Monthly Archives: June 2008

Technology and the Status Game

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Over at TPMCafe Book Club, Internet guru Clay Shirky and tech policy wizard Tim Lee are discussing the old debate between Henry Farrell and me about the proliferation of status dimensions enabled by wealth and the development of new technology, and whether or not there is some kind of meta-ranking of status dimensions.

To Henry’s attempt at a sort of comic reductio in the example of a “level 75 Night Elf Rogue who Kicks Serious Ass!”, Clay responds:

Now this example is designed to be an absurd extreme, and Henry says as much, but even in its seemingly absurd form, I’m not on board with it. As I write this, Tiger Woods may be making some sort of golf history, burnishing further his already highly burnished reputation & c., and yet, given the choice, I’d much rather have dinner with the elf. I don’t care about golf, but I do care about Warcraft, and someone with that degree of expertise is a big deal in my book.

One obvious objection is that I am simply a pallid, pencil-necked geek who doesn’t understand the implicit meta-ranking of golf over WoW, but in fact, I am a pallid, pencil-necked geek who understands the implicit meta-ranking of golf over WoW perfectly well. The NY Times never puts serious Warcraft players on the front page of the sports section, much less the front page over all, so the general social importance of golf is hardly lost on me.

I simply don’t care. That most of my fellow citizens prefer golf to WoW doesn’t make me feel bad that I don’t, which I take to be Wilkinson’s point.

Yup.

Tim does an outstanding job of explaining why new technology makes the existence of a meta-ranking more and more unlikely.

What I think lends Farrell’s claim of “implicit meta-rankings” some plausibility is the fact that, until recently, the national media provided something like a uniform yardstick for status. In 1970, whoever appeared on national television and in national magazines on a regular basis was a celebrity by definition. And because there were only three television networks and a dozen or so national magazines, the top end of the status hierarchy really was close to zero-sum. If you appeared on Johnny Carson, you displaced somebody else.

But as the Internet removes the artificial scarcity of soapboxes, it is becoming increasingly implausible to suggest that everyone’s fighting for a spot on a fixed national pecking order. Case in point: I just got back home from a road trip with my fiancée, and she brought along her iPod stocked with knitting podcasts. I wasn’t aware of it until recently, but there is, apparently, a vibrant online community devoted to swapping knitting tips, complete with its own blogs, forums, podcasts, and minor celebrities. I’m sure there were a few famous authors in 1970 who wrote about knitting, but the national conversation around knitting is incomparably larger and more participatory than it was in 1970. The rise of an online knitting subculture has created a whole new status hierarchy for knitting enthusiasts to compete over.

Later, in an IM, Tim pointed out that because knitting is “done mostly by women it’s harder to place on the male-dominated Night-Elf to Football quarterback spectrum that seems to be what people have in mind when they’re positing a monolithic pecking order.” I think that’s a great observation.

More Tiny Humans for the Glory of Our Kind!

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The inestimable Kerry Howley’s outstanding Reason cover piece on fertility panics is now online. Like the typical Howley production, this is a super-readable combo of fascinating facts and trenchant analysis. Kerry’s great on why talk about “desired fertility” is silly, but I think she’s most insightful on the cultural aspects of fertility policy:

For those who, with good reason, worry about the solvency of transfer programs in an age of population decline, replacement immigration looks like a partial solution, and therefore xenophobia is part of the problem. But for many if not most of the people preoccupied by fertility rates, immigration is no solution at all. The question isn’t about whether the United States, Singapore, or France will be without people in 2100; it’s about what kind of people will populate those countries: what they will look like, what they will teach in their schools, what God they will bow before. Mark Steyn’s America Alone warns that within a few generations Europe will be a Muslim continent. When Pat Buchanan discusses depopulation in The Death of the West, he does not proceed to suggest we replace children of European descent with Mexican laborers. Pro-natalist policies in Quebec, Singapore, and until recently Israel implicitly target a preferred ethnic group, attempting to fill the future with the demographics desired by the current political class.

[...]

At the heart of any fertility incentive lies an attempt to encourage a particular group of women to orient their bodies in a traditional way. Every pro-fertility policy is an effort to slow cultural transformation, to stabilize a society’s ethnic composition, to ossify a current conception of a national culture by freezing the genetic makeup of a nation. From Poland to Singapore, swollen wombs are a bulwark against change.

There is a reason we speak of “Mother Russia” and “Mother India.” Feminist sociologists such as Nira Yuval-Davis refer to women as the “boundary markers” of a state or society. While men may leave, fight, and be compromised, women represent purity and continuity. Yuval-Davis points out in her book Gender and Nation that the Hitler Youth Movement had different mottos for girls and boys. The boys’ motto was: “Live faithfully; fight bravely; die laughing.” For girls: “Be faithful; be pure; be German.” Girls simply had to be. They were the collective.

In times of great social anxiety, we see new calls for women to return to home and hearth—calls alternately cast as a return to tradition and as a progressive leap forward, but efforts, nonetheless, to enlist women in a national project while defining the boundaries of national inclusion. Depopulation is not a given, but ideologically fraught and scientifically questionable debates about gender, race, and culture will be with us no matter which way the population swings. “To know what demography is, we need to know what a population is,” the French social scientist Herve Le Bras wrote in The Invention of Populations. “That is where the trouble begins.”

Spot on! The way I see it, those obsessed with fertility are people who think the culture they desire cannot possibly win the argument against competing cultures. So, they conclude, it’s down to brute baby-making force: the culture that wins the fertility war wins the culture war. In contrast, I think liberal market culture has such immense, salient rewards (wealth, longevity, happiness, etc.) that it is not only possible to win the argument, but that we are in fact winning it. Of course, part of the winning is dynamist cultural synthesis. So if you’ve got a conservative, zoological view of cultural preservation which fixes on the importance of high-fidelity copying of inessential aspects of a culture’s history (costumes, holidays, rites, cuisine, skin colors etc.), you’re going to have a hard time of it. But if you care about the essential core of liberal modernity, you should be delighted with how things are going. You’ll eat your szechuan taco pizza and you’ll love it.

Return Migration

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Until my recent upsurge in interest in migration issues, thanks to Kerry, I had assumed that relocation was something people did for good and that people came to America to become Americans. I wasn’t aware of the large masses of Poles, Italians, Irish, etc., who came to the U.S. to work for a while, and then left again. And there’s a good reason for that: those people’s ancestors didn’t write American social studies textbooks. Anyway, most Mexicans don’t care that much to be Americans, either. But a lot of them would like to work here. And then, eventually, go home.

This story from Reuter’s about Polish immigrants to England moving back to Poland does a good job of illustrating the dynamic:

Four years after Polish graphic designer Chris Rychter headed to Britain to find work and study as a citizen of the European Union, he and his wife have returned home.

Part of a swelling tide of migration back east, they are having a house built in a suburb of the Polish capital.

“It took me just three days to find a job back in Warsaw,” Rychter, 27, told Reuters. “We never saw Britain as home… We went for the adventure and to get some professional experience.”

[...]

the Rychters show how Europe has shrunk and that — contrary to a popular view — migrant flows are not all one-way.

Economists now see a turnstile or pendulum effect of people moving between countries after quite short stints, in search of better conditions.

Statistics on migration within the 27-nation EU are not precise, but around half of an estimated one million people from eastern Europe who moved to Britain since 2004 have already returned home, according to a recent report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a British think-tank.

Increased labor market integration with Mexico would help improve the Mexican economy, making it relatively more attractive for Mexicans to stay or return, just like it’s doing for Poland.

Clark on Polanyi (the Bad One)

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Greg Clark’s NY Sun takedown of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is ripping good fun. This response, by a sociologist, is entertaining for other reasons. For example, I like how it starts out strong by pointing out that Sun is a neocon rag. The commenters at Mark Thoma’s, from whence comes the link, are aghast at Clark’s lack of reverence for the wrong Polanyi. Anyway, I want more new reviews of sixty year-old books!

Lost Canadians

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Speaking of citizenships, I just learned that had Canadian law been what it is now when my father immigrated, I would now also be a Canadian citizen, which would be awesome. But, as it was prior to 1977, my father lost his Canadian citizenship when he became a naturalized American citizen, and so I was thereby preemptively stripped of my ancestral Canadian rights. Why Canada? Why?

Why Is Switzerland the World's Most Immigrant-Friendly Country?

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I have to say I was pretty surprised the first time I saw this OECD graph, which shows the foreign-born as a percentage of total population [Click for full size]:

Why was I surprised? Because it’s relatively hard to become a citizen of Switzerland. But that was me thinking a path to citizenship and residency and work rights were a kind of logical package deal. And that’s wrong. So maybe Switzerland’s lack of birthright citizenship and relatively arduous naturalization process help explain their receptivity to immigration. I don’t know. And I don’t know about Swiss welfare eligibility rules either. (Anyone?) But it now strikes me that my initial surprise was probably misplaced.

That said, it doesn’t seem all that tough to become a citizen of Australia, another America-shaming immigrant haven, although it does seem that getting born in Australia is no longer good enough.

Welfare Magnetism

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Poking around looking for stuff about immigration and welfare, I found this 1997 Dallas Fed paper by Madeline Zavodny. Here’s her conclusion:

Much of the motivation for eliminating most immigrants’ access to federally funded public assistance benefits was concern that persons migrate to the United States because of the availability of welfare benefits. The 1996 welfare law makes noncitizens ineligible for food stamps and SSI payments and allows states to discontinue AFDC, Medicaid, and other public assistance benefits to noncitizens. Several states intend to continue extending benefits to noncitizens, whereas others are likely to cut off benefits, widening the already substantial differences in welfare benefits across states. These differences in policy create concern that immigrants will move in response to interstate differentials and that states that continue to allow immigrants to receive welfare payments will become welfare magnets.

In this article, I find little evidence to support the contention that new immigrants will choose their destinations based on welfare generosity. New immigrants are attracted to areas with large immigrant populations. Because earlier immigrants are disproportionately located in high-welfare states, it may appear that high welfare benefits attract immigrants. However, immigrants do not respond to interstate differentials in welfare generosity but rather to differences in the sizes of the foreign born populations. Immigrants are also attracted to a specific subset of states—namely California, New York, Florida, and Texas—and do not respond to changes in welfare benefits within states over time. The recent historical evidence gives little reason to be concerned that new immigrants will choose their destinations based on the welfare differentials created by the new welfare law.

This is notable for two reasons. First, it seems like most people don’t know that the 1996 welfare reform made most noncitizens ineligible for most federal benefits. I didn’t either, until fairly recently. Second, it supports the idea that welfare isn’t a significant factor in immigrants’ choices about where to go. Maybe this has changed in the last 10 years; I’d like to see a more recent study. But I’d guess this holds up.

Unfair in the Abstract, Fair in the Concrete

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Over at Psychology Today, Josh Knobe reports on a new experiment by Shaun Nichols (see me diavlog with Nichols here) and Chris Freiman (an IHS friend of mine and David Schmidtz advisee):

Subjects who had been assigned to receive an abstract question were asked:

Suppose that some people make more money than others solely because they have genetic advantages. Please tell us whether you agree with the following statement:

- It is fair that those genetically-advantaged people make more money than others.

Meanwhile, subjects who had been assigned to receive a concrete question were asked:

Suppose that Amy and Beth both want to be professional jazz singers. They both practice singing equally hard. Although jazz singing is the greatest natural talent of both Amy and Beth, Beth’s vocal range and articulation is naturally better than Amy’s because of differences in their genetics. Solely as a result of this genetic advantage, Beth’s singing is much more impressive. As a result, Beth attracts bigger audiences and hence gets more money than Amy. Please tell us whether you agree with the following statement:

- It is fair that Beth makes more money than Amy.

Surprisingly, subjects who were given the abstract question said that it was not fair, but subjects who were given the concrete question said that it actually was fair! In other words, it seems that each individual person is torn between left and right. People seem to have a kind of leftist intuition in the abstract but to move to the right when they turn to more concrete cases. Perhaps the differences we observe between the views of different individuals are due in part to the degree to which they hold on to this abstract principle.

I don’t actually think this is very surprising. Of course, the actual explanation of any pattern of holdings is always concrete. So repeat the Beth and Amy case a million times over, and you should still get “fair”. I’d guess this is why people with left-leaning ideologies tend not to unreflectively think that the relative success of friends and family is unfair. If pushed, they might retreat to higher level of abstraction and say they do think it’s unfair, but their revealed day-to-day talk and behavior tends not to reveal any serious suspicion of injustice in their own case.

Milton Friedman's Argument for Illegal Immigration

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Yesterday at Hit & Run, Kerry Howley put up a brilliant post on Milton Friedman’s most misused utterance (riffing off Bryan Caplan’s also outstanding post) which I thought was more or less dispositive.

But in the comments, MikeP (this man needs his own blog, if he doesn’t have one) points to this immensely useful post containing a partial transcript of a much more considered and representative discussion of immigration by Friedman from a lecture titled “What Is America.” It really puts the wall-builders’ favorite Friedman quotation in its proper context.

You had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experience so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century.

[...]

You will find that hardly a soul who will say that it was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was a good thing. ‘But what about today? Do you think we should have free immigration?’ ‘Oh, no,’ they’ll say, ‘We couldn’t possibly have free immigration today. Why, that would flood us with immigrants from India, and God knows where. We’d be driven down to a bare subsistence level.’”

“What’s the difference? How can people be so inconsistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today? Well, there is a sense in which that answer is right. There’s a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914 is not possible today. Why not? “

Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promised a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.

Look, for example, at the obvious, immediate, practical example of illegal Mexican immigration. Now, that Mexican immigration, over the border, is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But, it’s only good so long as its illegal.

That’s an interesting paradox to think about. Make it legal and it’s no good. Why? Because as long as it’s illegal the people who come in do not qualify for welfare, they don’t qualify for social security, they don’t qualify for the other myriad of benefits that we pour out from our left pocket to our right pocket. So long as they don’t qualify they migrate to jobs. They take jobs that most residents of this country are unwilling to take. They provide employers with the kind of workers that they cannot get. They’re hard workers, they’re good workers, and they are clearly better off.

Friedman’s point about free immigration and the welfare state, then, was simply that if the U.S. is going to offer welfare payments to anybody who legally migrates, then we’re going to have to put a limit on legal migration. But because free migration is such an unmitigated good, limits on legal migration make both the immigrants and the natives worse off. So, illegal migration, which severs the fact of residency from welfare eligibility, is therefore desirable in the context of a regime that guarantees welfare eligibility to all legal residents.

Friedman’s considered view is that free migration without a welfare state is first best. Welfare for all legal residents makes first-best free migration impossible. In that case, a high rate of illegal immigration is the second-best solution.

Now, Friedman’s discussion would have been much clearer had he recognized the logical and practical possibility of severing legal residency from welfare eligibility. It need not be the case that all legal residents are made eligible for welfare. Indeed, there are many actual effective restrictions on welfare eligibility based on legal immigration status. In the 1999 ISIL interview, Friedman says of this possibility: “I don’t think that it is desirable to have two classes of citizens in a society.” And then he admits that he had never thought about it before. Well, if he had, he would have grasped that illegal immigration — which, remember, he thinks is pretty great — ensures a very stark separation of classes. Because tight immigration restrictions hinder pareto-improving mobility, create underground economies that encourage corruption and abuse, and do much more to create invidious structural inequalities than would a formalized guest worker system, Friedman’s own logic clearly leads toward opening up labor markets while restricting welfare eligibility. It is no accident that Lant Pritchett, an economist very much in the Friedmanite mold, argues for precisely that.

But the important takeaway here is this: Friedman’s view is that a certain kind of unrestricted welfare state makes illegal immigration good, because it severs residency from welfare eligibility. Friedman is unequivocal about the desirability of free migration. Anyone really committed to Friedman’s stated view about welfare and immigration should by no means try to restrict immigration, but instead should try to enable illegal immigration. A devout Friedmanite should stand stoutly against every fence, every border cop, every increase in the INS budget, any proposed database check for a new workers’ legal status, etc. I think it makes more sense to argue first for a guest worker program. But if that is in fact impossible, then Friedman has it right: more illegal immigration is the best we can do.

Furmanology

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Chris Hayes quoting Steve Clemons on Obama’s appointment of Jason Furman to head his economic team:

But calling a spade a spade, it’s clear that Furman is no Dean Baker or Robert Blecker or Jared Bernstein—all important economists who have been far more right as of late than the Rubin crowd in anticipating the stress points in globalization, the housing bubble, trade, and the like.

Good point! Would it be asking too much for the Obama campaign to bring someone on board its paid economic policy team that brings with them an unabashed left-liberal perspective?

Probably. What’s the function of economic policy advisors in a campaign? To signal (largely to highly informed elites) what kind of policies we might expect from the candidate. So, which people are more important for Obama to signal to: left-liberal Democratic Party stalwarts or moderates with money who might seriously entertain voting for McCain if his economic policy seems considerably more friendly. Seems pretty obvious. Furman is an assurance of centrist reasonableness while relative extremists like Baker and Berstein will either turn people off considering Obama (like me!) or signal to people already deep in the tank for Obama (like Chris, I’d guess).

For an up close and personal taste of Jason Furman’s thinking not only about economic policy, but the deeper philosophical questions behind it, check out his comments on Danny Shapiro’s Is the Welfare State Justified? at this Cato book forum I moderated last October.

On the Willingness of Past Selves to Let You Buy Them a Beer

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Steven Berlin Johnson writes:

But sitting here at forty, for whatever reason, I’m imagining it the other way: would 1985 Steven have happily had a beer with the current model? I think he would, and that the pair of us would have hit it off. That’s one measure of success, right? Your continuity with your past selves; their willingness to let you buy them a beer.

Yeah. That’s one measure of success. It’s also one measure of failure. My secret theory is that the point of personal continuity is to solve assurance problems. Stability in personality, values, and aims is to a large degree a function of the nature of our iterated games. If not for those ongoing games, continuity matters very little. (You are then free to be “authentic” in the Sartrean sense.) If you are deeply socially embedded, enmeshed in a web of thick obligations, you can’t just turn on a dime and become a whole new person. Change has to be gradual and semi-imperceptible in order to bring along gently one’s ongoing cooperative partners. You know a relationship is about to end when someone says: “I don’t know who you are any more.” So we remain more or less the same to sustain our relationships, to enable the mutuality of lovers, family, friends, and community.

So whether or not continuity is a sign of success depends on the worth of those relationships. If you find yourself after twenty years as submissive, superstitious, and hidebound as ever, then continuity may be your greatest failure. Who cares if this was an “effective” strategy in your particular ongoing social tit-for-tat. That might not have been a game worth playing. Pathetic continuity is no success.

When I was the age Johnson was in 1985, I didn’t drink beer.

[Via PEG.]

The World in Your Pocket

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Here’s something I hadn’t considered:

One early darknet has been termed the “sneakernet”: walking by foot to your friend carrying video cassettes or floppy discs. Nor is the sneakernet purely a technology of the past. The capacity of portable storage devices is increasing exponentially, much faster than Internet bandwidth, according to a principle known as “Kryder’s Law.” The information in our pockets yesterday was measured in megabytes, today in gigabytes, tomorrow in terabytes and in a few years probably in petabytes (an incredible amount of data). Within 10-15 years a cheap pocket-size media player will probably be able to store all recorded music that has ever been released — ready for direct copying to another person’s device.

In other words: The sneakernet will come back if needed. “I believe this is a ‘wild card’ that most people in the music industry are not seeing at all,” writes Swedish filesharing researcher Daniel Johansson. “When music fans can say, ‘I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?’ — what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?”

That’s from anti-copyright guru Rasmus Fleischer in the lead essay of this month’s Cato Unbound. But that’s a good point. Suppose you can put everything on Lexis, or every movie ever made, on a thumb drive. What are they going do, ban Fed Ex? Thumb drives? Fleischer seems to think copyright is hopeless, but that in the short term, the attempt to police violations could really harm civil liberties. I suspect he’s right.

This Week on Free Will: Jonathan Haidt

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This week on Free Will, I talk with moral psychology big shot Jonathan Haidt about … the psychology of morality! This was fun because I’m a huge Haidt fan. Here’s my unpublished essay written for Reason on why Democrats should pay more attention to Haidt and less to guys like Lakoff.

Interestingly, I think Jon and I have a pretty fundamental disagreement about the implications of his theory. I think it actually helps to vindicate the authority of secular liberal morality, and, together with social indicators data, gives us reason to push for a more thoroughgoingly liberal culture. Jon thinks it helps us see what’s valuable in conservative moralities, and that we need a sort of balanced moral ecosystem of different kinds of moralities. Sadly, this all came up at the end, and we didn’t get to dig in as much as I’d have liked. But this subject interests me so much I think I want to write a book about it.

The View from the Bearded Mirror Universe

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Regarding my latest “liberaltarian” post, John Markley writes:

Will Wilkinson has what I would consider a deeply misguided post about the alleged affinity between libertarianism and big government welfare statist left-liberalism. It’s sort of the bearded mirror universe double of left-libertarianism; left-libertarians like Long, Johnson, Carson, et al. want to radicalize libertarianism and unite it with the anti-statist elements of the Left, whereas Wilkinson proposes to repudiate libertarianism’s more radical strands and draw closer to the Left’s more statist mainstream elements.

I think perhaps John has misunderstood me. I am arguing that (a) libertarian welfare statism is not only a possibility, but is actually espoused by canonical libertarian thinkers, and (b) that left-liberal welfare statists, insofar as they are actually liberals and not just progressive-style paternalist technocrats or closeted socialists, would better achieve their distinctively liberal aims by accepting something like the Friedmanite or Hayekian version of welfare statism. I’m not interested in “repudiating” libertarianism’s more radical left-leaning strands — I have a lot of sympathy with elements of Long, Johnson, and Carson’s philosophies. I am interested in promoting a tendency of thought and a set of policy reforms that I think will, as a matter of fact, make people better off.

As a reminder, behold Hayek in Constitution of Liberty, a core reading in the libertarian syllabus:

All modern governments have made provision for the indigent, unfortunate and disabled and have concerned themselves with questions of health and the dissemination of knowledge. There is no reason why the volume of these pure service activities should not increase with general growth of wealth. There are common needs that can be satisfied only by collective action and can be thus provided for without restricting individual liberty. It can hardly be denied that, as we grow richer, that minimum of sustenance which the community has always provided for those not able to look after themselves, and which can be provided outside the market, will gradually rise, or that government may, usefully and without doing any harm, assist or even lead in such endeavors. (pp. 257-258)

Should you be a state-smashing radical or a milquetoast piecemealer? I don’t know. The debate over reformism versus radicalism is never-ending. For my part, I have a fairly radical ideal theory of a cosmopolitan liberal global order of trade, migration, and peace. I think the “nation state-as-primary-moral-community” assumption at bottom of most modern liberal arguments for the welfare state (and in many libertarianism-in-one-country arguments, for that matter) is morally backward. But I also have a fairly conservative theory of incremental social change. Whether or not all our institutions are legitimate — and certainly they are not — they are also very good in relative terms, both historically and contemporaneously. My immediate interest is in taking steps to make those institutions better in a way that opens up to the possibility of expanding liberty and thereby well-being the world over.