisfy hard-core liertarian wonks but still leaves uneducated folk like me feeling like we get what he’s talking about. Find out what he’s drinking and send a case to the other pundits.
Reihan: I just finished a decade in the Bay Area and people are lying to you (unless you’re inland). The weather’s always like that. Except in February-March when it drizzles all the damn time.
— Sanjay · Jun 12, 01:25 PM · #
Lifafa Das,
I get tired popping up all over the place defending Sailer, but the fact of the matter is that your characterization of him is ridiculous. Whether you agree or disagree with his arguments, he is trying in his own humble way to make actual arguments, relying on factual evidence and logical analysis. Please respond to the substance of what he says instead of attributing defamatory statements to him.
As for his actual argument, I just sent him an email that said the following:
Since I was familiar with Heckman’s review I don’t think your characterization is correct and furthermore, I think I see a common theme emerging from your brief criticism here as well as your recent criticism of Jim Manzi.
First of all, a review of “The Bell Curve” that starts off with the following can hardly be called “angry”:
“Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein have produced a controversial and well-written book about human differences, the sources of human differences, and how we should respond to those differences. The early reactions to the book in the popular press have been emotional and denunciatory, focusing almost exclusively on the authors’ discussion of racial differences and the genetic basis for those differences. This is unfortunate. The book is not devoted exclusively to a discussion of racial differences, although it certainly considers them in detail. It is obvious that most reviewers of the book have not read it as a whole, if they have read it at all. It is also clear that in an age of rampant egalitarianism, discussion of differences in cognitive skills remains taboo. The authors deserve much praise for discussing a forbidden subject and thereby initiating a public discussion that challenges the egalitarian presumptions of our day.”
Yes, Heckman has disagreements with the arguments made in the book, but this disagreements seem to me to be factually based and well-argued. In other words, just because a smart guy disagrees with Murray and Herrnstein, it doesn’t mean he is “angry”!
As for Heckman’s specific arguements, I think they boil down to the same type of argument that Manzi was making about the current state of scientific research on genes: we have to be very careful in analyzing and interpreting this data because of the complexity of the variables (i.e. for Heckman it is difficult to separate the influence of nature and nurture, for Manzi, it is difficult to separate the interaction of many genes or epistatic interaction and how these genes then go on to determine intelligence).
These are the key paragraphs from Heckman’s review:
“Ironically, the authors delete from their composite AFQT score a timed test of numerical operations because it is not highly correlated with the other tests. Yet it is well known that in the data they use, this subtest is the single best predictor of earnings of all the AFQT test components. The fact that many of the subtests are only weakly correlated with each other, and that the best predictor of earnings is only weakly correlated with their “g-loaded” score, only heightens doubts that a single-ability model is a satisfactory description of human intelligence. It also drives home the point that the “g-loading” so strongly emphasized by Murray and Herrnstein measures only agreement among tests—not predictive power for socioeconomic outcomes. By the same token, one could also argue that the authors have biased their empirical analysis against the conclusions they obtain by disregarding the test with the greatest predictive power.
More disturbing is the authors’ treatment of family background. The index is based on parental education and occupational status, and on family income measured at one point in the entire life cycle of the child. For many young adults, the family-income measure is entirely missing and is omitted from the construction of the index.
The IQ measure used by Murray and Herrnstein is taken rather late in the life cycle of the child. (Recall that the IQ test is administered to youth 15 to 23 years old.) Many analysts suspect that IQ as measured by tests administered after early childhood reflects the outcome of social and cultural influences. The authors attempt to eliminate these influences by a standard statistical method called regression analysis.
But the standard statistical methods used by Murray and Herrnstein are vulnerable to measurement error. It would be incredible if 15 to 23 years of environmental influences, including the nurturing of parents, the resources they spent on a child, their cultural environment, their interaction with their children, and the influence of the larger community could be summarized by a single measure of education, occupation, and family income in one year. If environment is poorly measured but affects the test score—and there is solid evidence of environmental impacts on test scores—then Murray and Herrnstein’s finding that IQ has a stronger impact on socioeconomic outcomes than the measured environment may simply arise from the poor quality of the measure of the environment.
The authors present evidence that IQ rises with age and with years of schooling completed. IQ may actually be a better measure of the environment facing children than the measure of environment used by Murray and Herrnstein. They use IQ to predict schooling, but schooling produces IQ. Hence, they are especially likely to find a strong measured effect of “IQ” on schooling.
The same remarks apply to their study of racial and ethnic differentials in socioeconomic outcomes. If racial differentials in environments affect ability and influence measured test scores, evidence that racial differentials weaken when ability is controlled for using regression methods does not rule out an important role for the environment in explaining performance in society. In the presence of measurement error in the environment, the authors’ analysis will overstate the “true” effect of ability on those outcomes.
There are methods for addressing these problems, but Murray and Herrnstein do not use them. They should have tried a variety of measures of family background to explore the sensitivity of their reported results to the particular measures of family background they do use. A strict environmentalist could justifiably argue that the evidence reported by Murray and Herrnstein simply reveals the crudity of their measure of the environment and the strength of the correlation between the test score and their measure of environment.
One important technical point worth making here concerns the method used by the authors to measure standardized changes in IQ and family background. By its very construction as a measure that follows a bell curve, the “two-standard deviation” range in measured IQ used by the authors to gauge the sensitivity of outcomes to IQ represents a change in IQ ranging over 95 percent of the population. A “two-standard deviation” range of their family background index does not include 95 percent of the population, because that measure does not come from a bell curve. It may include as little as 75 percent of the population. By restricting the range of the environmental variable they understate the role of the environment in affecting outcomes relative to the role allocated to IQ.”
Or, to summarize Heckman in perhaps a more radical way: what social science can tell us about public policy is very, very limited because human beings and social life is so damn complicated and therefore is almost impossible to carefully model using regression analysis.
Finally, has Heckman gone on to write other articles examining this question? I ask because you claim he “spent the last dozen years trying to prove Herrnstein and Murray empirically wrong and his review right”. What’s your evidence for this statement?
— Jeff Singer · Jun 12, 05:08 PM · #
Jeff— this post has nothing to do with genetic bases for low IQ. Nothing. I am also tired. I’m tired of Sailer shoehorning his attacks on black people into every blog, no matter what the subject matter.
— Lifafa Das · Jun 12, 08:42 PM · #
Reihan,
Don’t listen to Sanjay! It always rains here! And there are are earthquakes! Have they told you about earthquakes? And droughts! And wildfires! And bears!
This message brought to you by the California Coalition to Keep Trevor’s Rent Low.
— Trevor · Jun 12, 09:51 PM · #
“What Will calls liberaltarian welfare statism was a key part of my political self-definition. Michael Lind was the first person who introduced me to the idea that Hayek defended the idea of a basic social minimum, and that piqued my interest in the pro-market right. I first encountered the Heckman-Carneiro work on human capital development in 2003, which I then pressed upon anyone who’d listen. I read Edmund Phelps’s Rewarding Work around the same time I read Christopher Jencks’s brilliant The Homeless, still one of the best books I’ve ever read. Though neither Phelps nor Jencks can be described as conservatives — certainly not Jencks, who is probably my favorite egalitarian liberal — I think both books accelerated my undergraduate self-understanding from the political left to the political right, which is, biographically speaking, a little off. I think most campus conservatives are motivated by what they perceive as political correctness run amok, etc., but that sort of thing never exercised me all that much.”
Reihan, I enjoy reading your work and I think you are honestly trying to improve political discourse in this country with your work. Still, whenever I read passages like the one above, I think of an observation a friend of mine had in college: “Any version of conservatism that can’t be easily understood and supported by a bunch of Texas fraternity boys has no future”. My friend wasn’t saying that triumphantly, he was saying that rather sadly, as his politics were (as best as I can describe them) as sort of Evelyn Waugh paleoconservatism.
In any case, while I think you raise a lot of good points, I can’t help but wonder if in your analyses you end up spending a lot of time veering off in the weeds, or overemphasizing theoretical points over more salient (though less intellectually stimulating) points, like what financial donors are made better off by a certain set of policies or political coalition, etc.
— Mark in Houston · Jun 13, 12:07 AM · #
Look, the centerpiece of this post is a quote from (I guess) Will Wilkinson saying, “… I think I’m tilting in favor of Heckmanesque early childhood programs as part of the liberaltarian package …”
What I’m saying is that trying to build an ideology around U. of Chicago economist James Heckman’s past policy recommendations is a questionable tactic because Heckman’s research hasn’t been working out the way he hoped it would when he wrote a very angry review of The Bell Curve in “Reason” in 1995 and then set out to prove he was right and Herrnstein and Murray were wrong. There’s all the money in the world available to social scientists to prove The Bell Curve wrong, but Heckman’s way too honest a scholar to fake what the world wants to hear. I follow Heckman’s research closely and he’s getting frustrated.
I’m sorry if this sounds like a broken record, but, as this example shows once again, there are a handful of empirical questions that keep turning out to be central to thinking productively about the modern world, and differences in IQ is right at the top of the list. That’s why we see such frenzied hatred and career punishment directed at heretics like James Watson and Larry Summers who question the conventional wisdom.
— Steve Sailer · Jun 13, 09:46 AM · #