Category: Academic Freedom – Civil Liberties – Privacy

Academic Ignorance

When I was a senior at Michigan State University in 1961-1962, I became a research assistant in the School of Labor and Industrial Relations. The school invited graduate students from other countries to spend a few months there to get acquainted with the U.S. and labor issues in the U.S. One of the invitees was an Egyptian named Ahmed. Ahmed was a burly fellow with a shaved head and dark skin. At first glance, he could have passed for an American black.

Having grown up among lower-middle-class and lower-class whites, I knew the prevailing attitude toward blacks, which was — to put it simply — bigoted. The idea that Northerners were less bigoted than Southerners was laughable to me. It’s true that there were far more lynchings of blacks in the South than in the North, and it’s true that the South enforced segregation through Jim Crow laws. But most Northerners disliked blacks and avoided contact with them to the extent possible.

I said as much to Ahmed, as a warning, in the presence of a director of the school, who demurred. I daresay that the director, despite his academic knowledge of labor issues, probably had little contact with denizens of the lower classes, and such contact as he had probably was limited to fleeting exchanges with gas-station attendants, store clerks, and the like. I didn’t press my view, but I wasn’t dissuaded from it by the director’s protestations.

I mention this incident because I recently came into possession of the deed to the burial plots of my parents. The deed, which was issued by a Michigan cemetery in 1954, includes this provision:

No interment shall ever be made except for the remains of members of the white caucasian race.

Such covenants are no longer legal, but they reflect attitudes among white Northerners that probably haven’t changed much in 61 years — especially in the wake of Ferguson and Baltimore. I remain steadfast in my view that racism was (and is) as deeply ingrained in Northerners as in Southerners, the attitudes of cosseted Northern elites to the contrary notwithstanding.

You’ll know that I’m right if you hail from the lower classes of the North or know a bit of history — which includes white vs. black riots and KKK activity in the North (see this and this, for example). It gives me no pleasure to be right, but I am offended by the ignorance of comfortable academics, who see the world as they think it ought to be, not as it is.

Today’s academics remain profoundly ignorant of the real world, just in different ways.

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The Gaystapo and Islam

Politics, as usual, makes strange bedfellows. The Gaystapo — which includes a lot of non-gays — wants to punish anyone who declines to endorse same-sex “marriage” by providing such things as flowers, cakes, and pizzas for occasions related to such “marriages.” Islamists want to punish (quite literally) anyone who dares to draw, exhibit, or publish an image of Muhammad.

Here’s where it gets really weird — if you’re a stickler for logical consistency. Islamists are well-known for their condemnation and punishment of homosexuality. But it is safe to say that persons who are sympathetic to Islam and willing to overlook such “peccadillos” as the stoning to death of queers (and unfaithful female spouses) constitute a large fraction of the Gaystapo. Oh, I should have mentioned Shari’ah law, which doesn’t seem to bother the typical member of the Gaystapo, even though it forces Islam down the throats of all who are subject to it — and the goal of Islamists is to subject everyone to it.

Which brings me to the common denominator of Islamism and the Gaystapo (and the left, generally): a strong taste for repression. They’re not such strange bedfellows, after all.

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Related reading:

Related posts:

See especially Wrong for the Wrong Reasons

Also:
FDR and Fascism
An FDR Reader
The People’s Romance
Intellectuals and Capitalism
Fascism
Fascism with a “Friendly” Face
Inventing “Liberalism”
The Shape of Things to Come
Fascism and the Future of America
The Indivisibility of Economic and Social Liberty
The Near-Victory of Communism
Tocqueville’s Prescience
Accountants of the Soul
Invoking Hitler
The Left
Our Enemy, the State
“Intellectuals and Society”: A Review
The Left’s Agenda
The Left and Its Delusions
The Destruction of Society in the Name of “Society”
The Spoiled Children of Capitalism
Politics, Sophistry, and the Academy
Subsidizing the Enemies of Liberty
Are You in the Bubble?
Liberty and Society
Tolerance on the Left
America: Past, Present, and Future
The Barbarians Within and the State of the Union
The World Turned Upside Down
The Fall and Rise of American Empire
Presidential Treason
“A Date Which Will Live in Infamy”
The Criminality and Psychopathy of Statism
Romanticizing the State
Ruminations on the Left in America
The Gaystapo at Work

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Not-So-Random Thoughts (XII)

Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

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“Intolerance as Illiberalism” by Kim R. Holmes (The Public Discourse, June 18, 2014) is yet another reminder, of innumerable reminders, that modern “liberalism” is a most intolerant creed. See my ironically titled “Tolerance on the Left” and its many links.

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Speaking of intolerance, it’s hard to top a strident atheist like Richard Dawkins. See John Gray’s “The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins” (The New Republic, October 2, 2014). Among the several posts in which I challenge the facile atheism of Dawkins and his ilk are “Further Thoughts about Metaphysical Cosmology” and “Scientism, Evolution, and the Meaning of Life.”

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Some atheists — Dawkins among them — find a justification for their non-belief in evolution. On that topic, Gertrude Himmelfarb writes:

The fallacy in the ethics of evolution is the equation of the “struggle for existence” with the “survival of the fittest,” and the assumption that “the fittest” is identical with “the best.” But that struggle may favor the worst rather than the best. [“Evolution and Ethics, Revisited,” The New Atlantis, Spring 2014]

As I say in “Some Thoughts about Evolution,”

Survival and reproduction depend on many traits. A particular trait, considered in isolation, may seem to be helpful to the survival and reproduction of a group. But that trait may not be among the particular collection of traits that is most conducive to the group’s survival and reproduction. If that is the case, the trait will become less prevalent. Alternatively, if the trait is an essential member of the collection that is conducive to survival and reproduction, it will survive. But its survival depends on the other traits. The fact that X is a “good trait” does not, in itself, ensure the proliferation of X. And X will become less prevalent if other traits become more important to survival and reproduction.

The same goes for “bad” traits. Evolution is no guarantor of ethical goodness.

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It shouldn’t be necessary to remind anyone that men and women are different. But it is. Lewis Wolpert gives it another try in “Yes, It’s Official, Men Are from Mars and Women from Venus, and Here’s the Science to Prove It” (The Telegraph, September 14, 2014). One of my posts on the subject is “The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality.” I’m talking about general tendencies, of course, not iron-clad rules about “men’s roles” and “women’s roles.” Aside from procreation, I can’t readily name “roles” that fall exclusively to men or women out of biological necessity. There’s no biological reason, for example, that an especially strong and agile woman can’t be a combat soldier. But it is folly to lower the bar just so that more women can qualify as combat soldiers. The same goes for intellectual occupations. Women shouldn’t be discouraged from pursuing graduate degrees and professional careers in math, engineering, and the hard sciences, but the qualifications for entry and advancement in those fields shouldn’t be watered down just for the sake of increasing the representation of women.

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Edward Feser, writing in “Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink” at his eponymous blog (October 24, 2014), notes

[Michael] Levin’s claim … that liberal policies cannot, given our cultural circumstances, be neutral concerning homosexuality.  They will inevitably “send a message” of approval rather than mere neutrality or indifference.

Feser then quotes Levin:

[L]egislation “legalizing homosexuality” cannot be neutral because passing it would have an inexpungeable speech-act dimension.  Society cannot grant unaccustomed rights and privileges to homosexuals while remaining neutral about the value of homosexuality.

Levin, who wrote that 30 years ago, gets a 10 out 10 for prescience. Just read “Abortion, ‘Gay Rights’, and Liberty” for a taste of the illiberalism that accompanies “liberal” causes like same-sex “marriage.”

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“Liberalism” has evolved into hard-leftism. It’s main adherents are now an elite upper crust and their clients among the hoi polloi. Steve Sailer writes incisively about the socioeconomic divide in “A New Caste Society” (Taki’s Magazine, October 8, 2014). “‘Wading’ into Race, Culture, and IQ” offers a collection of links to related posts and articles.

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One of the upper crust’s recent initiatives is so-called libertarian paternalism. Steven Teles skewers it thoroughly in “Nudge or Shove?” (The American Interest, December 10, 2014), a review of Cass Sunstein’s Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism. I have written numerous times about Sunstein and (faux) libertarian paternalism. The most recent entry, “The Sunstein Effect Is Alive and  Well in the White House,” ends with links to two dozen related posts. (See also Don Boudreaux, “Where Nudging Leads,” Cafe Hayek, January 24, 2015.)

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Maria Konnikova gives some space to Jonathan Haidt in “Is Social Psychology Biased against Republicans?” (The New Yorker, October 30, 2014). It’s no secret that most academic disciplines other than math and the hard sciences are biased against Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, free markets, and liberty. I have something to say about it in “The Pseudo-Libertarian Temperament,” and in several of the posts listed here.

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Keith E. Stanovich makes some good points about the limitations of intelligence in “Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking that IQ Tests Miss” (Scientific American, January 1, 2015). Stanovich writes:

The idea that IQ tests do not measure all the key human faculties is not new; critics of intelligence tests have been making that point for years. Robert J. Sternberg of Cornell University and Howard Gardner of Harvard talk about practical intelligence, creative intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, and the like. Yet appending the word “intelligence” to all these other mental, physical and social entities promotes the very assumption the critics want to attack. If you inflate the concept of intelligence, you will inflate its close associates as well. And after 100 years of testing, it is a simple historical fact that the closest associate of the term “intelligence” is “the IQ test part of intelligence.”

I make a similar point in “Intelligence as a Dirty Word,” though I don’t denigrate IQ, which is a rather reliable predictor of performance in a broad range of endeavors.

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Brian Caplan, whose pseudo-libertarianism rankles, tries to defend the concept of altruism in “The Evidence of Altruism” (EconLog, December 30, 2014). Caplan aids his case by using the loaded “selfishness” where he means “self-interest.” He also ignores empathy, which is a key ingredient of the Golden Rule. As for my view of altruism (as a concept), see “Egoism and Altruism.”

Wrong for the Wrong Reasons

When in search of provocative material, I often flip through the pages of The Great Quotations — a left-slanted tome compiled by the late and long-lived George Seldes. Today, I came across this:

Overthrow of the Government by force and violence is certainly a substantial enough interest for the Government to limit speech. Indeed, this is the ultimate value of any society, for if a society cannot protect its very structure from armed internal attack, it must follow that no subordinate value can be protected.

That’s from Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson’s majority opinion in Dennis v. United States (1951). Here’s an outline of the case and its aftermath, as given at Wikipedia:

In 1948, eleven Communist Party leaders were convicted of advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government and for the violation of several points of the Smith Act. The party members who had been petitioning for socialist reforms claimed that the act violated their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and that they served no clear and present danger to the nation….

[In the original trial] Prosecutor John McGohey did not assert that the defendants had a specific plan to violently overthrow the U.S. government, but rather alleged that the CPUSA’s philosophy generally advocated the violent overthrow of governments.[7] To prove this, the prosecution proffered articles, pamphlets and books (such as The Communist Manifesto) written by authors such as Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin.[8] The prosecution argued that the texts advocated violent revolution, and that by adopting the texts as their political foundation, the defendants were also personally guilty of advocating violent overthrow of the government.[9]…

Petitioners were found guilty by the trial court and the decision was affirmed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court granted writ of certiorari, but limited it to whether section two or three of the Smith Act violated the First Amendment and whether the same two sections violated the First and Fifth Amendments because of indefiniteness….

Handed down as a 6-2 decision by the Court on June 4, 1951, the judgment and a plurality opinion was delivered by Chief Justice of the United States Fred M. Vinson, who was joined by Justices Stanley Forman Reed, Sherman Minton, and Harold H. Burton. Separate concurring opinions were delivered by Justices Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson. Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas wrote separate dissenting opinions. Justice Tom C. Clark did not participate in this case.

The Court rule affirmed the conviction of the petitioner, a leader of the Communist Party in the United States. Dennis had been convicted of conspiring and organizing for the overthrow and destruction of the United States government by force and violence under provisions of the Smith Act. In affirming the conviction, a plurality of the Court adopted Judge Learned Hand’s formulation of the clear and probable danger test, an adaptation of the clear and present danger test:

In each case [courts] must ask whether the gravity of the “evil,” discounted by its improbability, justifies such invasion of free speech as necessary to avoid the danger….

[I]n 1969, Brandenburg v. Ohio held that “mere advocacy” of violence was per se protected speech. Brandenburg was a de facto overruling of Dennis, defining the bar for constitutionally unprotected speech to be incitement to “imminent lawless action”.[20]

This is from Wikipedia‘s account of Brandenburg v. Ohio:

The Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is directed to inciting, and is likely to incite, imminent lawless action.[1]…

Brandenburg completely did away with Dennis‘s central holding and held that “mere advocacy” of any doctrine, including one that assumed the necessity of violence or law violation, was per se protected speech.

And this is from the final paragraph of the Court’s ruling in Brandenburg:

[W]e are here confronted with a statute which, by its own words and as applied, purports to punish mere advocacy and to forbid, on pain of criminal punishment, assembly with others merely to advocate the described type of action. 4 Such a statute falls within the condemnation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

So, in effect (though not in so many words), the Brandenburg Court found the Dennis Court to be wrong. Not wrong about the wrongness of overthrowing the government, just wrong about when the wrongness may be prosecuted. The Dennis Court was prematurely protective.

To put it another way, it’s all right to advocate wrong-doing, as long as the advocacy doesn’t lead directly to the wrong-doing.

Well, the Dennis Court may have been wrong, but not for the reason cited by the Brandenburg Court, which is also wrong. Why? Because it invites endless hair-splitting about the point at which advocacy translates to action. If the action being advocated is wrong, isn’t it also wrong — constitutional niceties aside — to advocate the action? I’m certainly not advocating thought-crime prosecution, but I am not satisfied with the Brandenburg Court’s conclusion.

If the purpose of the United States, as originally constituted, was to foster liberty, why should the government of the United States tolerate the promulgation of anti-libertarian views? Freedom of speech, after all, is just one manifestation of liberty. And that manifestation could vanish, with the rest, under an anti-libertarian regime.

Here’s the counter-argument: If government is allowed to suppress speech that promulgates the overthrow of America’s constitutional values in favor of anti-libertarian ones (e.g., communism), couldn’t the government then suppress speech that might have a tenuous connection with the idea of overthrowing America’s constitutional values? Government could, for example, suppress speech that proposes the establishment of a socialistic scheme that isn’t contemplated in the Constitution, such as Social Security. And if government could suppress speech of that kind, it could also suppress speech aimed at amending the Constitution to legalize socialistic schemes.

That wouldn’t be so bad, but the power to suppress speech is easily adapted to anti-libertarian uses. Untoward speech and thoughts about “protected groups” could be outlawed. Oops! Such speech and thoughts have been outlawed. “Hate thoughts” may be inferred as the unspoken motivation for a crime, given the personal characteristics of the (supposed) victim of the crime.

By now, you may have concluded that the problem isn’t the Constitution, it’s government. Or, more concretely, the persons and groups who are able to command the power of government. No piece of paper can protect liberty from the anti-libertarian machinations of government officials and the voting blocs to which they are beholden.

Which brings me back to the quotation at the beginning of this post, Chief Justice Vinson’s muddled rationale for the Supreme Court’s holding in Dennis v. United States:

Overthrow of the Government by force and violence is certainly a substantial enough interest for the Government to limit speech. Indeed, this is the ultimate value of any society, for if a society cannot protect its very structure from armed internal attack, it must follow that no subordinate value can be protected.

Government is not society. Nor does the United States comprise a single society, but rather multitudes of societies and interest groups: some desirous of liberty, others desirous of domination. The latter have prevailed, and have come to dominate those that desire liberty. Accordingly, “subordinate” values (e.g., free speech, property rights, and freedom of association) have not been protected by government.

Government, as it now stands, is unworthy of protection by the friends of liberty. In fact, it is (or should be) in need of protection from the friends of liberty. And may they prevail.

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Related posts:
An Agenda for the Supreme Court
Liberals and the Rule of Law
The Slippery Slope of Constitutional Revisionism
A Hypothetical Question
The Real Constitution and Civil Disobedience
A Declaration of Independence
First Principles
Zones of Liberty
The Constitution: Original Meaning, Corruption, and Restoration
A Declaration of Civil Disobedience
Rethinking the Constitution: “Freedom of Speech, and of the Press”
Society and the State
Our Perfect, Perfect Constitution
Reclaiming Liberty throughout the Land
A New Constitution for a New Republic
Restoring Constitutional Government: The Way Ahead
“We the People” and Big Government
How Libertarians Ought to Think about the Constitution

Quotation of the Day

Hate speech IS free speech. Leftists would be almost completely muzzled otherwise.

John Ray, at Tongue Tied 3

Levant vs. Soharwardy

The infamous case of Ezra Levant takes a new twist. Levant, as you will recall, was the subject of a Canadian human rights complaint filed by Syed Soharwardy because, in 2005, Levant published the Danish cartoons of Mohammed cartoons in Western Standard magazine. (The magazine, once a print and web publication, in now only a web publication.)

A recent article by Soharwardy seems conciliatory enough (he has withdrawn his complaint), but it doesn’t address all of Levant’s allegations (here) about Soharwardy’s vindictive use of Canadian officialdom against Levant. Will the twain ever meet? Stay tuned.

Cell Phones and Driving, Once More

Almost two years ago I wrote about research conducted by the National Highway Traffic Administration and Virginia Tech’s Transportation Institute which finds, unsurprisingly, that inattention is a main cause of traffic accidents. Further,

[t]he most common distraction for drivers is the use of cell phones. [T]he number of crashes and near-crashes attributable to dialing is nearly identical to the number associated with talking or listening…. [D]ialing a hand-held device (typically a cell phone) [increased the risk of a crash] by almost three times.

Moreover, as the American Psychological Association points out,

[p]sychological research is showing that when drivers use cell phones, whether hand-held or hands-off [emphasis added], their attention to the road drops and driving skills become even worse than if they had too much to drink. Epidemiological research has found that cell-phone use is associated with a four-fold increase in the odds of getting into an accident [see below] – a risk comparable to that of driving with blood alcohol at the legal limit….

David Strayer, PhD, of the Applied Cognition Laboratory at the University of Utah has studied cell-phone impact for more than five years. His lab, using driving high-fidelity simulators while controlling for driving difficulty and time on task, has obtained unambiguous scientific evidence that cell-phone conversations disrupt driving performance. Human attention has a limited capacity, and studies suggest that talking on the phone causes a kind of “inattention blindness” to the driving scene.

In one study, when drivers talked on a cell phone, their reactions to imperative events (such as braking for a traffic light or a decelerating vehicle) were significantly slower than when they were not talking on the cell phone. Sometimes, drivers were so impaired that they were involved in a traffic accident. Listening to the radio or books on tape did not impair driving performance, suggesting that listening per se is not enough to interfere. However, being involved in a conversation takes attention away from the ability to process information about the driving environment well enough to safely operate a motor vehicle….

Disturbingly, forthcoming research [since reported in “A Comparison of the Cell Phone Driver and the Drunk Driver” and “Cell-Phone Induced Driver Distraction“] will show that talking on a cell phone (even hands-free) hurts driving even more than driving with blood alcohol at the legal limit (.08 wt/vol). When talking on a cell phone, drivers using a high-fidelity simulator were slower to brake and had more “accidents” than when they weren’t on the phone. Their impairment level was actually a little higher than that of people intoxicated by ethanol (alcohol).

The studies at Virginia Tech and the University of Utah rely on instrumented vehicles and simulators. Some skeptics dismiss the results of such studies because of their “artificiality.” But the results are consistent with after-the-fact analyses of the role of cell-phone use in actual accidents. See, for example, “Association between Cellular Telephone Calls and Motor Vehicle Collisions,” by Donald A Redelmeier and Robert J. Tibshirani (New England Journal of Medicine, February 1997), and “Role of mobile phones in motor vehicle crashes resulting in hospital attendance: a case-crossover study,” by Suzanne P. McEvoy et al. (BMJ, a journal of the British Medical Association, July 12, 2005).

Redelmeier and Tibshirani analyzed 26,798 cell-phone calls over a 14-month period and found that

[t]he risk of a collision when using a cellular telephone was four times higher than the risk when a cellular telephone was not being used (relative risk, 4.3; 95 percent confidence interval, 3.0 to 6.5). The relative risk was similar for drivers who differed in personal characteristics such as age and driving experience; calls close to the time of the collision were particularly hazardous (relative risk, 4.8 for calls placed within 5 minutes of the collision, as compared with 1.3 for calls placed more than 15 minutes before the collision; P risk, 5.9) offered no safety advantage over hand-held units (relative risk, 3.9; P not significant).

McEvoy et al. queried “456 drivers aged ≥ 17 years who owned or used mobile phones and had been involved in road crashes necessitating hospital attendance between April 2002 and July 2004.” The results:
Driver’s use of a mobile phone up to 10 minutes before a crash was associated with a fourfold increased likelihood of crashing (odds ratio 4.1, 95% confidence interval 2.2 to 7.7, P

All of the studies cited above are microscopic; that is, they examine the behaviors of specific drivers and/or the causes of specific accidents (or simulated accidents). They are also remarkably consistent in their findings: Using a cell phone while driving is risky — about as risky as driving while drunk.

Saurabh Bhargava and Vikram Pathania (hereafter B&P) are graduate students in economics at UC Berkeley who claim to have refuted the kinds of findings summarized above. Their effort is documented in “Driving Under the (Cellular) Influence: The Link Between Cell Phone Use and Vehicle Crashes” (AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, Working Paper 07-15, July 2007). As B&P explain, they

investigate[d] the causal link between cellular usage and crash rates by exploiting a natural experiment induced by a popular feature of cell phone plans in recent years—the discontinuity in marginal pricing at 9 pm on weekdays when plans transition from “peak” to “off-peak” pricing. We first document[ed] a jump in call volume of about 20-30% at “peak” to “off-peak” switching times for two large samples of callers from 2000-2001 and 2005. Using a double difference estimator which uses the era prior to price switching as a control (as well as weekends as a second control), we [found] no evidence for a rise in crashes after 9 pm on weekdays from 2002-2005.

What B&P found, in fact, is a slightly negative relationship between the rise in call volume and the accident rate. (See tables 5 and 6 on pages 28 and 29, and related discussion.) How could that be, if it is inherently reckless to use a cell phone while driving?

B&P’s paradoxical results flow from serious shortcomings in their analysis:

  • The actual use of cell phones by drivers isn’t known very well; B&P cite only broad averages based on survey samples.
  • The extent to which cell-phone use by drivers actually rises or falls at the switch-over certainly isn’t known.
  • The results rest on differences in accident rates between two periods: 1990-98 (before the introduction of “off-peak” pricing) and 2002-04 (after the introduction of “off-peak” pricing). But those two periods differ in potentially significant ways: the incidence of younger persons (i.e., more reckless drivers) in the population, the per capita consumption of alcohol, and the design of motor vehicles and highways. B&P acknowledge the second and third factors, but address none of them quantitatively. (See tables A1, a summary of data sources, and table A2, which gives summary statistics.)
  • B&P conduct three additional analyses (page 30) that, they claim, confirm their “basic results.” First, they find (unsurprisingly), a negative correlation between accidents and cell-phone ownership over time, but they merely acknowledge “that there are unobserved variables which are correlated with the growth in cell phone ownership across regions and time.” Second, their examination of the relationship between accident rates and cell-phone ownership across areas of varying population density (metropolitan, urban/suburban, rural) is unnecessarily convoluted and, therefore, unconvincing. Third, they trot out the apparent ineffectiveness of legislative bans on cell-phone use with fatal-accident rates in five jurisdictions, but they offer no statistics about the level of enforcement efforts that accompanied or followed the bans.

The bottom line is that B&P’s analysis fails to control for time-related variations in critical variables. For reasons detailed in the addendum to this post, time-series analysis is inadequate to the task at hand.

B&P expose some relevant cross-section data, but neglect its implications in their haste to exonerate cell-phone use as a cause of accidents. Figures 2 and 3 (page 4) give indices of cell-phone calls and fatal crashes in 2005, in 10-minute bins from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. A set of observations for a single year offers the advantage of controlling for time-related factors (proportion of young persons in the population, per capita alcohol consumption, and automobile and highway design). B&P do not divulge the data underlying figures 2 and 3, but — given the scale on which the figures are drawn — the data are readily discernible. Regression analysis yields this result:

Index of fatal-accident rate =
23.249
– (0.074 x number of minutes after 8 p.m.)
+ (9.787 if weekend, zero if weekday)
+ (0.199 x index of outgoing cell-phone calls)

The t-values of the intercept and coefficients are 2.469, -3.423, 6.183, and 2.670, respectively (all significant at the 0.95 level or higher). The adjusted R-squared of the equation is 0.695. The mean values of the dependent and explanatory variables are 49.692, 60, 0.5, and 130.385, respectively. The standard error of the estimate (3.984)/the mean of the dependent variable (49.692) = 0.080. The equation is significant at the 0.99 level.

The signs of the intercept and the variables are intuitively correct. One would expect (a) a positive “baseline” rate of fatal accidents; (b) a negative relationship between the lateness of the day and the accident rate, as the number of vehicles on the road diminishes and the use of cell phones shifts from the highway to the home; (c) a higher accident rate on weekends, when there is more “partying,” especially among younger (i.e., more reckless) drivers; and (d) a positive relationship between cell-phone use and accidents.

In fact, at the mean values of the variables, a 1-percent rise in aggregate cell-phone use leads to a 0.26-percent rise in the index of fatal accidents, which is equivalent to a 0.52-percent rise in the rate of such accidents. Putting it another way, cell-phone use accounted for about 50 percent of fatal accidents during the hours of 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. in 2005. That may overstate the contribution of cell-phone use to fatal accidents, but (given the evidence cited earlier in this post) I have no doubt that it points in the right direction. For example:

  • If Redelmeier and Tibshirani (see above) are right about the relative of risk of collision arising from cell-phone use (relative risk of 4.3 = 3.3 x baseline rate), and
  • about 15 percent of drivers are on cell phones between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., and
  • fatal accidents rise in proportion to total accidents, then
  • an estimate of about 50 percent is not unreasonable.

Despite having statistically exonerated cell-phone users as a menace to others, B&P concede the opposite. This is from the UC Berkeley press release announcing their paper:

The economists [B&P] don’t dispute that using cell phones while driving can be dangerous. Bhargava conducted his own personal experiment, talking on his cell phone while driving in Minnesota this summer. Acknowledging that he doesn’t often drive, much less drive and talk on the cell phone at the same time, Bhargava said he almost crashed twice on that trip.

“Our research should not be viewed as an endorsement to use cell phones in a negligent way,” he said. “It certainly may be risky for a marginal user.”

Pathania added another cautionary note: “Since we know that certain demographic groups such as teenagers frequently call and text while driving, and that they are also risky, inexperienced drivers, further research is needed in this area. Laws banning cell phone use in cars for such groups may well have some merit.”

Reality trumps cock-eyed statistical analysis every time.

The moral of the story is that cell phones and driving don’t mix. I am sticking with the bottom line of my earlier post:

[F]or the vast majority of drivers there is no alternative to the use of public streets and highways. Relatively few persons can afford private jets and helicopters for commuting and shopping. And as far as I know there are no private, drunk-drivers-and-cell-phones-banned highways. Yes, there might be a market for [such] highways, but that’s not the reality of here-and-now.

…I can avoid the (remote) risk of death by second-hand smoke by avoiding places where people smoke. But I cannot avoid the (less-than-remote) risk of death at the hands of a drunk or cell-phone yakker. Therefore, I say, arrest the drunks, cell-phone users, nail-polishers, newspaper-readers, and others of their ilk on sight; slap them with heavy fines; add jail terms for repeat offenders; and penalize them even more harshly if they take life, cause injury, or inflict property damage.

See the addendum at Liberty Corner II.

Conspicuous Consumption and Race

“Conspicuous Consumption and Race” is a paper by Kerwin Kofi Charles, Erik Hurst, and Nikolai Roussanov, which I have summarized and addressed here. Now comes Ray Fisman, writing at Slate, to add his $0.02 worth:

A few years ago, Bill Cosby set off a firestorm with a speech excoriating his fellow African-Americans for, among other things, buying $500 sneakers instead of educational toys for their children. In a recent book, Come On People, he repeats his argument that black Americans spend too much money on designer clothes and fancy cars, and don’t invest sufficiently in their futures….

If signaling [conspicuous consumption] is just part of a deeper human impulse to seek status in our communities, what’s wrong with that, anyway? If a household chooses to spend a lot on visible consumption because it gets happiness from achieving high standing among its neighbors, why should we care? To return to [Bill] Cosby’s concerns, if blacks are spending more on shoes and cars and jewelry, they must be spending less on something else. And that something else turns out to be mostly health and education. According to the study, black households spend more than 50 percent less on health care than whites of comparable incomes and 20 percent less on education. Unfortunately, these are exactly the investments that the black families need to make in order to close the black-white income gap.

Okay, so far, but in his next (and concluding) paragraph Fisman says this:

In his controversial speech, Bill Cosby appealed to the African-American community to start investing in their futures. What’s troubling about the message of this study is that Cosby and others may not be battling against a black culture of consumption, but a more deeply seated human pursuit of status. In this sense, Cosby’s critics may be right—only when black incomes catch up to white incomes will the apparent black-white gap in spending on visible goods disappear.

Here, Fisman reveals himself as a racial paternalist. “Deeply seated culture” may be a reason for conspicuous consumption, but it is not an excuse for it. We are not dumb animals; we are human beings, capable of thinking about our future and how to make it better, and capable of acting on our thoughts.

Fisman’s article is a thinly disguised apology for income redistribution and affirmative action. To which I say this: Those who have chosen to rise above their cultural and “instinctual” disadvantages should not be forced to subsidize those who have chosen to be bound by those disadvantages.

Intellectuals and Capitalism

Why is “capitalism” a dirty word in academia?

Andrew Norton notes that disaffected intellectuals since Rousseau have been attacking capitalism for its failure to meet ‘true human needs.’(26) The claim is unfounded, so what is it about capitalism that so upsets them?

Joseph Schumpeter offered part of the answer. He observed that capitalism has brought into being an educated class that has no responsibility for practical affairs, and that this class can only make a mark by criticising the system that feeds them.(27) Intellectuals attack capitalism because that is how they sell books and build careers.

More recently, Robert Nozick has noted that intellectuals spend their childhoods excelling at school, where they occupy the top positions in the hierarchy, only to find later in life that their market value is much lower than they believe they are worth. Seeing ‘mere traders’ enjoying higher pay than them is unbearable, and it generates irreconcilable disaffection with the market system.(28)

But the best explanation for the intellectuals’ distaste for capitalism was offered by Friedrich Hayek in The Fatal Conceit.(29) Hayek understood that capitalism offends intellectual pride, while socialism flatters it. Humans like to believe they can design better systems than those that tradition or evolution have bequeathed. We distrust evolved systems, like markets, which seem to work without intelligent direction according to laws and dynamics that no one fully understands.

Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant. It gets on perfectly well without them. It does not need them to make it run, to coordinate it, or to redesign it. The intellectual critics of capitalism believe they know what is good for us, but millions of people interacting in the marketplace keep rebuffing them. This, ultimately, is why they believe capitalism is ‘bad for the soul’: it fulfils human needs without first seeking their moral approval.

“Why Capitalism Is Good for You,” by Peter Saunders

Related posts:
“Lefty Profs” (21 Feb 2006)
“Why So Few Free-Market Economists?” (12 Oct 2006)
“Academic Bias” (22 Oct 2007)

A Misdirected Apology

American Thinker Blog notes that Columbia University professors are apologizing to Ahmadinejad for the “insulting remarks” (i.e., factual statements) aimed at the Iranian nut-case by Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, on September 24.

Would the same Leftist grovelers think to apologize to conservative academics whom they have barred from or driven out of Columbia? I don’t think so.

What is it with Leftists and anti-American regimes? The question answers itself.

It’s Happening in Britain…

…and if it’s happening there, it can happen here. What? The suppression of politically incorrect speech by the state — not just a tax-funded university, but the central government itself.

Wolf Howling has the story. It’s about a British blogger, Lionheart, who lays it on the line here, and links to his “offending” posts.

P.S. A good subtitle for this post is “Cowering before Islam.” Someone who is not cowering before Islam, even though his government would like to is Geert Wilders of the Netherlands. (Thanks, again, to Wolf Howling.)

P.P.S. I should have mentioned Canada, of course. Cases in point, the “human rights” complaints against Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn.

Dig This

The trailer for Indoctrinate U, a film about the suppression of speech on today’s campuses.

Academia has been quick to validate the film’s message. This is from the producers of Indoctrinate U:

Due to a threatened lawsuit from a major taxpayer-funded university, the Indoctrinate U homepage has been taken down temporarily. On The Fence Films LLC is deciding how best to proceed, and we will not be commenting on anything until after our final response has been executed.

Don’t worry, though, this will not derail the film.

One can only hope.

A Concurring Opinion

The opinion is by Steve Boriss (The Future of News), and it’s about Cass Sunstein and his twisted view of the First Amendment.

I have similar things to say about Sunstein and “unfree speech.” Here I quote the gist of Sunstein’s argument for “unfree speech” (which he offers in the name of freedom, of course). And here I subject him to an (imaginary) interview about his proposal.

Hillary Meets Cass

By which I mean that Hillary Clinton, who would control the blogosphere, is of a mind with Cass Sunstein, who would regulate speech in order to make it “more free.”

Academic Bias

Neil Gross (of Harvard University) and Solon Simmons (of George Mason University), writing in “The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” do two things:

  • assess many previous studies of academicians’ politics, and
  • report their own findings on the matter, based on a survey of 1,417 professors.

The bottom line is that Gross and Simmons try hard — but fail — to minimize the Left’s domination of academia.

This is from the concluding section of the paper:

Although we would not contest the claim that professors are one of the most liberal occupational groups in American society, or that the professoriate is a Democratic stronghold, we have shown that there is a sizable, and often ignored, center/center-left contingent within the faculty…. (page 72)

But “center/center left” is a subjective and misleading description. Going back to pages 35 and 36, we find this:

To get a better handle on the relationship between political orientation and party affiliation, we constructed a new variable by performing a factor analysis on three items from our survey: the political orientation variable, allowed to remain on a seven point scale; the party affiliation variable, also kept in its original seven point scale; and a question we wrote that asked respondents to locate themselves on a continuum ranging from “extremely left” to “extremely right.” The analysis extracted one common underlying dimension, accounting for nearly 85 percent of the variance on the three items, and in our view representing a more robust measure of overall political orientation than has typically been employed in faculty surveys. Figure 1 [p. 36] shows the distribution of this new politics variable. The further to the left a professor is, the lower her or his score. A score of four indicates the middle of the distribution, which may be interpreted as a moderate political identity…. [T]he figure indicates not simply that most respondents are located on the left hand side of the distribution, but also that significant numbers of them are located near the center left, a fact too often ignored in discussions that treat the university as a site of uniform liberalism.

As if the “center left” were not of the Left. The “center left” is simply a less overtly menacing animal than the “hard left,” just as Nikita Kruschchev was a less overtly menacing figure than Josef Stalin. The crucial fact is that both Kruschchev and Stalin were enemies of liberty, as is the American Left — however its adherents choose to describe themselves.

Gross and Simmons earlier (page 27) reveal the slipperiness of their political taxonomy as they explain how they manipulated respondents’ self-classifications:

In order to assess whether there were differences between the slightlys [those classifying themselves as “slightly liberal” and “slightly conservative”] and their colleagues further at the extremes, we averaged scores on all twelve of the Pew [Values survey] items. In this exercise, a score of 1 would indicate the most liberal response possible on all of the items, a score of 3 would indicate an intermediary position, and a score of 5 would indicate the most conservative response possible on all items. The score of those who stated their political orientation as extremely liberal or liberal was 1.4, while the score of those who identified themselves as conservative or extremely conservative was 3.7. The scores of those respondents closer to the center of the distribution in terms of political orientation were different: the slightly liberal scored at 1.7, middle of the roaders at 2.2, and the slightly conservative 2.8. Although the differences here between the slightly conservative and their more conservative colleagues are greater than the differences between the slightly liberal and their more liberal colleagues, that there are differences at all provides further reason to think that the slightlys should not be treated as belonging to the extremes.

Collapsing the data accordingly to a three point scale, we find that 44.1 percent of respondents [9.4 percent “very liberal” plus 34.7 percent “liberal”] can be classified as liberals, 46.6 percent [18.1 percent “slightly liberal” plus 18.0 percent “moderate” plus 10.5 percent “slightly conservative”] as moderates, and 9.2 percent [8.0 percent “conservative” plus 1.2 percent “very conservative”] as conservatives. Such a recoding thus reveals a moderate bloc that – while consisting of more liberal- than conservative-leaning moderates – is nevertheless equal in size to the liberal bloc.

If a “score” of 3 indicates an “intermediary position” (on a scale of 1 to 5), everyone who self-identifies in the range from “very liberal” (1) to “slightly conservative” (2.8) is left-of-center. Even the average “conservative” and “very conservative” respondent is barely right-of-center. Granting, for the sake of argument, that “slightly conservative” is “moderate” rather than “liberal,” here is the correct breakdown:

80.2 percent “liberal” (Left)
10.5 percent “moderate”
9.2 percent “conservative”

That breakdown is entirely consistent with the most revealing data of all: the voting preferences of the respondents. From page 36:

In Table 10, we show the distribution of Democratic, Republican, and other votes in the 2004 Presidential elections across broad disciplinary fields. Averaging the figures for the social sciences and humanities generates a ratio of Democratic to Republican voters of 8.1 to 1. It is in business and health-science fields that Bush fared better, though even in business Kerry did better than Bush by a margin of more than 2:1.

Table 10

Kerry

Bush

Nader

Other

Phys/bio sciences

77.4

20.8

0.9

0.9

Social sciences

87.6

6.2

1.8

4.4

Humanities

83.7

15.0

0.0

1.3

Comp sci/engineering

61.9

33.3

0.0

4.8

Health sciences

48.1

51.9

0.0

0.0

Business

65.4

32.1

2.6

0.0

Other

81.6

17.5

0.3

0.6

Total

77.6

20.4

0.5

1.5

Q.E.D.

The Gross-Simmons paper is worth reading for its rich detail. But do not be seduced by the authors’ attempt to minimize the academy’s strong Leftward bias. It is real, and the authors’ own data confirm its reality.

P.S. Gross and Simmons — like the typical product of post-World War II “education,” the media, and other fish in water — seem unaware that what now passes for “moderation” is far to the left of the pre-Depression, pre-War, pro-Constitution mainstream.

In the election of 1972, George McGovern polled only 38 percent of the popular vote. In the elections of 2000 and 2004, both Al Gore and John Kerry (nothing, if not McGovernites) polled 48 percent of the popular vote. Throw in the Naderites, and the Left’s share hovers around 50 percent.

Throw in big-government “conservativism,” and you have…well, just what we’ve got: something much closer to socialism than to laissez-faire capitalism. Why? Mises explains, in “Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism“:

The conflict of the two principles [capitalism and socialism] is irreconcilable and does not allow for any compromise. Control is indivisible. Either the consumers’ demand as manifested on the market decides for what purposes and how the factors of production should be employed, or the government takes care of these matters. There is nothing that could mitigate the opposition between these two contradictory principles. They preclude each other.

That is to say, the good intentions (and ill intentions) of those who would intervene willy-nilly in private affairs for the sake of “the public good,” “the children,” and cheap “compassion” can lead to nothing but ruinous state socialism. One cannot be “slightly liberal,” “moderate,” or even “slightly conservative” in the defense of liberty.

I refuse to be nonjudgmental in such matters. You are either for liberty or you are against it.

Related posts:
What Is the Point of Academic Freedom?
How to Deal with Left-Wing Academic Blather
Lefty Profs
Apropos Academic Freedom and Western Values
Why So Few Free-Market Economists?
The Shoe Is on the Other Foot
Affirmative Action for Conservatives and Libertarians?

Affirmative Action for Conservatives and Libertarians?

Greg Mankiw and Ilya Somin raise the issue. Mankiw says:

Question to think about: If right-wingers are underrepresented in universities relative to the population and discriminated against by the left-wing majority, as Larry suggests, should there be affirmative action for right-leaning academics? It seems that, on principle, those on the left (who favor affirmative action to promote diversity and correct past injustice) should endorse such a university policy, and those on the right (who more often oppose affirmative action) would be against.

Somin comments:

The underrepresentation of conservatives (and, I would add, libertarians) is almost certainly not all due to ideological discrimination. But evidence suggests that discrimination is probably at least a part of the story. In this excellent Econlog post, economist Bryan Caplan explained why ideological discrimination is more likely to flourish in academia than in most other employment markets. Even aside from discrimination, the ideological homogeneity of much of academia causes a variety of problems, such as reducing the diversity of ideas reflected in research, skewing teaching agendas, and generating the sorts of “groupthink” pathologies to which ideologically homogenous groups are prone.

However, whether or not [ideological] discrimination is the cause of the problem, affirmative action for conservative academics (or libertarian ones) is a poor solution. Among other things, it would require universities to define who counts as a “conservative” for affirmative action purpose, a task that they aren’t likely to do well. Affirmative action for conservatives would also give job candidates an incentive to engage in deception about their views in the hopes of gaining professional advancement. Moreover, conservative professors hired on an affirmative basis despite inferior qualifications would find it difficult to get their ideas taken seriously by colleagues and students. They might therefore be unable to make a meaningful contribution to academic debate – the very reason why we want to promote ideological diversity in hiring to begin with.

Somin’s argument is correct, as far as it goes. I would add this: Left-dominated disciplines (primarily the so-called liberal arts) will become less and less rewarding, relative to other (non-ideological) disciplines) as they become less and less relevant, economically. Left-dominated disciplines, therefore, will attract (proportionally) fewer and fewer students — because students (especially grad students) tend to go where the money is. As a result, the number of faculty supported by such disciplines will shrink (relatively, if not absolutely), and the academic influence of Leftists will diminish (relatively, if not absolutely).

In other words, the market will take care of the problem, albeit over a longish period of time. Market signals will influence tax-funded universities, as well as private ones, because tax-funded universities do compete with each other and with private ones for the “best and the brightest” students.

Compare and Contrast, Again

In praise of Kay S. Hymowitz’s realism about the limits of libertarianism, I say in “Compare and Contrast” that

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.

Hymowitz’s “libertarian” critics (e.g., Ilya Somin), just don’t get it. Somin thusly ends a post about Hymowitz’s response to his critique of her stance on libertarianism:

Hymowitz concludes her response by criticizing what she calls the libertarian “tendency to view individual personal liberty as The Good that should swallow up all others.” In reply, I can only reiterate a point I made in my critique of her original essay: believing that protecting liberty is the highest or even the sole legitimate purpose of government does not require libertarians to conclude that it is the highest good for all institutions. Still less does it commit us to believing that it is a good that “swallows up all others.” To the contrary, libertarians have long contended that liberty actually facilitates the achievement of other important values and does so far more effectively than government coercion.

What Somin (and other so-called libertarians) fail to understand is this: Liberty doesn’t just happen; it is not innate in human nature.

The true choice is not between liberty and government coercion, it is between ordered liberty, in which government does not (by omission or commission) undermine morality, and social dissolution, in which it does precisely that.

It is quite clear that we have been, for quite some time, in a state of government-condoned and government-sponsored social dissolution. As civil society dissolves, government takes over its functions, in ways that no self-styled libertarian could possibly endorse.

The key defect of libertarian absolutism (of the kind preached by Somin et al.) is its adherents’ blindness to its consequences. They cannot seem to grasp the fact that wanting liberty and having it are two different things. They are fixated on “what ought to be” and blind to “what is possible,” given human nature.

Related posts:
A Century of Progress?
The Case against Genetic Engineering
Eugenics
Social Norms, State Action, and Liberty
A Critique of Extreme Libertarianism
Anarchistic Balderdash
The Meaning of Liberty

Collegiate Crap-ola

When I was a freshman in college, Voltaire was held up as an exemplar of wit and clear thinking. This is Voltaire, at (perhaps) his best, that is to say, his worst:

“The Bible,” sighed Voltaire. “That is what fools have written, what imbeciles command, what rogues teach, and young children are made to learn by heart.”

This nonsensical generalization bears scant resemblance to the truth. (It does not, for instance, credit the civilizing influence of the Bible, as it is conveyed through Judaism and Christianity.) Voltaire’s statement is nothing more than propaganda for anti-religionism.

It is no wonder that so many young minds were irretrievably corrupted by their exposure to the “heroes” of collegiate “open-mindedness.” I was corrupted for a while, but I began to see the world as it is, not as Voltaire and his ilk would have it seem.

Katie Couric: Post-American

What is a post-American? From Mark Krikorian of NRO, via an earlier post:

Let me be clear [as to] what I mean by a post-American. He’s not an enemy of America — not Alger Hiss or Jane Fonda or Louis Farrakhan. He’s not necessarily even a Michael Moore or Ted Kennedy. A post-American may actually still like America, but the emotion resembles the attachment one might feel to, say, suburban New Jersey — it can be a pleasant place to live, but you’re always open to a better offer. The post-American has a casual relationship with his native country, unlike the patriot, “who more than self his country loves,” as Katharine Lee Bates wrote. Put differently, the patriot is married to America; the post-American is just shacking up.

What makes Katie Couric a post-American? This:

“The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying ‘we’ when referring to the United States and, even the ‘shock and awe’ of the initial stages, it was just too jubilant and just a little uncomfortable. And I remember feeling, when I was anchoring the ‘Today’ show, this inevitable march towards war and kind of feeling like, ‘Will anybody put the brakes on this?’ And is this really being properly challenged by the right people? And I think, at the time, anyone who questioned the administration was considered unpatriotic and it was a very difficult position to be in.” (Quotation from Jonah Goldberg of NRO, via many bloggers.)

Katie, Katie, Katie, how could anyone possibly question your patriotism after reading that?

Actually, one cannot fault the patriotism of a person who questions how the administration pursues the enemy, as long as that person offers a reasonable alternative in good faith. But the loony Left and whacky Right simply assert that “we” are the enemy and “we” had it coming to “us,” when they are not peddling the notion that “we” did it to ourselves — as in “inside job.”

But Couric is, by her own admission, unpatriotic. She is more than unpatriotic, however. She is, at best, a dupe for the loony Left and whacky Right. She is, at worst (I think), a witting dupe (to coin an oxymoron).

Related post: Depressing But True (and the links at the end)

The Firing of Ward Churchill…

…was long overdue and is entirely fitting. Hank Brown, president of the University of Colorado, explains his decision to fire Churchill (at last):

Controversy — especially self-sought controversy — doesn’t immunize a faculty member from adhering to professional standards. If you are a responsible faculty member, you don’t falsify research, you don’t plagiarize the work of others, you don’t fabricate historical events and you don’t thumb your nose at the standards of the profession. More than 20 of Mr. Churchill’s faculty peers from Colorado and other universities found that he committed those acts. That’s what got him fired.

Precisely. As I once wrote, apropos l’affaire Churchill,

[e]ducators are paid not only to educate but also to educate well. Perhaps the Churchill affair will serve as a reminder that gratuitous titillation isn’t education.

But l’affaire Churchill holds a broader lesson than that:

[A]lthough Ward Churchill and his ilk are despicable human beings, I don’t care what they say as much as I care that they represent what seems to pass for “thought” in large segments of the academic community. Clearly, universities are failing in their responsibility to uphold academic standards. Left-wing blather isn’t knowledge, it’s prejudice and hate and adolescent rebellion, all wrapped up in a slimy package of academic pretentiousness.

The larger marketplace of ideas counteracts much of what comes out of universities — in particular the idiocy that emanates from the so-called liberal arts and social sciences. But that’s no reason to continue wasting taxpayers’ money on ethnic studies, gender studies, and other such claptrap. State legislatures can and should tell State-funded universities to spend less on liberal arts and social sciences and spend more on the teaching of real knowledge: math, physics, chemistry, engineering, and the like. That strikes me as a reasonable and defensible stance.

It isn’t necessary for State legislatures to attack particular individuals who profess left-wing blather. All the legislatures have to do is insist that State-funded schools spend taxpayers’ money wisely, by focusing on those disciplines that advance the sum of human knowledge. Isn’t that what universities are supposed to do?

Yes, it is.