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Today’s efforts focus on James Q. Wilson who just passed. PowerLIne starts it off.
There’s a persistently legend that deaths of similarly situated famous people—actors, writers, political figures, etc.—come in threes. One of the persons who would have gone to the statistics to debunk this notion, social scientist James Q. Wilson, died today, just a day after Andrew Breitbart, and shortly after Christopher Hitchens. Like Hitchens and Breitbart, Wilson was utterly unique and irreplaceable.
I knew him slightly better than Breitbart, in his capacity as the chair of the board of academic advisers to AEI. We feted him at our chairman’s dinner back in December, during which George Will reminisced:
In his exasperation one day [Pat Moynihan] encountered Nixon in the hall of the White House and said, “Mr. president, James Q. Wilson is the smartest man in the United States. The president of the United States should pay attention to what he has to say.”
Nixon did. Not enough, the Lord knows, but he did pay some attention. James Q. Wilson’s name became sufficiently well-known to the Nixon reelection campaign that they solicited Jim’s name to be included on an ad—Democrats, I believe, for Nixon. I may be wrong; I take this from Moynihan’s letters. At this point, Jim Wilson was being considered for membership on a presidential commission on drug abuse, which he cared much about, and the president cared much about, and he wanted to have this.
But Jim said to this Nixon campaign apparatchik, he says, well, I might allow my name to be on that. In which case, of course, you would have to withdraw my name as a nominee to the drug panel and not consider me for any other position lest it seemed that my name is for sale. It was a kind of nicety not normally seen in Washington and probably unexpected on the part of the Nixon people, who were that not used to dealing with professors. . .
But wherever Republicans go, and certainly I feel the same way, we feel sooner or later we have a Robinson Crusoe experience. We look down and we see footprints in the sand of someone who’s there ahead of us, and it’s always James Q. Wilson. It’s very discouraging, frankly. The prescience of the man is astonishing, partly because, as I say, everything we’re arguing about today, he has argued already.
In his own remarks, Wilson struck a modest pose:
Let me turn to my own field, political science. In 2008, despite up-to-date polling, despite the results of countless debates, political scientists were persuaded that the candidates for the presidency would be Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani. There were two other people whom nobody spent any time talking about. Now, this is the background for people who try to guess about the future. It reinforces my view that the main role of a social scientist is not to predict the future but to explain what happened in the past.
My old thesis adviser, Edward C. Banfield of the University of Chicago, looked at me once and said, Wilson, stop trying to predict the future. You’re having enough difficulty predicting the past. He was quite right.
You can read the whole tribute to him here.
And here is that tribute from AEI’s dinner for James Wilson. First is Arthur Brooks.
… Jim is the author of more than a dozen books. One reviewer has described his 1993 seminal book The Moral Sense as “the most significant reflection on this matter since Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Book reviews just don’t get better than that. He’s had an enormously distinguished academic career. Currently, he’s a professor at Boston College’s Department of Political Science, but before that he has served as the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine, the James Collins Professor of Management at UCLA, and the Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard.
He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush, the Bradley Prize from the Bradley Foundation, and a lifetime achievement award by the American Political Science Association. Jim has been an intellectual hero and mentor to me and to many people of AEI for many years. At one point in my academic career, I was citing Jim so much that my colleagues said I should change my name to Arthur Q. Brooks.
I met Jim because he sat in on my Ph.D. dissertation defense lo these many years ago. Several years after that, I got an email from Jim. He knew that I was doing work on charitable giving at that time. I was an untenured assistant professor, and he asked me a research question about charitable giving, saying that he was thinking of writing a book on the subject.
I took the opportunity to send the great man an outline of a book that I was working on, on charitable giving. It was a pretty audacious thing to do, but I did it anyway. Quickly, within a few minutes, I got an email back from him saying, “I enjoyed your outline. I don’t think I need to write my book now, but I’d be delighted to help you with yours.” He carefully reviewed each one of the chapters in that book. He wrote the book’s foreword. He made the book immeasurably better, and that project quite literally changed the trajectory of my career. That’s a little bit of insight into the man and to the character of the man. A giant intellect with the convictions of a patriot and with a servant’s heart, that’s why he’s a hero to so many of us in this room tonight. …
Here’s more from Charles Murray.
… Back in 1975 when I was a newly minted Ph.D., I picked up the New York Times magazine and therein found an article entitled, “Lock Them Up and Other Thoughts on Crime.” In the first place, I just loved the title because in 1975 no academic said lock them up. Imprisonment was barbarous and we ought to be rehabilitating people. That you would entitle an article like that struck me as something audacious.
But then I read the article and I fell in love even more because, as all of you who have read Jim Wilson know, you have this mastery of the literature. You have this calm, wry voice, and you have this person who is speaking to you as an adult, who expects you to understand nuanced arguments, and respects you for your ability to do so. He became my hero.
Four or five years later, I wrote an evaluation of a program in Cook County, Chicago, for chronic juvenile delinquents, so obscure that no one could possibly have found it except, somehow, James Q. Wilson did. He called me up on the phone and said, I’m going to be in Washington, let’s have lunch. It was as if a parish priest in some village in Galway had gotten a call from the pope: I’m in the neighborhood, let’s have a drink.
So Jim came to Washington and I, quivering, went to the lunch where he quizzed me on the article and treated me as if he were chatting with Harvey Mansfield in the Harvard faculty club. It was an immensely gratifying experience for me, but that’s not why I’m telling the story. It’s because of what it says about Jim Wilson. First as a scholar, because if he knew about that evaluation of that program in Chicago, he knew everything there was to know about his topic, which has been characteristic of all of his work. The second is the person—unassuming, treating people not according to their status but simply as colleagues, a man who warrants the term gentleman in a way that is seldom used anymore. …
And here are some of Wilson’s remarks at that dinner. Find the ever so subtle slap at the man Don Imus calls, “skunk vomit,” That would be Newt.
… My old thesis adviser, Edward C. Banfield of the University of Chicago, looked at me once and said, Wilson, stop trying to predict the future. You’re having enough difficulty predicting the past. He was quite right. But as I look at AEI, I’ve discovered one thing that is quite remarkable. By and large, AEI scholars have done better at predicting the future than the people interviewed by Philip Tetlock or these brokerage accounts analyzed by Terry Odeon.
Fred Kagan and his wife predicted that the surge would work in Iraq and described how to make it work, and they were absolutely correct. Peter Wallison, in an early piece published in The New York Times on September 30, 1999, explained that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were disastrous and would become bankrupt. Within a few years, they proved to be disasters and became bankrupt, meanwhile having spent many millions of dollars on persons who, though not lobbyists, were busy advising them. In 2010, Des Lachman explained that Greece was going to (heading for) a crisis that would make it threaten to leave the European Union.
Now, why did these scholars do better than the ones interviewed by Tetlock? I think part of it is good management. Chris DeMuth and Arthur Brooks have been extraordinarily good at picking people who, despite the odds against them, do better than the averages and make statements that, though they may not value predicting the future, do better at predicting the future than anyone else. …
Turns out this is Neanderthal week. The New Scientist says they were sea-going.
IT LOOKS like Neanderthals may have beaten modern humans to the seas. Growing evidence suggests our extinct cousins criss-crossed the Mediterranean in boats from 100,000 years ago – though not everyone is convinced they weren’t just good swimmers.
Neanderthals lived around the Mediterranean from 300,000 years ago. Their distinctive “Mousterian” stone tools are found on the Greek mainland and, intriguingly, have also been found on the Greek islands of Lefkada, Kefalonia and Zakynthos. That could be explained in two ways: either the islands weren’t islands at the time, or our distant cousins crossed the water somehow. …