Longreads + Open Thread

Longreads

• Oliver Traldi has a delightful critique of Straussianism (the school of political philosophy, not the general practice of hinting at one's secret views in a cryptic, plausibly deniable way). One of the paradoxes of the Straussians is that they're a school of thought with a specific founder and some traceable academic lineages, but the practice of Straussian readings—trying to decode when an author is actively lying to the lay reader in order to transmit a secret message to a tiny intellectual elite&dmash;is a necessarily private one. Take Strauss's claims at face value, and it's a risky practice to openly practice Straussian interpretations: if people are hiding their messages because they literally fear for their lives, is it really a good idea to find those messages, and publish them in books written under your real name? In practice, any time you're dissecting some written work to find its secret meaning, and writing about this, you're doing it under some number of layers of irony, and part of the game is figuring out just how serious everyone's being. That said, a kind of Weak Straussianism, where writers accidentally tip their hands about their true beliefs or hide textual easter eggs for their friends, is probably a healthy exercise. And if you do it, you can be just as ironic as someone who cranks up Viking metal or gangsta rap before trying to hit a new PR at the gym: it's a good exercise that works if you can take it very seriously at one level but be willing to treat it as ultimately kind of silly.
• Henry Oliver has a fascinating look at what makes modern English feel modern. Sometimes, obsessively close reading of ancient texts really does yield answers, in this case ideas about modern sentence structure. Oliver traces the beginning of modern English to the Tyndale Bible, and translating a universal-as-far-as-the-verb-day-Englishman-is-concerned work into the vernacular will tend to crystalize how everyone writes and talks. And reading it does feel more modern than other works from that time. The history of language will always be especially contingent, because some things become fashionable because they get randomly popular, and other things get fashionable because they're a way for elites to distinguish themselves from the rest of the populace. There are more tendencies than rules, but once we start writing things down, talking the way we write, and writing the way we talk, the rules start to gel.
• And on the topic of language, Annie Joy Williams writes in The Atlantic on the death of the Southern Drawl. (One thing I learned from this: if a movie or play set during the Civil War features a character saying "Ah cayunt," instead of "I can't," it's anachronistic—the drawl came later (Incidentally, my kids will occasionally switch to this exact drawl. Most of them were born in New York, but all of them have spent a majority of their life in Austin, and apparently that branch of the accent hasn’t completely disappeared.)) Accent loss seems to be a generational process: grandma and grandma have the accent, mom and dad code-switch between their regional accent and General American English, and their kids speak fluent GenAm and have no clue what "fixin' to" might imply. Mass media has affected the transmission of accents a lot—some of the hippies in this video talk like FDR or William F. Buckley, because prep school graduates were overrepresented in radio and TV when they were growing up. But just as English has three times as many second-language speakers as the next most spoken second language, General American English is the first thing English speakers with any detectable accent learn to code-switch to.
• Naaman Zhou performs a little ethnography by asking why Astoria is a hotbed of socialism. The answer seems to be a 50/50 mix of people who've been there for a long time and people who just showed up: the long-timers include Greek immigrants who were fleeing real or perceived persecution and landed in a neighborhood with a few other Greek people, and new arrivals who didn't have enough time to get enmeshed in Democratic inter-party politics and could be more principled and more extreme instead. One of the ways you know you're dealing with a niche political movement is the constant purity tests, and, inevitably, this piece finds one: someone named Dmitris (no last name, "They have memories of McCarthy") who complaints that AOC et al. are adopting the label "socialist" because it's trendy but have somehow not gotten around to nationalizing the commanding heights of American industry. This piece really seems to be more about how local politics transcend labels. "Sewer socialism" can be plenty appealing to a registered Republican who happens to be peeved about a specific pothole or something. The labels matter for energizing donors, but a meaningful number of voters will pick whoever makes the most plausible case for fixing problems they care about.
• Patrick McKenzie on Regulation E. The best Patio11 posts are the ones that are a breakdown of some topic I had literally never heard of until the post, and this is no exception. It's a triumph of Regulation E that a typical American user of financial products can take it for granted—we can assume that, in the event that we're ripped off by someone who stole our credit or debit card, it's our problem for as long as it takes us to call our bank and inform them that it's their problem now. Making banks liable for a wide range of fraud feels like an aggressively pro-consumer thing to do, but it's really an example of Coasian economics: as long as you define property rights sufficiently well in the beginning, pretty much any distribution of them is going to lead to close-to-optimal outcomes, because whichever side faces the liability will find a way to charge for it. In this particular case, there's a tentative effort to work around the problem, but I came away from it with a renewed appreciation for the fact that when I spend money with my credit card, in the event that I'm wronged there's a company with a trillion-dollar balance sheet and a direct financial interest in making things right.
• On Read.Haus, a reader asks what is the best way to replicate an inflation-indexed perpetuity. This is a really fun question! It's a very bad idea for anyone to sell you an asset like this, since they'd be doubling down on two risks that everyone else takes—slow growth, leading to low nominal rates, is bad for just about every asset class, and inflation is bad for most of the beneficiaries of a low-rates environment. A flippant-but-true answer is that if you want an inflation-indexed perpetuity, you can easily get one: it's gold, and the yield is zero, but it probably will maintain its purchasing power over long periods. The existence of a product that produces a real return and hedges out the risks related to that return is itself a market inefficiency; governments and companies either take on nominal liabilities by issuing debt, or take on real ones by saying they'll solve a problem. So, in a sense, an inflation-protected perpetuity is the economic equivalent to a government that promises that you'll always get good medical care (whatever that turns out to mean) or an excellent education (however that gets defined). These are the kinds of commitments that tend to get reneged on; the closest you can actually get to this is to marry well. (If you follow this advice, please continue to follow my advice when I suggest that you not make this explicit in the vows.)
• In Capital Gains this week, we consider cases where transactions happen, but there isn't really a liquid market. In one sense, operating in public equities is a perfectly egalitarian world where the only thing that matters is your analytical ability. On the other hand, it means competing with firms that have immense resources and are constantly scouting for little inefficiencies they can exploit. You can go elsewhere, but you're just trading one set of problems for another.

Open Thread

• Drop in any links or comments of interest to Diff readers.
• What are some Diff-flavored questions you’d like to see answered? We have a good backlog of posts to write, but could always do more!

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