🍾🍾 Thought bubbles: cancelling people is fine 🍾 there are too many researchers 🍾 Plato's wheel of fortune 🍾 AWOL political science 🍾🍾

Everyone has to cancel someone 🍾

I wrote this before Trump was re-elected, not as a defence of right-wing cancellation culture specifically, e.g. in relation to the shooting of Charlie Kirk. Certainly not as a defence of Trump’s threats to free speech. But it bears on these issues.

Cancel culture is terrible and has got out of hand. But the general principle of cancelling people is fine. If someone has done or said very bad things, then you shouldn’t talk to them or debate them.

This is because most people — even perfectly innocent, uncancellable ones — are not worth arguing with. Nobody sensible enters into debates with every random taxi driver or social media poster. Debating people is a sign of respect.

Suppose Internet Hitler is a holocaust denier, but has perfectly sensible views about, say, public transport. If you get into a polite conversation with Internet Hitler about HS2, then Jews are going to feel terrible because they will believe Internet Hitler is a respected member of society and his views are legitimate. You should cancel Internet Hitler, and find someone else to talk to about the HS2 rail link.

More generally, cancelling people is how all cultures have enforced their social norms. If you are bad-tempered, the Inuit will cancel you. Lady Caroline Lamb got cancelled for her affair with Byron. It’s how we punish actions that aren’t strictly illegal but are immoral.

The internet made it easy to get people cancelled. Some people started to use it as a way to threaten others. Probably some people even specialized in getting people cancelled, becoming outrage entrepreneurs. That is bad and should stop. But everybody needs to cancel someone. If you make death threats or verbally abuse people, you should be cast out of polite society until you behave better.

There are probably far too many academic researchers 🍾

Two statements it is hard to deny:

1. The process of peer review is ridiculously burdensome. Papers which were written in a month, from first idea to complete draft, can take years to get through peer review. This is especially true in the social sciences.

2. The social sciences are drowning in garbage:

   and I’m pretty sure this is also true of science in general. There are entire subfields of social science that don’t say anything true. There are numerous journals where, by default, I would not trust the headline results. I’m talking about “respectable” journals which are known to specialists and appear in citation indices; never mind the whole layer below that, of garbage journals that nobody has heard of. (Academics get regular emails like this: “Dear sir, we read your paper on Building Regulations In New York, would you like to publish in the Journal Of Nasal Immunology?”)

What theory fits this data? Obviously, that there are far too many academics. We have a pipeline where there’s a very expensive filtering process, but the output is still a flood of raw sewage. That implies that too much crap is being produced upstream. Maybe we should stop paying people to produce it.

A counter-argument is that maybe academia is like the old joke from advertising: half the money spent on advertising is wasted, but nobody knows which half. Maybe academics mostly produce rubbish, but stochastically produce gold nuggets of important research. That argument requires research quality to be intrinsically unpredictable, though: but as I said, some subfields are just all rubbish.

What would be lost if we got rid of the humanities wholesale, for example? I love literature — I have just read War and Peace for the second time, which surely makes me a top-percentile nerd — but I have barely ever read any academic literary criticism. Maybe I’m missing out. More likely, the whole field is just useless. (At this point, I should air my theory that the real point of English departments is an excuse for pretty girls to go to university and meet future investment bankers.)

OK, that proposal is a bit extreme, and anyway, the market is already doing it. More seriously, identifying which fields, universities, departments and individual researchers are producing anything useful, and getting rid of the ones that aren’t, would obviously be a difficult process. But it also seems highly worthwhile, and under-invested in compared to the huge time and effort invested in peer review.

Plato as a political scientist 🍾

In the Republic, Plato puts forward a famous theory of political change, in which states move from monarchy or dictatorship to aristocracy to democracy, and then back to monarchy again. It’s not really taken seriously as a scientific theory today; instead it’s studied in the context of his thought, or as the first example of a medieval trope.

But the theory has two interesting empirical claims, one of which is surely right and one of which is worth taking seriously.

The first is the direction of change. In two changes out of three — from dictatorship to aristocracy and from aristocracy to democracy — the size of the set of political rulers increases. You could extend this a bit and think of a general process where the set of rulers is constantly expanding, until a critical collapse where we flip back to dictatorship. (Think of self-organized criticality: sand pours through an hourglass on to a constantly growing heap, until there’s a landslide and the process restarts.)

One reason you would expect this is that preserving the barriers to rulership is a public good between the rulers. The more members of the ruling elite there are, the less incentive each individual member has to prevent new members joining. I wrote about this here:

Plato’s second interesting empirical claim is about how democracy fails. A key role is played by value change:

if any one says to [the democratic man] that some pleasures are the satisfactions of good and noble desires, and others of evil desires, and that he ought to use and honour some and chastise and master the others — whenever this is repeated to him he shakes his head and says that they are all alike, and that one is as good as another….

In such a state of society the master fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their masters and tutors; young and old are all alike… [the old] are loth to be thought morose and authoritative, and therefore they adopt the manners of the young.

In other words, cultural power follows political power. We are used to this idea in the context of states, where e.g. American hegemony is linked to the spread of Hollywood, hamburgers and blue jeans. But maybe it also holds within individual political systems: when the majority rules, then majority values rule. And Plato suggests, very loosely, that democratic values eventually undermine democracy.

I think today that is a hypothesis worth examining. There’s a lot of justified concern about the “guardrails” protecting American democracy. Maybe one of those guardrails was that previous generations of politicians would have been shamed if they talked the way Donald Trump talks. Perhaps his coarseness and vulgarity, and the popularity of his coarseness and vulgarity, is of a piece with his ruthless vendettas against political opponents. Perhaps, more controversially, this change was enabled by previous generations who relentlessly attacked elitism. For a long time, Republican elites picked front men who claimed to be “outsiders”, running against the Washington establishment, representing the ordinary guy. Well, talk has consequences! Eventually you got a genuine outsider who really did take an axe to the establishment.

It’s an interesting thesis. I wonder how you’d operationalize it and test it.

AWOL political science? 🍾

Which leads me to a final bubble. I started my academic career in political science. I moved to an economics department ten years ago and haven’t really looked back. Now, I think of the tidal waves running over Western democracies, and wonder “where are the political scientists”? For all an outsider can tell, the whole field might not exist.

If you look for scientific explanations of populism, you seem to hear more from social psychology than from political science — explaining polarization or xenophobia, for instance. I don’t like all those explanations very much! But at least I know they are there.

It’s like with the academic humanities. Maybe there’s amazing content in the field. But if the outside world never hears of any, then at best that’s a failure to communicate, and at worst there really is not much there.

Here are the article titles from the latest issue of the American Political Science Review:

• Protocols of Production: The Absent Factories of Digital Capitalism

• Power Over Presence: Women’s Representation in Comprehensive Peace Negotiations and Gender Provision Outcomes

• I’m a Survivor: Political Dynamics in Bureaucratic Elites’ Partisan Identification

• Han Feizi on Reputation-Driven Disobedience: A Comparative Study

• Who Hosts? The Correlates of Hosting the Internally Displaced

• Justice Beyond Rights: Haqq and Global South Migration

• Civic Organizations and the Political Participation of Cross-Pressured Americans: The Case of the Labor Movement

• Climate Displacement and Territorial Justice

• Ideology at Work? Rethinking Reproduction

• Colonial Genealogies of Pluralism: Consociation as Disavowal in Contemporary Democratic Theory

There are more, but I’ll stop there, hoping you are still awake. Not very promising, is it?

A search for “Trump” in article titles gives 21 results; some are false positives — “When Talk Trumps Text” — and just four actually have (Donald) Trump in the title. Searching for “gender” gives 168 results. I tried “populism”, which gave 348 results but most were for “population”, not “populism”.

Maybe I’m wrong: if you have great examples of political science explainers, post them in the comments.

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