Isegoria

Economist Dani Rodrik found his father-in-law on trial in Turkey on trumped-up charges of leading a coup, and the trial led him to re-examine what makes “real” democracy possible:

When do democracies generate not just electoral majorities but also protection of rights for minorities, equality before the law — the kinds of things that were missing in the Sledgehammer affair?

By some measures, democracy has never been healthier. Electoral democracies account for more than 60 percent of the world’s nations, up from roughly 40 percent in the late 1980s. In practice, though, most of those democracies “fail to provide equal protection under the law,” according to a recent essay that Rodrik published with another economist, Sharun Mukand. To understand why, they examine three kinds of rights. Political rights rest on the strength of numbers. Property rights have the wealth of elites behind them. But civil rights typically benefit a relatively powerless minority, who lack wealth or numbers. For that reason, “a truly functioning liberal democracy that provides civil rights is going to be a very, very rare phenomenon,” Rodrik says. The question isn’t why democracies slide into illiberalism. That’s what you should expect. The interesting question — and one of the key puzzles that his new work tries to solve — is why some democracies manage to remain liberal. What makes the emergence of civil rights possible in societies where, on the face of it, those rights don’t have a strong constituency?

Rodrik’s new scholarship also tackles a second, related puzzle: one about narratives. His foray into Turkish politics pushed him to reconsider a deeply established tradition in economics, one that views policy outcomes in terms of vested interests. These are the powerful groups, like companies or trade unions, that advance their agendas through the political sphere. Rodrik realized there was something missing from scholars’ models of political and economic life: ideas.

Take the liberal intellectuals in Turkey. Their interests and Rodrik’s were the same: a more democratic country. But they bought into a different narrative, he says, one that made them “tools” of the government. They legitimized Sledgehammer for middle-class Turks and the West. It’s not an outcome that vested interests can explain.

“My argument here is not to deny that there are organized groups that have disproportionate power in the policy-making process,” Rodrik says, “but to make the argument that the manner in which these groups define what is in fact in their interest depends on all sorts of things having to do with their ideas, with the stories they’ve constructed, and with how they view their own identity.”

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On a less abstract level, Sledgehammer changed another aspect of Rodrik’s thinking. He no longer trusts much of what he reads in the newspaper. The professor had long been skeptical of economics stories. He now feels similarly wary about coverage of political developments in foreign countries. The reason: If you hadn’t known the reality in Turkey, he says, it was simple to accept the usual liberal explanations of what was happening.

“It’s very easy to read these stories, and they resonate with your own worldview as a liberal,” Rodrik says. “And you’re likely to believe it. I wouldn’t say that it turned me into a conservative. But it made me much more skeptical and much more cautious about what one might say is the standard Northeastern-Ivy League-elite-liberal-establishment narrative about how the world works. It’s made me extremely skeptical of what I read in The New York Times, and The New York Times’s take on what’s happening in different countries. In a way, I should have known.”

Milton Friedman said that you can’t have a welfare state and open borders, but Alex Tabarrok disagrees:

What we think of as the welfare state encompasses many different programs, many of which are not handouts. Social Security for example is mostly a forced savings program. For these types of insurance programs there is no problem at all as, for the most part, a person has to work and pay into the program to get money out of the program. For programs like schooling there is also no problem–even if the schooling is provided free to immigrant children–because the schooling leads to higher wages later in life which are taxed. In these cases, the immigrant children are really just receiving a loan which they will have to pay back from their own earnings later in life. The story for basic health is similar. Thus, the only cases where there is a worry about excessive transfers from citizens to immigrants is in pure handouts or health benefits to say the elderly. In these cases, I would simply say that such benefits are not available to immigrants or only available after five years or some such time period.

Commenter Peter Schaeffer notes that the fiscal impact of Middle-Eastern immigration has been extensively studied in Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, etc.:

A report just came out in Norway showing that each Middle-Eastern immigrant costs taxpayers $700,000 (net).

Our modern economy is only post-industrial, Henry Dampier argues, because we outlawed and then offshored anything dirty, without actually eliminating it:

In America, the educated classes tended to strip workers of dignity except as victims exploited by cruel capitalists, in need of rescue by the intellectuals. The intellectuals then proceeded to make the means by which those laborers eked out independence and property illegal in the name of ‘rescuing’ them. Dignity came to be conferred by education and having the right intellectual-opinions rather than by acting out the ethic of work, saving, and religious duty.

In the name of equality, actually being a good person according to the past measuring-stick of virtue no longer mattered. You could have dignity and still be worthless or a malefactor by the old rubric, so long as you had the right opinions or were a member of one of the ever-proliferating victim groups.

In this the democratic revolutions just created a new class of ‘enlightened’ masters deigned to continually liberate the ever-propagating new classes of ‘slaves.’ First it was the actual bonded slaves, then it was the laborers, then it was the women, then the blacks, then the colonized, then the homosexuals, and now the bigamists and barnyard-lovers.

The value is not in the actual liberation, but in the sense of meaning and motivation created by each new ‘liberation.’ Since actual equality is impossible, what changes are the stories about equality and the pretensions to it.

Yet despite all the pretensions to historical progress, many things continue as they have before, with perceptions changing much more than the underlying reality. Because it’s not possible for men to be women and women to be men, you can’t actually change one into the other — but you can demand that everyone pretend as if it’s possible. It’s quite the same with the ‘post-industrial economy’ and the ‘information age’ — it hasn’t been possible to abolish factories, but it has been possible to pretend as if it’s been mostly accomplished.

Theories on declining marriage rates or the rise of the hookup culture often come down to values, but the real issue is demographics Jon Birger (Date-onomics) suggests — and two religions shed some light on the larger situation:

Multiple studies show that college-educated Americans are increasingly reluctant to marry those lacking a college degree. This bias is having a devastating impact on the dating market for college-educated women. Why? According to 2012 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there are 5.5 million college-educated women in the U.S. between the ages of 22 and 29 versus 4.1 million such men. That’s four women for every three men. Among college grads age 30 to 39, there are 7.4 million women versus 6.0 million men — five women for every four men.

It’s not that He’s Just Not That Into You — it’s that There Just Aren’t Enough of Him.

Lopsided gender ratios don’t just make it statistically harder for college-educated women to find a match. They change behavior too. According to sociologists, economists and psychologists who have studied sex ratios throughout history, the culture is less likely to emphasize courtship and monogamy when women are in oversupply. Heterosexual men are more likely to play the field, and heterosexual women must compete for men’s attention.

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One of my web searches turned up a study from Trinity College’s American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) on the demographics of Mormons. According to the ARIS study, there are now 150 Mormon women for every 100 Mormon men in the state of Utah — a 50 percent oversupply of women.

[...]

One fact that becomes apparent when studying the demographics of religion is that it is almost always the women who are more devout. Across all faiths, women are less likely than men to leave organized religion. According to the Pew Research Center, 67 percent of self-described atheists are men. Statistically speaking, an atheist meeting may be one of the best places for single women to meet available men.

Due to men’s generally higher rates of apostasy, it makes sense that the modern LDS church, like most religions, would have slightly more women than men. The Utah LDS church was in fact 52 percent female as recently as 1990. Since 1990, however, the Mormon gender gap in Utah has widened dramatically — from a gender ratio of 52:48 female to male in 1990 to 60:40 female to male in 2008, according to a study coauthored by ARIS researchers Rick Phillips, Ryan Cragun, and Barry Kosmin. In other words, the LDS church in Utah now has three women for every two men.

The sex ratio is especially lopsided among Mormon singles. Many individual LDS churches — known as “wards” — are organized by marital status, with families attending different Sunday services from single people. Parley’s Seventh, one of Salt Lake City’s singles wards, had 429 women on its rolls in 2013 versus only 264 men, according to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper.

[...]

So why are there so many more Mormon women than Mormon men? The simple answer is that over the past twenty-five years, Utah men have been quitting the LDS church in unusually large numbers. ARIS’s Cragun, a sociology professor at the University of Tampa who is ex-LDS himself, said the growing exodus of men from the LDS church is an unexpected by-product of the growing importance of the mission in Mormon life. Serving a mission used to be elective; now it’s a prerequisite for leadership.

Contrary to popular belief, the majority of Mormon men do not go on missions, which typically entail a mix of community service and proselytizing. Mormon men are being asked to serve missions at precisely the time in their lives — late teens and early twenties — when sociologists say men are most susceptible to dropping out of organized religion. Cragun believed the dropout problem among men is the real reason why, in 2012, the LDS church lowered the age at which Mormon men can start serving missions from 19 to 18: “I think they were losing too many men who would go off to college or get a job before they turned nineteen and then realize they didn’t want to stop and serve a mission.”

[...]

The statistical explanation for why Orthodox men are in short supply is different from the one for the shortage of Mormon men. Orthodox men are not abandoning their faith in large numbers and leaving Orthodox women behind. According to a recent Pew Research study, only 2 percent of Orthodox Jews are married to non-Jews, and the attrition rate from the Orthodox movement to the more mainstream Reform or Conservative branches of Judaism has actually been declining.

The imbalance in the Orthodox marriage market boils down to a demographic quirk: The Orthodox community has an extremely high birth rate, and a high birth rate means there will be more 18-year-olds than 19-year-olds, more 19-year-olds than 20-year-olds, and so on and so on. Couple the increasing number of children born every year with the traditional age gap at marriage — the typical marriage age for Orthodox Jews is 19 for women and 22 for men, according to Michael Salamon, a psychologist who works with the Orthodox community and wrote a book on the Shidduch Crisis — and you wind up with a marriage market with more 19-year-old women than 22-year-old men.

There is no U.S. Census data on religion. But Joshua Comenetz, chief of the Census Bureau’s Geographic Studies Branch, studied the demographics of Orthodox Jews back in his college professor days at University of Florida. Based on his academic research, Comenetz contended that each one-year age cohort in the Orthodox community has 4 percent more members than the one preceding it. What this means is that for every 100 22-year-old men in the Orthodox dating pool, there are 112 19-year-old women — 12 percent more women than men.

The bottom line: According to a 2013 article in the Jewish weekly Ami Magazine, there are now 3,000 unmarried Orthodox women between the ages of 25 and 40 in the New York City metro area and another 500 over 40. That’s a huge number when you consider that New York’s Yeshivish Orthodox — the segment of the Orthodox community most affected by the Shidduch Crisis — has a total population of 97,000, according to the Jewish Community Study of New York published by the UJA-Federation of New York in 2012.

[...]

In the Orthodox Jewish community, however, there is a natural control group — one that does make it possible to settle the culture-versus-demographics debate with near certainty. That control group is a sect of Orthodox Judaism known as Hasidic Jews.

The core beliefs of Hasidic Jews differ from those of other Orthodox Jews in nuanced but spiritually significant ways. Hasidic Jews believe each daily act of religious observance creates a personal, perhaps mystical, connection with God. In contrast, their counterparts in the Yeshivish branch of Orthodox Judaism emphasize the study of Torah and Talmud as the primary means of growing closer to God.

While their religious practices may differ, the two groups are still quite similar culturally. Both Yeshivish and Hasidic Jews are extremely pious and socially conservative. They live in tight-knit communities. They are known for having large families. And both groups use matchmakers to pair their young people for marriage.

There is, however, one major cultural difference between the two groups: Hasidic men marry women their own age, whereas Yeshivish men typically marry women a three or four years their junior.

“In the Hasidic world, it would be very weird for a man to marry a woman two years younger than him,” said Alexander Rapaport, a Hasidic father of six and the executive director of Masbia, a kosher soup kitchen in Brooklyn. Both Rapaport and his wife were 36 when I interviewed him.

When I asked Rapaport about the Shidduch Crisis, he seemed perplexed. “I’ve heard of it,” he said, “but I’m not sure I understand what it’s all about.”

More than half of immigrant-led households receive welfare of some kind:

About 51% of immigrant-led households receive at least one kind of welfare benefit, including Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches and housing assistance, compared to 30% for native-led households, according to the report from the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for lower levels of immigration.

Those numbers increase for households with children, with 76% of immigrant-led households receiving welfare, compared to 52% for the native-born.

The numbers for the native-born are disturbingly high, too.

Declinism is apparently in decline, according to Adam Gopnik:

The great summit of declinism — the peak from which all subsequent declinism has declined — was established in 1918, in the book that gave decline its good name in publishing: the German historian Oswald Spengler’s best-selling, thousand-page work “The Decline of the West.” Spengler has by now been reduced to an adjective; news-magazine writers back in the nineteen-seventies always used to refer to Henry Kissinger as “Spenglerian,” meaning farsighted in his pessimism and trying to manage the decline of liberalism in the face of the inexorable spread of totalitarian societies. Yet Spengler turns out to be a more idiosyncratic writer than his reputation suggests. A German pedant whom other German pedants found too humorless, but who lived long enough to flirt with the Nazis and resist them, he wasn’t so much “pessimistic” as biological in his approach. His thesis was that each culture-civilization has its own organic pattern of development, and none can escape its foreordained cycle of growth, blossoming, and wilting, any more than a single rose can. We don’t fall, as empires are supposed to, from sin; we wilt, as flowers do, from sun and time alone.

Spengler struggled to reconcile two truths: first, that all art tends to follow a path from initial strivings to perfect utterance and on to ornamental luxuriance, whether the move is from eighth-century-B.C. geometric art to Hellenistic twistings, or from Bach to Berlioz, or, I suppose, from “Love Me Do” to “The Long and Winding Road.” And yet things from the same cultural epoch, however much they alter in outward form, always resemble one another more than they resemble other, exterior things that they may be imitating. A 1907 Picasso looks more like a Rembrandt portrait than like an African mask — its concern is likeness and the individual, not the spirit and the ritual. The Beatles sound like the Beatles, no matter how many sitars they strum.

Spengler reconciles the two by saying that all civilizations share the same seasons but have different seeds. There have been three distinct seedbeds within Western civilization, each with a set of forms and themes unique to it: the Classical, the Magian (meaning, essentially, early Christian and Byzantine, under the influence of the Near East), and our own, “Faustian” moment. The Classical was linear, with lines drawn around verse forms and atoms alike; Magian culture is mysterious and glittering, like its Magi; ours is, above all, spatial, with atmospheric perspective in our paintings and sea voyages of discovery in our dreams. Spengler has a long reach: there are comparative sections on Chinese and Islamic civilizations; “Pythagoras, Mohammed, Cromwell” is a typical chapter heading. But his main point is that the “West” whose decline we may fret over — the West that conquered the Aztecs and discovered science and built empires and made democracy — is already so far fallen as to be hardly worth mourning. We peaked sometime around 1300, with Chartres and then Giotto, and it’s been straight downhill to cosmopolitan cities and Old Masters and democracy ever since. Spengler has particular contempt for the idea that civilizations compete, a view that he sees as crudely “Darwinian” and “Materialist.” Cultures coexist, and go to hell in their own ways; “civilization” is just the name we give to the decline.

Like all big system-makers, Spengler is most interesting when he is least systematic, in the cracks in his system. He makes the sharp observation that in times of cultural fullness high stories and low dramas coincide; the plots of “King Lear” and “Macbeth,” like those of the Iliad, could be played in a village or a court. He also shrewdly notes that classical civilization, despite its mystery cults, assumed that the essentials of its world picture and logic were available to any educated citizen; in our Faustian culture, despite its “democratic” pretenses, these things are accessible only to a small body of experts. Democritus’ atomism was argued in the agora, whereas atomic theory is understood by a handful of physicists; everyone had an opinion on Praxiteles, but you master a code to crack Picasso. Spengler is also eerily prescient at times, predicting that a new style of “meaningless, empty, artificial, pretentious architecture,” heavy on ornament and historical reference, and filled with “imitation of archaic and exotic motives,” would appear in Europe and America around the year 2000. He was off by only a couple of decades.

But Spengler’s real superiority over this century’s declinists is that he isn’t writing public policy, just watching the wheels go round and looking for patterns in the roll. What Spengler contributed to history was not pessimism but a form of relativism — the insistence that each culture should be respected as a whole and not viewed as a debased version of another. Kissinger was truly “Spenglerian” not in the belief that all one could do was manage American decline but in the belief that each nation would have to find its own road to, and through, modernity — that Chinese democracy would be more Confucian than Jeffersonian, and that freedom in Russia would look more Russian than free.

Today’s declinists have absorbed Spengler, if mostly in unconscious ways. First, there’s his insistence on seeing one’s culture decline in terms of similar patterns elsewhere. This isn’t a self-evident idea; Gibbon, as he charts the fall of the Roman Empire, barely glances at the contemporaneous Persian one. And then there’s Spengler’s rule-seeking abstraction. After Spengler, it isn’t enough to say that the past two decades have been rough in Japan, or that the recession has been hard on Americans, or that the war in Iraq was a folly; the mistakes and the follies have to be shown to be part of some big, hitherto invisible pattern of decline — and made more vivid by contrast with the patterns of some other, as yet undeclined society. The simpler, saner idea that things were good and now they’re bad, and that they could get either better or worse, depending on what happens next, gets dismissed as intellectually disreputable. His imprint is left in the idea that a big wheel must be turning in the night sky of history, and only the author of the book has managed to notice it.

Adam Gopnik mocks Declinism:

What makes the bad days come? Why do we fall, and who calls us back, if anything can? Decline has the same fascination for historians that love has for lyric poets. Yet the coming catastrophe is always coming, and never quite getting here, so the first job the new declinist book has to do is explain why the previous declinist books were wrong. The population bomb that didn’t go boom! is an anchor tied to the ankle of the global warmers, while people who want to set up China as the new Yellow Peril are obliged to explain why the Rising Sun stopped rising. What’s more, since the intellectual predecessors of the declinist are all declinists, too, he has to grapple with the tricky point of insisting that the previous era was actually a peak rather than the valley that the previous declinists thought they were looking at.

With empires, as with rock bands, the most popular explanations of decline involve long-dormant disputes and frictions that came to life, or, more simply, a sinister force from Asia that brought the thing down and broke it up. At the same time, declinism can’t decline to the end. Although the forces of decline need to be ominously arrayed in tables and vectors, the author is expected to rally in the last chapter to explain the one way to reverse the otherwise irreversible: world government, national industrial policy, a third party, kindergarten education in Esperanto, or whatever. Everything has to be as inevitable as falling off a roof, and yet there has to be a chance for someone falling to suddenly fly. Declinism is, in other words, a genre as much as it is any set of claims.