Steven Klein

"The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State" out now with Cambridge University Press. Here's my overview of the argument in @jacobinmag: jacobinmag.com/2020/10/welfar…

This paper is receiving a fair amount of attention, primarily as ammunition in academic culture wars. The basic exercise is an LLM-based assignment of social science extracts to one of 10 ideology levels (right to left) that are defined by views of a set of political figures plus a Monthly Review writer. The analysis does *not* provide credible evidence on ideological bias/imbalance in social sciences. It is disappointing to see academics tout the paper. I frankly doubt most of them have even bothered to read it and certainly have not thought about the empirical methods. What are the problems? 1. Arbitrariness of ideology scale. The exercise reifies a set of subjective choices about ideological categories and treats their putative rank order from 1 to 10 as cardinal measures of ideological orientation. Why is Tom Cotton and not Mitt Romney the choice for center right? Why is Joe Machin the anchor for the measurements, i.e. defined as a moderate? One can go on. There is no reason to believe the results are robust to different choices of figures for the various ideological categories. 2. Cardinal measures are inappropriate for ideological positions as used in the paper. Conditional on the choices of figures to rank order different positions on a right left scale, it is not meaningful to say the ideological distance between Cotton and Manchin is the same as between Manchin and Biden, etc. By implications the ideology scores for papers are not meaningful. 3. The ideology measurements are not interpretable even in an ordinal sense. The analysis assumes a scalar notion of ideology which is not tenable. 4. The exercise is a black box as to *why* an abstract is associated with the ideology of a particular figure. Without understanding how the association is done, substantive claims the papers under study cannot be made. The article gives an example that illustrates the problem. Ronald Oaxaca's classic 1973 paper "Male-Female Wage Differentials in Urban Labor Markets" is ranked as 7, a match to Elizabeth Warren and thus "progressive". The abstract contains this sentence "Culture, tradition, and discrimination tend to make restrictive the terms by which women may participate in the labor force." which presumably is the source of the match. But anyone who knows the article also knows it is an exploration of how to identify discrimination versus other sources of Male/Female labor market differences. The method Oaxaca developed in fact provide a way to remove nondiscriminatory reasons for M/F differences. The only sense in which it is "progressive" is if one thinks that interest in the role of discrimination in labor market outcomes is sufficient to label a paper as progressive. This is obviously nonsensical. More generally the association of a paper's abstract to a political positions does not distinguish between 1) the subject matter is putatively of interest to left versus right figures versus or 2) the paper's analysis has been affected by ideology. This identification failure also undermines the paper's claim that social science has drifted to the left. Consider economics. It is certainly true that interest in inequality has increased in economics. This reflects, in my opinion, an intellectual enrichment of the field. I would go so far as to say inequality was understudied 40 years ago. Further, the openness of economists to sociological and psychological factors in understanding inequality has changed. If, as suggested by then Oaxaca example, the LLM used here codes papers on inequality as "left" then the purported ideological drift is scientifically desirable. If one wants to criticize the role of ideology in social science, it is necessary to delve into the details of particular research programs and specific arguments and analyses. The type of exercise conducted in this paper is not informative.

They've released more seats for the March 26th talk in London.— kcl.ac.uk/events/why-the…

John Mearsheimer, Oct. 3 2024: "I think that Biden's basic instincts are those of a warmonger, and I think that's not true of Trump. I think Trump is not that interested in fighting wars."

Excellent review of Natasha Piano's groundbreaking Democratic elitism: the founding myth of American political science. Far from being advocates of a "realistic" view of democracy, the Italian elite theorists warn us of the plutocratic dangers of election link.springer.com/article/10.105…

if we want a calibration for the potential response that chomsky et al could have pursued, we have norman finkelstein's blunt assessment of epstein's character

tfw when a significant chunk of prominent anti-woke voices were buddies with epstein

⏰ Call for proposals!⏰ Organisers are calling for full panel proposals, author-meets-critics sessions, or individual papers from those who would like to attend the next annual PPE conference at King's The deadline for submissions is February 20👇 ppesociety.org/ppe-society-lo…

Basically a succession episode

@samuelmoyn @daniel_dsj2110 Yet I think we as academics and observers should call a spade a spade (trump is anti democratic and a threat to democracy) and leave tactics to others.

@samuelmoyn @daniel_dsj2110 In that sense, I think the internal rot of the Democratic Party, which has due to its internal clientalism anointed and protected a series of clearly deeply flawed candidates, is causally responsible for Trump's rise.

One can, of course, resist Trump without accepting the fascist thesis of the NYT and MSNBC resistance liberals: nytimes.com/2026/01/12/opi…

@samuelmoyn @daniel_dsj2110 Yes agreed on not absolving. Not sure I fully follow re tactics, I think she is making a point more about basic political analysis. A question: do you think Trump is a threat to American democracy. If not, do you think people can think that now without it being tyrannaphobia?

@stevenmklein @daniel_dsj2110 Agreed on the second part but the first strikes me as wildly off. Even if so, it doesn’t absolve Trump’s people from responding as they have. And I’d say Michelle is most wrong in confusing how resistance has evolved given the changing opponent.

@samuelmoyn @daniel_dsj2110 Every presidency faces that. Other than the Muller investigation, none of this is outside the normal zone of American politics. And no president has reacted by trying to systematically dominate or destroy any major source of independent political check.

@stevenmklein @daniel_dsj2110 In part, not mainly, let alone wholly of course. But it’s clearly the case that part of Trump 2.0 is a direct response to Resistance strategies such as turning to friendly Republicans, calling for bureaucratic obstructionism, or engaging legal countermobilization (“lawfare”).

@daniel_dsj2110 I think what I see as an observer of this debate is someone makes a substantive argument (ie goldberg saying the fascism side is right) and are met either with an eye roll or some response about tactics (or in this case kinda both) rather than a substantive response

@daniel_dsj2110 Are you saying that the more intensified activities are still not fascist? What is the conceptual demarcation? What would need to be added? And that also ignores how to interpret Jan 6 which seems to confirm the fascism thesis at a moment of weakness

@samuelmoyn @daniel_dsj2110 So you think trump is doing what he is doing because of resistance liberalism? I guess I think trump and people in his orbit have their own agendas that they have developed on their own.

@daniel_dsj2110 @stevenmklein And because Resistance strategies failed in the first term to stave off Trump’s second term, while also affecting his own strategies this time around.

@daniel_dsj2110 But now the question is how the not a fascist/tyrannaphobia view should be updated with Jan 6, imperial wars, creation of a white supremacist paramilitary via ICE

@daniel_dsj2110 Does anyone dispute that? Yet the idea of "tyrannaphobia" does seem to point to delimiting resistance and things like civil disobedience. There are tactical implications to whether you view trump as a normal but bad manifestation of American politics or a threat to democracy.