By Jonah Goldberg – …Humans have an innate moral sense. How we use it depends on the environment we grow up in and how we define morality. The desire for unity and distrust of strangers are universal human tendencies. Of all systems ever created that actually increases trust and cooperation among strangers none has been as successful as the market. The market lowers the level of distrust by letting very different peoples and cultures find common interest. …ideology flows from human nature… and refining the definition of evil is the very essence of what civilizations do Read More
Book Reviews
The book summaries are a mix of interpretations, paraphrases of the author’s language, and direct quotes from the book (without quotation marks). One purpose of the summaries is to summarize the author’s main ideas so that if interested you can order the book. Another purpose of the summaries is to survey some of the most important and soundest ideas in government structure, political philosophy, history, and economics to give a rough idea of how they all fit together. These may not be the best books in each category but all are excellent and deal with extremely important subjects in a very thoughtful manner. A few of the best, and best known, books on many of these subjects are listed in a separate section.
All material on this site is for educational purposes only
Why Nations Fail
By Daron Acemoglu and James Ronbinson – “The authors convincingly show that countries escape poverty only when they have appropriate economic institutions, especially private property and competition….countries are more likely to develop the right institutions when they have an open pluralistic political system with competition for political office, a widespread electorate, and openness to new political leaders. This intimate connection between political and economic institutions is the heart of their major contribution…” – Gary Becker
Balance
Notes on BALANCE by Glenn Hubbard & Tim Kane – The book is a review of the experience of great powers in world history and the political and economic lessons to be learned from studying them. Two thousand years ago, Rome was a stable and prosperous civilization. After 3 centuries of decline from the relentless stagnation of its politics and economic vitality, Rome collapsed. It took a thousand years for civilization and economic prosperity to recover to Rome’s level at its peak. The decline of Rome was not caused by imperial overstretch or external threat. An examination of history from ancient empires to modern Europe shows that the threat to great civilizations is less barbarians at the gates than self-inflicted economic imbalance within. Over centralization of political power is a common factor in imperial decline. Even when ignorance is not a factor, perverse incentives are. For example, we are well aware of the grave threat to the United States from its runaway national debt. Many plans to fix the U.S Federal Budget would work in a technical sense, but none can be enacted. Our political institutions cannot accommodate them. The interaction of economics and politics is the game – with governments competing to find the right balance of laws and behaviors that would yield maximum prosperity with minimum instability. There is a rising fiscal imbalance in nearly every advanced industrial economy. What changed to make the U.S debt level alarming was entitlement spending. In 1971, Medicare and Medicaid cost $11 billion, 1 percent of GDP; in 2010 their combined cost was $793 billion, 5.5% of GDP. Adding social security gets it to 10% of GDP. The CBO projects the 3 programs will cost 15% of GDP by 2030. The symptoms and causes of the debt crisis for every western nation are well known, but the solutions are difficult, because the political structures that support the entitlements responsible will not allow them to be reformed in a way that is sustainable. We could change the rules of the budgetary game through a fiscal amendment to the Constitution. Great power decline almost always follows the same pattern; denying the internal nature of the stagnation, centralizing power, and mortgaging the future to overspend on the present. Most nations are born and sustained by overcoming crisis. Sweden proved that welfare states can succeed with reforms and Greece seems determined to show how reform can fail. The economic crisis now is a much bigger storm than most people realize, and slower; making it more dangerous. The world economic system is brittle, with demographics and debt compounding the risks. When great powers in the past declined, they were rarely replaced by challengers. When Rome failed, the world went dark for a thousand years. Modern economic growth theory suggests that the miracle economies of Asia should be the norm because ideas flow freely and are copyable. Any economy should be able to adopt existing technologies – the best known successful ideas that others have discovered. GNP is the market value of all final goods and services. Neither used goods nor intermediate goods count. In 1991, we changed from GNP to GDP to include goods made in foreign owned factories in the United States. Economics has been improving for decades in understanding the business cycle, but has failed for years in its analysis of macro trends. PWT stands for Penn World Table, a huge data base of benchmark comparisons. Angus Maddison developed an enormous amount of historical economic data on countries going back two thousand years. His data shows the growth of Soviet GDP from 1950-73 did exceed the U.S growth average, but collapsed soon after. They grew by exhausting physical resources, ignoring pollution, human welfare, investments in technology and workers’ skills. Per capita output and income were lower in 2000 than in 1973. There is a correlation between capital investment and growth rates, but it is growth that starts first and investment follows. The book, Why Nations Fail, by Acemogou and Robinson, explains that the foundation for all the various economic variables is institutions. A society’s economic institutions – property rights, work rules, market freedom – are the main factors that define relative prosperity and growth. There are three main types of growth defined economically. The first is Smithian Growth, resulting from specialization of labor. The second is growth from investment, or Solovian Growth. The third is Schumpeterian Growth, which is innovation sparked growth – technology and ideas – better ways of doing things. Politics explains human progress more than anything else. Technology is a key cause of growth, but it stands on a foundation of institutions. Invention is common, but innovation rare. The successful commercial exploitation and subsequent diffusion of inventions make all the difference economically. Institutions explain innovation. Without the right institutions there is little benefit from invention because its use does not spread. Invention itself relies on institutional ingredients – a free market and a legal system that defends intellectual property, and a stable currency. All three types of growth rest on a foundation of institutions. Rome’s growth came from the benefits of scale through well supplied cities, through trade networks, secure borders, respect for law and public works. When the institutional development stagnated, so did growth. Economic power is the foundation of military power. A reduction in military outlays does not automatically translate into a higher growth rate, nor is a higher growth rate incompatible with high military expenditures. The authors have developed a measure of economic power. Economic power = GDP X productivity X the square root of the growth rate Productivity, used here, is the GDP per capita. For the formula’s math, GDP per capita is shown in thousands and total GDP in trillions. So $41,000 GDP per capita equals 41 and 12 trillion GDP equals 12. History indicates that the biggest threat to great powers is not rising adversaries, empire overstretch, or misallocation between military and economic investment. Great powers lose their leadership when they stop pushing the technological… Read More
The Breakdown of Higher Education
By John M. Ellis – The preface cites Bloom’s, The Closing Of The American Mind, Kimball’s, Tenured Radicals, D’Souza’s, Illiberal Education, and Ellis’s, Against Deconstruction, all warning about the dangers of a radicalized campus being created by increasingly radical professors. “This book is of a different kind, since now the campus is already radicalized. …its purpose is to explain exactly what happened and what made it possible; to describe the damage done to all levels of education, ..and to our society; …and to suggest what can be done about this educational and societal catastrophe.” Read More
The Plot To Change America
By Mike Gonzalez – Introduction – The political purpose of identity politics is to divide the country into groups as a strategy to change America completely. Identity politics sees people’s beliefs and interests as determined by their membership in specific groups, particularly sex, race, sexual orientation, and disability status. It is an enemy of reason and Enlightenment values. Identity politics and critical theory are intended to transform America from a culture that values the work ethic and responsible individualism to one that directs distribution of group privileges, as individual natural rights are discarded in the rush to collectivism. Gonzalez defines identity politics as, the deliberate creation of pan-ethnic and other identity groups with the idea that members of these groups should get compensatory justice and adopt the culture of victimhood that this encourages. The book’s purpose is to explain how and why the elements of identity politics came together, who was behind the ideology’s rise, and what we can do about it. The book explains the rise of identity politics, the doctrines and philosophies behind it, and its threat to American liberties. Our government has created ethnic and sexual categories whose members have been instilled with resentments against the country and its system and given real financial benefits for nursing those grievances. Insisting on group grievances thereby perpetuates the identity groups. If we stop this vicious cycle by cutting off the funding we can free ourselves from the grip of identity politics. The book traces the origins of identity politics to the late 1960s and 70s when the white establishment panicked over the black riots. They offered temporary racial benefits to pacify the groups supplying the rioters. They accepted leftist activists claim that there was an analogy between the suffering of Blacks and the experience of Mexican Americans, Chinese, Puerto Rican, Japanese, and other specified groups. The analogy was later extended to women as a group. Activists sought to move the country away from its limited government traditions and toward the centralized state planning drawn from Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxian worldviews. The book’s goal is to change how the nation thinks about identity politics and identity groups by exposing the actors and the theories behind it. The first four chapters of Part I describe how the main ethnic and sexual categories were created. In Part II, Chapters 5, 6 and 7 explain the ideological basis for such category creation; Chapter 8 concludes the book by offering policy corrections and practical political solutions for ending identity politics. To this end, the book seeks to help us understand identity politics genesis and purpose. A particularly dangerous component of identity politics is the coercive diversity to which we must pay lip service. Our children were traditionally taught that all Americans regardless of origin are united in a common cause. The new diversity is its opposite. The intent of identity politics is to divide America into semiautonomous, formal, and cohesive subgroups that have distinct outlooks, aspirations, privileges, and rights. “Social justice” requires the redistribution of resources to members of identity groups. When diversity of race becomes the lodestar, diversity of views is banned. An example is the suppression of speech that the gatekeepers of identity politics label “hate speech”. The speed which identity politics has become acceptable is bewildering. Identity as a member of one of these groups confers a claim to victimhood, which has been elevated above individual accomplishment. Self-image and self-esteem are powerful motivators affecting our chances of success or failure. Identity politics instills self-doubt and encourages you to nurse grievances. Those who go around in search of racial or sexual slights are setting themselves up for a lifetime of self-inflicted grief – they are trading in self-reliance, self-respect, and success. If ever there was a Faustian bargain this is it. We are living in this victimhood culture today. The goal of social justice warriors is not equality but their new definition of equity – equal outcomes, the reverse of equal opportunity. In academia, critical theory seeks to replace Western culture by a full frontal attack on the Enlightenment tradition of liberal democracy. Since it relies on the creation of groups and giving people incentives to adhere to them – the ability to claim oppression is the key to the bank – eliminating group making’s subsidies can rid us of identity politics.. Identity politics is a not grassroots movement. It is an elite project. Pan-ethnic umbrella groups, such as Hispanics and Asians, were created by political activists, intellectuals, philanthropists, and their allies in the bureaucracy. Philanthropy had a tremendous amount to do with creation of identity politics, particularly the Ford Foundation’s grants. Fostering resentment is an effective bonding agent of solidarity for forming groups into voting blocs. Terms such as “minority”, “person of color”, and “privilege”, were introduced to promote the sense of grievance and resentment that is the lifeblood of identity politics. Mexican Americans began to be consolidated into a voting block by Saul Alinsky. His groups trained the Hispanic activists who used Ford Foundation money to fund the ethnic special interest organization La Raza and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). The intellectual leaders of identity politics saw philanthropy as a powerful tool to advance their agenda, especially with the Ford Foundation. The creation of an Asian identity group was spearheaded by Chinese-American and Japanese American Marxists indoctrinated by the Black Panther movement. Feminists in the 1960s were also influenced by the work of early Marxists. In 1974, the Census Bureau created the first National Advisory Committee On Race. Gonzales explains the role of the Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee in the establishment of identity politics, and the way radical organizations have used them to insinuate themselves into the policymaking process. The idea was to first force Americans to divide themselves into ethnic groups through the Census and other means, and then imbue them with grievances, and tempt them to identify with such groups in perpetuity through a system of entitlements like affirmative action, set-asides in… Read More