kitswulf:

nostalgebraist:

brainstatic:

Who is Chris Arnade and why does he always act like the only person on twitter who has ever met a poor person. 

He’s a guy who (by his own telling) worked on Wall Street for 20 years, took up photography as a hobby, started talking to poor people because he was taking pictures of them, and suddenly had this sophomoric moral revelation that Actually, Numbers Are Bad and Inhuman, While Individual Narratives Are Authentic And Good.  He quit his Wall Street job and now talks to / photographs poor people full time while sneering at everyone who dirties their hands with actual policy (which inevitably involves the dread Numbers, since “personally befriend everyone affected” does not scale up to millions of people).  One day he is going to learn about the concept of “voluntourism” and his mind is going to get blown, again

I am being mean here but the guy really pisses me off

I don’t want to be confrontational because I really respect you as a writer and as a thinker, but I’m going to have to defend him. One of the big, blaring, nasty failure states of policy wonks like us is going overboard and saying “The metrics (that we have defined, of course) are telling us all is well. Anyone who has problems with the status quo are either behaving in bad faith, or outliers. Because of that, we should discount them.” If we’re not careful, we tend to privilege the map over the territory (which on a fundamental level makes sense, we wonks deal with the maps rather than the territory) and end up trying to force human experience to conform to our equations rather than the other way around. Chris Arnade is an…important counterweight to those urges. He goes around and tries to document people and their experiences. Maybe it’s because I am marinating in academia too much, but it really seems to be a recurring pattern that we develop some models and then just stop there, with the models becoming normative. We don’t usually have someone go and check who’s experiencing the effect of our models afterwards. Two examples that I think pattern-match to what Chris is trying to do:

1. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20131578 The classic one is that there’s some evidence that trade with China did cost the US a significant number of jobs, and this harmed a lot of people in the US. I am uncertain this claim is right, but until very recently you weren’t even allowed to conjecture this without being shut down as some sort of anti-intellectual racist hick. And then, years later, oops! I guess all those racist hicks might have noticed a real thing! Whoopsie!
2. A more recent one, from SSC, was this http://www.businessinsider.com/check-cashing-stores-good-deal-upenn-professor-2017-2 where it turns out that poor people keep going to check-cashing stores for…rational reasons. Because it works better for them given what they value as a demographic. Yet we’ve built our policy models around the idea that evil dirty check-cashing stores are tricking poor dumb yokels into using them, and that we need to educate those poor people right.

I apologize if I’m getting heated, but it really does seem like a recurring theme where we wonks create a model, it matches well enough, and then when it starts encountering contradictions with reality we ignore (or worse, punish) the humans that are contradicting our policy models. Chris Arnade is going out and gathering the results of our policies, and he’s trying to do it with compassion and giving dignity to the people involved. That is a valuable service, especially to those of us who want to dismiss it.

I am not trying to put folk wisdom on some sort of pedestal here, less-informed people are wrong more often. But dismissing people because we have declared them less-informed and thus valueless is sloppy thinking. Deciding we have a lovely elegant model of how policy should work and prioritizing its implementation over actually looking at its effects on people is sloppy thinking. Chris is an evangelist of going up to the people affected by the bad outcomes of our policies and asking them how they’re working. It doesn’t mean the answers are oracular, just that he’s trying to push us in the opposite direction of our most common failure state. The fact that, if left unchecked, his arguments would push us into another, opposite-side failure state, does not seem to be grounds to dismiss him any more than it’s grounds to dismiss laissez-faire economists because they dislike economic coercion. I don’t always agree with Chris, but I think my intellectual ecosystem would be poorer for not having him.

First off, I admit I have read very little of his output.  Can you give me some examples of writing he’s done that you consider worthwhile in way you’re describing here?

Because I agree with you that this kind of investigation is valuable and important, and not done often enough, especially in parts of academia (I think there ought to be far more “field work” done in economics, and that check cashing case is a great example of why this matters).  But everything I have seen from Arnade suggests that he is not simply doing his part among journalists (there are others!), academics, etc. who talk to people on the ground and thus provide this vital kind of knowledge.  My impression of Arnade is that he thinks (to exaggerate only mildly) he is the only person that ever talks to people on the ground, and – what’s more – that makes his own general models more plausible than anyone else’s, even in cases where he hasn’t talked to people, just because he is in this unique state of talking-to-people-related enlightenment.

Or, as OP said, he acts “like the only person on twitter who has ever met a poor person,” and uses this quality of himself as a person as a discursive weapon.

Take for instance this passage from the article I linked above:

Recently I came home from a day in the Bronx, exhausted by the cumulative effect of a thousand little dramas. I opened my computer and looked at my twitter stream. My old world reappeared. I read smart commentary on places like Brazil. I scrolled through tweet after tweet, all shouting the story of the day.

It was all logical and rational and clever. Everyone was throwing different numbers around to show they were right.

Few were telling the messy and complex stories of the struggles to navigate the illogical and absurd reality of life, about the consequences of the news on, you know, people.

One smart columnist, Matt Yglesias, was arguing why the death of 1,129 people in a clothing factory in Bangladesh was understandable and “OK.” Poor countries need lax labor laws before they can be rich … It went something like that.

The author had fallen so far down the wormhole of numbers and clever arguments that he had forgotten humans were involved. Like Wall Street and I had forgotten that it was humans we were loaning money to and that it was humans who we were foreclosing on and it was humans whose governments were defaulting.

I wanted to tweet back. “Go to Bangladesh. Talk to one of the children of the dead. Hell, don’t just talk to one. Spend two weeks listening.”

He hadn’t gone to Bangladesh. He had just read a few headlines from a competing columnist and decided to argue based on that.

After much thought I tweeted to him, “you are an idiot.”

Yglesias’ post was tonedeaf, and he apologized for it.  But let’s note a few things.  First, Arnade didn’t go to Bangladesh either.  He imagined the misery he would witness there, from the armchair, and imagined that Yglelsias would change his mind upon witnessing this misery.  The argument isn’t “you’re wrong, and I know because I actually talked to the affected people”; the argument, as far as I can understand, is “you’re wrong, and I know because I am the sort of person who talks to affected people.”  And the end result – perfectly and poetically – was yet more standard twitter discourse between armchair jackoffs: “you are an idiot.”

Second, there is a real policy question here (“do poor countries need lax labor laws before they can be rich?”), and like many policy questions, it involves accepting one bad thing, X, to avoid another, Y.  This is open to multiple kinds of attack: that X is in fact worse than Y; that X is immediate and assured while Y is only the prediction of a fallible model.  What does not constitute a good attack is to point out that X is in fact bad.  We know that already.  Probably some people do need to “go to Bangladesh” (or the equivalent, for whatever policy question) to have the true awfulness of X rubbed in their unwilling face.  Sometimes this will change minds that ought to be changed.  But the armchair posture of “the only one here who feels the badness of bad things” is not conducive to helping people.  There are always people suffering, no matter what policy is implemented, and in policy discourse, “you don’t get it, suffering is really bad” is an argument that can serve any master, prop up any side of any debate ad hoc.  Its application is always ad hoc, because nothing important is without downsides.

(This all carries over in p. obvious ways to Arnade’s writing/tweeting about Trump and Trump voters.)

Finally, on a more emotional level, there is something that just … squicks me out about the idea of individual people getting used as discourse one-upmanship tools by the journalists who’ve talked to them, who’ve “spent two weeks” listening and self-consciously emphathizing, who feel their pain.  Thankfully there is nothing in my life like the Bangladesh factory collapse, but there are cases where I can imagine becoming such a token.  I’ve talked a lot on here about how I spent 5 years in my adolescence on Risperdal, and how it messed me up, and how I think there needs to be more awareness about the dangers of antipsychotics.  But I know very little about the ugly procedural guts of the system that ended up producing my 5-year Risperdal prescription.  And my insides squirm when I think about some journalist coming to talk to me, listening to my own story, and then using “I’ve talked to people hurt by Risperdal” as a trump card in some complicated policy argument.  Would their favored policies actually help people like younger me?  Would they help them, but at the cost of hurting other people worse?  Those are among the questions I would ask if I were part of the debate, but I wouldn’t be part of the debate; having been Talked To, my usefulness would have ended.

I would rather my suffering be known than not known, but once it is known as part of a statistic, I do not want to serve a further use as a sentimental token.  I do not know the answers, and ~feeling my pain~ does not confer knowledge of the answers.

(via kitswulf)