Category Archives: Current Affairs

Beliefs cluster. If you find out someone is an environmentalist, she probably also is sympathetic to rehabilitating offenders, affirmative action, generous welfare programs, and gay marriage, is a secularist and a professor or student. If you find out someone favors a strong military, he probably also "supports judicial restraint, laissez-faire economic policy, is more likely to be pragmatic than idealistic, censorious than permissive, meritocratic than egalitarian, and gradualist than revolutionary." If you find out someone is religious, she probably also supports lower taxes.

Here's a game to play while driving. When you see an activist-like bumper sticker on the car in front of you, guess the person's beliefs. For example, if I see a bumper sticker for the National Organization for Women with a pro-choice message, I bet I can accurately predict 95% of their beliefs on political and social issues.

Thomas Sowell has offered an audacious explanation for why beliefs cluster like they do: the collections each reflect a different fundamental view of human nature. Sowell sorts human nature into two camps: the Tragic Vision and the Utopian Vision. Steven Pinker summarizes it in The Blank Slate, which is where the quote in my first paragraph comes from. Excerpt:

In the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. "Mortal things suit mortals best," wrote Pindar; "from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made," wrote Kant. The Tragic Vision is associated with Hobbes, Burke, Smith, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, and the legal scholar Richard Posner.

In the Utopian Vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social arrangements, and we should not allow them to restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better world. Its creed might be "Some people see things as they are and ask 'why?'; I dream things that never were and ask, 'why not?'" The quote is often attributed to the icon of 1960s liberalism, Robert F. Kennedy, but it was originally penned by the Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw (who also wrote, "There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough"). …

In the Tragic Vision, our moral sentiments, no matter how beneficent, overlie a deeper bedrock of selfishness. That selfishness is not the cruelty or aggression of the psychopath, but a concern for our well-being that is so much a part of our makeup that we seldom reflect on it and would waste our time lamenting it or trying to erase it.

The theory is not foolproof in approximating bundles of belief. But it does provide a useful framework to understand certain political perspectives. Usually modern liberals tend to hold the Utopian Vision and modern conservatives tend to hold the Tragic Vision of human nature.

Consider public education in America from this perspective.

Conservatives are generally skeptical of the government monopoly of public schools. The Tragic Vision emphasizes the bedrock of selfishness in human nature, and conservatives see public school teachers and their unions as selfish, greedy economic actors like any other — no more, no less. The Tragic Vision emphasizes that power corrupts and even very smart people at the top can err; conservatives tend to support decentralized control and competition (through charter schools, vouchers, etc).

The Utopian Vision emphasizes the possibility for great individuals to transcend their darker self-interested temptations and fight for the "greater good." Liberals first see teachers as generous servants fulfilling an important calling, and in political debates give them corresponding deference. The Utopian Vision emphasizes equality, and liberals see government-run public schools as important instruments in this level-playing-field-for-everyone quest.

There are probably better examples of the theory at work, but it's one that jumped to mind as I ponder the state of public education.

Note that Sowell, in his book, actually uses the terms "Constrained Vision" vs. "Unconstrained Vision." The Constrained Vision sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the Unconstrained Vision sees human nature as malleable and perfectible.

I am excited to see entrepreneurs and venture capitalists lead the Start-Up Visa movement, which seeks to “help raise awareness and change policy around the EB-5 visa, which enables investors from other countries to get a visa in exchange for starting a business in the US with $1M in investment capital and creating 10 US jobs.”

Immigrants are an essential part of the Silicon Valley story; they have founded some of our most cherished companies like Google and Intel. And yet, every year the United States turns away educated and talented entrepreneurs who want to start companies in our country; or worse, forces already-in-progress start-up CEOs to leave. The Start-Up Visa aims to make that less common.

Kirk Wylie has posted some criticisms of the Start-Up Visa movement. Among other things, he says:

Because when I hear about things like a Founder Visa program, what I really hear is a general denunciation of US immigration policies and procedures. What I really hear is “We can’t hire the people that are necessary for the industries that are important to the country, and we’re picking the edge case that we understand the most.” That’s not good enough. The edge case isn’t the problem, the system is the problem.

Kirk argues that we need larger-scale immigration reform and that the proposed Start-Up Visa doesn’t solve the bigger problem. VCs Fred Wilson and Dave McClure both comment on the post saying, in essence, “baby steps.”

Dave comments:

i’m in support of long-term change to broad-reaching immigration policy in favor of more open borders. HOWEVER, that issue will take time & energy to achieve. OTOH, there is EXISTING legislation that addresses the “edge case” for investor visas that we can quickly modify with a very simple change to make an incremental step forward.

thus, while i’m not AGAINST making the world safe & wonderful for rainbows & unicorns & everyone else, i’m also not a patient person… and i sure as hell don’t feel like making this step forward is AGAINST the larger goal — in fact, it’s probably helpful in making incremental change happen sooner, and paving the way for more to come.

Fred comments:

the US immigration system is wrong on so many levels. the startup visa idea is about addressing something we can fix quickly because there isn’t much political opposition. i agree that what we should really be fighting for is wholesale overhaul. but perfect is not the enemy of the good. we should do this because we can.

Both Dave and Fred hold the assumption that an improvement on the margins is better than no improvement at all. Dave specifically says that taking a small step does not hurt the chances of taking a large step later on.

This is a logical intuition. But I wonder. In my post titled Symbolic Lip Service in the Form of Small, Ineffective Actions, I argue that sometimes taking a small step in pursuit of large goals — subscribing to a personal finance blog as a first step toward saving more and spending less — can actually lower the likelihood of you ever doing the big thing as you can more easily delude yourself into thinking you’ve taken care of it.

Political strategists grapple with this all the time. Should we settle for incremental health care reform as better than no reform at all? Or if we do that, political capital expended and the attention of the people exhausted for the short and medium term, do we miss our opportunity to pass more comprehensive reform? Health care cannot and will not command the nation’s attention every year. “Now or never” is too extreme; but “now or in 7 years, maybe” is probably accurate.

If you obtain a minor victory, your critics will exaggerate the victory and exaggerate their concessions that made it happen. This makes it difficult to return to the well the following year without being branded greedy and unaware.

I don’t know where I come down on immigration reform and and I don’t know whether the Start-Up Visa represents a strategically smart marginal improvement or whether, if it hits the big stage in Washington, its success will lower the likelihood or at least significantly delay the necessary large scale reform.

Bottom Line: Implementing tough, large-scale changes — whether in a political system or in an individual life — usually requires incremental change. But in situations where status quo inertia is most intense and where quid-pro-quo obsessed interest groups are most entrenched, can incremental reform actually hurt your chances at achieving a big win?

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Immigration policy is complicated not least because it awakens people’s nationalism. The H-1B visa debate, which has been raging for several years, is in part about whether American companies cannot meet their personnel needs with American workers and therefore need to tap an international pool. Here is my long-ish analysis of the situation. In short, I protest the premise that a worker already in America deserves first dibs on a job offered by an American company and find nothing wrong with a company which would rather hirer an equally qualified worker who will do the job for less pay. By challenging the premise I don’t care about all the arguments over whether there is in fact a domestic labor shortage in certain computer science professions, why salaries for engineers hasn’t increased at a rate commensurate with a shortage, etc.

Compare American liberal and conservative attitudes toward nationalism. (Pardon the generalizations.)

Conservatives tend to be proud nationalists. They poll higher on questions that ask, “Are you proud to be an American?” There’s the image of conservatives with their big American flags and trucks. Conservatives’ nationalism, at its strongest, tends to manifest in hawkish foreign policy.

Liberals tend to be unaware nationalists. They reject excessive displays of national pride. Flag waving makes them uncomfortable. They will proactively apologize for America when traveling abroad. Yet at the same time, they believe strongly in American jobs and workers. Narratives around the “little guy” being screwed by big bad multinational corporations is very much part of the liberal imagination. So liberals’ nationalism, at its strongest, tends to manifest in economic nationalism. In particular, protectionism.

Both forms of nationalism, when extreme, are dangerous.

But liberals’ economic nationalism I would say is less understood, especially by those who hold it. Most Americans, liberals and conservatives alike, do not understand economics and trade. So when liberals promote economic nationalism they get trapped in contradictions. We need to increase aid to Africa and poor people, for example, but we should also “Eat Local” and protect American tire factories. Those two goals pull in opposite directions: free trade and open markets is the best thing we can do for the poor in Asia and Africa. We need to help the little guy, for example, but not all those little guys overseas, even if they happen to be 10x poorer than a poor person in America.

Bottom Line: Liberals make fun of conservatives’ patriotism, but in fact liberals’ preferred economic policies are more dangerously nationalistic, and full of contradictions.

I don’t have an opinion on healthcare. I’m not following the debate that’s currently dominating the headlines in America (and China, incidentally, where I am now). I’m clueless. People ask me what I think, and I tell them, “I know nothing.”

I’ve decided I’m just going to read it about once it’s resolved.

You can’t keep up with everything. Rather than lightly follow along and skim articles and pretend to be informed, I’m consciously opting out. I rarely do this when it comes to current affairs — I’m kind of a junkie — but I must say, this time around, it feels liberating.

Now, since I still read my favorite bloggers, I do catch whiffs about what’s going on. As the debate seems to spiral into the gutter — welcome to the “era of separate fact universes” — perhaps it’s time to consider whether politics is the the mind-killer after all…

In their New Republic piece on environmentalism, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger make several interesting points. This one I loved most:

It has become an article of faith among many greens that the global poor are happier with less and must be shielded from the horrors of overconsumption and economic development–never mind the realities of infant mortality, treatable disease, short life expectancies, and grinding agrarian poverty. The convenient and ancient view among elites that the poor are actually spiritually rich, and the exaggeration of insignificant gestures like recycling and buying new lightbulbs, are both motivated by the cognitive dissonance created by simultaneously believing that not all seven billion humans on earth can "live like we live" and, consciously or unconsciously, knowing that we are unwilling to give up our high standard of living.

They say later that too many environmentalists “reject the modern project of expanding prosperity altogether.” This happens to be one of my strongest gripes with people who supposedly care about the global poor. The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth ought to be required reading for these people.

There’s a similarly flawed thought process behind Western do-gooders who decry the existence of sweat shops in third world countries: We need to “protect” poor people whose wages are “too low” from doing menial, backbreaking labor. Ugh.