Odds and Ends

I try to maintain a minimum length for my posts of about two pages in Word, 12 point single spaced. Sometimes I have something I feel like talking about that is shorter than that, hence this post.

Vote Your Conscience: It’s Free

(written before Biden withdrew)

I strongly disapprove of both Biden and Trump. Biden may possibly be a decent human being but he is a terrible president — the opposite of my view of Clinton. He is quite obviously corrupt and the policies he follows are very bad for the country. Trump is a loose cannon — another term might end up doing no great harm that Biden wouldn’t do, might even do a few good things, might be a catastrophe.

If my vote was going to determine which of them won I would have to think seriously about which I most want to lose, but it isn’t. If I were in a small purple state, perhaps New Hampshire, the chance of my vote affecting the electoral outcome could be as high as one in a hundred thousand, perhaps even higher. That might be an adequate reason to bother to vote for a good candidate but not to go through the agony of deciding which bad candidate I am less unhappy about supporting.

I am in California. Any election in which California has a significant chance of going Republican is one where the Republican candidate doesn’t need its electoral votes.

It follows that I can vote my conscience, which probably means voting for Chase Oliver, the Libertarian candidate, assuming he doesn’t do anything I strongly disapprove of between now and the election, or not voting for anyone if he does. The function of voting, the only thing it accomplishes for very nearly everyone in a presidential election, is the same as what cheering at a football game accomplishes — making you feel good.

Inconsistencies

Revealed Preference is the policy of judging what people believe by what they do, not what they say. From time to time I come across a notable contradiction between the two.

Biden says that climate change is a terrible threat, that we should do everything we can to prevent it, including switching to electric vehicles. Currently Chinese producers can sell an electric vehicle, low end but entirely functional, for something like half the cost of the least expensive gas vehicle sold by US firms, can sell a high end EV for substantially less than Tesla charges for the equivalent.

Biden is putting 100% tariffs on them. Climate change may be a terrible threat, but not compared to the risk of losing the votes of auto workers in Michigan.

Another example along the same lines is the hostile attitude of most environmentalists concerned with climate change to nuclear reactors, the one substitute for fossil fuel power that is not, like wind or solar, intermittent and, unlike hydropower, can be expanded without limit.

The Rice Christian Cycle

“Rice Christians” were Chinese who converted to Christianity because the missionaries had rice. The same pattern applies elsewhere.

Consider a political view that is out of fashion--conservatism or libertarianism c. 1960, say. Not many academics, not many authors, support it. But the ones who do are committed supporters because nobody else would pay the costs of being on the outside.  And, on average, they are abler than the opposition, both because they have been exposed to both sides, the other being all around them, and because surviving intellectually when everyone thinks you are wrong is hard work. A further advantage of being out of power is that, since you don’t have to justify everything that those in power find it politically necessary to do, you can afford to be consistent, to take unpopular positions if your basic arguments imply them.

Suppose some change, say the Reagan revolution, reverses the roles. One of the reasons for the change is that the outs, while less numerous than the ins, were of higher quality—more committed, with better arguments. It is hard, after all, to do a good job of rebutting views that you don't take seriously and are rarely exposed to.

Now being a conservative is not only respectable, it is the route to a good job in Washington, perhaps a profitable and prominent career. The number who choose to support that position increases sharply but their quality decreases, both because it is much easier to maintain a position when it is in favor and because quite a lot of them are rice Christians. 

On the other side, things are moving in the opposite direction. Only those who really believe in liberalism (modern American sense) continue to support it, now that it looks more like the wave of the past than the wave of the future.

And since the new ins are getting flabby and the new outs, if less numerous, are now of higher quality than they used to be, the wheel turns again.

That is a considerable exaggeration of what happened over my lifetime and not, I am sure, a full explanation of political cycles at other times and places, but perhaps a partial explanation. Better, I suspect, for the UK swing, early in the 20^th century, from classical liberalism to “liberalism” in its modern sense of democratic socialism in dilute aqueous solution.

The University Flap

Current arguments, at Harvard and elsewhere, focus on two issues: antisemitism and plagiarism. Much less attention is being devoted to the broader problems both are symptoms of. I expect it is true that Harvard students who express support for Israel in the current conflict are likely to face at least social pressure and very probably worse, but the same is true for members of the community who express the controversial biological claim that there are two sexes or suggest that one possible explanation for a different distribution of outcomes for men and women might be a different distribution of abilities. The fundamental problem is the existence of ideological orthodoxies enforced across the campus, at Harvard and elsewhere. Underlying that is the attitude that that anyone who disagrees with the current orthodoxy must be ignorant or evil.

Plagiarism: Symptom  not Problem

Following the controversy over plagiarism by President Gay, two things struck me. The first was that the plagiarism was for the most part trivial, chunks of text not ideas she was claiming for her own. The second, when I looked at Gay’s list of publications, was how thin it was — no books¹ and eleven peer reviewed articles only seven of which predate her appointment as a tenured full professor.

Plagiarism wasn’t the real scandal.

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1. None that she authored, one collection of articles for which she was one of four editors. A more detailed account on someone else’s substack.