Author: JohnMatel

Sorry, cannot blame Trump
Some parts of America are doing very well; others are okay, and some are in serious decline. This is a long-term trend, not something we can blame on the policies of any president. And it is an international trend, not something we can blame America, and – something I need to add at this controversy plagued juncture, this book was written in 2012, so we cannot blame Trump.
Three Americas, only one prospering
Moretti talks about the three Americas. We have become much more integrated racially and ethnically. There are few completely black neighborhoods left in America and probably no completely white ones. Most neighborhoods have their share of immigrants. But we have become much more segregated in terms of economics of opportunity. This goes beyond average incomes, although income is a big factor. It is more the difference between communities that are going somewhere and those that are going nowhere.
First a stipulation. Nearly everybody has become more prosperous in strictly material terms because of general enrichment over recent decades. Some communities, however, have gotten a lot more of the gains than others have. The three Americas are those who are racing into a bright future, those that are just standing still and those that are declining in relatively in terms of material prosperity and in absolute terms in relation to human capital, as well as intangibles such as hope and spiritual strength. These communities are breaking down and not providing the sense of community the people need.
Skilled jobs and skilled workers
Moretti mentions economic reasons why this has happened, the usual changes in the means for production, international competition and automation. American manufacturing produces more than ever before, but it does so with many fewer workers. As automation has replaced workers, those workers who remain need to have higher level skills. There are fewer and fewer jobs available for unskilled workers. Gone are the days when a man could graduate high school, or not even that, and then walk into a decent job. This is good. This is the basis of productivity. It encourages people to improve their skills and work at jobs are more interesting and fulfilling, and ones more likely to pay better. The problem is that not enough of these jobs have become available and not enough workers are qualified to get them.
Highly skilled labor force and highly skilled jobs are a chicken-and-egg problem. Moretti talks about the places that are very attractive and prosperous. These places have both a lot of well-paying skilled jobs, many involving innovation, and they have a lot of skilled and innovative workers to take those jobs, what they call a thick labor market. Once a region has achieved this happy situation, it usually is self-catalyzing, as better jobs attract skilled workers and skilled workers attract or grow firms that employ skilled workers. Such places also benefit less skilled workers. Job prospects even for unskilled workers are better and they are paid more. There is a spillover, positive externalities. Skilled and educated workers produce conditions that improve the general environment.
Can we create these environments?
How to achieve this wonderful balance, however, is not known, although there are lots of theories. Good communities always have an infrastructure of prosperity – theaters, restaurants, brewpubs, nice shops, parks etc. Some think that communities need to provide lots of amenities loved by the “creative class.” This idea is based on two related suppositions. One is that if you have the creative people, creative jobs will follow and the other is that it is the pleasant things that attract them. Unfortunately, this does not always work. Moretti gives the example of Berlin, which is very pleasant for the creative class, with lots of parks, orchestras, restaurants etc. Berlin has relatively low rates and has indeed attracted lots of educated and creative young people, but it has done this w/o creating or attracting creative jobs. Instead, Berlin lives off tourism and government. There are lots of “creatives” living in a type of genteel poverty. (This made me think of Madison, Wisconsin, when I went to college there. We used to joke that you needed a PhD in philosophy to tend bar in Madison, and a taxi license required at least a PhD in history.)
A better-known strategy is for local governments to try to attract firms that will bring with them jobs. State and local governments spend or concede vast resources to get firms to move in. Research shows that this does not work in the long-term. It makes the firms richer, but the money spent could have produced more jobs if they just opened some brew pubs (my addition).
Researchers and leaders study successful innovation clusters and try to copy what they did or have. The problem is that it is easy to see AFTER but maybe what we see was not the cause. For example, ALL successful innovation clusters are near universities. This is not helpful as a predictor, however, since ALL major American communities are near universities.
One thing that seems to work is to have some active and competent individuals. There is no golden rule except persistence. Moretti talks about the growth of biotech clusters. The ones that developed were no better situated than hundreds of others. What they did have at one or more local universities were superstars, people who attracted others. Smart people like to be around other smart people and they attract each other.
You start to be like those you hang out with
Parents often worry that their kids will be negatively influenced by the people they hang out with. This can be good too, if the crowd is good. Clusters tend to have people who pull up others.
Perhaps the best local leaders can do is to run their jurisdictions competently and in ways that create good quality of life for as many as possible. Good education generally is important, but aiming at any particular firm is not practical, since there is so much change. By the time your educated workforce is ready, the situation is very different.
This is a good & interesting book. I think that after (or before) reading the “New Geography of Jobs” it might be useful to read “The Smartest Places on Earth” that talks about renaissances in some of the former rust belt places. I don’t think the one contradicts the other, but they complement and fill in weak spots.

The legacy of liberalism
More than anything else, liberalism was responsible for the great enrichment that pulled humanity out of the poverty trap that has afflicted people always and everywhere from prehistoric times until just a few centuries ago. Liberalism was the instrumental in the scientific, democratic and market revolutions that created our modern prosperity. W/o liberalism, slavery would not have been abolished, our free market democracies could not have flourished and our great universities could not have developed into the innovative and free places they became. The last of these, or more accurately the danger of losing it, is the subject to the short book “The Assault on American Excellence,” by Anthony Kronman.
Let me add a note for both my liberal and conservative friends. The liberalism we are talking about here is not closely related to political liberalism. American Liberals and American Conservatives are both equally heirs to the small l liberal tradition. In fact, the use of the term liberal in the USA tends to confuse foreigners, since parties that call themselves liberal in Europe often tend to resemble moderate Republicans and the term “neo-liberal” refers to free market liberalization.

Back to the book.

Politics versus scholarship
The author is careful to make distinctions that we often ignore. A big one is the distinction between politics and scholarship. In politics, Americans generally believe in democracy and equality. Nobody’s vote should count for more than others. We decide by majority rule and we are generally suspicious of anybody who claims special expertise. Beyond that, winning is important. A political party is not seeking objective truth, but rather seeking to persuade, cajole or even intimidate people into supporting their candidate or platform. This is the opposite of what is true (or should be true) in scholarship.

Scholarship is by its nature hierarchical. All opinions are NOT assumed to be equal and decisions are not achieved by majority vote. Scholarship seeks truth, stipulating that the final truth never available to the mortal man. A university is elitist and maybe even anti-democratic, and we need institutions that are elitist and anti-democratic in a functioning pluralistic democracy.

Islands of excellence
Kronman makes the analogy of islands of aristocracy in a sea of democracy. I thought his choice of wording would get him into trouble, as many people will read that far and dismiss him as elitist. It is useful to read on. He is arguing for true diversity.
I would describe is islands in a way that I know is more obscure, but I think more accurate. These are like the “sky islands” of the Southwest Deserts. As the climate got warmer and drying after the last ice age, plant and animal communities adapted to the cooler and wetter environments moved north and up the mountain sides. Today if you go to the Southwest, you can find remnants of forest and biotic communities on the mountains. There is glorious diversity different from the many miles around.

This true diversity of the university – the diversity of ideas – is being eroded by the bogus diversity of identity and the general democratization of inclusion.

Excellence versus inclusion
Kronman traces the problem to the Bakke case in 1978. Bakke argued that he was denied admission to the University of California Davis medical school because of his race. He was technically correct. The school had set aside a quota of places for minority applicants. Had Bakke not been white, he would have gotten in. The Supreme Court declared quotas illegal but opened the door to a broader diversity standard. This made sense, but it opened the door for the mendacious system we have today and created all sorts of collateral damage for scholarship.

Kronman describes himself as liberal. He marched against the Vietnam War and has always supported Democrats for office. He saw no problem with a quota system, since it was transparent and could be justified based on past wrongs. It also could have a limit based on results. For example, in 1978 Asians were included in the quota as underrepresented minorities. This is no longer applicable, and Asians are among the chief victims of current affirmative action programs.

Diversity of ideas matter; others are mere proxies
The problem with the diversity argument, besides its mendacity, is that it is open ended, and it freezes people into identity, exactly what university is supposed to break down. Student are expected and sometime expect, to be “representatives” of their group, rather than scholars seeking to improve themselves and seeking truth. They are encouraged not to engage, but rather assert of message.

Kronman does not dismiss identity, emotions or peculiar points of view, but he says that they cannot be used to stop the discussion or as a trump card. For example, you might have as special point of view because of your experience. You might say, “as someone with this experience, this is my view.” BUT you cannot expect that experience to be accepted as proof. Rather you need to explain and make the other understand. If you believe your experience is so unique that it cannot be shared, at least intellectually, it is valueless in the greater search for truth.

Marketplace of ideas versus seeking to improve them
Kronman makes another useful distinction about free speech, and contrasts speaker’s corner free speech with an academic seminar. A speaker outside university has no obligation to seek truth, nor does his audience need to listen. The speaker is often trying to convince or cajole – in the political sense above – rather than find truth or even common ground. Audience members are free to heckle the speaker, within reason, and are under no obligation to add useful points. The speaker’s corner experience is a free market for ideas in the unregulated sense. An academic discussion, in contrast, has a leader, a subject and a goal of improving the outlook of all participants. Participants are expected to disagree, but they need to give good reasons. They are also expected to alter their own views based on what they hear or learn. In that end, the whole of the experience should be better than sum of the parts. Participants are expected to grow intellectually. If they come out with exactly the same views that they started, it was probably a waste of time.

Important to note that in the seminar above, participants are not subsuming their identities into the group nor is it necessary to come to consensus. Individuals will still come to their own conclusions, now better informed and more open to ideas. Ideas are not all equal and we can always improve.

If you leave college with the same ideas had when you came, you failed
Returning to university admissions, Kronman advocates a more explicit inclusion of factor such as race and other identities but says that once in everybody should be subject to the same sorts of criteria for judging and improving. What you come in as, you should not go out as. Education means change and we hope improvement, else why bother with it at all. A good university education should break down preexisting identities, predilections and prejudices, not protect them. There should be no intellectual safe places.
The book is very much worth experiencing. I listened to the audio book while driving and working on the farm, so I cannot go into deeper detail in some of the specifics.

Liberal values in university worth protecting.
I fear that we are losing the great value of our universities to excess inclusion, identity and just a lack of rigor. I recall reading “The Closing of the American Mind” back in the 1980s. That book warned of many of these trends. Unfortunately, it has gotten worse. Our universities were and still are a fantastic resource. Yes, the best of them are elitist and elitism in the pursuit of truth is good.

Intelligent people do not make better choices than their less gifted colleagues. In fact, very intelligent people often tend to be amazingly stupid about “common sense” decisions. Let’s add two caveats. The first is within a reasonable range. There are people with such low intelligence that they cannot make good choices at all and there are subjects that require higher intelligence to master, but generally once you get “enough” it stops being useful to have more. The second caveat relates to what we call intelligence. Even though we don’t talk much about IQ anymore, we implicitly judge intelligence by the types of things IQ test measure.

The author begins by talking about very intelligent people who just believe very stupid things. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the supremely rational Sherlock Holmes, believe is spiritualism and fairies, for example. One of the intelligence traps is that intelligent people can think up all sorts of good reasons to believe dumb things. They are used to people deferring to them and people do.

High intelligence is like a powerful engine. It can drive the car very fast, but it needs a competent driver, else it drives very fast in the wrong direction.

I thought “The Intelligence Trap” was very much like a book I read in the 1990s called “Decision Traps.” “Decision Traps” was one of the books that most influenced my life. If it makes me seem shallow because I mention such a book and not some wonderful classic, well too bad. “Decision Traps” featured a lot of useful wisdom and introduced me to the work of Kahneman and Tversky, before they were so famous. It mentioned specific paths that smart people go down that take them the wrong way. “The Intelligence Trap” does that too. It is in many ways and updated version, so I recommend it. It is an entertaining book too. The thoughts are not profound and I have read most of the examples elsewhere, but it is useful to remind ourselves.

Confirmation bias
“The Intelligence Trap” talks about confirmation bias, for example. I first came across the term in “Decision Traps” and the problem has become worse since 1990. Internet is a confirmation bias engine and it does it so seamlessly that we often do not even see it. One way I counter it is to have lots of Facebook friends who don’t agree with me. I tolerate even the abusive ones, since their points of view may be right, sometimes. The flaw in my plan is that some Facebook friends who disagree with me unfriend me, thereby denying themselves the benefit of my contrary wisdom and me of theirs.

This is related to motivated reasoning. This is when you are looking for information to bolster positions you already support or disparage information that contradicts.

Meta forgetting
I like to meet authors, but I always try to cut them a lot of slack. They often know less than is contained in the pages of their books. This makes perfect sense. When they finished the book, they were at the peak of their knowledge on that subject and forgetting set in that same day.

This happens to all of us. We can perceive it with subjects like math or language, but we miss it with other subjects. We tend to think we know all we did on the day we got the passing grade on the tests. We don’t. Good to recall and relearn if we need.

Hard is better than easy learning
Related is the idea that difficulty is good when we are trying to learn. We can often get better short term results when we concentrate. Out long-term recall and use of information is improved when we struggle a little, when we forget and have to relearn. This is one reason why crash courses tend to produce short-term wins, but long term don’t make much of an impression.

A man has gotta know his limitations
Socrates got it right. I liked that the author made many references to literature and philosophy. He mentioned the wisdom of Socrates and Solomon. Socrates was wise precisely because he knew that he didn’t know. He talked to all kinds of experts. These guys knew a lot about their specialties, but they lacked wisdom because they thought they knew more than they did about other things. There is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Solomon’s case was different. He was said to be one of the wisest men ever, but he could not run his kingdom or his personal life well. In the wisdom of that great American philosopher Clint Eastwood – “A man has gotta know his limitations.”
Related to this is expert entrenchment. When people know a lot, they think they know everything about it. They may not know as much as they think, but even in the areas of their specialties information changes. Sometimes the super stars are the ones least likely to want to change. They are doing well with the status quo. This can also lead to functional stupidity. Functional because it works at least in the short term. Productivity may be boosted in the short-term if you do not question and just get it done. It also might help with career success if you don’t rock the boat.

Fixed mind set
My father taught me many useful things. One of the not useful things that I had to jettison was a fixed mind set. He told me that either you were good at something or not. This was not strictly wrong, but it implies that you cannot change. In fact, we have lots of choices. Our futures need not be slaves of our pasts or of our CURRENT capacity.

The author gives the example of Richard Feynman, one of the top physicists of the 20th Century. Teachers didn’t think much of Feynman. He was self-motivated, which meant that he did not always study the things teachers thought important. He was also not incredibly intelligent on those traditional IQ measures. But he never stopped learning. He was always curious and looking for new information in wide varieties of subjects, not only physics. As a child, he was below average in language, but he kept on going and ended up mastering several foreign languages.

The race is not always won by the fastest, but by the one who just keeps running.
The race may be won by the fastest, but sometimes the fastest don’t know that the race is never over. You can keep on going and guys like Feynman just keep on going.
I learned this lesson from my friend David Brooks (the FSO, not the author. David, sadly, died a couple years ago.) What I learned from him was the usefulness of persistence in language learning. David seemed to have little talent learning Polish. He managed to get a 3/3 (enough to pass) but it was bad, so bad that even non-Poles like me noticed. But he kept on going. By the time he was done in Poland, he was among the best speakers. I took his lesson when I was in Brazil. I tried to keep on speaking and learning Portuguese until the day I left Brazil. Not sure how good I got, but I could communicate better.

Better in foreign language
Speaking of foreign language, if you know a foreign language well you know that your personality is different when you are speaking it versus your native language. I thought I was often a better diplomat in Portuguese than I was in English because I had to listen more carefully, reflect more and talk more thoughtfully. “The Intelligence Trap” talks about studies that indicate that people are more rational when explaining something in a language that is not their native one. The idea is that it slows you down so you don’t make the snap judgements. Even when you are very fluent, using a foreign language sets up a firebreak.

Tolerance of ambiguity
Finally, in my memory, if not in the book, is a tolerance of ambiguity. People who make better decisions often are those that can hold contradictory ideas at the same time and not go crazy. They do not feel the urgent need to resolve questions and so can take ideas from more sources. Sometimes you don’t need to resolve things. Sometimes it just doesn’t matter and so we should just leave it alone. Even if we “know” we are right, it does not mean others are wrong if they believe the opposite. Hard to resolve. Just lighten up.