By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, June 10,
2024
My favorite example of how to think about probabilities
versus outcomes is the guy who buys lottery tickets as his retirement plan. He
never saves for his retirement but buys a lottery ticket every week. Of course,
he doesn’t win—week after week, year after year, he buys a ticket and gets
nothing in return. And then, a week before his retirement, he wins a $1 billion
jackpot.
Now, he has a lot more money than his responsible friends
who saved for their retirements. But it was still a bad plan—a stupid,
irresponsible plan that just happened to work out.
Statistically unlikely things are not impossible things—just
unlikely.
A famous example of this situation in politics is the
2016 election forecast from FiveThirtyEight, much mocked by people who
don’t understand what that kind of analysis actually purports to offer. People
who like Donald Trump and hate FiveThirtyEight like to pretend that Nate
Silver et al. were spectacularly wrong in their 2016 estimate. They
weren’t. They gave Donald
Trump a 28.6 percent chance of winning the election—not a 0.00 percent
chance. Things with better than one-in-four odds of happening happen all the
time—they just happen less often than things with three-in-four odds. It was
the smug, insufferable people who insisted Donald Trump had no chance
in 2016 who were spectacularly wrong (guilty, Your Honor!), but those who were
merely skeptical of his odds were right.
Writing in The Dispatch comments section,
Patterico argues that Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump is much stronger than
critics say and predicts that it will stand on appeal: “When that happens,” he
asks, “will the critics finally acknowledge they were wrong?”
I suppose that will depend on whether they were, in
fact, wrong.
There is a difference between fact claims and claims
about matters of judgment. E.g.: If I were to have claimed that the
gambler in my opening example was guaranteed, at the level of metaphysical
certitude, never to win the lottery, then I would have been wrong. If, on the
other hand, I had argued that relying on the lottery for a retirement plan is
dumb and irresponsible, then I’d be right—even if he ended up winning the $1
billion jackpot.
I suppose there are legal critics out there arguing that
Trump’s convictions will certainly and without question be
overturned on appeal. But what I and other critics have argued is that Bragg’s
case was based on a novel approach to the law, that it was not a matter of
writing Trump a ticket for driving 99 mph in a 55 mph zone. Bragg’s case was
tailor-made for Trump, and it may yet be that the appeals court goes in for a
little sartor resartus. That doesn’t bother me as much as it does
some people: I think it is less in the style of Lavrentiy Beria (“Show me the
man, and I’ll show you the crime”) than it is something like how investigators
go about securing permission to use a wiretap or other invasive investigatory
measures against a suspected criminal. If you investigate someone you believe
to be a career criminal, then you might even surprise yourself with what you
finally come up with in the way of charges.
Contra Bragg’s critics, it is not always the
case that we investigate crimes rather than investigating people—if that were
the case, then we’d forgo a great many investigations of, say, organized crime
figures with clean criminal records. Bragg’s investigation of Trump was
premised on the belief that he probably had committed some kind of crime in the
course of the Stormy Daniels hush-money matter and other shenanigans, and Bragg
was able to show—to the unanimous satisfaction of a jury—that this was the
case. Three cheers for that—but I am not sure that it is obvious that the
outcome entirely sanctifies the strategy ex post facto or that it
is obvious that skeptics were or are wrong to be skeptical. Maybe Bragg’s case
has a 28.6 percent chance of surviving appeal; maybe it’s better or worse.
Obviously, the matter of whether the convictions are upheld will tell us
something about the wisdom of having brought the case—but it does not tell us
everything.
We do not have to accept happy outcomes as dispositive
evidence of the correctness of a course of action, that the end justifies the
means. The problem is that the associated counterfactuals in these cases are
usually unprovable. It seems to me, for example, that the best case the Trump
element can make for having backed him in 2016 is that the two big wins of his
presidency from the Republican point of view (judges and tax cuts) were worth
the tradeoffs (attempted coup d’état, etc.). I don’t think that was, as
a matter of fact, a good tradeoff, but, for the sake of argument, let’s say it
was. There is every reason to believe that a President Marco Rubio or a
President Ted Cruz would have delivered much the same results, if not superior
ones, without such embarrassing inconveniences as Trump’s 2021 attempt to
overthrow the government of the United States and illegitimately install
himself as president. But I can’t prove that. All I can say is that,
while Sen. Cruz has revealed himself to be a bootlicking sycophant, he remains
a first-rate legal thinker and would, one assumes, have made an excellent judge
of judges.
Conservatism is, to a considerable extent, a matter of
one’s attitude toward risk. That is one of the reasons the Trump movement, like
the Tea Party movement before it, ought not be understood as conservative but
as radical—populist, right-wing, and radical.
In one aspect, conservatism is risk aversion rigorously
thought-out and systematically applied to government and public life. It is a
definite style. Progressives and radicals will set their sights on something
good and then, having made the decision to pursue it, run headlong toward that
goal, often setting aside procedures, norms, and constitutional restraints in
pursuit of the good thing. Often, institutional guardrails will be treated with
positive contempt, from Woodrow Wilson’s dismissal of the Constitution to
Trumpists’ sneering at norms.
Conservatives, on the other hand, might agree about the
goodness of the good thing but still prefer to pursue it slowly and gradually,
or partly, or not yet. One reason for that is that we do not wish to damage our
procedures and institutions by running roughshod over them; another is that
experience teaches us that sometimes the good thing turns out not to be so
good. In the 1950s, enlightened progressives were all-in on civil rights and
desegregation—and they were right to be. But 40 years before that, progressives
had been all-in on eugenics, including forced
sterilizations. They were no less sure about the goodness of that project,
which, they assured all, was blessed by science. In the 1930s, the most
enlightened progressives had been all-in on Soviet-style
central planning and authoritarian regimentation, another application of
“science”—it is difficult to overstate the influence “scientific management”
theories had on the progressivism (and general political culture) of that era.
Progressives led the way on both women’s suffrage and on alcohol prohibition—a
very mixed bag of policies.
Conservatives are faulted, not without reason, for
slow-walking their way through the civil rights era when they weren’t being
positively recalcitrant. Fair enough. There was no less fault in American
progressives who ran as fast as they could into the embrace of Stalin et
al. (and the history there is not
as ancient as you might think), but we are asked to provide them with a
moral get-out-of-jail-free card, to understand them as only “liberals in a
hurry.” The same holds true for eugenics and “race science” and other
pseudoscientific enthusiasms with which our progressive friends today would
rather not be associated. To be generally skeptical of radical social changes
or grand plans, as conservatives are, will sometimes put you on the wrong side
of a good development, and it will sometimes put you on the right side of a bad
development. One would think that the great twin political enthusiasms of
the 20th century—the competing versions of national socialism practiced in the
Third Reich and the Soviet Union—would be enough to put us off political enthusiasm
entirely for a century or two. But that isn’t how the human heart
operates.
We must consider that there were many things that needed
changing, a need that found conservatives too slow-moving—or worse: Jim Crow in
the United States and apartheid in South Africa; the abuses of anticommunist
caudillos such as Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet; the various kinds of
social exclusion practiced to different degrees against ethnic, religious, and
sexual minorities; etc. As any serious social critic or investor knows, there
are risks in risk aversion, too. It is possible—easy, even—to have too much of
a mostly good thing.
Which brings us back to that funny word: wrong.
Consider the case of Sen. Barry Goldwater, who will be
remembered mainly—and wrongly—as an enemy of the civil rights movement.
Goldwater, in fact, had a proud record on the issue: Not only had he helped
establish the Arizona chapter of the NAACP (which used to be a very Republican
organization), he also helped fund Phoenix desegregation litigation out of his
own pocket, and he pursued desegregation in both his business and government
life. He voted for and actively supported most of the civil rights legislation
of the 1950s. But he thought the 1964 Civil Rights Act was an overreaching and
probably unconstitutional piece of legislation, warning that, if the federal
government was given expansive powers to pursue desegregation—which he and
other good-faith critics believed to be a worthy and enlightened goal—then
those powers would be used in other less noble ways, with no obvious limiting
principle.
Goldwater wasn’t wrong about that, as
the current mess that is civil rights law attests. But neither was William F.
Buckley Jr. wrong in his later confession that he and other
conservatives had been mistaken (and sometimes worse than mistaken) in their
obduracy about or indifference toward civil rights at the time when the
question was most urgent. Goldwater was a man of principle, but he wasn’t only that,
and his record is complicated by political self-interest (“hunt where the ducks
are”) and miscalculations of domestic realpolitik.
Political calculation in the civil rights era can be
perplexing in hindsight: Strom Thurmond had been seen as something of a
moderate on racial issues—I mean moderate within his context—before his 1948
presidential campaign, during which he made segregation the centerpiece of his
political identity, apparently believing that this was a savvy political move.
Thurmond was one of the few prominent national Democratic figures of his kind
to actually cross the aisle and join the Republican Party—and the one Republicans
should have most readily rejected. Another miscalculation from the party of
moral midgetry.
That we so often go wrong in our calculations doesn’t
mean that we should stop calculating. That our plans so often go awry doesn’t
mean that we should stop planning. What we need is to understand our
limitations and begin from a position of moral and epistemic humility.
If you are looking to derive a program from
these observations, you won’t have much luck. The best we can do is to embrace
caution and prudence in the knowledge that these, too, can cause us problems
when the dose is too large or is ill-timed. And so if we are wise we will in
our political discourse stick to “conversation so nicely restricted to What
Precisely and If
and Perhaps and But.”
Words About Words
Noting our
earlier discussion of the word tot—which means, among
other things, a ration of rum once given to sailors in the British navy—a
reader asks whether toddy, as in hot toddy, might be
related.
Probably not. Whereas tot seems to have
Norse roots, toddy is believed to be an Anglicization of a
Hindi word for a warm alcoholic drink made from the fermented sap of palm
trees. (Maybe I’m thirsty, but that sounds kind of good, if weird.) There are a
great many words of Hindustani origin that made their way into English, largely
by means of the British Empire: pajama, shampoo, cushy, punch, khaki, bungalow,
jungle. These are all words of Indian or roughly Indian origin, mostly from
Hindi or Sanskrit with some detours through Urdu and Persian.
Which raises a question I’ve received a few times: What’s
the difference between Hindi and Hindustani? As one source remarks, it is as
much a political question as a linguistic one. Hindustani refers to an
Indo-Aryan language of Hindustan, which is another word for India, and, in that
sense, Hindustani embraces both Hindi and Urdu, which are, for practical
purposes, the same language with a different script. Modern Standard Hindi is,
like Modern Standard English or Modern Standard Arabic, a kind of synthetic,
literary language, a standardization of a number of different languages and
dialects that each evolved in its own organic way over time. But while English
has largely displaced anything that might really be considered a separate
language (you don’t meet a lot of speakers of Saxon or Anglo-Norman), India’s
non-Hindi languages are very much alive, with millions upon millions of
speakers of Punjabi, Marathi, Konkani, etc. Sometimes, the various Indo-Aryan
languages are referred to as “Hindustani languages,” but that isn’t exactly the
same thing as the Hindustani language.
Or so I am given to understand. You get into some pretty
hotly contested territory pretty quickly when it comes to Indian languages—or
most any other language, especially in a multilingual society. If you want to
start a linguistic fight, ask how closely Punjabi is related to Hindi and Urdu
and see what happens.
Speaking of: Punjabi has about 150 million native
speakers and is the most common language in Pakistan. It is an unusual language
in that it is written with two different scripts: one common in India and a
different one in Pakistan. The word for such a language is diagraphic.
Economics for English Majors
The economics behind the proposed Manhattan congestion
tax—recently killed
in an act of pure political cowardice by New York Gov.
Kathy Hochul—is this: demand curves slope downward.
When conservatives want to criticize a particular tax or
tax proposal, we will often say: “If you tax something, you’ll get less of it.”
That’s true, and it is one of the reasons you don’t want very heavy taxes on
labor, savings, investment, etc. There are times, though, when you do actually
want less of something. But policymakers can be incoherent about that. Sure,
taxes on alcohol or marijuana could raise a fair bit of revenue, but would you
rather have people drinking more and smoking more weed, or would you rather
have less of those things and less revenue? So-called sin taxes generally are
not very good policies for precisely that reason: Nobody can agree about what
they want from them.
You get the same kind of problem with congestion taxes,
which are a form of sin tax—they probably aren’t a very good way to raise
revenue for most cities and states, but they might reduce the number of private
cars on the road if they are set high enough. There’s a sort
of reverse Laffer Curve notion in there: If revenue from a congestion tax is
growing, then you probably haven’t raised the rate high enough—assuming that
what you really want is less traffic rather than more revenue. One of the many
problems with such proposals is that they end up being riddled with exemptions,
special favors, rate subsidies, etc., and end up neither being particularly
good at producing revenue or at reducing the taxed activity.
The old Econ 101 supply and demand curves are not a
perfect analytical tool, by any stretch of the imagination. But they will point
you in the right direction.
I think of a family member who had a very successful
consulting business—too successful, too many customers, too much travel, too
many hours worked. What to do? The most straightforward economic answer in such
a situation is to keep raising your prices until demand for your work is
reduced to the level you are comfortable with. Raising prices is also a really
good way of discovering exactly how much your clients value your work—and what
aspects of your work your clients find most useful and
productive. What you’ll often find is that your clients (or customers) don’t
think about your work the way you do. I spent the first part of my journalism
career mainly working as an editor and manager, and I thought that probably
would be the main part of my work going forward. But the market had other
ideas, and people started asking me to write more and at better rates, while my
editing work fell off. People still wanted me to edit stuff for them, and so I
raised my rates, at which point the market started saying: “No thanks on the
editing. But could we get 800 words on x by 5 p.m.?”
Market conditions change, of course, and sometimes change
rapidly, for all sorts of reasons. Right now, cities all over the country are
watching—with mounting terror—as the commercial real estate market stumbles
toward collapse, led by a cratering of demand for big-city office space
exacerbated by persistent trouble in retail. New York City has basically the
right idea at hand with its two-birds/one-stone approach to converting unwanted
office space into housing, and, because it is a fundamentally sound idea, it’s probably
not going to happen or will happen in a way that is
idiotically expensive and market-distorting. For a long time, it looked like
Manhattan rents went only in one direction: up. Then there was the financial
crisis, and the Great Recession, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the city has
more office space than local businesses probably need, but good housing is
still expensive due to artificial scarcity.
There is some precedent for programs to convert unused
commercial space into residential stock: When he was mayor of Philadelphia, Ed
Rendell enjoyed some real success with a tax-abatement program that encouraged
the development of new condos and apartments. The program didn’t work out
exactly as intended: The planners had thought that the new housing would
attract young professionals but ended up attracting a lot of empty-nesters and
retired people—older, affluent people who were great for things like the restaurant
business. If Philly could have kept a lid on the crime and the chaos and maybe
figured out a way to make its schools suck just a little bit less, it might
have been a model for others. Rendell was at least smart enough to know that
the city’s 10-year tax abatement didn’t really cost anything in real terms:
Philly wasn’t giving up some existing revenue stream from new arrivals—it was
losing population—but was trying to create conditions in which a future revenue
stream might be created.
On the other hand, Philadelphia still burdens workers
with a local wage tax of almost 4 percent. If you want less of something …
Furthermore …
About the discussion of grocery cart returns on this
week’s episode of The
Dispatch Podcast: While I generally endorse consulting Mrs. W about
domestic matters, as the panel suggests, I generally do the grocery shopping,
sparing the lady of the house the logistical challenges. I avoid the apparently
common problem of kids locking themselves in the car by: not bringing four
children with me, and—this is the important part!—not giving children the
keys to the car, you savages.
In Conclusion
If there is a worse
hack in print than Gail Collins, I can’t think of who it might be.
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