Category: Political Science
Statement of Commitment to Academic Freedom and to Intellectual Merit
Academic freedom and intellectual merit are under attack in the United States, from both the left and the right. The norms of the university and intellectual life are fragile and need protecting because such norms are always in tension with political and economic power.
The undersigned members of the GMU Department of Economics express their commitment to academic freedom and to intellectual merit.
Addressed to the George Mason University (GMU) community and the public at large
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American universities have professed allegiance to two ideals. First, the ideal of academic freedom – the right of students and faculty to express any idea in speech or writing, without fear of university punishment, and secure in the knowledge that the university will protect dissenters from threats and violence on campus.
Second, the ideal of intellectual merit – the right and duty of academic departments to hire and promote the most brilliant, creative, and productive faculty in their fields, and admit the most intellectually promising students, without pressures from the administration.
These ideals are the cornerstones of liberal education. They protect faculty and students who hold views unpopular on university campuses. Academic freedom protects existing students and faculty who dissent from current dominant academic opinion and ideology. No matter how unpopular their views, they know the university will protect them. As stated in the University of Chicago Statement on freedom of expression and as quoted in GMU’s “Free Speech at Mason” Statement:
[We must hold a fundamental commitment to] the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.
Intellectual merit protects prospective students and faculty who speak and write against current dominant viewpoints. No matter how unpopular their views, they know that university administration will not obstruct or prejudice their admission, hiring, or promotion.
Recently, both of these ideals have come under attack. Pressure for conformity has intensified and universities have increasingly interfered with departments’ personnel decisions. For example, at some universities, one of the more egregious new practices is the requiring of written “diversity” statements by prospective students, staff, or faculty, then used to discriminate among candidates, often by quarters of the university with interests other than those of the department or unit. Such methods recall arrogations of the past, such as The Levering Act of 1950, used against radicals.
We strongly believe the attacks on academic freedom and intellectual merit are deeply mistaken. The classic rationales in favor of these ideals are sound. To protect them, viewpoint diversity must be celebrated and academic departments must maintain their ability to select, hire, and promote students and personnel based on intellectual merit. We insist that the degree of institutional autonomy that the GMU Department of Economics has traditionally enjoyed is vital to the health of viewpoint diversity not only within the university but within the academy writ large.
It is vital that every department in a university enjoys independence, so it can dare to be different and keep viewpoint diversity alive. George Mason University has excelled in supporting viewpoint diversity with a variety of diverse departments, centers and organizations. Viewpoint diversity at George Mason has benefited the university, the United States, and the wider intellectual world.
Indeed, some of the Department’s chief contributions have taught that all forms of authority can exert power to excess, and that guarding against such excess calls for the very ideals affirmed here, respect for dissent and intellectual merit.
We, the undersigned members of the GMU Department of Economics, look forward to continuing our independence to do good economics according to our judgment, guided by the ideals of academic freedom and intellectual merit.
Signed by the following GMU Department of Economics faculty (full-time & emeritus):
1. Jonathan P. Beauchamp
2. James T. Bennett
3. Donald J. Boudreaux
4. Bryan D. Caplan
5. Vincent J. Geloso
6. Timothy Groseclose
7. Robin D. Hanson
8. Garett Jones
9. Daniel B. Klein
10. Mark Koyama
11. David M. Levy
12. Cesar A. Martinelli
13. John V.C. Nye
14. Thomas C. Rustici
15. Vernon L. Smith
16. Alex Tabarrok
17. Karen I. Vaughn
18. Richard E. Wagner
19. Lawrence H. White
Matt Yglesias on depression and political ideology
The connection between Left thinking and high neuroticism (as a formal personality trait) is one of the most underdiscussed yet important themes in American politics (to be clear, the Right has its own pathologies as well). Here is one excerpt from Matt’s latest Substack (gated):
But I want to talk about something Goldberg mentions but doesn’t focus on: a 2021 paper by Catherine Gimbrone, Lisa Bates, Seth Prins, and Katherine Keyes titled “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs.” The CDC survey doesn’t ask teens about their political beliefs, but Gimbrone et. al. find not only divergence by gender, but divergence by political ideology. Breaking things down by gender and ideology, they find that liberal girls have the highest increase in depressive affect and conservative boys have the least. But liberal boys are more depressed than conservative girls, suggesting an important independent role for political ideology.
And:
Some of it might be selection effect, with progressive politics becoming a more congenial home for people who are miserable. But I think some of it is poor behavior by adult progressives, many of whom now valorize depressive affect as a sign of political commitment. The thing about depression, though, is that it’s bad.
And:
…progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophizing is a good way to get what they want…
One of the best and most important pieces you will read this year. I would go as far to say that you cannot understand the American public intellectual sphere without a grasp of the close connection between Left thinking and high neuroticism. I would add that incorporating gender expectations into Matt’s analysis would give it yet more explanatory power. Once you see all this, you can never look away again and forget it…
A view that hardly anyone embraces
It is not an airtight view, but it is also not the least plausible view. Imagine a “basic needs” argument that suggests, a’ la David Braybrooke, that individuals truly have positive rights to a certain degree of sustenance, health care, shelter, and so on. Yet above that basic needs level, individuals don’t have positive rights to much of anything at all. They are left to fend for themselves, though of course they will benefit from social cooperation. After all, positive rights have to stop somewhere if only because of the scarcity constraint. Furthermore, perhaps what society owes a person is “enough to construct a meaningful life,” but not so much more.
You may or may not agree, but as a view it is not crazy.
To make this more specific, imagine a health care policy that stated individuals have a true right to access any health care technology invented up through say…2004 or so. Individuals would be guaranteed “2004 value health care lives.” (In 2004 that certainly seemed pretty good.) But for subsequent health care developments, a free market will reign. Is not guaranteeing basic needs an essential part of the egalitarian argument? Surely not everything needs to be equalized? Anyway, no one believes in guaranteeing individuals protection against all the rare diseases out there, as that would cost too much. So a line will be drawn somewhere.
The very title of this post suggested these views are extremely unpopular. One reason might be their theoretical inadequacy. But surely another reason is that, at the margin, they suggest you just don’t have too much complaining you can do. You don’t have too much to say about social arrangements. You don’t have too many opportunities to express purely negative emotions about how things are.
And perhaps that is a big part of what people find intolerable.
What does that tell you about political views more generally?
*The Individualists*
The authors are Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, and the subtitle is Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism. Due out April 4, pre-order now, here is my blurb:
“Zwolinski and Tomasi have written the definitive book about libertarian ideas reaching up to the present day. They show that libertarianism remains a vital and fascinating source of ideological energy and influence.”
Recommended.
What should I ask Simon Johnson?
Other than “why don’t you have a better Wikipedia page?” Here is one excerpt:
Simon H. Johnson…is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management… From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, he was Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund. He is the author of the 2010 book 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown along with James Kwak, with whom he has also co-founded and regularly contributes to the economics blog The Baseline Scenario.
He has an extensive publication record, including in political economy, economic history, and economic growth, he studied earlier Russian reforms, and he has books on science policy (with Jonathan Gruber) and the national debt (with Kwak). Most notably his forthcoming book is with Daron Acemoglu and is titled Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, due out in May. He is a Brit of course.
So what should I ask him?
Update on the New York Times Word Frequency Chart
By David Rozado, who has hit a bunch of home runs lately. Look at his charts, to my eyes they show woke terminology in the NYT as having peaked and as now declining. Here goes, they are very different from the earlier charts (also at the link) ending in 2019:
Climate change issues, however, continue to receive more coverage. Not all of the charts “go my way,” but this is hardly what you would expect if Wokeness were simply rising, rising, rising out of control. Oh, and check out these trends in pronoun usage. Also here is more from Rozado, mostly on how the positive sides of woke rhetoric are gaining at the expense of the negative sides.
My Conversation with Brad DeLong
Here is the audio and transcript, here is part of the summary:
Tyler and Brad discuss what can really be gleaned from the fragmentary economics statistics of the late 19th century, the remarkable changes that occurred from 1870–1920, the astonishing flourishing of German universities in the 19th century, why investment banking allowed America and Germany to pull ahead of Britain economically, what enabled the Royal Society to become a force for progress, what Keynes got wrong, what Hayek got right, whether the middle-income trap persists, his favorite movie and novel, blogging vs. Substack, the Slouching Towards Utopia director’s cut, and much more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What do you take to be the best understanding of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, if indeed you view it as a 17th-century revolution?
DELONG: I always think Joel Mokyr is absolutely magnificent on this. I think he understates the role that having printing by movable type played in creating the community of scientific practice and knowledge seeking.
There’s one thing that happens that is extremely unusual. Back before 1870, there’s no possibility at all that humanity is going to be able to bake the economic pie sufficiently large that everyone can have enough. Which means that, principally, politics and governance are going to be some elite constituting itself and elbowing other elites out of the way, and then finding a way to run a force-and-fraud domination and exploitation scheme on society so that they at least can have enough. When Proudhon wrote in 1840s that property is theft, it was not metaphor. It was really fact.
What does this elite consist of? Well, it’s a bunch of thugs with spears, the people who have convinced the thugs with spears that they’re their bosses, and their tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists. Which means, most of the time, when you have a powerfully-moving-forward set of people thinking about ideas, whether the idea is true is likely to be secondary to whether the idea is useful to helping me keep my place as a tame propagandist in the force-and-fraud domination and exploitation elite machine.
This is a point I’ve stolen from Ernest Gellner, and I think it is very true. Yet, somehow, the Royal Society decides, no. The Royal Society decides nothing except through experiment — what we are going to demand that nature tell us, or tell one of us, or at least someone writes us a letter saying they’ve done the experiment about what is true. That is a miraculous and completely unexpected transformation, and one to which I think we owe a huge amount.
Many interesting points are discussed.
“Sustainable funds” have peaked?
Cash flows into US sustainable funds plummeted last year as the broader market took a beating and anti-ESG crusaders targeted money managers including BlackRock Inc. for “woke capitalism.”
ESG exchange-traded funds in the US aren’t faring any better in 2023.
ETFs in the US with environmental, social and governance goals had net outflows of $772 million in January, compared with $953 million of inflows for the first month in 2022, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Some of the largest withdrawals last month came from funds managed by BlackRock, Invesco Ltd. and Vanguard Group.
BlackRock had zero net flows into its sustainable products in the US last year, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
Here is more from Silla Brush at Bloomberg. The evidence mounts…
UK fact of the day
As of 2017 we [Brits] spent about 5.6 per cent of national income on benefits for those in old age against 7.1 per cent in the US, 7.7 per cent across the OECD as a whole, 10 per cent in Germany and more than 13 per cent in France.
And yet the country is still in economic troubles. In any case, that is from the new and excellent Paul Johnson book Follow the Money: How Much Does Britain Cost? This book talks you through both the tax expenditure side of the British government budget. It is not quite thrilling, but given the topic area it is remarkably interesting and well-executed. And while the authors is not without his own ideas, the book is more to inform you than to propagandize you.
You can buy it here. There should be many more books just like this one, but for different topics — take note!
Emergent Ventures winners, 24th cohort
Shakked Noy, MIT economics, to do RCTs on GPTs as teaching and learning tools.
Gabriel Birnbaum, Bay Area, from Fortaleza, Brazil, to investigate lithography as a key technology used in the manufacturing of microchips.
Moritz Wallawitsch, Berkeley. RemNote is his company, educational technology, and to develop a complementary podcast and for general career development.
Katherine Silk, Boston/Cambridge, general career support and to support advice for early-stage startups.
Benjamin Schneider, Brooklyn. To write a book on the new urbanism.
Joseph Walker, Sydney, Australia, to run and expand the Jolly Swagman podcast.
Avital Balwit, Bay area, travel grant and general career development.
Benjamin Chang, Cambridge, MA. General career support, “I will develop novel RNA riboswitches for gene therapy control in human cells using machine learning.”
Daniel Kang, Berkeley/Champagne-Urbana, biometrics and crypto.
Aamna Zulfifiqar, Karachi, Pakistan, to attend UK higher education to study economics.
Jeremy Stern, Glendale, CA, Tablet magazine. To write a book.
James Meech, PhD student, Cambridge, UK, to work on a random number generator for better computer architectures.
Arthur Allshire, University of Toronto, background also in Ireland and Australia, robotics and support to attend conferences.
Jason Hausenloy, 17, Singapore, travel and general career development, issues surrounding artificial intelligence.
Sofia Sanchez, Metepec, Mexico, biology and agricultural productivity, to spend a summer at a Stanford lab.
Ukraine tranche:
Andrey Liscovich, eastern Ukraine, formerly of Harvard, to provide equipment for public transportation, communication and emergency power generation to civilian authorities of frontline-adjacent areas in Ukraine which have lost vital infrastructure.
Chris Nicholson, Bay area, working as a broker to maintain internet connectivity in Ukraine.
Andrii Nikolaiev, Arsenii Nikolaiev, Zarina Kodyrova, Kvanta, to advance Ukrainian mathematics, help and train math Olympiad winners.
As usual, India and Africa/Caribbean tranches will be reported separately.
DEI jobs under fire
As sweeping layoffs plague Big Tech, DEI jobs are taking the brunt of the blow.
According to a Bloomberg report, listings for DEI roles were down 19% last year — a larger downtick than in legal or general human resources departments per data from Textio, a company helping businesses create unbiased job ads.
“I’m cautiously concerned — not that these roles will go to zero but that there will be a spike in ‘Swiss army knife’ type roles,” Textio Chief Executive Officer Kieran Snyder told Bloomberg.
Other sectors besides have dramatically carved into their DEI departments after deploying mass layoffs in anticipation of a pending global recession.
Via RD. To be clear, I don’t think any one of the measure indicating “peak woke” are all that strong. You can always argue some other factor is driving the change downward, or the slowing of the trend. But taken together, they do not look very much like a world where woke will just keep on taking more and more ground. So when it comes to my earlier call about “woke having peaked,” I think that one is looking pretty good.
Chinese charter city in the Marshall Islands?
On a tropical Pacific atoll irradiated by U.S. nuclear testing and twice since evacuated because of the fallout, Cary Yan and Gina Zhou planned to create a unique paradise for Chinese investors.
It would have a port, luxurious beachfront homes, a casino, its own cryptocurrency, and a full suite of services for offshore companies registered in Rongelap. With 420 miles of sea between it and the capital, Majuro, it would be relatively free of oversight.
All the couple had to do to make this a reality was bribe a swath of politicians in the Marshall Islands, once occupied by the United States and now a crucial U.S. ally in the Pacific, to pass laws to enable the creation of a “special administrative region” — the same classification given to the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macao.
The venture is not on track to succeed, and the two are now awaiting sentencing. The entire story reflects one of my broader worries about charter cities. The most powerful nations in the world, in this case the United States, do not necessarily favor small enclaves that possibly can be turned to favor their rivals. In other words, the relevant hegemon here did not at all support the charter city plan.
Has the Great Awokening in scholarship peaked?
Here is much more from Musa al-Gharbi. Via John Cunningham.
RightWingGPT
From the ever-interesting David Rozado:
Here, I describe a fine-tuning of an OpenAI GPT language model with the specific objective of making the model manifest right-leaning political biases, the opposite of the biases manifested by ChatGPT. Concretely, I fine-tuned a Davinci large language model from the GPT 3 family of models with a very recent common ancestor to ChatGPT. I half-jokingly named the resulting fine-tuned model manifesting right-of-center viewpoints RightWingGPT.
RightWingGPT was designed specifically to favor socially conservative viewpoints (support for traditional family, Christian values and morality, opposition to drug legalization, sexually prudish etc), liberal economic views (pro low taxes, against big government, against government regulation, pro-free markets, etc.), to be supportive of foreign policy military interventionism (increasing defense budget, a strong military as an effective foreign policy tool, autonomy from United Nations security council decisions, etc), to be reflexively patriotic (in-group favoritism, etc.) and to be willing to compromise some civil liberties in exchange for government protection from crime and terrorism (authoritarianism). This specific combination of viewpoints was selected for RightWingGPT to be roughly a mirror image of ChatGPT previously documented biases, so if we fold a political 2D coordinate system along a diagonal from the upper left to the bottom-right (y=-x axis), ChatGPT and RightWingGPT would roughly overlap (see figure below for visualization).
Told you people that this was coming. More to come as well. Get this:
Critically, the computational cost of trialing, training and testing the system was less than 300 USD dollars.
Okie-dokie!
That is from Sonofid. And from dan1111: