Academics From Canada

"But the core connection between himself and his followers was their great fear of the future. As Ann Coulter, his strong promoter during the campaign and reputed source of his anti-immigration rhetoric, said “He had me with ‘Mexican rapists.’” Trump’s MAGA slogan resonated with masses of “forgotten Americans” who indeed felt America wasn’t great anymore. Everything was changing. All the old standards were being trashed. The things that gave them whatever precarious advantage they had in life, being white (and for most of them) being male counted for less and less. Instead the United States was filling up with bad people who would blow up your church, steal your jobs and get your kids hooked on drugs."

"The long run prospects encourage one. Trump has solid support among my generation of Americans, for example, especially men, but we are not going to last forever. Some suppose that people become more authoritarian as they age, and so one batch of old white men will just be replaced by another. But studies show that political opinions tend to be set in early adulthood and endure. Today’s youth, better educated and wonderfully less ethnocentric than their predecessors, give one great hope for the future of American democracy in the long run. But this is like climate change. We were warned plenty that we were creating a disaster in the only atmosphere we’ve got, and we kept on doing it. Now we are facing the consequences. Whether American democracy endures could well depend on what happens at the polls in 2018 and 2020. Authoritarian leaders and authoritarian followers have no great love of freedom and equality. Those who do had better organize and get out the vote, or they will make Donald Trump look like the super-genius he believes he is."

"Eleanor now considers herself an agnostic, having stopped thinking of herself as a Lutheran in a religious sense whens he was about seventeen. However, "I'm still a member of the Lutheran church. I still go on Christmas Eve and all that," and "if I get married, I'm going to get married in a Lutheran church." She is now at peace with her agnosticism and no longer feels any guilt or fear because of her beliefs. "Just because I don't believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God, I'm not going to be damned to some eternal hell, if there is such a thing. It just does not make any sense to me." If she could find some way to reconcile religious teachings with her current belief, Eleanor could conceivably go back to being an active Lutheran. But it isn't likely because "I just don't believe that, really, any religion has the absolute answer." In response to the "Back to the Future" scenario, Eleanor said that she would tell her younger self about the intolerance, contradictions, closed-mindedness, and so on that she saw in religion. Her fourteen-year-old self would have been surprised at all this, and "a bit stubborn," but she "would have gone home and thought about it and started looking at things on her own." Why is Eleanor different from most people her age, who question but then accept religious teachings? "I have always considered myself to be really analytical about things. I can't knowingly have two beliefs that contradict each other." Also, it would be hypocritical to pretend to believe in something that she cannot accept, something she believes many "religious" people do."

"Eleanor's questions caused some anxiety, since "you are taught that you have to go this way or you'll go to hell." Near the end of her confirmation classes she gave a speech "intended to really question a lot of the beliefs." However, "it was so subtle that I guess nobody really caught on to it and they were all saying it was such a great speech." This made Eleanor feel guilty, since she appeared to be supporting religion when she had meant to question it. She did have some discussions with her minister about her questions, but found the answers to be unsatisfying. Sessions with a devoted Christian friend were much more influential. The two friends would often debate Christian teachings, with Eleanor taking the questioning position, and her friend defending religious beliefs. Similar discussions occurred in a high school English class. Eleanor's purpose in these debates was to make religion work for her. "I was trying at that point to tie everything to a religious framework that would allow me to believe in Christianity." But she couldn't find the answers she was looking for, and became less religious. She also hunted for answers in the Bible, which she read every evening before she went to bed. Eleanor misses those readings even today, "because it gives you a focus and if you believe in it, you have all the answers you're looking for right there in the Bible." But they were answers she could not accept."

"Could it be that the more parents and clergy stress religion to a child, the more likely the child will feel guilt or fear when questions arise later? If so, the emphasis becomes self-defeating at this critical time, because parents and clergy want children to bring these questions to them, not hide the seeds of doubt. But the more times a child has heard that her religion has a hold on the absolute truth, the harder it may be for her to ask for help in reconciling cracks that appear in the absolute."

"I am now writing the last page in my last book about authoritarianism. So, for the last time, I do not think a fascist dictatorship lies just over our horizon. But I do not think we are well protected against one. And I think our recent history shows the threat is growing... We cannot secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves, and our posterity, if we sit with our oars out of the water. If we drift mindlessly, circumstances can sweep us to disaster. Our societies presently produce millions of highly authoritarian personalities as a matter of course, enough to stage the Nuremberg Rallies over and over and over again. Turning a blind eye to this could someday point guns at all our heads, and the fingers on the triggers will belong to right-wing authoritarians. We ignore this at our peril."

"Think back on your own past. What did you do when questions arose about religion? Some questions probably came up. "Is there a God?" "Is there really a heaven?" "Why do tornados sometimes destroy churches and miss saloons?" Whom did you go to with these questions? Parents? Priests? Peers? You might naturally have gone to the people who had taught you the beliefs in the first place. You might also have prayed to God for help, and read scripture or some other book of religious guidance a minister might have recommended. Maybe you talked things over with friends sharing the same religious background. You do not have to be a psychological genius to know that all of these reactions would probably have confirmed the original religious beliefs. The people who taught you your faith, or who share it with you, are not likely to answer your questions with "Hey, I never thought of that. Our religion must be wrong!" If you want to take a wider, more "two-sided" approach to the questions, you would have to search farther afield."

"But the original question as, "Why is there still religion?" and the data above show that religion satisfies some important human needs about knowing who we are; why we are here; what will happen to us after we die; how to feel safety, love, and fellowship, and so on. These things logic and science do not do, at least not nearly as well. We would, as scientists, actually find some joy, happiness, and comfort in science's "poor showing." Science is not supposed to be emotional but objective, dispassionate, and even-handed. (We hope that the reader who has gotten to the end of this book is not surprised to hear us say this.) If some scientific theories or discoveries are "beautiful" (such as relativity); or "thrilling" (such as the genetic code), that is pure gravy. The endeavor is based in the cerebral cortex, not the adrenal glands. But as "Star Trek"'s Dr. McCoy kept telling Mr. Spock, human emotions undeniably enrich our lives and often govern us. They make us irrational at times, they may cause much of our worst as well as our best behavior. But to ignore them and their role in human enterprise- "That would be illogical.""

"It will seem strange that persons protesting against the government would be labeled “authoritarian followers.” But the concept of authoritarianism centers on submission to those whom one views as the legitimate, established authorities. And the whole point of the “birther” campaign against Obama is that he is an illegitimate president. As well, many Republican rank-and-file members believe the Democrats were unfairly favored by the media in 2008, and stole the election through massive voter fraud engineered by ACORN."

"If you think our countries could never elect an Adolf Hitler to power, note that David Duke would have become governor of Louisiana if it had just been up to the white voters in the state. Many people vote for extraordinarily High RWA candidates today. Many more would want one during a crisis. About a quarter of American state legislators are already poised to "stomp out the rot." And if you think a North American dictator could not find the people he needed to kill Jews, or professors, or Communists, or trade union leaders, or defiant clergy, or religious minorities, or the mentally "unsuitable," whomever he wanted to eliminate, then you might want to look at what Milgram found."

"Sometimes, when I tell people that I study authoritarian personalities, they say things like, "Oh, you mean neo-Nazis and the Klan." When these people are psychologists at conventions or the president of my university, I say "Right," because I know they will probably instantly forget whatever I reply. But I am more forthcoming with others. Most people seem surprised when I say, "No, I study normal folks, not Nazis." Few people, unless they are familiar with the history of fascism, understand that people as ordinary as you and I, and our friends and neighbors, might bring down democracy if the going got tough enough. But we are the people who, driven by fear and cuddling in our own self-righteousness, could create the wave that would lift the monsters among us to power. And once the monsters acquire the powers of the state, their evil explodes. Can one credibly talk about fascism in the North American context as we approach the year 2000? Is it even remotely possible that the horrors of Nazi Germany could someday occur in Canada or the United States? When I talk about prefascist personalities, do I seriously propose that many North Americans could act like Hitler, Himmler, Hoess, and so on? [...] although the Nazis did monsterous things, it is a mistake to thing that only ardent fascists and psychopathic killers became Nazis. Adolf Eichmann struck some as a bland person, not particularly anti-Semitic, who basically wanted to advance his career and so worked hard to impress his superiors. His evil was "banal." I can also imagine that many of those who made the arrests and transported the victims to the death camps would have been described as "good, decent people" by their families and neighbors. So would many of those who ran the slave labor camps in which hundreds of thousands of prisoners perished and maybe even the SS soldiers who massacred whole villages. You can be an ordinary Joe, or Lieutenant Calley, and still do terrible things. One of the first things Americans learned about the militias, in an Associated Press story dated April 27, 1995, is that they were "ordinary people who feel pushed.""

"Our studies have focused upon the religious decisions made by college freshmen both because they are a convenient group for psychology professors to examine and because they have just emerged from an often turbulent time when they scrutinized the family religion. But will the decisions reached by eighteen-year-olds hold for the rest of their lives? If they have decided to stay in the fold, will they still be found there decades later? If they have decided to chuck the family religion, will they come back to it when they have children of their own? Speaking as middle-aged adults who once thought that "Fifty is really old," but who now consider fifty "much younger than sixty," we can testify that one's views can change as the growth rings accumulate. So maybe youthful decisions to keep or abandon the family religion will be reversed later."

"Research indicates that a bed rock 20-25% of the adults in North America is highly vulnerable to a demagogue who would incite hatred of various minorities to gain power. These people are constantly waiting for a tough “law and order,” “man on horseback” who will supposedly solve all our problems through the ruthless application of force. When such a person gains prominence, you can expect the authoritarian followers to mate devotedly with the authoritarian leader, because each gives the other something they desperately want: the feeling of safety for the followers, and the tremendous power of the modern state for the leader. I would not say that all of the people trying to surge Donald Trump into the White House are authoritarian followers. But they almost certainly compose his hard core base. Where are the rest coming from? Various places, such as white males who fear their status in society is eroding and those who cannot abide a Hillary Clinton presidency. But authoritarianism rises in a population that feels threatened, and many Americans today are anxious about their family’s economic future, not to mention the throbbing fear of terrorist attacks. Many of them are clutching at straws. It’s been noted that if 25% of the American population is always ready to vote for a dictator, that’s half-way to a majority. If the “right” kind of crisis comes along, it could create enough newly panicked citizens to vote a tyrant into office who would overthrow the Constitution, the rule of law, you name it."

"Authoritarians did not disappear after George W. Bush left office and the United States avoided financial collapse. Instead they flocked to the Tea Party Movement, which the Republican Party cleverly (it thought) helped create and gathered unto itself. But the movement drove moderates from the GOP and sent radical conservatives to Congress. The “Tea Party Party” produced eight years of non-compromising stalemate in Washington as they imposed their own agenda on the Republican leadership. Now American authoritarians have united behind a presidential candidate who unabashedly says he wants to destroy the traditional Republican Party and deal a devastating blow to the Democrats as well. Is that anything to worry about?"

"Markets are, in general, an invaluable tool for promoting human well-being. It’s very easy to forget that whenever two people enter into an economic exchange, it’s because they both expect to be better off as a result of this exchange than they would have been without it. But it is false to claim, on this basis, that the more our society relies upon competitive markets to organize the production and distribution of goods and services, the better off we will be. Sometimes moving closer to the ideal of perfect competition will make us better off, but sometimes it won’t."

"Perhaps the most revealing experimental “anomaly” came from a study at Stanford University, where one group of subjects was instructed to play a public goods game called “the community game,” and another asked to play one called “the Wall Street game.” The two problems were in fact identical, but the rates of cooperation in “the community game” were twice as high as in “the Wall Street game.” (Cooperation in the former was around the “normal” rate of two-thirds; in the latter it was abnormally low, at about one-third.) Another version of this study, carried out among Israeli air force trainers, showed approximately the same effect. In that study, however, instructors were asked to predict how their trainees (whom they knew quite well) would behave. Interestingly, not only were the instructors wrong (they did no better than chance at predicting the behavior of their trainees), but they also made the mistake of ignoring the effect that the name of the game might have upon rates of cooperation and defection. In this respect, the trainers fell victim to the same fallacy that has plagued generations of economists. It is, in fact, a general flaw in our everyday social reasoning, which social psychologists refer to as an extrinsic incentive bias. Simply put, people have a tendency to overestimate the importance of external incentives in motivating human conduct. In particular, we have a natural tendency to overestimate the influence of power, money, and status in motivating other people’s decisions."

"Capitalism is not a spontaneous order. The compositional fallacy, however, makes it tempting to believe that it is. Since it is in everyone’s interest to have a system of property rights, or to have the orderly exchange of goods, won’t people just naturally tend to organize their affairs in that way? Who needs government to step in? Yet as it turns out, we do need government to step in, even to secure the most basic conditions for a functioning market economy. Two boys trading marbles in the schoolyard may constitute a spontaneous order, but the capitalist economic system is a highly artificial construct, based upon an elaborate set of social programs that have been refined and tweaked over the course of centuries."

"What are we to conclude from all this? The most obvious lesson is simply that human psychology is infernally complicated. The standard assumptions that economists have been known to make about human rationality and the way that people respond to incentives represent a gross oversimplification. Sometimes this simplified model produces incredibly powerful, highly generalizable results. But sometimes it generates predictions that are totally off base. Increasingly, economists are becoming aware of this—there has been a significant move toward so-called behavioral economics within the profession. This approach, as the name suggests, pays a lot more attention to how people actually behave. Unfortunately, behavioral economists have yet to generate anything with the explanatory and predictive power of “the model” that is taught in Economics 101, and so the latter continues to exercise its intoxicating (and sometimes toxic) influence on the minds of the young."

"The perfectly competitive market is more like the Atkins diet than a frictionless plane. The Atkins diet, one may recall, is the one that recommends eating only fat and protein—scrambled eggs, steak, bacon—but cutting out all carbohydrates. It works by tricking the body into thinking that it’s starving, thereby prompting it to start breaking down and consuming its fat reserves. But in order for this to work, you have to really trick your body, and that means absolutely no carbohydrates. People who follow a 100% Atkins diet can in fact lose a lot of weight. But one cannot infer from this that following a 99% Atkins diet—eating a lot of fat and protein and just a tiny bit of carbohydrates—will lead to almost as much weight loss. On contrary, it’s a recipe for putting on massive amounts of weight. In fact, “almost” following the Atkins diet is far worse than not dieting at all."

"So we need to have a state; the market cannot do everything. In particular, the market cannot arise spontaneously: it must be created, and its fundamental rules must be enforced, by the state. People have tried to square this circle in hundreds of different ways, but no matter how you run the numbers, the results always come back the same: You can’t get a market economy out of self-interest alone. What is required—and what self-interest cannot provide—is an honest enforcement agency to impose Hume’s three “fundamental laws”: to protect private property, to ensure the voluntariness of exchange, and to enforce contracts. This enforcement agency must remain neutral among the rival parties; its services cannot simply be available to the highest bidder. In order for its threats to be credible, the enforcement agency must be motivated by some principled commitment to ensuring respect for the law."

"One of my favorite Paul Krugman papers is called “Ricardo’s difficult idea” — on why people have such a hard time understanding the concept of “comparative advantage.” Although the situation is not quite as bad, I’ve been struck recently by how much difficulty many people have trying to understand the concept of a “collective action problem.” Although that idea has a bit more history to it, I don’t think it’s too much of a distortion of the record to call this “Hobbes’s difficult idea.”"

"In a sense, we are all Fabians now."

"From John Locke in the seventeenth century to Robert Nozick in the twentieth, libertarians have appealed to individual enforcement as the frontline mechanism for the defense of individual rights. They have failed to realize that presupposing punishment is as good as presupposing universal brotherly love. While positing either one can solve a lot of social-engineering problems, neither can be the result of self-interest alone. As a result, there is no such thing as “spontaneous order” in human society. The invisible hand of the market cannot do all the work; some type of conscious guidance is also required, to get the invisible hand going in the first place."

"Never cease to be amazed that you exist."

"I don’t know, maybe it’s a family trait, when I get in front of the camera, I just kind of go for it and it works out."

"Christian theism might in the future not conceive God as a Person or indeed as a Trinity of persons."

"A static technology is, however, almost inconceivable. It runs so strongly against established drives in American society as to be practically impossible. So long as we are thinking beings, we will find new ways to increase the productivity of work! The basic point, however, is that economic growth is needed to improve the quality of life. A rise in the GNP, taken by itself, is neither good nor bad. Everything depends upon what kind of production has increased, its costs to society, and who benefits from it. What people now want and need is resource-conserving, pollution-free growth—growth that does not harm the environment and demands less of the earth’s limited resources."

"During the sixty years between 1910 and 1970, the percentage of Americans living in urban areas of 2,500 or more rose from 45.7 to 73.5, and the number of urbanites more than tripled from 42 to 150 million. Urbanization clearly has brought important benefits to people… But this overwhelming tendency of people to concentrate in cities has worsened the environment through crowding, traffic congestion, delays and loss of time, and the over-loading of transportation, marketing and living facilities."

"World energy problems entered the headlines during 1973 and 1974 when members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) unilaterally quadrupled the price of crude oil. Concurrently, members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) cut back production and imposed a temporary embargo on shipments to the United States for political reasons. Suddenly, the industrialized nations awoke to their heavy and increasing dependence upon the abundant supplies of oil from Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America."

"Until 1837, companies were individually charted by ad hoc legislation. In that year Massachusetts enacted the first general corporation law, which was comparatively stringent in limiting corporate powers. Subsequently, motivated by the philosophy of free enterprise, as well as by competition among the states in charter-mongering, state corporation laws were progressively relaxed."

"The basic flaw in the distribution of political power among American economic institutions is that producer interests rather than consumer interests tend to dominate and shape the actions of government."

"Because contributions for charitable and educational purposes were the earliest form of corporate social action, their pattern enables us to test the validity of our theory. Corporate giving was stimulated by federal legislation in 1935 authorizing companies to deduct from taxable income up to 5 percent on account of such gifts."

"In a world market that was free of all taxes, royalties, or other governmental constraints, and in which competition was effective, the price of oil would be very low. But the real-world market for oil is dominated by high taxation by the oil-exporting nations, and, since 1972, by concerted efforts of the members of the OPEC to raise prices and to restrict output. Because of effective competition in the industry and the power of OPEC, an international oil company today has relatively little influence on the price of oil to consumers."

"A second drastic reduction in the political power of American corporate business occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. This crisis shook the faith of the American people in the capability of its industrial and financial leaders, even in the enterprise system itself… Roosevelt sought to make political capital of the popular disillusionment with business; and he made business a scapegoat for errors of federal economic policy that had deepened and prolonged the depression."

"If big businesses in concentrated industries truly behaved as oligopolists, one would find higher prices, persistently higher profits, more extensive advertising, and less product innovation among such industries than among unconcentrated industries. However, the facts show either the contrary or insignificant differences. During the period of price inflation from 1965 to 1970, prices rose most in the unconcentrated industries."

"The primary difficulty is the problem of determining what the interest of business is.At any given time, business corporations are split on many national issues; there does not appear to be a monolithic ‘business interest.’ Thus, petroleum companies have opposed liberal oil import quotas, while petrochemical companies have favored them in order to obtain less expensive feedstocks; steel companies have sought restraints upon imports of foreign steel, whereas automobile companies and other large users of steel have fought them; and even with respect to such matters as labor union legislation or antipollution regulation, businessmen are far from presenting a united front because firms in some industries are much more deeply affected than those in other industries."

"The multinational corporation is leading Europe toward a more egalitarian, homogeneous, and democratic society. While traditionalists will deplore the gradual blurring of class and national distinctions, such segmentations cannot in the end withstand the onslaught of technological and economic changes."

"Private business investment is inherently superior to governmental aid as an instrument of development because it combines transfers of managerial and technical assistance with that of capital."

"The multinational corporation is, beyond doubt, the most powerful agency for global economic unity that our century has produced. It is fundamentally an instrument of peace. Its interest is to emphasize the common goals of peoples, to reconcile or remove differences between them. It cannot thrive in a regime of international tension and conflict. The instrumentality of multinational business is man’s best hope of achieving political unity on this shrinking planet."

"Certainly the political assets of American labor organizations are formidable in both manpower and money. Unlike corporations, eighteen million union members vote. With the union shop prevailing in most states and union dues being deducted from members’ paychecks, labor unions have a steady inflow of funds, estimated to be around $700 million per year in 1963…Indeed, many a businessman seeking a favor from government has found that his most effective course was to get the support of the leaders of the unions representing his employees!"

"How did it come about that only a few international oil companies held concessions to all of this region Middle East at the end of World War II? The answer lies in the bitter struggle of the United States government to gain an entrance for its nationals into the British-dominated Middle East, a struggle which very significantly shaped the structure of the industry as it emerged from World War II."

"A fourth factor underlying the merger wave of the 1960’s was the steep rise in the load of corporate income taxation since World War II. In 1940, the effective federal corporate income-tax rate was 27 percent; in 1968, it was 50 percent. Rates of state and local taxes on business incomes have risen commensurately."

"The 4,400 business corporations that disappeared by merger during 1968 were a small number compared with the 12,000 that disappeared by failure, or the 207,000 new corporations that were formed. Even the $43 billion in securities exchanged in mergers that year were only 3.3 percent of the market value of corporate securities."

"Because some conglomerate, and other, mergers have proved to be unsound and failed. It has been proposed that government should prohibit such mergers. But there is no feasible way to identify bad mergers in advanced; only time and the test of market competition reveal them."

"Still another trend supports greater emphasis upon the social responsibilities of business firms and greater interest in the interactions between business and public policies. The great problems of contemporary society, such as environmental pollution, waste disposal, unemployment, poverty, urban renewal, and mass transit, are most likely to be solved by combining the organizational discipline of the action-oriented business corporation with the legal and taxing powers of government. Private corporations will more frequently be used to attain public purposes. At the same time, the public has made it clear that it will no longer tolerate the thrusting of private cost upon itself."

"Modern management science has made it feasible for corporations to expand the scope and variety of their operations. It has created new economies of scale through which larger aggregations of men, materials, and funds can be efficiently deployed and controlled over larger areas."

"During 1968, more than forty-four hundred companies disappeared by mergers involving an estimated $43 billion in securities—an all-time record. In this tidal wave of mergers, which subsequently crested and receded, conglomerate firms accounted for either a substantial or a preponderant fraction, depending upon the definition of ‘conglomerate’ adopted."

"A corporate manager, interested in playing a numbers game with stock price-earnings ratios for quick profits, is able to inflate current reported profits at the expense of future profits. The methods are legion: shift from accelerated to straight-line depreciation; defer or stretch out maintenance expense; deplete inventories held at low cost; sell assets for ‘one-shot’ income. Excessive flexibility in permissible accounting methods creates opportunities for misleading reports of profits."

"It comes as a shock to many, therefore to learn that the majority of the labor force in the United States works for government, unincorporated business, nonprofit institutions, or are self-employed. Less than half of the total labor force was employed in the entire corporate sector in 1969.Less than one-quarter worked for ‘large companies,’ defined for present purposes as those employing more than two hundred people."

"The largest corporations, like companies of lesser size, are a changing rather than a static group. Their annual turnover rate reflects the rise or decline of management and the vagaries of business fortune. Of the hundred largest industrial corporations in 1909, only thirty-six remained on this list in 1948. And, of the top hundred companies in 1948, only sixty-five continued to hold this ranking in 1968."