Best of 2019

Below are the best things I read or listened to in 2019.

Jonathan Rauch has two appearances. The guy has a knack for arguing for something I disagree with, but making so many good points that I have to take the argument seriously.

Two Ezra Klein podcasts make an appearance. If his episode with Jonathan Haidt had been a few weeks later, it would have made the 2019 cutoff and appeared as well. Even so, their conversation is the topic for a different story that made the list.

"Rethinking Polarization"

Jonathan Rauch

"In many respects, institutions are enemies of tribalism, at least in the context of a liberal society. By definition, they bring people together for joint effort on common projects, which builds community. They also socialize individuals and transmit knowledge and norms across generations. Because they are durable (or try to be), they tend to take a longer view and discourage behavior that considers only self-interest in the very short term...

"The more parties weaken as institutions, whose members are united by loyalty to their organization, the more they strengthen as tribes, whose members are united by hostility to their enemy."

"Too Much Democracy Is Bad for Democracy"

Jonathan Rauch and Ray La Raja

"Turnout in primaries is notoriously paltry, and those who do show up are more partisan, more ideological, and more polarized than general-election voters or the general population. They are also wealthier, better educated, and older.”

"When party insiders evaluate candidates, they think about appealing to overworked laborers, harried parents, struggling students, less politicized moderates, and others who do not show up on primary day—but whose support the party will need to win the general election and then to govern. Reducing the influence of party professionals has, as Shafer and Wagner observe, amplified the voices of ideological activists at the expense of rank-and-file voters."

"The Age of American Despair"

Ross Douthat

"[W]e should subdivide the “despair” problem into distinct categories: A drug crisis driven by the spread of heroin and fentanyl which requires a drug policy solution; a surge in suicides and depression and heavy drinking among middle-aged working-class whites to which economic policy might offer answers; and an increase in depression and suicide generally, and among young people especially, that has more mysterious causes (social media? secularization?) and might only yield to a psychological and spiritual response...

"But at the same time the simultaneity of the different self-destroying trends is a brute fact of American life. And that simultaneity does not feel like just a coincidence, just correlation without entanglement — especially when you include other indicators, collapsing birthrates and declining marriage rates and decaying social trust, that all suggest a society suffering a meaning deficit, a loss of purpose and optimism and direction, a gently dehumanizing drift."

"The Two Psychological Tricks Trump Is Using to Get Away With Everything"

Peter Beinart

“There is a secrecy “heuristic”—a mental shortcut that helps people make judgments. “People weigh secret information more heavily than public information when making decisions,” they wrote. A 2004 dissertation on jury behavior found a similar tendency. When judges told jurors to disregard certain information—once it was deemed secret—the jurors gave it more weight.

"While it’s unlikely Trump has heard of the secrecy heuristic, his comments about murder on Fifth Avenue suggest he grasps it instinctively. He recognizes that people accord less weight to information that nobody bothers to conceal. If shooting someone were that big a deal, the reasoning goes, Trump wouldn’t do it in full public view.

"By openly asking Ukraine and China to investigate a political rival, Trump expressed confidence that he’s doing nothing wrong. And while one might think the majority of Americans would view Trump’s confidence as an outrageous sham, academic evidence suggests that con men can be surprisingly difficult to unmask." 

This article is what made me think that Trump truly has something to hide in his tax returns. It's the only thing he keeps secret, which is probably why I give it more weight. But given what we know about Trump, it's probably less nefarious and more embarrassing. My guess is that he doesn't have as much money as he wants people to think.

"The Ideological Turing Test: How to Be Less Wrong"
Charles Chu

"What we believe as ‘true’ today is just a small blade of grass in a miles-wide graveyard of ideas.

"Much of what we believe today is doomed to join other infamous dead theories like Lamarckism (“Giraffes have long necks because they used them a lot.”), bloodletting (“Let me put a leech on your forehead. It’ll cure your allergies. I promise.”), and phrenology (“I’m better than you because I have a bigger head.”)...

"Bryan Caplan says that I should understand my opponents’ ideas so well that they can’t tell the difference between what I am saying and what they believe."

"The Geography of Partisan Prejudice"

A guide to the most—and least—politically open-minded counties in America"

Amanda Ripley, Rekha Tenjarla, Angla Y. He

This project, which measured the U.S. counties by political tolerance, sparked one of my own blog posts.

"Jonathan Haidt, Ezra Klein and the Nature of Wicked Problems"  

John Wood Jr.

"Klein worries that the solutions to the problems that concern Haidt and Lukianoff are also wicked in precisely the opposite direction. Civility and moderation, desirable qualities for political discourse and decision making, can numb us to the imperative of social change. 

"Klein argues that successful activism has a history of making people uncomfortable, who would otherwise simply ignore injustice. 'Confrontation is unpopular, and often necessary, in part to get people to see things they don’t want to see.'

"We must realize that the maintenance of dignity in activism does not require the abandonment of fervor."

This too sparked a blog post of mine. 

Podcasts

The Rewatchables: The Shining featuring Bill Simmons, Sean Fennessey, and Chris Ryan

EconTalk: Russ Roberts and Michele Gelfand on Rule Makers, Rule Breakers

The Ezra Klein Show: Michael Lewis reads my mind

The Ezra Klein Show: Matt Yglesias and Jenny Schuetz solve the housing crisis

Slate Star Codex
Because my favorite blog deserves its own category

"NEW ATHEISM: THE GODLESSNESS THAT FAILED"
Scott notes the decline in new atheism, specifically in liberal circles. His answer: New Atheism was a failed hamartiology, a subfield of theology dealing with the study of sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe.
So how does that impact liberal circles?

"As it took its first baby steps, the Blue Tribe started asking itself “Who am I? What defines me?”, trying to figure out how it conceived of itself. New Atheism had an answer – “You are the people who aren’t blinded by fundamentalism” – and for a while the tribe toyed with accepting it. During the Bush administration, with all its struggles over Radical Islam and Intelligent Design and Faith-Based Charity, this seemed like it might be a reasonable answer. The atheist movement and the network of journalists/academics/pundits/operatives who made up the tribe’s core started drifting closer together.

Gradually the Blue Tribe got a little bit more self-awareness and realized this was not a great idea. Their coalition contained too many Catholic Latinos, too many Muslim Arabs, too many Baptist African-Americans. Remember that in 2008, “what if all the Hispanic people end up going Republican?” was considered a major and plausible concern. It became somewhat less amenable to New Atheism’s answer to its identity question – but absent a better one, the New Atheists continued to wield some social power.

Between 2008 and 2016, two things happened. First, Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush as president. Second, Ferguson. The Blue Tribe kept posing its same identity question: “Who am I? What defines me?”, and now Black Lives Matter gave them an answer they liked better “You are the people who aren’t blinded by sexism and racism.”

"BOOK REVIEW: THE SECRET OF OUR SUCCESS"
"The author, Henrich, wants to debunk (or at least clarify) a popular view where humans succeeded because of our raw intelligence." This made me think of a Nassim Taleb quote: not everything that happens, happens for a reason. But everything that survives, survives for a reason.

"Henrich discusses pregnancy taboos in Fiji; pregnant women are banned from eating sharks. Sure enough, these sharks contain chemicals that can cause birth defects. The women didn’t really know why they weren’t eating the sharks, but when anthropologists demanded a reason, they eventually decided it was because their babies would be born with shark skin rather than human skin."

One of the reasons I like Scott is the he is critical of his own beliefs. This book is actually an argument against rationalism. The irrational idea that eating shark will give your baby shark skin is an idea that survived for so long that it must have a reason, however irrational it appears.

"WAGE STAGNATION: MUCH MORE THAN YOU WANTED TO KNOW"
Scott tackles the complexity of wage stagnation with all the nuance I've come to expect from him. A quick summation of his findings:

"If you were to put a gun to my head and force me to break down the importance of various factors in contributing to wage decoupling, it would look something like (warning: very low confidence!) this:
– Inflation miscalculations: 35%
– Wages vs. total compensation: 10%
– Increasing labor vs. capital inequality: 15%
—- (Because of automation: 7.5%)
—- (Because of policy: 7.5%)
– Increasing wage inequality: 40%
—- (Because of deunionization: 10%)
—- (Because of policies permitting high executive salaries: 20%)
—- (Because of globalization and automation: 10%)"

Shameless Self-love
My favorite blog posts written by yours truly.

"Strong institutions or inclusive parties?"
Can colleges and universities become the new institutions that millenials trust or will we continue down the road of tribalism?
"Ideological Equity"
Weighing the best version of ideological equilibrium for powerful institutions. It's hard to summarize ...
"In Data We Trust"
How does trust in one state compare to another. How does trust in the U.S. compare to other countries? What causes, or at least correlates with, high levels of trust. Lots of graphics in this one.