Judd Legum on Critical Race Theory →

In the Twitter thread the title of this post links to, Judd Legum makes Critical Race Theory sound a lot better than the Wikipedia article “Critical race theory” does. In particular, the current version of the Wikipedia article “Critical race theory” has this on academic criticism of Critical Race Theory:

Law professors Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry argue that critical race theory lacks supporting evidence, relies on an implausible belief that reality is socially constructed, rejects evidence in favor of storytelling, rejects truth and merit as expressions of political dominance, and rejects the rule of law.[19] Farber and Sherry additionally posit that the anti-meritocratic tenets in critical race theory, critical feminism, and critical legal studies may unintentionally lead to antisemitic and anti-Asian implications.[61][62] In particular, they suggest that the success of Jews and Asians within what critical race theorists argue is a structurally unfair system may lend itself to allegations of cheating, advantage-taking, or other such claims. A series of responses to Farber and Sherry on this matter was published in the Harvard Law Review.[63] These responses argue that there is a difference between criticizing an unfair system and criticizing individuals who perform well inside that system.[19][63]

In a 1997 Boston College Law Review article, Jeffrey Pyle argued that critical race theory undermined confidence in the rule of law, writing that "critical race theorists attack the very foundations of the liberal legal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law".[64]

Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals argued in 1997 that critical race theory "turns its back on the Western tradition of rational inquiry, forswearing analysis for narrative", and that "by repudiating reasoned argumentation, [critical race theorists] reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites."[20] Former Judge Alex Kozinski, who served on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, criticized critical race theorists in 1997 for raising "insuperable barriers to mutual understanding" and thus eliminating opportunities for "meaningful dialogue".[65]

In his June 21, 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed “Critical Race Theory Is the Opposite of Education” echoes some of these academic criticisms, contrasting the intellectual attitudes in Critical Race Theory to his open-minded Marxist tutor at Oxford. He writes:

Critical race theory—and its various postmodern cousins—is not some interesting interpretation of social and political history that we are free to examine, embrace or discard. Its proponents do not seek to frame a critique of modern America to be tested alongside alternatives.

They insist that a traditionally liberal approach to evaluating the merits of competing ideas is itself an outgrowth of an illegitimate system of oppression. Rejection of their critique is the product of false consciousness, since critical thought is itself invalid, the product of white male hegemony.

There certainly can be a version of Critical Race Theory that is exactly what we need: an “interpretation of social and political history that we are free to examine, embrace or discard. … tested alongside alternatives.” Some proponents of Critical Race Theory will be doing exactly this, while other proponents of Critical Race Theory will indeed be going too far by rejecting rational inquiry and rational judgment of evidence. In any case, those of us who are judging Critical Race Theory should be extracting the rational arguments from Critical Race Theory and paying close attention to those. Judd Legum points to some of those rational arguments.


In Praise of Herbs

For many people, salads seem healthy but boring. But they don’t have to be boring. My giant salad has evolved in many ways since I wrote “My Giant Salad.” Two of the best additions—when I have them—are sliced green onions and fresh basil.

Basil keeps good company with many other wonderful herbs. For example, fresh mint leaves can do a lot to jazz up almost anything. And Americans are ramping up the use of many other herbs. In “The Herb Revolution in American Cooking,” Bee Wilson describes many indications of the rise of herbs. First, use of herbs in typical American cooking used to be rudimentary:

In “Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book,” published in 1950, the anonymous author confidently pronounces that there are just “six simple herbs basic to all seasoning”: mint, thyme, sage, marjoram, rosemary and basil. Except for mint and basil, all of these are described as being good for stuffings and meat cookery, which reflects what a limited number of dishes herbs tended to be used in back then.

The author also grudgingly admits that bay leaves, chives, chervil, parsley and tarragon are useful “additional herbs.” But there is no mention at all of cilantro, which has grown in popularity along with Mexican immigration to the U.S. since then. 

Now, variety of herbs has increased:

Along with the older Western stalwarts of parsley and chives, Americans are increasingly buying Thai basil and makrut lime leaves and fresh methi leaves (a grassy and pungent herb much used in Indian cooking).

Quantity for a given dish is often higher:

Now, under the influence of Middle Eastern cuisine, we are getting bolder still in our use of herbs and seeing that they can be used by the handful rather than the tablespoon. The Persian omelet, kuku sabzi, is so green that there are more herbs in it by volume than eggs.

And the total amount of herbs used is rising dramatically:

Most Americans are using far greater quantities of herbs—and different ones—than in the past. Sales of fresh herbs in the U.S. have tripled since 2000 from 1% of all fresh produce sales to 3%. Fresh herbs used to seem like a fancy luxury ingredient compared with an old-fashioned jar of dried oregano, but a survey in 2018 by Shenandoah Growers, a Virginia-based produce firm, suggested that more than half of all shoppers now regularly buy fresh herbs.

Sugar is the lazy way to make food taste good. Herbs and spices are a more creative way, that avoids the harm of sugar.

Mormonism Wanted to Show It Was American. Now What It Means to Be American Is Up for Grabs—McKay Coppins

McKay Coppins January/February 2021 Atlantic essay “The Most American Religion” is a very long read, but has some incisive things to say about Mormonism. Let me distill out the most interesting and novel threads in what he said. All the quotations in this post are from that essay. McKay is a Mormon himself, and so sometimes uses “we” to refer to Mormons.

One key point he makes about Mormonism is how eager it is for validation in the broader culture. When I was growing up in Mormonism, every Mormon who was a celebrity in the broader culture was precious to us as Mormons. We were inordinately proud of the Osmonds and Johny Miller (the golfer) and the Marriotts (the hotel magnates). Mormons were (as I was) and are a little pathetic in this way because as McKay reports a theater critic telling him: “your people have absolutely no cultural cachet.”

McKay points to the importance for Mormon history of the desire for cultural validation:

Mormons didn’t become avatars of a Norman Rockwellian ideal by accident. We taught ourselves to play the part over a centuries-long audition for full acceptance into American life. That we finally succeeded just as the country was on the brink of an identity crisis is one of the core ironies of modern Mormonism.

The Republican tilt of Mormonism has something to do with the long-lasting effects of a deal the Mormon Church made to get statehood for Utah toward the end of the 19th century. (See “How the Mormons Became Largely Republican.” But the traditional Americanism of Mormonism has to do with trying to get acceptance.

Mormons still longed for full initiation into American life. By the end of the 19th century, they had embarked in earnest on a quest for assimilation, defining themselves in opposition to their damaging caricatures. If America thought they were non-Christian heretics, they would commission an 11-foot statue of Jesus and place it in Temple Square. If America thought they were disloyal, they would flood the ranks of the military and intelligence agencies. (At one point, Brigham Young University was the third-largest source of Army officers in the country.) To shake the stench of polygamy—which the Church renounced in 1890—they became models of the large nuclear family.

Unfortunately, one of the ways the Mormon Church tried to assimilate was taking on at least the basic American racism—something it is at pains to live down now, under the constraint that admitting fully that its past racism was a mistake runs the risk of diminishing the authority of past Mormon leaders. (See “Flexible Dogmatism: The Mormon Position on Infallibility” and “Christian Kimball on the Fallibility of Mormon Leaders and on Gay Marriage.”) And even changing the direct institutional racism required a revelation from God (as subjectively experienced by Mormon Church leaders).

Nevertheless, because Mormon racism was just trying to fit in, on average it never went as deep as the rooted racism that Mormonism was trying to blend in with. As some evidence that racism and its ilk doesn’t run as deep in Mormonism as one might expect from its history of overt, official racist policy, Mormons on average are much less subject to the ugly anti-immigrant sentiments than would be expected from their political leanings and the cultural moment:

According to one survey, Latter-day Saints are more than twice as likely as white evangelicals to say they welcome increased immigration to the United States. When Donald Trump called for a ban on Muslim immigration, the Church, hearing an eerie historical echo, issued a blistering condemnation. Later, when Trump signed an executive order allowing cities and states to veto refugee resettlement, Utah was the first red state in the country to request more refugees.

Muhammed Shoayb Mehtar, who served as an imam in Utah for more than a decade, told me that when new people would arrive at his mosque—many of them refugees fleeing desperate circumstances—locals would show up, offering food, furniture, and jobs. In some states, Muslims worried about harassment and hate crimes. But in Utah, Mehtar said, “folks don’t have this toxic view of Oh, they are foreigners; they want to take over. They don’t have that mentality within them.”

I suspect that my own views on immigration were heavily informed by the 40 years I spent as a Mormon before I left Mormonism in 2000. (You can see my views on immigration in “It Isn't OK to Be Anti-Immigrant,” ‘The Hunger Games’ Is Hardly Our Future--It's Already Here and “Handling Immigration in a Way that Addresses Legitimate Concerns.”)

Mormonism has real strengths in helping people have a positive attitude toward those that are different. (Even those in other religions need to be understood and empathized with in order to have any hope of converting them. See this Twitter thread.) And unlike Progressive doctrine, among the gulfs Mormonism helps people bridge is differences in political views. McKay writes:

Mormonism has a reputation for conformity—starched white shirts and white picket fences and broods of well-behaved white children. But in much of the world, Mormon congregations are characterized by the way they force together motley groups of people from different backgrounds. Unlike most American Christians, Latter-day Saints don’t get to choose whom they go to church with. They’re assigned to congregations based on geographic boundaries that are often gerrymandered to promote socioeconomic diversity. And because the Church is run almost entirely by volunteers, and every member is given a job, they have to work together closely. Patrick Mason, a historian of religion, calls this “the sociological genius of Mormonism”—in a society of echo chambers and bowling alone, he says, the Church has doubled down on an old-fashioned communitarianism.

… at church, my most meaningful relationships were with people who resided well outside my bubble—middle-aged mail carriers and Caribbean immigrants; white-haired retirees and single parents navigating the city’s morass of social services.

Those who don’t know Mormonism well often assume that they have standard Republican views. But Mormonism has a strong belief in redistribution and people’s need for help from others, but redistribution and help from others by the Church (acting either as individuals or institutionally) rather than by the state:

Though Utah is very conservative, its residents generally don’t romanticize rugged individualism or Darwinian hyper-capitalism. It has the lowest income inequality in the country, and ranks near the top for upward mobility. The relative lack of racial diversity no doubt helps skew these metrics—structural racism doesn’t take the same toll in a state that is 78 percent white. But economists say the tightly networked faith communities have provided a crucial extra layer to the social safety net.

For Mormons, there is a distinct set of religious ideals that can win out over political partisanship. McKay has two passages about Mormonism and Trumpism. The facts alone are fascinating, even if you disagree with McKay’s interpretation:

In the past few years, Mormons have become a subject of fascination for their surprising resistance to Trumpism. Unlike most of the religious right, they were decidedly unenthusiastic about Donald Trump. From 2008 to 2016, the Republican vote share declined among Latter-day Saints more than any other religious group in the country. And though Trump won back some of those defectors in 2020, he continued to underperform. Joe Biden did better in Utah than any Democrat since 1964, and Mormon women likely played a role in turning Arizona blue.

Scholars have offered an array of theories to explain this phenomenon: that Mormon communities are models of connectedness and trust, that the Church’s unusual structure promotes consensus-building over culture war, that the faith’s early persecution has made its adherents less receptive to nativist appeals.


… conservative Mormons were among the GOP voters most resistant to Trump’s rise in 2016. He finished dead last in Utah’s Republican primary, and consistently underperformed in Mormon-heavy districts across the Mountain West. When the Access Hollywood tape leaked, the Church-owned Deseret News called on Trump to drop out. On Election Day, he received just over half of the Mormon vote, whereas other recent Republican nominees had gotten closer to 80 percent.

Trump did better in 2020, owing partly to the lack of a conservative third-party candidate like Evan McMullin. (Full postelection data weren’t available as of this writing.) But the Trump era has left many Mormons—once the most reliable Republican voters in the country—feeling politically homeless. They’ve begun to identify as moderate in growing numbers, and the polling analyst Nate Silver has predicted that Utah could soon become a swing state. In June, a survey found that just 22 percent of BYU students and recent alumni were planning to vote for Trump.

Robert P. Jones, the head of the Public Religion Research Institute, says this Mormon ambivalence is notable when compared with white evangelicals’ loyalty to Trump. “History and culture matter a lot,” Jones told me. “Partisanship today is such a strong gravitational pull. I think what we’re seeing with Mormons is that there’s something else pulling on them too.”

An extreme case of a Mormon Republican resisting Trumpism is my distant cousin Mitt Romney voting to convict Donald Trump. Here, some of what I see as the “Stoic” virtues of Mormonism came into play:

After Romney voted to remove Trump from office—standing alone among Republican senators—he told me his life in the Church had steeled him for this lonely political moment, in which neither the right nor the left is ever happy with him for long. “One of the advantages of growing up in my faith outside of Utah is that you are different in ways that are important to you,” he said. In high school, he was the only Mormon on campus; during his stint at Stanford, he would go to bars with his friends and drink soda. Small moments like those pile up over a lifetime, he told me, so that when a true test of conscience arrives, “you’re not in a position where you don’t know how to stand for something that’s hard.”

I have half-joked or quarter-joked often in my blog about “save-the-world” projects. (And I posted my Unitarian-Universalist sermon “So You Want to Save the World.”) I got this combination of grandiosity, desire to make a—and belief that it is possible to make a difference—partly from my Mormon background (and from my high-status within Mormonism as a male and a grandchild of the 1973-1985 head of the Mormon Church, Spencer W. Kimball).

In the political realm, the idea that Mormons can make a difference is encapsulated in a powerful Mormon legend McKay lays out:

There is a story about Joseph Smith that has circulated among Mormons for generations. In 1843, a year before his death, he was meeting with a group of Church elders in Nauvoo when he began to prophesy. The day would come, Smith predicted, when the United States would be on the brink of collapse—its Constitution “hanging by a thread”—only to be saved by a “white horse” from God’s true Church.

Historians and Church leaders have long dismissed the story as apocryphal … But the notion has lingered for a reason. It appeals to the Mormons’ faith in America—and to their conviction that they have a role to play in its preservation.

Interestingly, Mormon efforts to make a political difference are showing up in a certain level of resistance to Trumpism. (For example, “Mormon Women for Ethical Government” arose in reaction to the election that made Donald Trump president.

It should be obvious that I find a lot to admire in Mormonism. And just as obviously, I found many things to object to in Mormonism, otherwise I wouldn’t have left the Church of my ancestors. Many Mormons and many who oppose Mormonism assume Mormonism is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. Not so. Like most complex objects, it is quite possible to learn from and emulate the good parts and reject the bad.

Biological Evolution Right Before Our Eyes

I get annoyed often these days reading or hearing people express their devotion to science but treating science as if it were an authoritarian enterprise. Saying one should believe in the scientists as if they were some kind of high priests is contrary to the spirit of science. The spirit of science is pointing to the evidence.

Now, of course it is not always possible to double-check and personally understand everything that scientists have done, so some degree of trust in scientists is a practical necessity, but the spirit of science is to go as far in that direction as is at all reasonable. For biological evolution, there is a lot that can be done toward citing evidence that can be understood by most people—including by people who want to disbelieve in biological evolution. Cal Flyn’s June 3, 2021 Wall Street Journal article “When Pollution Drives Evolution” is a great help in that regard. No longer are light and dark colored moths the best examples of evolution in modern times.

Let me quote some highlights from Cal Flyn’s article, with passages separated by added bullets:

  • Since the late 18th century, the heavy industry that lines New Jersey’s Newark Bay has belched a thousand insidious contaminants into the waterway. Tanneries used sulfuric acid to strip hides, arsenic to preserve them and chromium to tan them. Hat makers used mercury nitrates to turn fur into felt. Later, factories produced polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), highly toxic oils and waxes once used as coolants and insulators, as well as the phenoxy herbicides known as Agent Orange and their noxious byproduct dioxin—one of the most toxic substances known.

    In humans, these pollutants can cause every kind of cancer. In fish, PCBs alone are known to cause devastating deformities and developmental issues, including impaired fertility.

  • In 2016, a team of scientists at the University of California, Davis, genetically sequenced killifish from four contaminated harbors, including Newark Bay, and compared the genomes to those from uncontaminated sites. The pollution-tolerant populations had each evolved similar adaptations that rendered them up to 8,000 times more resistant to industrial pollutants, allowing them to live in water that would normally kill them.

    This was evolution at a stunningly fast pace, given that the most harmful toxins were released in the 1950s and 1960s. And the killifish is not the only species to have managed this feat. The Atlantic tomcod in the nearby Hackensack River, for example, has also evolved a gene that makes it immune to the effects of PCBs.

  • … tawny owls in Finland are now changing their colors. Tawny owls come in two colorations, dark brown and pale gray. Records suggest that the proportion of dark owls is increasing, which researchers have linked to declines in snow cover.

  • Overfishing and overhunting have driven the evolution of smaller fish, which are better at slipping through nets, and tuskless elephants, since tusked species are more often killed for their ivory. In one South African national park, 98% of female elephants are now born tuskless. And that’s not to mention our ongoing arms races with pesticide-resistant insects, drug-resistant viruses and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

There is no doubt that some disbelievers in evolution will remain unconvinced by even these examples, but I’ll bet that some will be convinced. And the mind and character of the one arguing for evolution is greatly enriched by making arguments based on facts such as these, rather than making an argument from authority.

On freedom of speech as opposed to authoritarian approaches to thought control, see:

Fasting as a Reboot

Link to the article shown just above

Link to the article shown just above

In wartime, during heavy fighting, when replacement parts are hard to come by, soldiers often given up on some of the vehicles, and strip those vehicles for parts to use in repairing other vehicles. This is called “cannibalizing” those vehicles whose parts are stripped.

Similarly, when the body finds nutrients scarcer because you are fasting (for example, not eating anything, but only drinking water), it gives up on certain molecules and even whole cells and cannibalizes them for spare parts. Then when you are eating again and nutrients look more abundant to your body, new molecules and even whole cells are constructed. Because the body is judicious in which molecules and cells it cannibalizes, fasting fosters a type of quality control for the body. The new molecules and cells are generally of higher quality than the ones that have been cannibalized. Thus, fasting, followed by eating again results in a type of renewal, or a “reboot,” to use a computer metaphor.

One of the easiest places to see the reboot in action is by looking at the white blood cells. The blog post “Study Finds Fasting For 72 Hours Can Regenerate The Entire Immune System” by Elizabeth DeVille reports on some research confirming the reboot for white blood cells.

Another, quite distinct way in which fasting is a reboot is that it seems to reset the production of hormones such as insulin and ghrelin. Evolutionarily, it didn’t make sense for your body to distract you with debilitating hunger when no food was available, and our ancestors faced plenty of periods of time with no food available. Our ancestors didn’t face “dieting” in the sense of eating reduced quantities of “modern” foods that have only existed relatively recently. In other words, our bodies are well-designed for periods of no food, but not well-designed for modern foods. Periods of no food that our body is well-designed for can help our body get its bearings.

So-called “paleo” diets focus on what kinds of foods were available long ago. But the temporal pattern of eating long ago—including substantial periods of no food—and the rarity of some foods that were available—for example, honey in only small amounts and that quite seldom—are also very important to pay attention to. Paleo diets have some useful ideas, but they are also missing some other key ideas.

On trying get insulin levels into a good range, see “Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon.”

On ghrelin, let me quote from the blog post “7 Benefits of Fasting and the Best Types to Try for Better Health” by Kissairis Munoz:

5. Fasting can normalize ghrelin levels.

What is ghrelin? It is actually also known as the hunger hormone, because it is responsible for telling your body that it is hungry. Dieting and really restrictive eating can actually increase ghrelin production, which will leave you feeling hungrier. But when you fast, though you might struggle in the first few days, you’re actually normalizing ghrelin levels.

In other words, fasting won’t be as hard as you think; it can be much easier than dieting in the sense of just trying to eat less of what you usually eat. (Eating low-insulin-index foods is the key to making eating less easier and to making the first day or two of fasting easier. See “Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid.”)

Before getting serious about fasting, there are important things for you to know. I have links to my diet and health posts organized in “Miles Kimball on Diet and Health: A Reader's Guide.” Within that bibliographic post, I have a section of links to posts particularly on fasting. Here are those links copy-pasted:

The Federalist Papers #33: The 'Necessary and Proper' and Supremacy Clauses Only Make Explicit What the Specified Powers Imply—Alexander Hamilton

For economic growth, the difficult political problem is to get a government powerful enough to keep private parties, subsidiary governments or foreign governments from the injustice of stealing, cheating and threatening violence, without empowering and licensing the government to unjustly steal, cheat and threaten violence from its own people. The same political problem arises for generating other blessing of society.

Americans on both sides of the debate about the Constitution had this problem on their minds. Those in favor of the proposed Constitution were more concerned about getting a federal government powerful enough to keep foreign governments, subsidiary governments and private parties from stealing, cheating or threatening violence, while those against the proposed Constitution were more concerned about keeping the federal government from overreaching and doing serious wrong.

In the Federalist Papers #33, Alexander Hamilton addresses the design problem of how the federal government should be constrained and how it should be empowered. He argues that it should be constrained by being subject to elections and by having a limited set of enumerated powers and empowered by being given all authority logically necessary to have those enumerated powers.

On being subject to elections:

If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify.

On having a limited set of enumerated powers:

The propriety of a law, in a constitutional light, must always be determined by the nature of the powers upon which it is founded. Suppose, by some forced constructions of its authority (which, indeed, cannot easily be imagined), the Federal legislature should attempt to vary the law of descent in any State, would it not be evident that, in making such an attempt, it had exceeded its jurisdiction, and infringed upon that of the State? Suppose, again, that upon the pretense of an interference with its revenues, it should undertake to abrogate a landtax imposed by the authority of a State; would it not be equally evident that this was an invasion of that concurrent jurisdiction.

On being given all authority logically necessary for those enumerated powers (different passages separated by added bullets):

  • … the constitutional operation of the intended government would be precisely the same, if these clauses were entirely obliterated, as if they were repeated in every article. They are only declaratory of a truth which would have resulted by necessary and unavoidable implication from the very act of constituting a federal government, and vesting it with certain specified powers.

  • What is a power, but the ability or faculty of doing a thing? What is the ability to do a thing, but the power of employing the MEANS necessary to its execution?

  • If there is any thing exceptionable, it must be sought for in the specific powers upon which this general declaration is predicated. The declaration itself, though it may be chargeable with tautology or redundancy, is at least perfectly harmless.

  • The Convention probably foresaw, what it has been a principal aim of these papers to inculcate, that the danger which most threatens our political welfare is that the State governments will finally sap the foundations of the Union; and might therefore think it necessary, in so cardinal a point, to leave nothing to construction. Whatever may have been the inducement to it, the wisdom of the precaution is evident from the cry which has been raised against it; …

  • But it is said that the laws of the Union are to be the SUPREME LAW of the land. But what inference can be drawn from this, or what would they amount to, if they were not to be supreme? It is evident they would amount to nothing. A LAW, by the very meaning of the term, includes supremacy. It is a rule which those to whom it is prescribed are bound to observe.

  • It would otherwise be a mere treaty, dependent on the good faith of the parties, and not a goverment, which is only another word for POLITICAL POWER AND SUPREMACY.

  • But it will not follow from this doctrine that acts of the large society which are NOT PURSUANT to its constitutional powers, but which are invasions of the residuary authorities of the smaller societies, will become the supreme law of the land. These will be merely acts of usurpation, and will deserve to be treated as such.

  • … it EXPRESSLY confines this supremacy to laws made PURSUANT TO THE CONSTITUTION; which I mention merely as an instance of caution in the convention; …

However well-designed a constitution, it will always be difficult to maintain in practice the middle course between a government too weak to rein in injustice and a government so unbridled itself that it commits great injustice. But enumerated powers along with whatever is logically necessary to those powers is a dimension of the design of the US Constitution that gives us a fighting chance, if we honor that principle.

As I write this, I am very conscious that the enumerated powers need to be interpreted in the light of changes in human affairs. The example I have in mind is monetary policy. Here, the Constitution clearly gives the US Federal Government authority over monetary policy as monetary policy was understood in 1787. But our understanding of monetary policy has advanced greatly since 1787. I am glad the US Constitution has been interpreted by the Supreme Court as allowing the US Federal Government to conduct monetary policy as it does today, even though that is not the only possible interpretation of the relevant parts of the Constitution.

As two other examples, I think the power of the federal government under the 14th amendment to protect citizens against infringement by state and local governments against those rights granted in the Bill of Rights has been underinterpreted, while the power of the federal government under the interstate commerce clause has been overinterpreted. (However, federal checks on zoning laws would clearly be within the power of the interstate commerce clause. Zoning laws have a huge effect on interstate migration and on the national economy. Also, the civil rights enforcement powers of the federal government under the 14th amendment also give the federal government power to put checks on zoning laws.) It is hard to avoid the need for interpretation, but interpretations can be of better or worse quality.

In any case, I think we will be better off if we don’t lapse into ignoring the principle of a finite set of enumerated powers of the federal government.

Below is the full text of the Federalist Papers #33, so you can see all of Alexander Hamilton’s arguments in context.

FEDERALIST NO. 33

The Same Subject Continued: Concerning the General Power of Taxation

From the Daily Advertiser
Thursday, January 3, 1788

Author: Alexander Hamilton

To the People of the State of New York:

THE residue of the argument against the provisions of the Constitution in respect to taxation is ingrafted upon the following clause. The last clause of the eighth section of the first article of the plan under consideration authorizes the national legislature "to make all laws which shall be NECESSARY and PROPER for carrying into execution THE POWERS by that Constitution vested in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof"; and the second clause of the sixth article declares, "that the Constitution and the laws of the United States made IN PURSUANCE THEREOF, and the treaties made by their authority shall be the SUPREME LAW of the land, any thing in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."

These two clauses have been the source of much virulent invective and petulant declamation against the proposed Constitution. They have been held up to the people in all the exaggerated colors of misrepresentation as the pernicious engines by which their local governments were to be destroyed and their liberties exterminated; as the hideous monster whose devouring jaws would spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane; and yet, strange as it may appear, after all this clamor, to those who may not have happened to contemplate them in the same light, it may be affirmed with perfect confidence that the constitutional operation of the intended government would be precisely the same, if these clauses were entirely obliterated, as if they were repeated in every article. They are only declaratory of a truth which would have resulted by necessary and unavoidable implication from the very act of constituting a federal government, and vesting it with certain specified powers. This is so clear a proposition, that moderation itself can scarcely listen to the railings which have been so copiously vented against this part of the plan, without emotions that disturb its equanimity.

What is a power, but the ability or faculty of doing a thing? What is the ability to do a thing, but the power of employing the MEANS necessary to its execution? What is a LEGISLATIVE power, but a power of making LAWS? What are the MEANS to execute a LEGISLATIVE power but LAWS? What is the power of laying and collecting taxes, but a LEGISLATIVE POWER, or a power of MAKING LAWS, to lay and collect taxes? What are the propermeans of executing such a power, but NECESSARY and PROPER laws?

This simple train of inquiry furnishes us at once with a test by which to judge of the true nature of the clause complained of. It conducts us to this palpable truth, that a power to lay and collect taxes must be a power to pass all laws NECESSARY and PROPER for the execution of that power; and what does the unfortunate and culumniated provision in question do more than declare the same truth, to wit, that the national legislature, to whom the power of laying and collecting taxes had been previously given, might, in the execution of that power, pass all laws NECESSARY and PROPER to carry it into effect? I have applied these observations thus particularly to the power of taxation, because it is the immediate subject under consideration, and because it is the most important of the authorities proposed to be conferred upon the Union. But the same process will lead to the same result, in relation to all other powers declared in the Constitution. And it is EXPRESSLY to execute these powers that the sweeping clause, as it has been affectedly called, authorizes the national legislature to pass all NECESSARY and PROPER laws. If there is any thing exceptionable, it must be sought for in the specific powers upon which this general declaration is predicated. The declaration itself, though it may be chargeable with tautology or redundancy, is at least perfectly harmless.

But SUSPICION may ask, Why then was it introduced? The answer is, that it could only have been done for greater caution, and to guard against all cavilling refinements in those who might hereafter feel a disposition to curtail and evade the legitimate authorities of the Union. The Convention probably foresaw, what it has been a principal aim of these papers to inculcate, that the danger which most threatens our political welfare is that the State governments will finally sap the foundations of the Union; and might therefore think it necessary, in so cardinal a point, to leave nothing to construction. Whatever may have been the inducement to it, the wisdom of the precaution is evident from the cry which has been raised against it; as that very cry betrays a disposition to question the great and essential truth which it is manifestly the object of that provision to declare.

But it may be again asked, Who is to judge of the NECESSITY and PROPRIETY of the laws to be passed for executing the powers of the Union? I answer, first, that this question arises as well and as fully upon the simple grant of those powers as upon the declaratory clause; and I answer, in the second place, that the national government, like every other, must judge, in the first instance, of the proper exercise of its powers, and its constituents in the last. If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify. The propriety of a law, in a constitutional light, must always be determined by the nature of the powers upon which it is founded. Suppose, by some forced constructions of its authority (which, indeed, cannot easily be imagined), the Federal legislature should attempt to vary the law of descent in any State, would it not be evident that, in making such an attempt, it had exceeded its jurisdiction, and infringed upon that of the State? Suppose, again, that upon the pretense of an interference with its revenues, it should undertake to abrogate a landtax imposed by the authority of a State; would it not be equally evident that this was an invasion of that concurrent jurisdiction in respect to this species of tax, which its Constitution plainly supposes to exist in the State governments? If there ever should be a doubt on this head, the credit of it will be entirely due to those reasoners who, in the imprudent zeal of their animosity to the plan of the convention, have labored to envelop it in a cloud calculated to obscure the plainest and simplest truths.

But it is said that the laws of the Union are to be the SUPREME LAW of the land. But what inference can be drawn from this, or what would they amount to, if they were not to be supreme? It is evident they would amount to nothing. A LAW, by the very meaning of the term, includes supremacy. It is a rule which those to whom it is prescribed are bound to observe. This results from every political association. If individuals enter into a state of society, the laws of that society must be the supreme regulator of their conduct. If a number of political societies enter into a larger political society, the laws which the latter may enact, pursuant to the powers intrusted to it by its constitution, must necessarily be supreme over those societies, and the individuals of whom they are composed. It would otherwise be a mere treaty, dependent on the good faith of the parties, and not a goverment, which is only another word for POLITICAL POWER AND SUPREMACY. But it will not follow from this doctrine that acts of the large society which are NOT PURSUANT to its constitutional powers, but which are invasions of the residuary authorities of the smaller societies, will become the supreme law of the land. These will be merely acts of usurpation, and will deserve to be treated as such. Hence we perceive that the clause which declares the supremacy of the laws of the Union, like the one we have just before considered, only declares a truth, which flows immediately and necessarily from the institution of a federal government. It will not, I presume, have escaped observation, that it EXPRESSLY confines this supremacy to laws made PURSUANT TO THE CONSTITUTION; which I mention merely as an instance of caution in the convention; since that limitation would have been to be understood, though it had not been expressed.

Though a law, therefore, laying a tax for the use of the United States would be supreme in its nature, and could not legally be opposed or controlled, yet a law for abrogating or preventing the collection of a tax laid by the authority of the State, (unless upon imports and exports), would not be the supreme law of the land, but a usurpation of power not granted by the Constitution. As far as an improper accumulation of taxes on the same object might tend to render the collection difficult or precarious, this would be a mutual inconvenience, not arising from a superiority or defect of power on either side, but from an injudicious exercise of power by one or the other, in a manner equally disadvantageous to both. It is to be hoped and presumed, however, that mutual interest would dictate a concert in this respect which would avoid any material inconvenience. The inference from the whole is, that the individual States would, under the proposed Constitution, retain an independent and uncontrollable authority to raise revenue to any extent of which they may stand in need, by every kind of taxation, except duties on imports and exports. It will be shown in the next paper that this CONCURRENT JURISDICTION in the article of taxation was the only admissible substitute for an entire subordination, in respect to this branch of power, of the State authority to that of the Union.

PUBLIUS.

Links to my other posts on The Federalist Papers so far:

Making Cities Better: James Hagerty and Samantha Pearson on Jaime Lerner

Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, died May 27, 2021. He was one of the most innovative mayors in the world, with practical “get the job done cheaply and practically” and “fail faster” philosophy (all quotations in this post are from the Wall Street Journal obituary “Brazilian Mayor Became a Global Guru of Urban Planning,” by James Hagerty and Samantha Pearson, with bullets added to separate passages):

  • “Imagine the ideal … but do what is possible today. Solutions for 20 or 30 years ahead are pointless because by then the problems will probably be different.”

  • Rather than spending years to formulate elaborate plans, he said, mayors should start making changes right away. “Citizens will teach you if you’re not on the right track,” he said.

In line with the “get the job done cheaply, practically, and quickly” Jaime went for buses, getting residents to do some of the work of garbage collection, and quirky rather than magnificent buildings:

  • Mr. Lerner, an architect, decided there was no reason a subway had to be underground. He built a network of dedicated bus lanes with plastic tubular stations, resembling subway platforms, where people paid in advance to speed boarding.

  • Sending garbage trucks into slums was difficult and expensive. Mr. Lerner found it was cheaper to persuade the poor to deliver their rubbish to collection points in exchange for vegetables.

  • … “urban acupuncture,” a quirky building or street feature that lures visitors and revitalizes a neighborhood. One example is Curitiba’s Wire Opera House, made of steel tubes.

Jaime was willing to force through a pedestrian mall in a winning bet that people would like them:

  • When he first became mayor in the early 1970s, downtown retailers had blocked proposals for a pedestrian mall. Mr. Lerner decided to plow ahead without awaiting a consensus. His director of public works estimated it would take four months to transform six blocks of a central street into a pedestrian zone. The mayor responded that he wanted the job done in 48 hours. “We did it in 72 hours,” he said later.

    Once retailers saw the results, Mr. Lerner said, they encouraged him to expand the pedestrian zone.

Finally Jaime respected the poor and existing good things:

  • Curitiba sought to preserve natural features and neighborhoods, while encouraging low-income people to build their own homes by giving them technical advice and discounts on land.

There were a lot of good ideas in this obituary. Stories of Jaime Lerner are good for anyone who cares about cities to hear.

For related posts, see “Why Housing is So Expensive” and the posts it flags at the bottom

Open Conspiracies, Exhibit A: Whitewashing Sugar

Apparently, a large number of Americans and other people around the world believe in what I consider to be implausible secret conspiracies. A key thing that makes a conspiracy implausible is the number of people who are supposedly in on the secret and faithfully keeping that secret. Once the numbers get large, someone usually breaks ranks.

I wish those outside of law enforcement would pay less attention to the possibility of secret conspiracies and more attention to the certainty of open conspiracies: conspiracies that are not secret at all, that anyone can pierce who is motivated and properly equipped with the ability to read, digest and interpret technical material, or simply have the patience to wade through large amounts of text. Open conspiracies are still conspiracies because they aim to deceive those who are ill-equipped to interpret technical material or who don’t have time to wade through reams of documents—and who make a bad guess or bad judgment about who to trust to do that for them.

Prominent among open conspiracies is the lie that sugar is OK in the quantities that the typical American consumes. Anahad O’Connor has done a good job exposing this open conspiracy in a trio of New York Times articles:

  1. Sugar Industry Long Downplayed Potential Harms

  2. How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

  3. Study Tied to Food Industry Tries to Discredit Sugar Guidelines

As teasers to encourage you to read these three article (which are all ungated), let me share some of my favorite passages, separated by bullets I have added (bullet = quotation from the article heading each section):

Sugar Industry Long Downplayed Potential Harms

  • The documents described in the new report are part of a cache of internal sugar industry communications that Cristin E. Kearns, an assistant professor at the U.C.S.F. School of Dentistry, discovered in recent years at library archives at several universities.

  • … the sugar industry launched a campaign in the 1960s to counter “negative attitudes toward sugar” in part by funding sugar research that could produce favorable results. The campaign was orchestrated by John Hickson, a top executive at the sugar association who later joined the tobacco industry. As part of the sugar industry campaign, Mr. Hickson secretly paid two influential Harvard scientists to publish a major review paper in 1967 that minimized the link between sugar and heart health and shifted blame to saturated fat.

  • Mr. Hickson was worried at the time about emerging studies indicating that calories from sugar were more detrimental to heart health than calories from starchy carbohydrates like grains, beans and potatoes. Mr. Hickson suspected this might be because microbes that reside in the gut, known collectively as the microbiota, metabolized sugar and starches differently.

  • The rats fed sucrose, the main component of cane sugar, had produced high levels of an enzyme called beta-glucuronidase, which three other studies published around that time had associated with hardened arteries and bladder cancer.

  • The initial phase of the research appeared to confirm that sugar’s adverse effects on cholesterol and triglycerides were a result of it being metabolized and fermented by gut bacteria.

This research was then quashed. But animal research of a similar type was later used to quash cyclamates, a particular type of nonsugar sweetener (and thus competitor to sugar).

How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

  • … a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of research on sugar, fat and heart disease. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.

  • The revelations are important because the debate about the relative harms of sugar and saturated fat continues today, Dr. Glantz said. For many decades, health officials encouraged Americans to reduce their fat intake, which led many people to consume low-fat, high-sugar foods that some experts now blame for fueling the obesity crisis.

  • Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, said …

    Given the data that we have today, we have shown the refined carbohydrates and especially sugar-sweetened beverages are risk factors for cardiovascular disease …

  • As they worked on their review, the Harvard researchers shared and discussed early drafts with Mr. Hickson, who responded that he was pleased with what they were writing. The Harvard scientists had dismissed the data on sugar as weak and given far more credence to the data implicating saturated fat.

    “Let me assure you this is quite what we had in mind, and we look forward to its appearance in print,” Mr. Hickson wrote.

    After the review was published, the debate about sugar and heart disease died down, while low-fat diets gained the endorsement of many health authorities, Dr. Glantz said.

Study Tied to Food Industry Tries to Discredit Sugar Guidelines

Now, fast-forward to 2016:

  • A prominent medical journal on Monday published a scathing attack on global health advice to eat less sugar. Warnings to cut sugar, the study argued, are based on weak evidence and cannot be trusted.

  • The review was paid for by the International Life Sciences Institute, a scientific group that is based in Washington, D.C., and is funded by multinational food and agrochemical companies including Coca-Cola, General Mills, Hershey’s, Kellogg’s, Kraft Foods and Monsanto. One of the authors is a member of the scientific advisory board of Tate & Lyle, one of the world’s largest suppliers of high-fructose corn syrup.

  • Critics say the medical journal review is the latest in a series of efforts by the food industry to shape global nutrition advice by supporting prominent academics who question the role of junk food and sugary drinks in causing obesity, Type 2 diabetes and other health problems.

  • The New York Times found that Coca-Cola had been funding scientists who played down the connection between sugary drinks and obesity. And The Associated Press reported in June that food companies paid for studies that claimed candy-eating children weigh less.

  • The paper, they say, is reminiscent of tactics once used by the tobacco industry, which for decades enlisted scientists to become “merchants of doubt” about the health hazards of smoking.

One possible weak defense of sugar could use “whataboutism”:

  • “It’s unfair to single out sugar and not [refined] starch,” he said. “I would like to see recommendations to limit both sugar and starch. But that’s half the calories in the food supply.”

Yes! Both sugar and refined starch should go. The fact that they are half of the calories in the food supply only makes the current situation more horrifying. No wonder obesity is going up, up, up!

Getting into the weeds a bit, it is easy for those who want to minimize the appearance of the harms of sugar to point to inadequate evidence. Then if they were sincere about the truth, they would be advocating more and better research. (It is difficult to say that the combination of existing evidence and the importance of the issue doesn’t justify spending a lot to find out the truth.) But often those pointing to inadequate research also (sometimes quietly) discourage further research.

The bottom line is that with big sugar working hard to deceive you, you’ll have to either think for yourself or find someone worthy of trust in order to get decent dietary advice. The US government’s dietary advice has been corrupted by the same well-funded interests.

The good thing is that with open conspiracies, there is hope to get at the truth. It just takes work to ferret it out. We live in a world with truth for the minds of the tireless and lies for the ears of the lazy.

For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see:

OED: A Brief History of Singular ‘They’ →

I posted these tweets giving some of my judgements about linguistic wokeness:

Dan Sloan then gave this useful reaction:

In addition to the specific point, I was delighted to realize that the Oxford English Dictionary seems to have a blog: https://public.oed.com/blog/

Note: I am actually a credentialed linguist. I have a master’s degree in Linguistics as well as a Bachelor’s degree and PhD in Economics. See “Miles's Linguistics Master's Thesis: The Later Wittgenstein, Roman Jakobson and Charles Saunders Peirce.”

Celebrate Failure

For learning, celebrating failure is a superpower. It opens the door to asking the stupid question that wasn’t stupid at all, paves the way to trying something out to get practice and course correct, and blazes a trail for deeper insight.

Show me someone who fails a lot because they take risks, and I’ll show you someone who is learning a lot.

Show me someone who cheers a friend on to take risks and gives them props for courage when that friend fails and I’ll show you someone who makes those around them succeed in the end.

Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes, knew the secret. If you fall on your face or on your rump, pick yourself up and shout “TA-DAAA!!”

In the realm of knowledge, a dunce cap is much better than a crown. Those willing to feel stupid will gain knowledge in a way far beyond the imagination of those who let the fear of feeling stupid make them into cowardly slugs.

Celebrate failure along the way, and you will have a brilliant life.

The Deep Mathematics of Dunce Caps:

Handling Immigration in a Way that Addresses Legitimate Concerns

Many people oppose immigration for either racist reasons or looking down on non-citizens in a way that is just as bad as racism. One way to suss out whether this is true in a given case is to call their bluff when they say (as they often do) that they are opposed to illegal immigration. OK, fine. Let’s be against illegal immigration, but let’s dramatically increase legal immigration. And, as I’ve often said on Twitter, if I get to choose the realized quantity of legal immigration that is a hardcore target, you can choose all the rules of who is favored for immigration and what hoops they have to jump through in order to reassure us that they are trying to assimilate and become American in whatever behaviors and attitudes we think are important in new Americans.

Other than if it helps in getting more immigration, I don’t want immigration to get caught up in the culture wars. The reasons I am for immigration are first, that we need a lot more Americans in order to maintain the geopolitical influence of the USA on a par or ahead of China and second, that allowing people from poverty-stricken countries to immigrate is one of the easiest ways to lift people out of desperate poverty. It may be OK to privilege the interests of citizens over non-citizens to some degree, but I hold to “The Aluminum Rule” that we should give a weight in the social welfare function to non-citizens at least .01 as large as we do to citizens.

But not all opposition to more legal immigration is due to racism or looking down on non-citizens. Some is based on a legitimate fear that to much change could upset good things that we have now. The talk by Roger Scruton at the top of this post points to the conservative advice of “hesitate” when thinking about something that will induce social change and to the value people put on “home,” whatever home means to them in practice. To me, these legitimate fears are why conservatives and Trumpian populists should get a big hand in the details of immigration rules, while the rest of us (progressives, liberals and centrists) insist on a much larger quantity of legal immigration.

The analogy I use in ‘Keep the Riffraff Out!’ is that we should be a proselyting nation as the Mormonism I was a part of until age 40 is a proselyting religion. We need more Americans in the world. And marvelously, due to the virtues of our nation, there are many, many people eager to become Americans. (Anything that has helped make us rich—and especially anything that has given us wages for folks at the bottom of the heap that look very, very attractive to those in other countries—counts as a virtue of our nation!) But to pursue the analogy further, to become a member of the Mormon Church (with some dysfunctional historical exceptions) one has to go through some very specific and detailed instruction and make some serious promises.

I don’t see an ethical objection to putting quite stringent requirements on immigrants. The key is that they be allowed to live and work and send their kids to public schools in the United States and that the requirements seem reasonable to enough potential immigrants that a much larger number of people per year immigrate legally to the US in the future than in the recent past. As an example of some of the restrictions I think should be seen as OK in the interests of getting a deal on immigration, it could be OK if they had a reduced access to the social safety net for some period of time, and it could be OK if they didn’t become fully naturalized to get voting rights for 18 years from the time they first legally immigrate. (The delay in becoming fully naturalized might be important in getting a deal with Republicans.)

What about tilting legal immigration more strongly toward high-skilled immigrants? I am OK with that, too. Although it doesn’t lift as many people out of desperate poverty, it does help the US in its competition with China and probably gives people a more positive attitude toward immigration, which could later make possible some increase in immigration that saves people from desperate poverty. Thus, a big increase in legal immigration, but only for high-skilled immigrants would be a step in the right direction.

What about those who are now here in the US illegally? My view is that if we increase legal immigration rates by enough, that those who came illegally can go far back in line and still be able to become legal immigrants within a reasonable amount of time. Of course, this points to one place we need to not go too far toward allowing only high-skilled immigrants. It is valuable to have a policy that allows illegal immigrants to become legal immigrants without that policy looking like “amnesty.” (Although I worry that any policy that gives illegal immigrants a path to becoming legal immigrants would be called “amnesty.” I’d like to know specifically what policy that gives some path to becoming legal is definitely not “amnesty.”)

Some readers might counter my policy urgings by saying we should help people improve the countries they are in so they want to stay there. There are two answers to that. First, helping other countries to improve their situations, beyond what is already happening, is very difficult. Second, if contrary to my view that improving things in other countries is hard, we could have a wild success in that regard, it would lead to limited immigration even if we had an open borders policy. So thinking it is possible to be wildly successful in making things better in other countries isn’t a good reason not to dramatically increase legal immigration.

In closing, let me say that I am not in favor of open borders. In one of my earliest posts on immigration, “You Didn't Build That: America Edition,” I write:

As stewards of this unbelievable American system, we need to regulate the pace of arrival so that the system itself is not overwhelmed and destroyed, but unless this unbelievable American system itself is threatened, let us open our doors wide to others who have not had the good fortune to be born Americans.

But I also wrote:

We didn’t build this unbelievable American system, and it is not our private property. We don’t have a moral right to exclude other human beings–human beings like us–from the benefits of this unbelievable American system.