Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 216

Reading this story, I find myself remembering that a few ...

Reading this story, I find myself remembering that a few years ago my wife sat next to Bart Starr on a Southwest flight. They chatted the whole trip, and several times he said, “I wish you could meet my wife. You’d love her. She’s so wonderful.”

unsure

I don’t often on this blog write from a position of professional expertise. Mainly I’m writing about things I’m not expert in, but am interested in, and am trying to think through. I post these thoughts here not because I have anything to teach anyone but because posting them to the interwebs requires me to form my thoughts with a at least a little more care and precision than they woiuld have if they were rattling around in my brain pan. And maybe they’ll help a handful of people who, like me, are trying to figure a few things out. Which leads me to….

A great many people think they’re interested in politics when they’re only interested in news. I have in recent years grown more and more interested in politics and economics, which is to say, the whole long history of all the ways in which we human beings have tried to live together without killing one another but instead, perhaps, finding some arena of mutual benefit. I think our current obsession with news makes it far harder for us to think about politics, so I have stepped away from the daily grind of “And Now This!” to try to inquire into the principles of political economy.

I don’t see any of these matters as First Things. For some people they are. For some people the ownership of firearms is not a good that may be weighed against other goods, and in that weighing perhaps found wanting, but a primal indicator of Freedom — not to be negotiated away at any price. For others inequality is not one factor among many in political economy but rather the Original Sin of our common life, and as such must be eradicated no matter how high the price. There is no political or economic consideration that rises to that level, for me. I try, instead, to think empirically about what conduces to our common welfare, and what does not. If I thought that communism did that better than other systems of political economy, I’d be a communist.

The big problem for people like me who want to look at these matters empirically is this: almost everyone who writes with expertise about political economy is a True Believer in something, and that often determines how the stories get told. For instance, Thomas Piketty’s famous book is called Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but right from the first paragraph of the book he explains that what he’s concerned with is “the distribution of wealth” and more specifically the unjust distribution of wealth. But that is only part of the story of capital and capitalism. As I commented in that post I link to above, Deirdre McCloskey thinks that wealth creation is the fundamental problem of economics and the history of economics. Piketty shows no interest in that. It’s hard for me not to think that Piketty ignores wealth creation because that would disrupt the clean lines of his story, while McCloskey largely dismisses the agitations created by inequality because that would disrupt the clean lines of her story. Though at least McCloskey has responded to Piketty’s argument, in an essay that strikes me as generous and charitable even though severely critical.

But here’s what bugs me: Can you imagine McCloskey saying, “Having read Piketty’s book, I now see that the argument I made in the two thousand pages of my Bourgeois Trilogy is fundamentally flawed, and I need quite thoroughly to reconsider my position”? I can’t. Can you imagine Piketty saying, “Now that I’ve read McCloskey’s trilogy I see that the Euro-neoliberalism that I’ve been committed to my whole career is fundamentally flawed, and I need to learn to embrace the creative powers of the free market”? Me neither. You’re not even going to hear a scholar say, “The evidence cuts both ways, but I think the preponderance of evidence is on my side.” That’s not how academic life works. That’s not how human life works, generally.

So the experts stake out their positions and defend them to the death, leaving the rest of us to try to sort out the evidence. But that sorting is hard work, and not many will willingly take it on, when it’s so much easier to pick a side and stick with it. Evan Davis of the Spectator thinks that maybe 1% of us will be willing to be confused about Piketty v. McCloskey. That estimate might be on the high side.

inequality

If you listen to politicians on the left, and especially those who call themselves socialists, describe what’s wrong with our country, the word that comes most frequently to their lips is inequality. “The Top 1 Percent’s Share of Income from Wealth Has Been Rising for Decades,”, we learn, and this, surely, is a prime driver of the recent increase in support for socialism.

But Deirdre McCloskey claims in her book The Bourgeois Virtues that

The amount of goods and services produced and consumed by the average person on the planet has risen since 1800 by a factor of about eight and a half. I say “about.” If the factor were four or five, or ten or twelve, the conclusion would be the same: liberal capitalism has succeeded. And like liberal democracy, its success continues. In these latter days the fact should delight and amaze us. Never had such a thing happened. Count it in your head: eight and a half times more actual food and clothing and housing and education and travel and books for the average human being – even though there were six times more of them [than there were 200 years ago].

And in the third volume of her trilogy, she provides even better news:

Hear again that last, astonishing fact, discovered by economic historians over the past few decades. It is: in the two centuries after 1800 the trade-tested goods and services available to the average person in Sweden or Taiwan rose by a factor of 30 or 100. Not 100 percent, understand — a mere doubling — but in its highest estimate a factor of 100, nearly 10,000 percent, and at least a factor of 30, or 2,900 percent. The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has dwarfed any of the previous and temporary enrichments. Explaining it is the central scientific task of economics and economic history, and it matters for any other sort of social science or recent history.

One could argue that the data McCloskey cites ought to settle the question of whether capitalism is preferable to socialism. Obviously capitalism — or what she prefers to call “technological and institutional betterment at a frenetic pace, tested by unforced exchange among all the parties involved” — has worked wonders. If I am, say, ten times better off than my ancestors were, why should I care if there are other people who are a thousand times better off?

But the fact of the matter is that people do care. Human beings are exceptionally sensitive to such differentials — but not skilled at knowing what they are. In general, people think that they occupy a lower place on the economic ladder than they actually do, estimate their country’s unemployment rate as much higher than it is, and believe inequality to be greater than it is. And these perceptions matter politically, even when they’re wrong, or based on very partial evidence, because of the passion that inequality prompts in people.

Scott Alexander summarizes part of the argument of a recent book by Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov called Secular Cycles:

One thing that strikes me about T&N’s cycles is the ideological component. They describe how, during a growth phase, everyone is optimistic and patriotic, secure in the knowledge that there is enough for everybody. During the stagflation phase, inequality increases, but concern about inequality increases even more, zero-sum thinking predominates, and social trust craters (both because people are actually defecting, and because it’s in lots of people’s interest to play up the degree to which people are defecting). By the crisis phase, partisanship is much stronger than patriotism and radicals are talking openly about how violence is ethically obligatory.

I’m inclined to believe that there’s something to this “secular cycles” theory, largely because it so nicely rhymes with Anthony Burgess’s Pelphase/Interphase/Gusphase model of history, and because there’s a lot of evidence that having money as such doesn’t make people happier but having more than our neighbors does. I don’t know precisely what weight we should give to inequality when we’re thinking about political arrangements, but it seems that a great many people rate it exceptionally highly and would prefer to reduce the gap that separates them from richer people, even at the cost of lowering their absolute standard of living.

So what counts as political wisdom in that situation? Beats me.

Latka

My post earlier today puts me in mind of something. Think of it as an allegory of social media.

In the old sitcom Taxi Andy Kaufman plays Latka Gravas, a mechanic, an immigrant with a funny high-pitched voice. And then at one point Latka starts to transform himself into someone else — into Latka’s idea of a cool guy, a successful guy. He gradually loses his eastern European accent, and his voice drops an octave. To the people he works with he sounds like a lounge lizard, or a parody of a lounge lizard: a guy who reads the articles in Playboy as a guide for self-improvement. He says that his name isn’t Latka Gravas. His name is Vic Ferrari.

Vic thinks he is a sexy playboy; in fact, Vic is a jerk. Finally, all the people in the cab company who have to deal with Vic deputize Alex — the central character in the ensemble, the most well-adjusted and psychologically healthy person available — to confront Vic and, somehow, bring back Latka.

It doesn’t go well. Vic scornfully repudiates Alex and the rest of the crew. He says that everybody liked him when he was the foreign guy with the funny voice, when he was shy, silly, dopey Latka, a figure of fun, a clown. Nobody respected him then. Of course they want that guy back, someone they can all laugh at. Of course that’s who they’d prefer him to be.

Alex, being the mensch that he is, takes all this in, and acknowledges that there is truth in it. People did laugh at Latka, they did treat him as the comical foreigner, and they shouldn’t have done that. All that (ruefully) acknowledged, Alex still wants to make a point. “I liked Latka,” he says. “But I don’t like you.”

what can’t be changed

Many outlets have reported in recent days that Facebook is testing the removal of Likes from posts. Let’s say they do eventually implement this feature. If so, then the first question is whether it will be opt-in or opt-out. That is, will Likes show unless you choose not to show them, or will they be hidden unless you choose to show them?

My guess is that, in either case, and despite the many calls by tech journalists for changing the way Facebook works, most Facebook users will want to keep counting Likes. We need to remember that there are over two billion Facebook users, and hundreds of millions of them have undergone years of operant conditioning: they have been trained to seek Likes, to rejoice in Likes, to be made miserable by the absence of Likes. Many of them have returned thousands and thousands of times to Facebook to check their count of Likes, refreshing their browser tab even when they don’t need to. The habit of measuring their personal value by Likes is so deeply ingrained that it is difficult to see how a significant number of them will break it. Or even really want to.

I don’t think we reckon with this phenomenon often enough, or seriously enough. The major social-media companies have been conducting for the past decade an implementation of B. K. Skinner’s principles more massive than anything we can truly imagine. They have found ways to get billions of people to volunteer for the experiments and devote sometimes hours a day to pursuing them. Operant conditioning at this level works. And its effects are difficult to undo.

One way to see this: often when people get sick of Facebook or Twitter or Instagram and find some other online venue, they simply bring with them to their new location the habits they learned in the previous ones: the snark of Twitter, the rants of Facebook, the posturing of Instagram. It’s like the old line about travel: wherever you go, there you are. It’s hard enough for people to leave Facebook or Instagram or Twitter behind; what’s almost impossible to leave behind is the person that those sites’ algorithmic behaviorism turned you into.

terror and history

This excellent post by my colleague Philip Jenkins reminds us of an earlier era — just 25 years ago! — when America was worried about right-wing terrorists. As I have often pointed out — see here and here — it’s not just the distant past we’ve forgotten, it’s the very recent past. And that forgetfulness makes it very difficult for us to come up with appropriate and proportionate responses to our current problems.

presentism revisited

A follow-up to my recent post on a certain variety of chronological snobbery: I see that Louise Doughty has nominated her top 10 ghost stories. Their dates:

1987
1898
2015
2017
2017
2010
2002
2009
1983
2001

So: seven of the ten best ghost stories ever written have appeared in the past 18 years. Amazing! How do we account for the fact that just in this century writers have gotten so good at ghost stories — so much better that people who came before, like Arthur Machen and M. R. James and Charles Dickens? It’s a mystery.

inaccessible

Of all the many task-management apps available for the Apple platforms, the one that fits my needs best, by far, is Things by Cultured Code. And if I’m using the iOS version it’s a sheer delight. I can organize everything from small daily tasks, to lists of movies I want to watch, to complex multi-stage projects. It’s beautifully designed and has lots of power when I need it.

But often I work on a Mac, and when I do, Things makes me miserable. I blink and strain my eyes until they hurt, I crane my neck towards and away from the screen. After anything more than five minutes I’m frustrated and in pain. The reason: the makers of Things have since day 1 of the Mac version of their app — twelve years ago — refused to allow users to adjust the size of any text in the app. They like text small and so they keep it small. But my aging eyes can no longer adjust, even with my fairly sophisticated lenses. So sometimes even when I have to use the Mac I will pull out an iOS device rather than struggle with the text on the Mac version of Things.

It’s not rare for software companies to do less than they might, and probably less than they should, to make their apps accessible to people whose senses don’t function peecisely as a healthy 25-year-old’s do. But it is really rare, these days, to find a company as actively hostile to non-ideal users as Cultured Code. It’s hard to imagine a usability feature more basic than the ability to adjust text size. But they won’t do it. I have a lot of money and time invested in their apps, but it looks like I’m going to have to turn to an alternative that’s actually less well-suited to my workflow.

(And dear reader, please do not respond to this post by giving me advice. Whatever you think I ought to do in this matter, I have tried it, and I do mean whatever. And while I have you on the line, please don’t ever give anyone advice, about anything, unless they explicitly ask for it.)

chronological snobbery

The novelist Hannah Beckerman was asked, “I’m an English lit postgraduate who’s slipped into a reading rut since my final exams – what are some good books to get me back into loving literature?” Here are the first publication dates of the books she recommended:

2006
2016
2013
2010
2014
2015
2015
1995
1997
2000
2002
2017
1959–1994 (Paley’s stories)
1937
2017
2019
1988
1926
1989
1999
2015

Also, all of them are written in English and by people from England, Scotland, Ireland, and the USA. The two major temporal outliers (1937 and 1926) are both children’s books, and there are no adults-only (or -primarily) novels from before 2002.

Is it really likely that all the books that might be recommended to someone who wants to “get … back into loving literature” are from our culture, our language, our time? And that none of them are poems or plays?

compromises

In yesterday’s post I quoted from Deirdre McCloskey’s work on bourgeois life, and I want now to return briefly to that. Late in the first volume of her trilogy she refers to a 1945 book called The Economic Order and Religion:

It develops that Knight and Merriam are arguing that social life in a large group with thoroughgoing ownership in common is impossible. That is what they believe Christian love entails. Their source is always the gospels, never the elaborate compromises with economic reality of other Christian writers, such as Paul or Aquinas or Luther, or the thirty-eighth article of the Anglicans: “The riches and goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same, as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast.”

What, the Gospels aren’t supposed to count? Methinks they count indeed. But I can understand why someone looking at Luke 12:33 and Luke 14:33 might want to quickly turn aside. In any case, it’s not just the Gospels that tell this story: we also have (and Hart cites) the book of Acts and the letter of James. If McCloskey is going to argue that we should imitate “the elaborate compromises with economic reality of other Christian writers,” then she really needs to say why we should follow those “other writers” when they disagree, or at least certainly seem to disagree, with the Gospels, Acts, and James.

And as we think about all these matters we should surely remember Kierkegaard’s comment that most Christians think that the commandments are intentionally over-severe, like setting our clocks ahead half-an-hour to make sure we get up in the morning. (He can’t mean what he says.)

As always: the evidence all seems to point in one direction when you ignore or suppress all the evidence that points in the other direction.