Red Mosquito

Bi_3 wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:and i wasn't even part of that board. i just couldn't stand the thought of Bi3 getting cancelled so soon after taking his job with MegaCorp

Thanks. You’re one of the good ones

The economics of political correctness
Kristian Niemietz
30 April 2014
Institute of Economic Affairs > Blog > Policies > Economic Theory

Over the past few years, spiked online magazine has consistently and robustly defended the principle of free speech against the censorship demands of the politically correct, whatever quarter they may come from. It is great, of course, that there is at least one magazine in which the phrase ‘I believe in free speech’ is unlikely to be followed by a ‘but…’, and more likely to be followed by an ‘even for…’. But while I fully support the spiked line, I also think the spiked authors sometimes misinterpret the intentions of the ‘PC brigade’, and would like to offer an alternative interpretation rooted in boring, old-fashioned textbook economics.

Spiked authors believe that PC is driven by a loathing for ordinary people. According to spiked, PC brigadiers view ordinary folks as extremely impressionable, easily excitable, and full of latent resentment. Exposure to the wrong opinions, even isolated words, could immediately awaken the lynch mob. PC, then, is about protecting ‘the vulnerable’ from the nasty tendencies of the majority population.

But if PC was not really about protecting anyone, and really all about expressing one’s own moral superiority, PC credentials would be akin to what economists call a ‘positional good’.

A positional good is a good that people acquire to signalise where they stand in a social hierarchy; it is acquired in order to set oneself apart from others. Positional goods therefore have a peculiar property: the utility their consumers derive from them is inversely related to the number of people who can access them.

Positionality is not a property of the good itself, it is a matter of the consumer’s motivations. I may buy an exquisite variety of wine because I genuinely enjoy the taste, or acquire a degree from a reputable university because I genuinely appreciate what that university has to offer. But my motivation could also be to set myself apart from others, to present myself as more sophisticated or smarter. From merely observing that I consume the product, you could not tell my motivation. But you could tell it by observing how I respond once other people start drinking the same wine, or attending the same university.

If I value those goods for their intrinsic qualities, their increasing popularity will not trouble me at all. After all, the enjoyment derived from wine or learning is not fixed, so your enjoyment does not subtract from my enjoyment. I may even invite others to join me – we can all have more of it.

But if you see me moaning that the winemakers/the university have ‘sold out’, if you see me whinging about those ignoramuses who do not deserve the product because they (unlike me, of course) do not really appreciate it, you can safely conclude that for me, this good is a positional good. (Or was, before everybody else discovered it.) We can all become more sophisticated wine consumers, and we can all become better educated. But we can never all be above the national average, or in the top group, in terms of wine-connoisseurship, education, income, or anything else. We can all improve in absolute terms, but we cannot all simultaneously improve in relative terms. And that is what positional goods are all about – signalising a high position in a ranking, that is, a relation to others. This leads to a problem. Positional goods are used to signalise something that is by definition scarce, and yet the product which does the signalling is not scarce, or at least not inherently. You can increase the number of goods which signal a position in the Top 20 (of whatever), but the number of places in that Top 20 will only ever be, er, twenty. Increasing the number of signalling products will simply destroy their signalling function. Which is why the early owners of such a signalling product can get really mad at you if you acquire one too.

We have all seen this phenomenon. Those of my age (1980 vintage) have probably witnessed it for the first time in their early teens, when an increasing number of their schoolmates tried to look like Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, and being a fan of that band lost its ‘edginess’. ‘Being alternative’ is a positional good. We cannot all be alternative [1]. Literally not.

Now remember how the ‘early adopters’ responded when Nirvana fandom went mainstream, and their social status was threatened, because there are clear parallels with PC: some of them went on to more extreme styles; others tried to repair the broken signal by giving endless sermons about the differences between ‘those who are in the know’ and ‘the poseurs’.

PC-brigadiers behave exactly like owners of a positional good who panic because wider availability of that good threatens their social status. The PC brigade has been highly successful in creating new social taboos, but their success is their very problem. Moral superiority is a prime example of a positional good, because we cannot all be morally superior to each other. Once you have successfully exorcised a word or an opinion, how do you differentiate yourself from others now? You need new things to be outraged about, new ways of asserting your imagined moral superiority.

You can do that by insisting that the no real progress has been made, that your issue is as real as ever, and just manifests itself in more subtle ways. Many people may imitate your rhetoric, but they do not really mean it, they are faking it, they are poseurs. You can also hugely inflate the definition of an existing offense. Or you can move on to discover new things to label ‘offensive’, new victim groups, new patterns of dominance and oppression.

If I am right, then Political Correctness is really just a special form of conspicuous consumption, leading to a zero-sum status race. The fact that PC fans are still constantly outraged, despite the fact that PC has never been so pervasive, would then just be a special form of the Easterlin Paradox.

Keep up the good work, spiked team. But bear in mind that you are up against a powerful economic force.

Teen Vogue Doesn’t Understand the Point of Being a Teenager
The revolt against Alexi McCammond shows that the magazine doesn’t think its readers deserve a sin jubilee.

1:21 PM ET
Graeme Wood
Staff writer at The Atlantic


Yesterday afternoon, Condé Nast, the publisher of Teen Vogue, announced that Alexi McCammond, a 27-year-old former reporter for Axios, would not be taking over as editor of the magazine after all. She had been done in by her own social-media posts, little time bombs she’d unwittingly armed when she tweeted them at age 17. Those posts groaned about her “stupid asian T.A.” and mocked Asians’ “swollen eyes.” She apologized for the tweets in 2019. The Teen Vogue staff discovered these comments, spurned the apology, and revolted.

My own half-swollen eyes widened at this news. McCammond’s tweets are a kind of denigration familiar to Asian Americans—an expression less of hatred than of social difference. If you regard Asian people as a distinct social type, never conceivably overlapping with your own circles, ineligible for friendship or romance or conversation, you might think that you can ridicule them and never suffer any consequences. Then the bombs go off, and instead of standing amid mock-ups for your “Summer Style” package, you are standing amid the ruins of your career.

I suppose a magazine aimed at teens and preteens would strain to acknowledge what every adult knows, which is that the entire point of being a teenager is to make and correct the most mortifying errors of your life. “The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes,” the artist Kimon Nicolaїdes once wrote, “the sooner you will be able to correct them.” Then, at some vague point when the first digit of your age is no longer a 1, you experience a cleansing bonfire of your sins, and your adult permanent record begins.

If Teen Vogue, even in its current woke incarnation, does not exist to celebrate this period of still-expungeable error, then it may as well be calling for the abolition of the teenage years altogether. Its staff, as well as many of its advertisers, evidently think its readers deserve no bonfire, no sin jubilee, and should be hounded eternally for their dumbest and most bigoted utterances. This suggests an intriguing editorial mix of beauty tips, celebrity news, and vengeance. Who wouldn’t want to read what a modern 20-something Torquemada thinks about Zayn Malik’s Netflix queue or a new brand of facial cleansers? Because I am no longer a teenager, I have no teenage years to lose. Although if Teen Vogue has its way, I suppose I should consider myself hostage to the idiocy of my wayward teenage self until I am safely dead.

Teenagers lose from this decision. Asian Americans do too. I know nothing about the racial composition of the staff of Teen Vogue, but the policing of anti-Asian tweets, no matter who does it, is a cheap exercise in identity construction. In an interview published Wednesday, the writer Cathy Park Hong told The Atlantic that fixing political problems requires that we “talk about our racial identity, because people feel intimately close to that.” The solution is to “build an Asian American identity that’s beyond loving boba tea and K-pop.”

The coup d’état at Teen Vogue is the result of a debased form of identity building—one that mistakes an identity worth having for one founded on the pitiless prosecution of offenses by members of other races regardless of whether they are large or small, intended or unintended, ongoing or long-disavowed. I see little harm, and some good, in the various Asian-hyphenated Americans celebrating their communities, and even their wider pan-Asian community. Like everyone, Asian Americans should meet racism and violence with the contempt they deserve. But they should decline to model their outrage on the vindictive excesses that have become commonplace. They should do so independently of existing structures, which originated in categories of Black and white, and don’t work very well for discussion of those races either. Nor is it any failure of allyship with Black people, or for that matter white people, to opt out of these structures. Black identity and white identity are lamentable realities, difficult to unravel because they are legacies of America’s original sin. If, as Hong says, Asian identity is something still being built, a real act of allyship would be to reject the defective templates of its predecessors. No one wants to be stuck in a prison of racial identity, but the prison walls do not crumble because some people volunteer to be inmates with those who have no choice.

The strongest argument for McCammond’s ouster is that she has not been especially gracious in accepting the apologies of others. (This is Wesley Yang’s “Dexter rule,” named for the TV serial killer who kills only other killers: Cancel only the cancelers.) But let’s grant her maximum charity. A world in which McCammond apologizes for her old tweets is better than one in which she sees nothing wrong with them. Possibly worse than the latter, though, is one in which the highest aspiration of racial pride is to slam the doors of repentance permanently in the faces of your enemies. In many religious traditions, expiation of guilt is an earthly process; you can confess your sins to a priest, or wander Earth in sackcloth and ashes. For the sake of today’s Teen Vogue readers, I hope that by the time they are McCammond’s age, the current culture has developed its own process of expiation. Most people were 17 once, and those who haven’t gotten there yet will be 17 someday, and 27 too.

BurtReynolds wrote:Lmao

BurtReynolds wrote:Lmao

Mickey wrote:I can't read the article because it's behind a paywall but it seems like she was critiquing anti-blackness in the Asian American community, which is not a controversial take. iI's pretty prevalent in Latinx communities as well.

Bi_3 wrote:

Mickey wrote:I can't read the article because it's behind a paywall but it seems like she was critiquing anti-blackness in the Asian American community, which is not a controversial take. iI's pretty prevalent in Latinx communities as well.

Definitely school-board material:

Bi_3 wrote:

Mickey wrote:I can't read the article because it's behind a paywall but it seems like she was critiquing anti-blackness in the Asian American community, which is not a controversial take. iI's pretty prevalent in Latinx communities as well.