Latest Article: "Studies Have Shown" Is Not Enough

 My latest opinion piece has been published in Discourse Magazine. It's titled "'Studies Have Shown' Is Not Enough." It's on the problem of people wanting to jump on edufad bandwagons as soon as a few studies supposedly show something.

More on Rene Girard's "I See Satan Fall Like Lightning"

 After spending the majority of the book exploring how the Bible "flips the script" on the cycle of violence and scapegoating, transferring sympathy from the overpowering crowd to the overpowered victim, in the last few chapters Girard notes how our era fully embraces the love of victims. He's not just talking about the political correctness of the 80's and 90's (he wrote in 1999), but about a couple centuries of expanded rights and liberation. He fully acknowledges that much expressed concern for rights is more rhetoric than action, but that doesn't change the fact that the rhetoric has power in modern culture.

One particularly noteworthy point in our era of cancellation and Twitter mobs is that even when we fall into the habit of scapegoating that Christianity tried (and failed) to expunge, it's common to scapegoat people for being bigots who scapegoated someone else. Hell, just the fact that I felt it important to add the parenthetical about Christianity failing at its task shows how much this era is obsessed with sin and failing. I cannot quote every awesome point in chapters 12-14, but a choice few:

On scapegoating in the name of concern for victims:

We ferociously denounce the scapegoating of which our neighbors are guilty, but we are unable to do without our own substitute victims. We all try to tell ourselves that we have only legitimate grudges and justified hatreds, but our feeling of innocence is more fragile than our ancestors'....Indeed, we practice a hunt for scapegoats to the second degree, a hunt for hunters of scapegoats. Our society's obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of cruelty. (pg. 158)

On modern society:

The idea of a society alien to violence goes back clearly to the preaching of Jesus, to his announcement of the kingdom of God. This ideal does not diminish to the extent that Christianity recedes; to the contrary, its intensity increases. The concern for victims has become a paradoxical competition of mimetic rivalries, of opponents continually trying to outbid one another.

The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors. And our neighbors do the same. They always think first about victims for whom they hold us responsible. (pg. 164)

Indeed. The beam in our own eye and the mote in our neighbor's eye.

But that quote on page 164 also exposes the weakness of the book: He doesn't offer much explanation for WHY our increasingly secular society is even more victim-obsessed. He offers a few points about global culture, and the fact that as we strip away the supernatural the most important part of Christian heritage we don't have to let go of is concern for victims. He talks about how Nietzsche recognized this central concern of Christianity, how the Nazis ran with it, and how the rest of the world recoiled in (mostly sincere) horror. On one level we needn't be surprised that people recoiled from the Nazis in horror. On the other hand, look at how many empire-builders of the past are regarded in the modern era with, if not full adoration, at least grudging respect.

Some of it is surely that their victims are dead but their lines on the map remain, and the Nazis are still in living memory. But horror of the Nazis cannot explain every facet of our victim focus. Girard is a grand systematizer, an intellectual with a Big Idea. He needs everything to fit into that paradigm. I offer for consideration an economic and technological fact: Machinery changes so many social arrangements.

Women are less constrained by their (on average) smaller size and muscles, and slavery is even less profitable when control of machines is more important than control of human muscles. (But let's not forget that workers able to exercise freedom have always had certain productivity advantages, advantages that ruling classes had to squelch in the interests of their individual power rather than collective prosperity.)

In this era of liberation, concern for victims is inevitable and important. Scales are being rebalanced. And so in this era the loving, victim-cherishing aspect of Christianity (in culture and heritage if not always in explicitly professed belief) will prevail over the submission to a Lord and Father in heaven.

In short, Girard takes his theory a bit too far. He tries to make it everything instead of a significant piece of the puzzle.

Revisiting Rene Girard: _I See Satan Fall Like Lightning_

 A while back I tried reading Rene Girard's Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and gave up. Now I'm attempting his later, shorter book titled I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. It promises to be an exploration of the victim concept in Western culture, and at some point will tackle political correctness. The basic premise is that Christianity flipped the script on the age-old ritual of scapegoating and communal violence, putting the emphasis not on the community purified by the removal of the enemy, nor even on the heroism of the divine sacrifice, but on the wrongness of crucifying Him. I'm about a third of the way in, and he's still mostly talking about "mimetic rivalry."

I was not sold on the mimetic basis of rivalry when I first read Girard. But this book makes a key point: Humans envy each other no matter how wealthy their society is. If our envy were based on desires that didn't derive from social cues, anyone with more food than a baseline caveman would be happy. But we desire new things and more things because we see what those around us have and how much they enjoy it.

One other key point: In chapter 4 he talks about a pagan society killing a beggar to end a plague. Contemporary historians considered the claim credible. Now, obviously killing a guy already in the town will not stop an epidemic. If he were the initial carrier and killed by arrows from a distance before entering the city, OK, that might save the town. But he was in town. No way killing him could stop a microbe.

What Girard says is that plagues led to social disorder, and so social disorder was sometimes interpreted as a plague. One might note an analogy with the social contagion of mass hysteria even in the modern world. So if historians note lots of people suffering mass hysteria, and perhaps even getting physical maladies from the disruption of life, the breakdown of services and supplies, etc., well, anything that restores order could indeed end the epidemic.

Girard writes on page 52:

Until the Renaissance, whenever "real" epidemics occurred they disrupted social relations.

Alas, he wrote this book in 1999, and died in 2015. He never experienced 2020.

Some have joked that Russia's invasion of Ukraine ended COVID. Now, on one level that's absurd: COVID was and is still spreading, albeit not with the same severity after a few years of both vaccine-acquired and naturally-acquired immunity. And early 2022 corresponded with the tail of the first Omicron wave that gave COVID to damn near everyone who had not already gotten it. On another level, Ukraine certainly diverted a lot of attention from COVID. A certain kind of Westerner had a new foe to oppose and a new victim* to support. I think I know what Girard would say to that.

*I characterize Ukraine this way not to critique them as weak but to simply recognize that they were the targets of unprovoked aggression. Their response has been heroic.

Poverty by America: The most interesting education point

There's a lot of idealism in the later chapters of Matthew Desmond's Poverty, By America. "Why don't we just get people to do all these things that will make it better?" I'm not going to tear into it because I'm reading for the stuff I can take away, not the stuff I'll leave behind. I'm going to focus on page 164, where he mentions an absolutely fascinating educational experiment that I need to read more about: Early in this century, Montgomery County, MD randomly assigned poor families to different public housing units, some in poor areas and some in more affluent areas. The county also massively pumped resources into its poorest schools. (One should always be skeptical of claims that resources were showered on the poor. However, Matthew Desmond seems to be at least as skeptical of these claims as anyone else would be, so I am inclined to believe him.)

Desmond notes that poor kids in affluent areas did better than poor kids in poorer areas, even if the schools got more money.

Now, I haven't examined the literature on this yet (but two key articles cited by Desmond are here and here), so I can't say anything about this with certainty, but I'll wager that two things happened, both of which I see evidence of on a daily basis on a campus that is very proudly, vocally dedicated to serving the most disadvantaged, to a degree that would give another Matthew a stroke:

1) All poverty relief and social services are delivered via "leaky buckets." There are lots of people who get their cuts. Yes, some amount of overhead is inevitable, necessary, and even (in small doses) beneficial. That grain of truth is the excuse used by every rent-seeker along the way. They insist that we need various administrators to plan and organize. We need specialized case workers to monitor each kid. The school lunch program needs several layers of planning to determine whether they bought the most nutritious brand of sugary pudding. We need assessment of all these various activities. And of course we need oversight to make sure that none of this money is wasted on pointless bloat!

So much for offering the salaries that will lure the best teachers, or making sure classrooms have roofs that don't leak and enough supplies that teachers don't have to spend their own money. (Though if they want to get reimbursed I'm sure there's a process available, one with 26 different steps to make sure no money is wasted. The Deputy Associate Superintendent for Administrative Efficiency has hired specialized staff to carry out all 26 steps!)

So who knows whether any of that high spending materialized in ways that could even begin to improve the classroom. Pretending to improve education for the poor is basically a massive jobs program for well-meaning college grads.

2) Meanwhile, you know what happens in affluent districts? Well, it probably isn't a showcase of pure efficiency. Affluent suburbs are perfectly capable of hiring paper-pushing grifters, even if they'll never hire as many as the districts trying to Save The World.

Still, in those more affluent classrooms there are kids who have more stable homes, and parents with the bandwidth and know-how to push them. The median kid in the class is ready and able to go farther, and the teacher teaches accordingly. Doesn't mean that all of those kids are geniuses who will actually reach great heights--many of those tokens of achievement that the schools spit out are their own form of grift that affluent college-educated parents push their kids to seek along their road to a cushy job Saving The World. Some of those kids are being prepared to preach the latest bullshit about Equity and Inclusion so they can prove that they are the most deserving applicant for some do-gooder job.

Still, the teacher teaches to the middle. And the middle in that affluent suburb is higher than the middle in a poorer district. And most of the kids below that middle are at least trying to reach that middle. They might not quite get there, but they're mostly aiming for it, and the standard that they might just fall short of is higher than the standard that they might exceed in a different setting. Offering challenges matters. There's no magic or mystery about putting a poor kid next to a more affluent peer. Some will emulate the affluent peer, and others will feel alienated from the peer. All that teachers and school leaders can do is play the odds, and the odds are that calibrating challenges to a higher but still reasonable and attainable median will result in more kids at least getting close to that higher goal. Some will always be left behind (and one can only hope that spoiled Harvard prick Teddy Kennedy is roasting in hell for pretending otherwise), but most will at least come close to a higher but reasonable median if that's what they're presented with.

None of this is nuclear rocket surgery. You don't need a PhD to see it. Two functioning eyes will do. Hell, one of my eyes is pretty mediocre. One and a half working eyes. That's it. That's what you need.

Current Reading: Poverty by America

 I'm reading Poverty by America, a book by Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond on the systematic factors that undergird the persistence of poverty in America. I'm not going to summarize everything--some of his economic assertions are a bit optimistic, but he has important observations. In particular:

1) Payday lenders and check-cashing places really do exploit the poor. I'm not convinced that getting more reputable bank to serve low-income/high-risk customers is as easy as he thinks, but by god it is a task worth working on. There must be some regulatory changes that could help here.

2) The money that inmates have to spend on phone calls is insane. It's just one of the many ways that literally captive customers are milked when they can least afford it. Obviously it's not the worst thing done to inmates, but it's a proxy for a bunch of things, and I suspect that an attack on the vested interests around exploitation of prisoners would raise similar issues whether the topic was phone calls or something else.

3) The decline of unions has had utterly predictable consequences for inequality in America.

4) Zoning that favors single-family dwellings is a huge cause of soaring costs of living.

5) America's tax code is full of social engineering, and the vast majority of it is for the benefit of the upper-middle class and above. I'm not optimistic that America would tolerate wholesale abandonment of tax breaks without corresponding across-the-board cuts, but even a more-or-less revenue-neutral change that removed these thumbs on scales would release a lot of economic pressures, and unskew a whole bunch of things. And if the change were even mildly revenue-positive, it would definitely improve the fiscal situation.

Hirschman on party systems

Hirschman makes the point that the Median Voter Theorem (all parties compete for the median voter and hence wind up nearly indistinguishable) breaks down because parties are dominated by people who will stay and exercise their voice option rather than the exit option. And exit doesn't necessarily mean voting differently--it could just mean that you stop volunteering for party work. So the party can stay away from the median if the other party does likewise, because both serve internal constituencies that chose voice over exit.

Hirschman also makes the case that, in some sense, this serves the public good. Two indistinguishable parties mean that there's no choice and the policy outcomes are far from both the left and right flanks. That sounds bad on the surface, but moderates aren't the only people whose interests count. The wings deserve some consideration too. If, say, we line everyone up on a spectrum from 0 to 100, placing the parties at points 25 and 75 means that nobody is more than 25 away from a party. Of course, they might be 50 away from a winner, but if the two parties alternate, you could be no more than 25 away from a common outcome and no more than 25 away from the average effect. That's not so bad.

I'm not prepared to endorse extremism, but it's an interesting point.

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Midpoint

A few interesting observations:

1) Hirschman notes that lazy quasi-monopolies with public subsidies might like it when dissatisfied users exit instead of protesting. Public schools are happy if the most demanding parents transfer to private schools instead of going to School Board meetings. The Postal Service might be OK if (some but not all) demanding customers use FedEx instead of calling their congressman.

On one level this is obvious. But it's also economically interesting to note how organizations cushioned against market forces might get worse rather than better in the presence of competitive outlets.

2) He notes that similar things apply in politics. Some poorly-run countries prefer if former politicians move abroad rather than critiquing successors. Some countries are happy if dissidents go into exile, and might even leave them alone to send the message that exile is a great choice.