An ongoing review of politics and culture

They Meant Us No Harm, But Only Gave Us the Lotus

After hearing Sam Quinones on EconTalk, I finally stopped procrastinating and read Dreamland. It only took a few days over which every other activity was a distraction from finishing the book. Dreamland provides a unified story of the opiate epidemic starting in the late 1990s with both the overall social trend and close-ups on the lives of dealers, addicts, doctors, cops, epidemiologists, and mourners. I’ve watched every episode of Justified and read Case and Deaton PNAS 2015, so I was not surprised by the broad argument of the book that a shift in medicine towards prescribing opiates created ubiquitous chemical dependence that was eventually met by black tar heroin, all of which disproportionately affected rust belt white people. What made the book amazing to me even knowing the broad contours of the social facts it describes was how every detail of the book illustrated and illuminated another aspect of sociology. As I remarked on Twitter, my discipline of sociology could very well treat Dreamland the same way political scientists treat History of the Peloponnesian War.

In no particular order, here are a few of the themes I noticed.

The dealers who come up from Xalisco, Nayarit to live for a few months in spartan conditions working long hours driving around with balloons of dope in their mouths are motivated by relative deprivation. As more and more dealer-migrants return to Xalisco flush with cash this creates a new standard of living in the village and transforms being an impoverished sugar cane farmer from just how life goes to a status that can be rejected. But relative deprivation is too weak to explain Xalisco life, which is better characterized as competitive feasting straight out of Mauss’s The Gift. Xalisco-style potlatch can occur whenever a migrant returns with suitcases full of Levis 501s to disburse to a receiving line of supplicants, but is especially centered on the corn festival, where migrants would compete by sponsoring banda performances (104). Interestingly, while dealers often planned to save enough wages to capitalize a small business, they tended to dissipate their wealth in gifts to family and “the rest on beer, strip clubs, and cocaine, and walked the streets of Xalisco for a week or two the object of other men’s envy” (261). This envy is something Quinones emphasizes repeatedly and the way it is formed by public feasting and is sublimated into a need to reciprocate so as to restore honor, which in turn creates the labor supply for black tar heroin retailing as men seek another bundle of cash through which to engage in such honorable public profligacy.

Social capital also plays a strong role in explaining how Xalisco drug crews operated, which was distinct from most drug dealers. Notwithstanding a handful of murders in the book, Xalisco dealers generally eschewed violence and never carry guns. Competing heroin crews had an approach of friendly competition rather than violent turf wars over territory. Quinones attributes this partly to their “pizza delivery” business model as compared to traditional corner slinging, but mostly to the thick interconnected ties based in a small rancho back home where everybody knows everybody. Another distinctive aspect of the Xalisco boys business model is that dealers earn a salary, whereas typically drugs are sold on commission. This would normally present a principle-agent problem, but it was not an issue for Xalisco dealers. Crew bosses did engage in monitoring through calling junkies to confirm that their dealers were prompt, polite, and the heroin was of high quality, but these monitoring costs were feasible because of the high level of trust. Crew bosses basically trusted their dealers because they weren’t junkies (Xalisco boys consider heroin disgusting) and they had thick communal ties from the rancho. This is the positive aspect of social capital, but there is also a negative sense of social capital in that men were pushed into drug dealing and returning to drug dealing by the insatiable demands to support relatives. That’s all supply side, but social capital also characterizes Quinones’s understanding of the demand side, though in a sense closer to Putnam than Portes, in blaming the rise of opiates on the collapse of community. In this aspect of the story Quinones is a staunch communitarian moralist, which didn’t bother me as I’m a communitarian moralist too, but YMMV and blaming opiates on the collapse of community was the only argument in the book that was more tell than show.

On the prescription opiates side, Quinones tells the story of how medicine lost its traditional reluctance to prescribe opiates in the pain revolution and particularly the key role played by Porter and Jick NEJM. The article itself is a one paragraph letter noting that in-patients treated with opiates rarely became addicted. The role of this brief letter in the pain revolution is instructive for scientific epistemology. In terms of scientific epistemology it provides a valuable cautionary tale for the problem of generalizing beyond the scope of the data. The finding showed that in-patients receiving very conservative doses of opiates rarely became addicted but this was interpreted as it being completely safe to provide out-patients with liberal supplies of opiates. In Quinones’s telling, the article is something of a Sleeping Beauty citation, taking off after it was cited in a 1986 Pain article by Foley and Portenoy. However a Google Scholar search= shows that the article began getting cited almost immediately (the earliest citation is from 1982 in a nursing journal). Nonetheless the story of how a brief publication summarizing a single database query was interpreted well beyond its original scope conditions to justify risky changes to medical practice can provide grist for the mill of historians and sociologists of science. A key part of the story as to why people cited this tiny publication is because they wanted to believe it as it created a permission structure for prescribing effective but dangerous drugs and pharmaceutical detailing exploited this by promoting Porter and Jick, or even just the black-boxed factoid of “1% addiction rate” to physicians.

A few other themes I noticed:
. pharmaceutical detailing in opiates, as in all drugs, follows my model of obfuscated transactionalism and Quinones has a lot of material on the history of detailing
. the submerged state gives Medicaid rather than cash transfers and a lot of diverted opiates came from pill mills paid for through Medicaid fraud
. Xalisco boys engage in statistical discrimination by only selling to white customers who they see as less likely to rob them than black customers
. chain migration characterizes some aspects of Xalisco boy migration, but they also are entrepreneurial in relying on junkies as scouts to explore new markets, including ones with no history of Nayarit migrants
. doctors prescribed opiates in part to get patients out of their offices quickly and prescribed 30 day packs of pills rather than 3 day packs of pills to avoid return visits. Proper pain management is extremely labor intensive, but hard to get insurance reimbursement. This follows logically from Baumol’s disease in that as high-skilled medical labor grows more expensive, insurance companies will substitute capital (drugs).
. reactivity is everywhere. Pain is part of doctor and hospital ratings, but iatrogenic addiction is not so doctors prescribe dope. Sentencing is based on large quantities of dope and carrying a gun so Xalisco boys carry only small quantities of dope and go unarmed.

And oh yeah, there’s also some stuff in the book about how this is an enormous social and public health epidemic, killing tens of thousands of Americans a year and stealing the souls of many more — debasing them into the kind of people who steal their children’s Christmas presents to trade for pills. But I’d rather focus on how it provides material for developing theory because I prefer to be fascinated than livid and that attitude is how I made it all the way through the book only breaking down in tears once.

Cross-posted at Code & Culture

The Enemy of My Enemy is My Myopia

Recently on Twitter, Josh Barro said Romney’s Never Trump speech from the primary was better than he remembered and Matt Yglesias replied that “If Mitt had the courage of his convictions and played the Evan McMullin role he could have made a real difference.” This struck me as profoundly uncharitable so I screencapped the tweet along with Yglesias’s infamous “Why I’m More Worried About Marco Rubio Than Donald Trump” post. Yglesias replied to this pointing out that he was wrong to say Rubio was worse and that he had retracted that take a few weeks later which he followed up by a few other tweets saying it was a mistake and other liberals had it right in vociferously opposing Trump from day one. Now as I have previously remarked, the appropriate response to someone who rejects folly for any reason is to embrace them for it. My point in blogging this is not to further sneer at Yglesias but to acknowledge that pretty much everybody has in some way underestimated the threat of Trump and this is what made him possible.

Most people underestimated Trump early on in the sense of seeing him as a problem that would solve itself, or perhaps as somebody else’s problem. For much of 2015 it was not absurd to see Trump as a clown seeking publicity who would drop out before certain disclosure-linked filing deadlines (just as he had in three earlier cycles). From this perspective you didn’t need to do anything to stop him as you could wishcast that he would drop out. Likewise, one could appreciate that Trump was a threat but focus on rivals within one’s own lane, which led to a collective action problem in challenging Trump. Hence the Jeb! Campaign and his Right to Rise super PAC squandered $100 million attacking Marco Rubio. Likewise, early in the primary Ted Cruz hugged Trump in the hope that he would sputter out and Cruz could then sweep up his voters.

There was also a much more egregious version of underestimating Trump which was to have such contempt for one’s traditional political rivals as to actively prefer Trump to them. This was the mistake that Yglesias (briefly) made in seeing Rubio as worse than Trump and giving as reasons all the standard complaints a center-leftist has against a generic Republican. And of course a center-leftist is entitled to oppose a center-right politician running on a garden variety fusionist platform, but it is absurd for a center-leftist to say fusionism is worse than fascism. Likewise, consider why once Rubio dropped out that the party didn’t rally to Cruz as Romney begged it to do, the standard answer being that every Republican in Washington hates Cruz for his endless showboating and propensity to call everybody else a bunch of RINOs and the K-Street wing was afraid that he would be harder to redirect towards their petty venalities than Trump. Now, I can understand hating Cruz for this. I hated Cruz for his shutdown theatrics and generally being the poster-boy for median voter theorem denialist derp, but I still voted for him in the California primary because it was the best shot at stopping Trump. And yet the party as a whole was so focused on the last six years of Tea Party versus establishment fights that it couldn’t recognize that the party was on the verge of being taken over by a demagogue far nastier than some guy in a three corner hat. If people like this were running things in 1941, we never would have extended Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union and Hitler would have taken Moscow in time to redeploy half the Wehrmacht to the Atlantic Wall.

The myopia of seeing Trump as somebody else’s problem, or worse, as less bad than my traditional enemy across or within political parties, is bad, but what makes it downright painful is there is every reason to believe the lesson has gone unlearned and that as a dog returns to its vomit so will we fools return to our folly. There was a preview of this “learned nothing, forgotten nothing” mentality a week ago when it briefly looked like the Republican party would convince Trump to resign and run Pence at the top of the ticket and the immediate response was a bunch of takes arguing Pence was just as bad or worse than Trump. Included amongst these was a piece from Vox, where Yglesias ran his “Rubio is worse than Trump” piece and the retraction a few weeks later. (Vox: The smartest thinkers, the tastiest vomit).

We deserve this. All of us.

we traced the demagoguery, it's coming from inside the house

One of my favorite novels is Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. It’s a hard sci-fi novel based on the premise that scientists live in monasteries cloistered off from the rest of society. People outside the monasteries have attitudes and beliefs about them that the science-monks resent and consider ridiculous. Over the course of the novel our protagonist, one of the science-monks gradually comes to learn that the hazy and confused notions people outside the monasteries had about them were grounded in a kernel of truth about the science-monks doing some pretty scary things to reality and memory.

This is a bit like being a conservative in 2016. For years we’ve been subject to libsplaining about right-wing authoritarian personalities and dog whistles to racism and our entirely sincere reaction was “that’s ridiculous.” For instance, when the Tea Party was in full swing, it was a really common thing to call it racist. (A Google search for “tea party racist” just gave me 1,070,000 hits). And the conservative response is what are you talking about, this is a small government movement and sure they have an unfortunate penchant for revolutionary war cosplay, PAC scams, and primarying anybody who doesn’t threaten a government shutdown over a bill to repeal the New Deal, but their hearts are in the right place, and have you heard how they clean up trash after their rallies?

And then Trump happens. You see a lot of people who liked to wave around pocket Constitutions as they seemed like they were angry about government that was too big to drown in the bathtub are now supporting a man who wants to order the military to commit war crimes and engage in the greatest politicization of the economy since the National Recovery Administration. And you realize, these people weren’t angry about an expansion of the state or problems with the separation of powers, they were just plain angry.

For decades fusionist ideology provided a rallying point that usefully sublimated our coalition’s politics into a rational and principled political program. And it was infuriating when liberals said, whatever, we don’t like your coalition and ignored what we were saying. But it turns out they knew something. Just as it is obviously true that the politics of late antiquity weren’t really about adoptionist Christology but this just provided a flag of convenience to separatist movements (and chariot racing hooligans), so it increasingly seems that our politics are epiphenomenal to more atavistic and tribal conflicts.

To put it another way, 2016 was the year when Perlstein’s Nixonland showed that Nash’s Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 has a glass jaw.

What Now

After Trump clinched the nomination in Indiana, I see it as a foregone conclusion that we will have four years of Hillary Clinton and she will appoint replacements for Scalia and RBG, and very possibly a third or fourth justice, cementing a progressive majority for a generation. I also prefer this to a Trump administration. So the question is what is best for 2020. Obviously this involves a rethinking of the platform, and this time being sure that the base will agree to the new platform, but in the meantime there is an election and what should us Never Trump types do. I see two options:

A. Unite behind a write-in candidate or third party candidate
B. Quietly stay home or leave ballots empty
(We will not be discussing C, make a Faustian bargain that will be so terrific you’re not gonna believe it, you’ll get tired of how much Mephistopheles will corrupt you)

“A” has the appeal of increasing turnout for down ballot races and maintaining some salvage value for the conservative brand. It also gives us something to do other than make SMOD jokes until November.

“B” has the appeal of denying the Trumpkins a credible “stabbed in the back” narrative. Suppose for the sake of argument that there are 50 million solid Hillary voters, 30 million solid Trump voters, 10 million voters who would go for Trump in a binary race but would defect to an alternative, and 10 million #NeverTrumps. In the two-person race, there is low turnout on the right and Trump gets beat 40 to 60 — a decisive thumping that would do a lot to kill his influence in 2020. In the three-person race, Trump gets 30%, generic conservative gets 20%, and Hillary gets 50%. That is the kind of outcome that invites a stabbed in the back narrative since, as we all remember from 2000, partisans assume third parties are poaching voters, not increasing turnout (and in 2000 they were right). This kind of stabbed in the back narrative would make it much harder to reconcile and rebuild the party around a modified platform (no more pushes for comprehensive immigration reform, a more Jacksonian foreign policy, and more comfort with tax and transfer).

The other appeal of “B” is it avoids the problem that there is no “generic conservative” around whom to rally. Last night Ben Sasse had a thoughtful post declaring his insistence on voting for an independent candidate who is not named Ben Sasse (and I don’t blame him). Our founder and proprietor wants Romney to run again and I would gladly vote for him, but there is a real risk of it seeming like learning nothing, forgetting nothing.

And third parties have their own problems. For instance, the Libertarian Party front runner is putting a substantive preference for social liberalism over thin liberalism. This is simply not a position that can get votes from the kind of principled social conservatives who are the core of the Never Trump movement. Moreover (unlike Johnson’s other positions conservatives dislike, like drug legalization) “bake the cake” is not even a libertarian position. RFRA is exactly the kind of compromise that fusionism is meant to encompass in providing potential common ground which allows people with socially liberal substantive preferences and socially conservative substantive preferences to coexist in the same polity and which moreover is based on the essentially libertarian ideological principle and freedom of association, freedom of contract, and voluntary exchange. But LOLjk, it’s really about telling “u mad bro” to the prudes and bigots. I find it very telling that libertarian intellectuals at places like Cato or Reason with strongly held substantive preferences for social liberalism support RFRA out of principle, but the Libertarian Party’s front runner Gary Johnson does not. Perhaps just as 2016 has taught us that Republicans (as compared to conservatives) are much less ideological and much more tribal or moral intuitionist than we thought, it may also in a much smaller way be telling us something similar about Libertarians (as compared to libertarians).

Traitors

This morning Governor Chris Christie endorsed Donald Trump for president. There was widespread speculation that this reflected Christie hoping for an appointment as Attorney General in the event of a Trump victory. This was met with widespread disgust from mainstream conservative intellectuals, all of whom despise Trump (and immediately prior to the endorsement were delighting in Rubio having learned to fight Trump at his own insult comic game). Over on Twitter, Josh Barro observed that it is precisely Trump’s outsider nature that makes endorsing him attractive for an ambitious Republican politician.

“The incentive to get in with Trump is EVEN STRONGER than with a normal presumptive nominee.”
“Most nominees have an entourage already: Senate staff, state house aides, large campaign staff, longtime political allies.”
“When you endorse a normal candidate, you’re getting in line behind all those people for jobs. With Trump, you’re at the front of the line.”
“Chris Christie has made himself, instantly and by a large margin, Trump’s most important ally. No endorser can do that with Rubio.”

This struck me as very astute and reminded me of Gould’s 2002 AJS on The Origins of Status Hierarchies. This model starts with a cumulative advantage model for status. The trick with cumulative advantage models though is to avoid their natural tendency towards absolute inequality and so the models always have some kind of braking mechanism so the histogram ends up as a power-law, not a step function. For instance, Rosen 1981 uses heterogeneity of taste and diminishing marginal returns to avoid what would otherwise be the implication of his model of exactly one celebrity achieving universal acclaim. Anyway, the point is that cumulative advantage models need a brake, and Gould’s brake is reciprocity. Gould observes that attention and resources are finite and so when someone has many followers, they lose the ability to reciprocate with them. To the extent that followers are attentive not only to the status of a patron, but the attention and resources the patron reciprocates, then their high numbers of followers will swamp the ability of high status followers to reciprocate and so inhibit their ability to attract new followers. For instance, a grad student might rationally prefer to work with an associate professor who has only a few advisees and so can spend several hours a week with each of them than with a Nobel Laureate who has so many advisees he doesn’t recognize some of them in the hallway.
In this sense, Rubio as the clear favorite of the party establishment has already recruited great masses of political talent. Should Rubio win in November, he will have an embarrassment of riches in terms of followers with whom to fill cabinet positions and other high-ranking political roles. That is to say, Rubio’s ability to reciprocate the support of his followers is swamped by the great number of followers he has acquired. (I’m talking about followers among the sorts of people likely to be appointed to administration positions, I’ll get to voters later). This then makes some potential followers decide to affiliate with a patron who is not too busy for them, and hence Chris Christie is hoping to spend the next eight years building RICO cases against people who use the term “short-fingered vulgarian.”
But, there’s a problem with this, which is that status itself provides resources, especially in a system where power is not continuous but winner-take-all. (The discontinuity of is really important, as Schilke and I argued recently). In this sense, it shouldn’t matter that a candidate with few endorsements has the fewest supporters competing for patronage because that candidate would lose and so not have patronage to allocate. That would be true if the political science model nicknamed “the party decides”(which we can generalize as the endogeneity of status competition) were true. But if that model were true, we would be seeing Rubio (who recruited the most intellectuals) or Jeb! (who raised the most money) as the clear front-runner and that is anything but the case since the GOP primary this cycle has been consistently dominated by outsiders (Trump, briefly Carson, and even Cruz, who is a senator but not a notably un-collegial one).
This then suggests that we have to recognize that power, including the ability to allocate resources to followers, is not necessarily a function of how many followers one has. In ordinary times it might be, especially in the Republican party which normally follows the party decides model. However in this year it is clear that popularity in opinion polls and primaries/caucuses has no (positive) correlation with establishment support. This may be because Trump, like Lenin, is a figure of such immense charisma that he can defy the models. Or it may be that the base is revolting over a substantive issue like immigration. Or maybe the support of neo-Nazis with a bizarre interest in anime and the Frankfurt school is the secret sauce. Whatever the exact nature of why the party decides model is breaking, the fact is that it is. The Republican primary reminds me of Bourdieu’s model of a field of mass cultural production and a restricted field of production. Rubio is clearly dominating in the restricted field of elite conservative opinion, but that does him very little good considering how effective Trump is at the mass field. If we view the competition for endorsements not as an isolated system, but one that is loosely coupled to an adjacent system of competition for voters, then the status competition for endorsements is no longer entirely endogenous but there is a source of exogenous power shaping it. (In the Gould model this would be subsumed as part of Q_j). Hence Trump’s great popularity with voters despite his great unpopularity with party elites makes him more attractive than he would otherwise be to party elites who will break ranks and affiliate with the demagogue.
In Trump’s case, his fame, wit, and shamelessness have gained him the support of voters and this has disrupted the otherwise endogenous system of endorsements, however the model could generalize to any source of power outside of the endogenous process of consensus building within party elites. A very similar model would apply to those political actors who welcome a foreign invader as supporters in domestic disputes they would otherwise lose. Americans take for granted that the opposition party will be a loyal opposition and so we abide by the maxim that “politics ends at the water’s edge,” which is why periods like the Second Red Scare (or from the other perspective, the Popular Front that preceded it) seem so anomalous. However for centuries, machinations to set yourself up as a client-state after relying on imperial powers to depose the current batch of elites is most of what politics was. In such a scenario, a political actor who lacks much power within the internal dynamics of oligarchy could still acquire followers if they seemed to be favored by the forces massing across the border. So we might expect a lot of ambitious mitteleuropean politicians to affiliate with heretofore minor fascist parties c 1938, or with heretofore minor communist parties c 1943.
cross-posted at Code&Culture

das Kacey Musgraves Problem

Reihan recently tweeted “A thought: could it be that the problem with the world is people not caring enough about other people’s biscuits?” As I replied at the time, Kacey Musgraves’s “Pageant Material” has the potential to be even more fruitful for conservative thought than was Marilyn Manson’s “Mechanical Animals.” Much as Adam Smith is best known for Wealth of Nations but das Adam Smith Problem emphasizes the difficulty of reconciling his themes there with those in Theory of Moral Sentiments, we can use das Kacey Musgraves Problem to refer to how Musgraves both braces against and embraces gemeinschaft.

As Reihan suggested, a central theme in Kacey Musgraves’s oeuvre is a rejection of the constraints of moral judgment. The verses of her current single, “Biscuits,” decry discussion of moral failings as nothing but the envy of lesser beings and the chorus advises to “mind your own biscuits and life will be gravy.” Likewise “Follow Your Arrow” on the previous album mostly consists of a list of pairs of social expectations, each of which form a Scylla and Charybdis of prudery and libertinism. The explicit theme being that social acceptability is impossible and so do what thou willst. We thus see a theme of rejecting the slave morality that would constrain an East Texas ubermensch.

But in parallel and contradicting this is an embrace of the inescapable necessity of community. We see this most obviously in “This Town,” which describes a town that is too small to be mean. Ironically, the song is immediately preceded by “Biscuits,” even though it has almost exactly opposite themes. Likewise, “Family is Family” expresses the theme that however aggravating they may be, the ties of kinship are uniquely indissoluble. Finally, the value of gemeinschaft is expressed negatively by showing the desperate neediness of isolation in “It Is What It Is,” in which the singer solicits someone to come over for casual sex, but resists the idea of a persistent relationship.

Whereas James Poulos derives from Marilyn Manson an ironic but nonetheless unified synthesis of hedonistic authoritarianism that James calls the pink police state, Musgraves is better described as emphasizing the duality of human emotional dependence upon other people and resistance to the moral constraints it demands. If one assumes that sin is inevitable (as does “Biscuits”) or that proper behavior is an impossible catch-22 (as does “Follow Your Arrow”), then by inference, moral judgment itself is nothing more than cruelty. And so Musgraves’s paradoxical relationship to gemeinschaft ultimately stems from a stultified WEIRD moral vocabulary, which Jon Haidt has shown to rely ultimately on harm and liberty, and where sanctity and loyalty are threatening insofar as they are conceived of as offering nothing more than harm and constraints on liberty. That this town is too small mean implies that one should therefore mind one’s own biscuits.

Or maybe I’m overthinking this.

When to Control for X

At Vox, Ezra Klein raises an important meta-theoretical point in social science analysis, which is that it is very hard to distinguish mechanisms from controls. If there is a zero-order correlation between X1 and Y, but it drops out when you introduce X2, this in of itself does not tell you if the X1~Y relationship is spurious or if it is mediated. If being shot at is correlated with death, but the effect falls out of significance once you control for exsanguination, one would not say that the probabilistic effect of being shot at on death is spurious. Rather you would say that losing a lot of blood is the mechanism by which being shot at often kills you.

I have been attentive to this issue at least since I read Lieberson’s Making it Count in grad school. In practice this sometimes comes out as fighting with peer reviewers who demand that I throw controls in a model, when the controls are closely related to the mechanism I had posited and so my model would predict that some or all of the effect would drop out when the controls/mechanisms are introduced. So I was glad to see Klein take up this issue at Vox. Klein’s particular case was that when you introduce a lot of controls, a lot of of ascriptive inequality effects drop out. He argues, very plausibly, that this is missing the point since this does not mean there is no effect, only that the effect is mediated by causal pathways.

There are two issues with this.

First, as Klein appreciates, but which I feel may be lost, identifying mechanisms is crucial for crafting a critique and a solution. Or for that matter, deciding whether a solution would be too intrusive and clumsy to be worthwhile. Take the women make 77 cents on the dollar factoid. This is often implicitly or explicitly taken as the boss ashing his cigar, laughing, and saying “A raise? Haven’t you heard? It’s a man’s world.” And this model underlies things like the Ledbetter Act and political mobilization premised on it. But if social science can show us that almost all of the gender gap is really a) a mommy gap and b) occupational sorting, then this is profoundly misleading and all we could expect of the Ledbetter Act is to make a few lawyers rich and maybe at best push the figure from $0.77 to $0.78. Working on the other $0.22 would require stuff like family-friendly workplaces and comparable worth laws, and even that probably would only get you halfway there in the absence of fairly radical changes in gender roles. Personally, I think things like comparable worth laws would be absurdly intrusive manipulations of labor markets that are likely to create innumerable absurdities and distortions, but at least they’d be addressing one of the key mechanisms instead of targeting a caricature of minor contemporary relevance and in practice do little more than give a handout to trial lawyers and an extra bullet point to the Life of Julia slide deck.

As more sophisticated critics of ascriptive inequality appreciate, the vast bulk of the action is structural not discretionary, let alone discretionary and volitional. Indeed under some circumstances they will craft theories that argue that even discretionary inequality is ultimately structural insofar as counterfactual structures would have reduced the scope of discretion. And yet when somebody is writing a story on racism the editor goes for a stock photo of a Klan rally, not a heat map of public transit commuting times to geo-tagged entry level retail positions.

Second, I expect any day now Vox will update this piece “ Debunking the most pervasive myth about black fatherhood, “ which shows that black men are great dads controlling for whether they live with their kids. The article hilariously acknowledges a few paragraphs in that black men are much less likely to live with their kids than white men, but then hand waves at how this is in turn probably caused by mass incarceration. Curiously, the “myth” piece on how the racial disparity in parenting goes away (and maybe even reverses sign) when you control for living with your kids was written after the piece on how it doesn’t matter that most of the racial disparity in criminal justice goes away when you control for offending rates, allocation of policing resources, etc. because controls are better conceptualized as mechanisms. Maybe Lopez doesn’t read the boss’s copy. How embarrassing.

Now it’s tempting to leave it at pundit, voxsplain thyself. However I have a broader point. To paraphrase Schmitt, the intellectual is he who decides on the control variables. Whether we call something a control or a mechanism is not a statistical issue in the sense that there is no R function or Stata postest command that will give you the answer. Rather, distinguishing a control from a mechanism is a theoretical issue. And in practice, theoretical issues are often political issues and so control versus mechanism is yet another instance of our old friend, that depending on how we feel normatively about a factual premise our epistemological standard shifts from “can we believe it” to “must we believe it.” If you find a zero-order association consistent with your worldview, then anything that threatens to explain it away is a mechanism. And if you find a zero-order association inconvenient for your worldview, then anything that promises to explain it away is a control.

Lacedaemonia: Disrupt

I was reading the house rules of Startup Castle and thought it sounded familiar. And then I realized the reason was because this. is. Sparta.

Here’s a comparison of a few Startup Castle house rules (in bold) with parallel passages from Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus (in plain text).

Prefer organized systems and common rules
Things being in this posture at his return, he applied himself, without loss of time, to a thorough reformation and resolved to change the whole face of the commonwealth; for what could a few particular laws and a partial alteration avail? He must act as wise physicians do, in the case of one who labors under a complication of diseases, by force of medicines reduce and exhaust him, change his whole temperament, and then set him upon a totally new regimen of diet.

Watch more than 4 hours of TV/movie/game entertainment per week
In the next place, he declared an outlawry of all needless and superfluous arts

Exercise at least 15 hours in a normal week
Their discipline continued still after they were full-grown men. No one was allowed to live after his own fancy; but the city was a sort of camp, in which every man had his share of provisions and business set out, and looked upon himself not so much born to serve his own ends as the interest of his country. Therefore, if they were commanded nothing else, they went to see the boys perform their exercises, to teach them something useful, or to learn it themselves of those who knew better.

we even stock the ‘generosity kitchen’ with basic foods like eggs, milk, cheese, bananas, rice, beans, potatoes, oats, cereal, and anything else that gets contributed.
They met by companies of fifteen, more or less, and each of them stood bound to bring in monthly a bushel of meal, eight gallons of wine, five pounds of cheese, two pounds and a half of figs, and some very small sum of money to buy flesh or fish with. Besides this, when any of them made sacrifice to the gods, they always sent a dole to the common hall; and, likewise, when any of them had been a hunting, he sent thither a part of the venison he had killed; for these two occasions were the only excuses allowed for supping at home. The custom of eating together was observed strictly for a great while afterwards; insomuch that king Agis himself, after having vanquished the Athenians, sending for his commons at his return home, because he desired to eat privately with his queen, was refused them by the polemarchs; which refusal when he resented so much as to omit next day the sacrifice due for a war happily ended, they made him pay a fine.

Have more than one internet app date per week
And so [the bridegroom] continues to do, spending his days, and, indeed, his nights with [his bunkmates], visiting his bride in fear and shame, and with circumspection, when he thought he should not be observed; she, also, on her part, using her wit to help and find favorable opportunities for their meeting, when company was out of the way. In this manner they lived a long time, insomuch that they sometimes had children by their wives before ever they saw their faces by daylight.

Drink alcohol more than 3 drinks per week
It is confessed, on all hands, that the Spartans dealt with [helots] very hardly; for it was a common thing to force them to drink to excess, and to lead them in that condition into their public halls, that the children might see what a sight a drunken man is; they made them to dance low dances, and sing ridiculous songs, forbidding them expressly to meddle with any of a better kind.

Own any clothing, shoes, watches, or handbags costing over $500
After they were twelve years old, they were no longer allowed to wear any under-garment; they had one coat to serve them a year; their bodies were hard and dry, with but little acquaintance of baths and unguents; these human indulgences they were allowed only on some few particular days in the year.

Caesaropapism is Our Greatest Strength

A few months ago I read TAS alum Alan Jacobs’ book The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography and it was truly fascinating. Probably the most entertaining bit was how early on the English attempted to impose their (high church) liturgy on the Scots and a Scotswoman hurled a chair at a priest, after which the bishop of Brechin “read his first service from the prayer book, he did so with two loaded pistols placed on the desk before him, in plain sight of the restive congregation.”

Less entertaining, but ultimately more worthy of reflection is the story of George C. Gorham, a priest who was denied a post by his bishop in a doctrinal dispute over baptism. Gorham then appealed his bishop’s decision to the Judicial Committee on the Privy Council. That is, a so-called “Episcopalian” system saw the decisions of an episkopos reversed by the British equivalent to the Supreme Court. Alan interprets this incident (pp 132-133):

The Judicial Committee’s “neutral reading” was, effectively, a plea that everyone just get along, and get along by vowing obedience to the Book of Common Prayer while allowing one another a good deal of freedom to read that book according to theological preference. The members of the committee were not saying that Gorham’s interpretation of the prayer book’s teaching on baptism was superior to the bishop’s, but rather that the bishop was ruling too narrowly and should have made more room for theological variance. They did not believe that every minister should be Latitudinarian, but they did, it seems, believe the boundaries of the Church of England as a whole needed to be set as broadly as possible.

In contemporary terms we would say the lay court was standing up for the individual’s right to freedom of conscience. We can go further and say that the court was not endorsing a particular view of baptism, but a diversity of belief about the sacrament. Of course in traditional Christian orthodoxy, bishops are supposed to enforce orthodoxy. (Presbyterianism and Congregationalism are early modern exceptions to this long-standing ecclesiastical rule, which dates at least to late antiquity and has antecedents in the New Testament era). For a secular authority to interfere with the internal doctrinal disputes of a church is traditionally understood to be Caesaropapism, a term that carries the pejorative understanding that it is as a form of tyranny.

So we are left with a paradox, when pushes comes to shove whose conscience do we respect? Gorham’s or his bishop’s? Or more broadly when an individual is affiliated with an institution, do we demand that the institution respect the individual’s conscience (and by implication that corporate freedom of conscience does not exist)? Or do we allow the institution to impose its own conscience on those who fall within its dominion (and by implication require that dissenting individuals either exit the institution or suck it up)? The classical liberal notion of freedom of association solves the problem by generally siding with the institution, at least insofar as the individual is free to exit the institution and seek another. (The legal term “public accommodation” is now so expansive that it is hard to identify things that are not public accommodations, but it originally only applied to monopolies and the like). Of course in fairness to Gorham, even if he were free to disaffiliate from the Church of England and seek ordination with a free church, there is a sort of moderate level of coercion insofar as doing so would require forgoing the state support that only the CoE, as the established church, enjoyed. Hence I have more sympathy with Gorham in the British context than I would were he to have pressed a similar case against an Episcopalian bishop in a country like the United States with no established church. Of course as the kind of people who are want to invoke argumentum ad Myhrvold’s Gulch are quick to remind us, the American government does subsidize religion indirectly through tax exemptions and the like, but much like our tacit arts policy (which also mostly consists of tax breaks) and our early tacit media policy (which mostly consisted of things like widespread literacy and favorable postal rates), the indirect nature of American subsidies for religion is consequential in establishing neutrality that promotes both flourishing and diversity of organizations in a way that facilitates dissenters from any particular organization voting with their feet.

This case reminded me of a general issue that cuts across many of our recent debates involving a paradox of freedom and diversity. In particular, are institutions free to restrict the freedom of individuals, each in their own way and so we see diversity between institutions as they exert varying degrees and varieties of restrictions on those individuals who sort into them? Or rather, are individuals to be free to act regardless of which institution they are within, with the corollary that institutions are to be coerced into liberating individuals? That is, will we have a program of intolerance for intolerance and an outcome of institutions that are homogeneously diverse?

For instance, consider the case of Gordon College, an evangelical college near Boston. (And full disclosure, whose president is a friend of mine from grad school, although we have not discussed these issues). Gordon has instituted a policy all students are required to restrict their sexuality only to heterosexual marriages, but gay students (and for that matter, straight single students) are welcome so long as they abide by the school’s conception of chastity. The Gordon policy restricts the freedom of its students, and let’s be honest, it makes especially strong demands of gay students, who Gordon expects to remain abstinent, whereas straight students are allowed to marry, and this is what makes people upset. Now, I work at a public university, which we can think of as the established church of Our Lady of Credentialism, and in the extremely unlikely event that such a proposal were to be proposed at UCLA, I would adamantly oppose it. This is not only because of my personal preferences, but because I feel a public institution has a special responsibility for inclusion and liberty. But even as Gordon’s policies would be unconscionable for a state college, it is also extremely disturbing that a quasi-public accrediting body is attempting to coerce Gordon into dropping this policy. That is, I think a free society should emphasize individual liberty when it comes to the state (including semi-autonomous arms of the state, like public colleges) but freedom of association, even at the expense of individual liberty, when it comes to private institutions. There are hundreds of liberal arts colleges in America, 28 of them in Massachusetts alone, and a free society can allow some of them to restrict student freedom, so long as students uncomfortable with these restrictions are free to choose other schools.

Of course, it’s possible to overdo it. It is troubling to remember that one of the key precedents in the development of the autonomy of the Church from the state was when Ambrose forced Theodosius to reverse an edict demanding restitution from a Christian mob that burned down a synagogue. We moderns think it is just that churches should be subject to the impartial administration of civil and criminal law even as their internal doctrinal matters should be immune to interference. Of course, it’s not always possible to clearly draw the line between internal matters that deserve autonomy and matters of public concern (cough Little Sisters cough), though I’m comfortable with saying Ambrose drew it wrong. I don’t really know whether the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council got it right or wrong, but I do think this is the kind of dilemma that can often be avoided or mitigated by not having an established institution but a plurality of private ones.

Evolutionarily Stable Strategery

Yesterday somebody asked Governor Walker if he believes in evolution and he ducked the question. As Ramesh argued, this was a mistake, and there was a fair amount of snark directed at this. Then there was a wave of counter-snark, stemming from the same impulse as Cooke’s recent NR cover story about how the NdGT “I love science” fan club is really about mood affiliation, much of it semi-sublimated anti-clericalism, and not really very much about scientific knowledge.

I totally understand the impulse to call out the extent to which affirmation of science is 99% mood affiliation and only 1% knowledge, but I actually didn’t enjoy this whole fracas last night on Twitter, especially from Sean Davis of The Federalist (who did some good reporting a few months ago showing how NdGT basically makes stuff up), who barraged Ben White of Politico with pointed quiz questions about the mechanisms of evolution. Meanwhile Davis got many a #sickburn type compliment. I found the whole spectacle lamentable for two reasons for this:

1) Criticizing the gotcha question, and particularly asking, ok smart guy, if you “love science” then how does genetic drift work, etc, sounds very similar to the rhetorical tactics of intelligent design folks and so plays into the idea that the right are a bunch of creationists and the intellectual right are still a bunch of creationists, just ones with a list of talking points that sound like someone ran an EEB textbook through a Markov Chain word salad generator. Note that this is still the impression I get, and I would imagine many other people do, regardless of whether the people issuing the “OK smart guy” snark are actually young Earthers, ID, or totally orthodox EEB. Remember, we live in a world where you still see headlines saying “Man Bites Dog: Pope Francis Believes in Evolution” and it’s only after the jump, if at all, that there’s the caveat “just like the last half dozen or so occupants of the throne of St Peter.”

2) Specifically because I am a conservative, I believe in deference to legitimate authority and the limitations of human reason. One particular manifestation of this is that I think we should embrace scientific orthodoxy even when we don’t personally understand it. To jump on people for demanding affirmation of science but without being able to distinguish allopatric from sympatric speciation makes about as much sense, and for similar reasons, as jumping on people for affirming belief in democracy without being able to explain the Arrow impossibility theorem or the median voter theorem, or for calling themselves Christians but without being able to explain “consubstantiality” (or for that matter, for being excited about just having just learned the word “eschatology” if you recall that recent circle jerk of Christian intellectual snobbery). It’s a good thing when people embrace the consensus of legitimate experts. When people start thinking things through for themselves and bullying those who naively accept orthodoxy this is when you get anti-vaxxers, truthers, religious heresy, etc.

(For what it’s worth, I personally have a very solid working understanding of evolutionary biology and so could answer pretty much all of the Jeopardy with your host Sean Davis questions, but I am fairly ignorant of most of the other hard sciences and could not explain, for instance, the Big Bang).

Anyway, knock it off guys. Sure, it’s obnoxious that the left and/or journalists confuse mood affiliation with knowledge, but just let it go.

I Am Hassle, For We Are Many

Starting in the 2012 cycle and in a much more serious way in the 2014 cycle, the Republicans decided that they could square the circle of their conscience clause position on sexual ethics with Democratic #waronwomen attacks through pitching over-the-counter oral contraception. Somewhat surprisingly, the left was not especially enthusiastic about this. The way I’ve been thinking about this is that both liberals and conservatives are addressing hassle. The emerging right-wing position is that the state requiring you to get a doctor’s scrip is unacceptable hassle and some nontrivial number of women have lapses in contraception because they can’t or don’t see their gynecologist, but would have found it easy to visit CVS or Walmart and pay $20 for oral contraception.

The emerging left-wing position has two aspects. The more overt aspect is that some people can’t afford $20 for pills. This is one of those arguments too stupid to put forward credibly, but God bless them, they make the effort. The real aspect to this is that they conceive of contraception as health care and so it is symbolically important that it be covered by insurance as this helps frame it as health care (which is covered by insurance) versus a consumer good (which is out-of-pocket). Economic sociologists call this kind of framing “relational work” (a concept associated w Viviana Zelizer).

However the real left-wing position that is not just #waronwomen “throw the damn incense at the emperor you atavistic theocrat” symbolism, but actually practical is also an issue of hassle. Increasingly health care runs up against limits not of what physicians can do, but “patient compliance” or how diligent patients are at sticking to their treatment. This is most obvious with things like substance abuse or diabetes, which theoretically don’t require medical treatment at all but only lifestyle changes (stop using, go on a diet, etc). However it’s almost impossible to get people to do this, which is why the preferred treatment for morbid obesity is no longer jogging and ricecakes but cutting out most of your stomach and the most promising therapy for opiate/alcohol addiction is Naltrexone.

Similarly, with birth control there is a huge gap between typical use and perfect use. Most forms of birth control, including withdrawal and rhythm, are fairly effective with perfect use, but surprisingly ineffective with typical use because most people are, ahem, boundedly rational. This includes oral contraception, which requires women to take daily pills and which they apparently neglect to do fairly often. Hence the push is to go away from oral contraception and towards more long-term birth control (IUD, NuvaRing, D-P, and sterilization) none of which require people to be especially diligent either during the sex act (like withdrawal or condoms) or on a daily basis (like oral contraception or rhythm). The way you see this in the public debates over Hobby Lobby etc, is distinguishing that they didn’t cover “the most effective forms of birth control” (read: IUD) and which actually are out of reach for out of pocket expense.

So basically, both right and left recognize that the obstacle to effective birth control is hassle. The right’s version is that making it OTC would eliminate the hassle of having to visit the gynecologist to get a scrip. The left’s version is that encouraging a switch from oral contraception to IUD would eliminate the hassle of having to take a pill every morning. There is a philosophical microcosm in that both sides are right about hassle being an obstacle to effective usage, but they emphasize those hassles they find illegitimate. For the right there is a negative liberty issue to the state throwing up the roadblock of a doctor’s visit to getting the pills. To the left your own nature is an obstacle to be solved with technocratically-administrated nudges that obviate the need for individual responsibility on a daily basis and to which you have a positive liberty entitlement.

Heighten the contradictions

Suppose that party A habitually engages in actions that party B finds morally offensive. Party B then finds various ways to obstruct this offensive action, but only partially, so the effect is to make the action more dangerous, but not impossible. Party A continues with the (now more dangerous) course of action and predictably problems ensue. Who is morally at fault? Or more to the point, who receives blame and is the ensuing policy push to prohibit A from engaging in the offensive action or instead for B to cease obstructing and switch to accomodation and harm reduction?

For instance, if I am morally opposed to clear-cutting an old growth forest and so I spike the trees, but it gets logged anyway and some lumberjack get injured or killed, who is at fault: Me or the loggers?

Well, as in so many things, I think who you blame ultimately comes down to confirmation bias and we can see this play out in a few recent incidents.

Over the last months there has been a great deal of outrage over botched executions in Oklahoma, Ohio, and Arizona in which the executions did not go as planned and in at least one of the three cases the condemned suffered prolonged excruciating pain. Many stories about these executions explained that states had been experimenting with new formulas because anti-death penalty activists and governments had systematically cut off their supplies of sodium thiopental — the old and much more reliable lethal injection chemical. However this was all in terms of the historical chain of events and I saw basically nobody saying that the anti-death-penalty activists were morally at fault for preventing a well-established and relatively effective means of execution or that the Lockett, McGuire, and Wood executions demonstrate the need to restore access to sodium thiopental. Rather the ubiquitous assumption was that once sodium thiopental was cut off that the states of Oklahoma, Ohio, and Arizona should have said “wow, looks like you got us into a checkmate, guess we’ll just commute every sentence on death row even though our electorates favor capital punishment.”

Conversely one of the issues with state-level marijuana decriminalization is that it’s a cash-only business which creates problems like armed robbery. The reason is that while many state governments have decriminalized marijuana, the federal government still opposes marijuana decriminalization and pressures banks not to service marijuana businesses. This means that marijuana businesses are easily identifiable as having large amounts of cash and/or frequent deliveries of cash to safe deposit boxes, all of which makes them inviting targets to armed robbers. The marijuana industry recognizes this, but you won’t be surprised to hear that their interpretation is not that they should stop selling cannabis until they are allowed to process credit cards. Rather Mike Elliot of the Marijuana Industry Group told Vox “If somebody gets killed because of this issue, we’re going to be pointing our finger at Congress saying, ‘This is your fault. You should have acted.’”

Probably the most severe current example is the current Gaza war, where Hamas appears to be deliberately placing military targets within or in close proximity to especially sensitive civilian areas. Despite fairly heroic efforts to minimize civilian casualties, Israel is thus in the position of either forgoing its offensive to destroy rockets and tunnels or destroying schools, hospitals, and many noncombatant human beings. Predictably those who see Israel as responding as any state would to an intransigent terrorism campaign see this as Hamas’s fault whereas those who were always inclined to see Israel as a colonialist apartheid regime see it as disproportionate.

I’m not trying to make a substantive argument that the obstinate actor A or the heighten-the-contradictions actor B is morally at fault when A continues to act under the circumstances made more dangerous by B. What I am saying is that whether you blame A or B largely depends on whether you sympathized with or opposed A’s action ex ante. Nobody who opposes the death penalty is going to say that the people who prevented state prisons from getting access to sodium thiopental are at fault when states wing it and botch executions badly. Likewise nobody who favors marijuana decriminalization is going to say that shops should cease selling marijuana if the federal government doesn’t let them bank. And nobody who already thinks Israel is a colonialist apartheid regime is going to say that it is justified in attacking military targets commingled with civilians. However, logically these conclusions have a lot in common, even though most people would agree to some but not all of them. And I’m just gonna lay out a marker here that any arguments I get on this will be to the effect that one issue is substantively different from the others, and I don’t necessarily disagree, but it really does prove my broader point that it’s all about whether you sympathized with the person engaging in the action or the person opposing the action in the first place and not about whether we should generally hold responsible actors who heighten the contradictions of an action as part of their attempts to abolish it.

Obfuscation Form 700

The Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby but among the many things that are not widely understood is that the decision did not actually result in the firm’s employees losing insurance coverage for IUDs. The actual result is that the employees will still have coverage for IUDs, but the insurance processor rather than Hobby Lobby will have to pay for it (at least in theory). That is, Hobby Lobby was seeking to take advantage of the Obama administration’s own proposal for faith-based nonprofits. As Julian Sanchez at Cato observed, the entire case turns on an entirely symbolic issue of whether the Greens explicitly have to pay for IUDs or are allowed to wink at an obfuscation in which their insurance company bears the cost (at least theoretically).

I found this interesting not only because it’s a much discussed case but also because it’s a close fit with my article published a few months ago in Sociological Theory. (Here’s an ungated version that lacks the benefit of some really good copy-editing). In the article I talk about situations where a moral objection gets in the way of a transaction but the transaction nonetheless occurs through the expedient of obfuscating that a transaction is occurring at all. I describe three mechanisms for accomplishing this and the nonprofit exemption which now also applies to Hobby Lobby is characterized by two of them, brokerage and bundling. That is, the employer does not buy the IUD for the employee but rather pays a broker (the insurance processor) who in turn provides the IUD. Moreover, the IUD is bundled together with other health coverage. The third model which is not at issue in Hobby Lobby but which I describe in the paper is gift exchange, where explicit quid pro quo is replaced with tacit reciprocity.

Of course for an exchange to be morally objectionable or for it to be koshered is entirely subjective. Most obviously in Hobby Lobby there is a range of opinions about the moral acceptability of birth control and abortifacients and where to draw the line between the two. More interesting to me is that opinions vary on what counts as “buying” the contested commodity and whether to seize on obfuscation and denounce it. On this issue the irony is that while the Obama administration itself came up with this obfuscation for nonprofits it opposed extending it to for-profit firms. At a general level, obfuscation doesn’t objectively exist but rather it creates a permission structure that actors can choose to consent to.

This becomes clear when we contrast Hobby Lobby to Little Sisters of the Poor. Whereas the owners of Hobby Lobby sued to avail themselves of the obfuscatory accomodation, the Little Sisters of the Poor who (as a nonprofit) already have this obfuscation available to them but are suing to denounce it as mere obfuscation and completely remove themselves from even obfuscated provision of all birth control. Specifically, the Little Sisters are refusing to fill out EBSA Form 700 stating their objection to providing contraceptive coverage since to do so would trigger provision through their insurer and they see this as involving themselves in something morally objectionable. That is, while Hobby Lobby would be delighted to wink and nod (and the Obama administration was reluctant to allow them to do so) the Little Sisters are adamantly opposed to a fig leaf (and the Obama administration would be delighted were they to play along with the face-saving obfuscation).

Rape Culture/Structure

In Sunday’s column, Ross provided three proposals for reducing campus rape. (1. Lower the drinking age, 2. End the party school system, 3. Loco in parentis lite for dorms). For the most part it was well received (including by many people who generally disagree with Ross), but sampling on the derpendent variable reveals no shortage of people saying some version of “how about we just tell men not to rape” which in its more concrete version takes the form of some sort of sexual consent education class as part of orientation. What I find interesting about this is that this answer is essentially to tackle culture, whereas Ross called for tackling structure.

I found this ironic since in other contexts (most notably, poverty) the right tends to emphasize cultural explanations and cultural solutions which the left meets with structural explanations and structural solutions. For instance, in explaining why there are such disordered family lives among the poor, the right tends to emphasize a declining interest in marriage (or in more subtle and accurate versions of the argument, the shift from a cornerstone towards a capstone conception) whereas the left meets this with structural arguments about the shortage of marriageable men in low-income communities. And it is worth noting that while the right is probably correct that marriage is causally important and not just an issue of selection, the evidence seems to be on the left’s side that marriage promotion doesn’t work.

The general tendency seems to be that if I say culture, you say agency, and vice versa. As in so many other things, I see this switcheroo as not entirely motivated by a cold-eyed analysis and saying, eureka, it looks like the schwerpunkt of rape is culture whereas poverty is better solved by concentrating on structure (or vice versa). Rather the heuristic seems to be avoiding actions we find intrinsically objectionable and a related one of assigning responsibility for reform to the parties we find morally culpable and avoiding placing demands upon sympathetic people. We see the first heuristic operating in the many responses I saw to Ross that were much more enthusiastic about lowering the drinking age than his other two proposals. This is predictable given that all three of Ross’s proposals load on Haidt’s moral foundation of “liberty/oppression,” but one goes one way and the other two the other way. Even if it is in fact the case that increasing liberty in some respects and restricting it in others is the best way to reduce a horrific crime, fewer people think in terms of “does this work” than “is it moral.” The other heuristic is a sort of who/whom logic that (understandably) wants to punish the guilty while holding harmless the victim. This most obviously manifests in the common (morally sympathetic but not terribly prudent) criticism of anything that tacitly “blames the victim” through offering advice on how to avoid victimization. In the reaction to Ross’s piece we see it in the largely sympathetic reaction to his proposal to wage total war on fraternity row compared to his mostly reviled (and frequently distorted) proposal to bring curfew lite to the dorms. The former punishes the aggressors and so is intrinsically worthwhile, but the latter restricts the autonomy of the victims and so is unacceptable. Whether either of them would be effective at reducing the rate of a felony second only to murder is at best a post hoc consideration.

Sticky demand

Miriam Weeks (aka Belle Knox) has an op-ed at Time about rising college tuition, subsidies, and the high implicit marginal tax rates the means-tested subsidy regime implies for students like herself who have relatively high earnings during college. But rather than focus on her (quite reasonable) argument about the abuses of an industry in which I am objectively a member of the exploitative class, let’s change the subject to exegesis of a tangential sentence about another industry:
“Demand for education, kind of like demand for porn, is pretty inelastic.”

This glib remark strikes me as highly dubious but also typical of libertarians, which I understand to be Ms. Weeks’ political perspective. Just as when liberals say something (say, health care not directly related to communicable diseases) is a “public good” they don’t really mean that it is non-rivalrous and non-excludbale, but only that they think the state ought to pay for it. Likewise when libertarians say something (and in particular a vice) is demand inelastic they don’t actually mean that quantity demanded doesn’t respond to changes in price, but only that they don’t want the state to regulate it. (Conversely, libertarians tend to play up elasticity with regards to taxes that they don’t like).

But let’s unpack what it would mean for porn demand to be inelastic. First, we can consider short-run elasticity. Elasticity is largely a function of substitutability and purchasing porn has good substitutes (starting with rewatching previously purchased porn) and so should be elastic. Moreover, demand for vices tends to follow a zero-inflated count distribution which means much of the total demand is concentrated among the heaviest users and which in turn means that you have to worry about income effects imposing a hard constraint as heavy users simply run out of money and therefore their demand is relatively elastic in terms of purchasing power even if their desire is unsatiated.

Moreover, we can take a long-run view. In the long-run as people shift to new margins very few things are inelastic. For instance gasoline is famously inelastic in the short run but this isn’t really true in the long run as we saw when the price of gasoline rose in 2006 and 2007 it led to a decrease in demand for exurban housing and SUVs and so the price of gasoline was less inelastic in the long-run than in the short-run. For vices we have the rational addiction model that suggests that even if demand is inelastic in the short-run (ie, addicts gotta get their fix) it is elastic in the long-run as price hikes motivate current users to quit and/or potential new users to refrain from starting. That is, if porn becomes expensive we should expect to see some current consumers learn to rely on their imaginations and new potential users fail to have sufficient exposure to be captured and conversely if porn becomes cheap we should expect to see more people develop the habit of frequently consuming it.

And putting aside theory, it’s something of an empirical question since first VHS and then the internet radically reduced the price of pornography (especially if one includes “transport” costs of hassle, shame, etc). I am highly skeptical that this decrease in the total price has led to no more consumption, as we would expect if demand were perfectly inelastic. That is, if demand for porn were perfectly inelastic this would imply no greater consumption today than in 1995 or 1985 or 1975 and this strains credulity.

The reason this matters is that if demand for vices is in fact elastic, or even just imperfectly inelastic (like gasoline), then it matters what the total price (including transport) is. This in turn means that decriminalizing vices is not a free lunch of just giving up enforcement costs (and evasion of enforcement) but you’ve also got to face the facts of increased demand.

The Internet of Selves (Elliot Rodger)

When the Columbine massacre happened one of the first things I thought of, thanks to Hegel and Nietzsche, was the internet.The internet was just then becoming this participatory thing, for everyone, and I had the Hegel-inspired bad feeling that one effect of this new technology of self-assertion would be a nagging and widespread condition of abstract discontent. In the olden days of Aristotle summoned by Hegel in the Phenomenology, it was only rich guys, who’d proven themselves in battle and owned slaves they’d taken in battle, who had the freedom to make a huge deal about their public reputations, gild those reputations through public performance. Honor-consciousness, the willingness to kill and die for the sake of one’s name, the cultivation of an expansive self to contest with other excellent selves in this zone of assessment and esteem, was a luxury of aristocrats. The long Occidental story Hegel tells is of the sublimation of this abstract, aristocratic self-assertion through progressive immersion in, and growing understanding of, material nature – foreshadowed in this dialectic’s first moments by the (Greek) slave’s practical wherewithal and his (Greek) master’s practical heedlessness and cluelessness.

Nietzsche, of course, put his own indelible stamp on this account, calling the impulse at play between the master and slave classes the “will-to-power.” This term has several treatments in his work, but in Beyond Good and Evil he gives it a gloss that has chilling resonance for us today. It’s tempting to think of something called a “will-to-power,” and described as fundamental, as some primal appetite, a deep cause, but here Nietzsche calls it, instead, an “effect.” In this it’s related to another great Nietzschean phrase, “the pathos of distance.” In short, a strong guy, looking around and seeing relative weakness in those around him, feeling the elevation that separates him from them as he looks down, wants to realize this merely latent power difference in action. The will-to-power follows something like hydrologic principles. A subject comprehending his own superiority feels the possibility of domination flowing out of him, via this awareness of downward distance, and from this the desire to realize this possibility formulates itself. The will-to-power, as an urge or motive, is thus effect of what the self can actually do. The larger the zone of envisioned latitude, the greater momentum the subject can see itself building up unopposed, the larger the will’s appetite to expand and realize itself will be. The specter of relative weakness is an invitation, a goad

Now, as Hegel described, before Nietzsche applied his dramatic names to the dynamic, even the hungriest subject, embedded in the pressing social and material conditions of work and communal life, will see only small possibilities for its expansion, small margins of self-assertion and recognition to offer as food to its will-to-power. Common life is paltry ground for cultivating existential ambition – and so discontent. For most people throughout historical space and time, the vistas of self were short and narrow. The self, as a projection of the imagination the will-to-power might strive to realize in action, and whose disappointments tend to form in proportion to these ambitions, was small. Its ambitions were small. Its disappointments were small. The phenomenological conditions of self-assertion made delusions of grandeur not just absurd in their content but hard to formulate at all. With the demise of feudalism and the rise of liberal democracy, in the Hegelian story, abstract subjectivity was doled out in modest portions determined by both law and nature (as understood by science), and, in theory, possessed in equal measure by everyone.

The internet both apotheosizes this process, of liberally redistributing aristocratic selfhood throughout the demos, and returns it to its first moment, in which an abstract and unbounded and perhaps empty and brittle subjectivity floats free of material life. It’s brought back Aristotle’s model of subjectivity at its most elevated and abstract, the materially free Greek citizen engaged in an ungrounded textual politics of self-assertion, and it’s globalized its setting. Instead of those standing in earshot of a citizen’s voice, the subject of the internet has a theoretical audience of all of humanity. The ambitions he tends for his own recognition can have that as their measure. And the resentments and disappointments he can husband when reality mocks those ambitions can grow to global size as well.

On this reading of the history of subjectivity, Elliot Rodger’s expression of his existential and sexual ambitions and the attendant disappointments and the much-discussed meanings he assigned to them, via YouTube videos posted on an easily accessed “web” described as “worldwide,” are not incidental but inherent to their formulation, to the construction of a self from which they flowered into an aristocrat’s grand entitlement, and then into disappointment and killing.

At Midnight, All the Economists

Krugman’s Journal. May 1, 2014.
Dog carcass in alley this morning. Only I predicted its stomach would burst like a housing bubble.

When the storm comes the insufficient aggregate demand of all their austerity will foam up about their waists and all the oligarchs and politicians will look up and shout “save us!” and I’ll look down and whisper “stimulus.”

They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed good men like my advisor, or President Roosevelt. Decent men who believed in counter-cyclical spending. Instead they followed the droppings of racists and goldbugs.

Krugman’s Journal. May 2, 2014.
Slept all day. Awoken at 4:37. Undergrad complaining about a B-. I am sure she cheated on the SAT. Beneath me, the township screams like an eating club full of intoxicated undergrads.

New York. Last month I got hired for a figurehead no show job in New York. Somebody knows why. The dusk reeks of foundation money and bad consciences.

Krugman’s Journal. May 3, 2014.
Meeting with Summers left bad taste in mouth. Possibly Koch-funded? Must remember to investigate further.

Why are so few of us left active, healthy, and without confirmation bias?

Why does it matter where Ronald Reagan gave a speech 35 years ago? Because there is good and there is dog-whistling, and dog-whistling must be punished. Even in the face of austerity I shall not compromise in this. But there are so many deserving of vituperation … and there are only 800 words Mondays and Fridays.

Krugman’s Journal. May 4, 2014.
Thought about Bartlett’s story on way to cemetery. Could all be lies. Could all be part of a revenge scheme. But if true, then what?

Heard joke once. Man goes into doctor. Says he’s confused. Says policy seems full of trade-offs. Doctor says “Treatment is simple. Nobel Laureate economist is in town tonight. Go and see him lecture. That should clear things up.” Man bursts into tears. Says “But Doctor … I am a Nobel Laureate economist.” Good joke, Everybody laughs.

Krugman’s Journal. May 4, 2014.
He knows nothing about any attempt to discredit Medicaid. He has simply been used. By whom? Kochs seem obvious choice. But the Oregon study was conducted by faculty at Harvard Public Health and MIT econ. Doesn’t fit. Can’t concentrate.

Krugman’s Journal. May 5, 2014.
On way out of Princeton met Woody Woo dean. Usual complaints Re: coughing “bullshit” at faculty meetings. There were micro-econ publications on her cv. Fresh ones. Out on Prospect inspected Madison Institute. Man and woman, possibly discussing God. Didn’t like it. Makes campus look haunted.

Krugman’s Journal. May 6, 2014.
Someone tried to kill the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Proves dog whistle theory. Austerity is closing in. Checked comment thread. Thousands of Times readers praising me. Connected, perhaps?

Is everyone but me going mad? This relentless recession: there is only one sane response to it.

Approached policy debate. An attempted discussion of Piketty. The wingnut turned and there was something rewarding in his derp. Sometimes the blogs are generous to me.

Krugman’s Journal. May 7, 2014.
Final entry? Left Princeton just before Midnight. Mayer, convinced Koch’s behind everything, is serious about visiting Manhattan. New Jersey Transit capable, apparently, but are we? Kochs. Cannot imagine more dangerous opponent. Prosperity seems unlikely. This last entry. Will shortly push to op-ed page CMS, only people can trust. For my own part, regret nothing. Have lived life, free from compromise…and step into the shadow now without complaint.

[Inspired by a conversation with James and Alan.]