Pun Salad

A (1) bold claim and (2) dire prediction from Steve H. Hanke and John Greenwood: The Economy Is Running on Fumes. A Recession Is Right around the Corner. Looking at the M2 numbers and going by history:

I have a gadget that pops articles into my feed on specified dates. I've scheduled this one for a review on December 31, 2024. And, God willing, we'll blog about it.

Also of note:

• One from the book. Specifically, The Coddling of the American Mind, the great 2018 book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. One of their "great untruths" that American youth were being pushed to accept: "What doesn't kill you makes you weaker."

  John McWhorter notes that it's still going on: Black Students Are Being Trained to Think They Can’t Handle Discomfort. Noting One More Thing from the university ladies:

  The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been roundly condemned for arguing, at a congressional hearing on antisemitism, that calls for genocide against Jews are not always susceptible to sanction on their campuses. (Liz Magill of Penn has since resigned.)

  Less noticed has been how starkly their expectations of Jewish students point up how low expectations are for Black students on many college campuses — expectations low enough to qualify as a kind of racism.

  Yes, racism, though it’s more of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” that George W. Bush referred to.

  Many leaders at elite universities seem to think that as stewards of modern antiracism, their job is to denounce and to penalize, to the maximum extent possible, anything said or done that makes Black students uncomfortable.

  In the congressional hearing, the presidents made clear that Jewish students should be protected when hate speech is “directed and severe, pervasive” (in the words of Ms. Magill) or when the speech “becomes conduct” (Claudine Gay of Harvard).

  But the tacit idea is that when it comes to issues related to race — and, specifically, Black students — then free speech considerations become an abstraction. Where Black students are concerned, we are to forget whether the offense is directed, as even the indirect is treated as evil; we are to forget the difference between speech and conduct, as mere utterance is grounds for aggrieved condemnation.

  And I am the sort of sick puppy to be amused by a past example:

  The offense can even be 100 years in the past. In 2021 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, some Black students were upset when walking past a boulder on campus that was referred to as a “niggerhead” by a newspaper reporter in 1925, when that term was common for large, dark rocks. The school had the boulder removed.

  In cases like those last two, it seems that Black students are being taught a performed kind of delicacy. If you can’t bear walking past a rock someone called a dirty name 100 years ago, how are you going to deal with life?

  And, yes, I did not bowdlerize McWhorter's language there. If New York Times readers can handle it, so can mine.

• Guess the state. Patterico's guest poster JVW, relates a tale of The State Where Everything Fails. Yes, that state is California. It's the sad story of HOPICS, the Homeless Outreach Program Integrated Care System, which despite being the recipient of heaps of taxpayer cash, fell months behind on paying the rent for the people they were supposed to be helping.

  Altogether, 306 residents of Los Angeles County lost their homes thanks to HOPICS failing to keep up on the rent subsidies. While the CalMatters piece assures us that “more than half were then placed in permanent housing or sent to temporary sites,” there are apparently 119 formerly-housed souls who are unaccounted for, though in interviews with former program participants CalMatters has ascertained that at least some of them are on the streets or are living in their automobiles. Perhaps others are incarcerated or even dead. Where did it all go wrong? According to documents reviewed by CalMatters, it was the usual mix of ineptitude such as a failure to properly vet middlemen who connected homeless residents with housing, utter and complete laziness like ignoring repeated warnings from landlords that the rent was in arrears, and that annoying sort of progressive grandiosity which in this case was taking on far too many clients than the program could properly manage.

  Naturally, HOPICS … blames their problems on an embarrassment of riches, i.e. the piles and piles of COVID money that the government was happy to shovel into the economic furnace over the past three years. The program hired the aforementioned middlemen, many of them from fly-by-night nonprofits that suddenly sprung up when the government started making it rain with all of the Jacksons, Grants, and Benjamins that they were feverishly printing late at night. You won’t be surprised to hear that HOPICS found some “questionable charges” on the invoices submitted by these middlemen, and investigating them started clogging up the whole payment process. And, of course, the eviction moratoriums being extended well beyond the point when the pandemic had started to subside ensured that there was no real urgency for HOPICS to act in a timely manner.

  As we have observed in the past: When government starts dropping cash from helicopters, there will be plenty of people out with buckets. Probably not you.

• Press this, yutz. Today's WSJ has the headline: U.S. Presses Israel to Begin Winding Down Gaza War.

  And instead of wracking my weary brain for language to express my disdain, I will outsource to Jerry Coyne:

  ‥ frankly, I’m tired of [ U.S. national security adviser, Jake Sullivan] telling the IDF how to do their business. Does he tell Bashar al-Assad to lay off killing his own people? Of course not; it’s the Jews he wants to control. I’m glad that Biden is financially and logistically supporting the war, but I don’t see him telling President Zelensky how to fight in Ukraine, which we support financially as well. Does the U.S. regard Israel as a “client state,” giving us the right to tell it what to do?

  Sullivan was, according to this article, "at the center" of the 2021 Afghanistan debacle. Where in the world does he get the chutzpah to lecture other countries on anything? Why on earth would anyone even pretend to listen to him?

Recently on the book blog:

Yet another book about thinking poorly, tribalism, demonization, dogmatism, and related maladies. I seem way too fond of them, maybe. This, however, is the only one I've read recently that uses the word "casuistry" casually. But it's the second non-fiction book I read in a row that quotes Adam Smith, specifically noting his disdain for the "man of system". Also seen: the Kant quote about "the crooked timber of humanity" and Isaiah Berlin's observation about foxes vs. hedgehogs. I swear, someone should make up a bingo card for the reader of books like this.

But the authors, Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, do provide a unique take. Both academics, Morson is a literary critic while Schapiro is an economist (but more recently a president at Williams College and Northwestern University). And they argue for using timeless insights from (mostly Russian) literature to illuminate one's thinking about current controversies. So, as a bonus, the reader gets a mini-tour of classics like Anna Karenina and Uncle Vanya.

Their main target is various forms of "fundamentalism", a term which the authors take care to define with philosophical rigor, not merely using it as an insult. Fundamentalism manifests itself in certainty: adherents admit no self-doubt, and nay-sayers are evil, stupid, or crazy. Another criterion (involving another word I didn't know) is the "perspicuity of truth": you not only can be certain about it, it's easy for anyone to perceive. And criterion three is often the presence of a "foundational text or revelation": the Bible, the Koran, Das Kapital, …

Definition out of the way, authors proceed to describe how fundamentalism crops up, and damages, large areas of controversy: politics (of course), economics, religion, and literature.

One of areas they discuss in the economics area is "market fundamentalism". Which got into an unsafe area for me; maybe they should have provided me a trigger warning! Am I a market fundamentalist? Fortunately, I think I didn't resemble their caricatures. Their prime example of a market fundamentalist is (Nobel prizewinner) Gary Becker, who thought that economics could potentially explicate all human behavior. And also was dead certain that humanity would eventually see the wisdom of a market in human organ transplantation. (Friedman and Hayek escape scrutiny.)