Category: Political Science
*China’s World View: Demystifying China to Prevent Global Conflict*
That is a forthcoming book by David Daokiu Li. Perhaps it is the very best book explaining “how China works today?”
“What should I read on China? Which single book?” — those are two of the most common questions I receive. There are plenty of perfectly fine history books, but I am never sure what I should recommend. Now I have an answer to that question. Here is one short excerpt from the text:
Many people in China are concerned with the side effects of the massive anticorruption campaign. The first side effect is that government officials, especially those dealing with economic affairs, have now become inert. The reason is that active officials almost surely create enemies or grumbling groups, such as through the demolition of an old building to make room for new investments. These groups would bring their cases, and perhaps even historical cases, to the party discipline committee. On their path to promotion and their current positions, most officials have either intentionally or unintentionally engaged in practices that are not in compliance with today’s tighter government rules. In the Chinese reform process, laws and regulations are gradually implemented and then tightened. The anticorruption campaign is using today’s tighter regulations to judge the past conduct of officials, which occurred when the rules were either looser or entirely unclear. As a result, officials today are extremely hesitant to take any action that would make them stand out or draw extra attention, even if those actions are in the best interests of the locale or department they serve.
The author covers much more, including the importance of history, how the CCP works, local governments, SOEs, education, media and the internet, the environment, population, and much more.
There should be a book like this about every country.
I should note that the author lives in Beijing, so he soft pedals some of the more negative interpretations of the data, but ultimately I think this is much more fruitful than the books by journalist outsiders. The analysis is here, and you can do the moralizing on your own, if that is how you want it.
Definitely recommended, a very real contribution.
Response functions for Israeli-Palestine conflict
A VAR is a clever way to model whether the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is tit-for-tat.
Here is much more by Cremiaux, with some simple statistics, controversial obviously. Via N.A.
That was then, this is now, Maori fashion edition
The outfit is distinctly Victorian. A high, vintage lace collar with ruffles cascades over the lapel of a black tailcoat. But it is not meant to be a throwback.
For Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, the co-leader of Te Pati Maori, a New Zealand political party, it is a reclamation of the era when her ancestors first engaged with the British, who began colonizing New Zealand in the early 1800s. She has worn this attire, plus a top hat, in Parliament.
“When you want to get a message out fast, fashion is a way to do it,” she said.
Here is the full NYT story. Here are further NZ fashion pictures. I told you the new world was going to be strange…
Some observations on universities and recent outrages
1. I feel stupid and unnecessary simply piling on with the usual observations and criticisms. Nonetheless they are mostly deserved, for a varying mix of administrators, faculty, and students.
2. The real black-pill is to realize that the structural equilibria behind the outrages also play a role in more usual affairs. Ultimately these cannot be entirely “segregated” incidents. Through invisible hand mechanisms, there is too much bias and too much groupthink conformity, even in the evaluation of ordinary scientific propositions.
3. This is true for the economics profession as well, though few will tell you this. They won’t tell you because they are the ones doing it, though often unintentionally or with genuine motives. They are laying bricks in the edifice of intellectual conformity, if only through what they do not talk about.
3b. I don’t think GMU economics differs in kind here, so politically speaking the situation is symmetric with respect to bias. Nonetheless mainstream policy views are far more prevalent than GMU-type policy views, so the actual net bias in practice is very much in the [fill in the blank ] direction. (What should I call it? The “Democratic Party direction”? That doesn’t seem quite right, but it is the closest descriptor I have found. Perhaps “the Democratic Party direction but passed through some intellectualizing filters”?) If you really think there are enough checks and balances in place to prevent this bias and conformity and lack of self-awareness from arising, I hope the recent outrages have black-pilled you just a bit.
4. Those who perform the outrageous acts of commission or omission are not usually evil people, just as most Irish-American IRA supporters in America were not evil people. Very often their failings stem from a mix of narcissism, mood affiliation, and fail to think through their professed views (perhaps they are indeed evil from a Randian point of view?). They frame political issues in personal, emotional terms, namely which values ought to be elevated (e.g., “sympathy for victimhood”), and that framing determines their response to daily events. Since their views on the personal and emotional side are held so strongly, it simply feels to them that they are right, even when they are glorifying groups and cultures that currently are failing badly and also performing some very bad and evil acts. They get caught up in such glorifications, including through the medium of apologetics, and through the other twists and turns they need to make to sustain their intellectual positions, even if they are not fundamentally malevolent as human beings.
I think about twenty percent of “the outrageous ones in academia” genuinely have evil, malevolent views, the rest are victims of their narcissistic mood affiliation.
4b. Keep in mind the eighty percent often have a deeper sense than you do of the humanity and vividness of the groups and cultures that currently are failing badly. That makes them all the more convinced that they are right and you are wrong. They can indeed feel that you do not “know what is going on.” In the meantime, you should try to acquire that deeper sense. As it stands, there is a pretty good chance you don’t have it, and that means you are deficient too. That is your own brand of narcissistic mood affiliation.
5. If you hear someone proclaiming a strong distinction between their “scientific views” and their “personal views,” usually they are in effect saying they don’t want their underlying “actual views on net” much challenged. It is fine to proclaim agnosticism about areas you don’t do research in, but then you should actually be agnostic about the areas you don’t do research in. I have never met such a person. Unwillingness to recognize these bad practices is a fundamental problem in academic economics discourse today. It cloaks so many of the current vices under the ostensible mantle of science.
6. The current backlash against academia is likely to remove or dampen the most egregious commissions and omissions on display, as we recently have been witnessing them, but without improving the underlying incentive structure more generally. Academics will more likely put on a better face, but without much reducing their biases on net. It might end up that such biases become more invisible and harder to detect and root out.
Have a nice day!
What should I ask John Gray?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is from Wikipedia:
John Nicholas Gray (born 17 April 1948) is an English political philosopher and author with interests in analytic philosophy, the history of ideas, and philosophical pessimism. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer. He is an atheist.
Gray has written several influential books, including False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), which argues that free market globalization is an unstable Enlightenment project currently in the process of disintegration; Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002), which attacks philosophical humanism, a worldview which Gray sees as originating in religions; and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), a critique of utopian thinking in the modern world.
John has a new book coming out The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. So what should I ask him?
Israel’s previous game-theoretic strategy?
Israel’s asymmetric response is supposed to serve a deterrent purpose, Byman told Vox, but the country has also, at least in the past, had a vested interest in keeping Hamas in power. According to a 2017 research brief by the RAND corporation, Israel has the military capability to wipe out Hamas, but doing so could perhaps be even riskier than not, given that an even more extreme organization could come into power — or that Israel could be put into the position of governing the territory itself. “As such, Israel’s grand strategy became ‘mowing the grass’ — accepting its inability to permanently solve the problem and instead repeatedly targeting leadership of Palestinian militant organizations to keep violence manageable.”
“We want to break their bones without putting them in the hospital,” one Israeli defense analyst told the research brief’s authors.
Here is more from Ellen Ioanes. Viewed through this lens, it is far from obvious what is the new equilibrium…? And here is some background context from the still-underrated Thomas Friedman.
*The Genius of Israel*
That is the new book by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. The authors argue that Israel has higher solidarity and also higher social capital than recent media reports might indicate. They are thus optimistic about the country, and the subtitle is The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Natoin in a Turbulent World.
I do not go to Israel enough to have a strong opinion on this, but their thesis is consistent with my casual observation, and also with my intuition about negative bias in media. The book comes out November 7.
That was then, this is now (median voter edition)
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said this week that the Biden administration planned to waive 26 environmental, public health and cultural preservation laws in order to fast-track constructing sections of the border wall in South Texas.
…The administration would use funds from a 2019 appropriation designated by Congress to construct the wall, which was spurred by a disaster declaration by the Trump administration…
“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States.”
Here is the full story, via Rich Dewey. And note that an actual jaguar is crossing the border.
My Conversation with Ada Palmer
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Ada Palmer is a Renaissance historian at the University of Chicago who studies radical free thought and censorship, composes music, consults on anime and manga, and is the author of the acclaimed Terra Ignota sci-fi series, among many other things.
Tyler sat down with Ada to discuss why living in the Renaissance was worse than living during the Middle Ages, how art protected Florence, why she’s reluctant to travel back in time, which method of doing history is currently the most underrated, whose biography she’ll write, how we know what old Norse music was like, why women scholars helped us understand Viking metaphysics, why Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist is an interesting work, what people misunderstand about the inquisition(s), why science fiction doesn’t have higher social and literary status, which hive she would belong to in Terra Ignota, what the new novel she’s writing is about, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: De Sade — where does that come from? What are the influences on de Sade as a writer?
PALMER: Thomas Aquinas. No, lots and lots of things, but he’s very interested in the large philosophical milieu in the period. Remember that the 18th century is a moment when the clandestine bookshop is a major, major thing. And if anyone enjoys and is interested in the history of censorship and clandestine publishing, I can’t recommend enough the work of Robert Darnton, a brilliant, brilliant historian of clandestine literature.
But the same underground bookshops sell all underground materials, which means an underground bookshop sells pornography, and it also sells Voltaire and Rousseau, and it also sells diatribes criticizing the king, and it also sells radical Jansenist theological pamphlets about whether the Holy Spirit derives from the Father and Son equally or from the Father alone.
The same kinds of people frequent these shops, and the same kinds of people buy things. So, think about how, when you go into a Barnes & Noble, the science fiction and fantasy section is one section, even though science fiction and fantasy are different things. But they have a lot of overlap, both in the overlap of readership and in overlap in books that have both science fiction and fantasy elements. It was perfectly natural, in the same way, for clandestine bookshops to generate these works that are pornography and radical philosophy at the same time. They’re printed by the same printers, sold to the same audiences, and circulate in the same places.
De Sade uses his extreme pornography to get at questions of morality, ethics, and artificiality. What are the ethics of hurting each other? Why do we feel that way about hurting each other? What are so-called natural impulses, as John Locke and Hobbes were very dominant at the time, or Descartes, who is differently dominant at the time in rivalry with them? They make claims about the natural human impulses or the natural character of a human being. What does extreme sexuality show us about how that character might be broader than it is?
I mean it when I say Thomas Aquinas, right? One of Thomas Aquinas’s traditional proofs of the existence of God is that everything he sees around him in nature — this also is one that Aristotle uses, but Aquinas articulates it in the most famous way for de Sade’s period — that when we look around us, it’s clear that everything is designed to work.
Interesting throughout.
Will misinformation be an electoral problem?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
…consider the story that former President Barack Obama was not born in the US. It did not take off because someone forged a copy of an Indonesian birth certificate. Instead, many people approached the issue wanting to believe that Obama was not “a real American,” some dangerous tidbits were thrown their way, and off they went. The release of Obama’s US birth certificate did not convince them they were wrong.
Lies, misunderstandings, instances of self-deception: They have long been in excess supply. Blame China, Russia, social media, regular media, whomever. A potentially gullible person is already flooded with more lies in a single day than he or she can possibly evaluate.
A greater number of falsehoods just won’t matter that much — because the scarce resources are attention and focality on the demand side. How much is someone looking to believe they have been wronged? How much do they resent “the establishment”? What kinds of grudges do they hold, and against whom or what? And how well can they coordinate with others of like mind, thereby forming a kind of misinformation affinity group?
There is much more at the link.
From the comments, on OWS and PEPFAR
Why have economically declining regions turned toward right-wing parties?
That is the first sentence of their abstract, here is the rest:
To explain this puzzling phenomenon, we develop a theory linking internal migration, localized social institutions (e.g., family and friend networks), and voters’ preferences for social insurance. We start with the observation that social ties provide insurance against adverse life events, such as job loss, and highlight two implications. First, those with strong social networks prefer lower spending on social insurance, because they have access to informal insurance that acts as a substitute for public programs. Second, social ties discourage people from moving, even when better economic opportunities are available in other regions. Combining these mechanisms, we argue that the effect of economic shocks on a region’s politics depends on the strength of social ties. Regions with dense social ties have muted migratory responses to negative shocks relative to regions with weaker ties. Further, those who remain in declining regions are more conservative than those who migrate — resulting in an electorate with lower demand for social insurance. Macro-level analysis of American election results, import shocks, and migration data provide empirical support for the theory’s predictions. An original survey corroborates the micro-level mechanisms. The results have important implications for understanding right-wing populist support in economically declining regions in the U.S. and other post-industrial countries.
That is from a new paper by William Marble and Junghyun Lim.
Texas fact of the day, educational polarization issue
This is absolutely insane. TAMU was probably one of the most conservative flagship state universities in the nation https://t.co/z3yVLvoe7I
— constans (@constans) September 25, 2023
*Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy*
That is the new book by Costin Alamariu, who also has self-identified as the very famous BAP. It is a published version of his Yale doctoral dissertation on political theory. It has been selling very well.
It still comes across as a doctoral thesis, but I feel any reviewer should excuse the unusual modes of presentation. The doctoral thesis of BAP is going to come out, one way or the other, and better something than nothing.
I am more worried that the main claims are a mix of not true and also too bold. Take the opening sentence — “The sexual market is the pinnacle of every other market.”
In contrast, I find it odd how little of contemporary society revolves around sex and breeding, relative to what a reading of Darwin might predict. You might feel, a’la Hanson, that so many of our social proclivities evolved from initially sexual and mating impulses, but how autonomous they have become! People spend so much time not having sex. Fertility rates are plummeting, and that is at best a marginal political topic. Rich CEOs very often utterly fail to create the harems that some might be expecting. If there is a missing figure in this book it is Adam Smith and his TMS, who can explain so much of our social world with only minimal reference to sex.
Or take this sentence, again from early on: “Who wins in the sexual market as it is formed in a particular society, who gets to breed, is closely related, nearly identical to the question of how the next generation in that society is to be constituted.”
That seems obviously false. There is simply a massive influence through socialization, and much of that is quite separate from the roles people may or may not have as “breeders.” For the most talented, breeding in fact might be a highly inefficient way to influence the world’s broader future. Intermediary institutions are systematically missing from the narrative of this book, so already the stage is set for everything to be darker than it needs to be, and for nature to have a stronger role than it ought to.
In any case it is hard to stay on the track of this argument, as the book is sprawling and repeatedly starts over again with new building blocks. Perhaps the actual underlying belief here (see p.45) is that the Western intellectual class is boring and decrepit? (Compared to what? Has the author spent too much time at Yale? It never has been easier to learn real stuff.)
We are led down paths of Nietzsche, Strauss, decaying political regimes, Pindar, and the ancient Greek world. Frazer enters with the Golden Bough. What I like best in the author is his willingness to throw himself into these worlds with convincing abandon. What I like least is how little space is carved out for morality, or for the view that there is still plenty of progress in the world, and that there is a broadly common intersubjective judgment that some states of affairs are better than others. I long for the Masons, and chatter about Hiram the Master Builder — there is a reason why ancient Greek philosophy no longer fits our world. The simple truths of a suburban real estate developer, and the spouse and kids and dog back home, are swept under the rug.
The truly dark move would be to argue that nature must be violent, that man cannot remove himself from nature, and thus to flirt with the fascist view that violence amongst humans must be acceptable as well. And, in this take, all of our moralities are phony adjuncts to the desire to breed. But the exposition is somehow too winding and too replete with fresh turns for those issues to surface in a meaningful way. Maybe some would argue they emerge from the Straussian muck? I would have no objection to seeing them addressed directly, as surely the author at current margins is not afraid of additional cancellation.
Would more adherence to the hypothesis testing methods of the economist have done Alamariu some good?
I do agree with his view that Nietzsche was more sympathetic to Christianity than is usually realized. The expositions and interpretations of Nietzsche probably are the best part of the book.
By the end we are given a new conclusion: “The chief intention of this study has been to offer an explanation for why the ancient city perceived philosophers as dangerous and as associated with tyrants — to argue that there was something to the ancient prejudice that philosophy was associated with tyranny.” On that I can agree, but a simple libertarianism would have gotten us there more easily. Alamariu can’t quite bring himself to make this conclusion either an empirical claim (too little actual hard evidence), or a logical claim (too many other variables in the model), and so it continues to hover uncomfortably in between, being put on the table with lots of drama but never receiving actual validation.
There is definitely material of interest in here, but it remains a book of its time. Unfortunately, too much of our era has an emotionally negative predisposition toward too many things, including our current elites, and for reasons that are mimetic rather than justified, whether rationally or even by our impulses to breed.
BAP once wrote: “I will add only that Nietzsche says somewhere that it is the duty of a philosopher to promote precisely those virtues or tendencies of spirit that are most lacking in one’s own time…” For all its pretense to the contrary, that is exactly what this book does not achieve.
The Rise of and Demand for Identity-Oriented Media Coverage
While some assert that social identities have become more salient in American media coverage, existing evidence is largely anecdotal. An increased emphasis on social identities has important political implications, including for polarization and representation. We first document the rising salience of different social identities using NLP tools to analyze all tweets from 19 media outlets (2008-2021) alongside 553,078 URLs shared on Facebook. We then examine one potential mechanism: outlets may highlight meaningful social identities–race/ethnicity, gender, religion, or partisanship–to attract readers through various social and psychological pathways. We find that identity cues are associated with increases in some forms of engagement on social media. To probe causality, we analyze 3,828 randomized headline experiments conducted via Upworthy. Headlines mentioning racial/ethnic identities generated more engagement than headlines that did not, with suggestive evidence for other identities. Identity-oriented media coverage is growing and rooted partly in audience demand.
That is from a new and important paper by Daniel J. Hopkins, Yphtach Lelkes, and Samuel Wolken.
That is from Kevin.