Here.
…about “black redneck culture,” which I have addressed in earlier posts (e.g., here and here). It is a possible explanation for the persistent black-white achievement gap. (There is also IQ.) But blacks certainly do not dominate the boisterous, live-for-today, take-what-you-can-from-the-man, in-your-face, quick-to-take-offense, often-violent “lifestyle” that is summarized in the term “black redneck culture.” White redneck culture is all too prevalent.
White redneck culture is not, as depicted in the following passage, restricted to the rural poor:
Rednecks typically are more libertine, especially in their personal lives, than other country brethren who tend towards social conservatism. In contrast to country people, stereotypical rednecks tend not to attend church, or do so infrequently. They also tend to use alcohol and gamble more than their church-going neighbors.
Redneck culture is no longer dominated by “rural poor to working-class people of rural extraction.” It is alive and flourishing among whites of all socio-economic classes and in all locales: from small towns to large metropolitan areas.
The prevalence of redneck culture — black, white, and tan — is evident in popular culture. Look at what’s offered and imbibed avidly via TV (both network and cable), movie theaters, CDs and DVDs, video games (or whatever they’re called now), shopping malls, and professional sporting events (most notably basketball). Noise, violence, vulgarity, profanity, and prurience prevail, usually all at the same time.
Redneck culture has these essential — and socially destructive — characteristics: disregard for other persons and their property, indolence, a sense of entitlement (as if in compensation for the effects of indolence), a ready acceptance of myths and prejudices in place of facts and reason, a sneering attitude toward education and hard work, and (thus) a tendency to “live for today and let tomorrow take care of itself.”
Liberty, which depends upon mutual restraint, cannot survive in a redneck milieu: a culture of moral anarchy which invites totalitarianism. The spread of redneck culture further encourages the emergence of totalitarianism because rednecks (of whatever race, class, and clime) are seduced easily by “bread and circuses” — and perhaps by the promise of “free” health care.
(I am indebted to my son for a crystallizing conversation on this topic.)
Lee Harris makes it, in “Drug Addiction and the Open Society,” at The New Atlantis. Here is one of many telling passages:
Herein may well lie one of the great advantages that highly authoritarian forms of government have over open and liberal society. They are in a position to crack down on social epidemics, like drugs, in ways that are far more effective, because far more brutal, than any option available to societies like Dalrymple’s England or DeGrandpre’s America. If so, what a fascinating paradox to present to Mr. Mill—those societies that most closely followed his “simple universal principle” could eventually be undone by their excess of liberty; in which case, the epitaph of the open society might well be taken from Dalrymple’s assessment of the addicts he dealt with in the British slum: “Freedom was bad for them, because they did not know what to do with it.”
Moral anarchy is fertile ground for totalitarianism.
Related posts:
The Meaning of Liberty
Social Norms, State Action, and Liberty
From Mark Steyn’s post of Monday last:
In his pugnacious new book [World War IV: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism: LC], Norman Podhoretz calls for redesignating this conflict as World War IV.* Certainly, it would have been easier politically to frame the Iraq campaign as being a front in a fourth world war than as a necessary measure in an anti-terrorist campaign. Yet who knows? Perhaps we would still have mired ourselves in legalisms and conspiracies and the dismal curdled relativism of the Flight 93 memorial’s “crescent of embrace.” In the end, as Podhoretz says, if the war is to be fought at all, it will “have to be fought by the kind of people Americans now are.” On this sixth anniversary, as 9/11 retreats into history, many Americans see no war at all.
Depressing but true.
In a related essay at OpinionJournal, Podhoretz writes this:
It is impossible at this point to predict how and when the battle of Iraq will end. But from the vitriolic debates it has unleashed we can already say for certain that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, did not do to the Vietnam syndrome what Pearl Harbor did to the old isolationism. The Vietnam syndrome is back and it means to have its way. But is it strong enough in its present incarnation to do what it did to the honor of this country in 1975? Well acquainted though I am with its malignant power, I still believe that it will ultimately be overcome by the forces opposed to it in the war at home. Even so, I cannot deny that this question still hangs ominously in the air and will not be answered before more damage is done to the long struggle against Islamofascism into which we were blasted six years ago and that I persist in calling World War IV.
We have, I fear, gone beyond the “Vietnam syndrome” — the simplistic view that war is always bad — to something much worse: Many Americans — far too many — simply think of America as the enemy. Thus these posts:
Shall We All Hang Separately?
Foxhole Rats
Foxhole Rats, Redux
The Faces of Appeasement
We Have Met the Enemy . . .
Whose Liberties Are We Fighting For?
Words for the Unwise
More Foxhole Rats
Post-Americans and Their Progeny
Anti-Bush or Pro-Treason?
Com-Patriotism and Anti-Patriotic Acts
…here, “past performance is no indication of future returns,” especially when it comes to this year’s Yankees.
I have been all over the lot on the fate of the 2007 Yankees (here, here, here, and here). I should follow my own advice and quit trying to make predictions, even if they are informed ones and not mindless arithmetic games.
I had effectively written the Yankees off for failing to sweep their recent series with the Red Sox, which left the Yankees 4.5 games in arrears. But three days later, the Yankees are only 1.5 games behind the Red Sox.
What happens now? I dunno. I hereby swear that I will not make another prediction about baseball — until I make another one.
Michael Cannon of Cato-at-Liberty writes:
In response to Andrew Sullivan: all liberals understand free markets.
It’s the leftists that are the problem.
Cannon assumes that modern “liberals” — you know the kind: LBJ, Hubert Humphrey, Ted Kennedy — actually understand free markets. It’s true that LBJ, HHH, EMK, and their ilk are not really “liberals” by the classic definition of the word “liberal,” but they long ago absconded with the word and corrupted it.
That “liberals” now call themselves “progressives” is evidence of the corruption of the word “liberal.” The use of “progressive” is an obvious semantic dodge, an effort to avoid association with what “liberal” has come to mean: a proponent of the nanny state.
As far as I can tell, all “liberals” (and “progressives”) are Leftists: anti-libertarian statists extraordinaire.
P.S. A Cato-type libertarian probably thinks that such “rights” as abortion-on-demand and same-sex marriage are manifestations of liberality, in the old-fashioned meaning of the word (see Noun 1. here). In fact, abortion-on-demand and same-sex marriage are not manifestations of liberality, they are manifestations of statism because they are (or would be) state-imposed — which is what “liberals” want.
If abortion-on-demand and same-sex marriage were manifestations of liberality, they would have arisen from voluntarily evolved social norms. That they have not done so means that they are destructive of the social order — of civil society — upon which liberty depends.
By the way, segregation in the South was state-imposed.
Some related posts:
Why I’m Not a Democrat or a Liberal
Left, Right, What’s the Difference?
The Liberal Mindset
The Meaning of Liberty
Social Norms, State Action, and Liberty
For much more, click on Leftism – Statism – Democracy
The authors compared, for the overlapping time frame 1962-2000, “the estimate of the northern hemisphere mid-latitude winter atmospheric variability within the available 20th century simulations of 19 global climate models included in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] 4th Assessment Report” with “the NCEP-NCAR and ECMWF reanalyses,” i.e., compilations of real-world observations produced by the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), in collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and by the European Center for Mid-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF)….
Quoting…the scientists who performed the model tests, “this study suggests caveats with respect to the ability of most of the presently available climate models in representing the statistical properties of the global scale atmospheric dynamics of the present [our italics] climate and, a fortiori [“all the more,” as per Webster’s Dictionary], in the perspective of modeling [future] climate change.” Indeed, it gives one pause to question most everything the models might suggest about the future.
And this:
It is difficult to understand how scientific forecasting could be conducted without reference to the research literature on how to make forecasts. One would expect to see empirical justification for the forecasting methods that were used. To provide forecasts of climate change that are useful for policy-making, one would need to prepare forecasts of (1) temperature changes, (2) the effects of any temperature changes, and (3) the effects of feasible proposed policy changes. To justify policy changes based on climate change, policy makers need scientific forecasts for all three forecasting problems and they need those forecasts to show net benefits flowing from proposed policies. If governments implement policy changes without such justification, they are likely to cause harm to many people….
Based on our literature searches, those forecasting long-term climate change have no apparent knowledge of evidence-based forecasting methods….
P.S. See also this post at World Climate Report.
Related post: “Warmism”: The Myth of Anthropogenic Global Warming
In “The Rational Voter?” I define rationality as the application of “sound reasoning and pertinent facts to the pursuit of a realistic objective (one that does not contradict the laws of nature or human nature).” I later say that
[m]any (a majority of? most?) voters are guilty of voting irrationally because they believe in such claptrap as peace through diplomacy, “social justice” through high marginal tax rates, or better health care through government regulation. To be perfectly clear, the irrationality lies not in favoring peace, “social justice” (whatever that is), health care, and the like. The irrationality lies in knee-jerk beliefs in such contradictions as peace through unpreparedness for war, “social justice” through soak-the-rich schemes, better health care through complete government control of medicine, etc., etc., etc. Voters whose objectives incorporate such beliefs simply haven’t taken the relatively little time it requires to process what they already know or have experienced about history, human nature, and social and economic realities….
Another way to put it is this: Voters too often are rationally irrational. They make their voting decisions “rationally,” in a formal sense (i.e., [not “wasting” time in order to make correct judgments]). But those decisions are irrational because they are intended to advance perverse objectives (e.g., peace through unpreparedness for war).
Voters of the kind I describe are guilty of suboptimization, which is “optimizing some chosen objective which is an integral part of a broader objective; usually the broad objective and lower-level objective are different.”
I will come back to suboptimal voting. But, first, this about optimization: If you aren’t familiar with the concept, here’s good non-technical definition: “to do things best under the given circumstances.” To optimize, then, is to achieve the best result one can, given a constraint or constraints. On a personal level, for example, a rational person tries to be as happy as he can be, given his present income and prospects for future income. (Note that I do not define happiness as the maximization of wealth.) A person is not rational who allows, say, his alchololism to destroy his happiness (if not also the income that contributes to it). He is suboptimizing on his addiction instead of optimizing on his happiness.
By the same token, a person who votes irrationally also suboptimizes. A vote may “make sense” at the moment (just as another drink “makes sense” to an alcoholic), but it is an irrational vote if the voter does not (a) vote as if he were willing to live by the consequences if his vote were decisive and/or (b) take the time to understand those consequences.
In some cases, a voter’s irrationality is signaled by the voter’s (inner) reason for voting; for example: to feel smug about having voted, to “protest” or to “send a message” (without being able to explain coherently the purpose of the protest or message), or simply to reinforce unexamined biases by voting for someone who seems to share them. More common (I suspect) are the irrational votes that are cast deliberately for candidates who espouse the kinds of perverse objectives that I cite above (e.g., peace without preparedness for war).
Why is voter irrationality important? Does voting really matter? Well, it’s easy to say that an individual’s vote makes very little difference. But that just isn’t true. Consider the presidential election of 2000, for example, where the outcome of the election depended on about five hundred votes out of the almost six million cast in Florida. I recall that Florida was thought to be safely in Bush’s column, until after all the votes had been cast.
If you are certain that your vote won’t make a difference (as in Massachusetts, for example), don’t bother to vote — unless the act of voting, itself, gives you satisfaction. Otherwise, always vote as if your vote will make a difference to you and those about whom you care. Vote as if your vote will be decisive. To vote otherwise is irrational, in and of itself.
The next (necessary) step is to vote correctly. Short-sighted voters (i.e., irrational ones) vastly underestimate the importance of voting correctly. As Glen Whitman points out, there is a tendency to
give[] too little attention to the political dynamics of…a mandate, instead naively assuming that the mandate could be crafted once-and-for-all in a wise and lobbying-resistant fashion.
That is to say, voters (not to mention those who profess to understand voters) overlook the slippery slope effects of voting for those who promise to “deliver” certain benefits. It is true that the benefits, if delivered, would temporarily increase the well-being of certain voters. But if one group of voters reaps benefits, then another group of voters also must reap them. Why? Because votes are not won, nor offices held, by placating a particular class of voter; many other classes of them must be placated as well.
The “benefits” sought by voters (and delivered by politicians) are regulatory as well as monetary. Many voters (especially wealthy, paternalistic ones) are more interested in controlling others than they are in reaping government handouts (though they don’t object to that either). And if one group of voters reaps certain regulatory benefits, it follows (as night from day) that other groups also will seek (and reap) regulatory benefits. (Must one be a trained economist to understand this? Obviously not, because most trained economists don’t seem to understand it.)
And then there is the “peace–at-any-price–one-world” crowd, which is hard to distinguish from the crowd that demands (and delivers) monetary and regulatory “benefits.”
So, here we are:
Conclusion: Voters who have favored the New Deal, the Square Deal, the Great Society, or almost any Democrat who has run for national office in the past seventy-five years have been supremely irrational. They have voted against their own economic and security interests, and the economic and security interests of their progeny.
This isn’t rocket science or advanced economics or clinical psychology. It’s common sense, a quality that seems to be lacking in too many voters — and in the politicians who prey on them. What else can you expect after seven decades in which creeping socialism and “internationalism” have been inculcated through public “education” and ratified by the courts.
I have added three updates to “The Shoe Is on the Other Foot,” a post about the un-hiring and probable un-un-hiring of Erwin Chemerinsky as founding dean of the UC Irvine law school.
Be pleasant toward persons whom you dislike or mistrust. They might be nice to you because they mistake your pleasantness for amicability.
In any event, being pleasant can help you avoid conflict. And with less conflict in your life, you will have more time for the things that you enjoy.
It’s all over the blogosphere. Glen Whitman has the best take on it because he ackn0wledges the slippery-slope, camel’s nose-in-the-tent factor.
What’s next after mandating health insurance for all? How about: the kind of health care we must have, who must deliver it, how it must be delivered, at what price, and on and on into the night. It’s a poisonous prescription for America’s still-excellent — if already somewhat socialized — health-care industry.
And there’s nowhere left to turn. Canada’s out because it already has fully socialized medicine. (Canadians in search of better medical attention are coming here, for crying out loud.) Mexico’s out because it’s a third-world country with fourth-rate health care and quacks who cater to desperate, terminally ill Americans with more money than sense. Medicine on the Moon, anyone?
P.S. A good post here.
P.P.S. More about health care in Canada here.
Jules Crittenden reminds us that “oil is worth fighting for”; specifically:
If the world’s single most important stragetic resource isn’t worth fighting for, in addition to peace, truth, justice, the American way, and slightly less abstract threats to U.S. national interests and security, then what is?
My take (on September 19, 2006):
The war on terror should be guided by three strategic objectives: searching out and destroying or capturing terrorists until they are truly a “law enforcement” problem, neutralizing the state sponsors of terrorism, and securing the oil reserves of the Middle East against terrorism and economic extortion.
That’s still my take.
P.S. From John Ray:
Greenspan clarifies Iraq war, oil link: “Clarifying a controversial comment in his new memoir, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said he told the White House before the Iraq war that removing Saddam Hussein was “essential” to secure world oil supplies, according to an interview published on Monday. Greenspan, who wrote in his memoir that “the Iraq War is largely about oil,” said in a Washington Post interview that while securing global oil supplies was “not the administration’s motive,” he had presented the White House before the 2003 invasion with the case for why removing the then-Iraqi leader was important for the global economy. “I was not saying that that’s the administration’s motive,” Greenspan said in the interview conducted on Saturday. “I’m just saying that if somebody asked me, ‘Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?’ I would say it was essential.”
In “A Footnote…” I say this about black Americans’ persistent achievement deficit:
If East Asians and Azhkenazic Jews could rise to the top of the IQ charts, as they have, why can’t blacks rise too? [Thomas] Sowell would answer [e.g., here] that they could rise, if only they would break the bonds of the “black redneck” culture, which hinders so many of them. The law cannot break those bonds, for, as Sowell argues, the law only reinforces those bonds by making blacks dependent on the affirmative action, welfare programs, and other “white liberal” contrivances.
Whether blacks can break the bond of “black redneck” culture, is a good question. (Though, even if they could, it might not improve* their relative economic standing, on the whole.) Kerwin Kofi Charles, Erik Hurst, and Nikolai Roussanov, writing in an NBER working paper (“Conspicuous Consumption and Race“), say:
A large body of anecdotal evidence suggests that Blacks devote a larger share of their overall expenditure to consumption items that are readily visible to outside observers than do Whites. Automobiles, clothing, and jewelry are examples of these forms of “visible” consumption. There has to date, however, been little formal analysis by economists of the degree to which these racial differences in consumption patterns actually exist in the data, what accounts for them if they do, and what the consequences of any such differential expenditure might be. We address these questions in this paper.
The first part of our paper documents differences by race in expenditures devoted to visible consumption items. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) from the period of 1986-2002 [sample here: LC], we show that although, unconditionally, racial minorities and Whites spend approximately the same fraction of their resources on visible consumption, Blacks and Hispanics spend about thirty percent more on visible goods, after accounting for differences in permanent income. These expenditure differences are found within all sub-groups, except older households.
We find that these racial gaps have been relatively constant over the past seventeen years. And, we show that spending on housing or differential treatment in the housing market cannot explain these patterns. Finally, the gaps are economically large: the absolute level annual dollar differential for visible consumption is on the order of $2300, which is a non-trivial quantity given Black and Hispanic average income.
Because household spending must satisfy an inter-temporal budget constraint, spending devoted to visible consumption must be diverted from some alternative use. Reduced spending on specific types of current consumption on the one hand and lower savings (future consumption) on the other are the two possibilities. We show that the higher visible spending of racial minorities seems to come out of both future consumption and all other categories of current consumption: Blacks consume less than Whites in essentially every other expenditure category (aside from housing) to maintain higher visible consumption….
Strikingly, we find that, consistent with the status argument, there is a strong negative association between visible spending and the mean income of one’s reference group within all races….
We then turn to the obvious next step: Do differences in…income explain the racial expenditure gaps that are our main focus? In a series of regressions, we show that accounting for [relative income] explains most of the racial gap in visible spending…
Controlling for the mean income of one’s reference group at the state/race level dramatically reduces the measured difference in wealth holdings between similar Blacks and Whites. Specifically, roughly 60% of the unexplained racial gap in wealth holdings after controlling for permanent income and demographics is accounted for by average differences in reference group income…[I]t does appear that the mechanism that leads Blacks to consume more conspicuous
goods than their White counter parts could also explain some of the well documented Black-
White wealth gap.
So, the propensity for visible (exhibitionist) consumption varies inversely with socio-economic status. But, socio-economic status explains only 60 percent of the black-white wealth gap. That leaves a lot of room for the influence of “black redneck” culture. My question stands: Can blacks (on the whole) break the bonds of “black redneck” culture?
__________
* This is a subtle reference to inherent racial differences in IQ, which I examine at length in the linked post. Following the lead of Arnold Kling, I hereby abandon subtlety.
I further direct you to this post by John Ray.
…by Hillary Clinton. Nailed by Walter Williams.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, of Overcoming Bias, writes:
…I suspect the vast majority of Overcoming Bias readers could not achieve the “happiness of stupidity” if they tried. That way is closed to you. You can never achieve that degree of ignorance, you cannot forget what you know, you cannot unsee what you see.
The happiness of stupidity is closed to you. You will never have it short of actual brain damage, and maybe not even then. You should wonder, I think, whether the happiness of stupidity is optimal – if it is the most happiness that a human can aspire to – but it matters not. That way is closed to you, if it was ever open.
All that is left to you now, is to aspire to such happiness as a rationalist can achieve. I think it may prove greater, in the end. There are bounded paths and open-ended paths; plateaus on which to laze, and mountains to climb; and if climbing takes more effort, still the mountain rises higher in the end.
Climbing the mountains of the mind is aided immensely by solitude. It need not take the form of physical isolation; indeed, physical isolation often is impossible. But, with practice and determination, mental solitude is attainable, even in the midst of tumult.
This article at the website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute reinforces what I say in “Monopoly and the General Welfare.” Both items are fairly short. Read them and overcome your fear of Microsoft.
The City of Austin likes to claim that Austin is “The Live Music Capital of the World.” I suppose that’s a more palatable claim than the more apt description, “The People’s Republic of Austin.” That moniker is owed to the predilections of Austin’s all-Democrat city council, which dispenses taxpayers’ money like manna from city hall, itself a monstrous monument to Austin’s commissariat:
In any event, Austin is not the live music capital of the world. It isn’t even the live music capital of the U.S., according to a new study of the music industry in the nation’s 50 most populous metropolitan areas:
It’s evident that Austin is not the capital of anything, when it comes to music. It may be the capital of smugness, though San Francisco, Manhattan, and a few other places are probably in Austin’s class (and I don’t mean “classy”).
Austin is the capital of Texas. Well, more precisely, the Capitol of Texas is in Austin. But that’s a historical accident. Austin is to the rest of Texas (Houston excepted) as George W. Bush is to MoveOn.org.
A post at RealClearPolitics notes that “Ohio Is Looking Blue” for election 2008. That’s not surprising, given that enterprising Ohioans have been fleeing the Buckeye State for decades; for example:
So, Ohio turns Blue, while sun-belt Red States (e.g., Texas and Georgia) turn a deeper shade of Red. Quelle surprise!
P.S. See also.
On the one hand, we have Bryan Caplan’s naïve anarcho-libertarianism:
I…think that the best way for Americans to reduce the risk of terrorist attacks on Americans is to imitate the Swiss by minding our own business. Or to be more blunt, the U.S. should buy peace in the Middle East and elsewhere the same way that Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, and Portugal bought peace with their colonies after World War II: leave them to their own devices.
So, we mind our own business and terrorists do what, reciprocate? Hah!
On the other hand, we have Kay S. Hymowitz’s realism about the limits of libertarianism:
A libertarian, according to Brian Doherty, “has to believe” that “the instincts and abilities for liberty . . . are innate,” that we possess “an ability to fend for ourselves in the Randian sense and to form spontaneous orders of fellowship and cooperation in the Hayekian sense.” But this view of the relationship between the individual and society is profoundly and demonstrably false, especially when applied to the family.
Children do not come into the world respecting private property. They do not emerge from the womb ready to navigate the economic and moral complexities of an “age of abundance.” The only way they learn such things is through a long process of intensive socialization–a process that we now know, thanks to the failed experiments begun by the Aquarians and implicitly supported by libertarians, usually requires intact families and decent schools.
Libertarianism did not have to take this unfortunate turn. Ludwig von Mises himself warned that the attempt (of socialists) to undermine the family was a ploy to strengthen the state. Hayek, too, grasped the family’s role in upholding the free market. Coming of age in Europe around the time of World War I, he stressed the state’s inefficiency but also warned, more generally, of the limits of human reason. “Hayek’s economics was rooted in man’s ignorance,” Mr. Doherty writes; so were his political views, which included both an enthusiasm for freedom and a Burkean respect for customs and institutions.
It is difficult to say why this aspect of libertarianism has faded away, but the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset once provided a partial answer. In Europe and elsewhere, he observed, modern radicals have tended to be of a Marxist, collectivist bent; in America, with its peculiar Lockean legacy and Jeffersonian ideals, radicals have gone to the other extreme, searching for absolute freedom. It is a quest that has left little room for the confining demands of family and other unchosen social bonds.
Good things don’t just happen, they must be made to happen. If they are not, bad things will prevail because the anti-social aspects of human nature — dominance, enviousness, and aggressiveness — outweigh the pro-social ones.
Related posts:
Social Norms, State Action, and Liberty
Anarchistic Balderdash
The Meaning of Liberty
Politics and Prosperity 