The arts are often viewed as being in some sense “liberal”. This could mean many different things. Art might make people more liberal. Liberals might be more likely to make art. Liberals might be more likely to appreciate art.

I don’t know enough about music to comment, but I have noticed that liberals are more likely to appreciate the visual arts. Here’s Psychology Today:

We already know from prior studies that conservatives prefer simple representational art over abstract art, traditional poetry over the avant-garde, and music that is simple, familiar, and ‘safe’.

I am not going to argue that abstract art is better than representational art—indeed most of the very best paintings are representational. Instead I’ll argue that the appreciation of abstract art is usually associated with a stronger attraction to art in general.

Consider a random sample of people that go to a museum show of abstract art, say a Klee or Kandinsky exhibit. Those people are also much more interested in representational art than the average person. They’d be far more likely to attend a representational art museum show (say Monet or Caravaggio), as compared to a random person that did not like abstract art. Abstract art is difficult, and a strong interest in abstract art is usually associated with an intense interest in the visual arts in general.

Again, I’m not arguing that abstract art is better (I like it a bit less, on average). Rather my claim is that liberals tend to have a stronger preference for the visual arts in general. I have no idea why.

When I visit coastal areas of Orange County, I notice that liberal areas tend to have more tasteful architecture than conservative areas, at least for newly constructed homes. (Say sleek mid-century moderns vs. overstuffed garish McMansions.) Of course there are plenty of exceptions. And both groups like beautiful older homes.

This tweet caught my eye:

I suspect that Stein is just trolling (although he’s right about the bad public policies, apart from some social issues). Seth’s hypothesis is less silly, but is still clearly wrong.

Lap Gong Leong uses the term “leftist”, but the more appropriate term is “liberal”. I consider myself a right wing liberal, and my two favorite US cities are San Francisco and Seattle. I find much of California to be attractive, whereas Florida is flat, ugly and depressing. I’m willing to take a big hit to my living standards in order to live in a place that I find beautiful.

But that’s just me. I’m not trying to suggest that people with different tastes are wrong. For example, I can easily understand why most people prefer exciting superhero films over more “artsy” films that use Mark Lee or Christopher Doyle as cinematographer. Nonetheless, when I attend art galleries or art films it’s pretty obvious to me that I’m mostly surrounded by liberals. So why wouldn’t we expect liberals to pay a premium to live in beautiful places? They care more visual aesthetics.

And again, there are plenty of exceptions—indeed millions of them. So stop whining.

So let me get this straight. The President of the United States encouraged the Chinese to build concentration camps in Xinjiang. The Chinese built concentration camps in Xinjiang. In response, we complain about human rights violations and launch a cold war that could easily turn into a hot war. Increasingly, I feel that America is just a giant lunatic asylum.

For years, the Chinese have complained that American criticism over human rights was not sincere, and instead was a pretext to try to restrain them from becoming a great power. I have no doubt that many Americans (including me) are sincere in their criticism of Chinese human rights violations. But given the behavior of our former and future president, can you blame them for thinking it’s all just an excuse to hamstring their high tech sector?

PS. Campus protesters seem determined to replace Biden with a guy who wants to put Muslims into concentration camps. I guess they’ve learned nothing since 1968. Remember Nixon?

I don’t think people realize how profoundly nationalism distorts their view of the world. Consider a recent comment in response to my complaint about people’s obsession with the Gaza War:

I suggest you ask a Palestinian for their views.

Maybe he was joking, as from a certain perspective this is an amusing response to my earlier post. But I suspect he was serious. If so, then my response is why the hell would I be more interested in the views of Palestinians than the views of Bolivians? Yeah, the views of Palestinians and Israelis differ, as both groups are nationalistic. Isn’t that the problem? In a rational world, they would not hold different views.

I sympathize with victims everywhere in the world. But the solution is not more nationalism, it’s cosmopolitanism.

The solution is the US, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, London, etc.

As you may know, the actual Phillips Curve is about the relationship between unemployment and wage inflation. That’s the relationship A.W. Phillips actually identified, and it’s still the correct version. Price inflation doesn’t correlate well with unemployment. Painful disinflation is and always has been about getting wage inflation down.

Forget payroll employment, the big news in today’s job report is the decline in 12-month wage inflation, to a rate slightly below 4% (and only 2.8% over the past three months):

It’s ironic that the thing that may well cost Biden the election (a surge in undocumented immigration) is the very thing that might (and I emphasize might) allow the first recession-free disinflation. The first American soft landing.

PS. The ultimate goal should be around 3.0% to 3.4% wage inflation.

PPS. It looks to me like wages are about 8% above pre-Covid trend and NGDP is about 10% above trend. I suppose the gap is unexpectedly high immigration. So Fed policy has been roughly 8% to 10% too expansionary over the past 5 years.

1. Commenter Floccina directed me to a video showing Matt Yglesias’s ideal city.

2. A back issue of Harpers had an article discussing the possibility of legalizing drugs. This comment caught my eye:

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask [former Nixon aide] Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Update: There is some question as to whether the quote is accurate.

3. AP has an interesting story on the origins of Covid. Here’s one tidbit:

Governments in Asia are pressuring scientists not to look for the virus for fear it could be traced inside their borders.

And this is even more interesting:

The first publicly known search for the virus took place on Dec. 31, 2019, when Chinese Center for Disease Control scientists visited the Wuhan market where many early COVID-19 cases surfaced.

However, WHO officials heard of an earlier inspection of the market on Dec. 25, 2019, according to a recording of a confidential WHO meeting provided to AP by an attendee. Such a probe has never been mentioned publicly by either Chinese authorities or WHO.

In the recording, WHO’s top animal virus expert, Peter Ben Embarek, mentioned the earlier date, describing it as “an interesting detail.” He told colleagues that officials were “looking at what was on sale in the market, whether all the vendors have licenses (and) if there was any illegal (wildlife) trade happening in the market.”

A colleague asked Ben Embarek, who is no longer with WHO, if that seemed unusual. He responded that “it was not routine,” and that the Chinese “must have had some reason” to investigate the market. “We’ll try to figure out what happened and why they did that.”

4. According to the FT, English speaking countries seem to attract the best people, according to a wide range of metrics including being law abiding:

International comparisons find that people with immigrant backgrounds are generally imprisoned at similar or higher rates to the native-born, except in the US, UK, New Zealand and Australia where they are under-represented in the prison population, a sign of successful integration.

However, these are relative crime rates. Recall that the absolute rate of imprisonment in the US is higher than for most other countries. The following graph is interesting:

I’m actually surprised that the immigrant situation in Sweden isn’t much worse. Given the stories I’ve read about immigrant crime in Sweden, I didn’t expect to see that country so close to the 45 degree line.

5. Chinese audiences used to go for dramas with rich, successful, and arrogant leads. Now beta males are in fashion:

They might work in an office setting in which they are treated as nobodies, but at home and in front of women, they show their husbandly charm. Far from undermining their manliness, the loser label highlights not merely their “worthlessness” but also their willingness to sacrifice. Under enormous professional and personal pressures, young people have no choice but to endure and compromise — to be “losers” — in order to make ends meet. Audiences, able to empathize, are falling hard for men who reflect this reality.

Also from China, cities are starting to ban facial recognition.

6. Dumb and dumber. The exceedingly dumb Donald Trump is seeking a VP that’s even dumber, who will not overshadow him. Apparently Elise Stefanik is among the finalists. She certainly seem to fit the bill:

Job opening: Vice President of the United States of America (serving behind a nearly 80 year old man). Only complete morons need apply.

7. Nate Silver has a good piece on the ways that people form political opinions. This nugget caught my eye:

And sometimes the desire for social signaling can lead people to confused positions. Here, for instance, was a statement made by a protester at a “Queers for Palestine” rally in January.

“Palestine could be the most homophobic place in the world—which it’s not, it’s literally better than here—but it could be, and does that mean all these people need to be killed?” Yaffa asked. “A third of those are children. The children are the homophobes?”

Emphasis mine. The protestor was claiming that Palestine — where same-sex sexual activity is illegal and has sometimes been subject to execution — was literally less homophobic than the place where the rally was held. The punchline is that the rally took place in Northampton, Massachusetts, which is sometimes considered the lesbian capital of the world. You have to be engaged in an extraordinary degree of motivated reasoning to think that Northampton is literally more homophobic than Gaza. The sort of motivated reasoning that comes when there are social rewards both for being pro-Palestine and for being pro-LGBTQ+, enough that nobody in your bubble is really pressing you on the details.

One area where the horseshoe theory applies is that the extreme left and the extreme right are both dumb as rocks.