THE LEFT IS THE RIGHT:

Taking on the right-on with cold, hard facts: a review of Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell (Jaspreet Singh Boparai, 2/05/24, The Critic)

These days, “idealism” means never having to say you’re sorry, and Sowell is disgusted by the mechanisms whereby intellectuals are protected from the consequences of their decisions, particularly when their ideas end in failure and cause people to suffer.

Sowell thinks the most dangerous intellectuals are the clever ones who don’t realise they have a faulty grasp of information that could change their ideas. Most of us would agree that decisions ought to be made by those with the most relevant knowledge. The problem is that intellectuals often disagree, not just on what constitutes “relevant knowledge”, but on bigger questions involving what knowledge itself really is.

To a normal person, this all looks like hair-splitting. Yet arguments about the definition of knowledge can have life-and-death consequences. Intellectuals have the job of trying to settle these questions for everyone ’s benefit. Alas, too many of them forget about benefiting others. Many develop a taste for using other people as lab rats. Sowell reminds us:

Intellectual élites crusading for their intellectual goals have, for centuries, seen children as a special target for their messages. As far back as the eighteenth century, William Godwin said that children — other people’s children — “are a sort of raw material put into our hands”. Their minds “are like a sheet of white paper”.

Sowell has a special contempt for Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton University before he became US president. Wilson epitomises the smugness, self-righteousness and passive-aggressive authoritarianism of those who believe in a dictatorship of professors and seem to regard freedom as conditional on your race and whether you have the right academic qualifications to make decisions for yourself.

Wilson is one of the central figures in the “Progressive Movement” of the early 20th century, who were obsessed with breeding and eugenics; Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) helped shape much of their thinking. Grant deplored “a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life”, especially when it was used “both to prevent the elimination of defective infants and the sterilisation of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community”. Idealism provides no protection against dark ideas, it seems.

MAGA and the Progressives are united by their Darwinism.

IT’S JUST WORK:

AGAINST HUMAN RESOURCES (HELEN ANDREWS, 2/02/24, The Lamp)

Only when corporations became so large that an owner could no longer learn the names of all of his employees did anyone start to talk about “human resources” in the abstract.

And even then it was hardly inevitable that the systematic science of selecting and managing workers would end up looking like the schoolmarmish, therapeutic, risk-averse paper-pushing that characterizes H.R. departments today. One textbook defines H.R. as “a largely behavioral science approach to the study of nonunion work situations, with particular emphasis on the practice and organization of management.” This is a pithy way of saying that H.R. sees bosses as economic actors and workers as psychological ones. From the beginning, H.R. has been the discipline addressed not so much to workers’ welfare as to their feelings.

As soon as the field of human resources was isolated from the rest of management, extravagant claims started to be made on its behalf. Henry Ford II said in 1946 that “solving the problem of human relations in production” could be as big a revolution as the assembly line. “Our task is nothing less than to rehumanize industry,” one psychologist declared in 1919. More recently, Silicon Valley C.E.O.s have mixed human resources with California-style spiritualism. Tony Hsieh of Zappos called his management system, Holacracy, “the next stage in the evolution of human consciousness.” His book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, spent twenty-seven weeks on the New York Times best seller list.

Zappos employees were not quite as enthusiastic about Holacracy. When the company offered buyouts to anyone who would not commit to the system, nearly twenty percent of employees took the money and quit. In November 2020, Hsieh barricaded himself inside a pool shed in New London, Connecticut, got high on nitrous oxide and marijuana, and burned himself and the shed to the ground. He was forty-six.

Just let us do our jobs.

A REPUBLIC, IF YOU CAN KEEP IT:

Federal Regulations: The “Administrative State” in Context (Federalism Index Project)

Federal agencies are tasked by Congress to create rules (“administrative laws”), which have the effect of law. Each year, regulatory agencies produce a significantly higher number of rules than laws passed by Congress. According to regulations scholar and historian Clyde Wayne Crews, agencies, rather than elected Congressional officials now do the vast majority of lawmaking today – raising questions not only about the economic cost of regulation, but the constitutionality of the regulatory process as it has evolved over time. Crews has monitored the number of rules passed in relation to laws, and produced a measure which he terms – somewhat playfully – “the Unconstitutionality Index.”

The Unconstitutionality Index measures the ratio of rules issued by agencies relative to laws passed by Congress and signed by the president. The following chart is based on Crews’ original research, and provides a summary view of public laws as a ratio of final rules. While Crews acknowledges that his formula is “somewhat lighthearted” and that there are “unavoidable complexities” in trying to measure the Unconstitutionality of rules, his work does provide empirical validation of the claim that there has been a significant shift in lawmaking from Congress to agencies.

In the last decade, there have been – on average – 22 final rules for every law passed by Congress and signed by the President:

How many regulations?

Measuring and tracking the real size or growth of regulatory activity over time has proved to be difficult. In part, this is because researchers lack consistent measures across time and across jurisdictions. In 2014, researchers at George Mason University published a database that attempted to quantify federal regulation, using the best available data going back to 1970. Using a novel method they termed “restrictions analysis”, the authors created a tool that helps to give a sense of the volume of regulatory restrictions. As the following chart shows, the total number of restrictions in the Code of Federal Regulations more than doubled from 1970 to 2022: