political partisanship

Pro-science = Pro-nuclear energy

by

Every time I see a meme like this…

…I can’t help but notice it’s missing a few lines. GMOs are safe. Humans begin as zygotes. And nuclear energy is efficient.

Ronald Bailey, the science correspondent for Reason, brought that last fact to my mind when he recently published the article “How We Screwed Up Nuclear Power.”

The Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in New Jersey opened in 1969. It cost $594 million (in 2017 dollars) and took four years to build. America’s newest nuclear plant, at Watts Bar in Tennessee, opened in 2016. It cost $7 billion and took more than 10 years to complete.

What happened? Anti-nuclear activism and regulation.

In general, scientists are a lot less concerned about nuclear power than the general public is. According to Pew Research, 65% of AAAS members–including 75% of working engineers and 79% of working physicists Ph.D’s–favor building more nuclear power plants, compared to only 45% of the public. If we are defining “pro-science” as “recognizing and agreeing with the majority view of scientists in the field,” then being pro-science would include being pro-nuclear energy.

Pew Research Center: Political Polarization from 1994-2017

by

According to Pew Research Center’s surveys, here is how the general public divided along partisan lines in 1994, 2004, 2014, and 2017.

The FB page Unbiased America has a post animating the changes with this summary image:

And with the following description (in part):

A common criticism from both parties has been that the other has become radicalized. Listen to just about any campaign speech and you’ll hear the time-tested demagoguery about how the opposition party is no longer moderate, but instead espouses views from the extreme. So I decided to see whether that’s actually the case.

The Pew Research Center does a poll asking Americans about their beliefs on a variety of issues. When plotted on a graph and then animated to show how ideologies have shifted over time, an eye-opening picture emerges. Since 1994, Republicans are only about 8% more conservative in their beliefs. Democrats, meanwhile, are fully 60% more liberal, with the median Democrat now closer to the far left than the center.

It wasn’t always this way. In 1994, the median Democrat was a centrist, holding views that were 50% traditionally liberal, and 50% traditionally conservative. The median Republican was only about 10% more conservative than the median Democrat.

Since that time, Republicans shifted left, and were the centrist party in 2004, before drifting back to the right. Today they are just slightly more conservative than in 1994.

Democrats, meanwhile, continue to move left, with the biggest surge coming between 2011 and 2017.

It’s interesting to see how everyone seemed to move left from 1994-2004, followed by the Democrats running in that direction and the Republicans walking it back. I wonder if the party with the President in office tends to shift less while the opposition party tends to react. It would be nice to have more timepoints to see (1996, 2000, 2008, 2012). Even if that were the case, though, it doesn’t look like the shifts cancel each other out as the Oval Office goes from one party to another; instead it looks as if the public is getting more polarized over time.

And as a quick aside, I’m not clear on why the Source info includes a survey from 2015 but the data is labeled 2014 instead.

Campus Free Speech Crisis a Myth?

by

The WaPo has an article claiming that there is no free-speech crisis, and providing stats to back up the claim. The article did not convince me. Here’s why.

It’s Not Just About Free Speech

The decline of free speech on college campuses is not the root problem; it’s a concerning symptom of a broader malady. In particular, the folks who are concerned about this issue posit that there’s a tendency of a radical minority to shut down political discourse as a political tactic. Although a lot of problems in the country are bipartisan, this one isn’t. It’s a peculiarly left-wing malady that reflects a growing contempt by many on the modern left for the values of liberalism that once defined it. I mean liberal in the old sense of the word, as in emphasizing individualism.

This isn’t an accusation from the outside, by the way, it’s an avowed element of one of the core intellectual components of Critical Race Theory. One definition states flatly that “CRT also rejects the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy.”

So it’s not that there’s this explicitly anti-free speech trend in college campuses. It’s that there’s a virulent new ideology that uses attacks on free speech as a first resort.

Not All Speech is Equal

This being the case, looking for general survey results that attack free speech is misguided on multiple levels. First, it’s possible that the anti-free speech crowd are too small to register much in surveys but still powerful enough to create a climate of fear. In fact, that’s basically exactly what people concerned about this issue are saying. Second, even if you can get a survey with enough granularity to pick up on this minority, they aren’t opposed to free speech in all cases, but only in some cases. If you ask them about the wrong cases, you won’t measure anything at all.

Bearing that in mind, what kind of survey does the WaPo piece rely on? One that asks whether or not gay people should be allowed to give a speech. I kid you not. That, and an example about an anti-American Muslim cleric, are the leading examples. If you wanted to design survey results to be willfully blind to the actual concern, you couldn’t do better than this.

What are We Trying to Measure?

Speaking of willfully blind, the last section cites research by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education that there were only 35 no-platforming attempts in 2017 with only 19 being successful. So, “In a country with over 4,700 schools, that hardly constitutes a crisis.”

The meaningless of this statistic is impressive, given that Jeffrey Adam Sachs went to the trouble of finding and citing a dataset, but apparently not copy-pasting it into Excel to do some super-basic charting. Your first question might be, “Well, 35 attempts in 2017 doesn’t sound too bad, but is there a trend?” That would be anybody’s first question, I’d think, and here’s what that chart looks like:

Well, gee. There’s an upward trend if ever I saw one. And remember, we said that this was an ideologically-biased trend. FIRE helpfully sorts the no-platforming attempts into left and right, so what does that breakdown look like?

We’ve got a more or less flat line from the right, and a pronounced, multi-year upward trend for the left starting a little less than 10 years ago. It’s almost as though all those people who are worried about a disturbing new anti-free speech trend coming from the political left might have something in the data to substantiate their concerns! Again: the same dataset that Sachs cited (but apparently didn’t really look at).

This doesn’t go directly to Sachs’ claim that 35 incidents out of 4,900 universities isn’t enough to care about, but that’s a questionable assumption if ever there was one. First of all, I’m curious as to what Sachs’ threshold is. How many times do left-wing radical have to shut-up speakers they don’t like in specifically the places ostensibly designated for discussing controversial, diverse ideas before it becomes a problem?

And then there’s the fact that this doesn’t reveal anything about how many controversial speakers never get invited at all because administrators don’t want to deal with protests? Counting free speech in terms of protests is fundamentally a strange concept. I would expect both a libertarian utopia and an Orwellian dystopia to have essentially zero protests, so what does the absence of protests say about free speech? Only that it’s not an issue. When it’s as prevalent as the air we breath, no one protests. And when it’s completely repressed, no one protests.

But when free speech is in a transitional period–away from or towards repression–well that’s when I’d expect to see a spike.

And keep in mind: there’s a lot more going on than just no-platforming. One of the most important functions of no-platforming is not only to dissuade controversial speakers from visiting the campus, but to create a climate of ideological intolerance and intimidation that keeps ordinary students from speaking their minds, something that is going on, as Sachs concedes: “Very conservative students also tend to report that they are less comfortable expressing themselves in the classroom than very liberal students.”

Final Thoughts

Some folks might not like that I’ve singled out the left in this piece, especially when I try to be even-handed. I get that. I do try to be even-handed. That’s not going to change. This post doesn’t represent a new, angrier, more partisan turn for me. This just happens to be one, specific, exceptional case where the cards don’t break evenly. The left has a bigger problem here.

But that doesn’t mean the right doesn’t have one! You could easily say that Trump’s populism and the entire Alt-Right is nothing but the right’s attempt to catch up with the left’s new-found identical politics. And you’d be right. And, lamentably, the right is a fast learner in this regard. It could very well be that–shortly–the right will have caught up with its own radical fringe of anti-free speech zealots.

Whether or not you call this a “crisis” is just semantics. What does seem evident is that there is a rise in no-platforming protests, that it is stemming primarily from the left, and that it is happening at the same time as a tide of research indicates ideological discrimination on campuses is widespread and pernicious for both students, professors, and research. For more on that, just check up on the Heterodox Academy’s problem statement.

Why do gun rights advocates fight common sense reform?

by

Each time our country focuses on the gun debate, a lot of proponents of gun control accuse gun rights advocates of not caring whether people die. It’s my impression that gun control proponents believe gun rights advocates disagree with gun control legislation because we are selfish, insane, and possibly sociopathic. If we cared about saving innocent lives, especially those of school children, why would we fight against common sense gun reform? I’d like to offer a few thoughts on how about half of America could disagree with certain gun control proposals for reasons other than mental or moral defect.

1) Gun rights advocates think of each gun policy in terms of a cost benefit analysis. Is there evidence that Policy X will decrease the frequency or lethality of mass shootings or of gun crime in general? How will the policy affect citizens’ abilities to defend themselves? Is it Constitutional?

It’s my impression that many gun control advocates don’t view policy proposals the same way. I’ve seen a lot to suggest gun control advocates believe (a) few or no people really use their guns in self defense and (b) either the Constitution has been interpreted incorrectly by SCOTUS or, even if the Founders did intend personal gun ownership, their views were borne of circumstances that no longer apply today. And I expect that if I too thought the factors of self-defense and Constitutionality were greatly exaggerated or even made up, I would view certain gun policies very differently. If you don’t believe the policy will cost anything substantial, you don’t really need to do a cost benefit analysis (and therefore you will have a very different idea of which reforms are “common sense”). I think, generally, that’s how most gun control advocates see this, but I’m open to correction there.

2) There seems to be an asymmetry of knowledge about guns between the gun control and gun rights sides, and it influences whether each side thinks a given policy will be effective or have undesirable side effects.

I get how gun rights advocates come off as pedantic when correcting terminology, and it’s easy for me to believe that there are people who really are just trying to feel superior or make the other side feel foolish. But I think the terminology and concepts are a lot more than semantics: they are directly relevant to the effects a given policy will have.

The gun control side may feel we’re making a big deal about small details, but it’s hard to discuss gun control proposals if neither our side nor your side is sure what exactly you’re talking about.

And from the gun rights side, it appears that the people most passionate and insistent on certain policies have little understanding of what those policies would mean. I’m really not trying to be rude and I’m sorry if it comes off that way. But the same side posting memes like this…

…just proposed legislation that would ban tens of millions of civilian-owned guns.

The bill prohibits the “sale, transfer, production, and importation” of semi-automatic rifles and pistols that can hold a detachable magazine, as well as semi-automatic rifles with a magazine that can hold more than 10 rounds. Additionally, the legislation bans the sale, transfer, production, and importation of semi-automatic shotguns with features such as a pistol grip or detachable stock, and ammunition feeding devices that can hold more than 10 rounds.

For reference, many of the most recommended pistols bought for home defense and as concealed carry firearms are semi-automatic and can hold more than 10 rounds; it’s also standard for pistols to have detachable magazines.

HR 5087 would ban the Glock G17 as an “assault weapon.”

I think for the most part the people who support that legislation don’t even realize that’s what the legislation would do. They believe it would ban only the so-called assault weapons that they further believe are used in most mass shootings. Neither of those beliefs are true.

3) I recognize some gun rights advocates have a knee jerk reaction against any limitation on guns; I think this reaction is primarily due to believing both that the legislation will make no positive difference and that it will be a slippery slope. The general impression from the gun rights side is that the gun control side neither understands guns nor cares how legislation would affect general gun ownership because they don’t believe people should have guns in any case. It’s not so much “We want to take your guns” as “we don’t know or care if the proposals we’re pushing will result in taking your guns.”

4) That said, there are proposals that even most gun owners would be fine with. Proposals focusing on who can have guns rather than which guns they can have seem to get pretty broad support. For example, Pew Research has found that most gun owners and non-gun owners alike support proposals focused on background checks, mental health issues, and no-fly lists.

Note the measures gun owners support the most all focus on who can access guns rather than which guns citizens can access.

More recently there seems to be momentum behind “red flag” measures which would allow authorities to temporarily take guns from people deemed dangerous. Such bills are primarily sponsored by Democrats but are seeing some Republican support too. I think the gun rights side generally believes that proposals that focus on the people rather than the guns are more likely to be both effective and Constitutional.

So why do gun rights advocates fight common sense gun reform? To summarize:

  1. We don’t believe many of these policies would accomplish what proponents claim.
  2. We’re worried about inhibiting citizen self-defense.
  3. We’re concerned about the Constitutionality of some of these policies.
  4. We suspect the people pushing for these reforms don’t understand or care about the full effects of these policies.

None of this means we don’t care if innocent people are hurt. That’s why we do support some gun reforms: specifically the policies we believe will best ensure the safety of ourselves and others while respecting Constitutional rights.

Are Democrats Outdoing Republicans When It Comes to Family Values?

by

Not really, despite what Nicholas Kristof has recently claimed. As W. Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia explains,

Here, Kristof is indebted to a book by family scholars Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, Red Families v. Blue Families, which makes the case that blue states have more successful and stable families than do red states. Arkansas, for instance, has one of the highest divorce rates in the nation, whereas Massachusetts has one of the lowest.

…But this state-based argument obscures more than it illuminates about the links between partisanship and family life for ordinary families in America. Scholars and journalists who have bought into the idea that red Americans are hypocrites on family values because some red states do poorly when it comes to family stability are committing what is called the “ecological fallacy” of conflating the family behaviors of individual conservatives with the family behaviors of states dominated by conservatives.

…Indeed, when we look not at states but at counties in the United States, we see that counties that lean Republican across the country as a whole have more marriage, less nonmarital childbearing, and more family stability than counties that lean Democratic. In fact, an Institute for Family Studies report I authored found, “teens in red counties are more likely to be living with their biological parents, compared to children living in bluer counties.” So, even at the community level, the story about marriage and family instability looks a lot different depending on whether or not one is looking at state or county trends. At the county level, then, the argument that Red America is doing worse than Blue America isn’t true.

Finally, when we turn to the individual level, the conservatives-are-family-values-hypocrites thesis really falls apart. Republicans are more likely to be married, and happily married, than independents and Democrats, as Nicholas Wolfinger and I recently showed in a research brief for the Institute for Family Studies. They are also less likely to cheat on their spouses and less likely to be divorced, compared with independents and Democrats. So, Donald Trump is the exception, not the norm, for Republicans.

He continues,

When it comes to family stability, Republican parents are less likely to be divorced. In fact, Republican parents who have ever been married are at least 5 percentage points less likely to have been divorced, compared with their fellow citizens. The 2017 American Family Survey also indicates Republicans are less likely to have their first child outside of marriage, compared with Democrats and independents. So, contra Kristof, it’s actually Republicans, not Democrats, who are more likely to enjoy a stable, happy family life anchored around marriage…When American parents are separated by whether or not they have a college degree, it turns out that Republican parents have about a 10-percentage-point advantage in the likelihood that they are in their first marriage. In both college-educated communities and less-educated communities, then, it looks like Republican parents are more likely to be raising their children in their first marriage…[E]ven [when] we limit our focus to whites, we still see that white Republican parents are more likely to be in their first marriage. Specifically, 62 percent of white Republican parents are in their first marriage, compared with 54 percent of white Democratic and 44 percent of white independent parents…When we break out parents by those who attend religious services frequently (several times a month or more) versus parents who attend infrequently or never, Republicans still have an advantage in both the more religious and less religious groups. In fact, in both groups, Republican parents are more likely to be in first marriages than their fellow citizens. Moreover, even after controlling for religiosity, as well as education, race, ethnicity, region and age, the data indicate that Republican parents are still more likely to be in their first marriage, compared with Democrats.

graphic3.png

“[B]ecause married parents are more prosperous and less dependent on government for their financial security,” he writes, “[Republicans] are less likely to gravitate to the Democratic Party and more likely to gravitate to the party of small government and lower taxes. Indeed, counties with large numbers of lower-income single parents are more likely to lean Democratic, partly because the Democratic Party supports policies designed to provide them with more financial security. The figure below is illustrative of the link between family structure and voting at the county level in 2016.”

graphic8.png

Wilcox highlighted this last point in a City Journal article back in July:

The problem with the progressive approach to poverty is that it denies the importance of culture and character to household prosperity—especially when it comes to marriage…Wendy Wang of the Institute for Family Studies and I recently co-authored a report, The Millennial Success Sequence, which demonstrates and quantifies the extent to which early life choices correlate with personal affluence. Though young people take a variety of paths into adulthood—arranging school, work, and family in a dizzying array of combinations—one path stood out as most likely to be linked to financial success for young adults. Brookings scholars Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill have identified the “success sequence,” through which young adults who follow three steps—getting at least a high school degree, then working full-time, and then marrying before having any children, in that order—are very unlikely to become poor. In fact, 97 percent of millennials who have followed the success sequence are not in poverty by the time they reach the ages of 28 to 34.

Sequence-following millennials are also markedly more likely to flourish financially than their peers taking different paths; 89 percent of 28-to-34 year olds who have followed the sequence stand at the middle or upper end of the income distribution, compared with just 59 percent of Millennials who missed one or two steps in the sequence. The formula even works for young adults who have faced heavier odds, such as millennials who grew up poor, or black millennials; despite questions regarding socioeconomic privilege, our research suggests that the success sequence is associated with better outcomes for everyone. For instance, only 9 percent of black millennials who have followed the three steps of the sequence, or who are on track with the sequence (which means they have at least a high school degree and worked full-time in their twenties, but have not yet married or had children) are poor, compared with a 37 percent rate of poverty for blacks who have skipped one or two steps. Likewise, only 9 percent of young men and women from lower-income families who follow the sequence are poor in their late twenties and early thirties; by comparison, 31 percent of their peers from low-income families who missed one or two steps are now poor.

…Young men and (especially) women who put “marriage before the baby carriage” get access to the financial benefits of a partnership—income pooling, economies of scale, support from kinship networks—with fewer of the risks of an unmarried partnership, including breakups. By contrast, millennials who have a baby outside of marriage—even in a cohabiting union—are likelier to end up as single parents or paying child support, both of which increase the odds of poverty. One study found that cohabiting parents were three times more likely to break up than were married parents by the time their first child turned five: 39 percent of cohabiting parents broke up, versus 13 percent of married parents in the first five years of their child’s life. The stability associated with marriage, then, tends to give millennials and their children much more financial security.

In a Hoover Institute interview, Yuval Levin commented, “Today’s progressivism–for all of its talk of communitarianism and of ‘we’ and of ‘You didn’t build that’–the purpose of it really is to liberate the individual from dependence on other people. It is in fact based on a very radical individualism that at the end of the day wants total moral individualism and is willing to abide some economic collectivism to get there.” The data above seem to confirm this suspicion.

Politicization and the Fall of Academia

by
The ivory towers of King’s College London’s Maughan Library (Public Domain)

I’ve often met academics who seem mystified and horrified at the extent and depth of conservative animus towards academia. This excellent article does a great job of explaining (1) where this dislike comes from and (2) why it should concern everyone, and not just conservatives.

First:

Entire disciplines—Literature, Anthropology, Sociology, and the various interdisciplinary programs that end in the word “Studies” – have all become more strongly associated with a particular species of left-wing interpretation that now influences the broader discourse in journalism and on social media. In some departments, the social categories of analysis—race, class, and gender—have attained complete hegemony. The most recent convention of the Modern Language Association, the most prominent organization associated with the study of language and literature, hosted three times as many panels on post-colonialism as it did on Shakespeare.

Second:

Conservatives will point to statistics such as the imbalance in the ratio between registered Democrats and Republicans as evidence of a political imbalance. Students it is argued are only getting one side of the story. While this sentiment is certainly understandable, it ignores an element of the current phenomena that might be even more deleterious to student learning and thus all the more intractable. The problem isn’t simply one of political imbalance, an absence of parity between Left and Right voices, but the extent to which humanities departments have become politicized.

I’m a conservative (more or less), and so I have an interest in conservatives being able to get their message out. But–independent of that partisan concern which I cannot pretend I do not feel–I have a sincere, non-partisan interest in the quality of public discourse. The politicization of everything is corroding that discourse. When everything is evaluated first in political terms, the conversation often fails to ever get beyond those preliminaries. Battle lines are drawn over rhetoric, terminology, tone, and framing. What’s left is a zombie-discourse, the husk of a conversation serving as a thin veneer for power games.

It’s bad for everyone.

It’s especially bad for academia. If folks like those at Heterodox Academy don’t manage to hold onto a middle-ground position, I’m not sure what the future of the academy in the United States looks like, but it will likely be quite grim. Elite institutions are already much more about the perpetuation of  elitism than education. When the academic content of academia effectively disappears, there will be nothing left except the quasi-covert apparatus of aristocracy.

The Economic Consequences of Political Partisanship

by

Image result for partisanship

I’ve mentioned the tribal nature of politics before and its tendency to make us mean and dumb. Now check out the findings from a new paper:

In the first experiment, carried out in a nationwide online labor market, we assess whether partisan congruence between employer and employee influences the willingness of the latter to work, as well as the quality of work they perform. We do so by tracking the wage proposals and task performance of freelance editors when the document they edit indicates whether their employers are co-partisans or supporters of the out-party. Study 2 examines whether partisan considerations also affect consumer behavior. Specifically, we explore whether people are less likely to pursue an attractive purchasing opportunity if the seller is affiliated with the out-party, and more likely to do so if the seller is a co-partisan. We conducted another field experiment that uses an online marketplace to study this question in a more naturalistic setting, albeit one that relies on ecological inferences. Finally, we replicate these patterns in the context of an incentivized, population-based survey experiment, where we find that fully three-quarters of respondents are willing to forego higher personal remuneration to avoid benefitting the opposing party.

Taken together, our studies offer substantial evidence that partisanship shapes real-world economic decisions. All four experiments offer evidence that partisanship influences economic behavior even when there are real pecuniary or professional costs. Although the effect sizes vary somewhat across contexts, in some situations, they are quite large. For example, the effect of partisanship on reservation wages in the labor market experiment is comparable to the effect of task-relevant skills such as education and experience. In the marketplace, consumers are much more likely—almost two times as likely—to engage in a transaction when their partisanship matches that of the seller. In our survey experiment, three quarters of all subjects forego a higher monetary payment to avoid helping the other party. We show that these effects of partisanship are at least as large as the effects of religion, another well-known and salient social cleavage. Even among weak or leaning partisans, fully two-thirds of them reject the partisan offer. In sum, partisanship’s effect on economic decisions is not only real but often also sizable, extending throughout the electorate.

…The results underscore the power of partisanship as a social identity in an era of polarized parties—partisanship can shape apolitical behavior, including economic transactions. The results also call for paying greater attention to potential discrimination based on partisan affiliation. To date, few social norms are in place to constrain it, as they are with respect to unequal treatment along other social divides (e.g., race and gender). Our analysis suggests that partisan-based discrimination may occur even in the most basic economic settings, and as such should be the subject of more systematic scrutiny (pgs. 3-5).

Hooligans in action.

Mr. Pence and Mrs. Butterworth

by

Let me start out at the outset by saying that The Onion’s spoof of the WaPo’s revelation that Mike Pence “never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won’t attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either” is hilarious: Mike Pence Asks Waiter To Remove Mrs. Butterworth From Table Until Wife Arrives.

Let me add, as a second point, that the issue of unequal treatment of women is very much alive today, and affects many women, especially those working in male-dominated sectors like engineering and computer science. We’ll come back to that at the end.

The mini-debate that has been ongoing on about Pence’s policy has been quite interesting. At least one friend on Facebook compared it to The Great Dress Debacle of 2015: conservatives found Pence’s stance perfectly normal while liberals were split between ridiculing him and accusing him of practicing Sharia. Lest you think I’m joking, here’s one example cadged from The Federalist:

So, here are a couple of thoughts.

First, some folks seem to be missing the primary point of a rule like this. It is not, as the mockers deride, because Mr. Pence’s self-control is so flimsy he is afraid that merely sitting next to a woman in a restaurant without supervision would place him in danger of fornicating right there on the spot.

This isn’t a minor confusion. It’s a fundamental misapprehension of an ancient worldview that Christians still adhere to. In religious language: we’re all weak, vulnerable, and prone to sin. In modern, secular language: we’re irrational and often behave in ways that counter our own best interests and/or confound the values and goals we think we have. Doesn’t matter if you call it “fallen nature” or “cognitive bias”, in this context we’re talking about the same thing.

So how does this play out? The most common way that Christians (or other social conservatives) might try to explain a rule like Pence’s goes something like this: Anyone who goes on a diet will start by throwing out all the tempting food in their house.

The problem is that this analogy is very easy to misunderstand. One interpretation–the wrong one–is that cheating on your wife is the same kind of momentary lapse as cheating on your diet. It’s as though absent-mindedly chomping down on a Krispy Kreme you forgot to throw out is equivalent to absent-mindedly wandering into a hotel room with a woman you’re not married too. Lots of folks get as far as this (silly) interpretation and stop there.

The actual interpretation of the metaphor is quite different. It is saying that good behavior is not just about making the right decisions in the moment. It’s about manipulating your environment to make it conducive to the kind of behavior that you want in your life. Social conservatives understand that because we’re irrational creatures with amazing abilities to rationalize our ways into following short-term desires part of being virtuous isn’t just saying no to temptation in the moment, but avoiding it altogether.

Pence’s rule doesn’t draw the line at the moment when he’s tempted to be sexually unfaithful to his wife. It draws the line much, much earlier and so prevents the first seeds of infidelity from ever having a chance to take root in the first place.

I don’t follow Pence’s rule. I think it’s overkill. I’m not interested in trying to convince anyone that his particular rule should be some kind of universal standard for everyone. But I don’t think it’s ridiculous or absurd either. After all–in addition to the concerns about compromising marital fidelity out of an initially innocent friendship–there’s also legitimate concerns about being taken advantage of. Politicians are powerful and that also makes them vulnerable. Just ask the KGB (the FSB, these days) which has employed agents to try and seduce traveling politicians and officials for decades and decades in order to blackmail their targets into betraying state secrets. This is, by the way, one of the reasons that the CIA, FBI, and many other agencies are fond of hiring Mormons. Not only are we extremely family-focused (I know lots of Mormons who follow Pence’s rules), but we also don’t drink. Taken together, this means observant Mormons are less likely to be compromised in this way than the average population.

In the wake of the Republicans failing to pass the AHCA, there was a nauseating avalanche of cutesy Facebook posts from liberal fans of Hamilton. Here’s one:

If you missed the reference, it’s from Cabinet Battle #1, when Madison and Jefferson taunt Hamilton. Other favorites included “Winning was easy… Governing’s harder” and “Do you know how hard it is to lead?”

The funny thing is, if Alexander Hamilton had followed a rule like Mike Pence’s, he could have avoided his part in America’s first political sex-scandal, saved his family a lot of agony, and spared Lin-Manuel Miranda a song or two.

And that brings me to my second point. Just as liberals are happy to take very selective lessons from Hamilton, there’s an awful weird dichotomy in a town where liberals practice all kinds of non-judgmentalism for open marriages but are more than happy to ridicule and deride someone for trying to keep their marriage closed. That’s the point Jonah Goldberg made at the National Review:

Last summer, when Bill Clinton spoke about his wife at the Democratic convention (“In the spring of 1971, I met a girl . . . ”), liberals gushed at the “love story,” and the rule of the day was that marriage is complicated and the Clintons’ ability to stay married (though practically separated) was admirable. Besides, “Who are we to judge?” — no doubt Bill Clinton’s favorite maxim.

It’s a very strange place we’ve found ourselves in when elites say we have no right to judge adultery, but we have every right to judge couples who take steps to avoid it.

He’s not wrong, you know.

I do think there are some legitimate concerns. The most important being that if you’re, say, a business executive who follows these rules, does it mean that you’re creating an environment where you give preferential treatment to men? If a young, up-and-coming male executive could ask you out to lunch to seek your advice, but a young, up-and-coming female executive cannot, then we do have a legitimate problem. It’s also possible to simply take this stance too far. I don’t recall conservatives having a problem with forcing Muslim boys to shake hands with their (female) teachers in Switzerland, for example.

So I’m not saying that it’s impossible to have questions and concerns about a position like Pence’s. But the degree of hostility and deliberate (or at least, lazy) misunderstanding of the rules that the Pences have agreed on for their own marriage are at least as concerning as the rules themselves.

How Do Professors Vote?

by

They vote Democrat. No one saw that coming…

Image result for you don't say gif imgur

At least those in economics, history, journalism, law, and psychology, according to a 2016 study. The abstract reads,

We investigate the voter registration of faculty at 40 leading U.S. universities in the fields of Economics, History, Journalism/Communications, Law, and Psychology. We looked up 7,243 professors and found 3,623 to be registered Democratic and 314 Republican, for an overall D:R ratio of 11.5:1. The D:R ratios for the five fields were: Economics 4.5:1, History 33.5:1, Journalism/Communications 20.0:1, Law 8.6:1, and Psychology 17.4:1. The results indicate that D:R ratios have increased since 2004, and the age profile suggests that in the future they will be even higher. We provide a breakdown by department at each university. The data support the established finding that D:R ratios are highest at the apex of disciplinary pyramids, that is, at the most prestigious departments. We also examine how D:R ratios vary by gender and by region. People interested in ideological diversity or concerned about the errors of leftist outlooks—including students, parents, donors, and taxpayers—might find our results deeply troubling.

Langbert, Quain, Klein, 2016, pg. 425.

Of course, this is nothing new. For example, Jonathan Haidt and colleagues recently highlighted the lack of political diversity in academic psychology. What’s particularly interesting to me, however, is the D:R ratio in economics. I recall a Facebook discussion toward the end of last year in which this bias was downplayed and economic departments were more-or-less given as examples of conservative (read Republican) hubs on campus. I already knew this wasn’t true and said as much, but my comment was pretty much ignored. This exchange made me realize that many outsiders likely think mainstream economics is tainted by an American brand of conservatism. But more important, it made me realize that some (many?) on the left reject the findings of mainstream economics because they think it’s politically biased.

So, to those who think economic departments are full of conservatives: yes, these departments are more conservative than others. But the only way they could be labeled “conservative” is due to other departments being so far to the left. Basically, econ departments are more politically diverse. Nonetheless, they are still dominated by Democrats. While this may not instill confidence in my Republican friends, perhaps it will convert some of my Democrat ones.

From Gregory Mankiw’s Principles of Economics, 7th ed. (pg. 32).

The Real War on Science

by

trust-me-im-a-scientists

New York Times reporter and best-seller John Tierny published an excellent article with City Journal in which he argues that the Left has waged a far more damaging and effective war on science than the Right, despite narratives to the contrary. The whole article is worth reading, but among his examples include:

  1. Extensive confirmation bias (and other biases) in the social sciences that result in skewed research, particularly regarding research comparing left-wing people and right-wing people.
  2. Taboos against valid research: for example, discouraging or outright condemning research that (a) explores genetic differences between genders or races (unless the genetic differences relate to differences in sexual orientation) or (b) finds negative impacts of single-parent households, LGBT parenting, or putting children in childcare versus stay-at-home parenting.
  3. Politicizing (and thus corrupting) research on (a) genetics and animal breeding (contributing to the eugenics movement of the early 20th century),  (b) overpopulation (contributing, Tierny argues, to China’s immoral and disastrous one-child policy), (c) environmental science (contributing to many different problems, such as increased death tolls from malaria when DDT was restricted or the spread of dengue and Zika virus due to needless fears of insecticides), and (d) food science (pushing low fat diets and greatly increasing American consumption of carbohydrates).

Tierny argues that possibly one of the greatest casualties of the Left’s war on science is the reputation of scientists. As he puts it: “Bad research can be exposed and discarded, but bad reputations endure.”

The whole article is worth reading, but here is a sampling:

In a classic study of peer review, 75 psychologists were asked to referee a paper about the mental health of left-wing student activists. Some referees saw a version of the paper showing that the student activists’ mental health was above normal; others saw different data, showing it to be below normal. Sure enough, the more liberal referees were more likely to recommend publishing the paper favorable to the left-wing activists. When the conclusion went the other way, they quickly found problems with its methodology.

 

The narrative that Republicans are antiscience has been fed by well-publicized studies reporting that conservatives are more close-minded and dogmatic than liberals are. But these conclusions have been based on questions asking people how strongly they cling to traditional morality and religion—dogmas that matter a lot more to conservatives than to liberals. A few other studies—not well-publicized—have shown that liberals can be just as close-minded when their own beliefs, such as their feelings about the environment or Barack Obama, are challenged.

Social psychologists have often reported that conservatives are more prejudiced against other social groups than liberals are. But one of Haidt’s coauthors, Jarret Crawford of the College of New Jersey, recently noted a glaring problem with these studies: they typically involve attitudes toward groups that lean left, like African-Americans and communists. When Crawford (who is a liberal) did his own study involving a wider range of groups, he found that prejudice is bipartisan. Liberals display strong prejudice against religious Christians and other groups they perceive as right of center.

Conservatives have been variously pathologized as unethical, antisocial, and irrational simply because they don’t share beliefs that seem self-evident to liberals. For instance, one study explored ethical decision making by asking people whether they would formally support a female colleague’s complaint of sexual harassment. There was no way to know if the complaint was justified, but anyone who didn’t automatically side with the woman was put in the unethical category. Another study asked people whether they believed that “in the long run, hard work usually brings a better life”—and then classified a yes answer as a “rationalization of inequality.” Another study asked people if they agreed that “the Earth has plenty of natural resources if we just learn how to develop them”—a view held by many experts in resource economics, but the psychologists pathologized it as a “denial of environmental realities.”

 

For his part, Holdren [a previous advocate of forced population control in the U.S.] has served for the past eight years as the science advisor to President Obama, a position from which he laments that Americans don’t take his warnings on climate change seriously. He doesn’t seem to realize that public skepticism has a lot to do with the dismal track record of himself and his fellow environmentalists. There’s always an apocalypse requiring the expansion of state power. The visions of global famine were followed by more failed predictions, such as an “age of scarcity” due to vanishing supplies of energy and natural resources and epidemics of cancer and infertility caused by synthetic chemicals. In a 1976 book, The Genesis Strategy, the climatologist Stephen Schneider advocated a new fourth branch of the federal government (with experts like himself serving 20-year terms) to deal with the imminent crisis of global cooling. He later switched to become a leader in the global-warming debate.

 

Yet many climate researchers are passing off their political opinions as science, just as Obama does, and they’re even using that absurdly unscientific term “denier” as if they were priests guarding some eternal truth. Science advances by continually challenging and testing hypotheses, but the modern Left has become obsessed with silencing heretics. In a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch last year, 20 climate scientists urged her to use federal racketeering laws to prosecute corporations and think tanks that have “deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.” Similar assaults on free speech are endorsed in the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform, which calls for prosecution of companies that make “misleading” statements about “the scientific reality of climate change.” A group of Democratic state attorneys general coordinated an assault on climate skeptics by subpoenaing records from fossil-fuel companies and free-market think tanks, supposedly as part of investigations to prosecute corporate fraud. Such prosecutions may go nowhere in court—they’re blatant violations of the First Amendment—but that’s not their purpose. By demanding a decade’s worth of e-mail and other records, the Democratic inquisitors and their scientist allies want to harass climate dissidents and intimidate their donors.

 

Related reading: