By our way, I mean the into the race realism camp.The answer is most certainly no, as he likes his pay check, but he flirting with dangerous ideas of late. Unsaid in the this post is that he obviously read and probably still reads Steve Sailer, who made some unfortunate observations about New Orleans once. This essay by Williamson has some observations that are the sorts of things that got Sailer hurled into the void. First he gives the standard lines conservatives are allowed to say about economics.
Economists have many different models explaining how economic growth happens. And though the relative merits of those models are hotly contested among economists, as are the relative weights that should be assigned to many variables, a few factors keep turning up: productivity, capital accumulation, population growth, and technological progress. (Those are the basis of the Solow-Swan model of growth.) While government policy certainly has an effect on those factors, they generally operate at some remove from it: You cannot simply pass a law mandating greater productivity or technological innovation. You can encourage your population growth by (for example) liberalizing your immigration rules, which will probably work if you are New Zealand or the United States but not for Rwanda or Haiti, or a sparsely populated rural community in the United States. Policy can encourage capital accumulation, but it cannot ensure it. We have invigorating political fights about the tax code and stimulus spending, and those are important fights to have, but many of the most important factors driving economic growth are beyond direct political control.
That’s the standard product from Conservative Inc. Their’s is a fight lost long ago, but they are still allowed to wear their uniforms and have parades once in while so they wave the flags of free market capitalism. Then we have this:
But there is a critical variable that is at least partly within the direct control of government: the quality of government. The quality of government — its honesty, competence, reliability, and predictability — has an effect on most of the important economic variables. And not just government itself, but other institutions with the power to shape public life, such as unions and large firms. Quality is something outside of and different from policy specifics, which is why similar policies often produce wildly different outcomes in different polities: Single-payer health care in Bahrain turns out to be very different from single-payer health care in Canada. A high level of government-enforced union involvement has been catastrophic for the U.S. automotive industry but not for the German automotive industry, which is a lot less of a mystery than it seems when you account for the fact that the UAW is not IG Metall, GM is not Audi, and the U.S. government is not the German government.
Guess what else is different? That’s right. Ingolstadt is full of Germans while Detroit is full of non-Germans. It is a lot easier to have a sane government when your smart fraction invented large chunks of Western Civilization. When your smart fraction is barely capable of running a small-time drug den without killing one another, you’re probably getting a government that reflects that fact.
There is no way to put a happy face on this fact: Critical American institutions are of shockingly low quality. Corruption is a part of that: At No. 19 on the Transparency International rankings, the United States is tied with Uruguay. Its transparency score of 73 is far behind where you want to be, among such category leaders as Denmark, New Zealand, Sweden, and Finland (91, 91, 89, and 89, respectively). We lag well behind our Canadian neighbors and such important international competitors as Germany. Our overall standing is not terrible, but it does not place us among global leaders, either. Moderation in the pursuit of honesty is no virtue.
There’s an elephant in the room here. Kevin is a bright guy and he must surely know it, but he likes living an easy life so he avoids stating it directly. Further, he surely knows his readership knows it too. Perhaps Kevin Williamson is deliberately doing the dog whistle thing. On the other hand, the blinkered way these guys see the world can never be discounted. it’s possible he has described the elephant in the room without actually noticing it. Some people never notice what’s going on around them.