Yeah, the post-war South is a bad example. The only reason such laws didn't exist then was because the American army was down here to ensure that they didn't. Those laws didn't shape public opinion, they were shaped by it as soon as the public was free to enact them. And it's unlikely that, without decades of no such laws, public opinion would have been all that different in the South.
It's true that, for subsequent generations, when the South's apartheid state had been chugging along for decades, thought it was just the natural state of things. But this is as much because few if any challenged the laws as it was because the laws existed. Once visible protests began, the laws were doomed, and ultimately, so were the opinions that shaped them and were shaped by them. As long as LGBTs and those who support equal rights continue to publicly point out the injustice of discriminatory laws, it will be difficult for them to shape public opinion against LGBT equality. It will instead be up to churches and parents to do that.
I love that Tom considers social science research a trump card when it agrees with his views, and considers it hopelessly biased when it does not.
Still, the paper he mentions doesn't rely on simple correlation. They use some pretty sophisticated modeling (regression) techniques to look at the relationship between immigration and the various outcome variables (wages, employment, incarceration). It's a pretty interesting paper, and it will definitely be interesting to see where the research goes from there. For now, it shows that a relatively small portion of the change in employment and incarceration is related to a wave of immigrants. However, if we were going to come up with some policy goals based on this research, I think it would be something along the lines of increasing education outcomes for African Americans, since the bulk of the impact in the paper occurs for high school dropouts.
Tom doesn't think about this as a researcher, of course. As he's shown before, if a study confirms his prejudices, it's the last and only study that matters; replication be damned!
Oh I hate Houston, for all the reasons you mention. Light rail looks nice, but Houston still has the worst traffic I've ever seen. And you're in Houston an hour before you are in Houston, 'cause of the damn sprawl.
But Houston is a pretty SWPL-friendly city these days, and is becoming more of one. And it's becoming one largely because, while there are a lot of "creative class" types already there, for various reasons (not the least of which is the Texas education system), it still has to import a lot of its brain talent, so it has to become more and more SWPL-friendly to keep bringing them in.
Strangely, Austin, which is not SWPL, it is SWPL, can't get light rail to save its life. It does have the smoking ban, bike trails, and a huge push for increased population density in the downtown area.
Nah, in some of his work, particularly in his later years, he talks about things in a way that's strikingly similar to natural law. Check out, for example, his Bernauer titled "Is It Useless to Revolt?"
Pomo stereotypes, though. Maybe they could get by on those.
Hmmm... Houston has light rail, a smoking ban, and an ever-increasing push for bike trails, and higher density residences are popping up pretty fast even as the housing market stagnates (and even if that sprawl remains out of control: sometimes I wonder if the world's so small...). It seems weird to call Houston an anti-SWPL city. Dallas, maybe, but not Houston.
Greed is certainly responsible for the drug wars in Mexico, as the bulk of the fighting is between rival drug cartels over trade routes. This, I take it, is what the author was talking about.
At this point, legalization so that supply can be regulated is just about the only way to stop that drug war. The Mexican army and police can't do it, and won't be in a position to in our lifetimes, otherwise. A "smoke local" movement might help, though ;).
I think Kucinich and Paul are pretty similar. They both have a great deal of support from a certain element within their party, but not much outside of that element. Perhaps one difference is that there are some on the left who would vote for Paul, while there probably aren't many on the right who would vote for Kucinich.
Tom, I was there. If I remember correctly, there was another poster, or maybe it was a paper, criticizing Keane's work on analogical arguments at the same conference. It's never been published in a journal for a reason.
But the larger issue is that analogical arguments are so prevalent because that's the way our minds work. If you stray from them, pretty quickly you'll end up making convoluted arguments that eliminate any advantage non-analogical arguments might ordinarily have.
Jaybird, you should feel free to make several factual errors about Metcalf and those like him, in the course of actually responding to the substance of his article.
I'd recommend some center-left blogs, but I'd have to have an idea of what "screaming left" means to you first. For some people, everyone to the left of Lieberman is screaming left, for example.
E.D., I wonder what you think of the South Korean school system.
I have a good friend from Korea (actually back in Korea now) who often talks about his time in high school (from which 97% of Korean students graduate). He didn’t particularly enjoy it, since he was at school for as many as 14 hours a day, and he only got about 10 weeks off every year, but he got a great education, and he’s thankful for it.
I don't think education and health care are analogous, but presumably if they were, then as in health care, the single-payer's bargaining power would keep prices down. Or at least I assume that's what E.D. is thinking.
No, Tim, but rj's characterization is quite different from Voegeli’s, and not only because there actually is a principle behind it (as rj's subsequent comment shows).
It also suffers from what we were just talking about on another thread: assuming to know what's in the mind of your ideological opponent. The amorphous, unrpincipled liberal straw men, while liberals are largely to blame for its existence (since "liberals" is a family resemblance concept), is a nice way of avoiding having to actually address what liberals think, while at the same time painting them as irrational sentimentalists.
Mike, I'm sort of like a libertarian: not conservative or liberal. Except I'm also kind of like the opposite of a libertarian (not classically liberal either).
I know that liberals, and libertarians, and hell, those who are the sorts of thing that I am, infer motives from policies and policy preferences, but I've only recently seen the reasoning going in the other direction (from inferred motives to policy preferences) from conservatives. I may have just missed it from liberals, though.
You fail to understand how the passions guide reasoning, if you think that the passions merely make it interesting. In fact, I’m not sure you really understand how reason works: the premises turn out to be as important as the process, in the end, because by itself rational does not equal true, it just means rational.
I agree. In my experience, liberals, libertarians, and conservatives are all bad at explaining the motives of those who disagree with them in politics and economics. It can be really annoying.
One thing that I will say, though, is that there’s been a recent trend among conservatives to first infer the motives of liberals (usually: rampant statism and/or Marxism), and then describe their policies and policy preferences from the inferred motives, rather than from actual behavior. We’ve seen it on this very blog, in the form of guest posts and comments by conservatives. That might be what Krugman was thinking of when he made his original claim.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Same-Sex Marriage in New York”
Yeah, the post-war South is a bad example. The only reason such laws didn't exist then was because the American army was down here to ensure that they didn't. Those laws didn't shape public opinion, they were shaped by it as soon as the public was free to enact them. And it's unlikely that, without decades of no such laws, public opinion would have been all that different in the South.
It's true that, for subsequent generations, when the South's apartheid state had been chugging along for decades, thought it was just the natural state of things. But this is as much because few if any challenged the laws as it was because the laws existed. Once visible protests began, the laws were doomed, and ultimately, so were the opinions that shaped them and were shaped by them. As long as LGBTs and those who support equal rights continue to publicly point out the injustice of discriminatory laws, it will be difficult for them to shape public opinion against LGBT equality. It will instead be up to churches and parents to do that.
On “Immigration, Inequality and Pie”
I love that Tom considers social science research a trump card when it agrees with his views, and considers it hopelessly biased when it does not.
Still, the paper he mentions doesn't rely on simple correlation. They use some pretty sophisticated modeling (regression) techniques to look at the relationship between immigration and the various outcome variables (wages, employment, incarceration). It's a pretty interesting paper, and it will definitely be interesting to see where the research goes from there. For now, it shows that a relatively small portion of the change in employment and incarceration is related to a wave of immigrants. However, if we were going to come up with some policy goals based on this research, I think it would be something along the lines of increasing education outcomes for African Americans, since the bulk of the impact in the paper occurs for high school dropouts.
Tom doesn't think about this as a researcher, of course. As he's shown before, if a study confirms his prejudices, it's the last and only study that matters; replication be damned!
On “LeBron James and the creative class”
Oh I hate Houston, for all the reasons you mention. Light rail looks nice, but Houston still has the worst traffic I've ever seen. And you're in Houston an hour before you are in Houston, 'cause of the damn sprawl.
But Houston is a pretty SWPL-friendly city these days, and is becoming more of one. And it's becoming one largely because, while there are a lot of "creative class" types already there, for various reasons (not the least of which is the Texas education system), it still has to import a lot of its brain talent, so it has to become more and more SWPL-friendly to keep bringing them in.
Strangely, Austin, which is not SWPL, it is SWPL, can't get light rail to save its life. It does have the smoking ban, bike trails, and a huge push for increased population density in the downtown area.
On “Painting Conservatism Out of the Corner: A Review of William Voegeli’s Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State”
Nah, in some of his work, particularly in his later years, he talks about things in a way that's strikingly similar to natural law. Check out, for example, his Bernauer titled "Is It Useless to Revolt?"
Pomo stereotypes, though. Maybe they could get by on those.
On “LeBron James and the creative class”
Hmmm... Houston has light rail, a smoking ban, and an ever-increasing push for bike trails, and higher density residences are popping up pretty fast even as the housing market stagnates (and even if that sprawl remains out of control: sometimes I wonder if the world's so small...). It seems weird to call Houston an anti-SWPL city. Dallas, maybe, but not Houston.
On “Is greed the real villain in the war on drugs?”
Greed is certainly responsible for the drug wars in Mexico, as the bulk of the fighting is between rival drug cartels over trade routes. This, I take it, is what the author was talking about.
At this point, legalization so that supply can be regulated is just about the only way to stop that drug war. The Mexican army and police can't do it, and won't be in a position to in our lifetimes, otherwise. A "smoke local" movement might help, though ;).
"
I don't know of data from the 60s and 70s, though I'm sure it's out there. Here's the data for the last ~20 years for high school students:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/49264657/EF11B27
Sorry the link is messy.
On “Forgiveness”
I think Kucinich and Paul are pretty similar. They both have a great deal of support from a certain element within their party, but not much outside of that element. Perhaps one difference is that there are some on the left who would vote for Paul, while there probably aren't many on the right who would vote for Kucinich.
I don't know a whole lot about Johnson.
"
Kucinich has been pro-legalization for a while, hasn't he?
On “Ignoring the Thrust”
Unless, of course, Wilt Chamberlain can enter because of the pattern itself. Which, you know, is sort of the case.
"
Tom, to see the science of analogy use in the real world, I recommend this paper:
http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~dunbarlab/pubpdfs/dunbarTICS.pdf
It's not politics, I know, but you'll see how analogy flows naturally, and how it aids in expression and comprehension.
"
Tom, I was there. If I remember correctly, there was another poster, or maybe it was a paper, criticizing Keane's work on analogical arguments at the same conference. It's never been published in a journal for a reason.
But the larger issue is that analogical arguments are so prevalent because that's the way our minds work. If you stray from them, pretty quickly you'll end up making convoluted arguments that eliminate any advantage non-analogical arguments might ordinarily have.
"
The illusion of explanatory depth is ubiquitous.
"
A surer way to justify a conclusion is to arrive at it through pure deduction.
I can't tell if you're making a joke there or not, but Mr. Holmes would approve.
"
Doing away with analogies wouldn't help to make things clearer.
"
Jaybird, you should feel free to make several factual errors about Metcalf and those like him, in the course of actually responding to the substance of his article.
On “Still More Caricatures of Libertarianism”
Pat, what blogs do you consider "screaming left"?
I'd recommend some center-left blogs, but I'd have to have an idea of what "screaming left" means to you first. For some people, everyone to the left of Lieberman is screaming left, for example.
On “School Choice and Single Payer”
E.D., I wonder what you think of the South Korean school system.
I have a good friend from Korea (actually back in Korea now) who often talks about his time in high school (from which 97% of Korean students graduate). He didn’t particularly enjoy it, since he was at school for as many as 14 hours a day, and he only got about 10 weeks off every year, but he got a great education, and he’s thankful for it.
"
Yeah, that's a nice figurative way of talking about them, but it doesn't mean that they have the same practical, including economic, dynamics.
"
I don't think education and health care are analogous, but presumably if they were, then as in health care, the single-payer's bargaining power would keep prices down. Or at least I assume that's what E.D. is thinking.
On “Painting Conservatism Out of the Corner: A Review of William Voegeli’s Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State”
No, Tim, but rj's characterization is quite different from Voegeli’s, and not only because there actually is a principle behind it (as rj's subsequent comment shows).
"
It also suffers from what we were just talking about on another thread: assuming to know what's in the mind of your ideological opponent. The amorphous, unrpincipled liberal straw men, while liberals are largely to blame for its existence (since "liberals" is a family resemblance concept), is a nice way of avoiding having to actually address what liberals think, while at the same time painting them as irrational sentimentalists.
On “Bryan Caplan: The Ideological Turing Test”
Mike, I'm sort of like a libertarian: not conservative or liberal. Except I'm also kind of like the opposite of a libertarian (not classically liberal either).
I know that liberals, and libertarians, and hell, those who are the sorts of thing that I am, infer motives from policies and policy preferences, but I've only recently seen the reasoning going in the other direction (from inferred motives to policy preferences) from conservatives. I may have just missed it from liberals, though.
On “Apostasy: an open thread”
You fail to understand how the passions guide reasoning, if you think that the passions merely make it interesting. In fact, I’m not sure you really understand how reason works: the premises turn out to be as important as the process, in the end, because by itself rational does not equal true, it just means rational.
On “Bryan Caplan: The Ideological Turing Test”
I agree. In my experience, liberals, libertarians, and conservatives are all bad at explaining the motives of those who disagree with them in politics and economics. It can be really annoying.
One thing that I will say, though, is that there’s been a recent trend among conservatives to first infer the motives of liberals (usually: rampant statism and/or Marxism), and then describe their policies and policy preferences from the inferred motives, rather than from actual behavior. We’ve seen it on this very blog, in the form of guest posts and comments by conservatives. That might be what Krugman was thinking of when he made his original claim.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.