Category: Political Science
*The Master of Contradictions*
The author is Morten Jensen, and the subtitle is Thomans Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain. An excellent introduction to Mann’s tome, and it many fine discussions. Here is one excerpt:
It becomes possible, then, to read The Magic Mountain as a novel partly about the limits and failures of the more positivistic strain of nineteenth-century liberalism — a triumphalist worldview that failed to recognize or halt Europe’s drift toward nationalism, reaction, and the industrial carnage of the First World War. Settembrini, the noveläs representative of this worldview, shares its myriad flaws, beliving, for instance, that self-perfection is the ultimate goal of humankind. And like so many nineteenth-century liberal utopians, he celebrates technology as “the most dependable means by which to bring nations closer together, furthering their knowledge of one another, paving the way for people-to-people exchanges, destroying prejudices, and leading at last to the universal brotherhood of nations.
…More than just a vessel for a philosophical point of view, however, Settembrini is, or becomes, one of The Magic Mountain’s most endearing characters. One cannot help but smile a little — half with affection, half with pity — whenever he enters the stage. It’s one of the novel’s great distinctions that its central characters are never merely reducible to the philosophical worldview they represent; Settembrini, even when Mann is at his most sarcastic, is always first and foremost Settembrini, as if Mann were gradually convinced by his fictional creation as a dynamic individual rather than a static representation.
Recommended.
My Conversation with the excellent Jonny Steinberg
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler considers Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage one of the best books of the last decade, and its author Jonny Steinberg one of the most underrated writers and thinkers—in North America, at least. Steinberg’s particular genius lies in getting uncomfortably close to difficult truths through immersive research—spending 350 hours in police ride-alongs, years studying prison gangs and their century-old oral histories, following a Somali refugee’s journey across East Africa—and then rendering what he finds with a novelist’s emotional insight.
Tyler and Jonny discuss why South African police only feel comfortable responding to domestic violence calls, how to fix policing, the ghettoization of crime, how prison gangs regulate behavior through century-old rituals, how apartheid led to mass incarceration and how it manifested in prisons, why Nelson Mandela never really knew his wife Winnie and the many masks they each wore, what went wrong with the ANC, why the judiciary maintained its independence but not its quality, whether Tyler should buy land in Durban, the art scene in Johannesburg, how COVID gave statism a new lease on life, why the best South African novels may still be ahead, his forthcoming biography of Cecil Rhodes, why English families weren’t foolish to move to Rhodesia in the 1920s, where to take an ideal two-week trip around South Africa, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: My favorite book of yours again is Winnie and Nelson, which has won a number of awards. A few questions about that. So, they’re this very charismatic couple. Obviously, they become world-historical famous. For how long were they even together as a pair?
STEINBERG: Very, very briefly. They met in early 1957. They married in ’58. By 1960, Mandela was no longer living at home. He was underground. He was on the run. By 1962, he was in prison. So, they were really only living together under the same roof for two years.
COWEN: And how well do you feel they knew each other?
STEINBERG: Well, that’s an interesting question because Nelson Mandela was very, very in love with his wife, very besotted with his wife. He was 38, she was 20 when they met. She was beautiful. He was a notorious philanderer. He was married with three children when they met. He really was besotted with her. I don’t think that he ever truly came to know her. And when he was in prison, you can see it in his letters. It’s quite remarkable to watch. She more and more becomes the center of meaning in his life, his sense of foundation, his sense of self as everything else is falling away.
And he begins to love her more and more, and even to coronate her more and more so that she doesn’t forget him. His letters grow more romantic, more intense, more emotional. But the person he’s so deeply in love with is really a fiction. She’s living a life on the outside. And you see this very troubling line between fantasy and reality. A man becoming deeply, deeply involved with a woman who is more and more a figment of his imagination.
COWEN: Do you think you learned anything about marriage more generally from writing this book?
STEINBERG: [laughs] One of the sets of documents that I came across in writing the book were the transcripts of their meetings in the last 10 years of his imprisonment. The authorities bugged all of his meetings. They knew they were being bugged, but nonetheless, they were very, very candid with each other. And you very unusually see a marriage in real time and what people are saying to each other. And when I read those lines, 10 different marriages that I know passed through my head: the bickering, the lying, the nasty things that people do to one another, the cruelties. It all seemed very familiar.
COWEN: How is it you think she managed his career from a distance, so to speak?
STEINBERG: Well, she was a really interesting woman. She arrived in Johannesburg, 20 years old in the 1950s, where there was no reason to expect a woman to want a place in public life, particularly not in the prime of public life. And she was absolutely convinced that there was no position she should not occupy because she was a woman. She wanted a place in politics; she wanted to exercise power. But she understood intuitively that in that time and place, the way to do that was through a man. And she went after the most powerful rising political activists available.
I don’t think it was quite as cynical as that. She loved him, but she absolutely wanted to exercise power, and that was a way to do it. Once she became Mrs. Mandela, I think she had an enormously aristocratic sense of politics and of entitlement and legitimacy. She understood herself to be South Africa’s leader by virtue of being married to him, and understood his and her reputations as her projects to endeavor to keep going. And she did so brilliantly. She was unbelievably savvy. She understood the power of image like nobody else did, and at times saved them both from oblivion.
COWEN: This is maybe a delicate question, but from a number of things I read, including your book, I get the impression that Winnie’s just flat out a bad person…
Interesting throughout, this is one of my favorite CWT episodes, noting it does have a South Africa focus.
The Game Theory of House of Dynamite
In the comments to yesterday’s review of House of Dynamite, some people balked at the movie’s central premise: that the U.S. has to decide—immediately—whether to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike. “Why not wait?” they asked. “Why not take a few days, even a few months, to figure out who actually fired the missile?”
That question even came up at GMU lunch, so it’s worth explaining why the time pressure is realistic. No real spoilers.
The U.S. doesn’t know whether the missile came from China, Russia, or North Korea and that seems to weigh in favor of waiting and gathering evidence. But here’s the problem: Russia, China, and North Korea don’t know what the U.S. knows. Suppose Russia thinks the U.S. believes Russia launched the strike. Then Russia expects retaliation. Expecting retaliation makes it rational for Russia to attack first. So Russia mobilizes.
The mobilization convinces the U.S. that Russia is preparing to attack—so now it’s rational for the U.S. to strike first. Which, of course, confirms Russia’s fears and pushes them closer to launching.
Even if the U.S. doesn’t actually think Russia fired the missile, it might still attack. Why? Because it believes that Russia believes the U.S. believes Russia did.
In this belief spiral, delay brings doom not clarity. In the film, Jake Baerington tries to break the doom loop but the logic is strong and amplified by speed and fear. Breaking the loop isn’t impossible, but as the movie suggests, it requires an act that cuts against immediate self-interest.
The evolution of Albanian AI governance
Albania’s AI-generated minister, Diella, is “pregnant,” Prime Minister Edi Rama has announced. He revealed plans to create “83 children”, or assistants, one for each Socialist Party member of parliament.
“We took quite a risk today with Diella here and we did very well. So for the first time Diella is pregnant and with 83 children,” he said at the Global Dialogue (BGD) in Berlin. Rama said the “children,” or assistants, will record everything that happens in parliament and keep legislators informed about discussions or events they miss.
“Each one…will serve as an assistant for them who will participate in parliamentary sessions, and will keep a record of everything that happens and will suggest members of parliament. These children will have the knowledge of their mother,” Rama said.
Here is the full story, bizarre throughout. At least you cannot say they are anti-natalist.
What should I ask Dan Wang?
Yes, I will be doing a podcast with him. Dan first became famous on the internet with his excellent Christmas letters. More recently, Dan is the author of the NYT bestselling book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
Here is Dan Wang on Wikipedia, here is Dan on Twitter. I have known him for some while. So what should I ask him?
Words of wisdom
Among these changes, the most underrated is not misinformation or kooky conspiracy theories or even populism per se — it’s relentless negativity. One thing that we’ve learned from revealed preferences on the internet is that negativity-inflected stories perform better…
The impact of ultra-negativity is symmetrical in the sense that both sides do it, but it’s asymmetrical in the sense that conservatives outnumber progressives. In practice, oscillating extremism results in a right-wing authoritarian regime, not a left-wing one.
That is from the gated Matt Yglesias. The important thing is to keep a positive, constructive attitude toward what is possible. Content creators who do not do that, no matter what their professed views, are supporting the darker sides of MAGA.
So keep up the good work people!
What matters for central banks?
This study examines the drivers of inflation levels, inflation variability, and growth variability collectively representing long-term central bank performance across 37 advanced economies in the Great Moderation era. A key finding is that central bank performance is consistently linked to the overall quality of institutions, while central bank-specific factors such as independence, exchange rate regimes, or inflation targeting show no significant impact. The analysis is extended to the 2022 inflation resurgence, using pre-2022 country characteristics. The results indicate that reliance on imports from Russia (likely gas) and its interaction with post-COVID GDP growth are the primary determinants, suggesting that the inflation surge was not a reversal of the Great Moderation.
That is from a new research paper by Livio Stracca.
Black Veterans and Civil Rights After World War I
Nearly 400,000 Black men were drafted into the National Army during World War I, where they toiled primarily as menial laborers in segregated units. Leveraging novel variation from the WWI draft lottery and millions of digitized military and NAACP records, we document the pioneering role these men played in the early civil rights movement. Relative to observably similar individuals from the same draft board, Black men randomly inducted into the Army were significantly more likely to join the nascent NAACP and to become prominent community leaders in the New Negro era. We find little evidence that these effects are explained by migration or improved socioeconomic status. Rather, corroborating historical accounts about the catalyzing influence of institutional racism in the military, we show that increased civic activism was driven by soldiers who experienced the most discriminatory treatment while serving their country.
That is from Desmond Ang and Sahil Chinoy, newly accepted into the QJE. Are we so sure the postulated mechanism is the correct interpretation for the results here? Being in the military can have other intellectual influences too. Via Alexander Berger.
Who exactly is rigid again?
In an adversarial collaboration, two preregistered U.S.-based studies (total N = 6181) tested three hypotheses regarding the relationship between political ideology and belief rigidity (operationalized as less evidence-based belief updating): rigidity-of-the-right, symmetry, and rigidity-of-extremes. Across both studies, general and social conservatism were weakly associated with rigidity (|b| ~ .05), and conservatives were more rigid than liberals (Cohen’s d ~ .05). Rigidity generally had null associations with economic conservatism, as well as social and economic political attitudes. Moreover, general extremism (but neither social nor economic extremism) predicted rigidity in Study 1, and all three extremism measures predicted rigidity in Study 2 (average |bs| ~ .07). Extreme rightists were more rigid than extreme leftists in 60% of the significant quadratic relationships. Given these very small and semi-consistent effects, broad claims about strong associations between ideology and belief updating are likely unwarranted. Rather, psychologists should turn their focus to examining the contexts where ideology strongly correlates with rigidity.
That is from a new piece by Shauna M. Bowes, Cory J. Clark, Lucian Gideon Conway III, Thomas Costello, Danny Osborne, Philip E. Tetlock, and Jan-Willem van Prooijen. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
On politics and gender
I also had other opportunities to meet with conservatives in DC. With a foot in both worlds, I noticed certain social differences that stood out to me. They center mainly around the ways in which individuals perform gender and are worth reflecting on.
When I talk about differences between conservatives and liberals here, I’m talking about people in politics who hang out in Washington. They may work as campaign managers or speech writers, or have jobs in think tanks, journalism, government, or sometimes academia. The following analysis doesn’t apply to San Francisco rationalists, or Brooklyn Hipsters, or rural church folk in Kentucky. And this doesn’t even apply to all conservatives and liberals in politics, but the ones I happened to spend some time with. So the scope of this analysis is limited, but readers will recognize some of what I’m talking about in other contexts.
The women at Abundance dress business casual. I don’t have the eye for these things to be Vanessa Friedman, so I can’t give a sophisticated analysis of what people wear, but the main difference is the degree to which dress accentuates secondary sexual characteristics. Among the MAGA crowd, cleavage lines are lower and skirts higher, with pants all but unthinkable. There is more makeup and the hair is longer. None of the women wear glasses; among liberals they all have very fancy frames. You don’t have to meet many conservatives or liberals to know this. Roger Ailes famously banned female talent on Fox from wearing pants until 2017. He also of course ended up being brought down for using the workplace as a harem, which he probably would not have been able to do running MSNBC.
In terms of behavior, left-wing women discuss their personal lives or ideas. If they flirt, it’s very subtle. Eye contact that lasts too long, a conversation that continues past the point at least one participant would have ended it under normal conditions, standing unusually close to the other party or looking for an innocent seeming pretext to see one another again. Conservative women, in contrast, flirt as their default style in loud, high-pitched voices. “Oh, you didn’t TEXT ME BACK, I’m so sad!!!” “Would you say I’m Low Human Capital? he he he he.” Of course, any particular signal shouldn’t be taken too seriously as an indicator of interest since they are like this with a lot of men.
You shake hands as a default when meeting liberal women, while with conservatives it would be strange to shake their hand instead of giving them a hug, which they will usually initiate. Liberals bring the norms of HR into social life. Anything too forward or that can be interpreted as showing sexual interest is potentially perilous. Meanwhile, with conservative women, men have the option of coming on to them, and then brushing off the rejection if they are shut down.
While not engaging in ostentatious displays of femininity, liberal women will sometimes drop these hints that subtly remind you they are still women. She might have a pixie haircut and thick glasses on, but will find a way to mention that she likes baking or the color pink. I’ve noticed that liberal women like to discuss how their sons are more aggressive than their daughters, which is the opposite of what must go on in the imaginations of many conservatives who probably picture them all bragging about their children being trans. I think that this stuff is a way to create a little room for gender expression in an environment in which feminist norms and HR culture push towards androgyny.
That is all from Richard Hanania. I too have noticed the hugging point.
*Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000*
By Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr, and Guido Tabellini. Due out in November, likely to be excellent.
Reading Orwell in Moscow
In this paper, I measure the effect of conflict on the demand for frames of reference, or heuristics that help individuals explain their social and political environment by means of analogy. To do so, I examine how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 reshaped readership of history and social science books in Russia. Combining roughly 4,000 book abstracts retrieved from the online catalogue of Russia’s largest bookstore chain with data on monthly reading patterns of more than 100,000 users of the most popular Russian-language social reading platform, I find that the invasion prompted an abrupt and substantial increase in readership of books that engage with the experience of life under dictatorship and acquiescence to dictatorial crimes, with a predominant focus on Nazi Germany. I interpret my results as evidence that history books, by offering regime-critical frames of reference, may serve as an outlet for expressing dissent in a repressive authoritarian regime.
That is from a job market paper by Natalia Vasilenok, political science at Stanford. Via.
A simple metric for choosing immigrants for America
I often hear the following standards suggested:
1. Use willingness to pay for entry.
2. Take people from high IQ countries.
3. Take people from high trust countries.
4. Take people from similar countries, which I suppose means Canada and Australia?
5. Take people with graduate degrees.
I will not evaluate those one-by-one, only to note they are not the very worst standards you might apply. Instead, I have a new idea, which consists of two parts. Apply strict (but not low “n”) standards for admission and then:
6. Take people from populous countries with high cognitive variance, and
7. All other things equal, prefer people from very distant countries.
That in essence suggests taking in people from China, India, and Russia, which are indeed countries with high cognitive variance. And today that is quite possibly the right thing to do. You will note that none of those countries count as especially high trust, and India at least has very mixed IQ readings, I am not sure about Russia given the rural idiocy there.
To understand that standard in more general terms, #6 gets you geniuses and the extremely ambitious. They are the ones who can fight through your immigration thicket, and will be motivated to do so. And because they are coming from screwed up countries, many of them will be quite keen to leave. They also will be used to fighting very hard to get ahead, more so than a lot of the graduate students who might come from Sweden.
#7 recognizes that a lot of people from nearby countries will come simply because it is convenient. And because of “the gravity equation.” So you should discriminate against them somewhat. Note that because borders are somewhat porous, you are going to get a lot of them anyway. That is OK, but you can then penalize them a bit in the standards process, in essence to get the same net “tax” on entry. And because their home countries are nearby, they might be a little slower to assimilate.
To be clear this is a recipe for America in 2025. A lot of other countries might do better opting for the boring Macedonian dentist, because they will not get top talent anyway. Or America in 1770, when building out a core population, might have done well with what was in essence a version of #3, with a bit of #2 and #4. Which is more or less what we did, though not by conscious design (borders were open).
Worth a ponder. These questions are underdiscussed. I am not sure this proposal is the best idea, but it occurred to me it never has been presented before.
My excellent Conversation with David Commins
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf are the topics, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
David Commins, author of the new book Saudi Arabia: A Modern History, brings decades of scholarship and firsthand experience to explain the kingdom’s unlikely rise. Tyler and David discuss why Wahhabism was essential for Saudi state-building, the treatment of Shiites in the Eastern Province and whether discrimination has truly ended, why the Saudi state emerged from its poorer and least cosmopolitan regions, the lasting significance of the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure by millenarian extremists, what’s kept Gulf states stable, the differing motivations behind Saudi sports investments, the disappointing performance of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology despite its $10 billion endowment, the main barrier to improving its k-12 education, how Yemen became the region’s outlier of instability and whether Saudi Arabia learned from its mistakes there, the Houthis’ unclear strategic goals, the prospects for the kingdom’s post-oil future, the topic of David’s next book, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Now, as you know, the senior religious establishment is largely Nejd, right? Why does that matter? What’s the historical significance of that?
COMMINS: Right. Nejd is the region of central Arabia. Riyadh is currently the capital. The first Saudi empire had a capital nearby, called Diriyah. Nejd is really the territory that gave birth to the Wahhabi movement, it’s the homeland of the Saud dynasty, and it is the region of Arabia that was most thoroughly purged of the older Sunni tradition that had persisted in Nejd for centuries.
Consequently, by the time that the Saudi government developed bureaucratic agencies in the 1950s and ’60s, the religious institution was going to recruit from that region of Arabia primarily. Now, it certainly attracted loyalists from other parts of Arabia, but the Wahhabi mission, as I call it — their calling to what they considered true belief — began in Nejd and was very strongly identified with the towns of Nejd ever since the late 1700s.
COWEN: Would I be correct in inferring that some of the least cosmopolitan parts of Saudi Arabia built the Saudi state?
COMMINS: Yes, that is correct. That is correct. If you think of the 1700s and 1800s, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf coast of Arabia were the most cosmopolitan parts of Arabia.
COWEN: They’re richer, too, right? Jeddah is a much more advanced city than Riyadh at the time.
COMMINS: Somewhat more advanced. Yes, it is more advanced, it is more cosmopolitan than Nejd. There is the regional identity in Hejaz, that is the Red Sea coast where the holy cities and Jeddah are located. The townspeople there tended to look upon Nejd as a less advanced part of Arabia. But again, that’s a very recent historical development.
COWEN: How is it that the coastal regions just dropped the ball? You could imagine some alternate history where they become the center of Saudi power and religious thought, but they’re not.
COMMINS: Right. If you take Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina — that region of Arabia, known as Hejaz, had always been under the rule of other Muslim empires. They were under the rule of other Muslim powers because of the religious value of possessing, if you will, the holy cities, Mecca and Medina. From the time of the first Muslim dynasty that was based in Damascus in the seventh and early eighth centuries, all the way until the Ottoman Empire, Muslim dynasties outside Arabia coveted control of that region. They were just more powerful than local resources could generate.
Hejaz was always, if you were, to dependency on outside Muslim powers. If you look at the east coast of Arabia — what’s now the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf — it was richer than central Arabia. It’s the largest oasis in Arabia. It is in proximity to pearling banks, which were an important source for income for residents there. It was part of the Indian Ocean trade between Iraq and India. The population there was always — well, always — for the last thousand years has been dominated by Bedouin tribesmen.
There was a brief Ismaili Shia republic, you might say, in that part of Arabia in medieval times. It just didn’t have, it seems, the cohesion to conquer other parts of Arabia. That’s what makes the Saudi story really remarkable, is that they were able to muster and sustain the cohesion to carry out a conquest like that over the course of 50 years.
COWEN: Physically, how did they manage that? Water is a problem, a lot of transport is by camel, there’s no real rail system, right?
Recommended, full of historical information about a generally neglected region, neglected from the point of view of history at least rather than current affairs.
“Vote now for the 2025 AEA election”
I have now received this email for the seventh (?) time:
If you have not already done so, I encourage you to take a few moments to cast your vote in the AEA 2025 Election. Paper ballots will not be mailed this year. Voting will be closed at 11:59 pm EDT, September 30, 2025. To access your official ballot and candidate biographical information, please click on the following personalized link…
Janice C. Eberly is the only candidate running for AEA president, and I have no idea what she stands for. (In fairness to the AEA, there is some choice for the vice-presidents, you can pick two out of four). Here is her statement of purpose:
Statement of Purpose: Economics brings powerful tools to understand and analyze issues in social science. To live up to that promise, we need to attract and retain talent, develop data and analytics, and engage students. The AEA mission to advance the field is dynamic and challenging. As economists, we rely on collaborators, students, researchers, and a host of academic, public and private resources. In a changing field, the AEA needs to be correspondingly resilient. We can apply our tools to evaluate our progress and experiment with new initiatives. As president-elect, I would focus particularly on data access and opportunities for young scholars, plus attention to emerging issues. Economics cannot thrive without growing young scholars – who are often the first to experience new challenges. The AEA consistently supports data innovation through its committees and journals and continues to advise public and private data resources.
I do not disagree, but where does she stand on the possibly contentious issues? How about a platform of turning over all AEA intellectual property, including published papers and referee reports, to the major AI companies to aid in the purpose of producing truly great economics AI models? That is what I favor, does she? It would be nice to use elections to settle matters of substance, that is what they are for, right?