Hitchens At Work

Posted on October 23, 2009 by Bradlaugh

Hitch at the top of his form.   (Click on  Play Clip.)

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Capitalism’s lost social capital

Posted on October 21, 2009 by David Hume

A few years ago Francis Fukuyama wrote Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity. The short of it is that modern economies tend to be “high trust,” you can rely on more than simply your family to get by in life because institutions are transparent and laws are honored more than breached. The System works, it is not something that exists to be worked. Americans have their own spin on the System, exemplified by the Horatio Alger stories. With hard work, perseverance and a little luck anyone could make it big. In contrast in non-modern economies it is more a matter of to whom you are born and who you know. Success is the outcome not of non-zero sum wealth creation through frugality, thrift and productivity, but taking the largest slice of the zero sum pie possible through connections.

You have probably read Simon Johnson’s The Quiet Coup, where he argues that governmental institutions have now been captured by private actors in the developed world, just as they have long been in the developing world. For me the turning point in the drift toward paranoia was this summer when I listened to an interview with Charles Ellis, author of The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs. What disturbed and alarmed me was Ellis’ undisguised contempt for the radio host and the callers. Granted, it is generally frustrating for intelligent people to come on these shows where they are asked to hold forth for 30 minutes and engage with dull interlocutors. But Ellis’ own attitude to the whole affair suggested an angel come down from on high, he made no effort at all, and refused to hide his lack of effort. What he thought of everyone else was clear, mortals were beneath his consideration. When he did deign to speak Ellis calmly would assert that Goldman Sachs was insured and protected no matter what happened to the economy, specifically, even if AIG collapsed. Now, to some extent public relations people will say the same thing, but there’s a particular false tone these types exhibit which gives you a clear indication that they’re being paid to say what they’re saying. Charles Ellis did not have the tone, he stated it in a calm and matter of fact manner. He contended that the banks were saving Main Street, which was the root of the problem, and that Goldman in particular was an organization of such competence and efficiency that it could weather any storm.

To some extent this is a confidence game. The financial sector deals in trust. But Ellis unnerved me with his calm, assured and superior attitude. Today we are hearing that the Treasury Secretary, Goldman alum Hank Paulson, gave his old firm a heads up on government policy. A part of me wondered listening to Ellis if he knew much more than he could say. One year ago I would not have entertained the possibility of secret cabals and conspiracies at the highest levels of government. Now I’m not as confident.

I began thinking of this as I read this post over at Marginal Revolution where Alex Tabarrok bemoans the counter-productive effect of pay caps on large corporations. What is striking is the vociferous tone of the comments which Alex has been receiving: if the readers of MR react this way it makes me highly skeptical that the public has any trust in the system at all.

Posted in culture, economics | Tagged , , | 33 Comments

What We Do, Not What We Say

Posted on October 21, 2009 by Bradlaugh

From an academic friend who knows a very great deal indeed about polls, voting, and public opinion (as in: he’s written books about them).

There are two ways to find out what people think, believe, want, and like:  (1) Ask them, or (2) Observe their behavior.

If one had to choose the better way to understand some phenomenon in the social sciences, one would study behavior, not attitudes. Behavior talks: poll responses walk. And hard data on behavior are everywhere.

Historically, studies of public opinion were only about behavior. Even the study of “attitude” only emerged in the 1930s.  Modern-type surveys did not even exist much before that. Public thinking was inferred from voting, newspaper stories, personal traits like religion or occupation and, of course, actual behavior. Chasing the tax collector out of town was a sure sign of unhappiness over taxes.

The academic Left has become infatuated with surveys since they control the questions and the interpretations, and can release the data as it suits them. Polls are putty in the hands of those wishing to make points not otherwise discernible. That the enterprise is draped in “science” and technical jargon settles the debate. So ignore actual tax avoidance and focus instead on what people say about paying taxes (they love the tax collector and crave more social welfare … yet all the while are cheating). Racial integration, for example, now becomes opinions about racial integration; and with the “right” data treatments, reality is no match for the skilled investigator. An ample literature exists demonstrating a weak link between attitudes and behavior. If you believe polls, nobody in America watches porn.

These observations are hardly novel. I’ve written about it all in my book Polling, Policy and Public Opinion. Interestingly, conservatives are regularly hoodwinked by poll results, though they insist the questions were loaded. They have it wrong. Verbal reality and behavioral reality are fundamentally different — witness liberal whites fleeing blacks when they move nearby.

Talk is cheap. I’ve tried to tell conservatives about this structural dishonesty of polling but they just don’t get it. They’re addicted to sound bites about liberal bias and lack any interest in technical details.

[Me]  I don’t know that conservatives are any more averse to data, evidence, numbers, and science, than are liberals. I guess religionism throws a bigger wrench in the works among cons than among libs, giving a stronger bias towards magical thinking and reality-denial; but most people, of all political and confessional persuasions, seem to be able to ignore or reject even the “hardest” data if it makes them uncomfortable. I’d put myself at about the 99th percentile in data-orientedness, yet I catch myself reaching for the ignore/reject button sometimes. We are poor muddled creatures.

Posted in culture, data, politics | 12 Comments

Cultural Adjustment

Posted on October 21, 2009 by Bradlaugh

Here’s a little gem of multi-culti lunacy from the newspaper you have never, ever seen anyone reading:

In Ohio, officials designing a seat-belt campaign aimed at the state’s large Somali refugee population wanted to adapt the popular “Click it or ticket” slogan but found that “ticket” doesn’t translate.

“They don’t have a government in Somalia, so ‘ticket’ doesn’t mean anything to them,” says Tina O’Grady, administrator of the state’s Traffic Safety Office. “We ended up translating it as ‘Strap it, or lose your livestock,’ which also means your money or income or livelihood.”

[Me]  I can’t see what would have been wrong with:  “Strap it, or we’ll send the militia round to massacre everyone in your village and feed their corpses to wild dogs.”  But hey.

[Insensitive? Moi?]

Posted in culture, law | 29 Comments

It’s not always better in Europe (?)

Posted on October 20, 2009 by David Hume

Matt Yglesias makes an observation that many colored people I have known have made (including family members):

There’s often a kind of conventional idea on the left that the United States is an unusually racist society. And I think there’s also often a kind of image of Europe as a place where more of the progressive agenda has been achieved than in the USA. But I think that you’ll find if you look at Europe through the eyes of the liberal agenda that while the German left has certainly been more successful than the American left at securing universal health care, it’s been much less successful at promoting a tolerant, integrated, multicultural society. And allowing for the errors implicit in making any kind of sweeping generalization, I’d say that’s pretty generally the case across Europe. This Swiss People’s Party campaign poster would, I think, make Jesse Helms blush. And I’m not even sure which of the Northern League posters from Italy is the most egregious.

It’s not only on the Left, many Europeans think that the United States is particularly racist, until you point out to them that Americans are actually less anti-immigrant and more pro-diversity than most Europeans. This isn’t that unknown of a concept, years ago Jonah Goldberg argued for a pro-immigrant policy because it would dampen any tendency toward socialism. This sort of argument is to me a classic illustration of overemphasis on the power of the free market totally extracted and abstracted from concrete real world institutions and societies (and Goldberg isn’t even a libertarian).

Just a reminder to everyone on the Left and the Right that we don’t live in the world of Dr. Pangloss, there are trade-offs in this world.

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Lions and Christians

Posted on October 20, 2009 by Bradlaugh

Intelligence Squared is a privately-funded outfit staging debates in London. You can get a sample of the kinds of topics they debate from their home page.

Free-market capitalism is so 20th century

The threat to our civil liberties from an overmighty state has been much exaggerated

Everything a man does he does to get laid

It is time to lift sanctions against Burma

Atheism is the new fundamentalism

… … …

Pretty much anything, in fact.

Well, yesterday they debated the motion:  “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world.” Speakers for the motion were John Onaiyekan, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria, and Ann Widdecombe, a Tory Member of Parliament and Catholic convert. Speaking against were actor/writer/gadfly Stephen Fry (Jeeves, General Melchett) and, yes, Christopher Hitchens.

Onaiyekan and Widdecombe got their keisters kicked. Daily Telegraph reporter Andrew Brown, a Catholic himself, tells the story here.

As Brown points out, the defeat of the motion was highly predictable. The two arguing against it were seasoned public performers, though of different kinds. An archbishop and an MP are also public performers, but not of the kind with long and deep training in thinking on their feet. (Members of Parliament are better at this than your average congresscritter, to be sure; but the House of Commons is not what it once was, and there are plenty of dull drones in there.) As Brown says:

The problem (from the Catholic point of view) was that the speakers arguing for the Church as a force for good were hopelessly outclassed by two hugely popular, professional performers.

He goes on to wish …

… that there still existed a great Catholic apologist like Chesterton or Belloc, someone who was not only brave and prepared to square up to the Hitch, but was his intellectual equal. Surely there is someone today who could do that?

I’m not sure about Belloc, but I don’t think Chesterton was a very good speaker. He was a good writer, but that’s a different skill set, though a great many people seem not to know this. (Nabokov: “I think like a philosopher; I write like a great novelist; I speak like a child” … & of course Dr. Johnson’s observation in the Rambler.) Someone in the comment thread suggests Robert George, whom I have never seen in debate. I have seen Michael Novak, debating with Heather Mac Donald. I’d been told by Catholic friends that Novak was one of their best minds. Perhaps he is, but he was a poor debater on that occasion.  Sample:  On the point about religious societies being better behaved than irreligious ones, Heather asked “What about Japan? They’re irreligious, but it’s a very orderly place.”  Novak: “Oh, I think the Japanese are very religious …”  Uh-huh. (On another occasion, in an exchange on NRO, I asked Novak how there could be any evidence for a human female having been impregnated by an invisible spirit.  He, apparently trying for mockery: “John Derbyshire does not believe the Mother of God.”  Uh ……. huh.)

In any case, Brown’s account of the event left me feeling more sympathetic to the defenders of the motion than the subject matter would have led me to predict. The mismatch of presentation skills is so big, I wonder if there wasn’t an element of set-up about it, though even if there was, I suppose the defenders have only themselves to blame for accepting the deal.

The reason this caught my attention is that I’ve been doing some public speaking myself recently. I’m pretty hopeless at it; but of course when your publisher tells you to go out and do X, Y, and Z to promote your book, you go and do them. I’ll draw the line somewhere this side of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel … but not very far this side.

There’s a sample coming up on TV this Sunday, a televised event where I do Q&A on my book with Alan Colmes. It was terrifically decent of Alan to do the thing. It paid nothing, and he had to come all the way out from Manhattan to Long Island in the rush hour for it. He’s really a very good guy.  Still, sitting down for the Q&A, the thought going through my head was something like: “OK, here’s Alan, seasoned TV performer/debater/defender-of-his-faith (i.e. multi-culti liberalism), and here’s me, a retired and uncourtly scholar, dragged blinking from his garret into the daylight. This will be lions & Christians …”  Friends who were present tell me I didn’t do too badly, but of course, driving home, I thought of all the points I should have made if only I’d been quick-thinking enough. I guess Abp. Onaiyekan and the Right Hon. Ms. Widdecombe were similarly afflicted last night.

Posted in culture, philosophy | 11 Comments

In hand-sanitizers we trust

Posted on October 19, 2009 by Heather Mac Donald

A letter in the Wall Street Journal today makes a good point:

In response to Lauren Winner’s Houses of Worship article “Swine Flu Spells the End of the Common Cup” (Oct. 9): If we as Christian believers hold to the truth that the blood of Christ takes away sin (Matthew 26:28), surely it will also cover a few germs in a common cup.

Given the boundlessness of God’s power and his willingness to use it in response to prayer, why should anyone worry about the swine flu, or even about diabetes?

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Book Stuff

Posted on October 19, 2009 by Bradlaugh

Some book stuff:

(1) Are there any WAD blogs? people are asking me.  Well,  I’m running one on my own website here, and there’s some to and fro about the book on one of the Amazon history forums here.

(2) The Russian translation of Prime Obsession is proceeding towards publication at a speed barely perceptible but, the translator assures me, “nonzero.” We now have a cover designed. I kind of like seeing my name in Russian, but … shouldn’t there be a patronymic in there? My Dad was John too, so it seems to me I should be Джон Джонович  Дербишир. I think this would go great in one of those heavy Russian novels.

At Bald Hills, Prince Dzhon Dzhonovich Derbishir’s estate, the
arrival of young Prince Andrew and his wife was daily expected, but
this expectation did not upset the regular routine of life in the
old prince’s household. General in Chief Prince Dzhon Dzhonoovich
(nicknamed in society, “the King of Prussia”) ever since the Emperor
Paul had exiled him to his country estate had lived there continuously
with his daughter, Princess Mary, and her companion, Mademoiselle
Bourienne. Though in the new reign he was free to return to the
capitals, he still continued to live in the country, remarking that
anyone who wanted to see him could come the hundred miles from Moscow to
Bald Hills, while he himself needed no one and nothing …

Born out of my time and place, that’s what it is. I would have been good to my serfs, I swear I would.

Posted in culture, Odds & Ends | 6 Comments

The Blue-Collar Gospel

Posted on October 19, 2009 by Bradlaugh

Here, from America’s Newspaper of Record, is a story that touches my heart.

Blue-collar work, whether it’s planting shrubs, pounding nails, tuning engines or laying bricks, can be just as rewarding as carrying a briefcase. In fact, it can be a whole lot more rewarding, if you’re not the sedentary type, or if the alternative is a corporate purgatory of cubicles brimming with spreadsheets and quiet desperation.

Boston landscaper Joe Lamacchia (When did “gardener” beome “landscaper”? What was wrong with “gardener”? It’s an honest old English word — the OED has a citation from AD 1300 … Never mind …) loves his blue-collar work and wants to proselytize.

“We don’t all want to sit in cubicles, pushing paper, working in middle-management jobs, traveling around the country for business meetings,” he writes. “I want more people to think about the alternatives and realize that you can be proud about going into a trade. A blue-collar career can be a choice that you feel good about as opposed to a fallback option.”

Joe has a website to spread the message, and now he also has a book out:  Blue Collar and Proud of It.

We’re on our way to 400 million people in this country by 2050. That’s a lot of apartments, houses, roads, bridges, etc., etc. Meanwhile, the infrastructure of the country’s falling apart at the seams. The secretary of transportation, Ray LaHood, was on the radio a couple months ago and said, “America’s become one big pothole.”

There’s a lot of work … It’s an exciting time. I tell people, if you’re 35 and you’re in the cubicle, don’t wait 10 years, because right now is the time.

This is of course heretical. Current orthodoxy dictates that every American has four years of college (and the corresponding quarter-million-dollar millstone of student loans) as his birthright, followed by that paper-shuffling bogus job in cube #479. For blue-collar jobs, we import people. If God had intended us to skip college and go work with our hands, why did He create Mexico?

Following on from similar books by authors preaching the blue-collar gospel — Charles Murray, Matt Crawford — this gets us a little closer to bursting the preposterous, middle-class-bankrupting, nation-wrecking education bubble (43,300 hits on Google for “education bubble”).

[Post reporter]  You like to cite a 2004 study in the UK, where blue-collar workers were found to be the happiest of all employees. What do you think is behind that?

[Joe]  It’s a nice life! If you’re a skilled craftsman, you can pick up your tools and go work anywhere you want. We’re not living out of a suitcase, we’re not out at the airport. We’re home in the evening for our kid’s Little League game, for our daughter’s play. These are great jobs.

I think about this a lot; partly on behalf of my bright, personable, and healthy, but deeply un-academic son, who I think, barring some dramatic character change during his high-school career (just started), would likely be happier and more useful to society in a trade than in a cube. Also on behalf of myself, though. With luck I have twenty years of working life ahead of me. I have no inclination to retire, being ungregarious and having no taste for golf, bridge, Florida, or watching TV. Writing doesn’t pay worth a damn. I have re-wired my house, and believe I’d make a capable and happy electrician. Have I left it too late to start? How long are the apprenticeships? Any readers in the electrical trade care to offer advice? Or give me a pass into the union?

Posted in culture, Odds & Ends | 21 Comments

Re: Attitudes Toward Immigration

Posted on October 19, 2009 by Bradlaugh

Mr. Hume:  Excellent post there.  With such a universal desire for less immigration, one has to wonder why the borders are still wide open, visa over-stayers are not tracked, and illegals, far from being deported, are fawned over as a Protected Minority.

The answer, I suppose, is that people don’t care much.   If a pollster comes up to me and asks whether I prefer chocolate mousse or  caramel pudding, I’ll give him an opinion.  Would I go to the barricades for that opinion?  No. Would I give up one hour a week of my time for it?  No.

It shouldn’t be beyond the ingenuity of polling firms to find out, not only whether people prefer A to B, but how much of a damn they give about the A/B business.  It would surely add meaning to the polls.

I guess quantification is the problem.  You need a common, universal scale of giving-a-damn, from “Might walk across the room for it” to “Would willingly give my life for it.”

Posted in culture, politics | 10 Comments