Sharpening my knife
For those interested in gaining insight into our own problems and how to solve them, the discussion is valuable, but without synthetic explanationswe are reduced to possibly over-fitting historical circumstances to our own.
— Richard McElreath (pdf) reviewing Collapse by Jarad Diamond
I usually ride my bike to school and when I come home, I park the bike unlocked in the street accessible car port. The key thing: I don’t lock my bike.
This morning I had a meeting with a professor and I left kind of early. I noticed my roommates bike, which he parks next to mine, was gone. This was noticed because he usually leaves the house late in the morning and I thought it weird that he was gone early on a Friday.
Anyway, I got back a couple hours later and the bike was still missing. Thinking the roommate must still be out, I was surprised to see him in the house.
“Oh, no! His bike was stolen.” Were the first thoughts that come to mind. When I lived in the Bay Area, I had my bike stolen in front of my house and I looking back on it now I remember being particularly and surprisingly angry about the incident. So, the idea that his bike was stolen raised some old hackles in me.
After checking with him, though, I discovered that, no, his bike hadn’t been stolen. It was raining yesterday and he he left is bike at school and took the bus home.
Remember how I don’t lock my bike when I park it in front of my house? Well, I had another appointment at school later in the afternoon (my students had a review session for their up-coming final). After, finishing there and returning by bike, I parked it in front of the house and then I locked it.
Why the hell did I lock my bike this afternoon? I had no new information about the trust-worthiness of my neighbors. I didn’t discover the odds of getting one’s bike stolen were higher than expected. The relevant facts did not change, so why did my behavior?
I guess I just did something funny.
This post by Cass Sunstein (I think) reminded me of that thing I was talking about last week. Paraphrasing myself: “social facts are different than physical facts… blah blah blah… one of the things that makes them different is they change over time.”
Sunstein argues the second amendment has only very recently been broadly interpreted by experts as granting an individual right to own guns. For example, “[a]s recently as 1992, Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative Republican appointee, rejected the individual rights view in public.” He speculates as to what caused this change: better interpretation of the amendment (the scholarship had it wrong before), the NRA cajoled everyone into believing the more pro-gun view, judges (who have a lot of sway in the public imagination in these matters) have become more conservative or there has been information cascades.
Even if supposing what he says about the shifting consensus is true, I’m not sure what to make of Sunstein’s list. Are these things causes of the shift or effects of it? For example, maybe judges are becoming more pro-gun rights because the politicians who appoint them are pro-gun. Politicians are being elected by people that had already become more pro-gun. The consensus changed so the judges changed.
Also, information cascades may be a mechanism for the consensus on the second amendment to change, but it wouldn’t be the cause of a change. There’s no reason why a different consensus wouldn’t have been “cascaded”, so to speak. Sunstein mentions some prominent liberal scholars that helped legitimize the individual rights view. Why did these scholars have such sway whereas other anti-individual rights scholars relatively little sway?1
Another issue is why does the shifting consensus of academics and judges matter. Because they’re the experts, does their interpretation of the amendment become the truth about it? Are social facts just the consensus of experts or the elite? If so, who makes up an elite or who gets to call themselves experts? I think the answers to these questions will depend on which domain we’re talking about, but it seems likely that the expert consensus matters less in the area of constitutional law, especially in democracies.
What causes social facts, like the interpretation of the second amendment, to change over time? There could be “real” changes like the physical facts or other higher-order social facts (e.g. the scholarly reinterpretation of the amendment) have changed. Otherwise, there may be legitimate (e.g. judges) or illegitimate (e.g. special interests) power shifts in society. One group becomes relatively more powerful2 and so their views become more important in determining the social fact.
A JEST.
It was asked of a painter why, since he made such beautiful figures,
which were but dead things, his children were so ugly; to which the
painter replied that he made his pictures by day, and his children
by night.
Growing up a red-blooded American, I believed America was a special place, a proud beacon shining the light of freedom upon humanity… or something. Anyway, I listened to Rush Limbaugh.
Then I went to Berkeley and they cured me of those ideas and I started listening to Democracy Now!.
Statistically, though, the U.S. is a special place. I don’t mean special in the we’re-an-outlier-in-the-good-way sense. I mean special in the why-the-hell-do-they-compare-Sweden (pop. 9m)-to-a-country-with-300m-people sense. We’re bigger than most everyone else. This means our political system is different (making our institutions different) than most other places, too. Scale suggests our “Parliament” shouldn’t spend much time debating airport expansions and hospital locations. Transportation and health care policy are delegated to the State level.
In comparing most policy differences, then, it makes sense to compare U.S. States to other countries, a la this map:
And in some cases, its more appropriate to compare U.S. cities to countries… like Sweden vs. New York City (population 8m).
