Putting the Cycle in the News Cycle

I'm Megan McArdle, and this was my week

You know, I really thought we’d spend less time litigating identity politics issues once Trump left office. In hindsight that seems … optimistic. This conflict, whatever you want to call it—culture wars, ”cancel culture”, “woke capital”—isn’t going away. Our divisions are too intractable, and these are issues that are too central to just ignore them and agree to disagree.

Obviously I have my own thoughts, which I’ve been expressing at length for years. But at this point, another paean to mutual tolerance, or the marketplace of ideas, doesn’t really move anyone; my opponents have heard it all before. Sure, the people who agree with me might enjoy hearing it again, but I wonder if even they aren’t growing a little weary. Instead I’m trying to engage with the best arguments of my opponents—and this week, that meant exploring two lacunae I see in their theory of progress.

So I wrote a column about the slow-motion attempt to cancel Substack (yes, the very service in which this update is composed!) Substack has a lot of different kinds of writers, but as I note:

Some of the most prolific users are heterodox political writers who had found mainstream publications an increasingly poor fit. A number quickly rose to the top of the Substack leader boards. This attracted the gimlet eye of the cancelers: Other online writers — some of whom had their own Substack newsletters — have leveled accusations of transphobia and other offenses. A nascent boycott aims to pressure Substack into deplatforming the alleged offenders. Reportedly, their campaign is having some effect.

If this works, I argue, it might augur a world in which you really can’t hold professional employment without embracing a pretty rigid progressive orthodoxy:

That world already seems uncomfortably close for journalists and academics, given that most of their institutions lean left. But self-publishing? It ought to be immune from cancellation unless the mob can somehow convince you to fire yourself.

That changes, however, if activists can enforce a secondary boycott on the newsletter services, payment processors or web hosts that writers use. If that happens, it’s hard to see where viewpoint diversity could survive for long, except possibly in conservative outlets big enough to run their own technology and thereby survive the purge.

Luckily, I don’t think it will work; I think that better-living-through-cancellation is likely, in the long run, to be a more limited strategy than its practitioners believe.

That could, of course, be my error, or mere wishful thinking, but I think I make a strong case. It’s based not in appeals to the better angels of sweet reason, but to the market economics that make cancellation feasible in the first place.

But for that, I am afraid you will have to read the whole article at my employer; this is just the preview.

Another cognitive gap I see, among roughly the same group of people, is in how they look at problems like crime—a lot of problems, actually, but the most relevant to this update is the question of crime.

In my latest column I ask “if there isn’t a reason that slogans such as ‘Defund the Police’ seem most popular with people who came of age after the year 2000, when U.S. crime rates were well into their decades-long decline.”

I grew up in New York City, smack in the middle of the ghastly spike we’ve long been declining from. Between 1960 and 1992, the number of violent crimes committed in America rose by roughly sixfold, while the population grew by only about 50%, and it felt like that was going to go on forever.

I belong to a Facebook group for my old neighborhood, the Upper West Side, and while preparing this column I asked people if my memories of all the things we did to avoid crime were typical—staying off the subways after rush hour, taking long, circuitous routes so we could stay on well-lighted avenues and major cross streets, carrying enough money to satisfy a mugger and enough money to get home stashed in a hidden pocket or a shoe, never pulling out cash on the street, avoiding parks after sunset.

I got whatever the virtual equivalent is of an earful: people remember how much crime impacted our lives, and also, how many pains we took to avoid it. A lot of people came up with strategies I hadn’t thought of—one person spoke of learning to take stab wounds on the forearms, many more of holding keys pointed out through their fingers as a makeshift weapon.

As someone pointed out, if you remember just how bad it was, even in our comparatively middle class neighborhood, it’s almost impossible to believe that everyone now walks around those same streets while openly flashing electronics worth hundreds of dollars. And the confusion is just as strong running the other way, which is why I tried to explain to younger people how that crime wave created such fertile territory for mass incarceration.

People were desperate to get their streets back, which is why so many of the laws that ultimately led to mass incarceration were initially supported by Black communities that then ended up most affected by the policing.

That’s not to say those were good laws (they generally weren’t), or that racism didn’t also play a role in creating public support for harsh policing (it did). The people shouting “defund the police” certainly aren’t wrong that mass incarceration was a terrible, brutal mistake. But letting crime grow out of control was also a terrible mistake, and it, too, especially devastated our most vulnerable communities. If you have personally witnessed only one sort of tragic mistake, it is easy to leap to an equal and opposite error.

But that’s just a fraction of the overall argument, which you can find, like the rest of my columns, at The Washington Post.

And of course, you are welcome to discuss my own cognitive gaps in the comments here.

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Megan Speaks!

I appeared on EconTalk, one of my favorite podcasts, to discuss disaster planning and why we’re usually planning for the wrong catastrophe.

I’ve also been appearing on NPR’s Left Right and Center this month with my colleague Christine Emba to talk the news of the day.

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Around the Office

Of course, I am not the only person writing for the Washington Post, and while you have a subscription—you do have a subscription, don’t you? Because they’re really marvelously cheap through Amazon Prime—you should sample some of our other great stuff.

My colleague Josh Rogin makes a correct and necessary point that “The United States must compete with China and confront the Chinese government on a range of issues while simultaneously combating the rise of anti-Asian racism at home. These two missions are not at odds with each other, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would have you believe. In fact, they must go hand in hand.”

The incomparable George Will writes “Today, a post-pandemic boom, powered by pent-up demand for everything, is almost as predictable as a solar eclipse, so Democrats are promising to create the boom by showering freshly created money on a grateful nation”.

It’s worth reading for the kicker alone: “Most economists say rates will remain low for the foreseeable future. In April 2008, most economists’ foreseeable future did not extend to September.”

(I am concocting an elaborate plan to steal all Mr. Will’s pens so that I need not be plagued with unquenchable jealousy over his effortlessly pellucid style. The pandemic has required further elaboration, which has set back the timetable a bit. But I persevere.)

Meanwhile, Henry Oleson makes a point I’ve been thinking about for a while: vaccine nationalism—and the pandemic more broadly—have revealed just how far we are from realizing the multilateralist dream of a world beyond borders:

The European Union has been locked in a war of words with Britain for weeks over whether the E.U. will bar vaccines produced within its members’ borders from being sent to the island nation. India has also engaged in vaccine nationalism, preventing the export of the savior drug produced within its borders for its own use. Contracts and the virtues of globalism apparently no longer matter to the leaders of these nations when their own domestic needs weigh down upon them.

… This dust-up just shows what wise leaders always know: Nations will always act in their own narrow interests and discard multilateral modes of behavior when their interests are seriously at stake.”

And over on the news side, a fantastic piece about a miracle cancer survivor—who turned out to have been misdiagnosed.

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Substackery

Freddie De Boer is beloved by center- and right-leaning folks for his acidic takes on the left, from the left. But the things I love most about his new newsletter are just Freddie musing about stuff he’s interested in … like The Nation of Islam. I learned a great deal, including this:

And that’s what the Nation of Islam has always been, a conservative organization. The fact that they are radically critical of America’s mistreatment of Black people does not change the fact that NOI teachings have always emphasized personal responsibility, traditional family relations, rejection of “alternative lifestyles²⁰,” patriarchy, and the idea that Black people alone can lift themselves out of poverty and oppression. Farrakhan, like Elijah Muhammad before him, advances an ethic of self-improvement that can look a lot like assimilation. He is in fact a Black leader who literally tells young Black men to pull their pants up in hopes of appearing more respectable.

Matt Yglesias is smart about buses:

But the big problem with the American bus is that while a bus can hold a lot of riders, the typical American bus doesn’t hold many riders. And because the buses are running empty, they are very expensive on a per-rider basis, even though it’s not like we’re spending a fortune on buses. In most of the country, transit is marginal, and even better buses wouldn’t make a big difference. But it does matter in the minority of the country where transit isn’t marginal. 

You should also read Scott Alexander on phobias and other psychological errors as a problem of trapped priors:

Suppose you are a zealous Democrat. Your friend makes a plausible-sounding argument for a Democratic position. You believe it; your raw experience (an argument that sounds convincing) and your context (the Democrats are great) add up to more-likely-than-not true. But suppose your friend makes a plausible-sounding argument for a Republican position. Now you're doubtful; the raw experience (a friend making an argument with certain inherent plausibility) is the same, but the context (ie your very low prior on the Republicans being right about something) makes it unlikely.

Still, this ought to work eventually. Your friend just has to give you a good enough argument. Each argument will do a little damage to your prior against Republican beliefs. If she can come up with enough good evidence, you have to eventually accept reality, right?

But in fact many political zealots never accept reality. It's not just that they're inherently skeptical of what the other party says. It's that even when something is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, they still won't believe it. This is where we need to bring in the idea of trapped priors.

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Elsewhere on the Web

Rutgers will require students to get vaccinated, and you should expect to be reading a lot of similar news over the next few months. You should also expect to be arguing fiercely over how far we can go in coercing the vaccine-hesitant to protect the herd.

More media malaise: The LA Times lost a boatload of money in 2020, and Medium is melting down (again).

My friend Conor Friedersdorf looks at racial justice initiatives in schools.

Check the partisan skew of your Twitter feed—surprisingly, mine leans very left.

Danish study of reinfection suggests that vaccines are more effective at preventing infection than a previous case of covid. Luckily, 25% of Americans have gotten at least one shot. Further, higher, faster!

Alan Jacobs asks the right question.

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Quote of the day

“Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.” — GK Chesterton