On "Stuff", Summers, Krugman, and Proper Interpretation

In commenting on Paul Krugman's column I used the term "stuff". There's lots of it around. I think the recent controversies over Summers by the left and Krugman by the right point to some lessons about proper interpretation of writings.

I think it's true that people discussing Summers speech and Krugman's column both make the same mistakes. Daniel Drezner says "Krugman mistakenly attributes the attitudes of some Republicans about evolution to all Republicans". Now the truth is that we don't know what Krugman believes, but we do know he never wrote all. Drezner inserts the word when he reads, and makes it explicit in his comment. Similarly, feminists who reacted to Summers inserted mental "alls" into his statements.

Unfortunately English, spoken and written, lacks simple means for qualifying statement, so we need to rely on our common sense.

I would offer Harshaw's rule of interpretation: any noun used in a serious discussion should be considered as qualified by the terms "majority of", "modal", "median" as appropriate (at least when the noun has a normal distribution curve. In other words, "conservatives don't believe in evolution" would convert to the phrase "[most] conservatives don't believe in evolution". This is the principle, but appropriate modifications would have to be made in other discussions; sometimes it's the verb that should be modified.

46 years ago in Psychology 101 I learned about the "fight or flight" reaction to the new. I take it as meaning today we all immediately [mis]interpret what we read to make it either more threatening or safer--we're uncomfortable with the middle ground of difference. (Although my misinterpretation could be a sign of age.) If we don't apply Harshaw's rule, we indulge in polemics without sense and without possibility of resolution.

More on Liberals in Academia

I'm trying to shift the flood of posts on the issue of liberal predominance in academia to see what causes they offer:

Daniel Starr
says liberals are open to new ideas and want to believe they're contributing to the public good, conservatives aren't open and value money earned through enterprise.

Redstateblog
agrees with the money angle, and emphasizes self-selection--a hostile climate of opinion in academia. (Krugman raised self-selection in the sense liberals see business as hostile, but focused on anti-scientism. )

Drezner contrasts David Brooks and Krugman, offers an example of bias against a conservative blogger professorial candidate, but is defensive on the rest (his commenters pick him up). But plaudits and kudos to commenter Mark Buehner, who first guaranteed that a large majority of Republicans believed in evolution, then had the grace and guts (qualities scarce in bloggerland) to come back with this:

"I should really do my research before making guarantees. If these polls are right, I may start to despair entirely:

http://www.pollingreport.com/science.htm

51% of dems and independents and 66% of republicans believe humans were created by god in their present form? Can this be right?"

Steve at SecureLiberty. org
offers no explanation for liberal hard scientists, but attacks marxism, feminism, and PC while denying religion influences his beliefs.

Todd Zywicki
at Volokh.com in my opinion misreads Krugman as saying "that the reason that there aren't more conservative scientists is because they are skeptical of evolution". He makes a reference to the Summers dispute, and asserts " most of those who are consistent evolutionary analysts tend to be libertarians and conservatives (often Hayek-influenced)." Reference is to his paper discussing group selection in evolution and tying it to Hayek's thought.

It's true that evolutionists have often been conservative. Think William Graham Sumner and other social Darwinists. The late, great Stephen Jay Gould and his opponents in NYReview of Books were on the other end. Whatever the beliefs of individual scientists, the issue seems to be the climate of opinion.

Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek
attacks Krugman's argument (including the implication that the 1960's/70's saw a lot of Republicans/conservatives in academia, which relates to my earlier post). He cites Hayek's explanation for the predominance of liberals--intelligent people overvalue intelligence and rational design, therefore reforms, therefore socialism. Interesting point, but I have to ask whether intelligent conservatives, such as libertarians, don't also overvalue intelligence? Sorry--that was snide.

BK (Before Krugman) Stephen Benjamin wrote a piece on Network effects, saying that in law the mentor/disciple relationship (mentors push their disciples for places) is a key. Later, here
he offered criticism of Jonathan Chait's LATimes piece, which triggered comments which he discusses.

I want to go back over my earlier post and incorporate some of the points from above. Unfortunately spring in Reston has arrived, so garden duty calls.

Why Are Political Donations Like Payment Limitations?

Because both require definitions of "person" and both are evaded. Each "person" can give X dollars per candidate. As this NY Times article describes, Homemakers Are the Fat Cats. Who Knew? Their Husbands "it turns out that many of them - some of whom live outside the city and may not be terribly invested in the outcome of races here - made their $4,950 contributions, the legal maximum, at the behest of deep-pocketed spouses with business interests in the city."

I've seen prior articles describing donations by minor children, even babies. It shows the problems of lawmaking and implementation; lawmakers have a picture in their mind but reality is more complex.

Why Liberals Predominate in the Hard Sciences

Paul Krugman in the Times writes An Academic Question on this subject, Juan Non-Volokh and Orin Kerr at Volokh.com interpret it, and Mark Kleiman attacks their interpretations. My take is biased, because I just posted yesterday on a related question: why liberals predominate in academia.

While Krugman throws in a lot of stuff*, I think his argument comes down to the following assertions excerpted from the piece:

• "But studies that find registered Republicans in the minority at elite universities show that Republicans are almost as rare in hard sciences like physics and in engineering departments as in softer fields. Why?

• "Thirty years ago, attacks on science came mostly from the left; these days, they come overwhelmingly from the right, and have the backing of leading Republicans."

• "today's Republican Party - increasingly dominated by people who believe truth should be determined by revelation, not research - doesn't respect science, or scholarship in general. It shouldn't be surprising that scholars have returned the favor by losing respect for the Republican Party."

* The "stuff" is conflating liberals and Democrats, conservatives and Republicans, theological conservatives and all conservatives (the professors on Volokh.com seems to tend libertarian conservative) plus a good helping of "the sky is falling" invective designed to get one's (liberal, pink) blood flowing in the morning. (This relates to another theme of mine, emotion is needed to stir action. Without the "stuff", no one would be blogging on this, not even me.)

Without getting into the question of who most correctly interprets Krugman, what do I think of the argument, as stated above. Andrew Dickson White wrote a famous book on the war between science and religion in the late 1800's. Although the thesis may be questionable, I think it's what people believe, and what people believe is important. A Christian [hard] scientist has to explain why her science is not antagonistic to her faith; an atheist does not. To the extent religious fundamentalists dominate the discussion, it probably pushes scientists and would-be scientists to the left.

Can't leave this subject without mention of Alan Sokal--the physicist who hoaxed the po-mo set. There is an anti-science mindset among some on the left, but they've neither the numbers nor the lungs of the religious right.

Why Would Liberals Predominate in Higher Ed?

There are many interesting posts on the issue of whether liberals dominate higher education. For the sake of argument, let me assume they do. The interesting question is why: Many of the conservatives discussing imply that discrimination against conservatives is the answer. As a liberal I'm uncomfortable with that, I suspect many liberals are, hence a reluctance to get into the issue. But some other answers are possible [caution, I last was on a college campus in 1965, when I busted out of grad school, so I've no current information]:

One thesis I particularly like takes off from George Marsden, "The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief". The idea is that ever since Harvard was founded, academia has been more liberal than the society at large. Most private colleges (like Dartmouth and Carleton College) were founded in connection with a Protestant denomination, but Marsden shows the tendency has been for them to evolve into secular (liberal) institutions. If I remember him correctly, the reason is one beloved of conservatives: competition.

To get students, and financial support, colleges had to reach further than their founding denomination and initial area. By competing over a wider space, both geographically and intellectually, they spread their fixed costs and increased their stability. Broader appeals meant minimizing theological correctness and ideology and emphasizing science, rationality, achievement, equality, democracy (the good liberal universalist virtues), as well as football teams and academic stars. The universities Marsden studies became secularized in the process, which undermined a foundation stone of conservatism. (He ends with the Bill Buckley's "God and Man at Yale" controversy in the 1950's.) It looks to me as if there was an educational establishment by 1950. Carnegie had seen to it that professors had a national retirement plan , the professional organizations were dug in, the AAUP was fighting back against McCarthyism, Harvard and Yale were the leaders and pacesetters, and ETS started pushing SAT.

(I don't know if this qualifies as "horizontal competition" in economics, but see Achenblog for a neat piece on it. The point is that competition forces the competitors to become more like each other, whether in location or in facilities and character. As of 1950 the Big Three carmakers each sported a full line of models, and the Kaiser-Frasers, Studebakers, and Nashes of the world faded away. The Big Three networks all had news departments and were very similar in content. I suspect all the elite colleges cover the same fields of study with few differences.)

Certainly when I went to college in 1959 many people on the right thought there was a liberal/pinko/egghead dominance of college faculties. Academia (faculty) was dominated by WASP males and some Jews. As for the student body, the colleges I applied to talked about diversity, but they mostly meant geographical. I think I remember 3 blacks in a class of 800. Males were a majority. Today my alma mater is 50/50 in sex, 27 percent minority, probably most Asian. In my field of history a popular theory was "consensus history"--the idea that America was always a liberal middle class society, lacking the hereditary upper class and the proletariat found in Europe.

I've not been back to college since I busted out of grad school in 1965. I have tried to keep up, through the Alumni mag and my history journals.

So, if academia was liberal in 1965, what would have kept it so?

1. Discipleship--seems to me that professors have "their" grad students, whom they try to place. That would tend to perpetuate any liberal bias.
2. Culture--I think all organizations have a culture that gets perpetuated through the air.
   
3. The appeal of the new--in the competition among grad students for places, topics that are new are favored over the old. (See labor history and agricultural history for two fields of declining importance in history, even though both would tend "liberal".)
   
4. New demography--colleges started going after new groups, notably blacks, but also other minorities and women. This is true both in the student body and in the faculty. It so happens that the new demographic groups are also the most liberal in the general population. In the case of women, they seem to have gone most strongly into fields that are now most heavily liberal (i.e., English and the arts, then social sciences).
5. Stronger competition--look at the attention paid to the US News ratings. Colleges are much more selective these days. One of the big criteria is selectivity. That's in line with the rule in literature: the more dead bodies the hero steps over, the greater the reward at the end of his quest. So every college in the competition wants to maximize the number of applicants. I might be cynical and say that the purpose of affirmative action is, in part, to attract more applicants to be rejected, which thereby increases the selectivity of the institution. But having a diverse professoriate, having people on the faculty with whom a possible applicant can identify, thus becomes very important. (See the LA Times article on celebrity instructors.)
6. Conservatism is not important among the incoming students. For the majority of students, college is probably a rite of passage and a ticket to punch (just as it was in my day) so the college's prestige is important, as are extracurricular aspects. (Liberalism isn't important to most, but having female or black role models will matter to some.)
   
7. Disdain for other occupations. It's true that people tend to demonize the others. So all things being equal, one should expect academics to denigrate those in business or government. They've been doing that since time immemorial, and seeing it done to them. (Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.)
   
8. Liberal guilt--one of the downsides of the bleeding heart liberal is that we become guilty very easy. That meant, and may be still means, that liberals will favor those who have no power, who have been oppressed.
   

All this means, I think, that conservatives should be concentrated in niches, the colleges that retain a strong religious connection, perhaps colleges trying to differentiate themselves (perhaps George Mason as opposed to UVA), some new fields (like bioeconomics, IT, etc. ). But the reality seems to be that even the hard sciences are 50 percent liberal, indicating the limits of any conservative push.

Do Away with Social Security Numbers

The Washington Post had its reporter try to get Social Security numbers from outfits operating on-line. He succeeded, and wrote this piece. Net Aids Access to Sensitive ID Data (washingtonpost.com):

"Although Social Security numbers are one of the most powerful pieces of personal information an identity thief can possess, they remain widely available and inexpensive despite public outcry and the threat of a congressional crackdown after breaches at large information brokers."

I've been working sporadically on a proposal to drop SSN's completely. I'm convinced it's feasible. Need to get back on it.

Don't Plant That Acorn, The Oak May Fall

The Post carries an article (Privacy Advocates Criticize Plan To Embed ID Chips in Passports ) that elicits the above response from me. The background--the State Department (and other federal agencies) are working to improve means of identification/authentication. The national Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued standards for ID cards that carry various data. The passport is one such card and State is proposing to include RFID chips in passports. (RFID chips send a radio signal to a receiver, like the don't steal tags on clothes or, in my library, the chips on books. Typically they send a very limited amount of information.) So privacy groups are attacking the plan. To quote:

"A government plan to embed U.S. passports with radio frequency chips starting this summer is being met by resistance from travel and privacy groups who say the technology is untested and could create a security risk for travelers."

What they say may be literally true, but so is the fact that the tree which grows from an acorn may fall and kill someone or damage some property. The reaction is somewhat like NIMBY (not in my backyard) reactions. There are always many reasons NOT to do something; it takes drive to get things done. The reasons often come flying when you're dealing with something new that people don't really understand.

My prescription in this case is for the State Department to open their testing process to the critics (on the assumption that any software development goes through multiple stages of testing). Give them the passports and be your beta testers. In my experience, it's usually better to try to co-opt your critics; they often have enough of a point that it's best to deal with it upfront, then ignore it and pay the cost later. But still, plant that acorn.

Thinking and Acting Are Uneasy Partners

Picking up on an old story, MSNBC reported a study showing brains don't mature until the 20's so that:

"many life choices -- college and career, marriage and military service -- often are made before the brain's decision-making center comes fully online. But for young adults, 'Dying on a highway is the biggest risk out there,' Giedd said. 'What if we could predict earlier in life what could happen later?'"

This is just one instance where taking action and thinking are at odds. That's one of the problems I have with organizations like GAO and the goo-goo emphasis on process. It's called "paralysis by analysis" or "the best is the enemy of the good". Another quote from the article:

"The pattern probably serves an evolutionary purpose, he said, perhaps preparing youths to leave their families and fend for themselves, without wasting energy worrying about it.

Maybe it's also why sons compete with fathers?

Relationship of farm programs and foodstamps--Updated

Update: Senator Chambliss ensured that the Budget Resolution contained language permitting the Senate Ag Committee to cut across the board, food stamps and/or farm programs.--4/2/05

From 2/7/05:
NewDonkey.com discusses the possibility that the proposed change in payment limitation will result in a lowering of food stamp money.

"Sunday, February 06, 2005

Farm Subsidies and Food Stamps

The Bush budget will apparently include a 'cap' on the maximum values of farm subsidies that any one producer can harvest, an idea that will (rightly) get some progressive support. But the proposal will run directly into already-announced opposition in Congress, especially from Senate Appropriations Chairman Thad Cochran of MS, who is mobilizing the powerful farm lobby to defeat it.

And that's where food stamps come in: Congress organizes its budget and appropriations work by federal department, and by a department-oriented system of budget 'functions' that track the jurisdiction of congressional appropriations subcommittees. If the White House and the GOP congressional leadership can succeed in setting lower targets for USDA spending, then farm subsidies will be placed into a direct competition with food stamps for funding."

Comments:

The setup is the result of the need to get urban votes for farm programs, and vice versa. In a logical world, foodstamps wouldn't be in USDA any longer (they first started in the late 30's to get rid of surpluses, were killed during the war, then George McGovern (I'm pretty sure) pushed them in the late 50 and they got adopted more or less as a pilot project under Kennedy. They kept being expanded over the years as the farm bloc grew less powerful and needed urban votes more and more in order to pass farm programs. (The biggest deal was to make food stamps = money, instead of limiting them to surplus commodities.)

I think it's true that payment limitations, at least in their current form, were the result of Senator Schumer, then Congressman Schumer's work when he was on the House Ag committee. Again, the cotton and rice people in particular didn't like it, but it was his price for supporting the 1985 farm bill. (Whether or not he knew that cotton and rice interests had inserted a couple provisions that would water down the payment limitation provisions, like the entity rule, I don't know. )

Because I like to think well of people, I'd guess Bush and Bolten wouldn't mind a cut of food stamps but are simply operating within a historical structure.

Berger Files and UN Files, What's Interesting?

The New York Times has an article on Sandy Berger's guilty plea to destroying files from the National Archives. According to them:

On Sept. 2, 2003, in a daylong review of documents, Mr. Berger took a copy of a lengthy White House 'after-action' report that he had commissioned to assess the government's performance in responding to the so-called millennium terrorist threat before New Year's 2000, and he placed the document in his pocket, the associate said. A month later, in another Archives session, he removed four copies of other versions of the report, the associate said.

Mr. Berger's intent, the associate said, was to compare the different versions of the 2000 report side by side and trace changes.

'He was just too tired and wasn't able to focus enough, and he felt like he needed to look at the documents in his home or his office to line them up,' the associate said. 'He now admits that was a real mistake.'

Mr. Berger admits to compounding the mistake after removing the second set of documents on Oct. 2, 2003, the associate said. In comparing the versions at his office later that day, he realized that several were essentially the same, and he cut three copies into small pieces, the associate said. "

The Post has a similar article. Comparing this to the destruction of files at the UN (see here) two things stand out. In Berger's case, Archives was keeping multiple copies of the same document, presumably because each had annotations by a different official. "Trace changes" indicates to me that Richard Clarke was clearing his report in parallel, taking advantage of modern technology to provide each official his/her own copy, then making appropriate changes in the final report.

If that's true, there's a contrast with the UN case as I discussed the other day (note: of this I'm not sure, have not been able to successfully download the report) use technology to make multiple copies. But what's good for expediting bureaucratic action is bad for the Archives and for historians. Berger was apparently trying to act as a historian, reconstructing what happened when. In the UN case, using carbons, all versions of a document were in one place and one could easily track the changes. Thus if Berger's story, as told by associate, is true, he wouldn't have had to steal documents.

A final point. I would trust Richard Clarke to squawk if there had been anything explosive in the annotations--he's certainly not publicity shy, so his silence means to me that this is a mistake and a misdemeanor, but not a coverup.

My bottom line: Berger's offense is due to bigshotitis, the idea that rules don't apply to me. See Richard Nixon and Elliot Abrams, who lied to Congress and is now back in the NSC. Personally, I'd throw all bigshots in jail for 6 months, Martha Stewart can testify to it's being educational.