Shifting the Goalposts at Gettysburg

Saturday, November 23rd, 2013

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is a magnificent and heartfelt oratory, China Hand says:

It is also a determined piece of goalpost shifting designed to cope with the fact that Lincoln’s Civil War was a bloody, improvised botch that he rescued by abandoning the positions that had won him the Presidency…

…and by redefining not only that war, but all American wars to come.

Both sides expected a short war, as always:

The only administration figure in the North who seemed to have a firm grasp of what was going on was Winfield Scott, an extremely capable but by 1860 superannuated general who had performed with distinction in the War of 1812 and brilliantly in the Mexican War of 1846. He looked at the Union’s untrained armies with disdain and proposed that they be carefully drilled and deployed as part of a three-year navy-based strategy to choke the CSA with an Atlantic/Caribbean/Mississippi River blockade.

This cautious protracted war strategy was anathema to Lincoln’s political team, setting the stage for four years of ineffectual butchery on a truly modern scale.

The Emancipation Proclamation made a negotiated settlement based on the status quo ante impossible:

Instead of letting the South go to seek its own destiny, the United States was committed to destroying it militarily and politically, and undertaking a long exercise of reconstruction in the south—what we now call “nation-building”—that today has still not achieved the seamless and productive political and cultural union of north and south.

And in order to justify a war whose aims were, by any close reading of the constitution as it stood in 1862, unconstitutional and opposed by a vast majority of voters (in a peacetime environment, opposition to emancipation was something that most northern as well as southern whites happily endorsed), it was necessary to stretch the law to its breaking point…and justify the carnage because, well, “Freedom”—an excuse that Lincoln’s successors, including both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, have both been most happy to invoke.

[...]

Today, the Civil War is regarded as the United States’ first “good war”. It has to be. Because it was America’s bloodiest and least legal war. Otherwise, it would be impossible to explain or justify. And I believe that’s why the Civil War remains a lodestone for American politicians, patriots, and warbirds and the Gettysburg Address is a sacred text. Because if we can justify and exalt the Civil War and its 600,000 dead, we can justify and exalt any war.

When the moral claims are absolute, there are few limits on the bullets, bombs, falsehoods, and lawbending and lawbreaking employed to achieve them—even if the actual victories for freedom are as partial, equivocal, and fleeting as they turned out to be in places like Iraq and Libya.

(Hat tip to T. Greer.)

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

The Rise of the Neoreactionaries

Saturday, November 23rd, 2013

Klint Finley (@klintron) doesn’t quite get the rise of the neoreactionaries:

It’s not hard to see why this ideology would catch-on with white male geeks. It tells them that they are the natural rulers of the world, but that they are simultaneously being oppressed by a secret religious order. And the more media attention is paid to workplace inequality, gentrification and the wealth gap, the more their bias is confirmed. And the more the neoreactionaries and techbros act out, the more the media heat they bring.

[...]

I’m not sure what to do about it. It’s not like I think the media should ignore the tech industry’s misdeeds. But maybe recognizing that cycle is the first step towards fixing it.

These white male geeks keep imagining that journalists are policing their thoughts. How do we fix that?

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

Changes in measured GDP aren’t capturing everything

Friday, November 22nd, 2013

We live in a richer world, Russ Roberts notes, and changes in measured GDP aren’t capturing everything:

I think I got something in my eye…

Posted in Economics, Policy, Technology | 1 Comment »

Elite Overproduction

Thursday, November 21st, 2013

Peter Turchin describes elite overproduction to the Bloomberg audience:

Past waves of political instability, such as the civil wars of the late Roman Republic, the French Wars of Religion and the American Civil War, had many interlinking causes and circumstances unique to their age. But a common thread in the eras we studied was elite overproduction. The other two important elements were stagnating and declining living standards of the general population and increasing indebtedness of the state.

Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions. Consider the Antebellum U.S.

From 1830 to 1860 the number of New Yorkers and Bostonians with fortunes of at least $100,000 (they would be multimillionaires today) increased fivefold. Many of these new rich (or their sons) had political ambitions. But the government, especially the presidency, Senate and Supreme Court, was dominated by the Southern elites. As many Northerners became frustrated and embittered, the Southerners also felt the pressure and became increasingly defensive.

Slavery had been a divisive force since the inception of the Republic. For 70 years, the elites always managed to find a compromise. During the 1850s, however, intra-elite cooperation unraveled. On several occasions Congress was on the brink of a general shootout. (As one senator noted about his “armed and dangerous” colleagues, “The only persons who do not have a revolver and a knife are those who have two revolvers.”)

Although slavery was the overriding issue dividing the elites, they also differed over tariffs and cultural attitudes toward immigration. In the decade before the Civil War these centrifugal forces tore apart the two-party system. The Democratic Party split into its Northern and Southern factions, while the Whigs simply disintegrated.

Slavery was an absolute evil and was going to be abolished, sooner or later. But its abolition didn’t need to result in hundreds of thousands of Civil War deaths. (About the same time, Russia banned serfdom without a civil war. The Russian Revolution came 50 years later — when Russia was hit by its own elite overproduction.)

This U.S. historical cycle didn’t end with the cataclysm of the Civil War. Huge fortunes were made during the Gilded Age and economic inequality reached a peak, unrivaled even today. The number of lawyers tripled from 1870 to 1910. And the U.S. saw another wave of political violence, spiking in 1919–21.

This was the worst period of political instability in U.S. history, barring the Civil War. Class warfare took the form of violent labor strikes. At one point 10,000 miners armed with rifles were battling against thousands of company troops and sheriff deputies. There was a wave of terrorism by labor radicals and anarchists. Race issues intertwined with class, leading to the Red Summer of 1919, with 26 major riots and more than 1,000 casualties. It was much, much worse than the 1960s and early 1970s, a period many of us remember well because we lived through it.

This suggests that political offices should represent a certain number of people or a certain amount of tax revenue, rather than a certain geographical region (of fixed size).

Or that political power and prestige should somehow be limited.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 2 Comments »

Trying to Secede

Thursday, November 21st, 2013

Fed up with liberal overreaching, rural counties are talking about seceding from their states — but there’s no chance of success:

The U.S. Constitution allows a new state to be formed out of an existing one only if approved by both the original state’s legislature and Congress, which almost never happens. The most recent states to form this way were Maine, which separated from Massachusetts in 1820, and West Virginia, which broke off from Virginia in 1863, when Virginia belonged to the Confederacy.

Claire Suddath, the Bloomberg writer, doesn’t seem to understand political “science”:

The interesting thing about these new movements isn’t their likelihood of success, but the fact that they constitute blatant attempts at ideological gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering isn’t about Democrats wanting to be with Democrats and Republicans wanting to be with Republicans; it’s about redistricting so that your party has a slight majority in as many districts as possible, since each district goes to whoever wins the winner-takes-all majority vote.

“If people want to live in ideologically homogenous communities, they’re better off if you let that happen,” says Jason Sorens, a lecturer of government at Dartmouth College and the founder of the Free State Project, which is working to get 20,000 Libertarians to move to New Hampshire to swing the state’s political makeup. But if we divide our states into smaller and smaller units, won’t we eventually have communities too diminutive to take care of themselves? After all, a city block doesn’t have the resources to care for its citizens the way an entire city can, and a handful of rural counties is rarely able to make up a whole state, unless it’s Wyoming. “Yes, but you don’t want people to live in a political environment they don’t believe in,” Sorens says. “The best we can do is give the most people the kind of government they want.” There’s a name for that idea: democracy.

Won’t we eventually have communities too diminutive to take care of themselves? Um, no? Why do we have states at all then? Why do we have counties within states? Why don’t we let the biggest, best government, the federal government, handle all our problems?

I suppose that doesn’t come across as reductio ad absurdum to some people. Anyway, if you call it democracy, it can’t be wrong.

Posted in Policy | 1 Comment »

A Black Man’s Path to Race Realism

Tuesday, November 19th, 2013

I can’t vouch for the veracity of A Black Man’s Path to Race Realism, but Larry Murdock’s story is… interesting:

For all these reasons I married a Chinese woman and we have a son. I don’t want him to identify as black. We speak Chinese at home, and I have decided that he can learn English as a second language—maybe after age five. We’ve had his DNA tested, and he is actually more Han Chinese (48.6 percent) than any other race (9.3 percent white, 42.1 percent black).

We are converting to Judaism, and therefore adopting a cultural environment that is as far from black as I can find. My son has options. He can think of himself as strictly Jewish. His names are Hebrew, and can be used in either the Sephardic or Ashkenazi traditions.

Or, he can think of himself as Chinese. Surprisingly, Chinese people have a better attitude towards those they think they are assimilating. My son has a Chinese passport, and if he decides to stay in China and can play the role of someone who accepts the glory of Han culture, he’ll do fine.

Or maybe he can think of himself as American—race unspecified. For his sake, I don’t want him to think of himself as “black,” because that just has too much baggage.

Posted in Policy | 4 Comments »

Official Rule

Tuesday, November 19th, 2013

The Japanese imperial family has officially ruled Japan for 125 generations, Spandrell notes:

The first emperor was the grandson of the Sun goddess, came to Japan in 660 BC, and ever since, the same bloodline has ruled the Japanese islands. Of course the date, and the number of emperor don’t make any sense; archeology tells us that in 660 BC the Japanese didn’t even have agriculture. Not much is known of the early stages of the Japanese monarchy, but there is reliable historical evidence of a Yamato clan around the 6th century AD. And again all evidence says that the patrilineal succession has continued, uninterrupted, to this day. That’s still very impressive, and if you count from then, you still get around 100 emperors. From the same family.

How did that happen? How does a family get to rule for 100 generations? That’s some rock-solid Schelling point there. Except it isn’t. The Japanese imperial family didn’t actually rule for that long. Actually it didn’t rule for very long at all. From a very early stage, the big clans of Japan, the Soga, the Fujiwara, etc. fought for influence over the imperial house, and they settled on a very straightforward system. You marry the emperor’s heir to a high rank girl from your clan. Then you get the emperor to appoint you Supreme General in Charge of Everything. If the Emperor disagreed, you kill or exile the bastard, and appoint yourself Regent until his son, i.e. your grandson comes of age. Still the patrilineal line continued, even if actual power was transmitted through the maternal line. Hey, it’s still blood.

Eventually, around the 12th century the centralized state based on the imperial house collapsed, and Japan fell into Samurai feudalism. Still there was no Odoacer who killed the emperor and took his place. The empire had collapsed, feudal lords were taking land for themselves and fighting each other without regard to imperial edicts, but the emperor was left in his palace, pretty much undisturbed. They even stopped calling him Emperor. He became the “Mikado”, i.e. the holy gate. The gate of the imperial palace, that is. So while a new military based polity grew out of Samurai bands 500 kilometers in the East, the old majestic Emperor was just “that guy in the palace”. Still the Shogun did get out of his way to get the emperor to name him “Great Shogun”.

The old Schelling point that said: “the king must rule because he has royal blood” lost effective power, but not so much that you could go and kill the emperor and take his place. Not like the emperor didn’t ask for it, as he more than once raise an army to battle the Samurais, only to be defeated. But he was never harmed, at worst he was forced to surrender his place to a brother. The imperial blood was still holy, and was the source of legal sovereignty. He had lost power, but he was kept in his place. The Schelling point stood. Quite similar to the way that the Abbasid caliphs were kept in their Baghdad palaces while his Empire fell to every kind of Turk. Or the way European constitutional monarchies left the Kings as sovereignty symbols while stripping them of any legal power. Eventually Hulagu Khan killed the last caliph, and republicans keep trying to abolish the ceremonial monarchies of Europe.

Nothing like that happened in Japan though. The imperial palace in Kyoto kept this sort of august aura, this Schelling charm that made every power holder wanted to be close to it. Of course it has to do with the fact that Japan wasn’t invaded by Hulagu Khan, or Wilsonian State Department apparatchiks. The Schelling point had evolved into saying: whoever gets appointed by the guy in the palace as Great Shogun, wins. And so we get the Onin war, and the subsequent Warring States period, where all the warlords in Japan go in a fighting spree to see who’s first to invade Kyoto and force the emperor to say he’s the awesomest Samurai in the world. Kinda ridiculous in the face of it, and it was. Getting to Kyoto didn’t stop Oda Nobunaga from getting killed. And in the end the big winner of the Warring States period, and final reunifier were the Tokugawa, based in the eastern plains where Tokyo is today. He overturned the Schelling point through the old trick of having the biggest army.

Still even the great Tokugawa didn’t go as far as getting rid of the guy in the palace. Again he kept him there, well fed, tightly controlled through a bureaucratic agency setup for the purpose. Tokugawa even went as far as make himself called“big holy palace”, which is obviously bigger than the name for the emperor, “holy palace”. So it’s not like he was full of reverence towards the holy blood of the imperial family. For the most part the Tokugawa’s didn’t give a shit about the emperors, and didn’t even bother to force the emperors to marry their daughters (they tried once at the beginning, didn’t work out).

In doing so the Tokugawa shoguns made a big mistake. You can respect a Schelling point, or you can break a Schelling point, trying to bring a new one into place. But you don’t ignore a Schelling point. You don’t just close your eyes and wait for it to disappear. For chances are it won’t.

The Tokugawa inaugurated the rebirth of the Japanese nation. It reunified the state, closed the borders, promoting native industry and agriculture, and the suppression of Buddhist sects created a new secular popular culture which evolved into most of what we recognize as Japanese today. The Tokugawa shogunate was a strong state, but it wasn’t without enemies. The shogunate run a very peculiar form of territorial control, a sort of finely bureaucratized feudalism. Most of the old Samurai bands of the warring states period were granted a fief, to be ruled at their pleasure. Lords who had been friendly to the Tokugawa during the war, were given big fiefs, hostile lords were given smaller fiefs, far from the center. Taxes were paid according to the rice production of the fiefs, and lords were to spend every other year in the capital, where their wives and children were held hostage permanently.

The big fiefs themselves contained smaller fiefs for junior lords. And this patchwork of feudal fiefdoms was controlled by a central bureaucracy, who could anytime they wanted strip a lord of his title, take away his land or move him to somewhere else. All in all it was a very smart, surprisingly modern system, and clearly the reason why it lasted so long. But while it kept the Samurais peaceful, it didn’t make them happy. In made a lot of them real pissed with the government. With war being out of the question, the opposition started looking for some good rationalization for their hating the government. They needed something to converge upon, a rallying point. Or should I say, a Schelling point. Conveniently there was a guy in a palace in Kyoto who was the perfect candidate. The imperial house had been suffering decline for several centuries already, but something was about to change.

The Tokugawa era, the Great Peace as it was called back then, had produced this very funny society, in which all Samurais, friendly or hostile, had nothing to do. They had their legal status as warriors, and they could, actually had to carry their fine katanas all the time with them. But there was no war to be fought. Yes there was a lord to defend, but nothing to defend him from. Still they couldn’t just grab a piece of land and grow food, or start a shop in the nearest town; even if they could go stand the thought of downward mobility, there were laws against that. There were 4 castes, warrior, artisan, peasant and merchant, and they had to respect their jobs. So what’s a warrior, millions of them, to do when there’s no war? They did like any other politically-connected class do. They manned the civil service. Oh, and the schools. Sounds familiar? Yes, the Samurais had their own mini Cathedral going on back then. They became a clerk-class, which means literate, and when a lot of people became highly literate, interesting ideas are bound to come out.

The Edo period saw the birth of the Kokugaku, the national studies, which saw many breakthroughs in philology, history and political theory. They deciphered the old classical texts, started to read them, and found that the imperial family actually was pretty damn awesome. Hey, did you know they descend form the Sun Goddess? That’s what this book commissioned by the imperial house in the 8th century says anyway. The knowledge of the ancient past of the country spread quickly, even to the imperial palace, who had forgotten itself. The Kokaku emperor in the 1800s found out that he wasn’t just the Guy in the Palace. He was the Emperor, or in the original Japanese, the Heavenly Sovereign. That has a different ring to it. So he restored the title, mostly unused for a whopping 900 years.

The reappraisal of the awesomeness of the Unbroken Imperial Line was of course a loaded weapon in the hands of hostile Samurai fiefs, which found it made a good rallying point for opposition to those perfid Tokugawas in the capital. We should overthrow those bastards, not because they took away half our land in the 1600s. No, it has nothing to do with that. They must be overthrown because they are not nice to the great Emperor in Kyoto, the real sovereign. How’s that for a Schelling point? Suddenly all opposition to the government had a very strong rationale. It didn’t help that the Tokugawas had adopted Neoconfucianism, of the Zhu Xi variety, as their official ideology, taught in the official schools. Confucianism teaching basically tell you to obey to the real King, and it happens that the Tokugawas were nominally just a military commander appointed by the King, and in reality they were just a bunch of stationary bandits which had seized the capital centuries before.

So it’s not surprise that that guy in Kyoto, who had no army, little land, and had wielded no real power for almost a millennium, suddenly found himself being held as the greatest King of all time. The only unbroken line of kings in the world.

Posted in Policy | 1 Comment »

Senseless but not Mysterious

Monday, November 18th, 2013

Mass shootings are senseless but not mysterious:

Building on Dr. Dietz’s seminal 1986 article on mass murder in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, researchers have used these characteristics to develop a taxonomy of mass killing outside of warfare. The major types include serial, cult, gang, family and spree killings.

But it is another kind that dominates the headlines: the massacre or rampage shooting. Whereas the other types of mass murder usually occur in multiple incidents or in a concealed manner, massacres occur as a single, typically very public event.

In 2004, Paul E. Mullen, then the director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health, wrote an illuminating study based in part on his personal interviews with rampage shooters who survived their acts. He notes that rampage shootings tend to follow a definite pattern, what he called a “program for murder and suicide.” The shooter, almost always a young man, enters an area filled with many people. He is heavily armed. He may begin by targeting a few specific victims, but he soon moves on to “indiscriminate killings where just killing people is the prime aim.” He typically has no plan for escape and kills himself or is killed by police.

Among the more pervasive myths about massacre killers is that they simply snap. In fact, Dr. Mullen and others have found that rampage shooters usually plan their actions meticulously, even ritualistically, for months in advance. Like serial killers, massacre killers usually don’t have impulsive personalities; they tend to be obsessive and highly organized. Survivors typically report that the shooters appear to be not enraged but cold and calculating.

Central to the massacre pattern is the killer’s self-styling. James L. Knoll IV, the director of forensic psychiatry at the State University of New York’s Upstate Medical University, describes in a 2010 article how perpetrators often model themselves after commandos, wearing military dress or black clothing. Investigators usually find they had a lifelong fascination with weaponry, warfare, and military and survivalist culture. Their methodical comportment during the act is part of this styling.

Contrary to the common assumption, writes author Michael D. Kelleher in his 1997 book “Flash Point,” mass killers are “rarely insane, in either the legal or ethical senses of the term,” and they don’t typically have the “debilitating delusions and insidious psychotic fantasies of the paranoid schizophrenic.” Dr. Knoll affirms that “the literature does not reflect a strong link with serious mental illness.”

Instead, massacre killers are typically marked by what are considered personality disorders: grandiosity, resentment, self-righteousness, a sense of entitlement. They become, says Dr. Knoll, ” ‘collectors of injustice’ who nurture their wounded narcissism.” To preserve their egos, they exaggerate past humiliations and externalize their anger, blaming others for their frustrations. They develop violent fantasies of heroic revenge against an uncaring world.

Whereas serial killers are driven by long-standing sadistic and sexual pleasure in inflicting pain, massacre killers usually have no prior history of violence. Instead, writes Eric W. Hickey, dean of the California School of Forensic Studies, in his 2009 book “Serial Murderers and Their Victims,” massacre killers commit a single and final act in which violence becomes a “medium” to make a ” ‘final statement’ in or about life.” Fantasy, public expression and messaging are central to what motivates and defines massacre killings.

Mass shooters aim to tell a story through their actions. They create a narrative about how the world has forced them to act, and then must persuade themselves to believe it. The final step is crafting the story for others and telling it through spoken warnings beforehand, taunting words to victims or manifestos created for public airing.

What these findings suggest is that mass shootings are a kind of theater. Their purpose is essentially terrorism—minus, in most cases, a political agenda. The public spectacle, the mass slaughter of mostly random victims, is meant to be seen as an attack against society itself. The typical consummation of the act in suicide denies the course of justice, giving the shooter ultimate and final control.

So, how do you reduce such mass killings?

A 1999 study by Dr. Mullen and others in the Archives of Suicide Research suggested that a 10-year outbreak of mass homicides had occurred in clusters rather than randomly. This effect was also found in a 2002 study by a group of German psychiatrists who examined 132 attempted rampage killings world-wide. There is a growing consensus among researchers that, whether or not the perpetrators are fully aware of it, they are following what has become a ready-made, free-floating template for young men to resolve their rage and express their sense of personal grandiosity.

Whatever the witch’s brew of influences that produced this grisly script, treating mass killings as a kind of epidemic or contagion largely frees us from having to understand the particular causes of each act. Instead, we can focus on disrupting the spread.

There is a precedent for this approach in dealing with another form of violence: suicides. A 2003 study led by Columbia University psychiatrist Madelyn Gould found “ample evidence” of a suicide contagion effect, fed by reports in the media. A 2011 study in the journal BMC Public Health found, unsurprisingly, that this effect is especially strong for novel forms of suicide that receive outsize attention in the press.

Some researchers have even put the theory to the test. In 1984, a rash of suicides broke out on the subway system in Vienna. As the death toll climbed, a group of researchers at the Austrian Association for Suicide Prevention theorized that sensational reporting was inadvertently glorifying the suicides. Three years into the epidemic, the researchers persuaded local media to change their coverage by minimizing details and photos, avoiding romantic language and simplistic explanations of motives, moving the stories from the front page and keeping the word “suicide” out of the headlines. Subway suicides promptly dropped by 75%.

This approach has been recommended by numerous public health and media organizations world-wide, from the U.K., Australia, Norway and Hong Kong to the U.S., where in 2001 a similar set of reporting guidelines was released jointly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute of Mental Health and the surgeon general. It is difficult to say whether these guidelines have helped, since journalists’ adherence to them has been scattered at best, but they might still serve as a basis for changing the reporting of massacres.

How might journalists and police change their practices to discourage mass shootings? First, they need to do more to deprive the killer of an audience.

That isn’t likely to happen. If it bleeds, it leads — TV news lives by this credo.

Posted in Crime, Policy | 5 Comments »

Why is that guy over there the king?

Monday, November 18th, 2013

Why is that guy over there the king?

Because his father was king? How fair is that? His father was a good man, while he is an evil bastard. Why should he rule? It’s not fair.

Of course it’s not fair, but that’s not how human societies are arranged. Human societies are organized over Schelling points. Primogeniture is a Schelling point. Monarchy is a Schelling point. And primogeniture monarchy is another Schelling point. Schelling points happen through trial and error. Lots of error really. And they don’t assure there won’t be any more error. But given the huge and numerous constraints which exist, this was the best arrangement possible.

Schelling points are fixed in place not because of an explicit understanding of their origin and importance. They just stumble upon existence, after which the people involved come up with some bullshit that sounds right. Or may I rephrase, people see Schelling points and come up with elaborated post-rationalizations to justify them. How do you justify that some kid, who has done nothing of merit in his life, who is ugly, dumb, clumsy and of bad character, becomes king just because his father was? Well I don’t know. But it’s always been like that, so if sons have a right to the kingship… well, it must be about blood. Yes, the bloodline. That’s it. It is of utmost importance that all the kings must be of the same blood as the previous king, as this is the blood of the founder, which was awesome. We can’t afford losing this awesome blood. It doesn’t matter that the lawful heir of this bloodline is ugly, dumb, clumsy and of bad character. That’s… uh… the fault of his teachers. Yes, bad teachers. The kid shares the bloodline so he must be king.

On the face of it the theory is quite stupid. Let’s assume blood alone makes you awesome. Even if you keep the father’s line, sons have mothers too, so the ‘bloodline’ gets diluted each time. By the 5th generation the new king shares very few genes with the great founder. And that’s if you are lucky and you don’t have a slutty queen who fucks someone else and fathers his children. Surely someone must have noticed this fact, but of course the solution to it is even worse. You keep using women from inside the family to avoid diluting the precious bloodline, and what you get is a monster. So you gotta worship the bloodline while doing all you can to dilute it. Hypocrisy is by no means an innovation of our times.

Dynasties in most of the world changed quite often, especially in Europe. So the common rationalization for the legitimacy of kings was not so much the bloodline, as simply the law. There are inheritance laws that say who has titles, and sometimes kings agree to leave the crown to some guy. And law is sacred. Most of the time anyway, European history is full of succession wars where people didn’t quite agree on the sacredness of laws, and everybody with a big army always found a plausible legal claim to the throne they wanted. But the emphasis was still in the law, which is a funny thing to take as sacred. Surely there are more important things that some agreement reached at some point of time, in some state of mind, by some old guy who didn’t really know what he was doing. But hey, another Schelling point, can’t touch that. Perhaps the famous legalism of Europeans, which is quite distinct to other civilizations, comes from the fact that we had no other concept in which to base our politics.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

How Monarchy Came To Be

Sunday, November 17th, 2013

It’s not hard to see how monarchy came to be, Spandrell suggests:

Lands are conquered through war. Armies need a commander, so when an army conquers a piece of land, the commander becomes king. He rules and collects taxes which he funnels to his war brothers, who become noblemen.

Then the king dies. What happens? Well different peoples had different systems to arrange for succession for a ruler. What would happen in most armies when the commander dies, is that the generals will get together and choose one of them as the successor, if the king didn’t arrange for it himself. And that evolved into elective monarchy. Problem is it’s hard to get people to agree to choose one king. The stakes are too damn high. So what you got was all the contenders gathering their armies in anticipation of the king’s death, and total war among the elite every 10 years or so.

The solution which was most widely adopted was that of hereditary succession. The metaphor for the kingship changed, from that of commander of an army, to that of owner of property. Since time immemorial property of all kind has been inherited in the family; in patriarchal societies it would be inherited by the sons. And so most kingdoms eventually adopted the system of hereditary succession. The king dies, the son takes over.

What if there’s more than one son? Well, the inheritance of property itself has two sorts of arrangements. To this day, some people divide their inheritance more or less equally onto their sons. And some give the whole estate to the eldest son, and screw the others. There are pros and cons to both approaches. Partible inheritance tends to break up the estates, which become ever smaller and smaller, and eventually not very profitable, which is bad for the family name, and makes them prone to be bought up or taken by richer, stronger people with bigger estates. Primogeniture ensures the estate doesn’t shrink, and with it the family honor. But it creates a huge incentive for the younger brothers to kill the eldest.

Partible inheritance was popular in medieval Europe. But it eventually disappeared, for obvious reasons. If there’s only one guy who doesn’t do it, and keeps his big estate, he’ll be able to field a larger army and take the small estates that your oh so egalitarian father left you. And so we see that on most of the world, primogeniture monarchy ended being the most widely adopted system.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

A Founder of Twitter Goes Long

Thursday, November 14th, 2013

Evan Williams, one of Twitter’s co-founders, has recently co-founded Medium, which is dedicated to (slightly) longer-form posts:

Broadly speaking, Medium is a blogging platform, meaning it’s a place for people to write and read posts. And Mr. Williams, as its C.E.O., hopes that it will allow thoughtful, longer-form writing to flourish. Mr. Williams frankly acknowledges that the medium of Medium is not new. In fact, he says he’s reaching back to the once-du jour notion of blogging because, in the frenzy to build social communications tools, something has been left behind: rationality.

“In the early days, I bought into the idea that the Internet would lead to a better world, that the truth was out there and that we didn’t need gatekeepers,” he said. The idea that he and many others embraced was that an unfiltered Internet would create a democratic information utopia. “Now,” he continued, “I think it’s more complicated than that.”

Medium is Mr. Williams’s version of a gatekeeper, albeit one that relies heavily on technology rather than human expertise or taste. While it has some editors soliciting and promoting some content, the bigger idea is to use algorithms to help identify blog posts that readers consider valuable and to bubble them to the surface.

He’s carrying out ideas he toyed with in his first big commercial venture, which was called, simply, Blogger. He sold that to Google a decade ago, begetting his first millions. Now, he is joining the mini-movement to celebrate long-form expression at sites and apps like Longform, Longreads and the Verge. The oddity is that Mr. Williams helped found Twitter, which is to long form what snacks are to dinner: sometimes a prelude, often an appetite killer.

The short-burst culture has eaten away at the very definition of “long form.” Many articles in Medium, for instance, are hundreds of characters longer than a tweet but tens of thousands fewer than something you’d find in, say, The New Yorker.

And some see little evidence that people want to consume anything that takes much time. “I see a diminishing audience for long form of anything,” said James Katz, director of the division of emerging media studies at Boston University. “The riptide of society is heading the other direction.”

For his part, Mr. Williams said he was disturbed by the swelling cacophony of information that makes it easy to be overwhelmed and hard to know what to trust. Good information, he said, can lose out, and, as he described his new mission, “I want to give rationality a fighting chance.”

“I’m an eternal optimist,” Mr. Williams told me over lunch last week, wearing skinny jeans and long-sleeve black T-shirt. “But I’m a more realistic optimist than I used to be.”

He traced the evolution of his thinking by describing an “epiphany that bothered” him this year. In preparing a speech, he revisited his career’s early days. The exercise made him realize that the Internet wasn’t changing the world as he had once idealized, but that, far less romantically, it had come to be little more than a “convenience.”

The common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

Posted in Business, Policy, Technology | No Comments »

Solomon Northup

Thursday, November 14th, 2013

Steve Sailer pokes some fun at Oscar frontrunner 12 Years a Slave, which is “built upon a fourth-rate screenplay that might have embarrassed Horatio Alger” and features “depressingly bad” Victorian dialogue “reminiscent of the sub-Shakespearean lines John Wayne had to deliver as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror“:

12 Years a Slave is hailed by critics as a long-awaited breakthrough that finally dares to mention the subject of slavery after decades of the entertainment industry being controlled by the South. Yet as cinema encyclopedist Leonard Maltin notes:

12 Years a Slave is a remake. What’s more, the original television film was directed by the celebrated Gordon Parks. Why no one seems to remember this is a mystery to me, yet all too typical of what I’ll call media amnesia. It first aired on PBS in 1984 as Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, reached a wider audience the following year when it was repeated as an installment of American Playhouse, and made its video debut under the title Half Slave, Half Free.

Sailer finds the film’s opening preposterous:

12 Years a Slave opens in 1841 with Solomon Northup (stolidly played by the Anglo-Nigerian actor Chiwetel Ejiofor) being effusively admired by his white neighbors in Saratoga, New York. Northup is a model of prosperous bourgeois respectability, always doffing his top hat to his white peers while out riding with his wife and children in an elegant carriage. (Watch 0:24 to 0:35 in the trailer.)

How could he afford that?

Well, actually, he didn’t and couldn’t.

A glance at Northup’s ghostwritten 1853 memoir makes clear that in 1841, rather than being a pillar of this Yankee community, he was an unemployed fiddler dragged down by his own “shiftlessness”:

Though always in comfortable circumstances, we had not prospered. The society and associations at that world-renowned watering place (Saratoga, the home of American horseracing), were not calculated to preserve the simple habits of industry and economy to which I had been accustomed, but, on the contrary, to substitute others in their stead, tending to shiftlessness and extravagance.

In McQueen’s often baffling movie, this upper-middle-class family man suddenly decides to run off to join the circus with two fast-talking white men without even leaving a note for his wife. While dining in an elegant Washington, DC restaurant with his new friends, he suddenly takes ill (perhaps from being slipped a Mickey Finn) and wakes up in chains.

Paradoxically, Northup’s life in slavery is better documented than his murky life in freedom. His poor family never reported or even guessed that he’d been kidnapped. They apparently assumed that vanishing was just the kind of thing he’d do.

Northup’s hometown newspaper suggested that he had been an accomplice in a skin game scam gone awry:

…it is more than suspected that Sol Northup was an accomplice in the sale, calculating to slip away and share the spoils, but that the purchaser was too sharp for him, and instead of getting the cash, he got something else.

Posted in Media, Policy | No Comments »

The emergent nature of the NFL locker room

Wednesday, November 13th, 2013

The culture of the NFL locker room is emergent, Russ Roberts argues:

Yes, the coach has some control over it. But the control is limited. These are large men who once a week make a living in a violent often unpleasant way. To be outraged over bullying in this environment is to misunderstand the world these people live in. It’s a tough world. It’s not like my world or your world. It’s a painful world. It’s a world where every player plays hurt. Linemen in particular play with broken bones. There is plenty of ego at the New York Times and ESPN and I’m sure newcomers there can be intimidated and even treated cruelly. But probably not like the NFL. It’s probably worse in the NFL for lots of people. But there’s a reason for it. And it’s not something you can “fix” with some new rules or regulations or an investigation.

The culture of an NFL locker room emerges from the bottom up and not the top down. It emerges because of what’s at stake every Sunday — the money and the pride and the glory — and it emerges from the people who are able to play through pain knowing that they may have trouble walking when they’re forty. They’re not normal. They are surely not physically normal. But they are probably not emotionally normal either. They cope with the challenges of their work environment by creating a very tight knit camaraderie of social interaction that you and I can’t begin to understand. How can you judge those men? If you don’t like the heat, you don’t have to work in the kitchen. Jonathan Martin has left the kitchen. I don’t blame in. I would, too.

The other part that’s strange about the outrage is that if you’re going to be outraged about the NFL, be outraged by the violence and the pain and the concussions and the possible brain damage and the shame and humiliation of failure that is witnessed by millions ever week. But bullying is the thing that has to stop? Because it’s a workplace? Ashley Fox is probably right — the laws of the workplace probably do apply to the NFL. But I can’t imagine how you enforce those rules. And what she misses and what Rhoden misses is that most of the men who work in that workplace like it the way it is. The men who play know that they are elite and rare. They are part of a community we can’t begin to understand. How do you understand grown men who try to hurt each other for three hours on a Sunday afternoon embracing each other when it’s over?

It’s not for everyone. It looks like it’s not for Jonathan Martin. But I have trouble condemning Richie Incognito when his own teammates come to his defense. That should tell everyone that something more complicated is going on here than one worker harassing another.

One commenter brought up Terry Tate, Office Linebacker:

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

The Gap Between Schooling and Education

Wednesday, November 13th, 2013

There’s an enormous gap between schooling and education, Lant Pritchett has found:

“The vast majority of countries will meet the Millennium Development Goal target for universal primary school completion, and very few countries will miss it by much,” he writes in his new book, “The Rebirth of Education: From 19th Century Schooling to 21st Century Learning.”

The change has been so rapid that the average Haitian or Bangladeshi in 2010 had more years of schooling than the average French or Italian person did in 1960. (That data looks at average years of schooling for people 15 and older, by the way.) Even repressive and nondemocratic countries have seen tremendous gains. “Good governments do schooling, but nearly all bad governments do it, too,” Mr. Pritchett writes.

But that does not mean that all that schooling has translated into much education, he says. For instance, in the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, less than half of surveyed children in fifth grade could read a story intended for second graders. About one in six students in fifth grade recognized letters but could not read words.

A lot of “solutions” are productive, but only with a limited scope:

There’s literally thousands of studies on this. Let’s say you’re attending a school with no roof. You learn less, and once you have a roof, you might learn more, but it’s done. That’s it. If someone gives you a better roof, or a thicker roof, or two roofs, you’re not better off — those inputs don’t add up.

Second, a lot of teachers don’t know what to teach or how to teach it, and a lot of those teachers are not embedded in performance-oriented schools. So, two of those teachers aren’t going to make a difference. That’s why we have really good experimental evidence that smaller class sizes work really well in places like Israel and Tennessee. But we also have really good experimental evidence that smaller class sizes, or an additional teacher, don’t make a difference in India and Kenya. That’s not that surprising, actually: The system isn’t committed to learning anyway. You’re just pouring more water into leaking bucket. That’s not going to fill the bucket.

So, we’ve seen massive improvement in what we can think of as the “input” side of education in the last decade. Class size is coming down, the number of schools is going up. But in India in the past six years, for instance, the inputs are getting better but the outputs are not. And in some places, the trend is actually zero or negative. That’s not to say I have anything against inputs!

So, these things work in Israel and Tennessee, but not in India and Kenya. Hmm… must be teacher quality.

Posted in Education, Policy | 1 Comment »

Manfred Rommel Dies

Tuesday, November 12th, 2013

Manfred Rommel, son of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, has died at age 84, in Stuttgart, where he served as mayor:

As mayor, Mr. Rommel angered his constituents in 1977 by allowing convicted terrorists to be eulogized and buried in the municipal cemetery. He said he wanted “to show how, with a little generosity of spirit, enmity ends with death.”

During his tenure, from 1974 to 1996, Mr. Rommel tightened control over city finances and reduced debts, while expanding public transport and building a new arena and convention center. In 1982, The New York Times called him “the rising political figure with the best chance of becoming national leader.”

But he turned down opportunities to run for state or federal office in favor of the municipal politics he said he liked best. “I’m not ambitious,” he said. “It’s an unbearable burden to be chancellor,” his country’s highest office.

He continued, “Federal officials in this country have an aversion to outsiders, and they’re only interested in them for help if they’re in mud up to their ears.”

Part of his political appeal was his last name. Many Germans felt pride in his father’s brilliant generalship, while also remembering his humanity in an inhuman situation. Field Marshal Rommel ignored orders to kill Jewish soldiers, civilians and captured commandos, and was not accused of war crimes. He angered Hitler by urging a negotiated surrender on the Western Front.

Manfred’s response to the Nazi horror was to emphasize the unity of Europe rather than German patriotism. “German history is too much for us,” he said in an interview with The Times.

“The shadow is too great,” he continued. “I belong to the generation of burned children, and I am not so sure about our capabilities. My father once said during the war, ‘The best thing would be to live as a British dominion now that we’ve shown we can’t manage our own affairs.’ He was being sarcastic, of course.”

Manfred Rommel was born in Stuttgart on Dec. 24, 1928. He was only 14 when he was drafted by the Luftwaffe as an antiaircraft gunner. When his father killed himself, he deserted and surrendered to French forces.

After his release from captivity, he studied law and political science at Tübingen University, then went to work for the state government of Baden-Württemberg, of which Stuttgart is the capital. He became deputy finance minister of the state.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

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