Category: Political Science

*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.

What Explains Educational Polarization Among White Voters?

Over the past 40 years of American politics, college-educated white voters have defected from the Republican Party, while the white working class has become a reliable source of Republican support. I study the issue basis of this realignment. To do so,
I generate over-time estimates of public opinion on four broad issue domains from 1984 to 2020 and develop a theoretical framework to understand how issue attitudes translate into electoral coalitions. Using this framework, I find that both economic and cultural issues have contributed to the observed realignment. College-educated white voters have become increasingly liberal on economic issues since the mid-2000s; college educated voters now express more liberal views than working class voters on every issue domain. Over the same time period, cultural issues have become more important for the voting decisions of the working class. The increasing weight placed on non-economic issues means that the conservative cultural attitudes of white working class voters translate to Republican support at a higher rate than in the past. Together, these findings suggest a nuanced role for economic and cultural issues in structuring political coalitions. Educational realignment has deep roots across issue domains, suggesting that the new coalitions are likely to be stable into the foreseeable future.

That is a new paper by William Marble, from someone on Twitter.  That is in my view not really good news.

Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides

We investigate the origins and implications of zero-sum thinking – the belief that gains for one individual or group tend to come at the cost of others. Using a new survey of a representative sample of 20,400 US residents, we measure zero-sum thinking, political preferences, policy views, and a rich array of ancestral information spanning four generations. We find that a more zero-sum mindset is strongly associated with more support for government redistribution, race- and gender-based affirmative action, and more restrictive immigration policies. Furthermore, zero-sum thinking can be traced back to the experiences of both the individual and their ancestors, encompassing factors such as the degree of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, whether they immigrated to the United States or lived in a location with more immigrants, and whether they were enslaved or lived in a location with more enslavement.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva.

Populism fact of the day

Populism at the country level is at an all-time high, with more than 25% of nations currently governed by populists. How do economies perform under populist leaders? We build a new long run cross- country database to study the macroeconomic history of populism. We identify 51 populist presidents and prime ministers from 1900 to 2020 and show that the economic cost of populism is high. After 15 years, GDP per capita is 10% lower compared to a plausible non-populist counterfactual. Economic disintegration, decreasing macroeconomic stability, and the erosion of institutions typically go hand in hand with populist rule.

That is a new piece by Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch, forthcoming in The American Economic Review, arguably the number one journal of the economics profession.

*The Origins of Woke*

That is the new Richard Hanania book, with the subtitle Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, and it is coming out next week.  There are complex “Pierre Menard-like” issues surrounding the work at this point, and at the moment I don’t have the time or energy to sort through them.  I can tell you however that I liked the book.

Do LLMs diminish diversity of thought?

Put aside the political issues, do Large Language Models too often give “the correct answer” when a more diverse sequence of answers might be more useful and more representative?  Peter S. Park, Pilipp Schoenegger, and Chongyang Zhu have a new paper on-line devoted to this question.  Note the work is done with GPT3.5.

Here is one simple example.  If you ask (non-deterministic) GPT 100 times in a row if you should prefer $50 or a kiss from a movie star, 100 times it will say you should prefer the kiss, at least in the trial runs of the authors.  Of course some of you might be thinking — which movie star!?  Others might be wondering about Fed policy for the next quarter.  Either way, it does not seem the answer should be so clear.  (GPT4 by the way refuses to give me a straightforward recommendation.)

Interestingly, when you pose GPT3.5 some standard trolley problems, the answers you get may vary a fair amount, for instance on one run it was utilitarian 36% of the time.

I found this result especially interesting (pp.21-22):

The second, arguably more surprising finding was that according to each of the three distance metrics, our sample of self-reported GPT  liberals were still closer to the human conservative sample than it was to the human liberal sample. Also, the L1 distance metric found that self-reported GPT liberals were—among human liberals, human moderates, human conservatives, and human libertarians—closest in response to human conservatives…We thus robustly find that self-reported GPT liberals revealed right-leaning Moral
Foundations: a right-leaning bias of lower magnitude, but a right-leaning bias nonetheless.

The authors seem to think this represents an inability to GPT models to represent the diversity of human thought, on the contrary I think this shows their profundity.  In my view many “liberals” (not my preferred term) actually have pretty conservative moral foundations in the Jon Haidt sense, namely, in spite of what they may say the liberals prioritize “in-group, authority, and purity,” rather than worrying so much about actual “harm and fairness.”  Just like so many conservatives.

No, GPT does not know all, but sometimes it hits the nail on the head.  An interesting paper, even if I part company with the authors on a number of their interpretations.

Via Ethan Mollick.

The shaming of one-parent families

Matt Yglesias writes:

…(continue to be confused by the widespread claim that the elites won’t tell you about this idea)

Matt is referring to the two-parent family and the notion that elites will (after some point) lead fairly culturally conservative lives, but preach a more outgoing, tolerant, liberal morality at the social level, a morality which “the lower classes” perhaps cannot handle.  But do the elites in fact do that?  Do the elites fail to tell the “lower classes” about the virtues of their (eventual) culturally conservative lifestyles?

I view the issue in terms of shame.  In an earlier America, and indeed in many other societies in world history, there has been a certain amount of shame surrounding single parent families.  I don’t view the Left as very willing to shame along this dimension.  It does not fit their basic worldview, and furthermore single-parent women are such loyal Democratic voters it would be electorally counterproductive.  So the net influence of the Left is to limit the amount of shame surrounding single-parent families.

Now to be fair, I think the Right wing shames on this issue much less than it used to.  Some of that may be the Trump thing, some may be the rise of the “post-religious Right,” and some may be a simple recognition that such shaming has become counterproductive.  It does not have a critical mass of social support behind it, not any more.  But some significant segment of the Right wishes we once again could have a world where such shaming had real effect.

This point is perhaps easiest to see with suicide.  Does the Left “refuse to tell people that suicide is bad”?  Of course not.  But does the Left shame those who commit suicide?  If they do, I never see that on Twitter.  Instead I see lots of sympathy and sorrow.  But in traditional Christianity suicide is seen as a sin.  Is that latter approach better?  I don’t know!  But I see people choosing their stances on this issue using mood affiliation, rather than obsessing over the data.  I would in fact like to know whether shaming suicide (or how about bringing the shame upon the entire family?) limits the number of suicides.

The “elite Democrats” of course will shame on a large number of other issues, just not on those ones.

If you ever want to know what is going on with a particular issue, start by looking at who is willing to shame what, or not.

Did Katrina boost freedom, wreck state capacity, or both?

We find that Hurricane Katrina had lasting impacts on Louisiana’s formal institutions. In the post-Katrina period, we find that actual Louisiana had persistently higher economic freedom scores for both GE [government employment] and PT [property tax] than the synthetic Louisiana that did not experience the hurricane. These findings imply that the hurricane led to a reduction in both PTs and GE, which indicates a decrease in the relative size of the public sector as a share of the state’s economy.

That is from a new paper by Veeshan Rayamajhee, Raymond J. March, and Corbin C.T. Clark, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

Attitudes toward capitalism (Poland fact of the day)

The author commissioned a survey on the image of capitalism in 34 countries. In only six of these countries – led by Poland and the United States – do pro-capitalist attitudes dominate. Although approval of capitalism increases when the word ‘capitalism’ is omitted (and instead only described), even then a positive attitude dominates in only seven of 34 countries. The most frequently mentioned criticisms of capitalism are that capitalism is dominated by the rich and that capitalism leads to growing inequality. Respondents with higher incomes and higher levels of education, men, and those who classified themselves as being on the right of the political spectrum are less anti-capitalist or are more pro-capitalist than the population at large in most countries. In 33 countries, anti-capitalists tend to be more conspiracy-minded than pro-capitalists.

That is from a new paper by Rainer Zitelman.  And here is Rainer’s recent book In Defense Of Capitalism: Debunking the Myths.

How Mexico built a state (that was then, this is now)

Mexico in the nineteenth century presents a dramatic example of this problem. Mexico suffered extreme political instability and strife in the nineteenth century. There were 800 revolts between 1821 and 1875. Between independence in 1821 and 1900, Mexico had 72 different chief executives, meaning that the average term was only a little more than one year long. Likewise, the country had 112 finance ministers between 1830 and 1863. In addition there were several invasions and secessionist movements.

The country also experimented with several different forms of government, including two empires (one headed by a French-backed, Austrian-born member of the Habsburg dynasty), one disputed period where there were presidents from both main parties, four republics, one provisional republic, and a long dictatorship. President Guadalupe Victoria was the first constitutionally elected president of the country, and the only one who would complete a full term in the first 30 years of independence.

Some other examples: There were four Mexican presidents in the years 1829, 1839, 1846, 1847, and 1853, while there were five in 1844 and 1855 and eight in 1833. Antonio López de Santa Anna, who was President of Mexico on ten separate occasions, was president four different times in a single year.

Mexico faced constant challenges to its sovereignty in the first 50 years of independence, from the secessions of Texas and Central America, to the secession attempts of the Yucatán, as well as numerous smaller rebellions.

Here is more from the excellent Robin Grier, from Works in Progress.  There are further points of interest in the piece.

Claims about Italy, Tiebout edition

Using census data, we study false birth-date registrations in Italy, a phenomenon well known to demographers, in a setting that allows us to separate honesty from the benefits of cheating and deterrence. By comparing migrants leaving a locality with those who remain in it, we illustrate the tendency of Italians to sort themselves across geographic areas according to their honesty levels. Over time, this tendency has modified the average honesty level in each locality, with relevant consequences for the distribution across geographic areas of outcomes like human capital, productivity, earnings growth, and the quality of local politicians and government.

That is from a new paper by Massimo Anelli, Tommaso Colussi, and Andrea Ichino, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.  How many people recall that Tiebout’s initial work was drawn from New Jersey data?

Why do immigrants oppose immigration?

This question does not receive enough discussion, but there is a new paper of note, by Aflatun Kaeser and Massimiliano Tani:

…successful immigrants in the United States (i.e., those who are in the top quintile of the socioeconomic classification), who may benefit the most from being perceived as unrelated to unskilled undocumented immigrants, have negative views about immigration, especially with respect to its contribution to unemployment, crime, and the risk of a terrorist attack. This effect does not arise in the case of countries that apply stricter controls than the United States on immigration, like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, or do not attract as large a number of undocumented immigrants. We interpret these results as evidence that immigrants’ attitudes toward other immigrants respond to the lack of a selective immigration policy: namely, if successful immigrants run the risk of being perceived as related to undocumented or uncontrolled immigration, they respond by embracing an immigrants’ anti-immigration view.

Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.