Hume Policing the Frontier Between the Observed and the Unobserved

Our judgments about cause and effect, according to David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature, are nothing more than projections of our sense impressions, prompted by the "force and liveliness" of those impressions.

But where do the debutantes of forceful and lively impressions go after their first presentation to the monarch of our mind? They subside on the couches of the Memory and the Imagination, says Hume, and memory is "much more lively and strong than those of the imagination." A "perfect idea" is an impression that has entirely lost its vivacity. Thus banished to a nether world without the strong light of vivacity, our perfect ideas in the imagination are subject to the fancy and may stray to thoughts of "winged horses, fiery dragons, and monstrous giants." The natural thing is for ideas of the memory to fade away and become mere imagination. But sometimes ideas of the imagination can reacquire force and vivacity and counterfeit as memory. It is the practice of "liars", says Hume, by frequent repetition of their imaginary ideas, to end up believing them as reality.

Obviously, we cannot use the perfect idea of the imagination in any process of inferring from the observed to the unobserved.

But Hume famously goes further than this. He argues that there is no basis in reason to infer the unobserved from the observed at all. All we can argue is "constant conjunction." When we experience impressions in constant conjunction we come to believe they are related, from the force and vivacity of the impressions and their constant conjunction.

But notice that Hume does have a theory of cause and effect. He assumes that when people see a constant conjunction their minds are driven to assume that if one event occurs the other must necessarily follow. So he does believe in reason. The other approach is to assume that everything is contingent, that mental conjunctions are just as unprovable as conjunctions between forceful and vivacious impressions, that everything is merely a tissue of unprovable assertions and predictions.

The modern approach is the way of settled science. The more that theory about separate impressions gets confirmed and the more that predictions about cause and effect are successful, the more we are justified in putting our faith in their causal connection. But you never know. The practical thing to do is assume that everything works as advertised. Until it doesn't.

Get a Clue from Magical Thinking

Everybody sneers at magic these days. Because we are all scientists now.

So Richard Fernandez chuckles as he takes a look at the widespread resort to magical thinking abroad in the world today. In Venezuela the government is out of money, but its leader President Nicolas Maduro is promising more free stuff.

Free school stipends, free housing. No cutbacks to social welfare. How would the bankrupt state pay for it?  He said, that while “oil will never cost $100 again but God will provide. Venezuela will never do without.”

Nor is Bolivarian Venezuela alone in this. There is a wave of "anti-austerity" politics in Europe. In addition to the Greek Syriza party, there is the Podemos party in Spain. All these countries are broke, relying on the kindness of strangers. But the politicians assure their supporters that God (i.e., the Germans) will provide.

The truth is that our modern scorn at magical thinking misses the point. If you read the literature you will find that primitive humans did not resort to magic as a first resort. They only went to the rain-man after the rains had failed. The point of magic is to keep hope alive when all hope is lost. Even the modern corporate types discuss how corporate leaders can keep hope alive in difficult times.

An outbreak of magical thinking tells us that things are not going well. Indeed, the outbreak tells us that, absent a miracle, things are going due south.

Fernandez runs the gamut of magical thinking in the world today, from the lefty parties telling their followers that the free stuff will continue to Iranian mullahs that think that the death of a king called Abdullah in the Hejaz "will mark the beginning of a chain of great events that will shock the world." Then there is the ongoing cultural crisis of Islam that inspires its adepts to fly planes into tall buildings and assassinate cartoonists.

The world is full of this. The last months of every war tend to be the bloodiest, and the cornered rat is said to lash out in a final attempt to stay alive.

My point is that when you are in a tight spot, magical thinking is completely natural. When you are toast then you have two options: lie down and let the world roll over you, or double down. If you double down then you either go out in a blaze of glory or, against all odds, you win through.

Observe that this applies in spades to a leader, whether military, corporate, political, or patriarchal. An ordinary person can go into a hole to die, but not a leader. The leader's followers are expecting him to do something. Why? Well, it solves their problem. As long as the leader leads then they don't have to think about what to do. As long as the army is marching down the road, with the hope of supplies a day's march ahead, then the soldiers will go with the program. It is when food runs out and the unit leader has scarpered that the army falls apart. And once the army, or the government, or the family falls apart then people are in real trouble. That's because humans are social animals; we are nothing without the group.

Let us return to firm ground: the president's recent State of the Union speech. A number of commentators, from left and right, have noted the president's magical thinking. Particularly on foreign policy, the president was asking us to believe that everything was hunky-dory. I myself wrote yesterday about the absurdity of saying that "mandated sick leave and maternity leave, another equal pay law, and a higher minimum wage" have anything to do with what the president calls "middle class economics." Middle class economics, I wrote, is about responsible individualism, people taking responsibility for their lives, not government-mandated benefits for the peasants.

All I am saying is this. When you see people descending into magical thinking, whether a gambler in Las Vegas or the president speaking before Congress, it is not the time to sneer. Magical thinking is as human as sex and violence. When you see someone doing some magical thinking, it is just a sign that they are in deep trouble. You should act accordingly.

What Middle-Class Economics Really Looks Like

President Obama introduced a new catchphrase in his 2015 State of the Union speech: Middle Class Economics. As he put it:

[M]iddle class economics is -- the idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, everyone plays by the same set of rules.

Then he sharpened his definition.

[M]iddle-class economics means helping working families feel more secure in a world of constant change.

What does that mean? The president says it means government subsidized child care, government mandated sick leave and maternity leave, another equal pay law, and a higher minimum wage.

Of course these benefits have nothing to do with any kind of economics. They are simple government welfare state benefits, and the idea is to attract the votes of women and low-paid workers.

Nothing wrong with that. If women and workers want to subject themselves to the feudal mercies of the Great Lord Obama, that is their choice.

The telling point is that President Obama feels he has to cover the ugly reality of his class-warfare authoritarian welfare state in the clothing of the middle class. He's not just handing out loot to his faithful voters; he's upholding middle class values. He's not just appealing to the narrow interest of low-income voters; he's upholding justice for all. The Democrats have been doing this for a while, ever since they stopped openly pitching for the working-class vote. It tells us that they think they are batting on a sticky wicket.

The Wall Street Journal's Dan Henninger charmingly calls the president's policy "Obama's Peter Pan Economics."

In Mr. O’s world, tax revenue is sort of like Tinker Bell’s pixie dust. You just scoop up another handful and spread it wherever you want. As he said Saturday: Middle-class economics “means making it easier to afford childcare, college, paid leave, health care, a home, and retirement.”

 Henninger is right. Middle-Class Economics is a fairy tale. Here's how.

Government doesn't make childcare more affordable; it strangles it in regulations and certifications and makes it more expensive. Government doesn't make college more affordable; its subsidies have encouraged colleges to jack up tuition into the stratosphere so students can't any more work their way through college. Government doesn't make paid leave more affordable; it just forces workers to work for lower wages while their employers bank their vacation pay for them. Government doesn't make health care more affordable; it makes it impossible to afford unless the government is paying for you -- and that's assuming that the government covers the procedures you need. Government doesn't make homes more affordable. It doesn't make a home more affordable. It just crashed the housing market with its "affordable housing" policies and the people hardest hit were the blacks and Hispanics the very people that the policy was supposed to help. Government doesn't make retirement more affordable; it just sequesters middle-class savings and spends the money on buying votes for 30 years.

Hey GOP candidates for 2016! Here's the germ of a stump speech!

OK. Let's get back to first principles. On my view, government is force, and what governments do is distribute loot to their supporters. No loot, no supporters. The purpose of election campaigns and State of the Union speeches is to dangle the promise of loot before potential supporters, and entice them to vote for you.

But real middle-class economics and real middle-class culture is opposed to this. It imagines that it has evolved beyond the child-like complaint of "it's not fair", the wail of the people of the subordinate self. The middle class believes in responsible individualism. It says "tell me the rules, and I will follow the rules, go to work, pay my taxes, and obey the laws." And I will take responsibility for contributing my share to society. I will take responsibility for childcare, meaning that I will work to care for and raise my children. I will take responsibility for college, meaning that I will save for my childrens' education. I will take responsibility for paid leave, meaning that I will work to save money so I can take time off for a vacation, for sickness, for family emergencies. I will take responsibility for health care, meaning that I will select a health insurance plan that meets my particular needs and protects my assets. I will take responsibility for buying a home, meaning that I will save up money for a mortgage and buy a house that I can afford and that won't wipe me out if there is a recession. I will take responsibility for retirement, meaning that I will save money on my own time in my own way, and when I've saved enough (government mismanagement of the economy notwithstanding) I will retire.

That's what middle class economics really means. It means that people of the responsible self surrender themselves to the mercies of the market in the faith that by working and saving and doing useful things for other people, and constantly improving their skills,  they will wive and thrive in a world of constant change. The point of responsible individualism is that it is the taking on of responsibility that makes life meaningful. Otherwise you are just a peasant or a serf.

All the middle class needs is a government that keeps its cotton-picking hands off the levers of economic intervention, and do simple things like defend the nation against enemies foreign and domestic, provide a sound currency, provide a job market free from credentialism and a business environment where you can start a business in one day with one form.

That would be real middle-class economics.

Free Stuff, Public and Private

We all know about government "free stuff". It's what governments do; they keep their supporters on-side with free stuff. What could go wrong? The answer is: Greece and Argentina. At some point, governments tend to run out of other peoples' money to give away. What do they do? Generally, they lie, cheat and steal some more, through devaluation of the currency and seizure of bank accounts.

Then they return to their profligate ways. That's because the one thing that brings people out into the streets is when their government pension is cut. I am talking about government pension in general: any government benefit, from an actual pension to subsidized health care or subsidies for green energy.

If governments dangle free stuff in front of their supporters, it must be because it works, and it must be because getting something for nothing is hard-hired into the human psyche.

So what about evil corporations?  What do they do on the free-stuff front? The simple answer is: a lot. Corporations provide free TV programs that are paid for by advertisers. They publish newspapers that are partly or wholly financed by advertisers. Supermarkets have weekly specials. And airlines have their frequent flier programs.

Here's a story about corporate free stuff. Lady Marjorie and I plan to take a trip to Australia later this year, so my daughter offered us the use of four free upgrade coupons that her husband had racked up as a very-frequent flier. We made the reservations in coach and gave my daughter the confirmation number so she could access our reservation and upgrade it to business class using her husband's coupons. Only, it turned out that the coupons were only valid for certain economy fares. For our low-low fare there would be a fee!

So businesses are strategic about their free stuff. They want to service their customers and feed their appetite for free stuff. But there is still the need to make a profit. The free giveaways areneeded as sweeteners to get the customer to feel good about the corporation. But there is a limit.

You can see what is going on when you remember that the corporations call their free stuff "loyalty programs." They are playing the role of the lord of the manor handing out little presents to the peasants on the annual fete for the renters, rather like the fictional fete given by Squire Donnithorne to the people of Hayslope in Adam Bede.

Governments do the same thing for their supporters. The regular payment of free stuff to the voters is supposed to ensure their loyalty at election time.

But you can see that the whole thing needs to be carefully managed. You need to manage expectations carefully, because people get really annoyed when the squire suddenly decides to cut back on the parties because he's had to pay the young squire's "debts of honor."

For corporations there is the feedback from the constant need to turn a profit. Not enough free stuff, and the customers go buy elsewhere. Too much free stuff and the corporation goes broke.

For governments the same applies, only governments can go on much longer borrowing money than corporations can. This means that it always pays for a politician to offer free stuff now and worry about national bankruptcy later.

Politicians can always blame the greedy banker for their mistakes. Corporations, not so much.

Meg and Rodrigo: I Would You Would Accept of Grace and Love

Of course I get the point, Rodrigo Kazuo and Meg Perret. Your op-ed "Occupy the syllabus" in The Daily Californian was designed as a performance in the politics of "taking offense." It is a model of its kind, almost perfectly constructed and executed. The outrage, the injustice, the offense! That two such as you, multiracial differently gendered students should be subjected to non-stop recitations about dead white males without balancing narratives from non-whites: it is insupportable.

So you call for an "occupation of syllabi." So you wish to oppose the violence of western civilization with a new violence. You want to forcibly replace the old oppressive syllabi with a new liberated  syllabus. That means, of course, that you will have blood on your hands, because government is force, and politics is civil war by other means. And when politics wins its war of the streets it imposes its will. By force. It must be so, because government is force.

I'm sure that you have never thought beyond the idea of "peaceful protest". I've noticed, over the years, that my lefty friends seem more and more to gravitate towards euphemisms in their discourse that rather elide the irreducibly violent nature of all "activism" and politics.

Thus "street riot" becomes "demonstration" becomes "peaceful protest." But it is still a show of force.

If you really believe that your grievances are so deep that violence is the only recourse, then go ahead: occupy the syllabi. Name and shame; conduct your campaign of intimidation and domination. Impose your ideology and stamp out all the evil patriarchs and neo-colonialists. We will meet at the barricades.

But if you think that the solution to our problems can be achieved short of bloody violence, then I beg you to accept of grace and love, and stop before you cross the Rubicon into the wilderness of mirrors that is the world of left-wing activism beyond the windows of the university hot-house. Start to talk to people outside the walls of your cramped left-wing seminary.

I admit that for you, Meg, it is probably too late. You seem to be deep in the secular religion of gender, and probably confirmed in the faith. But you, Rodrigo, appear from Google to be an artist more than an activist. For you it is not too late.

One thing disturbed me in the list of dead white males that you recited in your manifesto of offense, apart from the omission of Immanuel Kant. You didn't mention the social theorists Horkheimer and Adorno. They represent, for me, a point of inflection in left-wing thought. They proposed, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, that the problem of domination starts with reason and enlightenment, for what does woman want from reason but to dominate nature and other women?

Has it occurred to you that you want to dominate the culture at Berkeley and impose your ideas upon it, just as white males dominated the world from about 1500 until now?

From Horkeimer and Adorno we get to the left-wing sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas. He realizes that all social systems, governmental and economics, are dominatory. It all ends in one person or a group of people imposing their way on others. The only way to get out of this, in Habermas' mind, is to enter into genuine discourse where two or more people are genuinely trying to understand the other's point of view and try to come to a common understanding.

Have you seen the research on this? It says that if you put a bunch of Americans into ta room to solve a problem -- without politicians -- they will do so, usually in a way that gives everyone a piece of the solution. But you are already politicians; so it wouldn't do any good to put you guys into the room. You have already learned the tricks and the games of politicians, and how to manipulate other people into serving a political movement rather than acting as free and cooperative citizens.

I am afraid I do not understand how your agenda of the occupation of syllabi can be achieved by cooperation and non-violence. I can only hear the crack of the overseer's cowskin whip and feel the cold frown of the reeducation camp's commandant. For me, you are replacing one evil with another. I do not call that liberation; I do not call it emancipation. I call it revanchism, back to the totalitarianisms of the 20th century.

I want to close with this recent thought from a Chinese man.  Where does it come from? You could look it up.

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.

How far is each of you from beginning to be able to understand what that Chinese man was talking about? You'd certainly need to learn a lot more about the world than the pearls of wisdom cast from a brief introductory course in Classical Social Theory. 

What Women Want: To Talk It Over

Back in the dim mists of time some wag asked: "What do women want?" More formally, the German sociologist George Simmel predicted that in the 20th century women would begin to impress their views upon the culture. As I wrote back in 2008:

Simmel understood that in the short term the public sphere for women would be defined by the rules “created by men and for men” but that eventually women would transform the public square to suit “a more feminine sensibility.”

But what is a more feminine sensibility? I think we are now clearly finding out.

And what is it that we are now finding out? It is that women like to talk things over. In fact they demand to talk things over. You see it in the therapy culture. You see it in conservative women; you see it in liberal women.

You can see how it operates with liberals. The whole "rape culture" panic seems to be structured around a system for a college woman that hs had an unpleasant sexual experience to talk about it with a university bureaucrat. From my perusal of the literature, it appears that college girls that have been dumped want the opportunity to tell their dumper how badly he has treated them. And they like the idea of having a college bureaucrat, with whom they have discussed the whole matter, there by their side to impress upon the crude male dumper how mean and cruel he has been.

But the same thing applies with conservatives. Here is National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez writing about young women suffering crisis pregnancies. It's all about making sure that a woman never feels alone, that she always has someone to talk to.

Anne Koehl, a nurse who runs the Women’s Care Center in Fort Wayne, Ind., told me during a recent visit how when a woman seeking an abortion walks through the doors of her clinic, she listens and lets the woman make clear her needs, and she works to meet them. That’s her agenda — “the woman’s agenda.” It means loving the woman, letting her know she’s there to offer help, whether that help is diapers or mentoring — whatever she needs to make life go on.

This is obviously a world away from the male approach, which could probably be characterized by the bark of the drill instructor: "Get with the program, Jenkins!" To women, this is marvellous, as it was to the mother that described to me her amazement at the eagerness with which her son and his team-mates adapted to the discipline meted out by his Little League coach.

The great challenge to men in this modern age is that our male culture is not a culture of talk, it is a culture of action. We are facing the challenge that the more that women emerge into the public square the more they will change institutions from an action orientation to a discussion orientation.

No doubt there are many situations in this life that need discussion. There are others that need action. The challenge for our society is to let women dominate those areas that need discussion and for men to dominate those areas that need action.

No doubt, in the end, men and women will work all this out sensibly and instinctively, self-selecting into areas that suit their particular sensibilities.

Just don't look for any sense coming out of the political arena.

The Shrinking Middle Class: What To Do?

Liberal Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post is delighted. Finally, after 35 years of inaction -- since the Reagan recession of 1980-82 -- someone is doing something about the hole in the middle class. Here's the problem:

A gap between productivity gains and average family income — which didn’t exist in the three decades following World War II — opened in the 1970s and has only widened since.

After 30 years of inaction here comes President Obama with a solution.

This time, he had a concrete proposal to diminish the shift from income derived from work to income derived from investment — by raising the tax on capital gains and using the income to provide a tax credit to help working parents pay for child care. 

I guess what makes me dispirited about an opinion like this is the thought that Mr. Meyerson really believes it. By taking away money from capitalists and giving it away in a tax credit  he thinks we are really going to be able to boost middle class incomes. Where has he been?

Does he not get that taking money away from the capitalists and giving it away is exactly what Lenin did in Russia, exactly what the Castro Brothers did in Cuba, exactly what Chavez and now Maduro have been doing in Venezuela?

OK, let's admit that there are two narratives to account for the modern era.

One narrative is that the surprises of several economic revolutions have showered wealth upon all the people of the world, but disproportionately more wealth upon those communities that let capitalists get stinking rich.

The other narrative is that the benefits of economic production in the last two centuries only got shared because compassionate liberals forced the capitalists to share it out. You can see which side Harold Meyerson is on.

The president's new initiative is really cool, he writes:

Democrats have long sought to represent the interests of both business and labor... They’re the party that rewards work, that seeks to increase labor income even if — and you’d better believe they’ve polled on this — it means taking a bite out of capital income.

Hey, it might even win them back some of the white working class vote, he says. Yay!

OK. Here's my counterblast. (Aside from the fact that, given the swingeing taxes on business and labor, especially payroll taxes on labor collected by business, I'd say that Democrats are strongly opposed to both business and labor.)

The hollowing out in labor income since 1980, sez I, came from a number of secular trends and government policies. Let's list them, in no particular order.

• Labor income in the immediate post-WWII years artificially boosted by labor unions. After 1980, labor income reverted to the mean, as unionized companies went broke.
• Great Society programs that made it easier for people not to work, and imposed extremely high marginal tax rates on low-skilled workers trying to get off welfare.
• Entry of women into the workforce. More workers competing for jobs equals lower wages.
• Increased economic regulation.
• Staggering capital gains from the electronic, computer, and internet revolutions, that boosted capital income.
• Cheap money, which usually screws mom-and-pop savers.
• "Affordable housing" policy which has wiped out minority homeowners that got mortgages they couldn't afford.

Really, Harold Meyerson and I couldn't be further apart on this. For instance, I think that the current policy across the west of Zero Interest Rate Policy and Quantitative Easing is a clear sign that redistribution is failing. It is telling us that entrepreneurs and capitalists aren't investing enough in new jobs, so government has to pile on and help them by artificially lowering the interest rate. But Meyerson wants to reduce the return on capital with new taxes.

Look. Right now in the United States the governments are spending about $1 trillion a year on government pensions, $1 trillion a year in government health care, $1 trillion a year on government education, and $0.5 trillion a year on welfare. That's according to usgovernmentspending.com. All this money is straight-up redistribution.

So are we saying that $3.5 trillion a year in straight-up redistribution is not enough?

We are talking about $3.5 trillion in benefits that people don't have to work for. So no wonder the middle class doesn't work as hard as it might. And really, Harold Meyerson thinks that some fiddling with the capital gains tax and middle-class tax relief is going to fix the hollowing out of the middle class?

I tell you what scares me. Imagine what the economy would look like without the extraordinary wealth from electronics, computers, and the internet. And imagine the slashing articles Harold Meyerson would be writing to call for more redistribution from the greedy capitalists to the helpless middle class.