Arnold Kling

Very short book, available only for Kindle format I think. Describes the differences in the language used by progressives, conservatives, and libertarians and why they have such a hard time communicating with each other.

Nothing terrifically deep or complex, but he references a lot of other writers I like, like Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow) and Haidt (The Righteous Mind).

And I guess what I really like is that while the author is libertarian I think he is scrupulously fair to other viewpoints.… (más)

One of the moments in grad school that I've come back to repeatedly is the day where we talked about hierarchies of needs and different models to explain them. Maslow and all that. The fact that there were multiple pseudo-rigorous ways to say that food and shelter were more basic and necessary than emotional validation or high self-esteem fascinated me, and to this day whenever I see a system that tries to explain some psychological or social phenomenon by using geometrical metaphors I get reminded of that class. Obviously the basic insight that some things are more important than others is true, yet how can you have multiple different non-quantitative models to explain this? It's basically guaranteed that the most interesting questions will be found where those models disagree, and in that case can you really trust any of them?

Arnold Kling is a libertarian economist who will be familiar to anyone who reads any of the blogs written by him or his friends Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, and Bryan Caplan, all of who get referenced in the book. This short book is a meta-rational attempt to catalog American political rhetoric by using three axes that represent frameworks for how people think about political issues:
- The Progressive axis of oppressor-oppressed
- The Conservative axis of civilization-barbarism
- The Libertarian axis of freedom-coercion

It's expected that people will see different issues in different frameworks, but in Kling's view, people of each political persuasion will tend to look at similar issues using consistent frameworks. One of the examples of an issue that he uses is the cause of the mortgage meltdown that prompted the current global economic crisis. A Progressive might say that banks swindled people into deals they didn't understand by using manipulative language and unleashed a bubble they couldn't control. A Conservative might say that the government caused the crisis by lowering mortgage standards so that poor people and minorities who shouldn't have been buying houses could get loans they had no hope of repaying. A Libertarian might argue that the government caused the crisis through the Federal Reserve's manipulation of interest rates that distorted what had otherwise been a smoothly functioning market.

Kling explains these views and offers cursory rebuttal evidence towards each of thesm, with the ultimate point that whichever of these basic explanations you agree with, you have no hope of debating them with someone you disagree with if you don't understand the lens they're using to look at the situation through. And, thanks to the ubiquitous human tendency to explain away inconvenient data ("motivated reasoning"), a depressingly large percentage of the time people are talking past each other using coded language that's less about communicating viewpoints than cheerleading to people on your "team" that already agree with you. He also discusses the concept of an "ideological Turing test", meaning that you can't effectively criticize an argument if you can't explain or paraphrase it in a way that someone who agrees with it would say that your summary fairly characterizes their view.

All of this is reasonable and true-ish, in the same sense that Maslow's hierarchy of needs is reasonable and true-ish. Kling even has some data in the form of an analysis of some editorials by Progressive E.J. Dionne, Conservative Victor Davis Hanson, and Libertarian Nick Gillespie. Does his 3 axis model explain things any better than the slightly more familiar 2 axis model of economic and social liberalism and conservativism? Would adding in a fourth axis explain still more things? Why not 5? In the appendix he points readers to works by people like George Lakoff, Thomas Sowell, Jonathan Haidt, and Daniel Kahneman who have similar models of political philosophies, but he doesn't explain how his model explains the world better than those folks'. Any socialists out there will surely be wondering what happened to their point of view, and I don't think this book will do much for a non-American.

Overall this book is useful, in the sense that it's always useful to be reminded to put yourself in someone else's shoes, and Kling is pleasant to read, but I'm not sure that this book actually breaks new ground. Making an unfair comparison of this book to something like Aristotle's Politics, or Michael Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics, it's striking how bullet point-ish it feels, and the data is cherry-picked enough to be of dubious value (to his credit Kling is very up front about this). However, you could knock this book out in a subway commute, which you definitely can't say about Aristotle or Oakeshott. Ultimately these kinds of meta-rational works are useful only to extent that they actually explain anything, because you could fill an entire career constructing models about words without actually solving a single real-world problem. I'm happy to read a discussion of perspectives on civil rights, urban crime, or marijuana legalization, but as to learning whether your opinion on them is actually correct or grounded in real data, look elsewhere.… (más)

Kling offers a simple, robust model for understanding political perspectives in a way that can help us understand each other and find common ground. He explains how our psychology drives us to see things through our own lens, which gets increasingly reinforced over time. He also admits the three common political spectrums are just a model, with the limitations any generalization will have. I especially appreciated how much depth this author could provide in a short book full of shorter words than are typical in political science.… (más)