Recommended: The Tyranny of Merit

I have suggested before that while the country was obsessing about President Trump’s bizarre behavior, a much more important question was why half the voters in the country would vote for him (or a majority of voters in the UK would vote for Brexit, or The French “yellow jackets” would riot for weeks, or, or…)  What was the root cause, or causes, of the profound discontent sweeping the Western world?

While on a short vacation last week I was browsing in a small independent bookshop in Ouray, Colorado, when I stumbled across Michael J. Sandler’s new book The Tyranny of Merit. It escapes me why I have never run across his writing before. He is, as one reviewer notes, an international rock star of moral philosophy, and author of several really good books.

Trained at Brandeis and at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Sandler is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of government and political philosophy at Harvard University, where he teaches a widely-respected course on Justice (his 2007 book Justice summaries much of the readings for this course).

To give a flavor of his writing and views, let me suggest his short 2017 article in Project Syndicate entitled Lessons from the Populist Revolt, and the excellent 2020 article in Harvard Magazine entitled  No One Deserves a Spot at Harvard.  With respect to his latest book, let me suggest the review in the Guardian, which can be read here.  

Sandler echoes much of the views reflected in David Goodheart’s 2020 book Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence is Over-rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect, and to some extent was foreshadowed by George Friedman’s theses in his latest book The Storm Before the Calm.

There was a concept in Medieval times of “noblesse oblige”, the idea that those born to privilege also inherited an obligation to those less fortunate. It wasn’t always followed, of course, but it was nevertheless a foundational moral principle of the times. We seem to have lost that, and Sandler argues for a return to something like it, along with a recognition that those of us with good educations and high-paying jobs don’t owe it all to anything superior about ourselves or our work ethic, but owe a good bit of it to the pure dumb luck of being born in the right place at the right time to the right sort of parents. We could have had the luck to be born, say, to a poor, low-caste family in India, and we might have remained poor and illiterate the rest of our short lives. Given that fact, the contempt that some elites feel toward those not so fortunate (Hillary’s “deplorables”) is wholly unwarranted, highly destructive, and quite possibly a major contributor to the current unrest.

So how corrupt are our elites?

Sarah Chayes’s books, which I have mentioned in recent posts, argue that corruption threatens our very nation. And the media almost always has a story or two running about elite corruption, whether it be wealthy parents paying bribes to get their children into prestigious colleges or members of Congress getting caught with insider trading, or..or…or.  But of course we are a big country, so out of 330 million people there will always be a few good current corruption stories for the media to pick up.

So how bad is corruption among the elites? Here are some recent stories to ponder:

A recent study from the White House entitled What is the Average Federal Individual Income Tax Rate on the Wealthiest Americans? estimates that for the period 2010-2018 the 400 wealthiest Americans paid an average tax rate of about 8.2%.

ProPublica managed (probably illegally) to get their hands on 15 years of recent tax data on wealthy Americans. The relevant article can be read here.  The data shows many of the wealthiest among us paid no tax at all, while others paid in the range of 0.1%-3.4% federal tax.  You and I, of course, not wealthy enough to hire expensive tax lawyers to find all the loopholes for us, pay more in the range of 18% or so.

Bloomberg Business Week this week has a story Most Americans Today Believe the Stock Market is Rigged, and They’re Right, which reports that research shows that insider trading is widespread, something many of us have assumed already.

The Economist this week has an article New taxes will hit America’s rich. Old loopholes will protect them.  President Biden has been asserting that his proposed expensive new programs will be fully paid for by higher taxes on the rich and corporations, but of course neither the rich nor major corporation pay anything like the tax rates they are now supposedly to pay, so what are the odds they will pay much more tax in the future?

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy published a recent article entitled 55 Corporations Paid $0 in Federal Taxes on 2020 profits. The point is, of course, that they paid no tax LEGALLY, using loopholes provided them by a compliant Congress. Another 2017 report by them documented that over the eight-year period from 2008 to 2015, 258 profitable Fortune 500 companies paid an average effective federal income tax rate of 21.2%—while the federal tax rate was 35% for all those years.

National Public Radio had an article last year entitled How the CARES Act Became A Tax-Break Bonanza for the Rich, Explained. Most bills that get through Congress apparently get lots of little “goodies” stuffed into the 1000+ pages for this or that corporation or special interest group.

The Forbes article Top 1% of U.S. Households Hold 15 Times More Wealth That Bottom 50% Combined makes the point that inequality in America has reached about the same degree as in the 1870s Gilded Age of the Robber Barons.

The Economic Policy Institute has a report CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,322% since 1978, which points out thje growing disparity in pay between senior management and the average corporate worker.

Of course, as Sarah points out in her recent book On Corruption in America, and What is at Stake, the corruption isn’t limited just to the extremely wealthy at the top – it is a whole integrated business model in which all the facilitators – politicians, lawyers, brokers, bankers, accountants, government officials, managers, ete, etc - get their percentage for helping. The U.S. model of corruption is in general far more genteel than just bills stuffed in paper bags. We do it with plush jobs on corporate boards for retired generals, or generous campaign contributions for helpful politicians, or fat fees for helpful law firms, or lucrative positions with lobbying firms or think tanks for useful “fixers”.

There are of course a certain number of the wealthy evading taxes illegally, with Swiss bank accounts, offshore shell companies, undeclared income and the like. There are always thieves among us. But what is more worrying is that there are apparently so many LEGAL ways for them to avoid taxes. That suggests the whole system is corrupt.

All this suggests the corruption is pretty widespread and pretty serious.  Why aren’t more people up in arms about it?    

 

Recommended: Our Revels Now Are Ended

Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and author of a number of nonfiction and military fiction books, many of which have won prizes, is a pretty straight-talking guy. His 1999 book Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? is a pretty blunt, clear-eyed  assessment of current US military tactics and strategy.

He has just written a piece in Strategica entitled Our Revels Now Are Ended, and I highly recommend it. It is a blunt, unsparing assessment of our Afghanistan adventure, and it meshes perfectly with Sarah Chayes's lessons about corruption that I wrote about recently. Let me quote the first paragraph, just to get you interested:

It’s hard to win a war when you refuse to understand your enemy. It’s harder still when you cannot realistically define your strategic mission. You lame yourself further when you reduce a complex history to a single inaccurate cliché; i.e., “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires.” If you lack the will to win at all costs and—out of moral cowardice—allow critics to dictate your operational parameters, you might as well stay home. And if you ignore the lessons of your last war—lost barely a generation earlier—you are, no matter your fantastic wealth and inherent power, doomed.'

"The Taliban just had to show up for roll-call.

Recommended: On Corruption in America; and What is at Stake

Sarah Chayes is a journalist who has covered many of the really unsettled countries in the world, including Afghanistan. She is a very, very sharp woman. She is a former senior fellow in Carnegie's Democracy, Conflict, and Governance program, and was for a few years a special assistant to the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mark Mullen.  I am reading her 2020 book On Corruption in America; and What is at Stake, and I highly recommend it.  She has also written a 2020 book entitled Everybody Knows: Corruption in America, which probably covers much the same territory, though I haven’t read it yet.

I suggest watching two talks of hers available on YouTube:

First is a short 10-minutre TED talk given in 2015 entitled How Government Corruption is a Precursor to Extremism, which can be seen here.

Second is a 50-minute talk about her new book Everybody Knows: Corruption in America. It is very good, and can be seen here.

There is also a pretty good video of her 18-minute keynote speech in 2017 to a Griffith University conference, based on her 2016 book Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, which can be seen here.

But the title of the book Everybody Knows in fact sums up the reality. We do all know that the system is heavily rigged in favor of the rich and well-connected, and can think of dozens of examples. We all know perfectly well that there is insider trading going on, even if only the careless get caught. We all know perfectly well there is a “old boy’s network” (actually many of them, and not all boys) that insures the “in” crowd gets the plum jobs, and that they all cover each other’s backs.  We all watch people move between the corporate world and government, and back again, ensuring that policy favors their companies.

And while it is true that this sort of corruption has occurred throughout history (Rome was probably just as bad), Sarah’s argument is that it threatens the very fabric of our state, and she makes a persuasive case.

 

The Supreme Court’s abortion ruling – Not

The media are making a big fuss about how the Supreme Court just overturned Roe vs Wade and made abortions impossible in Texas. They did no such thing. They simply refused to issue an emergency stay on a defective application, which is exactly what they should have done.

Actually, the Texas law is pretty inventive, deliberately crafted to make it difficult to challenge it before it goes into effect. It expressly forbids any state official from enforcing the law, which means there is no state official who can be enjoined by a court. Instead, it empowers any private citizen to sue anyone involved in an abortion beyond six weeks. So there really was no one for the Supreme Court to enjoin yet, which is why they were correct to deny the emergency request.

The emergency appeal to the Supreme Court proposed to enjoin one randomly-selected Texas state judge from hearing any such case. But of course there is no such case before that judge at the moment, so there is nothing to enjoin, which is why the appeal was defective. And in any case, it is not clear there is any legal basis for forbidding a judge to hear a case., and certainly not for a federal court to control whether or not a state court hears a case. The Supreme Court can certainly overturn a ruling, but I don't see that a federal court can forbid a judge from making a ruling.

The four liberal judges were outraged, because they thought the Supreme Court should stop an obvious injustice. The problem is that is not the purpose of a court. The purpose of a United States court is to administer the law as it is written, not to solve social issues. Social issues are to be solved by elected legislatures writing fair laws. I’m frankly disappointed that the liberal justices don’t understand that.  

The Supreme Court may yet overturn Roe vs Wade someday, and they have a test case coming up next year, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which will be properly argued in normal court proceedings. I actually think it unlikely they will overturn Roe vs Wade, but in fact the reasoning behind that ruling has always been a stretch, as even Justice Ginsburg, a staunch liberal, pointed out.

I personally think there should be a strong legislative protection for women’s right to control their own reproductive processes, based on something stronger than Roe vs Wade’s imputed “right to privacy” (which has no real constitutional foundation) stretched even further to encompass abortion. Imposing abortion restrictions on women is really an imposition of the religious views of a minority on the majority, and ought to be banned. People who are opposed to abortion are free to avoid terminating pregnancies themselves, but they should not be able to impose their beliefs on others, any more than religions that forbid eating pork should be able to deny the rest of us the joys of eating barbecued baby back ribs.

No doubt someone soon will sue someone else under this law (perhaps abortion providers themselves will even arrange for such an action, to test the law), and then it will get a proper argument, first in lower courts and finally, no doubt, in the Supreme Court, which is the way the system is supposed to work. I have little doubt that the law will be found to be defective, failing the Supreme Court’s “undue burden” test installed by the 2016 ruling in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellersted.

But the hysterical claim by some media that the court has somehow overturned Roe vs Wade is simply misinformation, of which we already have too much from the media.

 

Recommended: The Social Science Monoculture Doubles Down

Back when I was in graduate school, a very long time ago, I attended a meeting or two of the local university peace group, whose membership was predominantly liberal faculty members. I only attended one or two meeting because, while they were all for world peace and getting everyone to live together in harmony, they were engaged in a bitter battle among themselves as to what to name their group.  I reasoned that if they couldn't keep the peace among themselves on a trivial subject, they were unlikely to do anything effective about peace  in the wider world.

I thought of this again as I read a piece entitled The Social Science Monoculture Doubles Down by Keith Stanovich, a professor emeritus of Applied Psychology at the University of Toronto, who turns out to have authored a number of good books, the latest of which is The Bias That Divides Us: The Science and Politics of MySide Thinking, published this year by MIT Press.

Stanovich's point, discussed in great detail in the article (this is not an easy, quick read), is that social scientists, almost exclusively ultra-liberal academics,  are producing studies that are seriously technically flawed, and heavily biased toward what they want to believe, studies which the media then picks up and trumpets, especially if it fits the stereotypes they believe in.

Doing good science is hard. Nature is subtle, experimenters get their egos wound up into their theories, good experimental design is difficult, and the interpretation of the results is always subject to the experimenter's expectations and biases (and too often, their poor understanding of the limits of statistics). Indeed, several recent studies have found that well over half the studies reported in the literature cannot be replicated, even in the hard sciences. In the social sciences this figure rises to the 70-80% level.*

So under the best of circumstances it is always wise to be skeptical of the result of studies.  This skepticism isn't "science denial". It is, in fact, exactly what good science is supposed to do. It is part of the process that eventually weeds out poor studies or fabricated results or misused statistics. Stanovich's article is a good introduction to how this happens.

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* See, for example The Economics of Reproducibility in Preclinical Research by Freedman, Cockburn and Simcoe, which estimates more than 50% of preclinical studies are not reproduceable. Or the article Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, Vol 349, Issue 6251 (28 August 2015), which shows overall about two-thirds of psychological studies reported in major psychological journals can’t be replicated.

Afghanistan final thoughts?

There is no question that we should have gotten out of Afghanistan – in fact we should have gotten out long, long ago. So I give President Biden full credit for finally doing what several of his predecessors, in both political parties, promised to do, but didn’t. But the Biden administration – including not only the President himself but his senior advisors in the White House, the State Department, the Defense Department, and the intelligence community – is fully responsible for the chaotic way we exited.

The level of either incompetence or, as some have suggested, irresponsible turf battles between agencies, is hard to fathom. Many people both in and out of government were bombarding the White House and the State Department as far back as December 2020 with urgent requests to get moving on approving visas for endangered Afghans, yet the process was moving at a snail’s pace and the White House apparently never took the warnings seriously or felt any urgency until too late, until the final week when the Taliban took over most of Afghanistan in just a few days.

Once we were in the crisis, the troops on the ground and the air crews at Kabul airport behaved magnificently despite the danger and the chaos, and they took casualties. And in fact they did manage to evacuate more that 120,000 people. Biden takes credit for that, but he shouldn’t. The troops on the ground should get the credit for recovering the situation from his mistakes.

Nonetheless, we are finally out. Some critics claim that our exit calls into question our credibility. Well, it may do so for people with a shallow understanding of geopolitics, but as Peter Zeihan points out, the US is still by far the most powerful nation in the world, and those that really understand geopolitics will see our exit as a perfectly rational move very much (finally!) in our own national interest.  Afghanistan was an unnecessary drain on our attention and resources, and those can now be turned to the issues that really matter to us, like containing China’s expansionist tendencies.

There is no doubt that some people in Washington should be fired, not only for so mishandling our exit from Afghanistan, but for being seduced for decades by the naïve international interventionist belief that we could “nation build” in an ancient Middle Eastern culture. But being Washington, probably no one will get fired, certainly no one in the upper echelons of government or politics. Some in fact may even get promoted.  Accountability has never been a strong point in Washington politics.

But the question that remains is this: if we were so incompetent at handling Afghanistan, both for the 20 years while we were there, abetting and funding the corruption, and now as we exited, how competent is our government (and I include both political parties equally here) likely to be at handling our other major international issues, like China, North Korea, Iran, or Russia?