Responsible Academics and Diversity

 My friend told me about the Critical Approaches to Diversity section on her syllabus, and wondered if--since I like the professor--if it would be Critical in a heterodox way?

I said that no, it is likely to be the orthodoxy, but that doesn't mean he's not a good professor or academic.

In fact, he is a good, responsible academic because he is going with the orthodoxy, and he's not an expert on this particular area.  So he is deferring to the experts, and that's good.

What went wrong in this case is that the expertise is illegitimate due to institutional capture because the usual epistemic forces that govern scholarship do not function normally on these issues.  

"Progressive" Journalistic Standards

The particulars of this story are unremarkable, but it's just another banal example of how progressive orthodoxy and its accompanying standard practices are rife for abuse by bad actors.  

This WaPo piece on the Queer Appalachia account includes these quotes illustrating the progressive tendency to not ask for evidence and take things on trust when it comes to marginalized people and good causes, as asking for and supply evidence is itself an injury:

"As the account picked up followers — 276,000 and counting — it received coverage from NBC News, Slate and USA Today, among many others....

"In a 2018 Bitch Magazine article, author Kristina Gaddy described QA as a collective of 15 people, a number that Gaddy attributes to Mamone....

"I spoke to nine people who donated material for the Electric Dirt zine, five journalists who have covered Queer Appalachia, and nine representatives of small nonprofits who received or were supposed to receive money from QA. They all said they’d never communicated with anyone at QA except Mamone....

"Journalists, perhaps eager to support what they perceive as a worthy cause, have written stories built only on interviews with Mamone...

"The rhetoric Mamone and Queer Appalachia use make them somewhat criticism-proof. “They have a lot of clout, and everyone is so afraid of backlash, being accused of not being supportive,” says Kayleigh Phillips. “I did feel a level of compassion [for Mamone],” she says of their time working closely together. “But ... they’re preying on the people that they’re supposed to be helping.”...

"“They presented themselves as a leftist and an anarchist,” says Leo. “But at the end of the day, it’s capitalism. And it’s been exploitation of all these people who really believe [in] and maybe have projected what they’ve wanted onto this project.”"

Same as with Erdley's Rolling Stone UVA sexual assault story, when she didn't try to corroborate certain facts, even when the public assumed she had--including her supportive audience, i.e. Anna Merlan etc.

Impact, not Intent?

Calcifying into dogma in some left-of-center circles is the (proposed) principle expressed by phrases like "intent isn't magic" and "impact matters, not intent."  This is the kind of thing common in certain communities on social and online media, but also is the type of platitude uncritically accepted and then promulgated by administrators and their student activist confreres in contexts like orientation sessions for new students.  Imagine a fresh arrival on campus, maybe--for the vividness of the argument--think of a graduate student in ethics and moral philosophy, or a law student ready to pursue truth only to find some questions provided answers before any classes even begin, answers decided by non-academics and with an air of stipulation that brooks no criticism or dissent.

The more recent "oops/ouch" discursive instructions from a few schools are another example, provided that entailed along with having to say "oops" is an admission and acceptance that the "ouch"-causing utterance was wrongful and to refrain from repeating it or similar verbal "oops"s.

Plenty more could be said on the absurdity of this status of received wisdom being afforded to this particular principle ('impact, not intent'), but suffice it to say that this absurdity is underscored by the fact that someone like Kant ('nothing can be said to be unqualifiedly good other than a good will') is apparently ruled fully wrong not only a priori, but even without any argument at all.

The Simple Answer to Scott Sumner

A lot of good links on EconLog lately, including this by David Henderson called "Protectionism IS Inflationary", a reply to this by Scott Sumner called "Protectionism is not inflationary".

In the former post, Henderson addresses the points put forth by Sumner in the latter post and--after recalling his and Sumner's common intellectual influence Uncle Milt's role in the revival of the quantity theory of money, according to which the price level and thus inflation is/are a function of the level of real economic activity, the (size of the) money supply, and the "velocity" of its circulation--characterizes Sumner's view as follows (readers can judge for themselves the fairness of this):

Protectionism makes y, real GDP, lower than otherwise. Scott and I agree on that. With an unchanged M and unchanged V, P is higher than otherwise. Therefore an increase in protectionism causes an increase in P. We normally refer to an increase in P, the price level, as inflation.

Scott doesn't dispute that. What he argues is that the current Federal Reserve Board will offset any increase by adjusting monetary policy, M, keeping the inflation rate at or around 2%. 

He may well be right, but that doesn't mean that protectionism is not inflationary. Protectionism IS inflationary AND the Fed can offset this inflation.

He ends by also quoting one of the comments on Sumner's original post:

If you have protectionism and all other variables stays [sic] the same (and therefore the Fed does not do any offset), protectionism is inflationary. If you assume the Fed does the offset, then you are changing two variables at once.

 ***

I note this only to finally ask a question that I've long wondered: am I missing something or does it really just take no more than this to deal with Professor Sumner's centrist-in-practice two-step?  

To see what I mean, consider the following post I had in the unpublished archives from at least July 2016, but probably from much earlier.  If it comes from a bona fide libertarian economist, does the argument against Sumner's argument form that we have seen and in what follows need to be no more elaborate than Henderson's and the commenter he cites?

Scott Sumner pisses off left-of-center people (and [New/Post/etc.] Keynesians, MMTers, etc.) like me

Consider the following short dialogues/conversations, that are very characteristic of SS's discourse with those of other economic views, especially (in response to) Keynesians:

1. SS: It doesn’t matter that state and local cutbacks negated much of the federal fiscal expansion. That the federal fiscal expansion didn’t help the economy/keep unemployment below 8%/prevent the recession/etc. proves the Keynesians wrong.

Ks: Well of course state and local cutbacks negated the effects of federal expansion. It’s kinda as if there was no federal expansion, so we didn’t really try my option.

SS: No, state and local spending are exogenous.

Ks: Ugh… 

And... 

2. SS: What will be the effect on GDP of fiscal expansion/stimulus? Whatever the central bank wants it to be. 

Ks: Well sure, of course the central bank could suddenly tighten to coincide with and in proportion to increasing federal spending. But what if they don’t? Then it will employ unused capacity to increase GDP until with hit the production frontier and fund only inflation, right?

...

Usually when we say some phenomenon does or causes another, it seems that "everything else being equal" is implied. Otherwise, as with SS in these instances/cases, it seems like responding to the advancement of the proposition that "its raining will make you wet" by denying it on the grounds that "not if you carry and umbrella". Well duh...

Sure, you can oppose the stimulus for other reasons like how government is worse at spending stuff to get a return than individuals are, or for other reasons (moral maybe), but I feel like people are being misled as they and the media apparatus that informs them get a simplified picture of your account and views, with perverse practical consequences. I think this is especially true because MM is easily portrayed as a moderate macroeconomic school between the partisan Ks and NCs and between the extreme MMTs and AEs, playing into the common tendency to pursue objectivity, reasonableness, moderation, compromise, and the middle. 

SS should give us the technical information to make our own choices. The federal government doesn’t control monetary policy, doesn’t know what they will do, and often it has looked like they even were way too tight, as SS himself as asserted. 

This is why I think (I think this is why) Scott Sumner pisses off liberals. 

---

This also makes me think again that the Fed should be given some fiscal authority for automatic stabilizers like infrastructure repair and investment. After the usual process of determining what ought to be built where, the Fed is given these projects along with a mandate to fund them/release the funds for them (whether financed by creating money or [regular] congressional appropriations) in accordance with their dual mandate. In addition to creating an alternative avenue for necessary projects to get done by removing them somewhat from the political process, it would give the federal a regional specific level to affect the economy. 

And would it slightly lessen the (CAP?) problem of non-coordination between monetary policy in one authority and fiscal policy in another?

Such projects would if course have to be classified as automatic though, so as to minors the effect on the (appearance of) discretionary budget and deficit. 

UPDATE:

There also seem to be conceptual confusions here.  Sumner can say that X doesn't boost inflation because X isn't the Fed and inflation is "always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" but in the his post in the current issue, he writes as if inflation can be a price increase across many goods and sectors from non-monetary causes, but real ones including government policy.

Danger of Identitarian Deference: After its Cause Wins, Does it Reverse its Position?

Having a rule of identitarian deference or other standard of identity politics under which some people's view is given more weight than others in accordance with who has the least power is dangerous because, once the disadvantaged cause in question that righteous/virtuous people are fighting for and for the purpose of fighting for which identitarian deference is established/practiced gains support and power and begins to win and becomes dominant, then it wouldn't lose the benefit vantage of identity, and opposition what in fact. 

In concrete terms, for example, Emma Sulkowicz has more power in some ways than Paul Nungesser; after all, one was supported by a multitude including elected officials and the other was not. Similarly, racial minorities have more social power and white supremacists and the KKK do at this time in this country. 

Should the arguments between these camps then really be settled by, or addressed by giving any (argumentative/discursive) benefit/advantage to, privileging the side with less power?

Identity Politics Criticism

I worry that (some of) my criticism of identity politics is (getting) conflated.

A lot of what I criticize of identity politics is not its policy and personal behavior/treatment/practice conclusions.  

It is not my position that we ought not to or can not (not in terms of possibility/ability) lessen the tilt against, and even positively tilt things towards, the marginalized, like in recognizing that “neutral” policy is best thought of/called “facially-neutral” and may indeed still be unfair and need changing, and in recognizing that some explicit advantages for the marginalized in treatment, like affirmative action or exceptions to free speech, may indeed to justified or even obligatory restore justice after countless examples of other phenomenon going to other way, reverse the effects of those that are in the past and those still persisting with us.

Instead, what I am criticizing of identity politics is the idea that we must even do so (engage in this retilting/rebalancing) in the debate itself on the question of whether or not to do so. 

There's also a problem of self-reference here too, among other things.

Identitarian Deference in Abortion Rights Rhetoric

I just realized another long-standing example of "identitarian deference" that I never noticed/recognized before:

"it you don't have a uterus, you do not get a vote"

"if you're not a woman, you don't get an opinion on this issue"

This is a very long-standing, from as far back as I can remember following politics, argument/piece of rhetoric/retort used by pro-choice women (and even some men) on the left to argue against pro-life men.

When in the past I've been thinking about how best to argue against some of these more risky/destructive tendencies, I've tried to recall previous examples of identity politics and identitarian deference ad hominems to show how the approach is fallacious; I especially tried to show them examples of conservative ad hominem fallacies that they might have decried as fallacious at the time and still would have the partisan amenability to that judgment.
But I was also trying to identity past examples of erroneous identity politics and identitarian deference in general, including on the left, in order in part to discover whether recent developments, in identity politics and PC--especially on campus, really represent a change on the political scene, whether there really was something new.
Even when I was recently casting about for specific identifiable examples of earlier lefty identitarianism, I didn't think of this.  Could mean nothing, but could be because of how deep this was engrained and normalized...

***

Incidentally, the current line on gender identity and trans rights would invalidate/preclude this rule anyway, since men and women can no longer be assumed to have penises and vaginas, respectively, and in general that there is no external way to determine whether they have a uterus or not--and asking them is rude and verifying is assault and insult.  

Identity Politics and Abortion Argument

Is this post, on the idea of a universal positive right to an abortion, an example of or does it contain any instances/examples of "identity politics"?  In the good sense of the term as used by those who profess its value?

At least in style it seems to me not; maybe in some sense about the content, since it directly concerns only part of the population, it is.  But so if it does count as identity politics for its content--despite or without regard to its style--then I only have a problem with the style of identity politics.

Procrastination and a Theoretical Confirmation

Hoisted from the draft queue from 2/12/14:

Andrew Sullivan points to a recent study in neuroscience showing that, neurologically, we think of our future selves as different people from our current selves, and that those for whom this is especially true are more likely to prefer short-term gratification over long-term gratification than those for whom this neurological fact is less true.

This is another example of experience following theory, as I've previously noted that if you combine the concept of collective action problems with the concept of splitting people into 'time-slices', you can account for procrastination without precluding rationality.

National vs. State-level Policy, and Deontology

As a general matter, it seems to me that you can't rationally oppose a policy at the federal level for deontological reasons, but support the same policy at the state level.  In other words, you can't argue both that a certain policy unjustifiably violates people's rights when imposed upon an unwilling opponent by the federal government and that the same policy does not violate people's rights when imposed upon an unwilling opponent by a state government.

Bloomberg is the Worst Kind of Pro-Regulation Liberal

Bloomberg is the worst kind of liberal because he validates the libertarian and conservative accusation that liberals want to regulate more and more the private lives of citizens, but he does so not for the cause that most liberals would find worth that cost of validating the opposition, but for a cause that most liberals would assign a lower priority.  In other words, I am (and I believe most liberals are) willing to defend government regulation in finance against objections that it's illegitimate paternalism before I am willing to defend nutritional regulation from those same objections.

Introduction

As an introductory post, I’ll just lay out what I think this blog will be.  


I’ll make some observations about politics, sometimes prompted by current events and sometimes not.  Some posts will be complete, clear arguments, and some will be much less.
This blog is dedicated to progress in debate and decision-making, and will most likely feature conceptual analysis over empirics.


Conceptual analysis over empirics because I’m not trained in economics, political science, or statistics or math of any sort, but also because conceptual analysis is necessary to progress resolving political disputes, but is much less commonly made explicit than wonky empirical analysis.  For example, consider a common exchange on monetary policy: one advocates some inflationary policy so that higher prices will lead to increased production by those who want to take advantage of those higher prices, which requires additional labor and hence increases employment, but the other counters that inflation is theft. So the former is making an empirical claim that a certain policy will achieve some public policy goal, while the latter does not address the empirical claim, but makes an unempirical one that the policy is morally wrong.  They’re talking past each other, and not even speaking the same language.  So while empirical analysis of these political issues is necessary to progress in political deliberation, it is not sufficient; purely conceptual analysis is necessary too, in this case to evaluate moral claims which cannot be investigated empirically.   


Playing devil’s advocate and charitably applying the principle of charity will most likely feature as well, given that the bounds of possibility consulting reason with empirics are much broader than when they are narrowed with empirical data.  


In other words, this is a blog on political philosophy.  


Here goes.