Anarchists = BLM Minus Black People

From the Los Angeles Times article, "Portland’s anarchists say they support racial justice. Black activists want nothing to do with them":

The election of Biden has only antagonized the anarchists — and exposed their differences with the Black activists they claim to support.

Black activists and community leaders, who generally view the defeat of Trump as an opportunity for change within the system, said the anarchists are hijacking the movement and undermining the push for racial justice by continuing to commit violence.

Continue ReadingAnarchists = BLM Minus Black People

Glenn Greenwald, Co-Founder of The Intercept, Resigns To Maintain Journalistic Integrity

I have been in the process of writing an article that I will title, "Everything Is Becoming Religion." This morning, while writing, I noticed that Glenn Greenwald has resigned from The Intercept, a news organization he co-founded. Here is an except from Greenwald's announcement:

The pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality that led to the bizarre spectacle of my being censored by my own media outlet are ones that are by no means unique to The Intercept. These are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom. I began writing about politics fifteen years ago with the goal of combatting media propaganda and repression, and — regardless of the risks involved — simply cannot accept any situation, no matter how secure or lucrative, that forces me to submit my journalism and right of free expression to its suffocating constraints and dogmatic dictates.

Greenwald's resignation comes on the heels of his riveting three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan earlier this week. During that discussion, Greenwald (and Rogan) aimed Greenwald's criticisms at our most prominent legacy media outlets across the entire political spectrum. And now our social media overlords are actively getting into the game. Three hours is a lot of time, but I would urge you to watch every minute of this. It would be a small investment, given that this discussion offers an accurate diagnosis of America's Dys-information Pandemic and some moral clarity about what needs to happen going forward.

Our prominent legacy news outlets have become sad jokes with regard to many critical national issues. Our "news" is now pre-filtered to protect us from basic facts and it treats thinking as though it is a team sport, much like the dogma people are offered in churches. It treats us like we are babies, as though we aren't able to think for ourselves. Our prominent legacy media outlets have so thoroughly choked off meaningful non-partisan information and discussion that this has ripped open up a dangerous information chasm---many of us now inhabit only one of two mostly non-overlapping factual worlds. This has, in turn, led to two exceedingly disappointing choices for President of this Duopoly. If I needed to hire an employee for any type of job in any business, I would never hire either of these candidates and neither would you. But this is where we are, unable to talk with one another about this sad situation with nuance. In fact, too many of us have been convinced that we should hate each other for having differing opinions, even when we are mostly "on the same side of the aisle."

Somehow, there are many Americans who are still convinced that they can uncritically sit back and "turn on the news." What they will actually be exposed to, for the most part, is reporters who are afraid to ask the same basic questions on the job that they actually and instinctively do ask each other in private. Instead of informing us with a wide range of facts and opinions, they are driven to please their bosses and audience. This is not news. This is Not-News. This parallels the deep dysfunction driven by social media, an issue address in the excellent new documentary, "The Social Dilemma."

We now have a News-Industrial Complex that is driven by money and ideology instead of integrity and courage to engage with inconvenient facts. This system is designed to please you, to give you more of what your intuitive side, your System 1, craves. Once you have this epiphany about what is really going on, you will no longer be able to stop seeing it. If you continue watching the "news," you will increasingly think, "Garbage in, Garbage out." It will increasingly realize that prominent legacy news outlets are fucking with our brains to make money and steer elections. Once you have this epiphany, you will experience a greatly heightened annoyance at what passes for "news" Once a critical mass of people have this epiphany, this will be our first step in a long slow recovery.

Continue ReadingGlenn Greenwald, Co-Founder of The Intercept, Resigns To Maintain Journalistic Integrity

Originalism, Redux: Amy Coney Barrett Trots Out a Mildewed Theory as Her Guiding Light

Here we go again. Amy Coney Barrett is proclaiming her belief in "Originalism." In a NYT article titled "The Philosophy That Makes Amy Coney Barrett So Dangerous: Do we really want our rights to be determined by the understandings of centuries ago?," highly-respected Law Professor Erwin Chemerinsky is not buying what newly appointed Justice Coney Barrett is selling about originalism:

Originalists believe that the meaning of a constitutional provision is fixed when it was adopted and that it can change only by constitutional amendment. Under this view, the First Amendment means the same thing as when it was adopted in 1791 and the 14th Amendment means the same thing as when it was ratified in 1868.

But rights in the 21st century should not be determined by the understandings and views of centuries ago. This would lead to terrible results. The same Congress that voted to ratify the 14th Amendment, which assures equal protection of the laws, also voted to segregate the District of Columbia public schools. Following originalism would mean that Brown v. Board of Education was wrongly decided in declaring laws requiring segregation of schools unconstitutional.

In fact, under the original public meaning of the Constitution, it would be unconstitutional to elect a woman as president or vice president until the Constitution is amended. Article II refers to them with the pronoun “he,” and there is no doubt that original understanding was that only men could hold these offices.

Throughout American history, the Supreme Court has rejected originalism and protected countless rights that cannot possibly be justified under that theory. For example, the court has interpreted the word “liberty” in the Constitution to protect the right to marry, to procreate, to custody of one’s children, to keep the family together, to control the upbringing of one’s children, to purchase and use contraceptives, to obtain an abortion, to engage in private adult consensual same-sex sexual activity, and to refuse medical treatment.

Chemerinsky notes that the rejection of originalism "is not new."  Indeed, it has repeated and deservedly come under withering attack. One needs only cruise at 1,000 feet to see that certain justices have selectively pulled out their "originalism" gambit only on certain cases, not others, revealing it to be an opportunistic excuse, not a respectable judicial philosophy.

For more on what should have been the last gasps of "originalism," see my previous article, "Judge Richard Posner skewers Justice Antonin Scalia’s so-called originalism."  If one is going to dismember a Justice of the United States Supreme Court in an article titled, "The Incoherence of Antonin Scalia," one better have the goods. My article celebrated Judge Posner's 2012 take-down of originalism, which was, indeed, swift and surgical. Posner's exceedingly clever approach was to actually read the cases on which Justice Scalia relied for his ballyhooing of originalism in his own book (co-authored with Bryan Garner): Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts.

Posner's take-no-prisoners detailed article exposes many deep flaws of originalism along with the suspect motives of those who bandy it about in their selective efforts to turn back some clocks but not others. Posner's article was so incredibly effective that I think of it as a remake of "The emperor has no clothes."  Here is an excerpt from Judge Posner's annihilation of originalism:

THERE IS A COMMON THREAD to the cases that Scalia and Garner discuss. Judges discuss the meanings of words and sometimes look for those meanings in dictionaries. But judges who consult dictionaries also consider the range of commonsensical but non-textual clues to meaning that come naturally to readers trying to solve an interpretive puzzle. How many readers of Scalia and Garner’s massive tome will do what I have done—read the opinions cited in their footnotes and discover that in discussing the opinions they give distorted impressions of how judges actually interpret legal texts?

Another problem with their defense of textual originalism is their disingenuous characterization of other interpretive theories, typified by their statement that textual originalism is the only “objective standard of interpretation even competing for acceptance. Nonoriginalism is not an interpretive theory—it is nothing more than a repudiation of originalism, leaving open the question: How does a judge determine when and how the meaning of a text has changed? To this question the nonoriginalists have no answer—or rather no answer that comes even close to being an objective test.” But “non-originalism” is not the name of an alternative method of interpretation. It is just a bogeyman, like what they call “so-called consequentialism”—“is this decision good for the little guy?”

A problem that undermines their entire approach is the authors’ lack of a consistent commitment to textual originalism. They endorse fifty-seven “canons of construction,” or interpretive principles, and in their variety and frequent ambiguity these “canons” provide them with all the room needed to generate the outcome that favors Justice Scalia’s strongly felt views on such matters as abortion, homosexuality, illegal immigration, states’ rights, the death penalty, and guns.

Thus they declare that “a fair system of laws requires precision in the definition of offenses and punishments,” implying that judges are entitled to use a concept of “fairness” to interpret statutes creating offenses and punishments. How is that to be squared with textual originalism? They say that “textualism, in its purest form, begins and ends with what the text says and fairly implies” (emphasis added), but evidently Scalia and Garner are not committed to its “purest form,” for they say that “determining what is reasonably implied [by the words of a statute] takes some judgment” (emphasis in original). They endorse the “rule of lenity”—the interpretive principle that ambiguity in criminal statutes should be resolved in favor of the criminal defendant—without showing how it can be consistent with textual originalism.

They assert that what they call “fair reading” requires “an ability to comprehend the purpose of the text, which is a vital part of its context,” and though they add that “the purpose is to be gathered only from the text itself, consistently with the other aspects of its context,” they also say that “a sign at the entrance to a butcher shop reading ‘No dogs or other animals’ does not mean that only canines, or only four-legged animals, or only domestic animals are excluded.” That is certainly right, but it is not right by virtue of anything textual. It is right by virtue of the principle that meaning includes what “would come into the reasonable person’s mind,” or what we know an author has “in mind” in writing something. On such grounds (which surprisingly the authors embrace as well) a sign that says “No dogs, cats, and other animals allowed” must be read to include totally unrelated animals (contrary to the principle of eiusdem generis—the “canon,” which they also approve, that a last general term in a series is assumed to be of the same type as the earlier, specific terms) because “no one would think that only domestic pets were excluded, and that farm animals or wild animals were welcome.” Right again! But right because textualism is wrong. Similarly, although a human being is an animal, a sign forbidding animals in a restaurant should not be interpreted to ban humans from the restaurant. It is the purpose of the sign, not anything in the sign, that tells you what meaning to attach to the word “animals” among its possible meanings.

I would invite anyone interest in this topic of "originalism" to read Richare Posner's entire article. It is a classic and it should have been the last word on a topic. It's too bad that we will probably need discuss it for many years forward.

Continue ReadingOriginalism, Redux: Amy Coney Barrett Trots Out a Mildewed Theory as Her Guiding Light

Head Start for Rich Kids

In episode 205 of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris spoke with Daniel Markovits about problems with meritocracy. Markovits is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. It was an especially engaging and challenging episode that provided many statistics that I hadn't before heard or appreciated. Here's an excerpt I transcribed:

Daniel Markovits: A poor district in America spends maybe eight to $10,000 per pupil per year. Middle Class public schools spends maybe 12,000 to $15,000 per pupil per year, a really rich public school in a town like Scarsdale, New York, where the median household income is over $200,000 a year, spends about $30,000 per pupil per year. And the richest and fanciest private schools in America 80%, of whose kids come from households that make over $200,000 a year, spend maybe $75,000 per pupil per year. So that there's massive inequality in educational investment. This means that if you look at a place like Yale, where I teach, or Harvard or Princeton, or Stanford, there are more kids in those universities whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution than in the entire bottom half.

And if you took the difference between what's invested in a typical middle-class kids' education, and what's invested in a typical one-percenter kids’ education, and took that difference every year and put it into the S&P 500, to give it to the rich kid as an inheritance when her parents died--because that's the way aristocrats used to transmit privilege down through the generations--that sum would exceed $10 million per child. So why am I saying this? I'm saying this, because it gives you a sense for the enormity of the educational inequality that exists in our society, between not just or even primarily the middle class and the poor, but between the rich and the middle class. And then if you look at the jobs that pay the most money, at elite law firms, at elite investment banks, elite management jobs, to graduates of elite business schools, all these jobs, specialists, medical doctors, all these jobs, almost require people who do them to have gone through some version of this fancy education.

Sam Harris: So what we have is a system of stratification and exclusion that runs through the central elite institutions of school and work in our society, in which those institutions exclude middle and working class families and children, not excluding them by any intent, but by surely the contingent fact of what it takes to jump through all the hoops you need to jump through to land in Yale or Princeton, or Stanford or Harvard.

Daniel Markovits: Exactly. Stanford admits fewer than 5% of its applicants. That means that if you're applying to college and anything serious ever went wrong in your childhood, you know, parents lost jobs, you had to move all of a sudden, somebody died, and you had to pick up some burden to earn some income for the family, you're not going to have a record that puts you in the top 5% of the already elite pool that tries to apply. . . . There are exceptional people, there are exceptional people always. But unless you're incredibly exceptional, you won't be able to get ahead if you don't have a lot of privilege behind you. And then this privileged class . . . asserts that they've earned their advantage and that they have got there on the merits and that those who are disadvantaged deserve to be disadvantaged because they're not as hard working. They're not as skilled. They're not as virtuous and now those who are excluded get appropriately angry and resentful and turn against the institutions, the schools, the professional companies, the forms of expertise, that people on the outside correctly think are underwriting their disadvantage and exclusion.

And a populist like Trump exploits that resentment. And a lot of people on the left think, "How can class resentment go with Trump rather than against him, given that he was born to a massive inheritance?" And the answer is, yeah, he inherited a lot of money. But he is not part of this system of training, education and professional certification that people correctly see as the principal source of their exclusion. It's not his inheritance that's maybe unjust, maybe not unjust--we can disagree about it--but it's on the margins of our society. Whereas all the doctors and lawyers and bankers and CEOs and elite managers who are training their kids like nobody else can and getting them into the best schools and buying houses in the best neighborhoods and getting them into the best colleges. That's the system that is keeping most Americans down. And so the populist resentment turns against it, in some sense accurately.

Sam Harris: So what is the alternative to meritocracy?

Daniel Markovits: Well, it can't be aristocracy or a caste system based on breeding or on race or on gender. That's, I think, important to say out up front, this you know, if this is a going concern as a social and political project, it can't be backward looking. It has to be forward looking.

Continue ReadingHead Start for Rich Kids

About Rent-Seeking

Until a few years ago, I hadn't heard the term "rent seeking." In the past few months, I've heard the term repeatedly and I'm writing this post to anchor this important multifaceted concept in my understanding and to share it with interested others.

I knew concept of "rent seeking" long before I learned the phrase. I've repeatedly had this fantasy where every person who earns a wage needs to step up to onto a big stage in front of the other 300,000,000+ Americans and tell us these three things in simple language:

1) What is your job title?

2) How much do you make?

3) Justify your wage in terms of what you do for your job. In other words, how does your work make your community a better place?

I imagine that many essential workers would come out of this process as shining heroes. A person who works for $15/hour at a typical grocery store could succinctly state "I help keep my fellow citizens alive by making food available for them.

On the other end of the scale, a big shot at Goldman Sachs. A 2019 article at Investopedia indicates: "The average Goldman Sachs employee makes $367,564 on an annual basis, according to the firm’s most recent financial disclosures." Bonuses exceed $40,000. What does this company do to improve the community? Good question. I look forward to hearing how this sort of money is justified in terms of community betterment.

I have sketched out these two examples in order to introduce the concept of "rent seeking." The following is from Investopedia: 

    1. Rent seeking is an economic concept occurring when an entity seeks to gain wealth without reciprocal contribution of productivity.
    2. The term rent in rent seeking is based on an economic rent which was defined by economist Adam Smith to mean payments made in excess of resource costs.
    3. An example of rent seeking is when a company lobbies the government for grants, subsidies, or tariff protection.

Here's another definition, this one from The Library of Economics and Liberty:

People are said to seek rents when they try to obtain benefits for themselves through the political arena. They typically do so by getting a subsidy for a good they produce or for being in a particular class of people, by getting a tariff on a good they produce, or by getting a special regulation that hampers their competitors. Elderly people, for example, often seek higher Social Securitypayments; steel producers often seek restrictions on imports of steel; and licensed electricians and doctors often lobby to keep regulations in place that restrict competition from unlicensed electricians or doctors.

Here's a third definition from CFI:

Rent-seeking is a concept in economics that states that an individual or an entity seeks to increase their own wealth without creating any benefits or wealth to the society.

Rent-seeking activities aim to obtain financial gains and benefits through the manipulation of the distribution of economic resources. Economists view such activities as detrimental to the economy and the society. The practice reduces economic efficiency through the inefficient allocation of resources. In addition, it commonly leads to other damaging consequences, including a rise in income inequality, lost government revenues, and a decrease in competition.

The concept of rent-seeking was developed by American economist Gordon Tullock in 1967. However, the term was offered by another economist, Anne Krueger. . . [T]he term “rent” is referred to as one of the sources of income generation that was conceptualized by Adam Smith. According to Smith, rent is an activity of lending one’s own resources in exchange for some benefits. Relative to other sources of income (profit, wages), rent is the least risky and the least labor-demanding source of income.

The corruption of politicians is related to rent-seeking activities. In order to gain certain benefits, the rent-seekers may bribe politicians. However, G. Tullock determined that there is a significant difference between the cost of the rent-seeking (bribery) and the gains from this practice. This paradox is called the Tullock Paradox.  The Tullock Paradox states that rent-seekers generally obtain large financial and economic gains at an enormously small cost.

With these definitions in place, I'd like to share an excerpt Episode 205 of the Making Sense Podcast, "The Failure of Meritocracy," in which Sam Harris interviews Yale Law Professor Daniel Markovits. It is a thoroughly engaging podcast, repeatedly touching on critically important economic issues we are facing. I'll end with this discussion of rent seeking (though that term is not used).  The speaker is Daniel Markovits:

[Re Silicon Valley and Finance] you see certain forms of seemingly rapid technological advancement. But these are not places that necessarily produce an enormous amount of increased social well-being or growth. And so what we need is a careful, deliberate eye to what kinds of skills our society needs. Let me give some examples of this idea to answer your question starting with ones that I think are easy for me and ending at ones that are hardest for me, just to be fair.

So the easy ones are fields like law and finance. We've had enormous innovation in law and finance, set asides, Silicon Valley, derivative securitization. But there is no--literally--no evidence that our super-skilled, super-elite financial sector produces any increase in economic productivity or well-being for the society. It's interesting, people don't realize that from 1950 to 1970, finance was neither better paid nor better educated than the rest of the economy. Whereas today, it sucks up the most educated people in the society and pays them vast amounts. Law is the same.

If you look at other countries’ legal systems, a system like Germany has much less elite or competitive legal education and loitering, but produces more effective justice at a lower cost. So there are some fields where what we're doing is we're creating intense training, genuine expertise, enormous innovation, but the innovation is just producing greater private wealth for the people who have the skills rather than a greater social product. I think that's true in management also, and we could talk about it.

But the hardest case for me is a case like medicine, because surely medical innovations produced by super trained, super creative people, cure diseases make us all better off. And of course they do. But even there, our system of meritocratic, hierarchical exclusive training leaves a lot of social good on the table. So take heart health as an example. Very well trained, very brilliant doctors and scientists have figured out how to transplant hearts, how to build an artificial heart. But here's some things we don't know about heart health. We don't know whether it's better for your heart over the long run, to exercise really intensively for one hour once a week, moderately for half an hour, three times a week, or just always to walk into take the stairs. We don't know the answer to that question. If we did know the answer that question and if we knew how to train people to do whatever is optimal, that would be a lot better for our population's heart health than the ability to transplant hearts for the very small number of people who get access to the heart and the surgeon.

Continue ReadingAbout Rent-Seeking