I enjoy debating…

by dang @ 7:25 pm. Filed under Abstractions

…but Julian Sanchez defends it more eloquently than I ever could.

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How liberals saved libertarians from themselves

by dang @ 10:46 am. Filed under Law & Politics, Abstractions

Matthew Yglesias delivers a friendly poke to his libertarian friends in an essay at Cato. On racial equality:

Barry Goldwater, probably the most libertarian major party presidential nominee we’re likely to see, didn’t think much of a giant pile of regulations telling people what they can and can’t do with their own property called the Civil Rights Act.
…
But, of course, the white supremacists (and the libertarians) lost that battle and the liberals won, building one important piece of the new, less traditional America that Lindsey observes we live in.
…
To me, this is all to the good. And if Cato Institute employees want to endorse it, that’s all to the good as well. But it’s not libertarianism.

And on personal freedom:

Federal social insurance not only mitigates risk, but allows people a certain measure of freedom from institutions – parents, children, churches, employers – who, in the past, might have been potential providers of that security. This was, as I understand it, the basis of the old “fusionist” synthesis of libertarianism and conservatism – a weak welfare state was thought to bolster traditional autocratic structures of family and religious life, by forcing people into dependence on those institutions.

Somewhere along the line, however, at least some libertarians – Lindsey included – seem to have decided that they don’t like being handmaidens of a dour, reactionary outlook on culture and, indeed, are more interested in promoting cosmopolitan individualism as a way of life than in promoting a specific doctrine about the legitimate scope of state authority. A good companion to Lindsey’s essay is Reason editor Nick Gillespie’s February 2005 column in which he concedes that the sense in which Kansas is “freer” than New York City isn’t actually a sense he’s interested in. Kansas has fewer business regulations, but New York is more conducive to cosmopolitan individualism. This turn is, as far as I’m concerned, all to the good – cosmopolitanism is an excellent thing, as is individualism, whereas libertarianism is a bit silly.

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Hail the Technocracy

by dang @ 3:59 pm. Filed under Law & Politics, Abstractions

Mark Kleiman has some interesting thoughts about Obama as a Presidential candidate, which I generally agree with, although I think he’s a bit inexperienced for a 2008 run. (I thought the same about John Edwards in 2004.)

What was more interesting to me, however, was one of the comments. Mark wrote:

For all Obama’s excellent policy-wonkery, that sort of language, and thinking, makes him far more strange to me than Wesley Clark is. But it makes him far more familiar and far more comfortable to tens of millions of people whose votes we need.

And this response is from ck up in this mofo (no comment permalinks available, but the timestamp is December 6, 2006 02:57 PM):

Gosh, Mark, you are a true technocrat. The people are a mere obstacle to your preferred policies. The people are there to be ruled, commanded. I get the sense that a wise King is what you’re looking for. That’s totally defensible but it’s crazy to see it put so starkly.

Perhaps I spend way too much time reading the technocratic blogosphere (the majority of my blogroll are academics, the rest are wonks), but I thought this was uncontroversial.

In all seriousness, democracy is clearly not the best system in the world because the majority of people make the smartest decisions. How many Americans could explain to you why the budget deficit matters, or even identify Iraq on a map?

Rather, democracy is necessary because it provides a check on the powerful. Academics and policy wonks, like everyone else, are corruptible by power. Accountability of leaders to the people is the only way to prevent excesses and keep corruption within tolerable levels.

Believing in democracy, however, does not mean believing in the policy wisdom of the masses. No one expects the majority of shareholders to actually make business decisions for a corporation; that is delegated to the board and the CEO.

So I do believe that we need to be led by wonks and experts who can determine what policies actually make sense. Even us amateurs who like to read the occasional journal article or policy paper don’t really know the right answer most of the time. Conversely, the wonks and experts–and their smooth-talking figureheads–also need to be accountable to the voters, to prevent them from growing too infatuated with their own power.

Of course, in the real world, it never works that smoothly. But I don’t see any real contradiction between democracy and technocracy.

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Letter to an Atheist Author

by dang @ 11:44 am. Filed under Abstractions, Religion & Philosophy

At a friend’s recommendation, I borrowed and read Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation. While Harris is a good writer, and he and I share the same fundamental metaphysical belief (atheistic materialism), I believe that much of his book is wrong-headed or naive.

(more…)

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Quote of the Day

by dang @ 4:12 pm. Filed under Abstractions

From Nobel-winner Thomas Schelling, paraphrased by Mark Kleiman:

When you see an organization acting recklessly, don’t leap to the conclusion that the people running the organization are themselves reckless. Perhaps they’re all such cowards that none of them dares to say to the others, “We can’t get away with this.”

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Science is hard; let’s go write a political book!

by dang @ 12:14 pm. Filed under Law & Politics, Abstractions

PZ Myers quotes a paragraph of Coulter that shocked me far more than the infamous 9/11 widows remark:

[Evolutionists are] almost always biologists—the “science” with the greatest preponderance of women. The distaff MIT “scientist” who fled the room in response to Larry Summers’s remarks was, of course, a biologist. While I’m sure there have been groundbreaking discoveries about the internal digestive system of the earthworm, biologists are barely even scientists anymore. They’re classifiers, list-makers, like librarians with their Dewey decimal system.

The level of sexist stereotyping going on here is astronomical. (Biologists = librarians = women whose mission is to be the guardians and high priestesses of great male learning.) I am no longer surprised by Coulter lashing out–without any sense of proportion or decency–at anyone who disagrees with her. But I wondered why an obviously strong and succesful woman would resort to such sexist argumentation.

Then again, Coulter makes her living by parroting the talking points of the (male-dominated) right-wing political machine. So maybe when she implies that women’s only intellectual task is to mindlessly regurgitate male doctrine, she’s not that far off from thinking about herself after all.

P.S. Read PZ’s whole post for some wonderful ripostes to Ms. Coulter.

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Having Kids These Days

by dang @ 7:45 pm. Filed under Abstractions

I hate to burst Glenn Reynolds’ bubble (well, not really), but the low social status of child care is nothing new. Parents who could afford it have long outsourced the care of their children to their social inferiors. Among those who cared for their own progeny, child care was generally the responsibility of women, the social inferiors of men in a patriarchal society. The main cause behind the increasing age of first parenthood, and the decreasing birth rate, is the increase in the social status and independence of women over the last forty years. (Or, given the importance of contraception to feminism, perhaps cause and effect are intermingled.)

Reynolds does have an interesting point, however, when he talks about the decreasing autonomy of children. He quotes Caitlin Flanagan:

By the time I was five, I was allowed to wander away from the house as long as I didn’t cross any big streets. I had the run of the neighborhood at six. . . . A nine-year-old could be trusted with a key; a nine-year-old knew how to work a telephone if anything went wrong.

I lived in Seville, Spain from the time I was six until I was twelve, and so my experience was closer to what you would have found in the United States a generation earlier. At seven I would walk to the bakery a couple of blocks away, to buy a loaf of bread; at nine I was allowed to walk to church (a mile away) by myself.

I don’t know if Seville was actually safer than an American suburb, or it simply had different social conventions. I think one thing that might have made it safer was the sense of community. One of my mom’s favorite anecdotes (I have no recollection of the experience) ocurred when I was six. I was walking along the street several yards ahead of her; I tripped and fell, and a woman across the street was over by me, helping me up, before my mom could even get to me.

There’s been a lot of ink spilled about how Americans are now less rooted in local communities, civic organizations, etc. People are good-hearted, and if they saw a kid alone and needing help, I’m sure they would step in and help. But it would be seen as an aberration, a failure of the parents’ responsibility; whereas in Seville, taking care of children on the street was everyone’s responsibility.

I also wonder how much of the change over the last few decades is due to greater risk-averseness and awareness of dangers. When I lived in New York, friends who had grown up in Queens spoke about freely roaming their neighborhoods as kids in the 70’s. New York in the 70’s was not a nice place. Were the kids really safer then, or are parents just more paranoid now?

It seems like an odd statement, but parenting has become more child-centric. There’s a lot more sense that children should be shielded from hardship, mischance, and unpleasantness. This has led to some wonderful improvements in parenting–the social unacceptability, not just of corporal punishment, but also of yelling and insults to children–but also a reduction in kids’ autonomy.

Ultimately, I think that greater protectiveness of children is part of the social trend towards less acceptance of violence and conflict, and a more proactive attitude towards protecting the weak; in other words, what Mark Steyn might call the ‘feminization’ of the West. Unlike Steyn, I welcome that trend. But protection and autonomy are difficult values to balance, and I don’t think we’ve found that balance in our treatment of children.

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Meditations of a Carnivore

by dang @ 9:56 am. Filed under Abstractions

William Saletan writes an article in Slate that captures almost exactly how I feel:

Shrinks call this “cognitive dissonance.” You munch a strip of bacon then pet your dog. You wince at the sight of a crippled horse but continue chewing your burger. Three weeks ago, I took my kids to a sheep and wool festival. They petted lambs; I nibbled a lamb sausage. That’s the thing about humans: We’re half-evolved beasts. We love animals, but we love meat, too. We don’t want to have to choose. And maybe we don’t have to. Maybe, thanks to biotechnology, we can now grow meat instead of butchering it.

With all the problems facing humanity—war, terrorism, poverty, tyranny—you probably don’t worry much about whether it’s right or wrong to eat meat. That’s understandable. Every society lives with two kinds of moral problems: the ones it’s ready to face, and the ones that will become clear or compelling only in retrospect. Human sacrifice, slavery, the subjugation of women—every tradition seems normal and indispensable until we’re ready, morally and economically, to move beyond it.

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Practical Anarchy

by dang @ 4:13 pm. Filed under Abstractions

This post by Billmon about Hobbes’ Leviathan got me thinking: what economic and technological conditions could actually make anarchy sustainable?

The best answer I can come up with would be some technology that can be owned by an individual (or a family or other small group) that provides absolute (or at least extremely strong) defensive capabilities, without equivalent offensive capability.
Individuals would no longer depend on governments for personal protection, and governments would no longer be able to enforce law or collect taxes without the ultimate recourse of coercive force.

The big question would be whether trade could be sustained. The only enforcement mechanism for contracts would be reputation. But there’d be no libel or fraud laws to protect against the spreading of false information, so reputation would be dependent on information brokers, who would in turn be dependent on reputation. Is there any way out of this infinite loop?

Anyway, sounds like an interesting premise for a sci-fi book, if nothing else. I imagine that like most ideas, it’s probably been done before; anyone know of a book like that?

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Models of Disability (I)

by dang @ 2:59 pm. Filed under Abstractions, Psych & Self-Help

Welcome to “Dan Talks About Stuff He Doesn’t Know Jack About.” In today’s episode, I will discuss the Journal of Counseling & Development article Models of Disability: Implications for the Counseling Profession (Smart, J. and Smart, D.; Winter 2006).

The article describes four different models of disability: the Biomedical model, based on diagnosis and categorization of the physiological characteristics of disability; the Functional and Environmental models (described as different models, but not really distinguished in the article), which analyze disability in the context of functional expectations and interactions between a person and their environment; and the Sociopolitical model, which views people with disabilities as an oppressed minority whose ‘otherness’ is socially constructed, and who do not currently receive their full civil rights.

The authors advocate the use of all the models in appropriate circumstances, although their strongest criticism is reserved for the Biomedical model because of its failure to address the emotional needs of individuals with disabilities, or society’s responsibility to them.

Because of my own very limited experience with the issue, some of my remarks are likely to be obtuse and/or tactless. However, the subject interests me enough that I am going to dive in anyway. I apologize in advance if I step on any toes.

First off, the Biomedical model. As the authors acknowledge, “no one, including proponents of the other models, suggests totally abandoning the Biomedical Model.” Medical treatment of conditions causing disability requires categorizing people according to disability, analyzing the patient independently of social context, etc.

The problem starts when the biomedical nature of disability is taken as the only valid lens through which to view the issue. As the Smarts point out: “The degree of prejudice and discrimination experienced or the lack of accommodations is typically not considered when medical professionals determine the level of severity of the disability or render a percentage of impairment.” To give an example in less loaded language, two people who have both lost the use of their legs may be experiencing the same biomedical condition; but if one lives in an industrialized society where motorized chairs are commonplace, and the other lives in an impoverished rural area without electricity, their actual levels of disability are very different.

By the same token, environmental factors–e.g. whether or not the public (through government or private charity) provides resources for those who cannot afford accomodations, whether jobs and public spaces are accessible–make a real difference in the level of disability that people with the same medical condition actually experience.

The Smarts also make a broader point:

The Biomedical Model of disability does not provide a strong basis for the treatment and policy considerations of chronic conditions, which include most disabilities. Because of the long history of the two-outcome paradigm of medicine–total cure or death of the individual–medical professionals work best with acute injuries rather than chronic, long-term disabilities. Vestiges of this two-outcome paradigm remain in insurance payment policies, which dictate that payments for services–such a counseling–are withdrawn once medical stabilization has been acheived and progress toward a full recovery has terminated.

The acute-care focus of the medical profession is a flaw on which ‘alternative medicine’ feeds. There’s been a movement in the last few years to put more emphasis on prevention, maintenance, etc. but cultural changes like that happen over generations.

This is turning into an incredibly long topic, so I’m going to pause here for now, and pick up in another post. Stay turned (or, if you prefer, tune out) for more posts on this subject.

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Computing is Beautiful

by dang @ 1:59 pm. Filed under Sci & Tech, Abstractions

At dinner last night, when I mentioned that I wanted to go back to grad school for Computer Science, a friend (who’s only known me for a few months) was a bit surprised. “But you seem to have such broad interests,” she said.

I replied that to pursue an academic career in an area, I have to be more than a dilettante; the subject has to be something I really love and do well at. That was true, but I realized afterwards that I didn’t really address the assumption underlying the question, which I think is a misconception a lot of people have about Computer Science.

The discipline of Computer Science is not about learning to program; that’s called Software Engineering. To a large degree, our educational system still conflates the two. (There is a discipline called Information Systems, but it tends to be taught at business schools, and so isn’t really suitable for programming instruction either.) That’s unfortunate, because most Computer Science graduates actually go on to programming careers, for which they have an inadequate education in Software Engineering. They either end up learning it through experience and on-the-job training, or they fail to learn it at all, as the large quantity of crap code out there attests.

While Software Engineering is an interesting and fulfilling profession, however, it has the same relationship to Computer Science that Mechanical Engineering has to Newtonian Physics. Mark Chu-Carroll has been writing some good lay introductions to foundational principles of the field at Good Math, Bad Math. (Specifically, Turing Machines, and First-Order Predicate Logic, which predates Computer Science but is very important to it.)

What Chu-Carroll’s posts make clear is that Computer Science, like physics, is essentially a mathematical discipline. Not math as in the sense of number-crunching (even less so than physics), but as in theorem-proving through axiomatic manipulation of symbols.

And the dirty little secret of math is that it is beautiful. The best (and completely non-technical) exposition of this is G. B. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology. Computer Science–like other mathematical disciplines–is a search for elegance: for theories that pack as much general applicability and explanatory power into as little complexity as possible.

This search for elegance is not fundamentally different from what animates the social sciences, or even significant portions of the humanities. While they may not express their hypotheses in mathematical language, nor be as directly provable or falsifiable, the characteristics of a strong psychological or historical theory–empirical support, broad applicability, predictive power–are very similar to those of a useful theorem. Even in the creative arts, the best work is that which captures broad swaths of human experience or evokes a deep emotional response utterly out of proportion to the simple nature of words on a page, colors on a canvas, or a few professional imitators strutting across a stage or in front of a camera.

So there is no conflict between a specialization in Computer Science, and an appreciation for the broader intellectual landscape in which we operate. While practitioners of any field–not only scientists, but often also artists, writers, and philosophers–can become so myopic that they fail to see outside the assumptions and practices of their discipline, there is a continuity between all fields of knowledge, which resists our attempts to pigeonhole ourselves.

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Dancing With the Devil

by dang @ 7:00 pm. Filed under Law & Politics, Abstractions

Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one of the strongest forces holding Iraq back from civil war and probably deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize, has reaffirmed the Islamic death penalty for gays:

Written in Arabic, the fatwa comes from a press conference with the powerful religious cleric, where he was asked about the judgment on sodomy and lesbianism. “Forbidden,” Sistani answered, according to OutRage, “Punished, in fact, killed. The people involved should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.”

So is al-Sistani a heroic peacemaker or a wannabe mass-murderer? Both. And that is exactly why we can’t conduct our foreign policy according to moral platitudes (neither the conservative ‘never give in to terrorists’ nor the liberal ‘always put human rights first’).

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Morality vs Autonomy

by dang @ 2:11 pm. Filed under Abstractions

I just threw in my two bits (currently awaiting moderation) in an abortion thread at Pandagon. I would normally not have bothered, but there was a poster whose thoughts were fairly close to mine and who was getting heaped with abuse, so I decided to throw another log on the fire:

Traven… I just had to say kudos to you for not allowing yourself to be stampeded. Count me in as another pro-choice male who thinks we can analyze moral ambiguities without kow-towing to the pro-lifers (or anti-choicers, if you prefer that term).

There are at least three separate questions here:

1. What are the moral rights of the fetus, if any?

2. What is the moral duty of a pregnant woman towards her fetus, if any?

3. Which, if any, of these rights and duties should be enforced by legislation?

Personally, I believe that a woman carrying a third-trimester fetus _does_ have a moral obligation to the fetus. However, as Amanda points out, the best person to weigh that obligation and make a final judgment is _the woman herself_, which is why I oppose legislation against abortion.

Contra Amanda, suggesting that the fetus has moral rights–and thus the pregnant woman has moral obligations–does not in any way imply that women need other people to make those moral judgments for them.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that people do shitty irresponsible things. There are men who are lying, cheating dicks and treat their partners like trash. There are parents who emotionally neglect their kids. There are businesspeople who rely on emotional manipulation and half-truths to make money. We can’t legislate those things away, but they’re still wrong.

And so given the strain of shittiness inherent in human nature, I’m sure that there are some pregnant women who have a reckless disregard for the potential life growing within them. That is not an anti-feminist or anti-woman statement, any more than my previous statements were anti-male, or anti-parent, or anti-businessperson.

If someone said that parents were never neglectful, or that men never cheated, any reasonable person would call bullshit. Still, you wouldn’t normally frame a discussion of relationships or parenting in terms of the cheaters and neglecters. Nor should the abortion debate be framed as if women with unplanned pregnancies–or unexpected difficulties with pregnancy–cared less about human life than the rest of society.

P.S. Since I started composing this post, Amanda replied to my comment… agreeing with me! Debates are funny things.

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Why are Small Classes a good thing?

by dang @ 9:26 pm. Filed under Abstractions

The obvious answer is that the teacher can devote more individual attention to each student. But a 2001 paper by Bush’s recent appointee to the Council of Economic Advisers (who appears to be a broadly talented scholar with liberal and libertarian support) suggests that another factor may be even more important:

Lazear’s model calculates learning time as the time remaining after disruptions. For example, if the class has one student or 30 students, the time available for learning is 100 percent if there are no disruptions. But if, on average, each student disrupts the class 1 percent of the time, the time available for learning drops to 99 percent for a one-student class . . . and to just 74 percent for a class size of 30.
…
If class size is reduced from 25 to 20, the gain in learning time is always smaller than that produced by reducing the level of disruption by one percentage point.

This has significant policy implications, since the cost of reducing class size is very large, while the cost of educating a teacher on improved classroom management is quite low.

Tyler Cowen gathers some of his other interesting research.

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For the Greater Good

by dang @ 2:06 pm. Filed under Abstractions

Via Tyler Cowen, an interesting side remark in a NYT article:

Brain-dead patients in France are presumed to be organ donors unless they have made explicit provisions to the contrary, and approval by next of kin is not normally required.

I feel like I should be more troubled by this than I am. After all, Western society has traditionally recognized a very deep personal interest in controlling the disposition of one’s body after one’s death. Here in the US, even if someone is a registered organ donor, their organs will not be used if their family objects.

And yet, all I can think about is the thousands of people who die from a lack of transplantable organs every year. And so at a gut level, the French approach seems right to me. But I’m open to being persuaded otherwise.

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Money is not a Signifier

by dang @ 3:15 pm. Filed under Abstractions

I’m not a full-out egalitarian, but I still have to call a bad argument when I see one:

In other words, as I have always longed to ask John Kenneth Galbraith, “if you think that we should equalise the distribution of income, why do you not think that we should equalise the distribution of PhDs?”

The answer, of course, is that transferring a degree from one person to another does not transfer the knowledge and experience that the degree signifies. Transferring money, however, does transfer the value it represents.

If Ms. Galt were not so consumed by her own cleverness, this rather common-sense point would undoubtedly be obvious to her.

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Weighing Deaths in the Balance

by dang @ 5:56 pm. Filed under Law & Politics, Abstractions

My condolences go out to the victims of yesterday’s attacks, as well as all those affected. London was not as badly hurt–this time–as New York or Madrid, but for the families of those who died, the numbers matter little.

Our reactions to the attack, however, are less about the number of deaths, than about the breech in our sense of security. There is no similar level of mourning at the daily toll of civilian casualties in Iraq, because they are distant and expected. They don’t disturb our sense of safety here at home.

We need to remember that reality when considering what a suitable response to terrorism actually is. Bush’s recent speech repeated yet again the ‘flypaper theory’: that we are fighting the terrorists in Iraq so that we don’t have to fight them at home. Events like yesterday’s prove that the flypaper theory is not an absolute; but even if it has marginal value, how can its effect on Iraqi citizens possibly be justified? The Iraqi newspaper Azzman editorialized:

But in his speech, Mr. Bush makes all Iraqis scapegoats of his war on terror by telling his own people and the world that he chose Iraq as the central battlefield for this war. So U.S. troops are in Iraq to settle scores with enemies they do not want to fight in America or anywhere else but in Iraq.

The idea that we are entitled to use an entire foreign country as our hunting decoy is so arrogant as to defy imagination. It is basically a flat-out statement that their lives are worth less than ours.

I’m no naive idealist; I realize that as a nation we have to look out for our own interests first. We can’t police the whole world, feed the whole world, or provide healthcare or jobs to the whole world. I don’t pretend to know exactly where the boundary line is that defines necessary selfishness. But I can’t believe that an explicit policy of drawing our murderous enemies to another country is not considered beyond the pale.

P.S. I see that publius already made a similar comparison between London and Baghdad.

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Happy 4th

by dang @ 7:59 pm. Filed under Law & Politics, Abstractions

Well today is the 4th of July, and that means I’m entitled to stand on my soapbox and bloviate a little bit.

We throw around the word ‘Freedom’ way too much in this country. During WWI, sauerkraut was called Freedom Cabbage. The (thoroughly justified) invasion of Afghanistan was called Operation Enduring Freedom. The replacement for the destroyed World Trade Center is being called Freedom Tower. We equate freedom with the United States; if we’re threatened, then freedom is threatened.

The concept of freedom–a corollary of independence–means something different to each of us. For me, the deepest formative experience of my life was growing up in a high-control religion, where I could not question received teaching, or speak my thoughts openly. * Perhaps because of that, I think that freedom of speech is the cardinal freedom.

All other freedoms are dependent on freedom of speech, and cannot be sustained without it. A right to property, or to protection from unreasonable search, cannot be enforced if you can’t publicize violations. Even the right to vote is useless if the political opposition is jailed or suppressed. Conversely, if free speech is allowed, the government will eventually have to bow to public sentiment in allowing other rights. **

And that is why I am proud of American freedoms, because our protection of free speech is the strongest in the world. A militia-member can promote overthrow of the government, a fundamentalist Muslim can preach hatred against the United States, and an anarchist can burn the nation’s Flag–all openly in our streets.

Despite all the concerns over the War on Terror and civil liberties, that is still true. I hope it remains so.

Happy Independence Day.

* Ironically, that same religion brought pivotal First Amendment cases to the Supreme Court. That is just another piece of their hypocrisy.

** This may sound far-fetched, but it it is (very roughly speaking) what happened in Britain in the 19th century.

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A Heartening Thought

by dang @ 12:21 pm. Filed under Abstractions

Amidst long-term demographic and cultural explanations for the rise of mega-churches, and even speculations about another ‘Great Awakening’, Big Brass Blog suggests a much simpler explanation: religion is a business.

During the 90s, the New Age was the rage, and New Age shops … seemed to be the headquarters of a new spiritual movement, and thought of themselves as such.

Now, it seems plain that although there may have been a movement at the core of the New Age phenomenon, for the most part it was just a consumer trend.
…
The Green Knight wonders whether this is also true of the corporate Christianity we’re seeing today, with its megachurch malls, its specialized music, its gimmicky toys, its bookstore chains. It too is often spoken of as a movement, and surely there is a movement of true believers at its core, but how much of it is also a consumer trend? In fact, how many of its consumers are the same people who made the New Age so profitable a few years ago, who have moved on in order to seek a perspective more suited to the current cultural mood?

I doubt that the overlap is substantial. New Age and megachurches differ on substantial psychological issues, most obviously their attitude towards sex. (Although that may relate to the recent study finding that women tend to shift Republican as they get married and have kids; both of those life events tend to affect one’s view of sex.) As parallel phenomena in different cultural spheres, however, the similarities are very strong.

One could object that the increasing religious conservatism of the US is part of a larger cultural movement that dates back to the 70’s. But that’s equally true of New Age, which was clearly rooted in 60’s hippiedom. But both hippiedom and fundamentalist Christianity, despite their prevalence in some areas, remained countercultural movements to the nation as a whole. They only entered the mainstream through their mass-market manifestations.

And that’s where the good news comes in:

And when the mood changes again (as it surely will), how much of this consumer bubble will remain a force in the culture, and how much of it will simply collapse, leaving empty storefronts behind? … Nothing is forever, especially not fashion.

Hallelujah.

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Who wears Blinders? I wear Blinders

by dang @ 9:21 pm. Filed under Abstractions

I don’t have anything to add to Todd Zywicki’s post, but I think it’s important enough to link to anyway:

So, for example, consider something like famine relief in Africa: the unconstrained vision says, “people are starving, give them food.” The constrained vision says, “people are starving, but if we give them food, that just means that we will have to give them food again next year, because we will destroy domestic farmers who can’t compete with free food.” Note, neither of these approaches are necessarily correct, they are simply different and raise different questions.
…
During our lives about half the people we interact with will have the opposite “vision” from us. … So unless the holder of the constrained vision can respond to the concerns of the unconstrained vision as well, then this is just two ships passing in the night.

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