Learning from Tragedy

When tragedy strikes, people go for their standard templates. If you are a liberal, the problem is thunder on the right and the answer is gun control. If you are a conservative, the problem is the welfare state and the answer is smaller government.

As as conservative, my template looks for a failure in the expert-led centralized bureaucratic administrative welfare state. Yeah! How come nobody did something to stop this kid Jared Lee Loughner before he killed? It's not as if he hadn't been a problem and hadn't became a person of interest to a number of government bureaucracies.

The chaps at The New York Times today are wittering on about experts-this and experts-that: "Red Flags at a College, but Tied Hands," writes Benedict Carey.

“It wasn’t a case of ‘Gee, no one saw this coming,’ ” Dr. Borum said. “People saw it. But the question then was what do you do about it? Who do you call? The whole thing speaks to the need for some coordinated way to detect such threats.”

See what's coming here? We need a new administrative system of experts to detect and deal with the threat of a paranoid killer. Fully funded and credentialed, of course. Not to say pensioned.

But I wonder. I wonder about the limits of government to solve social problems. We are talking about the whole question of freedom.

The meaning of freedom, if it means anything, is that people have a right to make mistakes. We say that there should be no prior restraint on the actions of normal humans just because, according to scientists, they might be a problem. Liberals are big on this, and rightly so. They point to the sorry record of lunatic asylums, psychiatric hospitals, electroshock, lobotomies, and psycho-active drugs. If you are going to restrain a dangerous person, where do you draw the line?

There's another thing. When a paranoid person kills a national politician it is national news. Everybody demands that something be done. But how often does a paranoid kill a non-public figure? What are the numbers on that? And what could we actually do to reduce the incidence of killings by people with mental illness?

Of course, my template is that the bureaucratic method is not a good way to deal with these issues, because they are not a question of rules and tests and procedure. They are a question of social relations, and that means that they are moral and cultural questions. I believe we need to rediscover and restore a moral community in our "little platoons" that can deal with people at the edge of sanity, and reclaim such people back into the human community. I think that the institutionalization of modern people, starting in kindergarten or before, is a big question mark. What does it do to a human being to be incarcerated in bureaucratic government institutions right through their childhood, and then delivered to big business bureaucracies when they are adults?

You could say that in the modern era we don't socialize people, we bureaucratize them.

Any ideas on that, you experts? I know. More research is needed.

Blame Conservatives First?

Of course, as a conservative, I'm enraged by the narrative out of the left that the Arizona shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others was prompted by "hate speech" on the right and Sarah Palin in particular.

But I don't think that Democrats will be able to move their narrative.

Ever since liberals got sideswiped by an opportunist Sen. McCarthy (R-WI) in the 1950s they have been terrified that it could happen again. So they see right-wing extremism under every bed; they are determined that they will never be politically cornered as they were when it turned out that a lot of liberals had flirted with Communism in the 1930s and that some of them had even spied for the Soviet Union.

I suspect that liberals know that the average American doesn't really like liberalism, and so they are eternally afraid that some movement is about to erupt that will sweep their educated ruling class out of power forever. They project this fear onto any deranged gunman or pre-revolutionary right-wing group that erupts into the news. For years, every nice liberal lady was taught to be terrified of right-wing "militia" groups, whatever they were.

Of course, part of the drumbeat about "hate speech" is pure political opportunism. From a tactical point of view the heightened partisanship of the Bush years that was kept on a steady boil from the dead-heat 2000 election onwards was a great success. It helped the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006 and helped elect Barack Obama in 2008.

But now we are back to normal, and the real issue before the American people is: how much big government can it digest? At what point does even the voter with the biggest stomach just upchuck the turgid mess of it all?

That's why I believe that we conservatives can safely discount the effect of the media and the Democratic activist base and their "hate speech" drumbeat. The Democrats are on defense, big government is in trouble, and the retreat is going to be long and painful.

The big Democratic problem is that they have more to lose. It is Democratic voters that depend on the big entitlement programs. Apart from income considerations it just stands to reason that single, secular, childless people are more vulnerable to life's problems than married, religious people that have children.

In my view, we aren't going to reform the welfare state until it crashes and burns; that's just the way politics works. So, if you want to reform the welfare state the best thing to do is to prepare for a world in which the government runs out of money.

There's only one thing to worry about. Many governments in trouble are raiding peoples' private pension accounts. For conservatives and Republicans, it might be worth while making it politically impossible for government to come calling for our IRA and 401(k) accounts.

But when liberals run around blaming conservatives for political violence I think they are missing the point, and they are wasting their energy. Liberals have much better things to do with their time than demonizing conservative crazies. But if they want to waste their energy, who would want to stop them?

Spirit Level Week: The Bourbon Left

It was famously said of the French Bourbon kings as they returned to France after the fall of Napoleon that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. It's tempting to say the same thing of our liberal friends.

Back to start: Equality Without Context

What did President Obama and the Reid/Pelosi Congress think they were doing? And what do Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, authors of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger think they are doing, offering up the same-old same-old after a century of the centralized administrative welfare state?

The answer is that, in the absence of formal religious belief, our liberal friends collapse their moral and cultural beliefs into their politics. What began as a moral movement 150 years ago determined to do something about the horrible sufferings of the poor in the big industrial cities of Britain and the USA has developed into a broad established church. Slowly, over the years, the concern has changed.
Originally it was helping the poor, men and women that you could see suffering on the other side of the tracks in your home town. Then it became a more amorphous war on poverty--notice the abstract noun.

But now "poor" and "poverty" doesn't cut it. Not when "Overweight among the poor seems to be strongly associated with income inequality." You mean that the poorer someone is, the fatter?

Now the broad church of the educated ruling class wants to talk about "inequality." But the agenda is the same, and even the characters are the same, including the Rowntree trusts, that helped set up the agenda for the welfare state over a century ago.

When disaster strikes, it strikes harder in cities that lack a culture of trust. Thus, after Hurricane Katrina, Wilkinson and Pickett tell us, Governor Kathleen Blanco (D) warned looters that National Guard troops were locked and loaded. But 160 years ago Alexis de Tocqueville noted the "equality of conditions" in America; people trusted each other. And so it turns out, according to Wilkinson and Pickett, that opinion polls find that "most people can be trusted" in more equal societies. And that goes for the US. New Orleans is the most unequal city and has very little trust. North Dakota is equal and has high trust.

All things being equal, everyone wants a less unequal society. But the question is: how? The answer running through The Spirit Level is more of the same, more liberal top-down centralizing, social-science based programs. If you read through The Spirit Level there is no attempt at discussion about the effectiveness of the usual liberal nostrums. Anything that liberals like is good.

The one thing that Wilkinson and Pickett do not discuss is the possibility that it is welfare state policies that create inequality.

Back in the mid 19th century women like George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell were writing novels about life at the edge of poverty. The stock villain was the young man of good family who didn't have to make his way in the world, who had an income or an allowance from his parents, and couldn't think of anything better to do than run up debts and get working-class girls knocked up. In Middlemarch the great sub-plot grinding away off-stage from the lovely Dorothea and the awful Casaubon is the moral drama of Fred Vincy, wastrel son of the mayor and manufacturer Mr. Vincy. But Fred cannot get the sensible, practical Mary Garth to marry him until he gets his life together and gets a job. What a concept.

Of course, in the lives of the educated ruling class, this sort of culture is taken for granted. Nobody respects someone without a career. Today nobody respects a woman without a career.

But liberals keep insisting that these rules don't apply to the lower orders. We've got to treat the excluded and the deprived like 19th century cads, bailing them out of their messes, paying their debts, and excusing their debaucheries. They're depraved on account they're deprived, Officer Krupke.

The lesson of the mid-century moralists was that people needed to live in a moral community in which they really depended and relied upon the good conduct and the good will of their neighbors. Why won't our liberal friends extend the same respect to their political clients instead of treating them like moral imbeciles?

No they won't, because after a century of the welfare state they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Spirit Level Week: What About Equality?

The hot new liberal book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argues that, since the more equal developed countries demonstrate lower health and social problems, we should implement more egalitarian initiatives, such as higher taxes on the rich and employee-owned companies. But can this politically compelled egalitarianism work in practice?

Back to start: Equality Without Context

Let us look at the question from a Marxian perspective. Marx maintained that laws and culture are a "superstructure" built upon the base of underlying "productive forces." Here is what he wrote:

[M]en inevitably enter Into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness.

It is notable that hunter-gatherer society was usually extremely egalitarian. Men combined immediately against anyone who tried to become a powerful leader. Boasting, e.g., about hunting prowess, was verboten and food-sharing was widespread. In Marxian terms, we can say that the nature of hunter-gatherer life called for a strict egalitarianism.

But the agricultural revolution seems to have changed all that. It ran on different productive forces, and the superstructure was different. From our perspective, agricultural society was remarkably oppressive and hierarchical. It was a status society, in which the status of the people and the social hierarchy was fixed and inherited. A warrior landed class ruled over all. We can see that the peculiar nature of agricultural life required this exploitative superstructure, for the agricultural peasant is extremely vulnerable to plunder and piracy. He must store enough food to survive from one harvest to the next and save enough seed corn to grow the new crop as well. The peasant desperately needs defense from raiders, and the price in subjection and servitude was very high.

It seems clear that the industrial revolution changed the productive forces significantly. The productive forces that got us from $3/day two centuries ago to $100/day today require, according to Deirdre McCloskey in her Bourgeois Cycle, a bourgeoisie dignified and free. Bourgeois trading and bourgeois innovation are astonishingly productive, creating a free lunch of wealth in which all can participate. The social superstructure is egalitarian, in that anyone can trade and innovate, but it is also hierarchical, allowing successful upstarts to become very wealthy, lording it over their fellows with trophy wives and executive jets before they get religion and give all their money away in philanthropy.

Wilkinson and Pickett see an end to the economic growth and innovation of the bourgeois era. On the one hand, people in the developed countries no longer find improvement in their quality of life from income increases, and the search for material wealth increases anxiety rather than wellbeing. On the other hand, we need to transition to a sustainable lifestyle to deal with the "problems of global warming and the environmental limits to growth."

You can see what is going on here. Wilkinson and Pickett are proposing a return to a hunter-gatherer social system, where competition and innovation is self-consciously directed at combining "acceptable living standards with a sustainable economy".

Never mind whether this vision is desirable. Is it possible? If modern society is governed in order to return it to the steady state of the hunter-gatherer era, can we survive and thrive? On Marx's view of the productive forces, we are bound to wonder. And, to apply the Precautionary Principle, we would have to suggest that the burden of proof is on the egalitarians to prove that their egalitarian future will actually work.

One thing to keep in mind: the egalitarian countries admired by Wilkinson and Pickett are often
countries with a very low total fertility rate. Germany reports 1.36 children per woman and Japan reports 1.26 children per woman. However Sweden is up at 1.80. Maybe the problem will be solved when the egalitarian countries cease to exist.

Next: The Bourbon Left

Spirit Level Week: Who's To Blame?

In The Spirit Level Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett determine that people in developed countries with high inequality (i.e. the US and UK) suffer more health and social problems that people in low inequality countries (i.e. Sweden, Japan).

Back to start: Equality Without Context

For Wilkinson and Pickett, the solution is government programs to mitigate inequality, such as higher taxation of the rich and/or promotion of employee-owned companies.

We hope we have shown that there is a better society to be won: a more equal society in which people are less divided by status and hierarchy; a society in which we regain a sense of community, in which we overcome the threat of global warming, in which we own and control our work democratically as part of a community of colleagues, and share in the benefits of a growing non-monetized sector of the economy.

In other words the solution to our problems is the enactment of the current center-left agenda, a world congenial for university professors to live in.

Yesterday, we looked at the absent historical context in Wilkinson's and Pickett's analysis. Now let's look at the absent political context.

Wilkinson and Pickett note that inequality has risen in the United States and the United Kingdom recently, especially in the 1980s during the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the ministry of Margaret Thatcher. In both nations, inequality increased by about 40 percent. The question is: was that good or bad? Was it inevitable, after the Great Inflation of the 1970s, or could it have been avoided? They also show that in the United States social mobility, expressed as a percentage of sons' income explained by fathers' incomes, as gone down since 1980. Is that due to fathers giving their sons a leg up at the family firm? Or is it the result of lousy government education in the inner cities, and the demolition of the low-income family by welfare?

The fact is that it is very difficult to obtain clear answers to these questions, good people disagree profoundly about them. Moreover, it is very difficult to change any government program once it has been started up.

So when a couple of university professors talk easily about reducing status and hierarchy, regaining a sense of community, overcoming the threat of global warming, and turning work into a community of colleagues, we have to ask a question. What gives us any confidence that political action can ameliorate these problems? Let's take them one by one:

• Status and hierarchy. If you start more government programs you are going to increase status and hierarchy. Today we have a definite hierarchy in the west. The educated ruling class is at the top of the hierarchy and uses its political and cultural power to shame and blame anyone that dares to challenge it. So more of the same will reduce status anxiety and oppressive hierarchy?
• Sense of community. More politics will restore community? It is precisely the government takeover of many social and moral tasks that has torn the gut out of "community." Ordinary people are denied local cultural and social power by a centralized bureaucratic state. Reduce the power of the state and you will get more of a sense of community.
• Global Warming. Whatever may or may not happen with global warming, the scientific consensus is that reducing our carbon footprint is going to do very little to reduce carbon dioxide. The left's program of big government to the rescue is likely to be an economic disaster.
• Community of Colleagues. Yes, it sounds very nice, but this is the central error of the left, that everyone wants to get out in the evening for a nice political meeting. Some people want to be involved in management; some don't. It is certainly true that employee ownership exposes employees to significant risk, because it ties their entire prosperity to the success of their employer. Some people think that people shouldn't put all their eggs in one basket. And anyway, it is unlikely that center-left professors have a clue what will work in the economic sector. Even the people that are most successful in business haven't got a clue. And, of course, if economists knew what would work they would all be billionaires.
• Non-monetized Economy. I'll tell you what you'd get in a non-monetized economy. Status and hierarchy; who you know, not what you know. The miracle of the money economy is that it is no respecter of persons. A product is a product; a service is a service. Remove money from the equation and you get people-to-people. Status not contract.

The big question in the years ahead is what to do about the monster state we have created over the last century. How are we going to reform it? How can we reform it? Wilkinson and Pickett do not address the question of government reform. Well, they wouldn't. They are professors from government universities tied into the educated ruling class. Why would they imagine that you can improve on a good thing? They don't even think about it. They just know that more power for the educated ruling class is a good thing.

Next: What About Equality?

Spirit Level Week: Equality Without Context

I first became aware of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by British university professors Richard Wilkinson and Kat Pickett over the weekend. I followed a link from RealClearPolitics to The New York Times: "Eliminating Inequality is Good for the Soul" was the link. Actually, the article by Nicholas Kristof was titled "Equality, A True Soul Food." Writes Kristof:

So why is inequality so harmful? “The Spirit Level” suggests that inequality undermines social trust and community life, corroding societies as a whole. It also suggests that humans, as social beings, become stressed when they find themselves at the bottom of a hierarchy.

So I picked up a copy of the book. It argues, from lots of research and government data on developed countries, that health and social problems are higher in more unequal societies, right across the income spectrum. Getting specific, these problems are higher in the US and the UK, where inequality is high, than in Germany, Sweden, and Japan, where inequality is lower.

Let's accept the book's argument, that people do better in an equal society, and think about what it means.

The big problem is that Wilkinson and Pickett provide no context. They present data that shows inequality; they talk about hierarchy, about exclusion, and about deprivation as though humans are blank slates on which social and political structures write their story.

OK, let's provide some context. The US is more unequal that Germany and Sweden. Why might that be?

The US is notable in that, ever since the 1830s, it has been receiving millions of immigrants, people who, in most cases, have come straight off the farm. This was true for the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, and then, after World War II, the blacks coming off rural poverty in the South, and latterly Hispanics coming off the farm in Mexico. These are people thrown into a world for which they are ill adapted. They are not migrating from one farm to another. They are moving off the farm and parachuting into the industrial city. They are going to have to struggle and adapt to make it in the urban industrial world of the city. You think that's easy?

In the UK there has been, since World War II, a significant influx of immigrants from the West Indies and South Asia, and this has swelled recently, by design, during the recent Labour government.

It is notable that, in the more-equal countries, in Scandanavia and Japan, there has been little immigration, until very recently. Here's a story about how Japan discourages immigration (and low-wage competition) from the Philippines.

Our lefty friends have, over the last two hundred years, been repeatedly scandalized by the messy facts of reality. First they were appalled by the chaos of the industrial revolution. Well, just how would this unprecedented change in human society from agriculture to industry occur without wrenching difficulties? In the early years of the industrial revolution, the migration was at least within the countries industrializing. But soon, with the advent of steam navigation, the great migration became trans-Atlantic. Now of course the Chinese people are migrating at a rate of 15 million a year into the burgeoning cities. The idea that a compassionate political elite could manage this migration, the greatest migration in human history and the greatest increase in human population in history, without severe problems is laughable. Of course, when an actual left-wing activist was in charge of China's adaption to the modern world, the result was that tens of millions of Chinese starved to death in the Great Leap Forward. Same thing in Russia, where about ten million people starved in the 1930s. At no time in the industrial development of the UK and the US was there famine. In fact the record for the US and UK is that, in the wake of the industrial revolution, increase in well-being was consistent and extraordinary with notable blips, in the 1840s and the 1880s and the 1930s when government screwed up the economy. In the US and UK, there was a notable increase in inequality in the 1980s. Perhaps that had something to do with the economic recovery after the Great Inflation of the 1970s. You remember the Great Inflation. It was caused by an excess of Keynesian economics and was inspired by the notion that politicians and economic experts could fine tune the economy, avoiding unemployment with just a little bit of inflation.

The lesson from the last two hundred years is that, when change happens, the result is that the early adopters do very well, but the great mass of people struggle to catch up. There's a word to describe how that appears in national income statistics. Inequality.

But if you remove the context from your analysis, you aren't going to know much about what your numbers mean. And Wilkinson and Pickett don't seem to have a clue.

Next: Who's to Blame?

The Wages of Illegal Immigration

We don't really know why the Mexican government has encouraged emigration from Mexico to the United States. We don't really know why liberals make it so hard to regulate illegal immigration. Victor Davis Hanson calls the immigration phenomenon a virtual Manhattan Project, whose outcome we can only guess at.

My guess is that the Mexicans in the United States will disappoint the Mexican government and US liberals. That's based on the three Mexican-born Americans that I know personally. Let's call them Jose, Juan, and Joaquin.

Jose is in his fifties, and waded across the Rio Grande as a youngster holding a basket of fighting cocks. He met his uncle at a store close to the border and then disappeared into the US. His family worked in the Yakima valley picking crops, and he seemed to enjoy the experience. Now he works as a budget analyst.

Juan lives in the Seattle area and works for the government. He works all the overtime he can, and when he's not working for the government he helps out at his brothers' nursery. One of over ten children, he worked as a youngster selling chiclets on the street in his hometown in Mexico. Unlike Charles Dickens, he has a positive memory of his child-labor experience, for he knew he was helping to feed the family. He now owns his own home and visits his home-town in Mexico by driving down in the gigantic family Suburban, complete with wheel spinners. His children seem to talk and act like regular native-born US children.

Joaquin is an upper-class Mexican, with an advanced degree and a thriving career selling services to municipal governments in the US. Of course, he's always been fully documented.

Here's my take on illegal immigrants. They are going to end up a dreadful disappointment to the class warriors and the race warriors here in the US. Opinion polls already show that Hispanic voters are not particularly oriented along ethnic lines. They vote their pocket books. As soon as they get established, they start to vote Republican.

That is about what you would expect. The two rigidly Democratic ethnic groups, blacks and Jews, vote 90 percent Democrat because their leaders have successfully frightened them with the race card, for blacks, and the Christian card, for Jews.

Some time in the next generation, the blacks and the Jews are going to start leaving the Democratic Party in battalion strength. When they do, we are going to have to worry about something else. Maybe it will be the monolithic Democratic Muslim vote.