“The basic problem is that just saying government programs should help address problems that aren’t addressed by the market alone, while true, offers basically no guidance about what to actually do. It is very, very important to come up with correct empirical analysis or else you’re not going to accomplish anything.”
This argument sums up why I read Slow Boring every day, even though I’m way to the left of MY and most commenters.
We have to care about getting things right, and EVEN if we were to agree that society needs to be transformed to achieve more just outcomes, we still have to do the work to come up with the most reasonable form of what we should transform it into (and we have to compromise with all the people who disagree, etc).
The Ozempic vs. combatting food deserts point is a great example of this. I’m willing to put human well-being ahead of free markets any day of the week, but the thing we’re doing has to work! :)
Since most experts have university training, I wonder whether solutions might involve reforming the university system. At elementary and higher school levels, the US once led the world in providing near-universal education. But at university level, as the population fraction completing degrees has gown past 50%, US university funding is unusually uneven. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand provide comparable per-student funding across almost all their universities. Given more broad educational spending, influential experts may naturally be drawn from a broader range of the population. The current US approach of drawing experts from a tiny fraction of the population via elite institutions may reinforce group-think that does not reflect the nationwide diversity of thought (I believe 20-something and 40-something percent of New York Times reporters have top-0.25% ivy and top-0.5% elite-campus degrees respectively). Drawing experts from such a narrow subculture may be particularly important given intergenerational immobility (I believe there are about as many ivy students from families in top 1% of earners as bottom 50% combined, and more broadly, highest qualification earned is more correlated with parent's than is income or even wealth).
So, here's a possible partial solution to the problems Matt points to in expert thought: To advance a vision of more universal education and greater diversity of thought, taxpayer subsidies (including endowment tax breaks) could be phased out as university's per-student funding exceeds the national average, and zeroed-out at at something like double. Such progressive fiscal policy, aimed at equitable provision of education across the wider population, may reduce group-think, while also advancing typical progressive goals.
Or we could just do like a sensible country and nationalize the big universities. Rutgers State University of New Jersey at Princeton. UMass Boston Extension Campus at Cambridge (Harvard). UMass Boston Engineering School (MIT). UC Palo Alto (Stanford).
Oops, misread "associate degree" as university degree, so fraction of population with university degree is actually 42% for 30-35 year-olds, but doesn't change logic.
I've thought this (that the crank realignment is noteworthy, and bad) for probably 10-12 years now. In general, I think there are three related and interconnected dimensions to hyperpartisanship:
1) the crank realignment - which leads not only to the things Matt discussed (one party incapable of policy, expertise becoming unnecessarily politicized, etc.) but has also hastened the episetemic breakdown in our society (in conjunction with the fragmentation of media, etc.)
2) failure to agree on the basic national problem space - my sense is that a democratic society needs a substantial level of agreement on the problem space, so that the debate can center on policy solutions. I fear whether healthy democratic discourse can survive when it is stuck on basic value disgreements over the nature of the problems that need to be addressed
3) incapacity to select leaders based on executive / governing competence - at this point, the collapse of the GOP as a sane policy-making enterprise (or, Democrats' commitment to Godless communism, if you prefer that flavor) leaves voters fewer and fewer opportunities to vote based on who they actually believe will do a good job in an elected position
Matt - you lightly touched on a problem that many people overlook. The problem of working and living with people who look and feel as you do can lead to siloed thinking. This is bad for science, but is even worse for politics. For too long we liberals have ignored most of the people on the right and this has allowed them to have undue influence on many issues. Electing fools to Congress who have no idea about how to address the problems facing our country, packing the courts with people who are willing to bend the laws to fit their political beliefs, and entertaining people who have denied science are just a few of the ways the Republican Party has ceased to be a viable counter-weight to the Democrats. Our democracy needs two strong political parties so it can function as the founders wanted. This is no longer possible. At the same time, most of us who identify as liberals, are not paying attention to how dangerous many on the Right have become. The media is no better, as they pay little attention to the violent words and actions that take place on a regular basis. Just because a person believes in foolish things, doesn't mean they are not dangerous.
While it’s true that economists in academia are mostly on the left, we are virtually all centre-left, and research that shows evidence for something that is coded as right winged is welcomed. This leads me to think that the problem with softer social sciences and the humanities isn’t so much that they have even fewer actual right-winged researchers, but that they are dominated by far-left “woke”, who have a culture that is inherently opposed to evidence or arguments that doesn’t fit their priors. In other words, the key for a healthy academic discipline is people committed to the values of science and academia. View point diversity probably does help, but the key is for scientific curiosity to be valued above any ideological commitments.
Thanks for the thoughtful piece. I think the demise of thoughtfulness on the political Right, at least in the GOP, has been bad for progressives both in the political realm and in academia. Progressives dismiss the Right as cranks and often that is the truth, but it shields Progressives from a reality check. As you say, when everyone in a field is of one political mind, there tends to be a lot of group-think that gets through, because peer review is no longer being critical review. My doctoral advisor always told us we should be our own worst adversaries in questioning our assumptions. Nowadays that seems a little old fashioned.
I recall one paper on gun laws that was published in The Lancet about ten years ago that made some claims that had no basis in fact. For example, IIRC, it said that a NYS law mandating that firing pins stamp identifying numbers on cartridges was associated with a favorable outcome in reducing gun crime. Except the law had never been implemented, and the reviewers didn't bother to check. (I recall the Hopkins and Harvard gun violence researchers having a cow over that publication; it brought discredit on the whole academic field). I've seen other papers do statistical studies claiming cause and effect when in actuality, most of these are model-dependent associations, not causal proof. Increasingly, the biases get published unchallenged. Yes, these models are helpful in designing policy, but one has to test the models against possibly confounding data. That is harder, more tedious and expensive, and often not done.
Worse yet is the notion on the right that scientists are simply lying to promote a Progressive agenda. Or the left's version of "believe the science" where science is in fact not supposed to be "believed" or watered-down, but rigorously tested and proved. Although I am a geochemist and climate change is not my expertise, for the Right to dismiss even the bulletproof underpinnings of climate science, such as the obvious connection between adding Tyndall gases to the atmosphere and the atmosphere's better ability to trap heat, is downright scary. One can accept good science while admitting its uncertainties. One can still argue what the best policies would be and that is harder than simple assertions. Not only are there climate model uncertainties but also economic model uncertainties that sit on top of them. None of this can be thoughtfully used to guide government or private sector action if people don't trust each other to be offering their best thinking and not their best spin. In that sense, I think honesty rather than "strategic dishonesty" is absolutely required.
I honestly thought BLM protests were going to be superspreader events and everyone who attended would die. We were told it was unsafe to be within six feet of each other, even outdoors!
I don't think so, but it's been a while since I checked the causes. The were nighttime BLM rallies as well. I think it was just a lot safer to be near people outdoors than they said it was.
I wonder how much of this can be attributed to a two party system. Seems like as long as the political structure incentivizes two parties, most sorts of polarization seem to be getting worse - education, gender, political. The one exception could be racial polarization, but only because it was already so polarized to begin with.
EDIT: two party system + living in an age w/ mass media/interent
Yes but not really anymore. Ideological sorting has rapidly occurred over the last couple decades. You rarely see conservative democrats or liberal republicans now.
That's true. I guess I should probably amend my statement to a two party system + living with the internet / mass media. When politics was more local, then yes I agree a two party system can coexist with non polarized politics. But when information travels so quickly and politics becomes so nationalized, then I'm not sure that it's feasible.
My big worry is that the Republicans will stay stupid even after Trump is gone, because the cranks are so firmly in control that experts can’t get a word in without getting shouted down. If the next Republican nominee for president is someone with a more conventional political resume than Trump but equally dumb, we’ll be at grave risk of extremely bad policy.
Macroeconomic arson - destroying the independence of the Federal Reserve and running whatever deficits they feel like until inflation explodes and wrecks the economy - is now a serious possibility for our future in a way it never was before. So are mass deportation sweeps and other kinds of things that sound good to people who know nothing but are destructive in reality. Or, in the worst case scenario, the end of the American Republic and its replacement with a dictatorship.
Much debate here about how the Dems have their own conspiracies and cranks, and how "intersectional" worldviews are conspiratorial. Can I make a suggestion?
1. Some people are cranks by disposition and will seek out conspiracy theories. These people have mostly sorted into being Republicans.
2. Any group can be convinced to believe in crankery if it has deranged enough institutions and media. Ideological monoculture and the rise of social media have done some of that for the Democrats, but it's less fertile soil for conspiracism and it doesn't grow as well.
Depolarization and the end of the engagement business model would make for less conspiracy thinking overall, not just redistribute it.
This piece felt good, but I think it's a bit too glib for its own good. There's a reason why the "cranks" are experiencing new levels of salience -- the elite class has engaged in such bubble thinking that they're making some significant errors that in turn fuel legitimate gripes that power -- and empower -- the cranks.
The cranks will go back to the edges of society, reading their National Enquirers and posting harmlessly on their Facebook feeds, when the elites gain some friggin' discipline:
- Stop conflating "the science" with "the solution" (science doesn't wade in solutions);
- Stop advancing well-meaning ideology as indisputable truths;
- And stand down on the impulse to silence speech that they find "dangerous."
The problem today is that the cranks actually have a lot of reason to be cranky, and it's due to the 'trusted class of experts' losing a lot of trust across broad swaths of citizenry.
I’m curious about whether the Green Party draws a significant number of left wing cranks from the Democratic Party.
There iisnt really a right wing version of the Green Party. Some of the state libertarian parties are full of cranks but most aren’t. Plus they’re not right wing on a lot of stuff
“The basic problem is that just saying government programs should help address problems that aren’t addressed by the market alone, while true, offers basically no guidance about what to actually do. It is very, very important to come up with correct empirical analysis or else you’re not going to accomplish anything.”
This argument sums up why I read Slow Boring every day, even though I’m way to the left of MY and most commenters.
We have to care about getting things right, and EVEN if we were to agree that society needs to be transformed to achieve more just outcomes, we still have to do the work to come up with the most reasonable form of what we should transform it into (and we have to compromise with all the people who disagree, etc).
The Ozempic vs. combatting food deserts point is a great example of this. I’m willing to put human well-being ahead of free markets any day of the week, but the thing we’re doing has to work! :)
My god I love Matt.
Bro, how is this not a 40k word article. This piece should be your magnum opus.
My thoughts exactly
Since most experts have university training, I wonder whether solutions might involve reforming the university system. At elementary and higher school levels, the US once led the world in providing near-universal education. But at university level, as the population fraction completing degrees has gown past 50%, US university funding is unusually uneven. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand provide comparable per-student funding across almost all their universities. Given more broad educational spending, influential experts may naturally be drawn from a broader range of the population. The current US approach of drawing experts from a tiny fraction of the population via elite institutions may reinforce group-think that does not reflect the nationwide diversity of thought (I believe 20-something and 40-something percent of New York Times reporters have top-0.25% ivy and top-0.5% elite-campus degrees respectively). Drawing experts from such a narrow subculture may be particularly important given intergenerational immobility (I believe there are about as many ivy students from families in top 1% of earners as bottom 50% combined, and more broadly, highest qualification earned is more correlated with parent's than is income or even wealth).
So, here's a possible partial solution to the problems Matt points to in expert thought: To advance a vision of more universal education and greater diversity of thought, taxpayer subsidies (including endowment tax breaks) could be phased out as university's per-student funding exceeds the national average, and zeroed-out at at something like double. Such progressive fiscal policy, aimed at equitable provision of education across the wider population, may reduce group-think, while also advancing typical progressive goals.
Or we could just do like a sensible country and nationalize the big universities. Rutgers State University of New Jersey at Princeton. UMass Boston Extension Campus at Cambridge (Harvard). UMass Boston Engineering School (MIT). UC Palo Alto (Stanford).
Oops, misread "associate degree" as university degree, so fraction of population with university degree is actually 42% for 30-35 year-olds, but doesn't change logic.
I've thought this (that the crank realignment is noteworthy, and bad) for probably 10-12 years now. In general, I think there are three related and interconnected dimensions to hyperpartisanship:
1) the crank realignment - which leads not only to the things Matt discussed (one party incapable of policy, expertise becoming unnecessarily politicized, etc.) but has also hastened the episetemic breakdown in our society (in conjunction with the fragmentation of media, etc.)
2) failure to agree on the basic national problem space - my sense is that a democratic society needs a substantial level of agreement on the problem space, so that the debate can center on policy solutions. I fear whether healthy democratic discourse can survive when it is stuck on basic value disgreements over the nature of the problems that need to be addressed
3) incapacity to select leaders based on executive / governing competence - at this point, the collapse of the GOP as a sane policy-making enterprise (or, Democrats' commitment to Godless communism, if you prefer that flavor) leaves voters fewer and fewer opportunities to vote based on who they actually believe will do a good job in an elected position
Matt - you lightly touched on a problem that many people overlook. The problem of working and living with people who look and feel as you do can lead to siloed thinking. This is bad for science, but is even worse for politics. For too long we liberals have ignored most of the people on the right and this has allowed them to have undue influence on many issues. Electing fools to Congress who have no idea about how to address the problems facing our country, packing the courts with people who are willing to bend the laws to fit their political beliefs, and entertaining people who have denied science are just a few of the ways the Republican Party has ceased to be a viable counter-weight to the Democrats. Our democracy needs two strong political parties so it can function as the founders wanted. This is no longer possible. At the same time, most of us who identify as liberals, are not paying attention to how dangerous many on the Right have become. The media is no better, as they pay little attention to the violent words and actions that take place on a regular basis. Just because a person believes in foolish things, doesn't mean they are not dangerous.
While it’s true that economists in academia are mostly on the left, we are virtually all centre-left, and research that shows evidence for something that is coded as right winged is welcomed. This leads me to think that the problem with softer social sciences and the humanities isn’t so much that they have even fewer actual right-winged researchers, but that they are dominated by far-left “woke”, who have a culture that is inherently opposed to evidence or arguments that doesn’t fit their priors. In other words, the key for a healthy academic discipline is people committed to the values of science and academia. View point diversity probably does help, but the key is for scientific curiosity to be valued above any ideological commitments.
Thanks for the thoughtful piece. I think the demise of thoughtfulness on the political Right, at least in the GOP, has been bad for progressives both in the political realm and in academia. Progressives dismiss the Right as cranks and often that is the truth, but it shields Progressives from a reality check. As you say, when everyone in a field is of one political mind, there tends to be a lot of group-think that gets through, because peer review is no longer being critical review. My doctoral advisor always told us we should be our own worst adversaries in questioning our assumptions. Nowadays that seems a little old fashioned.
I recall one paper on gun laws that was published in The Lancet about ten years ago that made some claims that had no basis in fact. For example, IIRC, it said that a NYS law mandating that firing pins stamp identifying numbers on cartridges was associated with a favorable outcome in reducing gun crime. Except the law had never been implemented, and the reviewers didn't bother to check. (I recall the Hopkins and Harvard gun violence researchers having a cow over that publication; it brought discredit on the whole academic field). I've seen other papers do statistical studies claiming cause and effect when in actuality, most of these are model-dependent associations, not causal proof. Increasingly, the biases get published unchallenged. Yes, these models are helpful in designing policy, but one has to test the models against possibly confounding data. That is harder, more tedious and expensive, and often not done.
Worse yet is the notion on the right that scientists are simply lying to promote a Progressive agenda. Or the left's version of "believe the science" where science is in fact not supposed to be "believed" or watered-down, but rigorously tested and proved. Although I am a geochemist and climate change is not my expertise, for the Right to dismiss even the bulletproof underpinnings of climate science, such as the obvious connection between adding Tyndall gases to the atmosphere and the atmosphere's better ability to trap heat, is downright scary. One can accept good science while admitting its uncertainties. One can still argue what the best policies would be and that is harder than simple assertions. Not only are there climate model uncertainties but also economic model uncertainties that sit on top of them. None of this can be thoughtfully used to guide government or private sector action if people don't trust each other to be offering their best thinking and not their best spin. In that sense, I think honesty rather than "strategic dishonesty" is absolutely required.
TV writers are the stupidest. loudest, and most arrogant left wing group
I honestly thought BLM protests were going to be superspreader events and everyone who attended would die. We were told it was unsafe to be within six feet of each other, even outdoors!
The problem is that we were using a concept like “safe” that is binary, rather than one that varies continuously.
Right, but being outdoors in crowds was incredibly safe.
During the daytime right as the UV destroyed the virus?
I don't think so, but it's been a while since I checked the causes. The were nighttime BLM rallies as well. I think it was just a lot safer to be near people outdoors than they said it was.
I wonder how much of this can be attributed to a two party system. Seems like as long as the political structure incentivizes two parties, most sorts of polarization seem to be getting worse - education, gender, political. The one exception could be racial polarization, but only because it was already so polarized to begin with.
EDIT: two party system + living in an age w/ mass media/interent
There have been decades where Republicans and Democrats had large areas of ideological overlap. So it's not two parties per se.
Yes but not really anymore. Ideological sorting has rapidly occurred over the last couple decades. You rarely see conservative democrats or liberal republicans now.
But that suggests that the two party system is not the issue, because the two party system used to coexist with non-polarized politics.
That's true. I guess I should probably amend my statement to a two party system + living with the internet / mass media. When politics was more local, then yes I agree a two party system can coexist with non polarized politics. But when information travels so quickly and politics becomes so nationalized, then I'm not sure that it's feasible.
“one crazy party and one party of credulous conformists” in the final paragraph. Nailed it!
My big worry is that the Republicans will stay stupid even after Trump is gone, because the cranks are so firmly in control that experts can’t get a word in without getting shouted down. If the next Republican nominee for president is someone with a more conventional political resume than Trump but equally dumb, we’ll be at grave risk of extremely bad policy.
Macroeconomic arson - destroying the independence of the Federal Reserve and running whatever deficits they feel like until inflation explodes and wrecks the economy - is now a serious possibility for our future in a way it never was before. So are mass deportation sweeps and other kinds of things that sound good to people who know nothing but are destructive in reality. Or, in the worst case scenario, the end of the American Republic and its replacement with a dictatorship.
Much debate here about how the Dems have their own conspiracies and cranks, and how "intersectional" worldviews are conspiratorial. Can I make a suggestion?
1. Some people are cranks by disposition and will seek out conspiracy theories. These people have mostly sorted into being Republicans.
2. Any group can be convinced to believe in crankery if it has deranged enough institutions and media. Ideological monoculture and the rise of social media have done some of that for the Democrats, but it's less fertile soil for conspiracism and it doesn't grow as well.
Depolarization and the end of the engagement business model would make for less conspiracy thinking overall, not just redistribute it.
This piece felt good, but I think it's a bit too glib for its own good. There's a reason why the "cranks" are experiencing new levels of salience -- the elite class has engaged in such bubble thinking that they're making some significant errors that in turn fuel legitimate gripes that power -- and empower -- the cranks.
The cranks will go back to the edges of society, reading their National Enquirers and posting harmlessly on their Facebook feeds, when the elites gain some friggin' discipline:
- Stop conflating "the science" with "the solution" (science doesn't wade in solutions);
- Stop advancing well-meaning ideology as indisputable truths;
- And stand down on the impulse to silence speech that they find "dangerous."
The problem today is that the cranks actually have a lot of reason to be cranky, and it's due to the 'trusted class of experts' losing a lot of trust across broad swaths of citizenry.
I’m curious about whether the Green Party draws a significant number of left wing cranks from the Democratic Party.
There iisnt really a right wing version of the Green Party. Some of the state libertarian parties are full of cranks but most aren’t. Plus they’re not right wing on a lot of stuff