How exactly do schools and parents matter? To what degree are the actions of parents responsible for how their children turn out, and how? What do children really learn in school, and what might they learn? And how do these questions relate to issues that Howard County is facing today, including housing affordability, school redistricting, raising students’ test scores, and the like?

Judith Rich Harris was once a Harvard graduate student in psychology before being kicked out of the program on the grounds that she would not “develop into our professional stereotype of what an experimental psychologist should be.” Prevented by chronic illness from obtaining her doctorate elsewhere, she first found employment as a writer of psychology textbooks and then began a second career as a independent researcher after coming to disbelieve conventional wisdom about the role of parents in child development. Her death last December at the age of 80 prompted me to explore her work and write this post.

Nothing that Harris wrote, or that I write here, should be taken as gospel. The state of psychology as a science right now is very unsettled, and (as I discuss below) it will likely take some while for the discipline to come to a consensus on how well Harris’s ideas explain the world. But her ideas are certainly plausible and consistent with other things we know about family, school, and society, so if nothing else you can consider this an interesting thought experiment about how the world might be different than we think, and our education and related policies likewise different.

How do parents affect their children’s development?

Harris’s chief interest as a researcher was in how children develop their personalities and become socialized to live and work in the world. Why is this such an important topic?

In my “seven answers” article on liberty and equality I discussed how even in the world of Major League Baseball, in which everyone might be expected to perform at an equally high level, there are large differences in players’ performances. Some of these can be chalked up to differences in raw athletic ability, but others are plausibly due to differences in personality and resulting behavior: how willing are players to practice? Do they listen to their coaches’ instructions and follow them? Are they leaders in the clubhouse, or disruptive to team cohesion?

As in baseball, so in life: conscientiousness, likeability, willingness to cooperate, and other factors help determine how successful people will be in their careers. Other aspects of personality, like altruism, community spirit, kindness, and so on, affect our judgements of how morally good a person is.

The traditional view (which is actually relatively recent in historical terms) is that parents’ guidance is the most important factor in molding children’s personalities: that if children are studious or kind it is supposedly because their parents “raised them right,” and if they fall short in any area then it is allegedly due to their parents failing to do their job.

In the course of writing psychology textbooks and reviewing the research on which they were based, Harris concluded that the traditional view was wrong: that parents’ actions in and of themselves have relatively little influence in how their children turn out, and that to the extent children resemble their parents in personality it is in large part because parents pass those personality traits on to them, in the same way parents pass on their facial features and hair color.

Harris spends much of her book The Nurture Assumption building the case for this. One key argument has to do with children who are adopted: that such children’s personalities do not typically resemble those of other children born into the same families, while identical twins have similar personalities even if they are adopted into other families and raised apart. In baseball terms, it’s unlikely that the average Little Leaguer would have become an MLB prospect if adopted by Ken Griffey, Sr. However, it’s likely that Ken Griffey, Jr., would have found athletic success even away from his father’s influence, if he had been given the opportunity to develop his talent (a key point to which I’ll return).

This is not to say that parents do not and cannot positively influence their children in any way—an extreme position that many of Harris’s critics ascribed to her, and a reaction that she herself sometimes inadvertently provoked by taking an “everything you know is wrong” attitude.

First, parents can and should provide their children the things we’d expect all children to have in a civilized society: adequate food and shelter, medical care, physical security and freedom from abuse of all kinds, and so on.

It is in turn the mark of a civilized society that it makes it possible for all parents to do this: that parents can earn wages sufficient to provide for their families (or be financially assisted if they cannot), that they can provide health care to their children without bankrupting themselves, that their homes and water supplies are free of lead and other poisons harmful to children’s development, and that they are subject to a system of policing that both protects and respects their persons.

Parents also influence their children by their actions in acknowledging and reinforcing the personalities already inherent in the children: if a child appears to be studious and interested in reading their parents buy them books and take them to libraries, if they show artistic inclinations their parents take them to the theater and museums, and if they like physical activity their parents play with them more and sign them up for youth sports.

This behavior is very much influenced by the parents’s own inherent personalities passed down to their offspring: for example, parents who are athletic will tend to have children who are also athletic, and then (being athletic themselves) will tend to further encourage those children in athletic activities. But again the larger society also plays a role, by providing opportunities for parents to influence their children in these ways, for example by funding public playgrounds and athletic fields.

Finally, through their actions parents can influence the behavior of children within the family itself, including children’s attitudes toward their parents: parents who treat their children with kindness and respect will be more likely than harsh and cruel parents to have their children respect them and treat them kindly in turn. This influence may not carry over into children’s behavior in the outside world—indeed Harris argues that children’s behavior in the outside world often bears little or no similarity to their behavior in the home—but it can improve the quality of the parent-child relationship.

How does the outside world influence children’s development?

If parents do not greatly influence their children’s personalities (beyond whatever personality traits were passed down from parent to child at birth), what does?

Harris contended that the major influence on children’s personality development and socialization is the world outside their families, and in particular the peers they encounter at school and elsewhere. One of Harris’s key arguments is based on the example of language learning, particularly when parents are immigrants and speak a different language than society at large.

Immigrant parents may speak their own language at home, and their children will learn that language and use it when speaking to their parents. However at the same time those children will learn the language of the outside world, because it is the language spoken by the other children who are their peers, and they will adopt the accent, vocabulary, and vocal mannerisms characteristic of those peers.

Harris explained this by pointing out that the ultimate goal of children, the goal that drives their behavior, is not to succeed at home (which they will someday leave), but to succeed in the wider world outside the home. To achieve that goal children emulate other children of their own age or slightly older, modeling their own behavior on theirs. They also categorize themselves in relation to other children, and join peer groups consistent with those categorizations: the studious child becomes a “nerd,” the athletic child allies themself with the “jocks,” and so on.

In modern societies the place where children encounter other children is in school, and therefore the school environment is the primary driver of children’s socialization, together with after-school environments both in-person and (increasingly) online—both of which are often just continuations of school interactions in other contexts.

What roles does this leave for parents, if they wish their children to develop into successful adults? The first possibility is that parents can indirectly help influence their children by the parents’ actions in the larger world. Children emulate older children, who in turn emulate older children still, until children who are almost adults emulate actual adults. Thus the values and attitudes of the parents’ neighborhood and the broader society flow down and become the values and attitudes of children. To the extent that parents can help shape those values and attitudes, they help shape those of their children.

However parents are severely limited in how much they can do. Whatever they themselves can do in the home or in the world is far outweighed by the influence exerted by others. In the final analysis they have little power to stop their children adopting the values and attitudes of their peers, just as immigrant parents cannot stop their children from learning the languages spoken outside the home.

What parents can realistically hope to do is to help determine who their children’s peers are, by their choices of where to live and where to send their children to school. This plays out in various ways depending on the parents’ income.

Wealthy parents have it the easiest: they can afford to live anywhere, and to send their children to exclusive private schools in which they will encounter only other children of the wealthy (and perhaps a few carefully-selected scholarship students).

Parents at the other end of the income spectrum have it the hardest: it is difficult for them to move to places other than where they grew up, and if they are not satisfied with their children’s school experiences then their only hope is that someone else will provide them a no-cost alternative, like the choice of a public school in a different neighborhood or a publicly-funded charter school.

Middle-income parents have a different strategy: They cannot necessarily afford to send their children to private schools, but they are able to move to jurisdictions where the public schools are filled with the children of other middle-income parents with similar values and attitudes. Those other children will then be their own children’s peers and (collectively) the primary influence on their values and attitudes.

This is the dynamic that has played out in Howard County: educated middle-class parents are attracted to the county by housing and job opportunities, and they pass on their talents and personalities to their children. Those children are then successful in Howard County public schools in large part due to those talents and personalities and their reinforcement by the presence of other children with similar talents and personalities. Howard County public schools then get a reputation as “good schools,” yet more educated middle-class parents are attracted to the county based on that reputation, and the cycle begins again.

This would seem to be an entirely positive dynamic, but it has its unfortunate aspects. First, it ties parents’ hopes for their children to the schools they attend, and to the neighborhoods within those school’s attendance boundaries. This makes fights over Howard County school redistricting more divisive than they otherwise might be.

Moving students from one school to another does not just change students’ teachers, it changes the peer groups that determine students’ socialization. Some parents may be concerned about their children being moved to a school with students whose values and attitudes may be different (or at least perceived to be so), and other parents may be concerned about the possibility of such students being moved into their own children’s schools.

This dynamic also makes Howard County less affordable and less open to those pursuing upward mobility. As Howard County becomes more known for its “good schools” (which would be better termed “schools with good students”) that increases the demand for housing, which in the absence of increased housing supply will raise the prices of houses and apartments in the county. This in turn means that the county will become affordable only to those of higher incomes, or in other words people who have the talents and personalities that are a good fit for jobs enabling them to command such incomes.

The Central Branch of the Howard County Library System in downtown Columbia recently hosted an “Undesign the Redline” exhibit tracing the history of legal and corporate attempts to restrict housing opportunities in the United States by race. The library’s hosting the exhibit was consistent with the founding story of Columbia as a “garden for growing people” (to quote its founder Jim Rouse), open to people of all races and income levels.

The experience of Howard County today, now past Columbia’s 50th birthday, shows that it is possible for similar patterns of residential segration to emerge in a more spontaneous manner. Unlike past redlining these new patterns are ostensibly race-neutral (because they are based on household income) and the restrictions on housing supply and housing types that drive them can be justified as supporting worthy goals like preventing school overcrowding, reducing over-development and the influence of developers, ensuring adequate public facilities, preserving open space, and protecting the character of the county and its neighborhoods.

Is it possible to break this cycle, to make Howard County once again affordable to a wider range of people and ensure that Columbia will fulfill Jim Rouse’s vision? That is a longer discussion than this article can contain, but surely part of the solution is to ensure that all Howard County schools are equally attractive to parents, so that some neighborhoods are not disadvantaged relative to others, and that all parents can feel good about the socialization their children will undergo in those schools.

How can schools do this, above and beyond their ostensible function of teaching students academic knowledge that will (supposedly) be useful to them as adults. At a minimum they should provide what we would expect parents to provide: an environment in which students are adequately cared for and are safe from physical and emotional abuse of various kinds, including bullying both off-line and on-line.

We’d also expect schools to provide an environment in which learning of all kinds is supported, and in which students who wish to learn are able to do so without interference or interruption. What can schools do to ensure this? Harris had some relatively unformed ideas about this, and I speculate about this a bit in the next section.

How can schools help children succeed?

Going back to my baseball example, suppose we lived in a country where playing baseball were the only way to succeed in society, with anyone who couldn’t play baseball at a high level unlikely to rise out of poverty. Suppose also that politicians in that country urged children facing such poor prospects to “learn to hit or pitch,” and proposed to help them succeed by providing every child free tuition to baseball camps.

Most people would probably consider this to be an inadequate response to the problem, and such a country to be a less than ideal place for children to grow up. (In fact, there are countries where lack of economic development means that playing baseball is the only way out of poverty. We don’t consider generally consider those countries as models for the US to emulate.)

What does this have to do with child development? In addition to considering personality attributes passed down from parent to child, and socialization of children by their peer environment, Judith Rich Harris also sought to understand why children develop different personalities even in cases (as with identical twins) where we might expect their personalities to be very similar.

In her book No Two Alike Harris argued that the answer to this question lies in children’s quest for status within the groups to which they belong. Per Harris, socialization within peer groups causes children’s values and attitudes to match those of their peers, but achieving higher status requires that they act in ways that make them stand out from their peers.

This in turn drives the evolution of children’s personalities: for example, the child who is studious and rewarded for doing well in academic subjects is motivated to study more, and the child whose extraversion and likeability makes them popular will seek more opportunities to display those attributes and achieve further popularity. This evolution is influenced not just by children’s own personality predispositions, but also by the socialization they receive (e.g., do the child’s peers consider academic or athletic success to be something worth pursuing?) and the opportunities open to them.

Our schools can then be seen not just as an environment for children’s socialization, but also as providing a set of opportunities for children to measure themselves against others and achieve higher status in one way or another. If that set of opportunities is relatively limited then children will seek other ways to achieve status, some of which may not be desirable from the point of view of the school or of society at large.

My tentative conclusion is then that our schools should not be like the countries where baseball is the only path to success. In addition to providing a positive environment for children’s socialization and a grounding in topics everyone should know (mainly basic literacy and numeracy), schools should strive to provide as many opportunities as possible for children to find something they’re good at and pursue the achievement of status in positive ways. Beyond traditional academic subjects for the studious and sports for the athletic, that might include opportunities for students to express themselves through arts of various kinds, to work with their hands, to learn how to run a business, to learn how to care for others, and so on.

Opportunities like this are often a feature of today’s schools, but they exist at the margin, under constant threat of funding cuts (like the arts), seen as less prestigious and desirable (like vocational programs), and in general considered to detract from the primary goal of driving children’s academic achievement as measured by standardized test scores.

Fully implementing the vision above would thus require a total rethinking of the way schools are organized, especially in late middle school and high school, corresponding to the years in which (according to Harris) children develop their adult personalities. It would also require a different way of measuring the success of schools and teachers—or perhaps abandoning the idea of measurement entirely, beyond ensuring that schools meet some base-line goals in terms of providing a safe and supportive environment for students.

Of course such a major rework of schools could not occur in a vacuum. Beyond state and Federal educational policies that might hamper such a change, it’s of no use for schools to offer alternative paths to students if society at large does not value people who take those paths. There must be opportunities and (if needed) support for them to live lives of dignity and worth and to provide for themselves and their families. I addressed this topic in other posts, so I won’t comment further on it here.

Looking to the future

As I mentioned at the beginning, this post is a thought experiment: if Judith Rich Harris was correct then these are some implications for parents, schools, and society. I happen to think her theories are plausible, but at present they are not generally accepted, particularly by the people who are most concerned with child development and who drive education policy.

Could this change, and if so, how long might such a change take? At this point it’s been over twenty years since Harris first laid out her hypotheses and the arguments for them. I suspect it may be almost as long until Harris is definitively proved right or wrong to the satisfaction of most of the people whose opinions count, and perhaps longer than that for her ideas (if correct) to be reflected in education policy.

First, people deemed to be child development experts would have to come to a consensus that children resemble their parents in personality and talents for the same reason they resemble them in appearance. As consumer DNA testing becomes more popular and its applications move beyond those that are primarily ancestry-focused or entertainment-oriented (“wine recommendations . . . scientifically selected based on your DNA”), it’s possible that ordinary people will come to this conclusion before most experts do.

Second, psychologists would need to test and confirm (or disprove) Harris’s ideas regarding children’s socialization and personality development. Right now psychology as a discipline is in the midst of a battle over whether past experiments underlying accepted theories were actually conducted properly,¹ and what if anything needs to be done to put psychological theories on a sounder scientific footing. Resolving these controversies will take some time, and probably depend to a large degree on researcher turnover within the field.

Finally, even if Harris’s ideas come to be accepted by experts and ordinary people alike, policymakers will not respond to those ideas until they have some compelling reason to do so. For now policymakers appear to be committed to the idea that what America needs most are more STEM professionals, that the primary if not only goal of our educational system should be to provide them, and that we can best measure public schools’ success in promoting that goal through students’ scores on standardized tests and their acceptance into four-year colleges and universities.

Policymakers will likely change their minds only if and when that strategy clearly proves insufficient to address the challenges that the Americans will face in the 21st century. I wrote this post in the belief that that day will come.

For further exploration

The best source for information on Judith Rich Harris is the web site judithrichharris.info maintained by her husband Charles Harris. The site includes a biography of Harris and an extensive set of links to articles and related material for her two major works, The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike.

Geting the full flavor of Harris’s argument really requires reading her books, since popular summarizations often distort what she was saying—most notably that she claimed that “parents don’t matter” in any way whatsoever. However if you don’t have time to read the books here are some sources in which Harris defends her theories in her own words:

• “Children Don’t Do Things Half Way.” An interview on the Edge online site in which Harris reviews the arguments of The Nurture Assumption. (See also the Edge retrospective on Harris.)
• “How Many Environments Does a Child Have?.” A reprint of a Harvard Education Letter article in which Harris comments on the role of schools, clasmmates, and teachers in forming children’s personalities.
• “The Nature of Nurture.” A “dialogue” (really, a debate) in Slate magazine between Harris and one of her critics, psychologist Jerome Kagan. Among other things, this highlights Harris’s contrarian and somewhat combative stance vs. the psychology “establishment.”
• “Where is the Child’s Environment? A Group Socialization Theory of Development.” The 1995 Psychological Review paper in which Harris first set out her theories.

If you do have time to read Harris’s books, the first part of No Two Alike recaps the arguments of The Nurture Assumption, so reading that book alone might seem like a shortcut. However some people might not like the way No Two Alike is structured (like a mystery novel), and the book omits the in-depth discussion in The Nurture Assumption of how Harris came to believe that conventional theories of child development were incorrect.

Finally, those who like Malcolm Gladwell’s popularizations can read his New Yorker profile of Harris, “Do Parents Matter?” written on the eve of publication of The Nurture Assumption.

tl;dr: The Niskanen Center promotes a pro-market pro-government vision for the center-right, but I think the sales pitch needs to be tweaked to get at least some conservative voters to buy it.

What’s my beef with the Niskanen Center?

I know the Niskanen Center (having read its blog for the past few years). I like many of the Niskanen Center’s policy recommendations (see my “seven answers” series). I even donate to the Niskanen Center. So why I am writing this long blog post (gently) chastising the Niskanen Center? For the answer read on (but feel free to skip over the next section or two if you already know the material).

The Niskansen Center advertises itself as “a moderate, nonpartisan think tank that works to promote an open society and change public policy through direct engagement in the policymaking process.” In other words, it’s engaged in the political equivalent of what we in the IT business call “enterprise sales”: trying to get high-level decision makers to buy what you’re selling and implement it in their organizations.

Recently the Niskanen Center has stepped up its sales efforts, releasing a white paper laying out a comprehensive vision “that sees government and market as complements rather than antagonists” and proposes a “new synthesis [to] help move our divided society toward the best version of itself and away from the toxic tribalism that afflicts us today.” The Center also sponsored a one-day conference “Starting Over: The Center-Right After Trump” featuring various conservative and libertarian thinkers, with a special guest appearance by our own Governor Larry Hogan.

Is the Niskanen Center pursuing an effective sales strategy? If not, how could it be improved? And why as a lifelong Democrat would I be interested in their success, especially if the result is to improve the future electoral fortunes of the Republican Party?

Why be a moderate in a two-party system?

It’s clear that the Niskanen Center sensibility has no natural home in a two-party system driven by winner-take-all elections and prone to polarization. In the US the only strategy open to the Center is to attempt to have its preferred policies adopted by either the Democratic or Republican Party.

As it happens many of those policies, including proposals for universal health care and other forms of social insurance, are more compatible with the positions of Democratic elected officials and their voters. So why is the Niskanen Center trying to cultivate support from Republicans and promoting a hoped-for moderate makeover of the Republican Party?

Leaving aside the past “fusionism” that saw libertarians ally with conservatives, a more plausible reason for its outreach to Republicans is simple electoral math: The structure of the US Senate and Republican domination of small rural states makes it very likely that Republicans will maintain control of the Senate for the foreseeable future, or will at least be able to block Democratic legislation if they vote as a unified bloc.

Advancing the Niskanen Center’s preferred policies (many of which are my preferred policies) will thus require gaining the support of at least some Republican legislators willing to go against conservative orthodoxy. Hence it’s joining with others in the quest to revive that almost-extinct species, the “moderate Republican” (and hence my interest as a Democrat in that quest).

Civilization vs. the barbarians

But how likely is it that moderate Republicanism can be revived? Larry Hogan won re-election by a substantial margin, and is now being feted by some Republicans looking for an alternative candidate in 2020. However I suspect that Hogan would not make it out of a Republican presidential primary anywhere in the US, including Maryland.

On the flip side, in the affluent, educated, suburban/exurban jurisdiction of Howard County, Maryland (traditionally a swing district), self-proclaimed “independent leader” and Hogan ally Allan Kittleman saw his own brand of moderate Republicanism go down to defeat at the hands of progressive African American Democrat Calvin Ball.

Hogan’s problem will likely be that he won’t be perceived as conservative enough by most Republican voters. Kittleman’s problem was possibly that when he attempted to adopt a more conservative position, as in his opposition to so-called “sanctuary” legislation for Howard County, it turned off some Democratic voters who might otherwise have been inclined to give him a second term.

I think the Niskanen Center, and those Republican candidates influenced by it, will have a similar problem. To diagnose it further I’ll enlist the help of Arnold Kling’s model of the three axes (or languages) of politics:

Due to its libertarian background the Niskanen Center has no problem speaking the language of libertarians where appropriate. Per Kling the preferred libertarian framing is that of the state vs. those subject to state coercion. The Niskanen Center’s promotion of the free market and support for reducing excessive government regulation plays right into that framing.

The Niskanen Center policy vision also at times echoes the preferred framing of progressives (per Kling), of the oppressed seeking to escape oppression and overthrow their oppressors. For example, the paper argues that “regardless of the justice of our contemporary rules, people’s capacities, social standing, and social capital are inheritances of previous rules that may have been profoundly unjust.”

However it’s hard to find in the Niskanen Center policy vision the framing that Kling claims is preferred by conservatives, namely that of a civilization under assault by barbarians and defending itself against them. This is especially true when we consider culture with a capital “C,” as in “Western Culture” or “American Culture.” (The word “culture” nowhere appears in the Niskanen policy vision paper.)

The Republican Party seems to have committed itself to a particular ethno-nationalist version of the “civilization vs. barbarians” framing, one that has resonated with many of its voters, portraying a white Christian civilization under attack by those who are non-white and/or non-Christian. This framing drives the political positions and electoral strategies of a host of Republican candidates, from local offices to the highest office in the land, particularly when it comes to immigration—the very issue driving the partial shutdown of the US government as I write.

This framing harks back (in one form or another) to Reconstruction and the antebellum nativist movement. The Niskanen Center, along with like-minded others, implicitly dismisses it as a nativist fantasy and attempts to counter it through cold hard facts, as in its “Guide to Answering Ten Commonly Asked Questions on Immigration.” But the ethno-nationalist version of the “civilization vs. the barbarians” framing is resistant to such an approach, relying as it does on a way of looking at the world that is congenial to conservatives and thus easily exploited by conservative candidates seeking electoral office.

I think the better approach is not to dismiss the “civilization vs. the barbarians” framing out of hand. Rather I’ll try to interrogate it more closely, to see if a different version of the “civilization vs. the barbarians” framing could be created to make the Niskanen Center vision more congenial to conservatives. In this I’m motivated by the words of the vision paper itself, that “we have an obligation to try to justify our beliefs in terms [our fellow citizens] can recognize.”

Cultural distance and American exceptionalism

In exploring the question of reinterpreting the Niskanen Center vision in a conservative framing, let’s start with the concept of “American culture”: a set of “socially communicated practices and beliefs” (to use Arnold Kling’s definition) characteristic of Americans. American culture is typically portrayed by conservatives as being derived from (white) European Christendom, and conservative political rhetoric often implies that it is not or cannot be shared by the non-white or non-Christian.

As is often the case, reality is more complicated, at least according to researchers studying cultural evolution and attempting to formulate better measures of cultural and psychological “distance” between countries. The construction of such measures is quite technical, but the basic concept is relatively simple to understand:

Consider a representative sample of Americans answering questions about their various beliefs: “How important is family to you?” “How often do you attend church?” “How much do you trust strangers?” and so on. For a given question the surveyed Americans will likely vary in their answers, but there will be a “typical” answer and some variation around the typical answer.¹

Now consider the same question asked of people in another country. Again this will produce a typical answer and variation in the answers. Finally, combine their answers to the question with those of Americans, looking at the typical answer and variation in the answers of the two countries’ respondents considered as a single group.

In some cases, as with American and Canadian respondents, the typical answer and variation in answers in the combined sample may differ very little from the typical answer and variation in answers produced by the American respondents alone. With another country (call it “X”) there might be significant differences in the combined answers and the American-only answers: country X’s respondents may have a different typical answer to the question, and/or their answers to the question may vary more or less than those of the American respondents.

These smaller or larger differences can then be used to calculate a measure of “cultural distance” between the US and another country relative to that particular question.² This cultural distance value will be close to zero for a country like Canada in our example, but larger for our example country X.

Now consider not a single question but a survey consisting of many questions, covering an entire range of attitudes and beliefs. The answers to this set of questions can be used to calculate a single value of cultural distance between the US and another country, which the researchers refer to as CF _ST .³

The graph above shows the cultural distances (CF _ST values) from the United States to each of a selected group of other countries, as calculated using answers to the questions on the World Values Survey.⁴ The cultural distance from the US to a given country can be roughly interpreted as the percentage of variation between the US and that country relative to the total variation within the two countries considered together.

Some of the results of those calculations accord with the ethno-nationalist version of the “civilization vs. the barbarians” framing: Canada is the closest country to the US by this measure, followed by other countries in the Anglosphere, while the countries furthest in cultural distance from the US are those with Muslim majorities. Other results are less consistent with this framing: for example, by this measure Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico are closer culturally to the US than European countries like France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

(Ethno-nationalists might interpret this as evidence of the effect of Hispanic migration to the US. However this seems contradicted by the small cultural distance between the US and Canada, which has a very small Hispanic population—on the order of 1-2%. Alternately they might claim that extensive Muslim immigration is driving European countries further away in cultural distance from the US. Again this seems implausible, as Great Britain, a country with a Muslim population percentage as high as Germany and almost as high as France or the Netherlands, is at almost the same cultural distance from the US as New Zealand, a country with a very small Muslim population—again on the order of 1-2%.)

Another point is that even for countries maximally culturally distant from the US, variation between those countries and the US is a relatively small fraction (less than a quarter in the most extreme case) of the variation within the countries considered together. The typical resident in such countries will have attitudes and beliefs significantly different than those of a typical American, but even in such culturally distant countries there’s likely to be a significant number of people whose attitudes and beliefs are consistent with those of mainstream American culture.

I’ll revisit this point below, but I first want to consider a different question: Why is American culture (and by extension Anglosphere and European culture) relatively exceptional relative to the cultures of other countries, and what implications does that have for the “civilization vs. the barbarians” conservative framing?

How the Church created liberal democracy

Part of the ethno-nationalist version of the “civilization vs. the barbarians” framing promoted by many conservative politicians is that American culture, and Western culture in general, is inextricably linked to European ancestry and the Christian religion. In contrast, the same researchers responsible for the measure of culture distance discussed above also argue that Western culture and its associated psychology are simply due to an odd accident of history.

Their hypothesis, supported by considerable evidence, is that the typical psychology of those living in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries has its ultimate roots in the decisions of the leaders of the Catholic Church in late antiquity to enact strict prohibitions on marriage between couples related even to the slightest degree.

These prohibitions had the affect of breaking up traditional social arrangements based on kinship within extended families. The resulting changes in culture favored those people who had a more individualist outlook, who owed less to their extended families and more to the efforts of themselves and their immediate families, and who were able to cooperate with unrelated others for their mutual benefit.

The three graphs above represent a small part of this argument. The first graph shows that present-day individualism in various countries (as measured by the Hofstede scale) tends to be less in countries with a previously high intensity of kin-based institutions (as measured by the Kinship Intensity Index). The second graph shows that the same lessening of individualism is present in countries with a higher prevalence of marriage between cousins. Finally, the third graph shows that individualism tends to be higher in countries that have had more centuries of exposure to the Western (Catholic) church.

If true this hypothesis has some interesting implications. In particular it implies that what are thought to be unique characteristics of Western culture—greater individualism, creativity, trust in strangers, impersonal cooperation and altruism, and lessened obedience, conformity, and traditionalism—have little or nothing to do with actual Christian beliefs. (Among other things this is implied by the experiences of countries like Russia that have been primarily exposed to the Eastern church, the theology of which does not differ significantly from that of the Western church.)

This also implies that there is no inherent reason why countries with non-Christian and/or non-white majorities that are currently more culturally distant from the US could not have developed—or might yet develop—cultures more similar to those of the US and other Western countries, if kinship arrangements in those countries had been (or are in future) similarly altered to emphasize nuclear families as opposed to extended ones.

Rethinking the civilization/barbarian axis

What are the implications of the research discussed above for the “civilization vs. the barbarians” conservative framing? Who in this conception are the real barbarians, and what is the civilization that conservatives—and everyone else—should be called upon to defend?

Here I rely on the thesis put forth by Mark Weiner: that the only alternative to the modern liberal state is “a form of governance that unites a radically decentralized constitutional structure with a culture of group honor and shame . . . and makes the extended family the constitutive unit of society, politics, and law.” In other words, the rule of the clan.

By breaking the bonds of kinship formed by intermarriage within an extended family, the Catholic Church arguably created the preconditions for the emergence of a liberal order that valorized individual autonomy, had some concept of the public interest (as distinct from clan interests), and based governance on a set of impersonal institutions that (at least in theory) existed for the benefit of everyone equally. In other words, the rule of law.

We can see what the rule of the clan looks like by looking at other countries around the world, especially those culturally distant from the US. We can also look into the past, at the European societies that emerged from the rule of the clan. The painting above shows one example: a staged battle in which men from two Scottish clans butchered one another over some matter or other touching on their clans’ honor.

According to Weiner, as the rule of the clan recedes the bonds of extended kinship lose their power over the individual but live on in benign form as part of individuals’ cultural heritages, one way in which they situate themselves within society and in the story of humanity. As shown in the photograph above, a group of Scots marching together is no longer a sight to be feared by their clan’s enemies, but simply an occasion for people to express pride in their heritage.

The barbarism we should combat is thus not clannishness as family feeling but anti-social clannishness, that prioritizes clan over country and the interests of one’s fellow Americans. (By “anti-social” I of course mean this in American terms. In a clan-based society it would be anti-social not to put your own clan’s interests above others.)

This anti-social clannishness comes in many forms: the criminal gangs bound by ties of family and ethnicity; the terrorists who kill and maim others in the name of ethnic and religious solidarity; the parents who kill their children for perceived violations of family honor; the businesspeople who think nothing of cheating and defrauding those of different ethnic groups or religions; and (last but not least) the demagogues who promise to support “the people” but instead use their political positions to enrich themselves and their families.

In this framing the civilization that we seek to protect from barbarism is that of the rule of law, of individual autonomy, of “free minds and free markets,” of peaceful toleration of those with whom we disagree, and of a public interest broadly defined to encompass the needs and desires of all Americans, no matter their heritage or station in life.

How might this alternative framing, what I’ll call “rule of law conservatism” or “anti-clan conservatism,” play out in term of policy? In particular, can we talk about immigration policy in a way that is consistent with both the Niskanen Center vision and with this different framing?

The immigrants we want

Those who lobby for immigration restrictions characterize their opponents as advocating for “open borders.” Immigration supporters object to this, and rightly so, because very few people argue for no restrictions on immigration at all.

However I think the “open borders” charge is politically effective because it captures a common feeling: that beyond a few limited cases (like denying entry to criminals and suspected terrorists) immigration supporters are perceived as being unwilling to make judgements, particularly moral judgements, about which immigrants we want to attract to the US and which we don’t.

The ethno-nationalist version of the “civilization vs. the barbarians” framing offers a simple and politically potent response to this, designating some countries as unacceptable sources for immigrants based on their being non-white and/or non-Christian.

The alternative “rule of law vs. anti-social clannishness” framing, combined with the research I’ve cited, may offer a alternative approach: Given the amount of variety in cultural attitudes within each country, even in those countries culturally distant from the US, there are likely to be many people around the world whose attitudes, beliefs, and personalities are “American-like,” and who would therefore make good US citizens.

In fact, it may even be in the more culturally distant countries where we might find the best candidates for US citizenship. Any “American-like” people in those countries will likely feel all the more strongly the cultural gap between themselves and their countries’ dominant cultures, and will likely be the most motivated to assimilate to American culture as immigrants. In other words, they will be the people most “yearning to breathe free.”

We also can infer from the cited research that being non-white or non-Christian is not in and of itself an inherent obstacle to being a good American. What really matters is that prospective immigrants not be predisposed to anti-social clannishness that violates American norms and is inconsistent with American culture.

So how would this alternative framing cause us to rethink US immigration policy? Or would it necessarily?

For example, the Niskanen Center has defended the lottery-based “diversity visa” program, partly on the basis that in practice those admitted under the program do better than other immigrants. It’s likely that those who are most attracted to the American way of life, and most predisposed to be compatible with it, are going to be the most motivated to jump through the many hoops that entrance under that program requires.

In another example, US family-based immigration policy already prioritizes uniting of nuclear families over uniting extended families. It’s not immediately clear to me how it could be tweaked to further discourage immigration by those predisposed to anti-social clannish behavior.

It’s possible that what is needed with US immigration policy is not a major overhaul (although there may be useful reforms that could be made). It may simply be that we need a different way of talking about immigration: that we can and should have clear criteria about who to admit to the US as immigrants and who not to admit, but that such criteria should consistent with a “rule of law vs. anti-social clannishness” framing as opposed to an ethno-nationalist framing.

This also implies that we should not be shy about valuing and promoting a common American culture and identity based on freedom, individualism, and the liberal order. This culture and identity can and should ultimately take priority over the many ethnic, religious, and other cultures and identities to which individual Americans belong.

As the Niskanen Center vision paper notes, “the liberal democratic capitalist welfare state [is] the best model of governance ever devised, producing the richest, healthiest, best-educated societies that ever existed.” But I think the Niskanen Center needs to go further and recognize that the liberal democratic capitalist welfare state exists only because Americans, and others like us, have a particular culture that makes it possible for such a state to emerge and flourish, and that the continued existence of that state is dependent on our willingness to promote and defend that culture.

This I think is the missing piece in the Niskanen Center vision, one that may help it justify its policy program to conservatives, just as the Center has acknowledged the concerns of libertarians and progressives and tried to justify its vision to them in terms they can recognize.

It’s possible, if not likely, that this reframing of the “civilization vs. the barbarians” axis will not attract the support of most conservative politicians and voters, that they will still be wedded to a framing based on ethno-nationalism.

But if even a few conservative politicians can win electoral success campaigning on an alternative vision of America, that may be enough to implement the Niskanen Center’s preferred policies in alliance with those from the other side of the aisle. The Niskanen Center seems to be playing a long game, and in that game even the smallest of advantages may be the key to ultimate victory.

For further exploration

For more on the Niskanen Center and its policy vision, see the following:

• Niskanen Center Conspectus lays out in more detail the goals and strategy of the Center, based on its theory of policy change as “a product of intense insider activity to overcome profound status quo biases in the political system—biases that are not easily moved by external political pressure or material resources.”
• “The Center Can Hold: Public Policy for an Age of Extremes,” by Brink Lindsey, Will Wilkinson, Steve Teles, and Samuel Hammond, attempts to combine the Niskanen Center’s various policy positions into a single coherent vision that “rejects the false dichotomy between ‘big’ and ‘small’ government and combines the best aspects of the ‘pro-market’ right and the ‘pro-government’ left.”
• “Starting Over: The Center-Right After Trump” was a one-day conference exploring “political prospects for a new center-right, and the policy ideas and ideals that can revitalize the post-Trump Republican Party.” Among other things, it featured a welcoming address by Maryland Governor Larry Hogan. Unfortunately there are no transcripts for the conference audio, and no audio for Hogan’s remarks.
• “Is Hogan the antidote to Trumpism?,” by Josh Kurtz for Maryland Matters, and “Maryland’s Hogan speaks to GOP dissenters looking for alternative to Trump,” by Ovetta Wiggins and David Weigel for the Washington Post, report on Hogan’s appearance at the “Starting Over” conference and the part he might play in a potential future Republican Party more receptive to the Niskanen Center’s ideas.
• “A Guide to Answering Ten Commonly Asked Questions on Immigration” and the various policy briefs on immigration provide a comprehensive picture of the Niskanen Center’s views on immigration and related issues.

The following are a representative sampling of reactions to the Niskanen Center policy vision:

• “A new center being born: The market and the welfare state go together” by David Brooks for the New York Times. In one of the most enthusiastic responses to the paper, Brooks writes that he “felt liberated to see the world in fresh new ways, and not only in the ways I’ve always seen them or the way people with my label are supposed to see them.”
• “What would a responsible center-right party do?” by Jennifer Rubin for the Washington Post. Rubin writes that “[The paper’s] greatest contribution might be in its recognition that ‘small government’ is a slogan and a canard, and too much effort in the right is spent (intentionally or not) on policies that inhibit widespread prosperity.”
• “I have seen the future of a Republican party that is no longer insane” by Jonathan Chait for New York magazine. Chait writes that “[The paper] synthesizes two years of heresies into an impressively coherent approach to governing,” with the Niskanen Center “operating from the starting point of what a well-functioning right-of-center party ought to stand for, rather than how the current one can be tweaked.”
• “The Niskanen Center is a splendid policy shop, but it is not the future of the Republican Party,” by Jeet Heer for The New Republic. Heer claims that the Republican party will not find the Center’s vision compatible with its base’s desire for “culture-war theater, white nationalism and tax cuts.”

The following sources provide background for my comments on modifying the Niskanen Center to make it more attractive to conservatives:

• “Culture Matters” by Virginia Postrel for Econlib. Postrel argues that libertarians and classical liberals do not understand culture but need to learn more about how it works and evolves.
• “It is sometimes appropriate . . .” is a blog post by Arnold Kling in which he (to my knowledge) first set out his model of political discourse, including conservatives’ use of the “civilization/barbarian” axis. Kling later expanded his thoughts into a book, The Three Languages of Politics.
• “Beyond WEIRD Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance” by Michael Muthukrishna, et.al., is a preprint of a paper outlining an approach to measuring cultural distance between countries based on their inhabitants’ responses to the World Values Survey. See also the web site culturaldistance.com for supplemental material.
• “The Origins of WEIRD Psychology by Jonathan Schulz, et.al., argues that the “peculiarity of populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD)” in part “arose historically from the Catholic Church’s marriage and family policies, which contributed to the dissolution of Europe’s traditional kin-based institutions.”
• “The Catholic Church, Kin Networks and Institutional Development” by Jonathan Schulz. In this “job market paper” building on “The Origins of WEIRD Psychology,” Schulz extends the argument that the “Catholic Church’s medieval marriage policies dissolved extended kin networks and thereby fostered inclusive institutions.”
• The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom by Mark Weiner discusses governmental institutions in societies dominated by kinship-based clans, and how such societies can evolve to become liberal societies based on individualism and the rule of law. Weiner summarizes his argument and applies it to geopolitics in his article “The Call of the Clan” for Foreign Policy.

I’ve now completed my series of posts addressing the questions put forth by Jason Booms in his article “Seven Questions.” In going back and looking at prior posts I had some additional thoughts, which I present here as my final take on these issues (at least for now).

But first, a meta-comment: Jason didn’t create his questions to motivate me to write about my political beliefs. He did it as a way to evaluate the positions of candidates for Howard County political offices. But did candidates’ positions on this set of issues really make any difference in the election? I don’t know the answer, but I’d certainly be interested in hearing Jason’s thoughts on this.

Wealth inequality

I had two thoughts after writing my post on wealth inequality:

First, a commenter on a libertarian site once made the argument to me that what people objected to was not differences in economic circumstances, i.e., income and wealth inequality, but differences in political power, i.e., being politically dominated by others. It’s an argument that comes naturally to libertarians, of course, but I agree that it seems plausible.

For example, most people likely think of Warren Buffett as a folksy grandfather-like figure, not as someone whose personal wealth is equal to that of a substantial fraction of the US population. The billionaires who excite popular resentment are instead those like George Soros and the Koch brothers who are very active in and identified with particular political causes and parties.

Why this should this be so? I have my own ideas, but for now I’ll simply say that I’m skeptical of narratives around economic inequality that see politics on the issue as driven primarily by resentment of the wealthy for their wealth itself.

Second, I suspect one corrosive aspect of wealth inequality relates to the incentives it provides to engage in corruption and general bad behavior. Consider a game played by 100 people, a game whose outcome is generally due to relative luck and skill, but which can also be influenced by underhanded tactics and outright cheating.

Suppose the prize for the bottom 90 finishers is $50,000, for the next 9 finishers is $250,000, and for the overall winner is $1.25 million. Now increase the second prize from $250,000 to $500,000, and the top prize from $1.25 million to $5 million.

It seems fairly self-evident that the incentives for cheating would be higher in the second scenario than the first. Those whose personalities already predispose them to cheat will receive significantly greater rewards but presumably suffer no greater chance of getting punished for cheating.

I think the same dynamic operates in human societies at large as wealth inequality increases. In fact, the motivation to cheat and engage in corrupt activities is probably even greater, since winners can use their rewards to greatly lessen their chances of punishment, either by buying off those in power or by acquiring political power themselves.

I don’t believe that these consequences of wealth inequality are fatal to a society, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many countries with very high Gini coefficients (e.g., Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, etc.) are also marked by relatively high levels of political instability and corrupt authoritarianism.¹

Social democracy

Regarding my post about social democracy, events continue to prove my point that in American discourse the word “socialism” is used primarily to score political points, without any real understanding of what it means in practice.

I think this will ultimately be to the detriment of those using “socialism” as a slur: If people’s understanding of “capitalism” is that you can’t afford health care and experience ongoing job insecurity, stagnant wages, and unemployment then I think it will erode support for the free market and even liberal democracy in general. It may then take another Roosevelt to save capitalism from itself.

I’ll also note that after last Tuesday’s 2018 gubernatorial election a Republican will still be governor of Maryland, and hark back to my speculation about Maryland legislators making a deal to increase social insurance programs in return for reducing excessive regulations on businesses and individuals. I don’t think this will actually happen, but I still think it would be a justifiable bargain. (I may blog later about what I consider one particular bit of Maryland regulatory overreach.)

Racial equality

I don’t have much to add to my post on racial equality. This election showed the importance of voting and of working against vote suppression, and the experience of Baltimore shows the importance of policing and crime in shaping the prospects for a city and its people.

Liberty and equality

I think one thing lacking in my liberty and equality post was talking more about immigration, the distinctions we make between those who are our fellow citizens and those who are not (or at least are not yet), and what it means to be an American.

Immigration is one of those topics where the heart rules the head. Think tanks and academics can issue all the pronouncements they wish regarding whether immigrants are a net benefit to the economy, whether they harm employment prospects for some already-resident Americans, or whether they are associated with increased crime and terrorism.²

However in the end the emotional aspects of immigration hold greater sway: On the right we have the belief that immigrants (especially unauthorized ones) are invaders taking our jobs, threatening our safety, and (in more extreme imaginings) aiding “white genocide.” On the left we have a vision of immigration of all kinds (authorized or not) as a way to rescue the oppressed, build a vibrant multicultural society and (again, in more extreme visions) overthrow “white hegemony.”

Here’s where I stand on all that: First, I believe that national identity is both real and important to most people. (It certainly is to me.) National identity in the sense I mean is driven by

• shared life experiences both small (e.g., school life) and large (e.g., wars, political upheavals, cultural touchstones, etc.);
• national narratives (“stories nations tell themselves”) and one’s participation in them;
• national stereotypes that serve as examplars by which people model their behavior;³ and
• in-group markers like language and accent, religion, style of dress, food preferences, etc.

Except for the last none of these is necessarily associated with membership in a particular ethnic group, and even there the “Americanization” process turns many ethnic markers into the common property of all Americans. (For example, consider pizza, hot dogs, and sushi.) In short, although America as a nation originated from the experiences of particular ethnic groups (primarily the English), it by no means is—or should be—an “ethno-state.”

Why is having a coherent shared national identity important? Because it forms a critical component of self-identity, co-existing with and to some extent subsuming more particular personal identities formed around ethnicity, religion, ideologies, etc. As such one’s national identity creates a sense of “fictive kinship” that helps foster both small- and large-scale social, economic, and political cooperation.

Coming back to immigration, it seems to me that the proper approach is one that is proactive rather than reactive (i.e., is deliberately and consciously designed in service to agreed-upon goals) and that maintains and strengthens national identity in the sense outlined above, while still providing us with the cultural and economic benefits that immigrants can bring as new Americans. I don’t have space or energy here to comment further, but I don’t think either ethnonationalism or multiculturalism (at least in its more extreme forms) are up to this task.

Class warfare

Regarding my class warfare post, after the run-up to and aftermath of the recent elections I have to say that Peter Turchin’s ideas about elite competition are looking more relevant every day.

I follow a relatively small number of people on Twitter, but they cover a fairly wide range of political views and include both local people I know and people active in national politics and media. What they tweet and retweet is a window into the political preoccupations of elites in conflict and how ordinary people get caught up in them. Even why I agree with the sentiments expressed, it’s apparent that the topics tweeted about—and the anger and outrage associated with them—are just as much calculated to secure one elite faction or another a political advantage as to address genuine problems.

But enough cynicism: I conclude by linking to two proposals intended to address the problem of elite overproduction and elite political conflict: Lee Drutman’s articles on greatly increasing the size of the US House of Representatives and reducing the effects of gerrymandering through multimember legislative districts. Both are good ideas to keep in mind for that future time when competing elites have fought each other to the point of exhaustion and are willing to consider fundamental changes to political institutions.

Gender equality

Having exhausted myself writing comments for other sections, I have nothing further to add to my post on gender equality.

LGBTQIA equality

I don’t have much more to say on LGBTQIA equality at this point other than to highlight the outcome of the Massachusetts Question 3 referendum.

The final vote in favor of Question 3 (that is, for retaining gender identity in non-discrimination legislation) was 67.8%, versus 32.2% opposed. To my knowledge this is the first state-wide election focused on gender identity issues, and the supermajority win is a good omen—especially compared with the results of early referendums on marriage-related questions.

On the flip side, the not-quite-68% support compares to the 71-73% support for Question 3 in pre-election polls and (especially) the estimated 80% of Massachusetts adults favoring LGBT non-discrimination laws in the 2017 PRRI American Values Atlas survey. It looks as if support in terms of votes was slightly softer than support in polls, possibly due to lower turnout among young voters. It also appears that of those people polled who described themselves as undecided or refused to answer, pretty much all of them ultimately voted against Question 3.

This has implications for other states: It may be that the 12-13% difference between the Massachusetts PRRI estimate and the ballot result means that the PRRI-estimated support for LGBT non-discrimination laws needs to be at least 63% or higher in a given state in order for LGBTQIA activists to have a reasonable chance of winning a state-wide referendum on including gender identity in those laws.

(States at or just above that threshold include Arkansas, Kentucky, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. States just below it include Lousiana, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia.)

That’s all I have to say on these issues for now. I now know better than to pre-announce what I’m planning to write about next, or to give any sort of timeframe for when I’ll do so. But if you’re interested in the sorts of things I write about please check back here every month or two, or follow me on Twitter at @hecker to see announcements of new posts.

tl;dr: The struggle for marriage equality provides guidance for how the longer-term campaign for LGBTQIA equality might go.

In the concluding post in my series outlining my answers to the “Seven Questions” posed by Jason Booms, I address Jason’s seven and final question:

Many LGBTQIA Americans have expressed concerns that the current Administration (and those who view the world similarly) are dedicated to rolling back recent legal protections fought for, and recognized, in this country. What steps can and should be taken to safeguard the rights of LGBTQIA citizens to participate fully in the “pursuit of happiness” stated in our Declaration of Independence?

First, to repeat my previous disclaimer: questions like this should first and foremost be addressed by people who are most directly affected by the issues under discussion, namely LGBTQIA¹ people. I’m writing here not because I have any special knowledge of or connection to these issues, but as one voter among many who will be asked to weigh candidates’ positions.

Minority rights and majority opinions

Having said that, to discern how the rights of LGBTQIA people might be best secured in the future we can look to the past. In particular, the movement for marriage equality in the US was remarkably successful in achieving its aims, and over a relatively short time period at that.

As shown in the graphs above, as recently as 2004 no state had a majority in support of marriage equality, with support in most states below 30%. Fast-forwarding to 2017, only a few states have less than majority support for marriage equality, with many states having a solid majority in favor (60% or greater) and a few a supermajority (70% or greater).² In total there were 26 states with a solid majority or supermajority of support. These states represented almost two-thirds of the US population.

It’s worth noting that the shift from minority to majority support appears to have occurred sometime in 2012 or 2013. That was the same period in which (after a long string of defeats) the movement for marriage equality achieved its first successes at the ballot box, with referendum victories in November 2012 affirming marriage equality legislation in Maine, Maryland, and Washington, and rejecting a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in Minnesota.

It’s a commonplace saying that “we can’t put protection of civil rights to a majority vote” (and in fact Julia McCready said just that a few months ago). This is indeed true as a ideal. However, in practice exercising one’s rights requires a majority willing to support or at least countenance that, whether that be directly via referendums, indirectly via the actions of elected legislators, or even more indirectly by society’s acceptance of decisions by unelected judges.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the movement for marriage equality picked up momentum after the electoral victories of November 2012 made it clear that there was an emerging majority of Americans willing to vote in support of LGBTQIA people.

So, the first tentative thought I have is this: There are bound to be elections in which LGBTQIA rights become an issue, directly, indirectly, or sometimes both. For example, recall past political campaigns when opponents of LGBTQIA rights sought to use referendums on marriage equality and related issues to increase the turnout of voters likely to support socially conservative candidates.

Given that, it’s arguably counterproductive to focus primarily on securing favorable judicial rulings or administrative regulations—rulings or regulations that can be overturned or rescinded when new judges and new administrations come on the scene. If there are elections that need to be won, whether that’s to elect supporters of LGBTQIA rights or to win straight-up “yes/no” referendums on LGBTQIA questions, the focus will need to be on securing the majority support needed to win them.

When marriage equality supporters were successful in winning such elections, as in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington, it made it clear to people in other states, to legislators, and to judges that support of marriage equality was not a fringe opinion that could be ignored. I think this is generalizable to LGBTQIA rights in general.

Of course, the key here is actually winning such elections—but before I discuss that topic, a brief detour into a larger question: what is or should be the goal of the fight for LGBTQIA rights?

Reform vs. revolution

There are LGBTQIA activists who believe that the focus on marriage equality was a strategic mistake, an unfortunate distraction from the real problems facing the LGBTQIA community. For example, rather than focusing on marriage as a way to secure health care for LGBTQIA couples, they believe energy would have been better spent on lobbying for a universal health care scheme not tied to marriage or employment.

From their point of view marriage is simply “a tool of social control used by governments to regulate sexuality and family formation by establishing a favored form and rewarding it” (as Dean Spade and Craig Willse claim), and marriage equality a cause favored by a “few wealthy foundations and [the] donors who fund them . . .—the gay 1%” that does little to address the true needs of the “queer and trans 99%-ers.”

This conflict regarding goals echoes the historical split among gay rights activists between “liberationists” and “assimiliationists,” which in turn echoes the age-old conflict between revolutionaries and reformers:

Is working to improve and reshape existing institutions a reasonable and realistic approach to effecting desired social changes, or is it simply a form of “respectability politics” in which a favored few gain access to power structures by accepting society’s norms, leaving more marginalized groups outside in the cold?

As is probably apparent from my earlier posts in this series, I’m a reformer at heart. Nevertheless I think the challenge issued by the revolutionaries and liberationists deserves an answer. Here is mine:

First, many of the criticisms of LGBTQIA opponents of marriage equality are on point: health care benefits should indeed be universal and not tied to marriage, there is a need to recognize alternative family arrangements in cases where marriage is not suitable (for example, with a caregiver caring for a friend), and so on. They are also correct that marriage equality is fundamentally a socially conservative change—a point also made by marriage equality advocate Andrew Sullivan.

However, I don’t believe that means that the marriage equality movement was misguided. It’s possible to believe, for example, that universal health care is a desired goal, and to work toward that goal, while at the same time believing that locking LGBTQIA couples and families out of existing health care arrangements is an injustice that should be corrected. If we still don’t have a workable universal health care system (and we don’t), I don’t believe the reason is that LGBTQIA activists got distracted.

Second, even though marriage equality privileges a certain type of social relationship, namely a monogamous partnership between two people, it does make legal recognition and (by implication) social endorsement of that relationship open to everyone, regardless of the sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender presentation of the two individuals entering into it.

Suppose civil unions had been instituted as a parallel structure to civil marriage, and consider the situation of transgender people in particular. Think of the gatekeeping and insults to personal dignity that would have occurred in determining who would be entitled to “real marriage” instead of being relegated to the perceived second-class status of civil unions. In this sense marriage equality was a more radical change than many might credit.

Finally, whatever the factors driving sexual orientation and gender identity, they seem to operate relatively randomly across the entire population, so that we’d expect LGBTQIA people to have roughly the same range of personalities and political predispositions as anyone else. In other words, the phrase “gay Republican” is not an oxymoron, and the support for marriage equality from both progressives and conservatives is not that surprising.

Although the marriage equality movement was in large part funded by rich white gay men, and one of its most visible symbols (Edith Windsor of United States v. Windsor) was a rich white lesbian, I don’t believe that means that marriage equality was simply by elites and for elites. I suspect that there were many ordinary LGBTQIA couples, perhaps even the majority, who were not interested in progressive political activism but simply wanted to be married. For them the “conservatism” of marriage equality was not a bug but a feature.

My conclusion: the successful fight for marriage equality was a major step forward in according LGBTQIA people a greater level of respect and furthering their inclusion in society. I think the most fruitful way forward will be to work for incremental reforms that can potentially benefit all people (for example, universal health care) and at the same time work to make sure that LGBTQIA people can benefit from those reforms to the same extent as anyone else.

But in the end I think it will all come down to winning elections, so that’s the topic I turn to next.

Shared values and the persuadable middle

What accounted for the increase in support for marriage equality shown in the graph above? Part of it may have been a matter of younger and more socially liberal voters replacing an older cohort of voters. Part of it may have been increased visibility of LGBTQIA people in the national culture—the “Will and Grace effect.”

However, the political scientists I’ve read seem to agree that something more was going on: that the changes seen in marriage equality support were too rapid to be accounted for by voter replacement and increased cultural visibility. Wins in referendums and other elections ultimately require persuading individuals and changing their minds, and somehow a significant number of people did in fact change their minds.

There’s another way to look at it, one that’s perhaps more relevant to today’s conflicts and controversies: For many years the tried and true strategy of gay rights opponents was to demonize gay men and lesbians, to portray them as unnatural and alien, and to peddle scare stories about the terrible consequences that would ensue in the absence of laws and social norms that discriminated against them—essentially the same playbook we see used today against transgender people.

That playbook provided to be very effective, as gay rights opponents racked up a series of electoral victories through the 1990s and 2000s. Demonization and scare stories were working very well—and then in 2012 they stopped working, as voters in multiple states ignored the fearmongering and decided to cast their votes for marriage equality. Why was that?

It’s always dangerous to single out one factor in victory or defeat, but based on my reading it appears that the answer was in marriage equality campaigns shifting their messaging: They moved (and felt they needed to move) from “previous messaging which focused on the ‘rights and benefits’ of marriage and on the notion of equality and civil rights” to “[communicating] that marriage mattered to gay and lesbian couples for the same reasons that it mattered to straight couples.”

That’s the conclusion that Freedom to Marry and other groups fighting for marriage equality came to after suffering defeat in California’s Proposition 8 referendum. (The quotes above are from the retrospective look at the struggle on the Freedom to Marry website.)

After conducting public opinion polls, focus groups, and other research, these groups formulated a strategy that stressed universal values like love and commitment, appealed to people’s sense of fairness (e.g., the Golden Rule), sought to engage a conflicted but persuadable middle group of voters in conversations intended to answer their questions and open their minds, and used as messengers people from the voters’ own communities, ethnic groups, and political parties.

An early version of that strategy was tested in the Proposition 8 fight in 2008, using an A/B test in two different California areas, and proved successful. More research was done in 2010, a complete strategy created and documented in 2011, and tactics rolled out through the 2012 ballot challenges and beyond. One particularly interesting (and labor-intensive) strategy was to have canvassers engage conflicted voters in in-depth conversations about what marriage meant to them personally.

It’s hard in hindsight to say exactly how much of an effect the changed strategy and tactics had. However there’s no question that 2012 marked a significant turning point in the fight for marriage equality, and after that year the momentum gathered and eventually proved unstoppable. If the new strategy wasn’t the whole story, it was certainly a key part of it.

New struggle, same strategy?

Now that marriage equality has been achieved the fight for LGBTQIA rights has moved to other issues, including in particular enacting non-discrimination laws of various types. From the 1990s on gay rights groups tried to have Congress pass an Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). They had some partial victories, but success eluded them.

Given the current administration and makeup of the House and Senate, it’s unlikely we’ll see anything like ENDA or its successor legislation, the Equality Act, enacted at the Federal level in the near term. Given the Supreme Court decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, it’s also unlikely we’ll see Federal court decisions that mandate sweeping non-discrimination provisions. The fight for non-discrimination legislation will thus move to the states, just as it did with marriage equality after the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act.

One of the issues that derailed passage of ENDA in the 2000s was whether or not to include protections for transgender people. Now that the Supreme Court has ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges and majority support for marriage equality has solidified, issues around transgender people, including non-discrimination laws relating to employment and public accomodations, have become the next flashpoint for political conflict.

Here there is good news and bad news. The good news is that inclusion of transgender people in non-discrimination laws has broad-based support across the US, with solid majorities (60% or greater) in all states and supermajorities (70% or greater) in almost all of them—a very different situation than that that faced marriage equality supporters after DOMA. The 45 states with supermajority support represent 95% of the US population.

The bad news is that even supermajority support is not necessarily sufficient to get non-discrimination laws enacted. Researcher Andrew Flores and his colleagues found that public support in a given state had to be at least 81% for there to be even a 50-50 chance of including transgender individuals in non-discrimination policies.

(Why is this? There are various possible reasons, including the fact that transgender people are a very small fraction of the population, and hence have little political power on their own. Their wants and needs in turn receive little political attention, especially in states whose legislatures are dominated by conservative Republicans.)

As of 2015 that level of support was found in only 19 states (representing about 43% of the US population), and only 17 states included transgender people in their non-discrimination policies. (Maryland was in both categories, with an estimated 87% support for transgender inclusion in non-discrimination policies³ and gender identity as a category included in the Fairness for All Marylanders Act of 2014.)

In order to repeat the success of the marriage equality movement, the movement for LGBTQIA rights and transgender inclusion will need to help elect state representatives supportive of inclusive non-discrimination laws, whether they be Democrats or Republicans willing to go against their party’s position (as many Republican legislators did in the marriage equality fight). They’ll also need to persuade the “conflicted middle” of voters when these issues go to referendums, as some no doubt will.

I expect that the strategies and tactics used in these elections will be based on those employed in the fight for marriage equality.

For example, the Movement Advancement Project, one of the groups that worked with Freedom to Marry on marriage equality messaging, urges supporters of non-discrimination policies to emphasize what they refer to as “work values” (hard work, providing for oneself and one’s family, etc.), “American values” (opportunity, freedom, and personal responsibility), and “personal and faith values” (e.g., “treating others like we want to be treated”). The overall message is that everyone, including LGBTQIA people, should “have a fair opportunity to earn a living, be safe, meet their responsibilities, and build a better life.”

Research on other effective tactics has also continued. For example, David Broockman and Joshua Kalla conducted an in-depth study evaluating canvassing techniques, in which they claim that “a single approximately 10-minute conversation encouraging actively taking the perspective of others can markedly reduce [antitransgender] prejudice for at least 3 months.”

In other research, Brian Harrison and Melissa Michelson studied the effect of the choice of messenger on effective messaging around LGBTQIA issues, concluding that people were most persuaded when the person delivering the message had the same or similar in-group identity, and having that message come from that person was somewhat unexpected.

(One of the most prominent examples of this was Barack Obama’s public declaration that he had switched from supporting civil unions to endorsing full marriage equality. Among other things, this may have increased marriage equality support among African Americans enough to ensure victory in the 2012 Maryland referendum.)

Are the theories correct and the corresponding strategies and tactics effective? One critical test will come in a few days, when Massachusetts voters go to the polls to decide whether to keep or repeal a recently-passed gender-identity non-discrimination law. (Opponents of the Fairness for All Marylanders Act of 2014 attempted to force a similar referendum, but failed to get the approximately 56,000 signatures needed to get a measure on the ballot.)

Given that Massachusetts has among the highest levels of estimated support for transgender inclusion in non-discrimination policies (as high as Maryland’s⁴), a loss would be a critical blow to the movement for LGBTQIA rights, fully as devastating as the Proposition 8 loss in California.

At present support for “yes” on Massachusetts Question 3 (retaining the non-discrimination law) is polling above 70%, up from below 60% several months ago. While it looks as if there will be a comfortable margin for victory, it’s worth noting that these figures are significantly lower than the estimates of support referenced above.

Two final thoughts: First, the strategies and tactics I’ve described above—reaching out to voters who are conflicted but persuadable (and ignoring those who are not), leveraging shared values and identities, actively listening to people’s concerns, and so on—would be familar to anyone who’s ever worked in sales and attended a class on effective selling. This is “sales 101,” as they say.

While protests and calling out bigotry are effective in raising public awareness and energizing activists and core supporters, different techniques are needed to get to an electoral majority—even someone who appears to be a bigot upon first impression may end up embarking on a personal journey to become a supporter.

Second, I recognize that from the point of LGBTQIA people themselves, especially transgender people, this is a time when their prospects look dire. Demonizing them for political advantage still works, at least among a key segment of the electorate, and so certain elected officials, political candidates, and interest groups will continue to do it until it stops working.

However I don’t think I’m being pollyannaish in having a measure of qualified optimism about the longer-term prospects for the full inclusion of LGBTQIA people, and transgender people in particular, in American society. I think the LGBTQIA movement has “cracked the code” on how to persuade voters (as the Freedom to Marry website put it), has a core set of activists who gained valuable experience in successfully organizing supporters and winning campaigns, and is dealing with a public that is much more sympathetic to its cause than it was even ten years ago.

But there’s no denying that the next few years are going to be tough, especially for transgender people, and especially in states where there’s a hostile governor and legislature and a level of public support that falls below the very high threshold needed to overcome those obstacles. They have my support.

This marks the conclusion of the promised “Seven Answers” posts. My thanks go out to all of you who’ve read this and other posts in the series. If time and energy permit I’ll post some final thoughts in the next few weeks.

Further exploration

The best source for messaging around marriage equality is the website for the advocacy organization Freedom To Marry. It now serves as an archive of documents outlining the strategy they crafted with other organizations to pursue victory in the minds of voters and in the courts. Key documents include:

• “Messaging, Messengers and Public Support” discusses problems with messaging in early campaigns and how they were corrected.
• “Moving Marriage Forward: Building Majority Support for Marriage” summarizes the messaging strategy created by Freedom to Marry and others.
• “An Ally’s Guide to Talking About Marriage for Same-Sex Couples,” co-authored by Freedom to Marry and the Movement Advancement Project, presents a detailed step by step approach for supporters to use when trying to persuade others.
• “How We Won Marriage: 10 Lessons Learned,” by Marc Solomon of Freedom to Marry, summarizes his advice for other progressive social movements.

Other sources of information and opinion relating to marriage equality include:

• Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America, by Nathaniel Frank, is a good overview of the origins, history, and successful conclusion of the marriage equality movement, including a discussion of conflicts between “liberationists” and “assimiliationists” over goals and strategies.
• “Philanthropy’s Role in The Fight for Marriage Equality,” by Benjamin Sockis, provides a high-level overview of the fight for marriage equality, with a focus on philanthropic support (including a “who’s who” of private foundations and their wealthy donors) and associated strategies and tactics.
• “Against Equality: Marriage” contains links to several articles arguing against LGBTQIA activists focusing on marriage versus other priorities. See in particular “Marriage Will Never Set Us Free” by Dean Spade and Craig Willse, as well as the various articles by Yasmin Nair.

Public support for and messaging strategies relevant to transgender issues are discussed in the following documents:

• “Transgender inclusion in state non-discrimination policies: The democratic deficit and political powerlessness,” by Andrew R. Flores, Jody Herman, and Christy Mallory. A study indicating that overwhelming majority support (over 80%) is necessary for there to be a better than even chance of implementing policies protecting transgender people from discrimination.
• “Talking About Nondiscrimination Protections for LGBT People” and “Talking About Transgender People & Restrooms” from the Movement Advancement Project build on the messaging strategies employed in the “Ally’s Guide” referenced above.
• “No, Wait, Short Conversations Really Can Reduce Prejudice,” an article in The Atlantic by Ed Yong, describes research by David Broockman and Joshua Kallas on the effectiveness of in-person canvassing featuring in-depth conversations. (For more see the paper “Durably reducing transphobia: A field experiment on door-to-door canvassing.”)
• Listen, We Need to Talk: How to Change Attitudes about LGBT Rights, by Brian F. Harrison and Melissa R. Michelson, describes various studies in which the authors sought to test their theory of “Dissonant Identity Priming,” i.e., that people change their minds more when encountering someone in their identity in-group presenting an unexpected position.
• The Ballotpedia article “Massachusetts Question 3, Gender Identity Anti-Discrimination Veto Referendum (2018)” contains summaries and links to information about Massachusetts Question 3, including polls.

Finally, for the calculations and data behind the graphs above, see “Changing Support for Marriage Equality by State” and the source code for that article in the seven-answers code repository.

tl;dr: When it comes to gender equality, I don’t think there are any simple solutions, only tentative ways forward.

After a detour reviewing Howard County campaign signs, I’m back to my series outlining my answers to the “Seven Questions” posed by Jason Booms. In this next-to-last post I address Jason’s sixth question:

Considering the UN’s sustainable development goals which refer to gender equality as a “fundamental human right,” how is America performing when it comes to promoting gender equality and what specific steps can and should be taken to secure true gender equality in the United States?

As I did in my post on racial equality, I’ll note up front that questions like this should first and foremost be addressed by people who are most directly affected by the issues under discussion. I’m writing here not because I have any special knowledge of or connection to these issues, but as one voter among many who will be asked to weigh candidates’ positions.

Also, in this post I’m discussing the traditional perspective on gender equality, namely that of women in relation to men. Questions relating to LGBTQIA equality I’ll postpone to the next (and final) post.

This was the hardest post for me to write, because I couldn’t think of one single unifying idea or policy vision around which to organize the discussion. I finally settled on two related topics: the wage gap between men and women, typically thought of as evidence of discrimination and a problem needing correction, and sexual harassment, much in the news recently as a problem impacting the prospects for women’s professional advancement in various fields.

I also consulted only two source documents, both attempting to provide an comprehensive overview of their respective topics, with their own perspectives and potential biases. That means I can’t claim to have a complete picture even of these two topics, so this is at best a starting point for further discussion.

The gender wage gap

When viewed from a high level the story of the gender wage gap is pretty straightforward, as shown in the left graph above: the average woman is paid less than the average man, on both a weekly and annual basis, with women’s income going from roughly two-thirds of men’s income in the 1960s to about four-fifths of their income today. When you see a quote like “women make 78% of what men do” this is the comparison it’s referring to.

However if you look it at this more closely the gap becomes more complicated, and skeptics have the opportunity to raise a host of questions about the causes of the gap, and the extent to which women are actually discriminated against. Labor economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn have written extensively on this topic over the years; the figures above are taken from one of their recent papers. My take after reading their paper is that the raw 22% per cent gap isn’t all due to discrimination, but that the various other factors skeptics have suggested don’t totally explain the existence and persistence of the gap.

The right graph above represents Blau’s and Kuhn’s attempt to explain the gap using the most comprehensive data available to them. They start with the unadjusted gaps as measured in various years from 1980 to the present. Then they attempt to account for “human capital” effects: for example, do men and women receive equal pay if they have the same level of education, the same amount of work experience, and so on. Once this is accounted for the gap narrows by a few percentage points.

Blau and Kuhn then attempt to account for additional factors in their “full specification,” in particular whether men and women receive equal pay if they work in the same industries and occupations. After accounting for these the gap is reduced further, but still exists–and in fact has remained relatively the same for the past 10-20 years.

The datasets they’re using aren’t detailed enough to look into all posible explanations of the gender wage gap, but they cite other research to try to get a feel for how salient those explanations might be. In particular they look at explanations based on gender differences in psychological factors (for example, that women prefer “working with people” to “working with things”) and conclude that “this source of the gender gap, based at least on what we know at this point, while worth pursuing, does not appear to provide a silver bullet in our understanding of gender differences in labor-market outcomes.”

Some other interesting take-aways from this paper:

• It’s possible that one major factor in reducing the gender wage gap was the decline of unions in the manufacturing sector. In other words, things didn’t get better from a gender equality perspective because women got paid more, but because (many) men got paid less.
• “Women [now] exceed men in educational attainment and have greatly reduced the gender experience gap.” In other words, traditional “human capital” explanations for the gender wage gap are now less relevant.
• In recent years the gender wage gap has been “larger for the highly skilled than for others, suggesting that developments in the labor market for executives and highly skilled workers especially favored men.” Although the authors do not draw this conclusion, it’s possible that this persistence of the gender wage gap for more skilled workers helps explain why the issue continues to be so politically relevant: it affects exactly those women who are most likely to be politically active.
• Finally, the authors point out that “recent research suggests an especially important role for work force interruptions and shorter hours in explaining gender wage gaps in high-skilled occupations than for the workforce as a whole.” Depending on one’s perspective we could see this as another example of the power of societal expectations (women being expected to downplay work in favor of family responsibilities) or as an aspect of personal preferences—or perhaps both factors operating simultaneously.

Sexual harassment

Why might women be less represented in certain professions, might be less able to reach the highest (and best-paying) levels of a profession, or might leave a profession earlier than they otherwise might (thus limiting their lifetime earnings)? One possibility is that certain industries, professions, and organizations make women unwelcome, so that they are less likely to enter them and more likely to leave them.

Sexual harassment in particular industries, professions, and organizations is one thing that might be relevant to this. Certainly recent years have seen a number of high-profile cases of harassment and abuse, highlighted by the #MeToo movement. However that doesn’t directly address how prevalent sexual harassment might be in general.

One source of data on this question is a large survey (over 28,000 students) carried out by the University of Texas System. This survey was in turn one of the major inputs to a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report on sexual harassment in STEM fields, along with a similar survey at Penn State. Since these surveys were done at universities their findings aren’t directly applicable to workplaces in general. However they are at least suggestive of what post-university workplaces might be like, especially when looking at the experiences of graduate students (who can be considered entry-level academic employees).

The University of Texas survey found a relatively low incidence of the most severe forms of sexual harassment of student women by faculty or staff: about 1% of student women across all academic disciplines had experienced sexual coercion (“when favorable professional or educational treatment is conditioned on sexual activity”) and about 2-4% across those same disciplines experienced unwanted sexual attention (“verbal or physical unwelcome sexual advances, which can include assault”).

These figures for harassment of students by faculty or staff were about the same for student men, indicating that sexual harassment in its most severe forms is not necessarily something suffered only by women. However, there was a significant difference in the rate at which student women suffered gender harassment, defined as “verbal and nonverbal behaviors that convey hostility, objectication, exclusion, or second-class status about members of one gender.” About a quarter to a half of student women across academic disciplines had experienced these sorts of misogynistic attitudes from faculy or staff, a rate about a third to more than twice as high (depending on discipline) as that for student men experiencing misandristic attitudes.

As alluded to above, student women in some academic disciplines experienced gender harassment at significantly higher rates than in other disciplines: almost half of all student women in medicine experienced this, and about a quarter in engineering. High rates of gender harassment of medical students were experienced by men as well (about a fifth of student men).

The figures from the Penn State survey are not directly comparable, since they’re not broken out by discipline. However in general they echo the findings of the UT survey: a relatively low rate of the most severe forms of sexual harassment, with women and men experiencing this type of harassment at roughly comparable rates, and a relectively high rate of gender harassment, with women experiencing this at a rate significantly higher than men.

So what should we make of all this? I have several thoughts:

First, although this isn’t directly demonstrated by the data in this case, my bet is that sexual harassment in its most severe forms is an outgrowth of a more general atmosphere of gender harassment: just as (for example) lax attitudes towards corruption create an environment in which people predisposed to financial wrongdoing are emboldened to pursue it on a massive scale, I suspect an environment of pervasive gender harassment provides cover for a relatively few people to engage in severe sexual harassment.

Second, although again this isn’t directly demonstrated by this data, sexual harassment (in all its forms) that particularly affects employment prospects seems to be a function of power differentials within the industry, profession, and organization. Thus, for example, the medicical field has long put doctors on a pedestal, and tolerated a sort of professional hazing in the treatment of residents. It’s therefore not surprising that gender harassment of medical students should be particularly widespread.

In general powerful people can get away with harassment and abuse of all kinds: they are seen as indispensable and/or untouchable, and they have equally powerful friends and associates willing to cover for them and protect them from any consequences for their behavior. Sexual harassment is no exception. This scenario plays out in fields from politics and business to science and the humanities, as witnessed by the recent coverage of high-profile sexual harassers in each of these fields.

So, what if anything can be done about this, above and beyond more strictly enforcing legal sanctions already in place? Gender harassment in an industry, profession, and organization is an example of general incivility in professional contexts, and I think can be at least partly addressed in the same way, namely by social promotion and enforcement of norms of professional civility.

The #MeToo movement is in a way an example of this. So too are the first three recommendations of the NAS study on sexual harassment: “Create diverse, inclusive, and respectful environments“, “Address the most common form of sexual harassment: gender harassment,” and “Move beyond legal compliance to address culture and climate.”

However professional norms are greatly influenced by those at the top, who can model good behavior or exhibit bad behavior. Thus in addition to grass roots promotion and enforcement of desired norms, it’s also important to ensure that powerful people can be held to account, and known abusers prevented from exploiting their power base. The #MeToo movement is part of this also, but there are also other potential ways to address this.

For example, one common pattern seen in the sciences is for a “superstar” laboratory head (Principal Investigator, to use the correct term) to engage in multiple incidents of sexual harassment and abuse over the years without any consequences. Among other things, their ability to bring in a continued stream of government grants and other funding makes them valuable to their host universities, and thus causes those universities to dismiss or downplay reports of abuse of students–students who themselves are dependent on the abuser to provide them recommendations for future positions.

Even if universities themselves prove to be uncooperative in disciplining their faculty (which is likely to be the case as long as they value the money and fame superstar faculty members bring), governments can exercise their power over grants. Beyond just denying grants to known abusers (which will be ineffective if abusers are not reported), they can help moderate the “superstar” system by spreading grants to more institutions and making grants less dependent on institutional and researcher reputation, for example by using lotteries or apportioning more grants to young researchers.

(The NAS report on sexual harassment made one recommendation along these lines–“Diffuse the hierarchical and dependent relationship between trainees and faculty,” for example by channeling funding through academic departments rather than through individual researchers–but does not address the overall system of government grantmaking.)

Whether there are similar mechanisms that could work in other fields is an open question. (For example, it’s not clear what could reduce the power of abusive gatekeepers in film or TV.) However I can’t conclude this post without making one final point:

The media have focused on high-profile cases of sexual harassment, including those involving prominent celebrities, and the discussion of obstacles to women’s professional advancement has focused on high-skill professions. However, the brunt of gender harassment and more severe forms of sexual harassment is likely borne by those closer to the bottom of the income pyramid, women stuck in relatively low-paying jobs that they feel unable to leave for various reasons.

I’ve written previously about social insurance proposals to provide universal health care, a basic income, and other means by which people can have increased opportunity and less chance of falling through the cracks of a dynamic capitalist economy. To the extent such measures increase labor mobility and lead women to take more chances in their work lives, I think they may also help address the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace, and perhaps the gender wage gap as well. Rather than being able to exploit a captive and compliant workforce, firms that foster a culture of incivility and harassment may find themselves facing the market discipline of women workers who feel more free to say “no.”

Further exploration

As noted above, for this post I read deeply rather than widely, focusing on two lengthy works that themselves cover a great deal of relevant topics and research.

• Blau, Francine D., and Lawrence M. Kahn. 2017. “The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations.” Journal of Economic Literature, 55 (3): 789-865. DOI: 10.1257/jel.20160995. Reviews research on various explanations for the gender wage gap in the US. (Blau and Kahn have a long history of publications on this topic; this is the most recent one.) See section 7, “Conclusion,” on pages 852-855 for an overall summary.
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2018. Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/24994. A 312-page report that explores the research on sexual harassment of women in various STEM fields and makes various recommendations for institutional and policy changes. For a condensed version of its findings and recommendations see the 12-page summary.

Other works of interest include the following:

• Cultivating Learning and Safe Environments (CLASE) study. A survey undertaken by the University of Texas System, covering over 28 thousand students at 13 academic institutions within the UT System.
• Sexual Misconduct Climate Survey. A survey undertaken by the Pennsylvania State University system, covering about 11 thousand students. Unfortunately there does not appear to be a single summary report for all campuses, but University Park is the largest campus and its report is presumably representative.
• “Here’s How Geoff Marcy’s Sexual Harassment Went On For Decades,” by Azeen Ghorayshi. A Buzzfeed article discussing how a “superstar” university researcher managed for many years to evade consequences for his sexual harassment of students.

tl;dr: Is there a class war going on? Yes, but it’s also an intra-elite war with others caught in the crossfire.

I’m continuing my series outlining my own answers to the “Seven Questions” posed by Jason Booms. Here’s Jason’s fifth question:

Let’s assume that something called “class warfare” exists. If so, who has been winning? For how long? And in whose interest is it to continue the war?

My answer: I happen to think that class-driven social conflict is and has been a real thing. However, I don’t think it fits the classic “rich vs. poor” model of an undifferentiated upper class in conflict with an undifferentiated lower class. I see it as being just as much about conflict between elites themselves, with elite factions exploiting the woes of non-elites to try to recruit them as co-combatants.

My model here is the so-called Demographic Structural Theory or DST¹ originally advanced by sociologist Jack Goldstone and then elaborated by theoretical ecologist Peter Turchin and others.

“Class warfare” in pre-modern societies

DST originated out of a desire by Goldstone to explain why and when major revolutions (like the French Revolution of 1789 or the Russian Revolution of 1917) occur, and more generally why civilizations throughout history have experienced periodic collapses of the social order. His goal, and the goal of Turchin and others who followed, was not to find a purely verbal explanation, but rather to try to mathematically model the rise and fall of societies using a restricted set of variables and historical data for those variables.

The resulting theory goes something like this:

In pre-modern societies based on agriculture, population growth depended almost entirely on the amount of farmable land relative to the population (since agricultural productivity changed only slowly over time). Society could be broadly divided into peasants who worked the land, an aristocratic elite who owned the land and lived off taxes extracted from the peasants, and a state apparatus headed by a supreme ruler and financed by the aristocracy and the peasantry.

That’s not to say that these groups were monolithic. For example, aristocrats ranged from those at the apex of society and power to minor nobility whose influence was limited to a small area. These in turn were comparable to rich peasants who had managed to amass enough land to enjoy some level of wealth (and indeed there was some flow between the two groups).

There were also two other classes in pre-modern societies, merchants and the clergy. Merchants are accounted for in DST primarily as potential aristocrats, e.g., through their purchase of noble titles. In this way they could convert wealth in the form of money into wealth in the form of land—the most prestigious and secure form of wealth in pre-modern agrarian societies.

From a DST perspective the clergy played two roles in pre-modern society: Their primary role was to provide legitimacy for those who ruled and arguments in support of the rulers’ actions. During times of conflict they would often be recruited to provide justifications for the claims of competing elite factions. Religious bodies also often owned land, and some high-ranking religious leaders might also be considered functionally part of the aristocracy.

When productive farmland was widely available the ranks of the peasants increased, and they in turn were able to support a larger and richer class of aristocrats and an expanded state. However as the overall population approached the carrying capacity of the land, peasants were less able to support themselves and a now greatly expanded aristocratic class.

The response of the aristocratic class was threefold:

• to increase as much as possible the income extracted from the peasantry, further worsening the peasants’ condition;
• to lessen their financial support of the state, putting strain on the state budget; and finally,
• to compete more vigorously amongst themselves for the limited number of lucrative and powerful aristocratic positions, leading to increased political conflicts within the aristocratic class and ultimately violent civil strife affecting the entire population.

The resulting conflicts could extend over decades or even centuries. At times they might be interrupted temporarily as one generation succeeded another and grew weary of the conflicts instigated by the previous ones. However the underlying trends of “popular immiseration,” “elite overproduction,” and the “fiscal crisis of the state” (to use Turchin’s terms) would continue unabated.

The eventual result was the fiscal collapse of the state, the collapse of the social order, a reduction in the size of the peasantry due to war, famine, and disease, and an accompanying reduction in the aristocratic class, either through violence or poverty (which returned some of them to the peasant class).

At that point the carrying capacity of the land was more than sufficient to support the reduced population, and the reduced aristocratic class was able to negotiate among themselves to end the conflict. Population growth could then resume and the cycle begin again.

As a purely verbal explanation this is reasonably plausible, and in fact in something close to this form dates back to the 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun. The achievement of Goldstone, Turchin and their colleagues was to express the theory in a reasonably simple mathematical form and validate the predictions made by the mathematics. Among other things, this required identifying key variables as inputs to the equations of the theory and using detailed historical data to assign values to those variables. (For example, Goldstone created a “political stress index” by which the levels of conflict within a society could be quantified.)

Demographic Structural Theory and the US

Although it’s far from being mainstream (it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page), my personal assessment is that Demographic Structural Theory does a pretty good job of explaining social change in the pre-modern world of agrarian societies. The $64,000 question, the one that makes DST potentially relevant to today’s America, is whether DST can be extended to modern industrial societies. This is a task that Peter Turchin has undertaken, most notably in his book Ages of Discord.

Conceptually the three major divisions of pre-modern society map to present-day society as follows:

• The peasants of traditional society correspond to the vast bulk of the modern population that subsists primarily on wage income.²
• The pre-modern aristocratic elite maps to the small fraction of the population that exercises political power either directly (as elected political officials) or indirectly (through having a large amount of influence on such officials). As in pre-modern times, this elite can range from having national influence to having only local influence (the modern equivalent of the country squire).
• The state apparatus includes the military; unionized police, firefighters, teachers, and other government employees; and an ancillary base of government contractors.

The merchants of pre-modern society have their counterparts in today’s wealthy investors, successful entrepreneurs, and corporate executives. Just as merchants would purchase titles of nobility, it’s not uncommon for such wealthy individuals to seek political office or to pursue political power through lobbying efforts and campaign contributions.

Finally the clergy of pre-modern society correspond to the modern-day “intelligentsia” that works in academia, the media, and think tanks of all political persuasions. As before, their primary role from a DST perspective is to legitimize political leaders and their actions and provide arguments for competing elite factions, although some of them (for example, owners of media empires) have political influence equivalent to or (in a few cases) greater than that of elected officials.

After the Industrial Revolution we now live in a post-Malthusian economy in which greatly increased agricultural productivity supports a larger population and greater prosperity without requiring a corresponding increase in the amount of land under cultivation. The focus thus moves from land per person to more general economic factors: the overall amount of goods and services produced, and the relative claims (in the form of money) that we each have to those goods and services.

Given his desire to mathematically model the evolution of American society, the problem for Turchin then became finding a new set of variables that could be used as input into the model. For example, as one measure of economic well-being for the non-elite he uses the ratio of wages to GDP per capita (suitably adjusted for inflation and with short-term fluctuations smoothed out). Similarly, as one measure of elite dominance he uses the ratio of the largest personal fortune to the average annual wage. (To give an idea of changes over time, that ratio is currently well above 1,000-to-1, where 40-50 years ago it was on the order of 100-to-1.)

Turchin then combines multiple variables to form an overall index of “popular well-being,” and a separate set of unconnected variables to form an overall index of “elite overproduction.” The result is shown in the figure above: long-term cycles in US history (on the order of a century or more in length), with popular well-being falling as elite overproduction grows, and vice versa.

Assuming that Turchin’s theory is valid, we now have a more comprehensive answer to Jason’s question: There is an inherent conflict between the interests of the elite and the interests of the populace at large. Since the 1960s popular well-being has fallen as elites have become more dominant, wages have been relatively stagnant compared to previous periods, and more and more of the wealth created by increased productivity and technological innovation has accrued to investors instead of to workers.

At the same time conflicts within the elite have grown, as more and more elite aspirants compete for political power and influence: paying more for access to elite educational institutions seen as gateways to power, raising the cost of political campaigns, and heightening the intensity of political disputes and the polarization of political views. Elite factions also exploit popular discontent to enlist non-elites to participate in these conflicts and help advance factional interests.

Looking to the future through a DST lens

If we accept Demographic Structural Theory as providing a useful framework for explaining the past and the present, the obvious next step is to use it to predict the future, and in particular to try to answer the following questions: what happens next? When will things get better? How will things get better?

In the short term (say the next ten years at least) DST predicts continued and possibly intensifying political and social conflicts, given that the underlying driving trends remain active. Although economic factors play a major role in providing the underlying conditions for these conflicts, it’s likely that the conflicts themselves will revolve around questions of group identity: cultural, religious, ethnic, and so on.

This is consistent with past experience in pre-modern societies: episodes like the Thirty Years’ War (which directly and indirectly killed over 8 million people) combined conflicts over religious identity (in that case between Catholics and Protestants) with conflicts between competing elites. Questions of group identity are typically very important to individuals, and will often take precedence over purely economic concerns.

Given that we live in an advanced post-industrial society, I think it unlikely that we’ll see anything like the famines and plagues that characterized conflicts in pre-modern times. However, if the cycle matches those of the past the upcoming years may see more severe pressure on government finances and major reductions in both middle-class and elite wealth—for example through future financial crises, recessions, or even an extended depression that is global in nature (and thus leaves investors no options as they “reach for yield”).

In the longer term there will presumably come a point when conflicts will moderate, as competing factions within a reduced elite negotiate some sort of “grand compromise,” a set of initiatives intended to improve popular well-being and reduce intra-elite conflicts. However this might be a few decades in the future.

If such a grand compromise occurs, what form it might take? In my previous posts I’ve outlined one possibility: the institution of more universal and comprehensive social insurance schemes designed to cushion individuals and families from economic uncertainty. However as I noted in my previous post, the initiatives resulting from such a compromise may not be considered entirely progressive in nature.

For example, the increase in well-being seen in the graph above for the 1920s, 1930s, and beyond was accompanied by an almost complete shutdown of immigration (seen as harming native workers), followed by the creation of social insurance schemes (i.e., Social Security and related programs) that were deliberately designed to disfavor African-Americans. Thus, for example, I would not be surprised to see a future compromise that included more stringent restrictions on immigration, withholding of expanded benefits from immigrants not yet citizens, or both.

As another example, one measure taken in the 1920s and 1930s to limit intra-elite competition was to institute informal quotas on Jewish applicants to Ivy League universities (couched as evaluating applicants on their “character and fitness”). This helped to ensure that the elite remained a relatively small and homogeneous group of WASPs for as long as possible.

I doubt we’ll see anything as crudely discriminatory as that in future attempts to end elite overproduction (although note that present-day Ivy league schools have been accused of having informal quotas on Asian-American students, justified on the basis of promoting diversity). However we’ve already seen state legislators and governors criticize university liberal arts programs and promote STEM programs and vocational training as alternatives. Thus it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that in response to political pressure “public Ivies” and other state-funded universities might severely cut back humanities and liberal arts programs that have traditionally served as a source of potential politicians and activists.

Rather than (or along with) attempting to restrict the number of elite aspirants, another approach would be to open up more opportunities for them. For example, the US has a very low number of Congressional representatives compared to its population, second only to India for national legislatures and an order of magnitude lower than that of other G8 countries like the U.K. and Italy.³

One can imagine a political compromise that would significantly increase the size of the House of Representatives, or even that of the Senate—for example by increasing the number of senators for the most populous states, or by allowing larger states like California to divide themselves into smaller states, each with its own pair of senators. Other measures to alleviate elite competition might include more draconian term limits (to increase the “churn” in legislatures) or pursuing more decentralization of government functions (which could increase the desirability of political positions at the state and local level compared to the national level).

One can imagine other elements of a potential grand compromise down the road, including measures to limit the impact of automation and globalization, and to give Americans a much greater share of the wealth produced by technological progress.

In any event, I don’t think there’s any chance of any such compromise happening anytime soon—for now our focus will be on navigating safely through the coming years of conflict—but it’s not too soon to start thinking about what a future and potentially better dispensation might look like.

A personal note

Reading this post over in final draft I could see people saying, “Wow, Frank, this sounds pretty cynical, sort of a ‘plague on both your houses’ take on the current political scene. Don’t you understand that there’s a right side and a wrong side in the battles now raging?”

First, if you’ve been following this series you should be able to tell that I’ve already picked a side, and which side it is. However, my interests as a citizen, taxpayer, and voter are not necessarily identical to the interests of my party’s elected officials or (especially) its major political donors. Hence my political positions need not be identical either.

Second, if politics is not literally war (and in a democracy it shouldn’t be) then it is ultimately about persuasion. I find that persuasion works better when I don’t insult or disrespect the people I’m trying to persuade, when I acknowledge the place they’re coming from and the interests they have, and when I recognize that they may know things I don’t.

This approach may not work if I’m trying to get elected to something, especially in the current climate, but I’m not. I’m simply trying to understand the underlying dynamics behind our present-day politics, and trying to think about how those dynamics might be resolved in a way that’s better for our country rather than worse.

For further exploration

I originally wrote about Peter Turchin’s work in a post in 2013. For more information on Demographic Structural Theory see the following:

• “Demographic Structural Theory: 25 Years On,” by Jack Goldstone. A 2018 review of how DST came to be conceived of by its originator, and its reception and elaboration over the years, published in a special issue of Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution.
• “A Dynamic Analysis of American Socio-Political History. A Review of Ages of Discord: A Structural Demographic Analysis of American History by Peter Turchin,” by Peter Richerson. From the same issue of Cliodynamics, a review of Peter Turchin’s 2016 book Ages of Discord that summarizes its argument and assesses how well it explains historical reality.
• “Social Instability Lies Ahead, Researcher Says,” by Peter Turchin. A 2016 article that summarizes the arguments of Ages of Discord for a popular audience (with bonus Hari Seldon and Psychohistory analogies).
• “Return of the Oppressed,” by Peter Turchin. A 2013 article in which Turchin first popularized the arguments about modern American history that he later made in Ages of Discord.

As noted above, Peter Turchin is the most prominent present-day advocate of the Democratic Structural Theory, especially as applied to modern American society, and has published a number of books touching on various aspects of DST. In case you’re interested in reading any of them, here are my thoughts on each:

• Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall. I consider this early work (from 2003) to be the best book in terms of justifying the DST approach to history, and especially in explaining the particular forms that mathematical models must take in order to account for cycles of societal growth and collapse. Unfortunately it requires that you have some comfort with mathematics (including calculus) in order to get the most out of it.

• Secular Cycles (with Sergey A. Nefedov). Another specialist work, with less mathematics but a lot more data, that attempts to apply DST predictions to a wide range of pre-modern societies,

• War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires. A non-mathematical popular treatment of the ideas from Historical Dynamics and Secular Cycles, again applied to pre-modern societies. This is probably the best in-depth introduction to DST for the general reader. (It also outlines Turchin’s ideas about “metaethnic frontiers” as locations for new empires to arise.)

• Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History. Turchin’s attempt to apply DST to American history up through the present. In my opinion it’s a sort of an in-between book, to its detriment: it’s too technical for a general audience, but doesn’t contain as many details on the models and supporting data as one might like, for those who want to dig deeper. (Turchin has published some supplementary material on his web site that partially makes up for this lack.)

tl;dr: How America’s pastime illustrates the tensions and trade-offs between liberty and equality.

In this post in my series outlining my answers to the “Seven Questions” posed by Jason Booms, I address Jason’s fourth question:

Thinking about the principles of liberty and equality, and this can apply to any given challenge (fiscal, social, etc…), how can they both be promoted to ensure that the “unalienable rights” of all Americans are protected?

What does it mean to be “free” or “at liberty”? What does it mean to be ”equal”?

Suppose someone tells you, “When I retire next year I’ll be free to travel the world.” In what senses are they using the word “free”? The most basic sense is that they are free from coercion: no one, including the government, is going to physically stop them from leaving the country and visiting others.

The next sense is liberty as individualism: they are not bound by social and familial obligations or restrictions that might otherwise keep them at home. They can live their life as they choose.

A third (but not necessarily final) sense is liberty as “capability”: they are healthy enough to travel, any disabilities they might have can be accomodated, and they have money to pay their way.

What about equality? One sense would consider us all equal in our in-born potential: that each of us could accomplish anything given sufficient will, opportunity, and support. We could be equal in a political sense, as in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. We could be morally equal in the sight of God, as the apostle Paul wrote in Galatians 3:28. Finally, we could be equal in the rewards that accrue to us in our life and work.

My primary concern here is with freedom as capability, with the first and last senses of equality—to what extent are we equal in our abilities, and to what extent should we receive equal rewards—and how those connect with our political equality. To make the discussion more concrete, let’s talk about baseball.

One way in which we are not all created equal

Major League Baseball players are a rare breed: they’ve proven their ability to play in the major leagues and have the benefit of all the training and other support that their well-financed teams can provide. From a naïve point of view we’d therefore expect them all to demonstrate equal skills and ability.

This is not the case. As shown in the graph above, when measured by one common baseball statistic, the ability to get on base and hit for extra bases, Major League Baseball players show a wide range of performance, with the best players achieving at a level better than twice that of the worst.

More specifically the players’ performance roughly follows a so-called Gaussian distribution, with most players performing at an average or near-average level, some players performing significantly better than average, and some players performing significantly worse.

Gaussian distributions tend to arise when there are many factors influencing a certain measure, with each factor having a relatively small effect and being relatively independent of other factors. For example, when it comes to the ability to get on base and hit for power we can look to factors such as excellent eyesight, quick reaction time, good “hitting mechanics,” and so on.

Many other measures of personal characteristics follow a Gaussian distribution, including measures that are economically important. Thus we’d expect that people in general would differ in their ability to exercise the many competencies that various employers value: some would do a great job, some a poor job, and most a mediocre one.

It’s unlikely that a typical sandlot ballplayer could become a major league player, even given every opportunity and assistance possible. Similarly it’s unlikely that any given person could perform at a high level in every possible job, even if they were intensively trained from early childhood. Discussion of balancing liberty and equality must start with that fundamental premise.

How liberty magnifies inequalities

Back to baseball. We’ve seen that players’ abilities span a fairly wide range even in the major leagues, and in at least this case seem to be distributed in an approximately-Gaussian manner. We’d therefore naïvely expect that how much players were paid would follow a similar pattern, with most receiving an average salary, some significantly higher salaries, and some significantly lower salaries.

Again, this is not the case. Instead the distribution of salaries more closely resembles a Pareto distribution or “80-20” rule: most players have relatively low salaries and a few players have relatively high salaries. Looking at the same group of players as in the first graph, there is more than a 2-to-1 difference in performance as measured by OPS, but more than a 50-to-1 difference in pay. Why should this be so?

An important reason is that players are ultimately judged on helping their team win, and a relatively small edge in performance can result in a team winning rather than losing. These relatively small differences in performance will then be magnified into relatively large differences in compensation, resulting in a small group of highly-paid superstars separated by a relatively wide gulf from the mass of journeyman players.

The economist Robert Frank referred to this as the “winner-take-all” effect, “the result . . . of the spread of markets in which the value of production depends primarily on the efforts of only a handful of top players who are paid accordingly.”

Winner-take-all dynamics arise relatively easily in economies in which free trade and global communications allow companies to serve a larger market, thus increasing the returns from hiring top talents, and in which top talents are in turn free to move from firm to firm in pursuit of higher compensation. Thus increased (economic) freedom leads to increased (economic) inequality, above and beyond what we might expect simply from the distribution of peoples’ abilities and performance.

Inequality and the uncertainties of life

The disparity between journeymen players and superstars, wide as it is, is but one aspect of inequality in Major League Baseball. Further inequality arises because players have major league careers of different lengths, with many players’ careers cut short due to injuries, age-related declines in skills, or simply being marginal players more susceptible to being released.

As shown in the graph above, most players have relatively short careers. Given two players of equivalent skills, the player with the longer career will have greater lifetime earnings, especially if they play long enough to become free agents and enter into more lucrative contracts.

The minimum salary in Major League Baseball is quite high compared that of the typical employee. However, if a player spends only a short time in the major leagues and then has limited employment prospects after leaving baseball, their lifetime earnings may be no greater than those of a middle-class worker with a steady job and a good salary.

Of course, the traditional “steady job with a good salary” can be hard to find nowadays for many if not most people, with wages for many people stagnant and part-time or contingent employment increasingly common even for people who’d like to work full-time.

Just as in baseball, this dynamic further increases inequality, particularly wealth inequality: people who make less or have unexpected expenses (e.g., due to ill health) are less able to save and have less opportunity to acquire assets such as a house, stocks, or bonds that can provide compounding of wealth over time.

The politics of liberty and equality

Thus in baseball as in life, individual differences in ability and performance are magnified into large differences in compensation, and these in turn combine with the random events of life to cause even large differences in overall wealth. But someone might reply, “Is this really a problem? And if it is, can we solve it without unduly restricting peoples’ liberty?”

For example, one argument is that peoples’ compensation is merely a reflection of the added value they provide to those who pay them, their so-called “marginal product.” Such compensation is therefore deserved, and to interfere in compensation arrangements erodes the incentives provided by a free market.

If this were the case then we should see salaries in baseball track reasonably closely with statistics that attempt to measure a player’s value to a team. But this is not necessarily the case: as shown in the graph above, a player’s salary is only loosely related to the particular measure of performance that is OPS.

Long-term contracts account for part of this, since they uncouple present pay from immediate past performance to some extent. It’s also possible to use more sophisticated measures of baseball performance to determine compensation, for example “wins above replacement” or WAR. Yet arguments still rage over whether some players are significantly undercompensated relative to their performance, and others significantly overcompensated.

The situation is even worse outside baseball, where in a large firm it is often not clear at all how much value a particular employee is adding to the firm’s bottom line, especially for general corporate support functions. This makes it difficult to judge whether any particular person “deserves” what they are paid.

A related argument is that as long as compensation is the result of voluntary agreements freely entered into, any attempt to change the resulting distribution of income and wealth is an unwarranted restriction on liberty.

But is baseball compensation really the result of an unrestricted market free of any political considerations? The short answer is no. First, Major League Baseball is the unique beneficiary of an exemption from US antitrust law that allows MLB team owners to collude in ways that would be considered illegal restraint of trade in other industries. Second, not-so-uniquely Major League Baseball players are organized into a union, an activity permitted and protected by relevant labor laws and overseen by the Federal government.

Thus salaries are not based purely on free-market considerations but rather are in large part the result of negotiations between team owners and players considered collectively. This is a struggle into which questions of fairness and justice almost inevitably intrude, which is subject to government interference on behalf of either side, and thus which can be characterized as political as well as economic.

This is true in the wider economy as well: the economic rewards that each person receives are a function not just of their talents but of the political, social, and economic system in which people exercise those talents. The entire system can then be judged on well it performs for those who participate in it.

Pursuing democratic equality

Where does that leave us? First, it’s clear that the freedom that people enjoy has increased greatly compared to the past, even if many still do not enjoy it to the same degree as others: Liberal democracies have greatly lessened the burden of government coercion; evolving social mores mean people are less subject to social strictures; and science, technology, and the free market have made necessities of life like food, clothes, and transportation more affordable—while making it easier than ever to satisfy what we desire beyond the bare necessities.

At the same time it’s also clear that an inherently unequal distribution of talents and other non-monetary assets is further magnified by the free-market system. This in turn lessens the extent to which many enjoy freedom in the sense of capability, even though economic freedom and individualism may be greater than ever before.

Given that, what (if anything) should we do about it? And how should we justify any policies we adopt? I’ll address the latter question first, since the justifications for addressing inequalities help determine the means by which we might do so.

This question is often reduced to a binary opposition between ensuring equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome. This is both simplistic and unrealistic. Ensuring equality of opportunity is certainly consistent with promoting freedom as noncoercion and freedom as individualism. However given inequalities of talent and the dynamics of a free market system in magnifying those inequalities, it cannot in and of itself promote freedom as capability.

On the other hand, ensuring true equality of outcomes is difficult to impossible. Even in a system not organized around free markets natural differences in talent and other personal characteristics would lead to inequalities in outcomes, inequalities that history shows us could be rectified only at the expense of severely limiting freedom.

That might seem to leave only a practical justification for reducing inequalities, such as that recently offered by Samuel Hammond and others: that providing a generous system of social insurance is the best way to bolster support for the free market and stave off the growth of anti-market populism. This seems plausible, but as a justification it has a “bread and circuses” flavor to it, implying as it does that equality matters only as a way of promoting political peace.

I prefer philosopher Elizabeth Anderson’s conception of what she calls “democratic equality,” which focuses on freedom from domination and our relationship to our fellow citizens: that “people are entitled to whatever capabilities are necessary to enable them to avoid or escape entanglements in oppressive social relationships . . . and to the capabilities necessary for functioning as an equal citizen in a democratic state.”

People can meet each other in equality as fellow fans of a team, whether they sit in the luxury boxes or in the cheap seats (or watch from home). The ideal of democratic equality is for people to be able to similarly meet each other in equality as fellow citizens, even if their personal circumstances are very different. What must happen for them to be able to do this?

First, it helps if there exist opportunities for everyone to be a productive member of society and to seek excellence in their own way. This is one of the benefits of a free-market economy: that entrepreneurial innovation can create not just new jobs, but different kinds of jobs. Had basketball not been invented and baseball been the only professional sport, we might know Michael Jordan (if we knew him at all) only as a better-than-average minor league player. Similarly a dynamic free-market economy provides spaces for all sorts of talents, especially when it helps support a vibrant civil society.

Second, there must be a level of subsistence below which people cannot fall, and as much as possible a minimum return for the work they perform. Baseball’s minimum salary for new players means that everyone who advances to the major leagues starts out in roughly the same position, and ensures that the intense competition between players eager to join an MLB team does not leave them vulnerable to owners eager to squeeze payrolls as much as possible. Minimum wages in other contexts, as well as related schemes like wage subsidization, can function similarly, providing benefits for workers sufficient to compensate for the downsides (e.g., higher prices to others).

Third, people should be buffered to some extent from the unforeseeable events of life. Long-term contracts in baseball not only allow team owners to retain stars and likely stars, they also provide players a reasonably guaranteed return on their work regardless of what might happen in the future. Similarly schemes like government-provided universal catastrophic coverage can help ensure that people and their families do not suffer financial ruination due to ill health, but can instead plan for the future knowing that their health care costs will never exceed an undue percentage of their income.

The support given to people in support of democratic equality is to enable them to participate in democratic life with others. It should therefore be provided to everyone as a matter of course, like Social Security or Medicare, and not be means-tested. This avoids singling out some among us as the objects of our charity and pity—and thereby risking their in turn becoming the objects of resentment.

It’s also desirable that such programs be funded at least in part by sources that are in some sense “owned” by all of us or stand apart from us. One example at the state level is the Alaska Permanent Fund, which issues “dividends” to Alaskans based on their perceived common interest in the state’s oil resources. Similar assets at the national level include rights to public lands or portions of the electromagnetic spectrum auctioned off to telecommunications companies for their use. This again helps avoid characterization of social insurance programs as simply forced redistribution from “makers” to “takers.”

In this vein, recall that the idea of democratic equality involves making it possible for us to stand before each other equally as fellow citizens. But pursuing democratic equality for all citizens does not necessarily require pursuing it for anyone else. It’s not unreasonable for Americans to believe that they owe more to those who are their fellow citizens than to those who are not.

We can and should welcome those who want to become Americans, but at the same time we can justify withholding the full benefits of being a citizen until they complete their own paths to citizenship. Until that time the taxes they pay could be dedicated to help fund universal social insurance schemes for those who are already citizens.

Suppose that we agree that achieving the democratic equality of all American citizens is a worthy goal. Suppose also that we have some idea of what measures might best promote this. What’s stopping us from implementing them? The problem is that these measures require that we take collective action via government, and the ongoing influence of individualism and group identity politics (of all flavors) have impacted our ability to take such actions.

As I write in my next post, this deficit of collective will may continue for the foreseeable future. But there may come a time when we can adapt the words of Paul to our contemporary situation, and say that as citizens there is no longer white or black, there is no longer rich or poor, there is no longer red state or blue state, for all of us are equal as Americans.

Further exploration

The following provide additional background for and expansions of the topics discussed in this post:

• “Talent and the Winner-Take-All Society” by Robert Frank discusses the phenomenon of increased inequality in free-market economies due to “winner-take-all” dynamics. (See also Frank’s and Philip Cook’s book The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us.)
• “What is the point of equality?” (ungated version [PDF]) by Elizabeth Anderson criticizes “luck egalitarianism” and lays out her alternative vision of “democratic equality.” (See in particular pages 316-321 and the conclusion on pages 336-337.)
• “Common Property: How Social Insurance Became Confused with Socialism” is a popular article by Anderson that touches on many of the same themes, including a look back to Thomas Paine and his social insurance proposal.
• “The free-market welfare state: Preserving dynamism in a volatile world” by Samuel Hammond of the Niskanen Center proposes a strengthened welfare state as the best approach to maintaining a free-market system. (See also the Twitter thread announcing the paper and the Washington Post interview of Hammond discussing his views.)
• “A Health Care Plan That’s Universal and Bipartisan” by Ed Dolan (also of the Niskanen Center) outlines one approach to ensuring that all Americans can cope with the costs of health care.

Finally, for the calculations and data behind the graphs above, see “Baseball salaries vs. performance” and the source code for that article in the seven-answers code repository.

tl;dr: How to promote racial equality? Possible places to start: reducing crime, improving policing, and promoting voting.

I’m continuing my series of posts in which I give my own answers to the “Seven Questions” posed by Jason Booms. Here’s Jason’s third question:

Racial discrimination continues to plague our nation. This is evident in our workforce (hiring practices, income disparities, opportunities for advancement, etc…), in the administration of our criminal justice system, in systemic efforts to disenfranchise voters based on race, in the relative dearth of substantive environmental protections for communities where people of color constitute a large percentage of the population, and in other facets of American life. What steps can and should be taken to address these issues?

Before I get into the main body of this post I’ll say a couple of things up front:

First, I think questions like this are ultimately best answered by people who (unlike me) are part of minority populations, since they’re the people most directly affected by the issues under discussion and the people who will have to live with whatever policies get adopted to address them. But Jason directed these questions to all candidates, not all of whom are racial minorities, and all of us as voters will end up weighing the candidates’ answers. So I’ll put my two cents’ worth in as well.

Second, although Jason refers to “racial discrimination” in general, my comments are specifically directed to issues relevant to African Americans. Those issues are what most people think about when the subject of “race in America” comes up, and they’re major factors in politics at the local, state, and national level—as they have been for the past two hundred years or more.

So given that, what are my own thoughts? As is evident from Jason’s question, questions of race and racial discrimination arise in many areas of life, and it would be overly ambitious of me to try to address all or even most of those areas. I’ll instead focus on a few areas that I think are fundamentally important and where there appears to be good reason to think that improvements can be made.

Crime

The first two areas are crime and policing, specifically ensuring that African Americans do not suffer a disparate impact from criminal violence, and that measures to reduce crime do not themselves cause a disparate impact on the ability of African Americans to live their lives in dignity and freedom.

Reducing crime is fundamental because ensuring the security of its citizens is the first and foremost task of any government. Improving policing is fundamental because we expect our governments to go about the task of ensuring citizens’ security in a way that embodies the ideals of a liberal democracy, as opposed to resembling the practices of a police state, an occupation force, or a paramilitary group.

No one should have to live in an environment marked by constant criminal violence. In addition to its effects on individuals, it has a corrosive effect on the neighborhoods and cities in which it occurs. Efforts to build communities and promote their economic development cannot be expected to succeed in the absence of adequate security for their inhabitants.

Why should we expect progress can be made? Because progress has in fact already been made in some respects, as can be seen in the graph above. Murder is the most extreme outcome of criminal violence, and the rate at which people become victims of murder has gone down dramatically over the past decades.

This is even true for African American men, who are murdered at significantly lower rates today than in 1995, the first year for which I was able to find data. (Given the trends apparent in the graph for murder rates in general, I suspect that the rate prior to 1995 was even higher, and thus the reduction from its peak even more significant.)

Although murder rates for African Americans remain too high compared to the overall US murder rate (not to mention those in other countries), this reduction is no small thing. Sociologist Patrick Sharkey points out that given the reduction in the murder rate thus far, “The drop in homicide mortality increased [life expectancy] of African American males by .72 years . . .—roughly equivalent to the estimated impact of eliminating obesity altogether.”

There is still a lot of variability around the country in murder rates. But this variability also shows that there is significant room for improvement at the local level: there are cities that have similarly low murder rates despite being very dissimilar demographically and otherwise, and cities with very different murder rates that we’d expect to be otherwise comparable.

Policing

So things have gotten better, and could potentially get better still. But could this be done without subjecting minority communities to overly aggressive policing? Just as we can look to murders as representing the extreme end of criminal violence, we can look to police killings of unarmed people as emblematic of citizen concerns about police actions.

The number of police killings of unarmed individuals is relatively low when viewed in the context of killings overall, and especially low in relation to the total population. For example, in 2015 police killed 75 unarmed African American men, just over 1% of the more than 7,000 African American men murdered that year, with the chances of any particular African American man being killed by police being extremely low. Some commentators have used these statistics to argue that the problem of police killing African Americans has been blown out of proportion.

But even a few killings exert a large influence on people’s perception of police behavior, similar to how even a few terrorist incidents influence political responses to terrorism. For example, as noted above, of all African American men who died violent deaths in 2015, about 1 in 100 were killed by police while unarmed. If we look at men of other races who died violent deaths in the United States from 1995 through 2016, the fraction of those deaths due to terrorism (including the 9/11 attacks) is almost exactly the same: about 1 in 100.

If we look at the post-9/11 years the fraction is even lower: Of nonblack men who died violent deaths from 2002 through 2016, only about 1 in 1000 were killed by terrorists, and only about 1 in 2000 by Islamic extremists.

The shadow of 9/11 still hangs over US politics, and it’s not surprising that it does: of nonblack men who died violent deaths in 2001, 1 in 5 died in the 9/11 attacks—a number so large it caused the FBI to omit 9/11 from crime statistics for 2001, presumably lest it distort analysis of historical trends. Federal, state, and local governments continue to spend billions of dollars a year to protect Americans from the threat of terrorism, with combating Islamic terrorism the main political focus.

But as an ongoing problem today the problem of unarmed African American men being killed by police is an order of magnitude worse than the problem of other men being killed by terrorists in general, much less by Islamic terrorists. Thus it’s reasonable in my opinion for governments to take the necessary actions and allocate the necessary funding (e.g., for better police training) to reduce police killings and other instances of police-initiated violence to as low an amount as possible.

Again, the data suggest there is definite room for improvement: Rates at which police kill African Americans vary widely across different jurisdictions (almost by an order of magnitude), and at first glance there’s apparently no strong relationship between rates of killings and overall crime rates. This suggests that many police departments could in fact do their jobs in a way that is both more effective in reducing crime and more acceptable to the communities they serve.

Voting

Of course, improving policing in this way requires electing officials who are motivated to take the necessary actions to do so. This leads into my recommendation for another key action for reducing racial discrimination and promoting racial equality, namely making sure that the political power of African American voters properly reflects their presence in the general population.

This includes a wide variety of issues and actions: registering more African American voters, making sure they’re motivated and able to get to the polls, working against laws and regulations that may have a disparate impact on African American voters, and addressing broader issues like gerrymandering of electoral districts to favor one political party over another.

I don’t have time or space in this post to do an in-depth treatment of the controversies around measures like voter ID laws and the like, and render a considered judgement on all the claims and counter-claims that people have made around voter fraud, the need to protect the security of elections, etc. Instead I’ll just “state my priors” and describe the underlying principles I think are relevant here.

First, America has a history here, and not a very good one. Arguments advocating (for example) strong voter identification systems and noting their uncontroversial use in other nations would play a lot better if there wasn’t a long tradition of disenfranchising African American voters in various ways, and if present-day politicians didn’t make claims about “massive electoral fraud” far in excess of any potential reality.

Second, it’s a general principal of security that it is far easier to commit extensive fraud with computers than with people. (For example, the weak link in many traditional “cybercrime” schemes is the need to recruit “money mules,” US-based individuals who receive money fraudulently transferred from victims and transfer it on to the perpetrators in other countries.)

Thus I would put a significantly higher priority on securing voting systems themselves, including requiring a paper audit trail for all votes, than I would on worrying about whether someone could possibly vote as someone else, vote twice, vote out of their jurisdiction, or vote when they’re ineligible to do so.

Acting locally

A final thought: Jason directed his questionnaire at local candidates generally, including candidates for the Maryland legislature, the Howard County council, and the county executive. There’s another set of elections occurring, namely the so-called “courthouse races.” These are for positions that are relatively obscure to most people (for example, Judges of the Orphans Court) and thus don’t receive a lot of attention.

However one of these positions is particularly relevant to the issues I’ve discussed above, namely that of State’s Attorney, the person who decides which criminal cases to prosecute and how to go about doing so. Local prosecutors occupy a key position in the criminal justice system. It would be interesting to hear candidates’ thoughts on how best to achieve the twin goals of reducing crime and improving policing, with a view to improving the lives of African Americans in Howard County and elsewhere in Maryland.

Further exploration

I found the most interesting analysis of crime and policing issues to be that of Patrick Sharkey, as outlined in his book Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence. Of course, “interesting” does not necessarily equal “true,” but I found Sharkey’s treatment to be both not obviously wrong and not overly ideologically biased.

Here are some more references relating to Uneasy Peace:

• “Two Lessons of the Urban Crime Decline.” A New York Times op-ed by Sharkey briefly summarizing some of the arguments from the book.
• “Uneasy Peace: Supplemental Slides for Empirical Analysis. A slide presentation by Sharkey summarizing the empirical arguments in Uneasy Peace and the supporting data. If you’re not put off by graphs and (a couple of) numeric tables, I think this is the best single expression of Sharkey’s arguments.
• Two reviews of Uneasy Peace from liberal and conservative commentators respectively:
  • “The Great Crime Decline: Drawing the right lessons from the fall in urban violence.” Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker magazine.
  • “An ‘Uneasy Peace’ and the Search for Durable Cities.” Edward Glaeser in the Wall Street Journal.

Other articles and sites worth checking out:

• “The Counted: People killed by police in the US.” A database maintained by The Guardian newspaper on people killed by police (for whatever reason). It allows filtering by demographic groups, unarmed vs. armed victims, and so on.
• Mapping Police Violence. A combined data and advocacy site focusing on police killings and related violence.
• “Better Policing Is the Best Criminal-Justice Reform.” A National Review article by Rachel Wu that encourages conservatives to adopt a “law-and-order, civil-rights reform agenda” based on “high-quality policing” and “diminish[ing] our society’s reliance on incarceration.”
• “Voting rights in the United States.” This Wikipedia article is a good summary of political controversies over voting rights in the US since its establishment, including attempts to eliminate or dilute the political power of African Americans.
• “The single most important person to reform the criminal justice system is not . . ..” An article by Shaun King in which he explains why he’s shifting the focus of his activism to electing reform-minded prosecutors. (He subsequently founded the Real Justice PAC).

Finally, for the calculations and data behind the graph above and other numerical statements in this post, see “US murder rates and deaths from terrorism” and the source code for that article in the seven-answers code repository.

Even before writing my previous post, seeing yet another person on the Internet refer to “socialist Sweden” had prompted me to channel the spirit of that great American Noah S. “Soggy” Sweat, Jr.

My friends, I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about socialism. All right, here is how I feel about socialism:

If when you say socialism you mean that system in which government controls the means of production, distribution, and exchange, the devil’s brew of political interference in economic decisions large and small, the poison scourge of cronyism and corruption, the bloody monster of central planning, that defiles the market, dethrones economic reason, destroys the home and workplace, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil regimes that have toppled millions of men and women from the pinnacle of righteous and gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.

But, if when you say socialism you mean the provision of a robust safety net, the philosophic quest for social justice, the positive externalities created when good people get together in support of each other, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean a basic measure of economic security that gives Christmas cheer to workers and their families; if you mean the stimulating spending that puts the spring in the stagnant economy in the frosty depths of depression; if you mean the system which enables men and women to magnify their in-born potential, and their economic well-being, and to have some measure of protection against life’s great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that system, the taxes of which pour into our treasuries untold billions of dollars, which are used to provide universal health care for our little children, our neighbors with disabilities, our aged and infirm, and any one of us caught up in calamities we could neither foresee nor forestall; to build highways and hospitals and schools and provide the foundations for an advanced liberal democratic society and capitalist economy, then certainly I am for it.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.

For further exploration

For a good example of people being confused about supposed “socialism,” see the following:

• “Socialism’s Rising Popularity Threatens America’s Future”. A National Review writer worries about the increased appeal of “socialism” to American voters.
• “ACFI survey reveals details about the ideology gap separating Americans”. A press release summarizing the results of a survey by the American Culture and Faith Institute in which 37% of those surveyed preferred “socialism” to “capitalism,” including 54% of self-described liberals, 37% of self-described moderates, and 23% of self-described conservatives.

tl;dr: What is social democracy? My preferred definition is dynamic capitalism plus liberal democracy plus an effective social safety net.

I promised to give my own answers to the “Seven Questions” posed by Jason Booms. Here’s Jason’s second question:

What are your thoughts on social democracy?

My answer: First, I really wish Jason had asked, “What are your thoughts on socialism?,” because I had a snappy answer already written and ready to post on that particular topic. But no matter: once I answer this question, I’ll answer that other one in a special bonus post.

So, “social democracy.” Wikipedia defines it as

a political, social and economic ideology that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal-democratic polity and capitalist economy, as well as a policy regime involving a commitment to representative and participatory democracy, measures for income redistribution and regulation of the economy in the general interest and welfare state provisions.

The Wikipedia article then goes on to give as real-life examples of social democracy the “socioeconomic policies that became prominent in Northern and Western Europe—particularly . . . in the Nordic countries.”

Couched in those terms there is little I would disagree with and much to approve of, especially concerning the desirability of looking at Denmark, Sweden, etc., as possible models. But—and this is a big but—we have to be very clear on what a workable and sustainable “social democracy” might mean in practice, and especially clear on what the “Nordic model” really consists of.

Many people seem to dislike market-based economies on principle, and lament the pervasive presence of markets in our lives. Some seem to use the term “social democracy” as a synonym for “socialism” (or at least a sort of “socialism lite”), with the general idea that it’s a possible and desirable alternative to “capitalism.” To my mind this is very much not the case.

In particular, some people speak of our present economic system as “late capitalism,” seemingly in the hope and expectation that capitalism is on its last legs and will soon be replaced by a presumably kinder and gentler system, whether we call that system “socialism” or “social democracy” and something else. But it makes no more sense to speak of “late capitalism” than it does to speak of “late agriculture.”

Just as there is no viable alternative to basing an advanced human society on intensive agriculture, there is no viable alternative to basing an advanced human society on a market-based economy in which the vast majority of economic decisions are made via a price system, in which some form of capital-based finance exists, and in which—except for certain limited exceptions—everyone secures their daily bread through a combination of capital investment in productive ventures and selling their labor (or the fruits thereof) on the open market. Venezuela is but the latest example that supposed alternatives to capitalism simply do not work in practice.

However, the agriculture of today is not the agriculture of the past: thanks to (among other things) capitalism, almost all of us are freed from being tied to the land and working the fields from sunrise to sunset. Likewise, the agriculture of today is not necessarily the agriculture of the future: changes in social attitudes drive changes in agricultural practices (for example, preferences for organic produce and meat from more humanely-raised animals), and innovations in technology may expand our ideas of what it means “to farm” (for example, industrial production of “synthetic meat”).

Similarly it’s possible to imagine a system that is very much capitalistic in nature without at the same time exposing us to the ravages of a predatory capitalism “red in tooth and claw.” Moreover, we have actual existing societies to point to as examples of this.

So, Frank, do you mean that (for example) Sweden is not a “socialist” country? Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. The key point about today’s “Nordic model” is not that it demonstrates the viability of “socialism,” it’s that it combines measures many think of as “socialist” (high taxes and redistributionist measures) with a capitalist system that in many respects is significantly more unrestricted than what we have in the US.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at the “Index of Economic Freedom” produced by the Heritage Foundation, generally thought of as a conservative think tank. As you might expect, the index prioritizes government policies friendly to businesses (including those that increase the power of employers over employees) and penalizes countries with high levels of government spending.

But even with that thumb on the scale, in the 2018 index “socialist” Sweden is ranked #15, three places above the US (#18), and at #12 Denmark is six places above the US. (Norway and Finland are ranked #23 and #26 respectively.)

How can this be? The answer is simply that at present the Nordic countries are not in fact “socialist” by any reasonable definition. They do have extensive social insurance schemes and redistributive policies, but they combine those with a commitment to economic liberty and a capitalist economy. (Most notably, Sweden’s ranking in the Index of Economic Freedom increased from #26 in 2009 to #15 in 2018.)

For example, in the US many politicians have promoted laws to require that employers pay their employees a “living wage.” But in Denmark, Sweden, and other Nordic countries there is no statutory minimum wage. If an employer wants to offer an employee the equivalent of $1 per hour, and the employee is willing to take it, as far as I can tell the state will not intervene to prevent it.

Does that mean that employees in these countries are at the mercy of greedy capitalists? No, because in practice most employees are covered under collective bargaining agreements negotiated within the various industry sectors between companies and unions. (What is thought of as the “minimum wage” in those countries is simply an average of negotiated base wages across sectors.) Thus we shouldn’t automatically assume that “living wage” legislation is an absolutely necessary component of a “social democracy.”

(On the flip side, both progressives and libertarians should push back hard on the idea that so-called “right to work” laws have anything to do with freedom and liberty. They are simply government restrictions on the freedom of private companies to enter into exclusive arrangements with suppliers of labor, no different in principle than laws that would prohibit private companies from entering in exclusive arrangements with vendors providing other goods and services.)

At the heart of the discussion about “social democracy” are two independent but related propositions:

First, that social insurance schemes and redistributive measures in general are conceptually separate from government regulations on economic activities. It is possible to both provide a robust social safety net (funded by relatively high taxes) and at the same time significantly loosen regulations imposed on businesses.

Second, that a robust social safety net and an invigorated capitalist economy are not just compatible, but rather are each necessary for the continued success of the other. Without strong economic growth governments do not have the fiscal base needed to fund a safety net, and without a robust safety net people are reluctant to let capitalist innovation work its magic.

Policy advocate and commentator Will Wilkinson sums things up nicely:

A sound and generous system of social insurance offers a certain peace of mind that makes the very real risks of increased economic dynamism seem tolerable to the democratic public, opening up the political possibility of stabilizing a big-government welfare state with growth-promoting economic liberalization.

(He goes on to note, “This sense of baseline economic security is precisely what many millions of Americans lack.”)

Now, for reasons I go into in a future post I think such a “grand bargain” between progressive advocates of “social justice” and conservative and libertarian advocates of “business friendly” policies is extremely unlikely at the national level, and will remain so for some time to come.

Could progress be made at the local level? Maryland has more than its share of government regulations that are arguably unnecessary or at least overly restrictive (case in point: why can’t I buy beer and wine at my local Giant Food store?). One can make the case that we’d be better off economically, and no worse off otherwise, if many of these regulations were repealed or revised.

Maybe there’s a possible deal that could be struck at the state level: maintain or even expand the current tax base and use it to provide a comprehensive program of health care and other social provisions for Marylanders (making up for shortfalls at the national level), in exchange for a thoroughgoing review and reduction of Maryland regulations affecting businesses and their employees.

I’ll leave it to local political experts like Jason and others to tell me whether this is just a pipe dream. However as a Maryland voter and taxpayer this is a policy approach I’d be more than willing to sign up to.

Further exploration

The folks at the Niskanen Center, a libertarianish¹ think tank, have been at the forefront of promoting the synergy of capitalism and economic liberty with a system of comprehensive social insurance. See for example the following articles by Will Wilkinson:

• “For Trump and G.O.P., the welfare state shouldn’t be the enemy”
• “What if we can’t make government smaller?”
• “The freedom lover’s case for the welfare state”

See also the following:

• “The Administrative State vs. the Social Insurance State,” by Jason Brennan, a political philosopher and one of the founders of the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog (motto: “free markets and social justice”).
• Country rankings for the Index of Economic Freedom produced by the Heritage Foundation.
• Statutory minimum wages in the EU 2017. A summary of minimum wage legislation in the European Union states, including Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. (Norway and Iceland are not included because they are not EU members.)
• “Labor law in Denmark.” A summary of employment-related government regulations in Denmark. In addition to no statutory minimum wage, note that there is “no legislative provision on what constitutes normal working hours,” “no legislation on public holidays,” and “[the] only rule is that an employee must be allowed one day of rest for every seven days.”

Finally, for the calculations and data behind the graph above and other statements in this post, see “Index of Economic Freedom Comparisons” and the source code for that article in the seven-answers code repository.

tl;dr: Is wealth inequality corrosive for democracy, and if so what then? It’s complicated . . .

In the previous post I promised to give my own answers to the “Seven Questions” posed by Jason Booms. So without further ado, here’s Jason’s first question:

Do you consider the increased concentration of economic wealth in the United States to be corrosive to our democracy? If yes, how should this issue be addressed? If not, why not?

My answer: First, I don’t consider wealth inequality in and of itself to be a bad thing. I think it’s problematic only to the extent that a) it coexists with a diminishment of the economic prospects of those people who are not wealthy, and b) it enables the wealthy to pursue political policies that further that diminishment (not necessarily intentionally, perhaps as a byproduct of policies that otherwise have some positive benefits).

Now, as it happens I think both of these things are true: Despite recent economic growth and a slow recovery from the Great Recession, we have not been living in times when all people have rising economic fortunes and prospects. Rather for some time now many if not most people have faced stagnant incomes and increasing economic uncertainty.

Technological progress and globalization have cushioned some of this, by providing cheaper and more capable goods and services and opening up new economic opportunities, but at the same time these trends have also had the opposite effect on putting pressure on the wages of workers exposed to them.

I’ll discuss in a future post a potential theoretical explanation of the social and political dynamics behind all this. For now suffice to say that those who have most benefited from the economy of the past few decades are strongly motivated to preserve their position, and are happy to leverage the political process to do so. (Again, as I noted above this need not be attributed to active malice. Often it’s a matter of conflating what might be good for oneself with what might be good for everyone else.)

Since elites in general have more political influence than others—not just due to wealth but also due to their favored position in the overall social/economic/political networks that drive political decisions—they’ve generally been successful in having their favored policies adopted, or at least in blocking the adoption of policies they don’t favor.

So what is to be done? One set of answers focuses on reducing the wealth of the extremely wealthy (for example through increased taxation) and reducing the effect of wealth on politics, for example through public financing of campaigns. I don’t think these are wrong answers exactly, but I don’t feel they address the roots of the problem.

Another set of answers focuses on addressing the trends that lead to people accumulating great wealth and with it great power over others. Some of these are not just about the extremely wealthy; they also address wealth inequality between the merely upper middle class and everyone below them.

(To get a little math-y for the moment, the general idea is that there are aspects of our society, economy, and polity that convert a Gaussian distribution of natural talents and learned skills—some with little, some with a lot, most in the middle—into a Pareto distribution of realized wealth and influence—20% of the people have 80% of the wealth, or even more unbalanced.)

So let’s take a quick look at some of the possible causes of and trends behind wealth inequality. I don’t have the time or the energy to do a complete treatment of these, so just consider this a list of “things to discuss”:

Technology and automation. This encompasses not just the typical “robots are coming for my jobs” concerns, but also technologies like the Internet that enable firms to grow to much larger scale while depending on a much smaller employee base.

This is an area where some of the biggest and splashiest new fortunes have been made (think Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.). Ease of distribution, near-zero marginal cost to serve additional customers, winner-take-all network effects, and global reach combine to produce massive rewards for those people and firms able through talent, luck, and other means to achieve dominance in their sectors.

Globalization. There’s no question that globalization on balance has been a boon to humanity, with increased trade lifting literal billions out of deep poverty in China, India, and elsewhere. However while the average worker’s income in traditionally poor countries has risen dramatically, the average worker in the US has benefited mainly through cheaper goods as opposed to increased salaries. On the other hand, high-end US workers benefit from being able to sell their talents into a larger marketplace.

Financialization. Besides technological innovation, another major driver of wealth extremes is increased financialization of the economy, in which more and more economic activity is in the form of financial transactions only indirectly related to the production of goods and services.

The consensus opinion seems to be that the underlying issue here is explicit and implicit (“too big to fail”) government subsidization of finance, ensuring that financial industries and the people who work in them can capture the upside while being protected against the downside (e.g., through bailouts).

Goverment-granted monopolies and subsidies. This covers a whole set of issues: excessive copyright terms, dubiously-granted patents, industry-specific subsidies both explicit and implicit (as discussed above with regard to financialization), and so on.

The preferred ways to address the distortions caused by great wealth will depending on what people think are the most important factors: for example, some advocate antitrust policy to address industry concentration in tech and finance, others advocate policies aimed specifically at reducing subsidies and artificial barriers to competition, and yet others have ideas on how to address the downsides of globalization.

There’s no shortage of interesting ideas, the problem is how to take effective political action to implement them: the fact of great wealth translating into great political power means that actions in opposition will face an uphill battle to succeed.

I don’t have any easy solutions for how to do it. I think to a large degree success will depend on “preparing the ground” for new policies (i.e., winnowing out the best ideas and figuring out how to effectively sell them), circumstances favorable to their adoption (e.g., another financial crisis for addressing excessive financialization), and straightforward political action and organizing to put things over the top. For reasons I go into in a future post, I am relatively pessimistic about things in the short term, but more optimistic in the long term.

For further exploration

Here are some cherry-picked articles covering the issues I discussed above. These are of course subject to my own interests, predispositions, and even browsing history. (I picked them in part by doing an Internet search for key terms like “technology” and “inequality.”) You’re welcome to propose sources of your own.

• “Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data,” by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2016, 131(2): 519-578. An attempt to measure the relative shares of US wealth held by households over the period 1913 to 2012. The supplemental data for this paper are the source for the figure above.
• “You’re not imagining it: the rich really are hoarding economic growth,” by Dylan Matthews. A Vox article addressing various criticisms of measures of income inequality. (This includes, among other things, the criticism that measuring income and wealth by household instead of by individual is misleading given changes in family structure among lower-income people—a criticism that could be levied against the figure I reproduce above).
• “Technology and inequality.” From the MIT Technology Review, this is a representative example of the many articles written about the role of technological innovations in increasing inequality, with guest appearances by various prominent economists, including Thomas Piketty, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, David Autor and Daron Acemoglu, and Robert Solow.
• “It’s time to think for yourself on free trade.” A Foreign Policy article by economist Dani Rodrik outlining his concerns about globalization, free trade, and “social dumping.”
• “‘Financialization’ as a cause of economic malaise.” A New York Times opinion piece by former Reagan/Bush advisor Bruce Bartlett summarizing the concerns of various economists about the role of finance in the US economy.
• “Freeing the captured economy.” A series of articles from the Cato Institute journal Cato Unbound discussing the arguments in the book The Captured Economy by Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles.

In the introduction to a planned loosely-connected series of posts, I wrote that I wanted to look at the long-term trends and themes that may drive politics in the 21st century. I’ve been having trouble getting started on writing, but finally got pushed out of my procrastination by the January post “Seven Questions” by local political blogger Jason Booms.

Jason writes:

With the Maryland filing deadline fast approaching for those who are (or are considering) seeking public office in the 2018 election cycle (February 27, 2018 to be precise), this blog is once again considering what questionnaires (if any) to send out to various campaigns. . . .

While we can discuss specific policy proposals all day long ($15/hr federal minimum wage, Medicare for All, etc. . . .), I like to return to exploring “first principles” to understand how candidates think about underlying issues.

This is a pretty interesting approach to try to take candidates out of the “talking points” mode of political campaigning. Some candidates have already taken Jason up on his offer, beginning with some candidates for District 12 of the Maryland House of Delegates.

I thought it would be fun to supply my own answers to his questions, even though I’m not running for anything. I’ll do one question and answer per post, and will update the following list as I publish new posts:

1. Wealth inequality
2. Social democracy (plus a bonus fun post “If-by-socialism”)
3. Racial equality
4. Liberty and equality (and baseball!)
5. Class warfare
6. Gender equality
7. LGBTQIA equality

These posts will be primarily “think pieces,” but I may offer some actual policy suggestions here and there.

Addendum

I’m not 100% sure what Jason would consider to be acceptable answers to these questions (although his subsequent posts offer some guidance). Certainly some if not most of them I’d consider to be leading questions, in the sense that Jason is apparently trying to suss out who best matches his particular vision of progressive politics.

I doubt very much that I myself would pass Jason’s litmus test (to the extent he has one), but I think these are questions to be taken seriously. I’ll try to answer them honestly and to the best of my ability. I’m still thinking through a lot of these issues and doing ongoing reading and research, so a lot of my comments represent “work in progress” and “thinking out loud”. I reserve the right to change my mind on some points in the future. (As I said, I’m not a candidate for anything.)

Finally, I’ll remind everyone once again that I am a registered Democrat and have been all my life. However, I’ll try to be as non-partisan as possible, in the hope that these posts may be of interest to you no matter your political affiliation.

If you’re like me you may be tired of reading (or participating in!) Twitter tiffs and Facebook free-for-alls about political issues, but not necessarily tired of thinking about the future of Howard County, Maryland, the United States, and the world. If so, I invite you to take a break from social media and speculate with me about the long-term trends and themes that may drive politics in the 21st century:

How long might our current period of political conflict last? What political ideas and arguments might gain traction in the coming years and decades? What about the political implications of social and technological changes and other “macro-trends”? I very much doubt that my readers will agree with everything I write, but at least I hope that I can say something interesting that can’t be captured in 140 characters.

Unlike my previous series on the Chrysalis and Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods, I don’t have a list of posts planned out ahead of time, although there are particular ideas and themes I definitely plan to touch on. However I can at least sketch out what I intend this series to be (or not be):

• Non-partisan. Although I am a life-long registered Democrat, I am going to try to write in a way that is fair and civil to people of different political parties and persuasions. (If you think I’ve failed in that aim, see the sidebar for where to send complaints.)

• Non-current. No commentary on current events—whether today’s, this week’s, this month’s, or even the next four years’—and no comments about anyone currently holding or seeking to hold political office.

• Non-local. Although I’m writing from a Howard County perspective for a Howard County audience, I’ll typically focus on politics at a national level (mostly the US).

• (Mostly) non-technical. Long-time readers know that I love to throw in mathematical, statistical, scientific, and technological material from time to time. (See for example my past posts on income inequality and maps of election results.) I’ll try to curb that tendency but won’t be able to avoid it entirely, because science and technology will likely play a significant role in the politics of the future.

Although my intent is to be non-partisan, it would be stupid to deny that I have particular opinions and interests that influence what I think about political issues. Here’s the perspective from which I’ll be writing:

• I am skeptical of attempts to justify particular political systems based on pure deductive reasoning and/or unrealistic ideas about human nature. I am partial to ideas that take into account what we know (or can reasonably conclude) about people, the societies they live in, the culture and institutions they create, and the history of the world.

• I tend to judge political systems by how well they improve the lives of people as individuals, including in particular individuals marginalized within their societies. I am skeptical of those who think political systems exist primarily to serve one’s family, ethnic group, nation, or God.

• I don’t believe that political philosophy is a search for truth (for example, what types of political, economic, and social arrangements are provably most just). I believe it is a search for plausible and persuasive arguments in favor of our own ideas and feelings about how society should be organized. I also believe that—if approached correctly—that is not necessarily a bad thing.

So, that’s what I’ll be writing about in the coming months. Apropos of my last point above, for my next post I’ll talk about how political philosophy is (or should be) like selling, only with a really long sales cycle.