Here’s H.A:
“I think you’re emotional dishonest (although you come close to honesty with the “class conflict” line at the end) but I think it’s hard to get around the point that your mind, like mine, is relatively mediocre compared to the best human minds when it comes to determining the expertly designed hard-to-rebutt rules vs. the experts with discretion balance, -and similarly, our notions of what the democratic masses want is also mediated to us by experts.
Regulatory capture of experts is also a problem -but of course once again we’re going to get best of breed analysis of this by the relevant experts.
In other words, I don’t see a way out of microspecialized expert communities and their respective consensuses (consensi?) on any given topic -I think we should efficiently surrender our egos to it and move on.
To be on the side of angels, I think we should develop our own microexpertise according to our comparative advantages -to prey on latent envy is destructive, IMO.
Don’t bother with cognitive class warfare in our hurtle towards information theoretic death. I think if we take a comprehensive look at policing, undeformed by status envy, it would be reasonable to conclude that mass irrationality is a huge priority over quantitative elite capture by financial interests or ego. So as an agent, I think it behooves you to look critically at how you divide up your own policing pie.”
Here’s me:
“Writers in the public sphere have two options. They can try to improve outcomes for all of us collectively (increasing the likelihood that H.A will live forever) or they can participate in a tug-of-war over the esteem various groups hold. The latter tends to be a negative-sum activity, which is part of the reason why most people still try to appear as if they are doing the former.
“Policing” means monitoring behavior and responding to infractions with punishment (or possibly rewards for good behavior). We can police for either of the ends mentioned above. In the blogosphere this consists mostly of public criticism. H.A is policing you for engaging in what he thinks is wasteful/harmful discourse.
You are making an argument about the problem of elite experts. In H.A’s view this problem is unavoidable and you should seek better targets (and the irrationality of the masses is such a target). To the extent that elites are a problem, you should seek out an expert (Caplan & Hanson both discuss that sort of thing, though they are more salient than brilliant) that can determine the degree to which it is a problem (relative to something like mass irrationality) and then perhaps use your writing talents to popularize this expert view. What you are currently doing is arguing with Delong over the extent to which experts are a problem, but you do not have any particular competency when it comes to that question. In fact, H.A suggests that you are envious of these experts and this envy both drives you to try to reduce their status and creates an audience happy to read such critiques. This could be viewed as appealing to that audience’s baser aspects rather than spreading truth. Instead you should spend your time trying to correct the misperceptions held by your audience, ultimately making it more likely that our society is functional enough to maintain our perpetual existence.”
Entitled to an Opinion 
October 18, 2010 at 12:22 pm
Of course, the debate over the degree to which experts are a problem is an intra-elite debate.
Schumpeter’s notion that no matter what, ideological conflict is about, implicitly, which elites are to rule is spot on. It actually meshes fairly with an illiberal “conflict” theory of social interaction, contra some of the glib propertarians who submit that all is harmonious in a true market (e.g. Rothbard).
October 19, 2010 at 12:35 am
I’m pretty sure Robert Michels beat Schumpeter to the punch. Also, all IS “harmonious” in a Rothbardian free market , because it is literally built into his very definition of the term.
October 18, 2010 at 3:16 pm
I think the correct response is HA should go fuck himself. Delong publicly (and I suspect intentionally) misrepresented my views. I was both correcting the record and *raising the level of discourse* by identifying what I take to be a real (as opposed to negligently fabricated) difference between us. That HA failed so completely to grasp the nature of the exchange makes his baseless psychologizing especially insulting. Anyway, I’m not much for holding grudges, and I’m happy to accept his apology should he be able to see why he should apologize.
October 18, 2010 at 7:38 pm
I agree that Delong has a track record of misrepresentation. I suspect H.A doesn’t care about someone misrepresenting you and is more offended by your abetting of Ferguson’s populist narrative, and is unlikely to apologize.
October 18, 2010 at 10:07 pm
WW, I don’t think your views are worth that much. Where’s the humility? What’s your real expertise on these topics? So what if Prof. DeLong misrepresented your views. That’s not really very important because it seems to me that your views aren’t that important. There are people with similar education, credentials, and topic fluency as you that have greater humility, self-awareness, and transparency about their limitations and deficiencies. I think you should follow suit.
October 18, 2010 at 3:50 pm
Of course politics is and always will be a conflict between competing elites or elite factions. Pareto and Mosca made this point years ago and their arguments have never been satisfactorily rebutted.
The question is or ought to be, then, are the present self-styled “expert” elite, who have effectively ruled this country since the ‘thirties along the lines advocated by Lippmann, really the “meritocracy” they claim to be? Or are they really mediocrities?
The historic educational curriculum first devised for the grandnephews of Domitian in Quintilian’s “Institutio oratoria,” revived with slight modifications by the Renaissance humanists, and followed as a pattern in the education of the Anglo-American elite until very recently, was designed to impart a knowledge of history and philosophy that would enable its students to govern wisely, with reference to past examples and to basic principles.
The courtier or officer class of the Renaissance and early modern period was of a very high intellectual standard indeed. Castiglione’s “Il cortegiano” sets forth the expectations of the period – skill in languages ancient and modern, command of the military arts, a passable musical and poetic ability, as well as the capacity to act as a diplomat or jurist. The art, literature, and architecture left by such persons is a testimony to their sophistication and refinement. What such relics will the present age leave?
I recall reading, in Leon Voet’s “The Golden Compasses,” a history of Christoffel Plantin’s printing and publishing business founded in Antwerp in the mid-sixteenth century, that the printers he employed – whose social status was no more than that of skilled tradesmen – were required to know Latin, Greek, and one “vulgar” (i.e., modern) tongue other than their own, this in addition to being fully skilled in their craft. It would be surprising to find a Harvard graduate today possessing such linguistic skills, quite apart from those of a sixteenth-century printer. Old Chris wouldn’t have hired them to do more than sweep the floors of his shop.
October 18, 2010 at 9:57 pm
You remind me of the old Tae Kwon Do masters before the advent of the early mixed martial arts tournaments. At some point there seems to have been a mash-up competition and the microspecialization nerds (particularly in the fields of quantitative studies and mass communication) won. I think learning ancient greek or latin would be wasteful activity for most future technocrats. But if you’re one in a thousand or better intelligence I think it makes sense to become fluent in population statistics and large organization management, and if you’re one in ten million or better intelligence it makes sense to become fluent in topics like empirical macroeconomics, governing large populations, mass communications, stuff at that level.
October 19, 2010 at 7:14 pm
I think learning ancient greek or latin would be wasteful activity for most future technocrats.
I’m sure that’s true. But it might still be the case that learning the Greek and Latin is a useful activity for the people the technocrats work for. Or are you implicitly saying that the technocrats should be the one who ultimately call the shots?
October 19, 2010 at 8:50 pm
Technology may change, but human nature doesn’t. That’s why a study of history – and particularly ancient history, when people tried all the forms of governance known to subsequent ages – is important. As Santayana famously observed, those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it; and superior technology won’t help them avoid that fate.
October 20, 2010 at 2:36 am
1. flenser, yes I think a retreat from the relevant experts calling the shots is a step down from optimal decision-making.
2. Michael, I agree studying history is important (isn’t it a corner-stone of decision theory, prediction science, etc.?) but everybody, even the smartest folks, has a limited capacity for learning. In the list of valuable competencies, I don’t think latin or greek makes the final cut for most technocrats.
October 20, 2010 at 11:38 am
Maybe Latin or Greek aren’t important to a technocrat, but history and philosophy are clearly important to a ruling elite.
Classical languages are just the means to the end, and – not coincidentally – serve as intellectual hurdles that disqualify the incompetent. This is one reason why the old classical curriculum persisted so long in the education of past elites – indeed, at British “public” schools and the better U.S. prep schools, well into the twentieth century and within the memory of many still living. It is impossible to fake competence in ancient (or modern) languages in the way one can in what is risibly called “social science.”
The same might be said of differential equations, organic chemistry, or several other disciplines that are undoubtedly just as demanding as Latin or Greek – and just as typically absent from the curriculum vitæ of our so-called technocrats. I can recall when Carole Browner, who was the head of the EPA under Clinton, said that it was among her goals in that position to “eliminate chlorine from the environment” – apparently unaware that chlorine is an abundant element in nature, constituting (inter alia) more than half the mass of the solid content of the oceans, in the form of its compound with sodium. Jesus wept! What in God’s name did this “technocrat” study in college? And did she pay attention?
My point about the qualifications of past elites is not really about their exact intellectual content but rather about the relatively high level of learned attainment they represented, as compared with that to be found amongst the present elite. As I asked in my initial comment, are these people really the “meritocracy” they claim to be – or are they mediocrities? Evidence of real intellectual attainment on their part, compared to past elites, is scant.
October 21, 2010 at 12:25 am
By philosophy I assume you are referring to the Aristotle-Aquinas kind rather than modern navel-gazing. Sailer reports that today’s philosophers do score well on the grad school entrance exams though. You refer to “competence”, but that could mean either screening for the trait of intelligence+diligence or simple domain-level qualifications. It doesn’t really matter all that much whether a person has such qualifications in greek/latin these days. And the screening for raw brainpower is an oft-lamented trend in economics today. Greg Ransom rants about “idiot savant quant jock rocket scientists” who fall so short of The Great Hayek. Along the lines of Campbell/Goodhart/Lucas I think the demonstrated competence of social scientists may be causally reduced (ceteris paribus) with increasing responsibility.
October 21, 2010 at 4:57 am
Great responses, TGGP & Michael. Increasing responsibility limits my own ability to respond further at this time.
October 21, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Indeed by philosophy I mean Aristotle or Aquinas, and by history, Thucydides or Plutarch. Greek and Latin were means to the end of understanding such works.
Harry Truman was a fan of Plutarch. Even though he was, for most of his life, a hack machine politician from a quintessentially middle American (i.e., hayseed) state, he thought that the examples of history’s great men were worthy of study and emulation. I’m old enough to remember when many people didn’t think much of Truman, but as time has passed his leadership and willingness to act on principle have come to be admired even by those who disagreed with his politics.
The possession of raw intelligence, and the willingness to exert the effort to use it, are not sufficient conditions to guarantee competence, but a certain level of both is a necessary one. The old Renaissance-humanist curriculum required these traits. The modern curriculum consisting of what a friend of mine memorably called “the bullshit disciplines” merely calls for a ready ability to simulate them.
This is one good reason why the modern age is as it is – our “meritocracy” has little real merit, and is both intellectually and morally impoverished.
October 22, 2010 at 3:14 am
Michael, I suspect the modern age is better managed than any previous age at the global level, and that the industrialized nations are better managed than all but perhaps a few exceptional outlier local governments in human history.
I put more stock in the mathematical modeling empiricists of the present than the poetic wisdom writers of Western precursor civilizations, although I’m for mining all of past knowledge.
I think a good discussion on the scope and limits of the value of venerated old dead thinkers was done in overcomingbias a while back (I think TGGP participated, maybe me too) and I don’t think we’ve improved upon it here.
Basically there’s value in old political philosophers and historians (not just greek and roman ones), and unique and specific value to counter biases of the present, but it’s not the trump canon of knowledge. Old texts aren’t sacred texts, at their best they’re just more useful data and theories.
October 22, 2010 at 10:50 am
The modern age is better managed – really? In what respect?
Let’s look at central banking, just for an example. The Bank of England (then privately owned) kept the value of the pound stable for almost a century between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the onset of World War I. The gold sovereign coin, worth £1, was in open circulation all this time and never varied in weight or fineness.
After World War I, when the British government attempted to restore the pound to its pre-war value (£1 = US$4.86, with gold at US$20.67/oz), the re-valuation was not sustainable. By the onset of WWII, the pound was worth about US$4.00. After the war, and the nationalization of the Bank of England under Attlee and Cripps, it sank first to US$2.80, then to US$2.40, and finally was cut loose to fluctuate downwards to below US$2.00. I has been hovering below that level, down to about US$1.40, for the past few years.
It would appear that the classically educated central bankers of the nineteenth century (doubtless aware of the constant debasement of the Roman sesterce) did a better job of maintaining monetary stability than have the technocrats of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The same may be said of global governance. Again, for more than a century, the products of the playing fields of Eton ran an empire upon which the sun proverbially never set. Order was imposed upon barbarism everywhere they ruled; thuggee and suttee were suppressed in India, cannibalism and slavery in the African colonies. Lord Roberts suppressed the Afghan menace, and that country gave Britain no trouble for the next fifty years. Then the post-WWII technocrats, influenced by modern ideas, gave up the empire, and great parts of it have reverted to their aboriginal savagery. Such is “progress.”
In these United States a century ago, a respectable citizen was able to go on foot in complete safety through urban neighbhorhoods that he would not dare to enter today. Violent crime was much less frequent; justice was swift and severe. The assassin of President McKinley was tried, convicted, and executed in less time than it took to empanel the jury for the trial of O.J. Simpson. Now – well, consider the condition of all Detroit, and great stretches of many other cities (including our nation’s capital) are effectively controlled by criminal gangs.
If such present circumstances are “better managed” than those of the past, what, I wonder, do you consider bad management?
October 22, 2010 at 4:02 pm
I don’t think latin or greek makes the final cut for most technocrats.
I agree with you there.
I just don’t think that technocrats are the sort of people who should be deciding WHAT we’re going to do, as opposed to implementing the ideas of smarter people.
There was a great Simpsons episode on this …
October 23, 2010 at 3:48 am
Michael, Although I’m amenable to the notion that the most talented wasps should disproportionately fill the leadership class (in the spirit of the old joke that the british run heaven and the germans run hell) your historical examples seem cherry-picked and non-comprehensive, although you know more about the british empire than I do. Still, with all the computational, communication, and logistic inefficiencies of 19th century managers, I still doubt that a comprehensive look would show that they were able to more effectively manage either the world or the industrialized local parts than today’s global and local-industrial administrators.
Flenser, I don’t think there’s anyone “smarter” than my preferred choice of technocrats. I think the size of population and global resources one manages should be proportionate to one’s relative intelligence. So for global technocratic administrators we’re talking about least 1 in a hundred thousand (to create a pool of 60,000 large enough to draw from).
October 26, 2010 at 3:45 pm
With all the computational, communication, and logistic inefficiencies of 19th century managers, they still did quite well. With all our present technological advantages, we don’t seem to do as well. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, is a basket case. It was not so as recently as fifty years ago, and in some places – Rhodesia and South Africa – it was not so, even more recently than that. Since “global managers” decided to lay down the white man’s burden, is this major part of the globe really “better managed than any previous age”?
I’m not sure how “cherry picked” my examples are. They were just the first ones to occur to me. It seems to me that such matters as central banking and foreign exchange, and the governance of vast areas of the earth’s surface under the rule of law, are properly “global” matters. What could be more so at such a level?
I do not dispute that technology has made life more comfortable and first-world economies more prosperous since the nineteenth century, but this is not the consequence of technocratic rulers. It is the consequence of open markets and free trade. Contrast mainland China, which until quite recently was a classic technocratic, command-and-control economy (it still is a command-and-control polity). It was much less prosperous than Hong Kong under old-fashioned British colonialism, which kept its hands off the economy, rather than trying to “manage” it.
The plea for technocratic rule by experts is only the utopian dream of a society managed by philosopher-kings, first floated by Plato in his “Republic,” presented in modern dress, like Orson Welles’s Shakespeare. It is not improved by re-costuming.
The art of governing requires a sense of its limits. It also requires those who govern to have sound character and good judgment. Development of these faculties is the proper object of elite education – and, looking at the state of the world, we can only conclude it has been badly neglected, if not deliberately perverted.
October 26, 2010 at 4:51 pm
It seems to me you’re just calling technocratic competence “the art of governing”.
“The art of governing requires a sense of its limits. It also requires those who govern to have sound character and good judgment. Development of these faculties is the proper object of elite education – and, looking at the state of the world, we can only conclude it has been badly neglected, if not deliberately perverted.”
October 19, 2010 at 7:24 pm
The concept of rule by a technocratic elite is, of course, a left-wing idea. Saint-Simon got the ball rolling and it was picked up by Marx and others. Although these days you see increasing numbers of people who call themselves libertarians who’ve fallen under the same spell.
But hey, the libertarian technocratic elite will do things right!
October 20, 2010 at 2:28 am
I feel like the word “elite” is grafted on to the word “technocratic” in your comment. I think it boils down to the losing proposition of “decision making by the dumber and less informed masses rather than relevant experts”.
October 22, 2010 at 4:08 pm
I feel like the word “elite” is grafted on to the word “technocratic” in your comment.
Not sure what you mean there. Perhaps you consider “technocratic elite” to be redundant. That would be consistent with the general thrust of your remarks.
The Big Idea with which Hayek and others refuted socialism was that the dumb and less informed masses were smarter, in many important ways, than the technocrats. In fact, that the technocrats could never possess the necessary knowledge to accomplish the things they claimed they could.
October 23, 2010 at 7:00 am
No, I don’t consider technocratic and elite to be redundant.
I’d define elite as someone who has greater resource control than some orders of magnitude proportion of the rest of the population.
I’d define technocrats as those who have greater resource management competence than some orders of magnitude portion of the rest of the population.
For extreme contrast, I’d class Sarah Palin as elite and Michael Bloomberg as technocrat.
I’m aware of the alternate (and I think unuseful) definition of elite as someone unlike and who dislikes the masses -and who considers themselves superior to the masses, which is basically a label populist social entrepreneurs use to gain constituents in a more craven way than by demonstrating superior resource management skill.
October 23, 2010 at 7:04 am
the concept of competence is separable from the ideas of level of control or socialism.
The competent technocrat I’d think would be an empiricist, it’s not about big ideas or dead founding fathers, or ideological identity. How much “control” over the economy should various technocratic organizations have? How much socialism should be implemented into institutional design? Those are empirical questions, that call for diversified experimentation, data gathering, and data mining of the available past. It shouldn’t be considered opportunities for ideological posturing, IMO.
October 23, 2010 at 4:22 pm
How much “control” over the economy should various technocratic organizations have? How much socialism should be implemented into institutional design? Those are empirical questions ..
No, they are not. They are value judgments. There can be no empirical answer to the question of which should be given greater weight – the individuals desire to do what he pleases or the technocrats desire to limit what the individual can do.
You’re assuming that there is one knowable “answer” towards which all humans are striving, with various degrees of success, and that some smart technocrats can get us there. But your assumption is mistaken. No amount of “experimentation, data gathering, and data mining of the available past” will reconcile the differing goals of Muslims, libertarians, socialists, Christians, and capitalists.
Your questions can only have agreed upon empirical answers if you think that everyone has the same vision of the ideal society in mind, and are merely confused about how best to achieve it.
October 23, 2010 at 4:27 pm
I’d define elite as someone who has greater resource control than some orders of magnitude proportion of the rest of the population.
I’d define technocrats as those who have greater resource management competence than some orders of magnitude portion of the rest of the population.
For extreme contrast, I’d class Sarah Palin as elite and Michael Bloomberg as technocrat.
Billionaire Bloomberg has rather greater control of resources then does Palin.
But thanks for offering a concrete illustration of the sort of person you believe we should defer to. You still sound like a socialist to me.
October 23, 2010 at 4:36 pm
I think the size of population and global resources one manages should be proportionate to one’s relative intelligence.
You think we’re arguing about means, when actually we’re arguing about ends.
Up until very recently the notion that anybody could or should “manage populations” would have seemed absurd. The idea became popular with the rise of the socialist and communist movements, but then was rather discredited by their failure.
I’m not arguing that people with humanities degrees should manage populations, as opposed to your technocrats doing so. I’m arguing that the notion of “managing populations” is stupid and unfeasible.
October 23, 2010 at 9:56 pm
“Technology may change, but human nature doesn’t.”
I don’t think I can agree completely. Our environment has changed and we have evolved to a certain degree along with it. As Greg Cochran said, the past is another country.
It might be said that ultimately somebody is holding a sword, and ultimately people are managing people (just as the “nudgers” point out that defaults will inevitably be chosen). Who is to make decisions? I would prefer that it be a person who bears costs resulting from those decisions (Mencius Moldbug thinks a governed territory should be property of a profit-seeking corporation), and I personally don’t like being subject to the authority of someone I haven’t voluntarily accepted. I’m interested in Seasteading/competitive governance as a way of generating innovative experiments in governance whose relationship with their subjects would be more along the lines of “exit” and voluntary association.
I don’t think the modern age is that terrible. We are far richer than anyone before us. When I pressed Mencius on this he just said that it was because of technology and that we should be far better off. I think you are inaccurate about how dangerous the past was, the official stats show a big rise before the Great Depression and those numbers arguably understate the rates from earlier on due to difficulties in data collection. And of course since the mid-90s things have gotten back to the era of Leave it to Beaver in L.A. Steve Pinker has pointed out how much less violent we’ve gotten over time, and he’s supported by the evidence of thicker skulls in the past.
The Overcoming Bias thread was Why Read Old Thinkers.
Should the goal of monetary policy be to ensure a stable value of currency? George Selgin argues that it should increase in value due to productivity, Japan’s central bank has done a near-perfect job of keeping their currency at a constant value but nobody congratulates them on it. I think there are some costs to inflation, but as long as increases in income or the gains to investment keep pace a change in the value of the currency doesn’t seem that important.
“Afghan menace”? How was Afghanistan causing trouble all the way over in Britain? I thought the problem was supposed to be that Russia might gain it as a territory to menace India from, with the spark for the second war being the acceptance of a Russian envoy and refusal of the British one. And to be pedantic, there was less than a forty-year gap between the second & third Anglo-Afghan wars.
flenser, I think each person may have differing preferences, but we can say that the extent to which any course of action fulfills those preferences has a definite empirical dimension.
H.A, since the Germans were late to Weltpolitick I think it’s hard to evaluate how they compare to the Brits. It does seem to me that as far as colonization goes Britain > Spain > France.
flenser, I don’t think H.A would deny that Bloomberg is an elite. I’m personally much less of a fan of his nannyism.
October 23, 2010 at 10:33 pm
We did, as I recall ,go over the second Afghan War in a previous exchange. The Afghans slaughtered Cavagnari and the entire British legation – Roberts punished them quite effectively – and there was never another such episode.
We Americans have forgotten how to carry out punitive expeditions against lesser breeds without the Law. Nineteenth century Britain excelled in them.
Human nature, at least as far as the great majority of people, has not changed. The thoughts of most people are dictated by their bellies and their gonads. The seven deadly sins are nothing more than the predominant behavioral traits of our species, as they always have been.
Change, if it has happened, is only in the minds of the elites. Realism and hardness have gone out the window. The parallels to today’s elites may be found in the Rome of the fourth century A.D., Constantinople of the thirteenth century, and Venice of the eighteenth. Doubtless all these people felt, as today’s elites (and folks like H.A.) that things had never been better.
October 23, 2010 at 10:51 pm
Cavagnari had come to Kabul to sign a treaty ending the war begun by the refusal of the Afghans to permit British envoys and then stayed there as a permanent representative. After the rebellion which killed him was put down, the British agreed not to have that presence in Kabul (though they kept up the subsidy to the Afghan government). I stand by my point that the Brits were focused on the menace of Russia, not a motley assortment of Afghan tribesmen without any significant ambitions.
October 26, 2010 at 1:16 pm
The initial tension may indeed have been a part of the ‘Great Game’ played out between Russia and the British Raj, but what we are discussing here is only the relative effectiveness with which a civilised power was then capable of dealing with barbarians, as compared to the difficulty we seem to have at present. What ultimately stirred the barbarians up is of little importance to the point.
We might take as a similar example the former extirpation of piracy by the civilised powers, which was essentially complete by the mid-nineteenth century, as against the revival of piracy today, and the comparatively ineffectual response of today’s much-vaunted world governance.
Do ships even have suitable yard-arms any more from which to hang pirates? Have sailors forgotten how to tie a running noose? These are simple things, yet evidently beyond the competence of the modern age.
October 24, 2010 at 4:49 am
My sense is that Flenser and Michael should read more neuroscience.
I agree with a large chunk of this paragraph by TGGP.
“It might be said that ultimately somebody is holding a sword, and ultimately people are managing people (just as the “nudgers” point out that defaults will inevitably be chosen). Who is to make decisions? I would prefer that it be a person who bears costs resulting from those decisions (Mencius Moldbug thinks a governed territory should be property of a profit-seeking corporation), and I personally don’t like being subject to the authority of someone I haven’t voluntarily accepted. I’m interested in Seasteading/competitive governance as a way of generating innovative experiments in governance whose relationship with their subjects would be more along the lines of “exit” and voluntary association.”
But this:
“I personally don’t like being subject to the authority of someone I haven’t voluntarily accepted.”
I think is fantasy posturing removed from “defaults will inevitably be chosen” realism, unless you acknowledge it as hedonic and potentially a rentier preference.
and this:
“I would prefer that it be a person who bears costs resulting from those decisions”
seems overreduced to me -it discincentivizes agents from becoming decision makers, so I’ld like a more nuanced rule that provides incentive, not just punitive costs.
as for this:
“whose relationship with their subjects would be more along the lines of “exit” and voluntary association.”
I think diversified experimentation should include locked in population versions as well as “exit” and “voluntary association” populations. Although this type proposal is red meat for commision/ommission bias exploiters, I think it’s a mature approach to “defaults will inevitably be chosen” which is the closest anyone in the public discourse is getting to seriously grappling with the commission/ommission bias and governance norms.
October 24, 2010 at 6:36 am
I posted this to Delong. Most of my posts get deleted from his blog (despite their generally flattering and deferential nature) so I’ll repost to comment threads of your blog when I have the time.
“Anybody have a bead on what percentage of the country sides with the DeLong-Romer expert macroeconomist axis that
” now is a time to twiddle all of the policy knobs the government has at its disposal up to 11: federal purchases increases, tax postponements, aid to states, partial or full nationalization of mortgage finance, loan guarantees, raising inflation targets, talking down the dollar, quantitative easing–especially since the expansion of government spending to offset the fall in private demand in the recession never happened.”
1% of the population? 10%? 49%? I’m interested in the percentage of the population receptive to this analysis and their demographics relative to the general population and those who are hardcore opposed.”
October 24, 2010 at 7:36 am
Interesting link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Economic_Interpretation_of_the_Constitution_of_the_United_States
I ran into it looking for macroeconomists and other social scientists attempting comprehensive looks at how regulation (which is pretty much all laws and norms) affects outcomes, including foundational documents like the U.S. constitution and global and other larg population regulatory analogs.
I don’t think the U.S. constitution and similar documents are looked at critically enough with a quantitative/optimization science eye, or if they are, it’s been successfully obscured from limited engagement dilettantes like myself.
October 24, 2010 at 8:27 am
An essay updating from Beard in 1913 to 2007.
I’m more interested though in economic analysis on how the constitution regulates and affects the population, and optimization critiques.
This discussion seems geared towards the less interesting question “how much were the founders motivated by economis self-interest”.
October 24, 2010 at 6:24 pm
You’ll have to elaborate on neuroscience.
We were told about Beard in highschool history class. But they certainly didn’t tell us about revisionist historians that came later, like Barnes.
You may be interested in some of Ed Glaeser‘s work, which discusses how the institutional arrangement of the legislature/electoral college has affected our policies relative to places like Europe.
Rather than turning every knob up to 11, I’d be interested in conducting experiments with one knob at a time.
Some of it is hedonic, but I’m not sure what you mean by “rentier”. I feel paranoia about the power of others (since I see no reason for them to give a damn about my interests) and if they aren’t willing to give me the choice to opt in or out I figure it’s because they don’t expect me to evaluate it as being in my interests. Furthermore, the possibility of others having exit allows me to free-ride off the diligence of others, as with low prices at a supermarket (though stores try to price discriminate with things like coupons).
Yes, I was too brief in just referencing “costs”, the property of a corporation proposal involved the sharing of benefits. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita suggests along those lines that the Israelis & Palestinians should divide up tourism revenues so that they have a stake in reducing violence.
October 25, 2010 at 8:17 am
My sense is that Flenser and Michael should read more neuroscience.
My sense is that you should stop shucking and jiving. The economic arguments you are trying to make here have been utterly discredited in the last century. “Neuroscience” does not offer you a deus ex machina.
October 25, 2010 at 4:49 pm
Flenser, how literate are you on the current state of neurscientific insight?
And what’s my economic argument here? That the consensus of macroeconomic experts should be our go-to guidance for macroeconomic policy? Because I doubt that’s been discredited in the last century.
October 25, 2010 at 11:01 pm
Again I don’t know what the relevance of neuroscience is supposed to be. You should explain.
October 26, 2010 at 3:14 am
” There can be no empirical answer to the question of which should be given greater weight – the individuals desire to do what he pleases or the technocrats desire to limit what the individual can do.”
Here’s one example which I think captures how Flenser is generally naive about neuroscientific insight.
November 6, 2010 at 11:36 pm
If “neuroscience” is to be used tio justify tryanny and slavery, then death to neuroscience.
October 26, 2010 at 3:46 am
Yet another response to a recent delong post by me:
“Prof. DeLong,
I think you strike the right tone here for your place in the competency heirarchy.
America-first commenters: we apes think in terms of personalities, and some personality has to represent technocratic thought about what is best for the world, not just some country X or Y.
Do you really need Prof. DeLong reduced to being an America-first strategist? Consider the wealth (median, per capita, any measure) of Americans vs. Chinese or the global population. It’s a bit noxious to heckle American macroeconomic experts to narrow their public epistemologic participation to America-first advocacy.
To be on the side of angels, I think Americans below the global income, wealth, living standards indexes should be advocating in a different direction, like for redistribution or something like that, rather than against policies that improve global stability and global wealth.
But yeah, I understand the tricky nature of the subject even if one is with good faith and technical competence attempting to be on the side of angels.”
October 26, 2010 at 8:09 pm
It sounds like Michael isn’t against rule by technocrats per se (the etymology of aristocracy is “rule by the best”) but whether H.A’s winning microspecialization nerds are more or less competent than their defeated predecessors. By H.A’s language Michael sees him as being on the side of the moderns, and so he harps on the worst of modernity in favor of the ancients.
Michael, “played a part” doesn’t put enough emphasis. It was the whole shebang. There was no Afghan “menace” other than that they would go to Russia. The Afghans killed an English official stationed in Kabul, the English avoided a repeat of that by not stationing an official in Kabul. When it was resolved that Afghanistan would follow the English line on foreign policy, there was no other concern to be had.
I don’t know how neuroscience is able to bridge Hume’s is-ought gap (disagreements over America-first vs global wealth don’t seem reducible to an empirical question, though perhaps in particular cases the conflict is mistaken). I’m also not aware of the studies done on technocrats, though I’d be interested in any links you might have.
October 27, 2010 at 2:16 am
“… the individuals desire to do what he pleases …” this is a romance that lives in the context of an ignorance of the latest (and for that matter long-standing historical) neuroscientific (and other social science) insights. You know as much when you recognize that rules are default nudges.
This romantic, willful ignorance of the best neuroscience seems to me to be at the heart of a lot of libertarian economist academic blogging. I think it’s bad faith public espitemological participation.
October 27, 2010 at 1:50 pm
“When it was resolved that Afghanistan would follow the English line on foreign policy, there was no other concern to be had.”
Don’t you think that Roberts’s deposition of the emir, the replacement of him by a friendlier despot, and the mass hangings of those responsible for the massacre of Cavagnari & Co. had anything to do with that result?
The point is that we have forgotten how to deal with savages, pirates, etc. It doesn’t matter WHY they have attacked us – only THAT they have. Our amnesia on this point is responsible for many of our problems in the middle east, sub-Saharan Africa, etc.
Instead of taking a simple, swift, and severe policy – the Punjab Principle – towards the local heathen, modern ‘technocrats’ attempt to introduce demaaahhcracy in these benighted purlieus, where it has about as much chance of flourishing there as do orchids at the North Pole. Roberts – or any Roman proconsul worth his salt – would have snorted in disdain at such impractical schemes, correctly foreseeing that they would come a-cropper.
October 27, 2010 at 3:38 am
Interesting a relevant post on the cognitive biases/bounded rationalitty of (technocrat) regulators:
http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2010/10/the-behavioral-economics-of-regulators.html
October 28, 2010 at 12:53 am
H.A, the individual’s desire to do as he pleases (rather than what someone else may please) is not a fiction. Yes, people will tend to go with defaults, but I am not hallucinating when I see people continue do so something after being instructed & given some incentives not to. flenser was stating that there is a conflict between the goals of regulator vs regulated, and the question of who out to make the final decision is not an empirical one.
Michael, Russian foreign policy had little to do from the Afghan perspective for why Cavagnari was killed. But from the English perspective, that was the central issue. To describe it as being about an “Afghan threat” is to confuse things. It was a simple matter to be confirmed in a treaty. The U.S has not set out such simple goals (in Iraq there was a shift from the initial W.M.D justification, and part of Obama’s campaign was an attack on Bush’s benign neglect in Afghanistan). Whether or not Saddam was hanged (Yaqub & Ayub Khan weren’t, Ali kicked the bucket on his own) doesn’t really matter.
H.A, I believe Dain blogged his interview with the author of that paper. Bainbridge seems to misrepresent Thaler & Sunstein, not that he’s alone in doing so.
October 28, 2010 at 12:36 pm
TGGP – You persist in confusing strategic with tactical concerns.
Russian ambitions in “the Great Game” were a strategic concern of the British. The approach the British followed in dealing with the Afghans – or the fuzzy-wuzzies in the Sudan, or slavers and pirates, or whatever – during the nineteenth century, was a tactical one.
We’ve forgotten the tactics, and the reason for them. If the United States is to be an imperial power, a point on which there is apparently little disagreement between the Bush and Obama administrations, then it must re-learn the tactics and steel itself to their use. It is pointless to try to be diplomatic and humanitarian with savages. We knew that at one time in this country – witness Sheridan’s campaigns against the red Indians. It is not a lack of technocratic social-engineering skill but a want of leadership, historical learning, sound judgment, and testicular fortitude that is at the root of our problems.
Tactically, militant Islam or any other sort of barbarism needs to be whipped so ruthlessly and memorably that it is cowed into submission. retreats to lick its wounds, and doesn’t try messing with the white man again for a good long time. The West needs leaders like Roberts in the fight against it.
October 28, 2010 at 2:05 am
“H.A, the individual’s desire to do as he pleases (rather than what someone else may please) is not a fiction. Yes, people will tend to go with defaults, but I am not hallucinating when I see people continue do so something after being instructed & given some incentives not to.”
You’re hanging hard on the romantic framing of the defauts. The default we’ve been talking about it is the barrier activity not overcome by sufficient (or properly information-theoretic?) incentive.
October 28, 2010 at 10:17 am
That’s a remarkably opaque way of saying: “With sufficient levels of coercion we can make people behave in whatever fashion we desire”.
Is your exceptionally muddy prose style an attempt to hide the nature of your beliefs from others, or from yourself?
November 6, 2010 at 11:43 pm
You have to realize you are dealing with someone who has expressed his admiration for the head of the Japanese organization that carried out human experiments during Japan’s war with China and the Pacific War.
This is who and what “Hopefully Anonymous” admires:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
October 28, 2010 at 10:07 am
Flenser, how literate are you on the current state of neurscientific insight?
I find your tendency to bandy about pompous and pretentious terms like “neurscientific insight” to be pretty pathetic.
You’re not actually saying anything, just making an appeal to authority and pretending that you are that authority.
I’m familiar enough with “neurscientific insight” to know that it does not and cannot provide answers to the problem I posed. There can be no “neurscientific” answer to the question of which should be given greater weight – the individuals desire to do what he pleases or the technocrats desire to limit what the individual can do.
You know as much when you recognize that rules are default nudges.
I see you’ve been imbibing Cass Sunstein’s “paternalist socialism”. Or “paternalist libertarianism” as he foolishly calls it.
Who nudges the nudgers?
October 29, 2010 at 1:39 am
“There can be no “neurscientific” answer to the question of which should be given greater weight – the individuals desire to do what he pleases or the technocrats desire to limit what the individual can do.”
What does “the individuals desire to do what he pleases” mean, using the best neuroscience, rather than romantic framings?
Sure, like you imply, our organizations seem to be built out of boundedly rational individuals, including the most talented resource managers within our organizations. Beyond that, there are a lot of empirical questions about the best forms of organizational design. The questions become tricky and I think the answers become deliberately incoherent on your end when organizational mission departs from something like maximizing the persistence odds of the component population to the organization. Do you consider information theoretic death a limit on the desire of the individual to do what he pleases? If not, it seems to me like your resistence to limits is either grounded in commission bias or it’s some sort of slow suicide aesthetic (or a heckle not sincerely grounded in an audience’s best interests, but rather a pander to their own commission bias).
November 6, 2010 at 11:45 pm
You are a fool and a sociopath who conceals his pathology behind pseudo-scientific gibberish like “commision bias.”, HA
October 28, 2010 at 8:51 pm
Michael, different strategies will entail different tactics. If one’s strategy is incoherent, as I believe to be the case with the United States, tactics will not save you. My guess is that body-count racked up by America easily dwarfs that of Britain in Iraq/Afghanistan.
H.A, I think referring to defaults as barriers to be overcome by sufficient incentives is a helpful way of framing it (and I had been planning on linking to LessWrong on willpower, but now I don’t remember the particular post). My point has nothing to do with how romantically anything is framed. I am saying that there exist conflicts, and the manner is which they ought to be resolved is not an empirical question. I’m not sure which particular defaults we are talking about. Flenser started things off arguing about socialism, but that is not really your interest. Brad Delong is (as far as I recall) not proposing behavioral economics but plain old fashioned blunt econ policies, though I don’t think flenser is specifically responding to them and may not be aware of what they actually are.
flenser, I recommend you check out my link on Thaler & Sunstein.
Thinking about the behavioral economics of authorities, the point that they are people like everyone else and subject to similar biases should be obvious enough that it goes without saying, but I suppose it’s helpful to remind us. I’d like to hear analysts of behaviorists to discuss the psychological research on how people given power behave differently from others.
Off-topic, but there’s good news for H.A.
October 29, 2010 at 1:50 am
My most recent repy to flenser above addresses a lot of what you wrote (though you’ve probably seen me write it before).
A small point that I side with critics of the behavioral econ/traditional macro divide that it’s all behavioral econ (policy tends to change behavior) and that there’s thus an oversold sense of newness to how behavioral econ is contrastingly framed to traditional econ.
” I am saying that there exist conflicts, and the manner is which they ought to be resolved is not an empirical question.” I think at the lest it’s a coherence transparency question. Once made transparent to a certain threshhold, I think it can be possible to rank the relative rationality of the positions from an organizational (or organizational constituent) perspective, in a more heckle/bias-exploitation free manner.
October 29, 2010 at 11:41 am
It is not just body-count that counts. Dishonor must accompany death in such cases. The action should have been, but wasn’t, quick, harsh, and humiliating to the enemy – as, for example, Roberts’s mass hangings of the murderers of the legation in Kabul were. That itself was in the classical tradition – we may recall the story of Julius Caesar, who as a young man was captured by pirates. He vowed he would come back to punish them – they laughed at him. They were not laughing when Caesar later brought a detachment of Roman soldiers, and put each one to an ignominious death.
The U.S. strategy has been incoherent, certainly. Instead of concentrating on catching Osama bin Laden and his henchmen, and punishing them in exemplary fashion, it has concentrated on nation-building, opium-poppy suppression, and other projects irrelevant to the task. These only reward corrupt officials like Karzai or alienate the local peasantry. Efforts to be humanitarian or diplomatic in dealing with the enemy are perceived only as signs of Western effeteness and weakness.
On purely “technocratic” grounds, we may contrast the technocratic superiority of nineteenth-century Britian – where the study of Oriental languages, particularly those used in parts of the Empire, was assiduously cultivated – with the dearth of American ability in these fields today. If we expect to exercise proconsular authority in such faraway places, we certainly ought to have a contingent of native-born Americans who can understand what the ghazis, fuzzy-wuzzies, and other assorted heathens in question are saying, as the British “politicals” in the days of the empire did. We don’t. Do you suppose there is a single American military officer today with the skills of Capt. Sir Richard Burton? I very much doubt it.
October 30, 2010 at 9:36 am
Sir Richard Burton’s modern military analogues in the USA (you specified American military officers) are junior special forces officers.
They seem fairly impressive to me (although their polylinguistic training seems to me to be more varnish than Burtonesque substance). The best graduate to CIA Black Ops, I don’t see why there’d be a skill fall off from the level of Sir Richard Burton, except that he had the opportunity to perfect his small unit tactics and close arms combat in the context of much less restrictive rules of engagement, at least it seems to me.
I don’t know of a clear example of a smarter, more talented version of Sir Richard Burton at what he did, but he’s a heroic yeoman technocrat who happened to be a translator and a historian.
He wasn’t a macroresource manager, which I think is what higher level technocrats do. I think we probably have more relevantly educated macro-resource managers that make better decisions in the industrialized world in 2010 than the British Empire did in Sir Richard Burton’s time.
There may not be an ass-kicker today that can speak six languages and can conduct competent geographic and anthropological surveys. But that’s more heroic than optimized from the perspective of resource management. I’d expect specialization and modest dual-specialization for unusual bright people to work better than to encourage the development of heroically polyspecialized individuals.
October 30, 2010 at 4:22 pm
If we have “more relevantly educated macro-resource managers that make better decisions in the industrialized world in 2010 than the British Empire did in Sir Richard Burton’s time,” then why did the British Empire move from success to success, while this country today goes from failure to failure?
On the level of “macro-resource managers,” surely central banking should qualify as a field of comparison; the Bank of England’s record in maintaining the stability of the pound’s value is something I’ve mentioned before, and I’ll add to it the expertise with which J. Pierpont Morgan served as this country’s unofficial central banker. Contrast his decisive handling of the panic of 1907 with just about any Fed chairman’s dealing with subsequent crises, up through and including Bernanke’s.
Let it be noted that Morgan had been educated in mathematics at Göttingen – in the time of Gauss! – and his biographers relate that he could figure out complex foreign currency arbitrage trades without setting pencil to paper. His usual modus operandi was to have his grandchildren bring him tapes from the ticker in his house at the breakfast-table, and he would formulate his plan for the day before going to his office. As proficient a banker as Jamie Dimon is, I’ll bet he can’t do that.
October 30, 2010 at 5:49 pm
Michael,
First, thanks for leading me to the wikipedia article on the Panic of 1907. A few things jump out from my read of it.
(1) “Confidence fairies” seems like a real thing, derided though it is by folks I respect that are critical of austerity measures. Although here it wasn’t austerity that boosted confidence.
(2) New Keynsian concepts don’t seem that crazy in the context of a sometimes panicky public.
(3) Mass religiosity and organized religion may have benefits in countering public panics, when used in a technocratic manner (as JP Morgan used it to counter public panic).
October 29, 2010 at 11:21 am
What does “the individuals desire to do what he pleases” mean, using the best neuroscience, rather than romantic framings?
Why do you persist in thinking that you make some telling point by asking questions to which you do not know the answer? As a rhetorical technique, it’s sophomoric.
You may be unaware of this, but your silly tic of trying to frame your own position as “scientific” and those you argue against as “romantic” is pure 19th century Marxism.
Sure, like you imply, our organizations seem to be built out of boundedly rational individuals, including the most talented resource managers within our organizations
I don’t “imply” that, and I don’t believe it. I don’t even accept your peculiar belief that people live in “organizations” run by “resource managers”. You talk like a caricature of a communist.
it seems to me like your resistence to limits is either grounded in commission bias or it’s some sort of slow suicide aesthetic
I have no “resistance to limits”. I have a resistance to your particular notion that “limits” can and should be set by technocrats. I’d sooner see the limits set by an hereditary aristocracy! Of all the myriad ways of conducting their affairs which humanity has devised, rule by technocrats has proven itself the most hideous failure, both conceptually and in practice.
October 29, 2010 at 11:34 am
Flenser started things off arguing about socialism, but that is not really your interest.
HA has been arguing for socialism in explicit terms all through this thread. Your mistake lies in thinking that socialism consists of certain specific courses of action, when in reality its essence consists of answering the vital question “Who decides?” with “Scientifically trained technocrats”.
Once you answer that question with that answer, you are a socialist. Regardless of what specific things you believe the scientifically trained technocrats should do with their power.
It’s an odd libertarian who’s never read and understood his Hayek.
October 30, 2010 at 6:39 am
My answer to “who decides” is “whoever’s decision maximizes my persistence odds”. But wearing my good faith public epistemologist hat, I think it’s helpful to consider the degree to which an algorithm adopts a decision process that deviates from what maximizes its persistence odds, as the degree to which that algorithm is “captured” by a rival algorithm.
So I think the degree to which agents promote or are susceptible to “libertarianism” beyond the degree to which it maximizes the persistence odds of the agents is a measure of the degree to which the agents are captured by a different algorithm, be it “the distribution of libertarianism in mindspace” or just entropy (which I think can be considered algorithmic, even if at the end of the day it’s just something like “zero”, but probably shouldn’t be viewed as itself an agent).
October 29, 2010 at 11:42 am
The questions become tricky and I think the answers become deliberately incoherent on your end when organizational mission departs from something like maximizing the persistence odds of the component population to the organization.
Talk about “incoherent”! Would it kill you to stop abusing the English language like this?
November 6, 2010 at 11:48 pm
Abuse of the human language is a deliberate tactic, not a failing, of would be tyrants.
October 30, 2010 at 10:54 am
This is awful IMO.
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2008/11/public-administration-majors-dead-last-on-gre-scores.html
October 30, 2010 at 2:34 pm
Fairly awesome article I got from searching for “empirical leadership studies”:
Click to access scientific.pdf
I read about halfway through page 6.
Interested to see what has been published since 1997 in this vein.
October 30, 2010 at 6:30 pm
I googled “persistence odds”, and used a couple of other search engines as well. The bulk of the hits that come up are of you talking about “persistence odds”! Go figure.
it’s helpful to consider the degree to which an algorithm adopts a decision process that deviates from what maximizes its persistence odds
Bully for you, HAL. But people are not algorithms, and they frequently show a distinct lack of interest in maximizing their persistence odds.
October 30, 2010 at 10:53 pm
Yeah, I’ve also noticed (disappointingly) that my passions amount to a heap of statistically improbable phrases that attract the interest of few but TGGP. Call it a little man theory of ahistory.
“But people are not algorithms, and they frequently show a distinct lack of interest in maximizing their persistence odds.”
I can’t argue with the second part of that. They don’t give it primacy, even aspirationally, except for a population so rare that it borders on solipstic.
October 31, 2010 at 8:46 am
I’m of course a fan, but I doubt he’ll run:
http://theweek.com/article/index/208737/bloombergs-road-to-the-white-house
I think a challenge from the right is more likely, and that Obama wins in 2012 the way Clinton won in 1992 (barely, and thanks to a third party conservativesque vote siphon).
Dems can’t overcome their anti-racism conceit to reject Obama, and conservatives can’t unite Tea Partiers with Wall Streeters into a consensus national candidate (Wall Street won’t accept Palin, and the Tea Party won’t accept Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney).
October 31, 2010 at 7:03 pm
When I saw this on the place of elites from McArdle, I thought of H.A. But I forgot to link it until now.
Neuroscience is a rather low leven to discuss concepts like an “individual” and its “desire” for any particular “end”. Psychology is the more appropriate level (and the behavioral economists are generally psychologists, with neuroeconomics being another field). Agents are commonly modeled as possessing goals with predict their behavior. Goals of different agents can conflict. A common goal (or perhaps sub-goal) is to avoid death, but not always and restrictions on suicide conflict with the desire of some to die. Assuming something like the classical economic conception of rationality (which may not be accurate), then there can be rankings. But these rankings are from the perspective of a particular agent and in cases of conflict those rankings can be quite different. Like Robin Hanson I am interested in avoiding conflict, but I still see it as pervasive.
Saddam seemed to have been plenty dishonored by the Sadrists, with much use of footwear to indicate disrespect. I’d actually like to know if there is evidence that public dishonoring is more effective than simple disappearance. “Corruption” doesn’t sound so bad in a client state. Trying to suppress the major cash-crop (helping to create a funding source for insurgents) is indeed silly though. For my own part I am not confident Osama is even alive. Most seem to think he is in Pakistan near the mountainous border region.
New Keynesianism seems plausible enough and represents something like the expert consensus, though humorously enough it may more closely resemble the pre-Keynesian “classicals” (or even “new classicals”) than Keynes himself (whose banner is borne by the marginalized Post-Keynesians). Nick Rowe has written a lot recently on the relevance of “fairies” (“Tinkerbell“) in macroeconomics recently.
“Of all the myriad ways of conducting their affairs which humanity has devised, rule by technocrats has proven itself the most hideous failure, both conceptually and in practice.”
I’d like to hear some evidence for that assertion.
flenser, Mao & Pol Pot were at times quite hostile to the educated, ordering they be re-educated through labor. The essence of socialism is socialism. If the consesus of experts is “Anything but socialism!”, then rule by expert consensus would not be socialism. You can redefine terms on your own blog. I don’t know who is proclaiming themselves to be a libertarian (certainly not H.A). For my part I agree with Bryan Caplan that Hayek is not a very clear writer, and it is not hard to find numerous ways in which the substance of his writing falls short. I prefer to read distillations of Hayekian ideas, and criticism of them more interesting than the question of what Hayek actually said (though getting that wrong may be an indication that someone is sloppy/misleading).
I believe I’ve heard about those GRE results before (which may make attitudes like flenser’s towards the promise of technocratic rule less surprising). But the ones about educators & education administrators are more salient in my head.
I’m more familiar with the historians’ rankings of Presidents, which generally fill me with disgust. Mere peace & prosperity tend to result in poor rankings.
I’d guess that more people are concerned with drastically prolonging their lifespan, but most don’t use the jargon H.A has settled into.
What is the “little man theory of ahistory”?
I also doubt Bloomberg will run (Giuliani had no chance, and Bloomberg has less) and I don’t think there will be a sizable portion of the vote going to a third party. I think it more likely that the “Tea Partiers” and (if not Wall Street broadly) the “Wall Street wing) of the G.O.P can be reconciled, because there doesn’t seem to be much substance to the Tea Party. A simple lack of tenure at national office in a Republican should be sufficient.
November 1, 2010 at 3:57 am
TGGP,
I think you underaccount for dummy passion for Sarah Palin types, which is why we ended up with so many dumb republican nominees in 2010 (in my blog, shortly after Obama’s election, I pointed out that that the technocratically inclined should focus mostly on getting the right people to run for and win the Republican nomination in swing districts, because structurally a lot of Dem districts would probably flip Republican -I don’t recall many other commenters, even smart and relatively independent ones like Andrew Sullivan or Reihan Salaam, making that obvious point).
I think the republican presidential nomination process is sufficiently money-driven and insulated from the dumbest third of the republican base that someone competent will beat out someone the Tea Partiers like.
Finally, and this is a bit meta, of the people that will run, I think most people have a mature sense that Obama would do the best job of the people willing to run for president, but don’t want to actually vote for him. A weak, 1992 style win by Obama where a lot of Americans don’t have to vote for him, and a bunch get to vote for their favorite dumb white person Palin-type identity candidate solves a lot of these social problems. I do think people can do these sort of weird mass coordination and pull it off, without being transparent to themselves that that’s what they’re doing.
But I understand some of the problems with the above analysis (a bunch of details can signal deep understanding, but statistically because less probable to be accurate because all these details need to correlate).
It reminds me of my deeper concerns with qualitative analysis and the “story” nature of it.
+++
“What is the “little man theory of ahistory”?”
-It’s a jokey contrast to the “Great Man Theory of History”, referencing the lack of influence my “evaluating algorithms on the degree to which they maximize their persistence odds” lense has had on the world. Though now that I think about it, the other term I use, “optimization”, has been around for decades, and engages in pretty much the same analysis (also, it’s basically what game theory and evolutionary algorithms, stuff like that studies, although I’m not expert enough to discuss them deeply).
+++
“Neuroscience is a rather low leven to discuss concepts like an “individual” and its “desire” for any particular “end”. Psychology is the more appropriate level (and the behavioral economists are generally psychologists, with neuroeconomics being another field).”
I thought neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology were all the same field, and that neuroscience and cognitive science just allowed a reset to be more empirically picky about the acceptable canon of thought and status of theories and theoretical lenses. Neuroscience might perceive psychology as a subset of neuroscience (the breakdown I recall is subcategories of computational neuroscience, physiological neuroscience, and cognitive neuroscience, with psychology mostly being cognitive neuroscienc). I suspect psychologists who seek to divorce from neuroscience are most often attempting to escape rigor.
And to be direct, I think neuroscience is a great place to discuss “concepts like an “individual” and its “desire” for any particular “end”.” because of the rigor of the discipline, and the lack of starting presumptions of romantic ideas like “free will”.
November 2, 2010 at 1:50 am
I could see Reihan making that point. Surprised by the mention of Sullivan. Sarah Palin has yet to show much ability to actually be elected. It speaks poorly of her competence as an executive that she resigned so quickly from her governorship, but well of her own perception of her capabilities that she has adopted the role of cheerleader rather than running for office herself.
I’ve heard the theory that people are more likely to “throw their votes away” if they think the result is going to be a landslide anyway. I don’t know how accurate that is.
I haven’t heard anyone argue that psychology should escape from neuroscience. I am of course a reductionist who shares E. O. Wilson’s vision of consilience. It is simply more practical that we speak in the language of biology and chemistry sometimes rather than the underlying physics. The way I normally hear the terms used, neuroscience is about actual neurons and dazzling fmri images. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with referring to someone as a “cognitive neuroscientist” it’s just not the rule of custom I’m familiar with. I’m also a determinist and have explicitly rejected the idea of “free-will”. But just as one can discuss the entities of a computer simulation as acting in an agent-like goal-oriented manner, we can say the same of biological entities acting under deterministic physical law.
November 1, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Yes, Saddam was dishonored by the Sadrists – but not by the United States!
Let’s say that instead of monkeying around with Saddam for months, and then turning him over to a native court that finally got around to hanging him, the following scenario had instead taken place:
Within a few days after capturing him, suppose the U.S. government had Saddam tied to a stake in the principal square of Baghdad, and smeared in lard. A suitable American proconsular authority – perhaps even G.W. Bush himself – then appeared, armed with a flame thrower, which he then discharged upon the ex-dictator. As the ensuing conflagration reduced him to a charred hulk, loudspeakers carried the proclamation: “Thus perish all who defy the United States of America!” Videotapes could have been sent to all heads of Muslim states.
Combining suitable public spectacle with a degrading end for the defeated – like Roberts’s mass executions in Kabul – would have made far more effective propaganda than what actually was done. As things stand, the enemy is still able, with some credibility, to portray this country as weak and soft. With little more trouble than we’ve already faced, we could quite easily have changed that perception.
November 2, 2010 at 2:25 am
Someone fairly smart arguing in the vein of Charles Murray against technocratic leadership:
http://onestdv.blogspot.com/2010/11/smart-politicians-and-how-left-keeps-it.html
I think it’s baloney, but it’s about an opposite an argument to my position as I think you can find.
November 2, 2010 at 7:57 pm
I am disgusted with Charles Murray. Jimmy Carter deserves much of the credit (or blame, if you’re an unreconstructed liberal) for the success of the Reagan era. He bore the blame for the inflation problem Nixon bequeathed and the interest rate hikes Carter’s necessary appointment of Volcker produced. Reagan negotiated with the Iranians not to release the hostages until his inauguration, just to make Carter look bad. There is nothing to respect in Palin as a politician. And don’t get me started on McCain.
November 10, 2010 at 7:38 pm
it’s about an opposite an argument to my position as I think you can find.
Ever read the comment section of this blog?
November 3, 2010 at 10:47 am
Quick thoughts on the election:
1. Glad Coon beat O’Donnell, although he’s not super-impressive as a public intellect despite his yale law degree. A Senator should have some clue what the 14th amendment is.
2. I’d like to see Obama choose not to run for reelection. The nation doesn’t need him to be President again, just someone of his threshhold competency or better. He has a lot of folks like that in his cabinet. I’d like to see some of them run in 2012. I dislike that influential pundits are trying to turn this into “what game does Obama need to play to win in 2012”. I think everything is better, and nothing worse, if both Democrats and Republicans have a robust field packed with technocrats representing different American subpopulation, than it being Obama vs. a Republican field in 2012. Though I think Obama could win, I don’t think he should run.
I’d like to see an effort made to make sure technocrats run for party nominations in districts likely to flip in 2012. There really should be an organized movement just for this easy way to tweak improve governance.
November 3, 2010 at 7:53 pm
O’Donnell never had a chance according to Intrade. People were saying the Republicans had thrown the election as soon as she was nominated.
November 3, 2010 at 2:12 pm
I hope Bill White doesn’t run for Senate or do some small private sector job.
I’d like to see him continue to build his administrative resume (for example, he could take Chu’s spot at Department of Energy) and then run for Texas governor again in 4 years.
I’d like to see Chu move up to Health and Human Services or Secretary of Defense in preparation for a California Governorship run in 4 years.
November 3, 2010 at 4:58 pm
Recent post to delong’s thread “Can Obama get and stay on message”.
I like the PAYGO message. I think it’s a good way to autopaternalistically manage stimulus spending with long term fiscal discipline.
Many of the comments here seem to me to criticize Obama without a mature and humble consideration of the limited life (and recent) accomplishments of the commenter relative to Obama. To Obama’s credit he’s much more mature than a huge swath of the population that he’s governing, including many of the commenters in this thread.
November 4, 2010 at 3:57 am
But you’re evil, HA.
Sorry to have to point this out. Didn’t you ever notice?
November 4, 2010 at 6:45 am
What did my comment have to do with evil?
November 10, 2010 at 7:31 pm
Many of the comments here seem to me to criticize Obama without a mature and humble consideration of the limited life (and recent) accomplishments of the commenter relative to Obama.
You could defend every President of the US with those words, no matter how bad they were. I find myself doubting that you wrote the same thing while Bush was in office, although it was equally correct then.
November 11, 2010 at 1:14 am
If you look for my obscure posts and comments, you’ll see that in my analysis, Bush was by many measures highly qualified for the Presidency.
The #1 prerequisite for the Presidency in my opinion is a successful run as a large population state governor, which puts former governors of California, Florida, New York, and Texas at the top of the list.
My #2 prerequisite is an elite administrative graduate education. Here Bush qualifies with his Harvard MBA, however he had mediocre grades and no empirical research and publication trail to my knowledge.
However, after formulating what I consider to be the meritocratic prerequisites for a competent presidential candidate, I was surprised that George W. Bush fit the bill better than most if not all prior presidential candidates (who I think lacked either large population state governorships or graduate administrative education).
However, I wasn’t impressed with Bush, which probably has hurt my credentialist intuition and strengthened my IQ reductionist intuition. Because I think Bush Jr. was better credentialed to be President, but Obama is smarter, and I think Obama is doing the more effective administrative job to date.
As for IQ, I think the best evidence outside of life achievement (which is significant contrary evidence) is that I’m smarter than Bush, Jr. but less intelligent than Obama. Still, Bush, Jr. in my understanding earned about 1250 on the old SAT’s, which places him well above average in intelligence -that sounds right to me to be able to graduate Yale and Harvard Business school with undistinguished grades.
I do think I’m less intelligent than VP Cheney, and I do have a humble appreciation for the government logistical complexities he managed over 8 years.
As for Bush, it’s a bit difficult for me to evaluate him or Cheney strictly as an administrator since I do view them more through the “looting” than “administrating” lense (in contrast with Republican large population administrators like Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, who I rate highly). I could either rate them in absolute value of rentier aiding in wealth extraction (they’d rate high in effectiveness, though I’m not sure who the comparison class is) or in smallest value of damage done to their own country (much less damaging than Mugabe, for example).
November 3, 2010 at 5:57 pm
Conservative republican shtick that’s on the side of angels?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704462704575590344022699132.html
November 3, 2010 at 7:43 pm
I agree with him on crudeness, but I didn’t completely get his Obamacare reform. I don’t see how it addresses the constitutional issues he implicitly refers to by mention of the Supreme Court striking it down.
November 4, 2010 at 1:43 am
follow-up comment to delong:
” And if he does that then he’ll be a goner in ’12.”
What’s up with this meme? Obama can be an extremely successful President AND choose not to run for reelection in ’12.
I don’t see the argument for Obama running for reelection. The Democrat bench is deep, there are many “first” presidents to be had still, Obama will have many post-presidential opportunities (for a 1/2 kenyan, UN Secretary General may be obtainable, and he probably has a lock on a Supreme Court seat if he wants one).
November 4, 2010 at 8:55 pm
How many people want to be elected that don’t want to be re-elected? And how many presidents have declined to run for another term and were replaced by a member of their own party? I also think the GOP would filibuster an attempt to appoint him to the Supreme Court, though (like Taft) he may be more cut-out for that role.
November 5, 2010 at 2:19 am
TGGP,
I wouldn’t expect an immediate appointment (maybe 5+ years after the presidency). I doubt Senators would filibuster a former Senator’s appointment (perhaps I’m wrong, but I think that would be close to unprecedented).
I’m not sure Obama would be one of the 9 best choices in the country for the Court anyways. I’d like to see some very economically literate folks appointed to the Supreme Court.
November 5, 2010 at 5:56 pm
The Senate defeated Bush 41’s nomination in 1989 of former Sen. John Tower to be Secretary of Defense. So much for the fraternal comity of Senators!
I wouldn’t put much confidence in assumptions of Senatorial courtesy in the unlikely event Obama were nominated following his presidency to the Supreme Court. Normally nominations to cabinet posts are not as vigorously opposed as Supreme Court nominations, since cabinet posts are held at the president’s pleasure, in no event outlasting his term, and there is a presumption that a president should be allowed to appoint persons loyal to him to serve in the executive branch.
On the other hand, nominees to the Supreme Court, and even to the appellate courts, are frequently filibustered on partisan grounds. Obama has been such a divisive president that I cannot imagine his nomination would not be filibustered. Moreover, there would be the obvious grounds for objection that he had no prior judicial experience, and was in no sense a legal scholar.
November 6, 2010 at 4:25 am
Michael,
I think it would be tougher to oppose President Obama for the Supreme Court on the grounds you state. First, the combination of being a constitutional law professor (or instructor? I forget his actual UChicago title) AND a former Senator historically overcompensates for lack of appellate federal judicial experience (given that former Senators have been appointed without his constitutional law expertise pedigree) -not to mention that he would also have been a former president. Second, I just don’t see this country blocking such an unusually qualified and apparently super-unusually impulse controlled black guy from an appointment like that.
However, I’m more enthused about the possibility of getting quant and social science dual literate people into slots like Supreme Court seats. Empirical legal scholars, empirical macroeconomists specializing in the effects of regulation, stuff like that.
November 6, 2010 at 12:56 pm
Obama’s legal scholarship is questionable. His law-review position at Harvard was a popularity contest; his position as a law professor was a classic example of affirmative action. He is so deeply unpopular with Republicans that I cannot imagine their not filibustering him. There would have to be 40 or fewer Republicans in the Senate for cloture to be invoked in such a case.
Your wish to get “quant and social science dual literate people into slots like Supreme Court seats” vastly overstates the value of “social science,” which seems mostly to me to be a dressing-up of preferences and prejudices in sesquipedalian verbiage to make it seem erudite. You ought to read Andreski’s “Social Science as Sorcery.” I’d much sooner have a competent chemist on the Supreme Court as a “social scientist.” You also omit to consider the other aspect of aristocracy, which even Thomas Jefferson acknowledged, as he wrote to John Adams:
“I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talent…”
What about virtue? Where are your technocrats going to get their areté, philotimia, virtus? Or is virtue non-existent in the age of the administrator, as Alasdair Macintyre suggests?
November 6, 2010 at 2:10 pm
Michael,
I think your assessment of Obama is deformed by his blackness. Affirmative action wasn’t designed for high IQ immigrants (which is where Obama got his genetic-component intelligence from) and by intellectual pedigree, Obama seems to me to be overqualified to be a U Chicago law professor by the standards applied to white folks (there just aren’t enough Harvard Law magnas to go around).
I’m in the half sigma camp -I don’t think affirmative action is the defining narrative for Obama, though perhaps he received it to get into Columbia, Harvard Law, and to give the keynote speech for the 2004 DNC, I think he’s also received attempts to discriminate against him based on his blackness (clinton primary strategy, fox news general election strategy) as well as the inauthenticity of his blackness (blacks for hillary clinton strategy, black republican strategy), and overall its been a wash.
I think he beat the Clintons and the McCains on intelligence, primarily his own, and I think achieving a magna rank from Harvard law is a very high end IQ test that shows his raw cognitive ability is frankly well above average for any job he’s ever held including the presidency.
Having said that, I think it’s reasonable to have higher or different standard literacy prerequisites than a harvard magna for a uchicago law professorship (the truth is the standards are lower though, not higher), to force people of Obama’s IQ to develop literacies and skillsets that would be more useful for society, akin to the hoops empirical macroeconomists and industrial engineers have to jump through on the way to their Ph.D.’s.
I think it’s an arbitrary distinction on your part virtue vs. talent, both are subsets to technocratic competence in my eyes. But we already had that discussion.
I side with Steve Sailer and TGGP on the value of empirical social science, even if the social sciences are rife with bias and ideological posturing (generally of a banal lefty variety).
November 6, 2010 at 1:53 pm
I finally read the wikipedia on Schelling Points, since its come up so frequently on tggp’s blog. Very enlightening.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)
I was suprised that “grand central station noon information booth” was the student-derived answer for meeting a stranger on a random day in NYC, because I would have thought even in 1960 otr so the answer would have been somewhere in Times Square at 6pm (times square being more universally known both as a location and as a meeting point, and 6pm generally being a better and more natural meeting time for people). In 2010 I would specify the 24 hour starbucks.
November 6, 2010 at 7:35 pm
Obama isn’t just a “former senator” (and he wasn’t even that for very long), he’s a former president.
Michael, would you favor a rule requiring that cabinet nominations require an up-or-down vote with no filibustering? As much as I love obstruction, I don’t think it’s particularly helpful there.
I can’t actually recall anyone complaining about a lack of economic literacy on the Court before. Could just be my memory though.
I believe Rehnquist did not have previous judicial experience, but the trend has been toward appointing former appellate judges. Even Kagan was a bit controversial for not knowing her way around a courtroom very well when arguing before the Supremes.
The effects of regulation seems more a micro than macro topic. Maybe systemic risk counts as macro.
Obama seems like a very intelligent guy, but I’m not as impressed by his accomplishments throughout his career. Any of the major dem candidates would have beaten McCain, so his one real campaign victory is beating Hillary.
Affirmative action isn’t designed for immigrants and their children, but they are some of the primary beneficiaries (along with descendants of Caribbeans).
“Virtue” sounds like a suspicious concept to me (a child of the modern era). I’d like to hear it defined.
H.A, you still need to provide a time. And is there only one Starbucks?
November 7, 2010 at 3:45 am
TGGP, I said 6pm, re-read my comment for why. There’s only one 24 hour starbucks, which I think makes it the most natural meeting point.
Actually I’m very impressed with Obama’s accomplishments as President (though not so much prior to that, with the exception of his campaigns and his harvard law performance). I’ve watched him discuss his agenda and accomplishments off-teleprompter and I think his intelligence and mastery of his complex job is apparent. There’s a comic bias in the folks that distort his performance in my opinion. Primarily it makes me excited about the possibilities of getting even smarter and more competent people into the Presidency, like Secretary Chu or Mayor Bloomberg.
I don’t think it’s a lock that any major Democrat would have beaten McCain. I thought McCain ran a good, strategic campaign that required significant tactical intelligence for Obama to capitalize on luck and win.
I thought the effects of regulation on a macrosocial population of 300 million would count as macroeconomics, and that all policy is regulation, but perhaps I misunderstand.
Economic literacy in the court isn’t my concept. Either Caplan or Kling have talked about it, and at least one law and economics professor claimed easily detectable flaws in federal judicial decisions due to economic illiteracy (I think it might have been someone named Buchanan?).
November 7, 2010 at 6:44 pm
I think that cabinet appointments might well deserve an up-or-down vote (though I’m open to opposing arguments).
Judicial appointments should be able to be filibustered simply because they are lifetime appointments of officials who are basically answerable to no one once they are installed. Since the modern habit is to kick all of the hot-button controversies (e.g., abortion, gun control, same-sex marriage, etc.) to the judiciary so that elected legislators can avoid dealing with them, judges should be able to get supermajorities for confirmation.
Virtue is a suspicious concept to you entirely because you are a child of the modern era. See Alasdair Macintyre for an explanation of the reasons why you, and many others, fell that way.
We may best understand it first by stripping away the Christian accretions and looking at its roots. The Latin stem of virtus is vir, i.e., a man in his status as such, an adult male, rather than as a member of the human species. Virtus is the condition of manliness as understood by the ancient Romans: a mixture of physical and moral courage, the latter including especially fidelity to one’s pledged word, the willingness to do what is right even when it is personally inconvenient, and upholding the good repute of oneself and one’s family. The Greek philotimia is literally a love of honour, meaning all these things. In sum, virtue in this sense refers to the qualities of chivalry or gentlemanliness.
Macintyre’s argument is that these qualities have been discarded in the age of technocratic administration. There is something to this, and whenever I hear the praises of technocracy it seems to me that the underlying belief is that we can do away with the need for morality by some sort of (pseudo)scientific manipulation, as B.F. Skinner’s “Walden Two” proposed. Göring is reported to have said that when he heard the word “culture,” he reached for his revolver. When I hear the word “technocracy,” it provokes a similar reflex in me.
November 7, 2010 at 10:37 pm
You’re right, I forgot about the 6 pm thing. Wouldn’t have occurred to me, perhaps because of atypical work schedules. I also assumed that franchises like Starbucks kept basically the same hours everywhere. I’ve never been to New York and don’t know much about the place.
I’d have to look up InTrade numbers, but the major factors were the economy and dissatisfaction with the war. I don’t recall much about the McCain campaign, but I don’t think he did a very good job. He was originally going to pick Lieberman as Vice President, and when his advisors told him that wouldn’t be acceptable he basically chose Palin out of spite. Republican presidential nominations are known to go to those that have “paid their dues” and runner-up gets Vice President. Then when he campaigned McCain prohibited anyone from using the Jeremiah Wright controversy. Might fit into his conception of honor, but a competent politician doesn’t leave those kind of bills lying on the sidewalk.
The notable economists named Buchanan is James, the public choice theorist. I’m not familiar with his thoughts on the judiciary.
It wasn’t Goring who said that, it was a fictional character in a play by Hanns Johst.
I have heard it said that there are two concepts of honor. The older, military or aristocratic one is along the lines described by Steve Dutch as The World’s Most Toxic Value System. The modern bourgeois one is about honesty and reliability.
I imagine MacIntyre does have plenty on what moderns think, my suspicion is that it’s a lot of Bulverism. I’m not interested enough in philosophy to actually investigate, though I saw a video of Sandel at Harvard lecturing on communitarianism, with Aristotle & MacIntyre against Kant & Rawls.
November 8, 2010 at 12:26 am
As for “the world’s most toxic value system,” try this thought experiment.
First, consider what is meant when a person’s behavior is described as noble, chivalrous, or gentlemanly. Secondly, consider what describing one’s behavior as businesslike implies. Finally, consider what is intended when his behavior is described as bureaucratic.
Though the age of feudalism and squirearchy is long gone, it is still a compliment to be described as “noble,” “chivalrous,” or “gentlemanly”. Bear also in mind that there are still other words connected with these social strata. When a person is described as generous, what is implied is that he is excellent, noble, and well-bred; the term derives from Latin generosus, which in turn derives from gens or family. The behavior described is that of a person of “good family.”
As we move from the feudal era to that of capitalism, we note that to describe someone as “businesslike” – i.e., possessing the qualities exemplary, or at least ideally characteristic, of its dominant stratum, the bourgeoisie – is at best lukewarm praise. It’s hardly the same as saying that he is chivalrous or gentlemanly.
Finally, as we come to the ultimate triumph of socialism, as predicted by Marx, we enter the era in which the bureaucrat represents the dominant stratum; and to call someone’s behavior “bureaucratic” is most definitely not a compliment. We wish the bureaucrat might at least be businesslike; we’re all too aware that the only way in which he is likely to be generous is with money that doesn’t belong to him; but we know that to hope he might be gentlemanly or chivalrous is completely in vain!
Thus do our common usages betray a wise and true understanding of the nature of these different value systems, even as supposedly higher thought attempts to obfuscate them.
November 8, 2010 at 1:05 am
Having just read the Steve Dutch piece to which you linked, it seems to me that you do not quite get it right in identifying the European aristocratic concept of honor with what he is describing, the “thar” culture of blood vengeance characteristic of the Arab world. Indeed, he makes clear that Japanese “bushido” is not “thar.” Neither, I suspect would he so describe the classical concept of areté or virtus (i.e., goodness, excellence, rectitude), or the idea of Christian chivalry exemplified by (say) the Knights Hospitaller of St. John. Chivalrous honor and bourgeois credit – the two systems opposed to each other by Sir Walter Scott in “Rob Roy” – have more in common with each other than they do with the blood vengeance of Arab lands, or those parts of Europe tainted anciently by a Moorish presence.
November 9, 2010 at 1:01 am
To me the Industrial Revolution is the one event in history and all of pre-modernity is more similar to each other than to modernity. Ironically, Mencius Moldbug already paralleled the modern underclass with aristocrats of old, and Tom Wolfe did it before him.
November 14, 2010 at 4:18 pm
If Mencius Moldbug has parallelled the old aristocracy with the modern underclass, he’s sending a very mixed message. The modern underclass has not produced anyone like Lord Cromer, whose colonial proconsulship MM has praised to the skies. Nor has it produced anyone like Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford, whose authorship of the plays attributed to Shakespeare Moldbug has championed over at Steve Sailer’s website, on the grounds that only an aristocrat could have written them, not a common ignorant fellow like Will S. from Stratford.
Even the Steve Dutch piece to which you linked distinguishes between the “thar” culture he is describing as “The World’s Most Toxic Value System” and the values of European aristocracy:
“I believe the Western concept of the individual has been one of the pivotal ingredients in the rise of technology, because people who see themselves as autonomous agents, capable of chaning the world, invent things. Many historians trace our concept of the individual to the medieval concept of chivalry, which created an elite class that was expected to model its conduct on an internalized code of ethics – and sometimes even did.”
Your assertion that the “older, military or aristocratic one [i.e., concept of honor] is along the lines described by Steve Dutch” must be attributed either to carelessness or to deliberate misreading, since he is at such pains to distinguish the Western (and Japanese) aristocratic cultures from those of the Arab world, in which “thar” prevails.
I should further argue that the Western aristocratic culture hearkens back to the ancient Greeks, and particularly to Aristotle’s politics and ethics, which were prized by Aquinas and the other schoolmen of the middle ages.
No doubt there were rapacious noblemen of the Wenzel von Tronka type, but it is important to note that such behavior was always considered worthy of condemnation by their own class.
As for the industrial revolution, to identify it as some sort of unique turning point is a vast historical oversimplification. What about the development of a credit economy, and international commerce, which were the underpinnings of Renaissance Italy? What about the textile trade in the low countries, or the invention of printing? These phenomena antedated the so-called Industrial Revolution – really just the mechanization of industry during the nineteenth century steam-engine era – by centuries. The latter could not have happened if the financial and commercial institutions that supported it had not already long been in place.
November 7, 2010 at 9:45 am
Seems like a nascent technocratic party in some ways in Vancouver, though I hate the name “Reason” -it’s obnoxious for the libertarian magazine, too.
November 7, 2010 at 9:45 am
referring to this:
http://reasonvancouver.ca/about-reason/
November 8, 2010 at 2:50 am
I think claims that Hillary Clinton or John McCain ran poor campaigns have 2 problems with them. (1) There’s the monday morning quarterbacking element, (2) how good someone appears to be in a socially competitive situation is distorted by how good their competition is. President Obama is very tough social competition and so made folks he beat look like socially poor competitors. I think the evidence is that McCain and Hillary Clinton acted at high levels of social competence. They’ve both beat tough competitors. From your perspective, it’s easy to claim the McCain made mistakes and ran a poor campaign, but consider your difficulties in you microsocial, low stakes world compared competition for the Presidency. It’s a very tough gradient at that level. I think McCain was outsmarted, not bumbling.
November 8, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Obama was elected simply because he motivated black voters to come to the polls and to vote almost unanimously for him. Other Democrats were swept into office on his coat-tails, since there is no voting bloc in the American electorate more reliably Democratic than the black community. And of course Obama’s promise to “spread the wealth around” was understood in the black community – and intended to be understood – as a promise to expropriate from whites and give to blacks.
We see the results of Obama’s absence from the ballot in this mid-term election. McCain beat Obama amongst white voters by 12% in 2008. The results of this year’s election are explained by the Democrats’ loss of such white voters they had in 2010, plus the lack of interest in voting on the part of blacks in an election that didn’t offer the attraction of putting a ‘homie’ in the White House.
November 8, 2010 at 12:58 pm
Michael, in your epistemological deformation here is class-representative, but “weird” to me as a phenomenon, and of the same type of your inability to have Obama’s magna count for him the way we conventionally do for a Scalia, a Roberts, or a Romney (the last two are cum laudes, which I still think is impressive).
Obama did something tactically very impressive in 2008. I think he’s also governed impressively since. Also, I think he performed impressively academically and socially at harvard law. Those are three impressive accomplishments in high competition milleius.
To acknowledge that doesn’t change the reality of the distribution of intelligence in human populations.
To try to say that because most people who look like Obama are dumber than most people who look like Bill Clinton, and therefore Obama is dumber than Bill Clinton is of course silly on its face. But that’s the direction in which your class seems to be struggling mightily. I don’t get the impulse. I think Half Sigma calls it better here.
November 8, 2010 at 2:54 pm
Is grading at Harvard Law race-blind?
What was Obama’s publication record in the Harvard Law Review? What was his publication record as a University of Chicago faculty member?
I don’t dispute that Obama is an intelligent man, but I do believe that he has achieved academically beyond the level that his record would predict, were his race not part of the calculation.
This holds true also in his political career. Here is a man who was elected to his state legislature, quickly plucked from it to run for U.S. Senate, where he served two relatively undistinguished years before running for and winning election as President of the United States – with no administrative experience. This appears to me to be more the work of experienced political fixers within the Democratic party who wanted an alternative to Hillary Clinton than it reflects a recognition of his singular merits.
If he has any genius it is for campaigning, not for governing. You can’t deny that his campaign brought a huge black turn-out to the polls in 2008, and for the most part they voted the straight Democratic ticket because he was at its head. To the general public he spoke in glittering generalities of “hope and change,” letting the mask slip only occasionally, as in his remarks to “Joe the Plumber” or before the supposedly private gathering of wealthy backers where he derided the hicks in flyover country who clung to their guns and religion. He had the aid of “community organizers” at ACORN, who registered vast numbers of fictitious voters, so that when they stuffed the ballot boxes in urban precincts, the embarrassing circumstance would not arise that more votes appeared to have been cast in a precinct than there were voters registered in it.
I am underwhelmed by his subsequent governance. Rather than taking an active part in setting the agenda for his first two years, he turned this task over largely to the congressional Democratic leadership, weho promptly sought a left-wing wish-list that had been stymied since 1994.
He spent an excessive amount of time and political capital on the health care bill, a vast piece of legislation that was cobbled together for the one purpose of getting enough votes to pass, which no one really read in its entirety. He spent more time and political capital on cap-and-tax, and on the card-check bill his union allies wanted, even though neither managed to pass despite commanding Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. The stimulus has done nothing to reduce unemployment; his promise was that the stimulus would prevent its rising above 8%, when instead it has risen to 9.6%. The so-called financial reform bill enshrined too-big-to-fail, did nothing to reform Fannie and Freddie (which hold or guarantee more than half the residential real estate mortgages in the country), and erected a be-kind-to-deadbeats regulatory agency to harass the country banks and credit-card companies, which had nothing to do with causing the crash. Congress had two years to deal with the expiring Bush tax cuts, and has yet to get around to them; it will now (maybe) do so in a lame-duck session.
Do you call this “impressive” leadership? You must be very easily impressed.
November 8, 2010 at 3:56 pm
You really don’t know how grading is done at harvard law?
But that’s not really the argument.
I think you’re lawyerly rather than good faith empiricist in the way you discuss Obama.
At the end of the day, I guess this comes done to where you think the asymptote is for (half) black cognitive performance.
The empirical record is that it is somewhere below Fields or Bates Medal or Nobel Science or Economic Prize or or Putnam winner, although whites, east asians, and south asians all make the cut.
Put apparently a black person or two can graduate magna from harvard law.
I don’t see why you feel the need to call bullshit there, it’s an arbitrary rarified line to say that out of 1 billion blacks, not only are all less smart than Krugman (I think that’s at least a reasonable possibility) but all are also less smart than Bill Clinton (also a reasonable possibility, but in our reality, there are a few that seem to be in the same IQ league and possibly smarter, like Obama).
I didn’t have super-high expectations of Obama’s presidential performance, but evaluating it in an undeformed way, in contrast with the other modern Presidents and concurrent large population executives, I think Obama’s performance is very impressive. It’s a vote for giving more resource control to demonstrably super-smart people. And the good news is that we seem to have people in the wings significantly smarter than Obama and any other modern prior president.
November 8, 2010 at 3:59 pm
“At the end of the day, I guess this comes done to”
should read “At the end of the day, I guess IT comes DOWN to”
November 8, 2010 at 3:58 pm
“At the end of the day, I guess this comes done to”
should read “At the end of the day, I guess IT comes DOWN to”
November 9, 2010 at 12:53 am
My impression is that Clinton ran a good campaign, so I’ll give team Obama credit for that. McCain seemed glaringly short of the arena he was competing in.
Michael, the black vote is overwhelmingly Democratic but they’re too small a portion of the population to put a President into office on their own. Otherwise there would never be Republican presidents.
I agree with Michael that Obama’s actual accomplishments (publications, achievements as a community organizer or state/federal legislator) are less than what one might expect given his intelligence (evidence by his magna cum laude). There are probably personality factors other than intelligence involved. Maybe he’s not enough of a rapacious bastard.
I don’t downgrade Obama for deferring to Congress. The Clintons ran into trouble when they tried to write the healthcare bill from the White House. And unlike Obama, they failed to pass it.
“Cap-and-tax”? I know people derisively use the phrase on the internet, but since cap-and-trade and carbon-tax are distinct policies I’d like you to elaborate.
What qualifies as a “country bank”? Scott Sumner argues that it was small southern banks that were the worst offenders rather than evil Wall Street firms.
I’d like to hear what H.A thinks is particularly impressive about the Obama presidency. To me he seems to be continuing a lot of Bush policies, but hasn’t yet had any of Bush’s collossal screw-ups (though I believe as Senator he voted for the bottomless bail-out of Fannie/Freddie).
November 9, 2010 at 3:46 am
This piece is a bit of an oversell, but I think it’s a good distallation of what is otherwise spread in a bunch of blog posts, with a minimum of fluff.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/how-obama-saved-capitalism-and-lost-the-midterms/
In short: auto-bailout worked, TARP worked, stimulus worked, and universalish health care act worked. I’d add to that no major terrorist attacks and Iraqi drawdown success (from the perspective of not being disastrous for the American military or international security). Like the opinion piece noted, nobody gets credit for avoiding a plane crash.
As for the auto-bailout and TARP, I had no idea of they were going to work or not. It seems to me a lot of critics were wrong.
The health care act seems to me to be positioned to imorove american economic efficiency quite a bit.
So, I’m impressed by Obama’s governance. On the other hand, he doesn’t have a super-impressive set of recent presidents or large state governors to contrast against. If we had more folks like Bloomberg in governance, Obama might look less impressive in contrast.
November 9, 2010 at 12:56 pm
The “worst offenders” were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – still in the hole, and with no possible hope of repayment. Essentially all TARP funds placed with commercial banks have been repaid, with interest.
Georgia until recently had unit banking – i.e., its banks were not permitted to branch. This left that state with a large number of very small banks. Very few if any were rescued by TARP – they were liquidated in orderly fashion by FDIC.
The situation was not the same in other southern states. Indeed, in September 2009 I sat at an ICBA seminar about how to acquire or merge with other banks, next to the chairman of a regional bank in the southeast. His bank had almost 50 branches and footings of about $1.2 billion, by far the largest bank of the 40 or so represented at the seminar. When the speaker asked if anyone present had taken TARP money, he was the only one to respond affirmatively. When the speaker asked him why he took it, he responded that it was more or less forced on him. When asked what he was doing with it, he responded, “nothing”; asked what he intended to do with it, he replied, “pay it back as soon as possible.” The speaker then noted that this was the response he received from every banker he had met who took TARP monies.
In any event, Georgia’s small banks were vulnerable for the same reasons many small banks failed during the Great Depression – bad investments rather than bad loans. In the Great Depresson those bad investments were bonds, often Latin American sovereign credits, that they were encouraged to buy by the money-center banks and by the Treasury Department, which gave them its apparent endorsement (see Ron Chernow’s “The House of Morgan” for details). In the aftermath of 2008, the bad investments were mortgage-backed securities and preferred stock in Fannie and Freddie, which were zero risk-rated under the Basel accords.
To conclude, the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau established by Dodd-Frank, or whatever this agency is to be called, will do nothing to enhance the safety and soundness of customers’ deposits from substandard credit risk. Indeed, at the insistence of Elizabeth Warren, appointed by Obama as a “special adviser” to Treasury so he could circumvent the requirement of Senate confirmation, the Bureau is to be insulated from those sections of the Treasury Department that concern themselves with safety and soundness. This will serve only to guarantee that yet another bureaucracy will be working at cross purposes to safety and soundness, as (for example) CRA and HMDA already do. It is, as I previously said, a be-kind-to-deadbeats agency.
Cap-and-trade imposes an artificial cost which functions as an effective penalty or indirect tax on emissions above an allotted amount through the requirement of buying someone else’s unused emissions allotment. A carbon tax imposes a similar cost directly. In either scheme the idea is to discourage activities that generate carbon dioxide by attaching punitive costs to them. Both concepts are akin to the marihuana tax, the full-auto weapons transfer tax, the white-phosphorus match tax, etc., in their intent. Par divers moyens on arrive à pareille fin.
As for Obamacare, the provisions that have already gone into effect (no denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions, no lifetime cap on claims, and requiring children to be carried to age 26 under their parents’ policies) have already had predictable results: premiums have risen. Insurance companies cannot be forced to carry additional risk – and in the case of the no lifetime cap on claims requirement, unquantifiable risk – without charging higher premiums. That is, unless in the name of “consumer protection,” the government forces them to engage in unsound business practices that will lead ultimately to failure. The record is pretty clear on this point. Look how much good the government did by encouraging mortgage lending to people who were not creditworthy, against woefully insufficient collateral!
November 9, 2010 at 2:12 pm
Further to the black vote: of course, at 13% of the population, it’s not enough to elect a president by itself. But when almost all of it is cast for Democrats – and when it’s motivated by the presence of a black man at the top of the ticket, as Obama was in 2008 – it’s a considerable advantage for the Democrats to have such a large voting bloc.
Bearing in mind that, according to exit polls, McCain carried the white vote by 12%, it ought to be evident that Obama could not have won the election without the near-unanimous support and extraordinary voter turnout of blacks in 2008. The comments H.A. made about black or half-black cognitive performance are utterly irrelevant to this point.
November 9, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Michael,
I’m not sure we can do much else with this discussion, since it seems to me that you’re bad faith and most comfortable playing a dialectical role rather than engaging in comprehensive analysis.
I’m curious to see you name white administrators that you think Obama is smarter than, though.
November 9, 2010 at 5:19 pm
In what way have I written in bad faith?
What I have written here is based on my own observation and experience, particularly with respect to banking.
Rahm Emanuel is a very smart political operative and was very effective in the Obama White House. I think Chuck Schumer is a very astute politician; his role in shepherding the Obama candidacy for the Democratic nomination in 2008 was key to its success, and quite skilfully done. Obama is undoubtedly an intelligent man, but probably not as smart as he imagines himself to be, or as you think.
He would be nowhere if not for his political patrons and promoters, who saw him as a marketable commodity: a black politician who did not, as Harry Reid observed, speak in “negro dialect,” and who moved with ease in the company of affluent, academically-credentialled white liberals.
Such people always flatter themselves, especially so when a politician they have plucked from obscurity, and with whom they identify in some way, succeeds. Archetypal of this was the “Camelot” phenomenon. In truth, Jack Kennedy was a man of vulgar tastes whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book was ghostwritten by Theodore Sorenson. He cheated on his wife and concealed his potentially incapacitating Addison’s disease from the public. Yet his camp followers constructed a personality cult around him that has scarcely been rivalled in American history, of the rich, glamourous, handsome, young intellectual and his beautiful wife, the devoted mother of two picture-perfect children. One might have imagined the Kennedy White House to have rivalled the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent. And he had the superb taste to crown all this by dying a martyr’s death!
If it had been filmed only a little later, one might have thought the last line in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” had been intended as an epigram on Camelot: “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Ted Sorenson and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. surely did that. And there are some who would do the same for Obama.
November 9, 2010 at 5:47 pm
I wrote ” it seems to me that you’re … most comfortable playing a dialectical role”.
Your reply has lived up to that in a delightfully unironic manner.
So you think President Obama is an intelligent man but blah blah blah. What white administrator is he more intelligent than? Who is the smartest white administrator that he’s more intelligent than?
I’m geniunely curious where you would place President Obama in that context.
I volunteered that I think President Obama is a more competent administrator than former President Clinton and a less competent administrator than Mayor Bloomberg. Your turn.
November 10, 2010 at 1:46 pm
You still haven’t told me how I have written in bad faith.
I have told you that I think Messrs. Emanuel and Schumer are highly competent politicians, more so than Mr. Obama himself. Without Chuck Schumer, Obama would not have got the Democratic nomination. His victory in the general election was as much a result of the timing of the Lehman bankruptcy and the ensuing bank panic and stock market collapse as of Obama’s campaign, which (as I noted) was dominated by glittering generalities. McCain and Palin actually led in polls between the Republican convention and the market crash. Once Obama was inaugurated, most of his legislative ‘successes’ really are owed to Rahm Emanuel’s familiarity with the workings of Congress. Obama was not particularly effective during his two years in the Senate; contrast this with Emanuel, who was an old Washington hand, both in the Clinton administration and in the House of Representatives. It appears to me that Obama is the creature of his handlers.
As far as Obama’s administrative skills – he seems to be following many of the policies established under G.W. Bush, despite the outcries of his left-wing supporters. The prison he promised to close at Guantanamo is still open. He has sent additional troops to Afghanistan. He has not sought the repeal of the Patriot Act, and has deferred to Congress on don’t ask, don’t tell, rather than abolishing it by executive order. I do not know whether this represents mere inertia on his part, or whether he has recognized that there is merit in Bush’s policies. If the latter, we ought to recognize the superior administrative merits of the man who instituted them, as compared to the man who merely continues them – don’t you think?
November 10, 2010 at 4:57 pm
Michael,
So you’re unable to name a single person that Obama is better administrator than?
More specifically, you’re unable to name a single white guy that you think Obama is a better administrator than?
November 10, 2010 at 5:51 pm
I don’t know how much of Obama’s administrating is actually his work product, and how much is that of his handlers, so the answer you want is hard to give.
I suspect that – from a standpoint of purely administrative skills – Larry Summers was probably the best of Obama’s staff, clearly better than Obama. I suspect that some of the ideologues Obama appointed to various posts are less competent than himself. Numerous among these are minor appointees of the Van Jones type. Of high-level appointments, Sotomayor is pretty clearly a dull functionary, chosen for partisan reliability rather than brains. Elena Kagan on the other hand is highly capable and has so demonstrated in her prior career. But, again, judges are not administrators proprement dite.
November 11, 2010 at 12:40 am
Michael, so in your estimation President Obama is a better administrator than Mr. Van Jones, and maybe than Justice Sotomeier.
How about white guys? Can you name any that without caveat you think Obama is a better administrator than?
November 10, 2010 at 9:36 pm
I’m not going to go into the merits of TARP, but as Egan notes Obama basically followed through on Bush policies there. Same with the troop drawdown in Iraq. I believe the Afghan surge is more Obama’s rebuke to Bush, and I don’t think it will work very well. I don’t think there’s any way you can claim the health care act “worked” since it hasn’t really been implemented yet. Nancy Pelosi famously said we can’t know what’s in the bill before it’s passed, and following it’s passage liberal wonks like Ezra Klein were saying health care was only partially reformed so we’d need another reform to patch up this one.
It does seem that the government is going to make money from TARP. I have heard Michael’s claim that many recipients didn’t need the cash but were given it to avoid signalling that recipients were insolvent. A more troubling claim is that some recipients have been able to pay back their loans thanks to Fannie & Freddie, and it appears that hole just keeps getting larger and larger. I’m not going to blame Obama for that, since it happened under Bush.
The purpose of the marijuana tax is to make any possessor guilty of a felony, as the tax is never actually paid. My impression is that most proposed carbon taxes or caps are not targetted at a level of carbon consumption too different from current amounts.
All presidents these days rely on a larger group of advisors & officials. I give Obama credit for the quality of people who puts responsibility in.
Sotomayor isn’t that impressive, but keep in mind that Bush wanted to appoint Alberto Gonzalez & Harriet Miers because they were Texas pals of his. Gag me with a spoon.
November 11, 2010 at 12:49 am
TGGP,
What’s your analysis of Michael’s competency ceiling on Obama, which seems to me to be a kind of winking coordination against acknowledging any black person is more intellectually competent than any white person (a variation might be against acknowledging that any liberal black person is more intellectually competent than any non-liberal white person, which might be called the Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell exception).
The truth seems to me to be in the politically incorrect zone that whites have higher IQ’s, etc. than blacks but Michael’s stance seems to me to be not just a random overshoot, but an overshoot with a constituency.
November 11, 2010 at 1:49 pm
A white example of an Obama subordinate who was clearly appointed because of his ideological orthodoxy rather than his administrative ability is Kevin Jennings. There are certainly other white appointees of whom the same can be said. As for competent blacks (other than Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell) I’d cite the example of Colin Powell. Although he is not an Obama appointee and is at least nominally Republican, he is a “wet” or “RINO,” and if I recall correctly, he endorsed Obama. That does not diminish my respect for his abilities as a soldier and cabinet officer.
As for TGGP’s indication that “some recipients [of TARP monies] have been able to pay back their loans because of Fannie and Freddie,” I’d like to know more. Is it alleged that Fannie and Freddie bought distressed loans from banks that were TARP recipients? What is being claimed?
It is true that the Federal Reserve Bank has supported the prices of Fannie’s and Freddie’s debt instruments, which certainly has helped every bank in the country avoid loss in its investment portfolio. The Fed’s balance sheet is now swollen with assets like these and at least some of them are of questionable value. Obama is not to blame but neither is Bush. The Federal government for many years implied that these securities were almost as good as Treasuries – its regulators (and international regulators as well, under the Basel accords) required zero loan loss reserves be held against investments in the GSEs’ debt – and all this time Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and others were pressuring the GSEs to step up their purchases of substandard credits.
Fannie and Freddy equities, typically preferred stock, were NOT supported by the Fed, and although they were rated as “bank quality” investments, they are now valueless. The one example I know of in which TARP monies were used to bail out a bank that got into trouble because it held Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac preferred is OneUnited Bank of Boston, Mass. It received $12 million in TARP funds because of the intercession of Rep. Maxine Waters, whose husband had been a director of OneUnited. This transaction is one of the issues that led to the investigation of Rep. Waters by the House Ethics Committee, and her pending ethics trial.
November 11, 2010 at 9:52 pm
I can’t recall which places I read about the link between the GSEs and TARP repayments.
Michael lacks brevity and is prone toward harping on certain preferred angles. In my experience he is more invested in left vs right (and present vs past) issues than black vs white.
November 12, 2010 at 4:06 am
He’s extraordinarily binary in his thinking for an otherwise very smart person, and I think he lacks any sort of self-awareness of his limitations.
November 12, 2010 at 2:14 pm
If I “lack brevity” it is often because I do not know how much background information those who read these comments already have, so I try to supply it rather than assuming it is common knowledge. If I were speaking about (say) bank regulation, Federal Reserve policies, or GSEs and their securities with a fellow bank director or officer, much of this could go unsaid.
H.A. is, it seems, though using pussyfooting language, trying to make my criticisms of Obama out to be racist. They are not. I thought as little of Jimmy Carter’s performance in office as I do of Obama’s. And I’m not a particular fan of George W. Bush, in many respects.
I am unapologetic about being a reactionary, but I do admit there are intelligent leftists. Their abilities are not lacking – their principles are the problem. I do observe that a great many black politicians and self-styled leaders (e.g., Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson. Charles Rangel) appear to me both to lack principles and to have intelligence that, while it places them in the ‘talented tenth’ of their race, is not more than bright-normal. They are leaders of their community for the same reason that a one-eyed man is a leader amongst the blind.
My “limitations” have nothing to do with this conversation, because I have never pretended to be a competent public administrator. I don’t claim to play the fiddle, either – but I’m perfectly able to tell when a fiddler sounds a false note. In like fashion, whatever limitations I may have don’t prevent my correctly identifying as such the mistakes and falsehoods of politicians and bureaucrats.
November 12, 2010 at 3:07 pm
It’s bizarre to me placing Obama in the same category as Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, or even Charlie Rangel.
I guess you’re a snob without being a credentialist or an IQ fundamentalist (two of my own weaknesses)?
Obama isn’t the descendant of West African slaves. He’s the son of a high end african immigrant technocrat and a woman from a family of mid-tier white American technocrats. That reduces poorly to the Al Sharpton talent pool, sort of like expecting Abhinav Kumar’s mathematical performance to be limited by his complexion.
But it’s too easy an error to be a blindspot. It seems to me to be a push narrative, but like I said meaninglessly so since we can construct a performance line that no black has crossed already, above the level of Obama’s intellectual performance.
Where does this impulse and constitutency come from? What does it feel like on the inside?
Particularly since you’re anonymous anyways.
November 12, 2010 at 3:12 pm
Michael, it seems to that you’re highly vested in linking intelligence to ideological team matching, and secondarily to racial team matching, and that you operate epistemologicially like a lawyer for your “side”.
I think the ideological team match intelligence assessment is common for many ideological identity types. The racial team matching is probably more common for whites, and maybe for jews, asians, northeasterners, ivy leaguers, engineers, korean subset of asians, etc. Certain populations that have agent constituents that operate with resistence to claims that anyone outside the population can be as smart as anyone inside the population.
Is this at all internally transparent to you?
November 12, 2010 at 5:52 pm
I agree with what you have said about Obama’s background – but he’s still benefited from affirmative action treatment intended for American blacks, even though he doesn’t share their background. So, it might also be said, did Colin Powell, who is also not the descendant of American slaves.
Obama is no doubt a superior intellect to Sharpton and Jackson, and probably more sophisticated in his venalities than Charles Rangel – but he’s still come up in politics through the degraded culture of the American black community. That’s why he joined Jeremiah Wright’s church, isn’t it? I personally have no doubt that Obama is a complete agnostic, if not an atheist. His religious affiliations was purely opportunistic. Association with Wright’s church served him well when his constituency was the Chicago black community; when he had to cater to a larger constituency outside it, Wright was more of an embarrassment than an advantage, so Wright and his church were discarded, as the rind of an orange might be after one had squeezed out the juice. This reflected a certain cold-blooded calculation on Obama’s part – as I have previously observed, he’s not an unintelligent man.
I am a business owner and derive my income from capital. My interest in politics is in the preservation of the rights of private property and freedom of enterprise. This is not a purely selfish interest, because there is ample evidence that when governments secure the rights of private property, and do not penalize capital, prosperity results for all. When, on the contrary, governments fail to protect private property or are actively hostile to it, they impoverish not just the owners of property, but all their citizens.
As an accident of the history of this country, most black politicians, from my point of view, are on the wrong (i.e., left) side of these issues. The problem, as I observed earlier, is not with primarily with the intelligence of leftists, but with their principles.
As for “high end African technocrats,” how high their end is may be measured by the general state of affairs in sub-Saharan Africa, which is with few exceptions a disaster. Obama’s father was a drunk who abandoned his son in infancy and died at an early age. I’m not sure how typical this is of high-end African technocrats.
In any event, the difficulty I have with all of your palaver about technocratic skills is that it takes no account of principles or character. In my view, these are primary considerations in evaluating any ruler. Intellect or skill in the absence of correct principles and good character aggravates, rather than ameliorates, a ruler’s performance.
November 13, 2010 at 3:42 am
Your snark suggesting “african technocrat” may be oxymoronic reminds me of the joke about the african and the asian that become friends in Oxford’s econ program, and meet again years later. Both are finance ministers of their home countries. The African brags about how rich he ha become, and the Asian brags about how rich his country has become.
November 12, 2010 at 6:46 am
I’m a bit of an administrative law nerd, and know about Preeta Bansul because I’m a bit of a Harvard Law magna graduate groupie, but somehow I missed the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States. Looks like one of those things President Obama was talking about accomplishing that we “don’t even know about”. I like it, as well as its pedigree (created by President Eisenhower) and the part of its explicit mission that is to bring more science to administration. I stumbled on a related news article mentioning it by google news searching “professor” and “regulation”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Conference_of_the_United_States
November 12, 2010 at 7:39 am
This guy looks like he may have quant-imperialized the Erving Goffman space a bit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_P._Abelson
November 12, 2010 at 10:21 am
Efficient voting with compensation:
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/4/0/8/6/p140866_index.html
Looks interesting. The jist I got from the abstract is everybody’s better off if we list candidate by preference and then how much money we’d accept to have a lower-ranked candidate selected. I assume there’s some anti-heckling angle to it to encourage lower, honest bidding, like a proportion of the payment demands, the most expensive ones, don’t get compensated.
November 13, 2010 at 4:29 am
Something towards an American technocrat party:
http://www.sefora.org/about/
Although I think they’d be sensible to swap out physicians for social scientists.
November 13, 2010 at 8:21 am
Evidence in favor of calorie fundamentalists (TGGP, I remember a side debate on this from our discussion of Bloomberg’s calorie transparency law).
http://www.kens5.com/news/health/Nutrition-experts-junk-food-diet-Its-not-what-you-eat-just-how-much-107481113.html
November 13, 2010 at 9:44 am
Should the USA (and a bunch of other similarly wealthy nations) rightfully have a median income an order of magnitude above $5K per year? Or are the middle classes of wealthy nations rent-seeking on both high performing elites and low income global masses.
What would a good critical assessment of this look like?
November 13, 2010 at 4:41 pm
an axion of microeconomics is that the marginal product of labor is the wage of labor. The accumulated wealth of rich countries is a measure of their past productivity; their annual GDPs are measures of their current productivity.
The US consumes so much because it has historically produced so much. Of course, its continuing trade deficits reflect declining productivity, and they cannot continue without eventual decline in living standards. Even so, by most measures, the US is still a very productive country.
Rent seeking cannot occur without some sort of restraint of trade. Economic rents represent the difference between the price of a good or service as set by a free market, and the price of that good or service as it is established in a market that is somehow restrained, as for example by monopoly or oligopoly, monopsony or oligopsony. Such restraint is never lasting unless it is enforced by sovereign power. The OPEC cartel is a good example of rent-seeking through restraint of trade by sovereign powers.
In what way do you envision that “the middle classes of wealthy nations are “rent-seeking on both high-performing elites and low income global masses.”
Further, how do you define “middle classes”? Do you understand this in the traditional sense, i.e., the bourgeoisie, made up of small capitalists and people in the learned professons? Or do you mean “middle class” in the feel-good American sense, denoting just about anyone who is neither a welfare-dependent lumpenprole nor an independently wealthy rentier?
November 13, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Incipit should read: “An axiom…”
November 14, 2010 at 12:57 pm
I mean in the sense that the best financial engineers and search engine optimizers (or the best managers of these populations) become billionaires everywhere, but competent drivers, construction workers, and a lot of other “middle class” workers make an order of magnitude more in wealthy nations, perhaps to extend your analogy, because of citizenship birthright cartels?
I gues one can argue the same for the “welfare-dependent lumpenprole”, but numerically I’m guessing the middle classes are a more sizeable and economically significant rentier population?
November 14, 2010 at 3:43 pm
I am assuming from what you say, you mean ‘middle class’ in the American sense.
One of the peculiar things about the marginal product of labor is that capital investment can greatly increase the marginal product of labor – so that the laborer, though he is perhaps no smarter and working no harder than before, will enjoy a rise in wages just because his employer has provided more productive tools.
As an example of this, consider Henry Ford’s famous decision in 1914 to pay his employees a minimum of $5 a day, at a time when the ordinary mill hand earned $1 in the same period. Ford was able to pay such a wage because his system of production – his capital investment – made it possible, not because his employees were intrinsically five times better than other mill hands.
To the extent that successful businessmen invest their capital at home, they create opportunities for their fellow countrymen to be more productive than people elsewhere can be; those employees receive correspondingly higher wages.
This is not so much a consequence of deliberate restraint of trade creating economic rents for that class of people as it is an example of imperfect competition. Farming is often said to be an example of perfect competition, since one farmer’s corn sells for the same price as another’s – farmers are price takers rather than price setters. Yet all farmers do not make the same profit on a bushel of corn, even though they receive the same price. Some have more fertile soil than others; some have better farming skills than others.
I should say that the United States has historically been a more productive country than others because its soil (metaphorically speaking) has been more fertile, and its climate more salubrious, for the flourishing of profitable commerce and industry, than has been the case in other countries. This can and will change as business becomes more ‘globalised,’ and as politicians alter our salubrious conditions. In this respect,
Obama & crew appear intent on sowing our fields with tares, and perhaps with salt. That’s a sure way to end American exceptionalism!
November 14, 2010 at 3:43 pm
I am assuming from what you say, you mean ‘middle class’ in the American sense.
One of the peculiar things about the marginal product of labor is that capital investment can greatly increase the marginal product of labor – so that the laborer, though he is perhaps no smarter and working no harder than before, will enjoy a rise in wages just because his employer has provided more productive tools.
As an example of this, consider Henry Ford’s famous decision in 1914 to pay his employees a minimum of $5 a day, at a time when the ordinary mill hand earned $1 in the same period. Ford was able to pay such a wage because his system of production – his capital investment – made it possible, not because his employees were intrinsically five times better than other mill hands.
To the extent that successful businessmen invest their capital at home, they create opportunities for their fellow countrymen to be more productive than people elsewhere can be; those employees receive correspondingly higher wages.
This is not so much a consequence of deliberate restraint of trade creating economic rents for that class of people as it is an example of imperfect competition. Farming is often said to be an example of perfect competition, since one farmer’s corn sells for the same price as another’s – farmers are price takers rather than price setters. Yet all farmers do not make the same profit on a bushel of corn, even though they receive the same price. Some have more fertile soil than others; some have better farming skills than others.
I should say that the United States has historically been a more productive country than others because its soil (metaphorically speaking) has been more fertile, and its climate more salubrious, for the flourishing of profitable commerce and industry, than has been the case in other countries. This can and will change as business becomes more ‘globalised,’ and as politicians alter our salubrious conditions. In this respect, Obama & crew appear intent on sowing our fields with tares, and perhaps with salt. That’s a sure way to end American exceptionalism!
November 14, 2010 at 4:02 pm
I never got the Henry Ford claim that it was a viable strategy to pay his workers more so that he could buy his Model T’s. Wal-Mart’s strategy (Apple Computers’ too) seems more obviously viable to me. Although I understand the PR benefits for him to take that stance, it seems a bit zero sum (there can only be one “Henry Ford” of wages, not much glory left for the guy who pays his workers $4 per hour instead of $1).
What was really going on with Henry Ford? How did wage and employment really work? Was he essentially google paying a higher wage to a more talented fraction of the population that would have commanded it for doing other work otherwise? Did the vast pool of non-henry ford employers follow him culturally so that non-Ford employees really could all aford to by Model T’s?
Where’s a good critique of that mythology?
November 14, 2010 at 4:33 pm
Ford’s rationale for paying a higher than average wage to his employees, though he may have believed it sincerely, had nothing to do with his ABILITY to pay them such a wage. That ability arose from the immense improvement his methods of production brought about in the marginal productivity of his workers – as compared to the marginal productivity of workers in other industries. He could afford to pay them more, and so he did.
Ford’s reasoning for why he did what he did is an example of being right for the wrong reasons. It’s akin to the explanations of Vitruvius of how amphitheatres should be constructed to enhance the audience’s ability to hear the players. From the standpoint of modern acoustics, Vitruvius is wrong. However, following his instructions still led to nearly optimal acoustic results, as the surviving Graeco-Roman amphitheatres demonstrate.
November 14, 2010 at 5:03 pm
I’m thinking another way to look at it is that it’s better for Brazil and the world that Steve Jobs has Apple manufacture Ipods in China. It’s not just better for Steve Jobs and China. The American middle class is a rentier that’s also lowering global efficiency /wealth creation.
That’s probably too simple, but is it more accurate than the more standard rhetoric I see that free trade and comparative advantage is good for everybody, including the middle classes of wealthy nations? Because I think the middle classes of wealthy nations could have an incentive to engage in rent optimization, in which case it because a policing/coordination problem for everybody else.
November 14, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Asserting that the American middle class is exacting economic rents does not make it so. You have not shown how they are.
Why should not the United States attempt to maintain policies that enhance the prosperity of its people? Is not this what wise and benevolent governance ought to do? Any normal person ought to have more feeling for his fellow countrymen than he does for foreigners. You appear to be proposing that Americans should accept the same wages as Chinamen or Hindoos in the interest of “global efficiency.” Globaloney is more like it.
As long as this country is a firm guarantor of rights in private property, enforces contracts with impartiality, and refrains from predatory taxation of capital and the return on capital, the whole of its citizenry will be more prosperous than are the subjects of other countries. For my part, to this sort of American exceptionalism, I say, ‘esto perpetua.’
There are, of course, those who either unwittingly or purposely seek to destroy it. When I hear Obama speaking of punishing his enemies, as he did before the election, I know as a business owner that he identifies me as someone deserving of punishment. I fear for myself, and I fear for the future of the America I grew up in and love.
November 14, 2010 at 6:08 pm
Do you have a meta-interest in America and the world or are you reducibly an agent-constituent of America?
November 14, 2010 at 6:57 pm
What in hell is that supposed to mean? I’m a patriotic citizen. My ancestors came here when it was still British North America; their descendants helped to found this country. As distasteful as I find its present government, I cherish the “land where my fathers died” – and I have nowhere else to “go back to.”
For myself, my family (past and present), my friends, business associates and employees, neighbors and feIlow countrymen, I want this country to prosper. I wish ill to no one, but wish better for those mentioned than I do for foreigners.
November 14, 2010 at 11:48 pm
Michael. HA’s “Do you have a meta-interest in America and the world or are you reducibly an agent-constituent of America?” means nothing at all but he certainly believes it sounds all technocratic and scientific. I believe that at least some of the reason for his gibberish may be a deliberate desire to obsfucate or even to merely annoy, but he also has a quasi-magical belief in impressive-sounding abracadabra.
November 14, 2010 at 1:39 pm
Global Administrative Law Blog
http://globaladminlaw.blogspot.com/
November 14, 2010 at 11:02 pm
Michael, it is my understanding that you have experience in banking and so volume is appreciated on that front. But I was thinking about other subject matter in which you lack brevity. I don’t think H.A gives a shit whether someone is “racist”, he’s talking about whether Barry Half-White in particular is a competent manager, and if blacks (or antiracist whites) are pleased enough that “one of their own” is in power that they don’t make trouble, so much the better. His angle is technocratic rather than moralistic.
I think physicians are more respected by most Americans than social scientists.
I don’t recall a discussion of “calorie fundamentalism” related to Bloomberg, but I have linked to Modeled Behavior on critiques of the idea. Here for example.
H.A, I’m surprised you’re even using such a phrase as “rightfully”. Taboo it.
Michael, I highly doubt that is an axiom. Rather, it is an implication of certain models. A model featuring slavery is an easy counter-example, and of course you later mention restraint of trade which may be what actually exists in our reality.
H.A, I’ve heard Dean Baker argue that doctors, lawyers & similar professionals benefit by excluding their own niche from global competition. I believe that’s in “The Conservative Nanny State” which can be freely downloaded online. I think Bryan Caplan has argued similarly on a lower end of the scale.
H.A, it is a complete myth that Ford paid more to get more customers. He was losing money because of the high turnover rate and the cost of training employees. The bonus pay was also conditional on some paternalistic behavior modifications. The percentage of worker revenue spent on cars was very small and not enough to make a dent in the cost of wages.
The usual rhetoric I hear acknowledges that specific low-skill occuppations can be harmed, but that overall we benefit from free trade. There’s an implicit Kaldor-Hicks criterion there, although sometimes it’s just painting special interest beneficiaries of protectionism as the enemy of the rest of America.
Michael, why the hell do you write “Hindoos” instead of “Hindus”? The latter is standard spelling and requires fewer letters.
Could you link to Obama on punishing enemies?
I remember reading De Vere comments at Sailers, but I don’t recall Mencius taking part. I went back and oddly enough found him responding to someone scoffing at an earl having someone murdered on a whim by pointing out that De Vere had personally killed a man in a swordfight. Dutch is a conservative and basically nationalist who posits a regional dichotomy, I see a temporal one. I don’t think an internalized code of honor is that unprecedented. Monkish asceticism is found in a variety of different cultures, though generally a rare practice despite the honor attached to it. I would agree that medieval europe is similar to ancient greece only because all of pre-modernity had commonalities that differentiate it from modernity. The Industrial Revolution had pre-requisites, but those changes did not alter society in the way the I.R did.
If you want to know my own opinion on Shakespeare, here’s my general heuristic. Occam’s Razor also suggests that the guy they’re attributed to wrote them, particularly seeing as nobody said otherwise at the time.
November 15, 2010 at 1:25 am
“Hindoo” is phonetic in English, and is the way the British used to spell it. The long “u” in English is customarily pronounced by educated speakers as if there were a “y” in front of it, as in for example in “use,” “mule,” “fuel,” “puberty,” etc. We do not say “Hindyou.”
I do not understand the reasoning for the change in transliteration of these East Indian words. One used, for example, to see the former Indian princely state spelt Oodeypore, which is in fact how it was pronounced. Now it is spelt Udaipur, which would appear to sound like something one might do to a baby.
Many of MM’s more forcible arguments on the authorship of the plays attributed to Shakespeare are found in Sailer’s comment section under the article headed “Joe Sobran, RIP” (dated 10/06). You probably missed them because you looked only under the article headed “Shakespeare” (dated 10/10).
If you will simply Google “Obama punish our enemies quote” you will get (at least I just did) 128,000 links. I shan’t bother to list them all here. The phrase was uttered during a speech urging Latinos to go to the polls and do this by voting against Republicans.
I don’t think Obama is particularly technically competent as a politician, and cited the reasons therefor: he has failed to accomplish many of the objectives which he promised to do during his campaign, this despite commanding majorities in both houses of Congress. Left-wing activists who devoted themselves to his election are now frustrated with him on these counts. Surely that they, his most enthusiastic backers in 2008, are now expressing dissatisfaction with his accomplishments, is some sort of verdict on his competence.
It is really a lame excuse to blame the foregoing on Republicans – until Scott Brown’s election, Obama had a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, and Republicans had little ability to block anything in the House. His real problem was with members of his own party. Then of course his stimulus program failed to prevent unemployment rising, when he promised it would reduce it. He’s done nothing to deal with Fannie and Freddie, which are much more central to the mortgage crisis than he or any Democrat is willing to acknowledge; &c., &c., &c. Again, these failures seem to reflect on his basic competence.
Obama’s party has now received a “shellacking,” which is to a great extent due to low turn-out among blacks, who didn’t have their man to vote for during mid-terms. Blacks are a highly loyal Democrat constituency – routinely over 90% vote Democrat. They weren’t motivated to turn out this time. Republicans need to be aware of this in 2012, when Obama will again be on the ballot, as he’ll probably encourage a massive turnout amongst blacks. I don’t think most blacks really care whether he is a “competent” president generally; they want the satisfaction of having their man lord it over the crackers, and “spread the wealth around” in the black community.
I don’t particularly care who wrote Shakespeare’s plays; I suspect, given the variations in his writing style between one play and another, and indeed the patchwork sources used in many cases for the same play, such as “bad” quartos and other variant readings, that the scripts for the plays may have had one or more “script doctors.” This has not been an infrequent practice in periods subsequent to Shakespeare, and (though we know little enough about theatrical practices in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) that the same practice was used then.
H.A.’s frequent resort to double-talk reminds me of this:
http://www,youtube.com/watch?v=yjXTOlsE8k0
November 15, 2010 at 2:07 am
“Should the USA (and a bunch of other similarly wealthy nations) rightfully have a median income an order of magnitude above $5K per year?”
I think it’s pretty clear that I mean from the perspective of maximizing global wealth (subordinate to minimizing global existential risk).
Not from a redistributive perspective, so I don’t think “rightfully” is doing sneaky normative work here.
November 16, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Further to your argument that it is not axiomatic that the marginal product of labor is the wage of labor:
Of course one is usually thinking of free labor in a capitalistic economy. However, slavery is not necessarily a counter-example.
Although a slave was owned by his master, his labor was not therefore free to the slaveholder. The slaveholder had to pay for the slave’s food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and provide for him in infancy (assuming he was born on the plantation) and in old age. Assuming the slave was purchased, there was in addition some need to amortize the cost of his purchase over his useful life.
I submit that the “wage” of a slave employed in menial agricultural or household labor amounted effectively to these provisions for his subsistence, and these in turn were about equal to the marginal product of his labor.
Bear in mind that as recently as the eve of World War I, it was possible in Britain to employ a free person as a live-in domestic servant such as a scullion or chambermaid for as little as £20 a year, plus room, board, and uniform. Obviously, the bulk of the cost of employing such a person was these non-cash benefits; the cash was almost for lagniappe. And, of course, the costs of employing a household servant circa 1910 did not include medical care, bringing him up as a child, or providing for him when he was old and decrepit.
Indeed, a problem of slave economies in general was that slave labor was not very productive, and the costs it imposed on the slaveholder made it uneconomical for all but the most lucrative kinds of agriculture. John Randolph of Roanoke, himself a slaveholder and a defender of slavery, made this point when he refused to support legislation that would amend the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to allow slavery in Indiana; he did not think its land and climate were suited to slavery.
It is rather obviously the effect of technology, and the improvement in the productivity of labor that it has brought about, which prevented Ricardo’s “iron law of wages” from operating. The failure of Ricardo’s prediction is an empirical demonstration of the truth that the marginal product of labor is the wage of labor.
Marxism seems to me to be largely a reaction to Ricardo, and it is interesting to observe that the ideals of socialism – providing adequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care from cradle to grave – approximate the benefits slaves ‘enjoyed’ on the plantation. Indeed, the similarity of socialism to slavery did not escape slavery’s defender George Fitzhugh, who argued that it was a more humane system than wage labor in a Malthusian/Ricardian economy.
And of course, slavery collapsed just about everywhere other than the United States with a whimper rather than a bang, because its uneconomic character was widely enough recognized that in most places no one thought it worth fighting to preserve. One wonders whether, if the Yankees had not been so eager to loot the South, slavery might have ended peacefully there within a couple of decades without all the bloodshed of 1861-65.
We have seen or are seeing, in similar fashion, the largely peaceful collapse of Marxian socialism, and for the same reasons.
November 17, 2010 at 11:19 pm
The long “u” does often seem to come with a “y”. Some counter-examples are “indubitably”, “inscrutable”, “tumor”, “puma”, “cruel” and “induce”. The last two arguably don’t count because there is an “e” indicating the “u” is long but the same is the case for your examples. I also think it would be funny if we used the spelling “Foo Manchoo”.
Business owners are the enemies of latinos? Businesses tend to be pro-immigration.
Matthew Yglesias has argued that Obama has actually gotten a lot done, but I attribute that largely to his large Dem majority (with the feeling of panic playing big roles in the bailout/stimulus).
I will go out on a limb and say that black turnout in 2012 will be significantly higher than 2010 but lower than 2008.
I think blacks will tend to vote for the Democrat no matter what. The Inductivist does present data here on how race interacts with income & liberalism to predict attitudes toward redistribution.
H.A, “rightfully” is almost always used normatively and you aren’t using it in reference to positive law. So is it the “sneaky” part you’re arguing against?
Robert Fogel argued in “Time on the Cross” that American plantation slavery was actually quite economically productive.
November 18, 2010 at 1:44 am
TGGP, I mean here I think my frame has been straightforward in analyzing what rational global administrative policy would be if it was grounded in maximizing living humanity’s persistence odds (this is as you know different from what I would WANT global policy to be, maximizing my personal persistence odds, which has a strong constitutency of one at most).
So I don’t think “rightfully” is a violation in that context.
The sneaky part would be if I was claiming to describe the way the world worked empirically and snuck in a normative framing, or if I claimed to describe a persistence maximizing course for an agent (a positivist description) and snuck in some normative statements -like “you all want to prosper? then give money to Ceaser”.
So I appeal the foul call.
November 18, 2010 at 2:09 pm
I should say that indubitably, tumor, puma, and induce were correctly pronounced with the “y” sound; that is how a BBC announcer would have said them back in the days when there was such a thing as “BBC English.” Inscrutable and cruel are exceptions, as is rule; all have an r before the u, and this seems to be a usual exception when long u follows that letter.
The Wade-Giles system of Chinese transliteration was in use when Sax Rohmer wrote the Fu Manchu stories, so presumably that name was transliterated according to it. Have you any idea what it would look like in Pinyin? It would probably appear as “funny” as Foo Manchoo.
You leap to the notion that “business owners are the enemies of latinos?” from the observation that Obama urged Latinos to go to the polls to “punish their enemies,” whom he implied were the same as his” Republicans. Your quibble is with Obama, not with me. He was the one who spoke of punishing enemies.
I have heard of Fogel’s claim about the profitability of plantation slavery, but have not read his book. I’d note that profitability and productivity are not necessarily the same things. Stoop labor, whether done by slaves, serfs, or sharecroppers, is inherently limited in its productivity.
It seems to me that his arguments should have applied à fortiori in Brazil, which has a climate even more favorable to the cultivation of lucrative cash crops than does the American South. Yet slavery went out with a whimper, and not a bang in Brazil; its preservation was not considered worth hundreds of thousands of deaths there. If it were such an essential part of the Brazilian economy one would have expected more resistance to its abolition in that country. That this did not happen seems to me to undermine Fogel’s contention about the profitability of the system.
As for H.A., as long as we are discussing Shakespeare, these lines seem apposite:
“He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.”
November 18, 2010 at 11:00 pm
Fair enough, H.A.
I looked up on youtube for BBC plus some of the words. Tumor sounds like I expected. It was hard to find any for “puma” but there was a non-youtube video I found via Google where a British kind of military aircraft was pronounced with the “y” sound. The Daily English Show pronounces “indubitably” without that sound. I think it’s from New Zealand though.
Obama made the statement about enemies, but you made the inference that he was talking about business owners.
November 19, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Obama was talking about Republicans and tea-partiers as “enemies.”
The Republican party is largely the party of businessmen, outside of a few New York billionaire Democrats, largely Jewish, such as Goldman Sachs partners. Tea-partiers are largely small-business owners. I do not think many small businesses, or any businesses outside of states next to or near the Mexican border, are particularly egregious employers of illegal immigrants. The exception might be construction contractors.
Indubitable and induce are words that come into English from Latin through French. The long u pronunciation with the “y” sound before it is derived from the French pronunciation of long u. Try saying these words in French (they are exact cognates). This gives some notion of how the long u is pronounced by a correct English speaker.
I’ll agree that the tendency has been to make long u sound like oo. Johnny Carson, you may recall, pronounced the word puberrty as “pooberty.” That didn’t make it right – any more than Eisenhower’s (and many following his example) pronunciation of nuclear as “noo-kyou-lar” made that correct.
BBC has dumbed down and proled-down its announcers’ speech from the upper-middle class south-of-England standard it invariably followed forty or fifty years ago. It is to that standard, and not what you might hear from them now, that I had reference.
November 19, 2010 at 2:14 pm
If there should be any doubt about Obama believing that business owners are deserving of punishment, consider his stance on extension of the Bush tax cuts.
Not only does he not wish to extend them for persons making more than $200,000 singly, or $250,000 jointly, but also he wants the capital gains rate to go from 15% to 20% (as it was under Clinton) and for the rate on dividends to go from 15% to whatever the recipient’s top bracket for ordinary income is, which could conceivably be as much as 39.6%.
Taxable capital gains are realized only by sellers of capital assets, which are substantially common stocks (equity in principal residences, the major capital asset of most American families, is effectively exempt from capital gains taxation). Dividend income is received only by owners of corporate stock, i.e., business owners.
What do you call increasing capital gains taxes by 500 basis points, and potentially more than doubling the tax rate payable on dividends, other than punitive? Obama has identified the “class enemy” – and it is, inter alia, me.
November 20, 2010 at 4:39 am
It seems like a weak argument from you.
Adopting your “this agent activity targets enemies” framework, I think as good a case can be made that optimized existential risk minimizing social epistemology is your enemy, and by promoting skewing our models of reality from that direction you’ve identified the class enemy, and it is those who want to minimize human existential risk.
Btw, I’m open to arguments that low taxes of particular types are better for maximizing my personal persistence odds. But I aspire for me personally to persist, not for a particular tax regime to persist (if I desired the latter, I think I’d effectively be a captured agent for that ,ow-tax algorithm’s persistence).
November 20, 2010 at 4:42 am
“,ow-tax algorithm’s persistence” should be “low-tax algorithm’s persistence”.
November 21, 2010 at 1:33 am
Again, you draw the thread of your verbosity finer than the staple of your argument. What in the world do you mean by “optimized existential risk minimizing social epistemology is your enemy?” Where did you learn to write like this?
From a standpoint of restoring the country’s prosperity, Obama’s tax policies are the equivalent to cutting off one’s nose to spite his face. The static assumptions that lie behind pronouncements that continuing the tax cuts will “cost” the government, or allowing them to expire will “save,” some specified amount of revenue, are based on the assumption that people do not change their behavior in response to changes in taxation. That they in fact do is well known, and politicians seem to understand this when they propose to raise taxes on articles the consumption of which they wish to discourage, e.g., tobacco or gasoline.
IRS data suggest that more taxes have been collected on dividend income since the dividend tax rate was lowered to 15% than were collected on such income when it was taxed at the rate for ordinary income.
The reason is plain to see – before the rate was lowered, dividends were not an efficient way to pass on value to the shareholder. For a dollar of corporate income to be taxed at 40% and then to pass on some portion of the remainder to stockholders who were taxed at 39.6% didn’t make sense when the alternatives were to retain all earnings, declare stock splits occasionally, and let stockholders realize capital gains taxable at 20% at times convenient to them, made more sense.
But once the dividend and long-term capital gains tax rates were set equal at 15%, many corporations that had previously paid little or nothing in dividends increased them or began to pay them. Microsoft is a well-known example of the latter.
Do you suppose that this change will not be reversed if the law reverts to the status quo ante the Bush dividend tax cut? Raising dividend taxes and capital gains taxes will simply mean that there will be less dividends paid, and fewer capital gains realized. It is not a revenue maximizing step.
I suggest that Obama knows this and does not care. His view of taxation is not primarily as a means of raising funds for the government’s use, but as an instrument of social engineering – and that includes punishing his enemies. He imbibed for years at the source of the assertion that “the white man’s greed runs a world in need,” and he wants to punish those greedy white business owners who, in this view, are responsible for the poverty and oppression of his most loyal constituency.
Of course, if he got his way, his punitive policies would serve only to suffocate whatever possibility of economic recovery might now be in statu nascendi. The parallel is the way in which FDR’s unfriendliness to business caused a “strike of capital” that resulted in unemployment stubbornly remaining high throughout the ’30s – it was still 18% as late as 1939, a decade after the great crash.
I’m not sure whether Obama is just ideologically blindered and oblivious to the likely consequences of his policy, or whether he knows full well that it will cause a protracted period of economic distress. Perhaps he views such an environment as more favorable to the eventual achievement of his goals of expropriating and “spreading the wealth around.”
November 21, 2010 at 3:42 am
Michael,
As far as I can tell, the expert consensus is against you on the idea that tax revenues or even economic productivity is better with 15% than 39.6% didident tax rate.
If I’m wrong about the expert consensus, then I’d appreciate some citations.
I dislike and distrust “lower taxes” or “raise taxes”, postures, I think it’s ideological role-seeking.
I like arguments on what an optimized tax regime is -for example, I respect that Prof. Mankiw seems to do so by beating the drum for Pigovian taxes, which I think nicely fits a cost-benefit analysis, paternalistic approach to governance.
I intuit that it can effect productivity when the sovereign government taxes a citizen more than 40% of their income, and when its difficult for citizens to be able to escape a combination of nation, provincial, and local combined tax burdens of more than 50% of their income. But this should be subordinate to empirical inquiry and expert consensus.
As far as you, Michael, you seem to me to just want to be the “lower taxes” guy. Which I think is evidence that you’re behaving as one of the social epistemological rentiers (or parasites, to use your term) in the equation.
November 21, 2010 at 4:20 pm
Federal tax revenues have varied as a percentage of GDP very little over the past 65 years, despite vast changes in marginal rates. Why, then, structure taxes with high marginal rates? The effect is purely punitive to those who fall into those brackets. It does little or nothing to enhance overall revenues.
This discussion boils down to principles. The principles on which this country was founded, and which were embodied in its Constitution, held taxation to be a means of raising revenues for the necessary expenditures of a government that was to be strictly limited in its purposes. Redistribution of wealth is neither a legitimate purpose of government, nor among the powers delegated to Congress in Article I, section 8 of the Constitution.
Stop blathering and engage this issue on the basis of principles. Either you believe it is legitimate for governments to redistribute wealth in a teleocratic fashion, or you do not.
November 19, 2010 at 11:16 pm
I don’t think parasites view their hosts as enemies (though hosts may take that view of parasites). I agree with you though that business owners are a Republican constituency.
An english dude performs a variety of accents (including various regional english ones) here.
November 21, 2010 at 1:47 am
An efficient parasite never kills its host; ideally, it approaches the condition of a symbiote, like the intestinal flora. Voracity is self-defeating in the long term. A parasite that kills not just its individual host, but destroys the host population, brings about its own extinction in the process.
I recall that an ancient Roman emperor – can’t remember which one – observed that in taxation, it was important to remember to shear, rather than skin, the sheep.
My question is whether Obama really views white business owners as a host population to parasitize, or as sheep to be sheared, or whether he’d rather not destroy them. Surely his long-term mentor the Rev’d. Jeremiah Wright is in favor of the latter solution; like the late Susan Sontag, I suspect Obama views us as a cancer on the human race.
November 21, 2010 at 4:53 pm
I doubt Obama regards business owners of any color as
anything more than “parasites”; he represents and works for an overwhelmingly white liberal establishment that is deeply hostile both to social mobility in general and minorities in particular. (If you doubt this you have not spent much time around white liberals, as I have.)
November 21, 2010 at 4:22 am
cool data website on countries and regulation with a focus on ease of doing business:
http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings
November 21, 2010 at 11:57 am
What do you think of this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/business/economy/21view.html?_r=1
I think I prefer tax expenditure optimization instead of elimination.
The arguments against the mortgage interest deduction sound strong, but Prof. Mankiw should have addressed, rather than ignored, the concept that property owners take better care of property than do renters.
Perhaps some type of incentive for beating the curve on property appreciation or depreciation that both owners and renters can be eligible for?
November 21, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Intuition doesn’t go far with me, I’d like to see citations. Economic productivity is a tricky thing to measure, revenues are easier. I’ve mostly heard that the Laffer curve peaks well to the right of where we are currently, but usually that’s in a discussion of income taxes. Taxes on capital are quite different.
I think of Obama as an efficient parasite. Wright seems fairly radical, Obama certainly hasn’t governed that way.
The difference between renters & owners (if there is one) doesn’t sound like a market failure to me. The externalities would be internalized by the landlord.
November 21, 2010 at 4:51 pm
“I think of Obama as an efficient parasite”
Is he in any meaningful way an efficient parasite rather than a part of the organism?
I don’t see Obama as drag on a productive element of the system, at least not in relation to his class of recent presidents and presidential candidates. In a world of Steve Jobs and Sergey Brins, Obama would be a parasite. I don’t see that here.
“Intuition doesn’t go far with me, I’d like to see citations.”
Aren’t you heroic.
“Either you believe it is legitimate for governments to redistribute wealth in a teleocratic fashion, or you do not.”
I don’t know what teleocratic means off the top of my head, and I’m not going to look it up right now. “Legitimate” is a loaded word that I think is best dealt with empirically (systems improve their persistence odds by reaching threshhold legitimacies with relevant agent populations, it seems to me).
But I like the idea of governments taxing income and wealth and redistributing it where it can help solve coordination problems more efficiently than by not intervening in such a way. For example, it may be a better way to conduct basic scientific research, national defense, and certain types of macroeconomic management for growth optimization.
It seems incoherent to me that revenue is static at any marginal tax rate. I’m aware of the cutesy notion that the lower taxes are, the more likely people are to actually pay them or that increased economic growth will increase the amount of taxes collect. I’m not sure what the expert consensus is on all that, but as taxes vary from 1% to 50% of income, I doubt revenue stays constant.
November 21, 2010 at 11:45 pm
Teleocratic means governance in the pursuit of ends; whatever the ends are, justify the means. It derives from the Greek teleos, which, when applied to actions, means completed or perfect.
Its converse is nomocratic; i.e., governance to protect what is, rather than to create something that is yet to be. You’d be familiar with these terms if you had read Bradford or Oakeshott.
The Constitution is a nomocratic document. That is why people like Col. House, Walter Lippmann, and their followers don’t like it – they are frustrated by its limits.
Principles are not “best dealt with empirically.” Do you deal empirically with the determination that murder, rape, or stealing are wrong? If government is not founded on principles, it quickly degenerates into the exercise of power based upon pure expediency, which is the essence of tyranny.
A chart showing Federal revenues as a percentage of GDP may be found at:
http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/current-tax-receipts
The 30-year average is 18.2%. Bearing in mind that top marginal tax rates have gone from a high of 94% in 1945 to a low of 28% in 1988-90, it is not at all clear that increases in marginal tax rates have anything to do with increases in federal revenues.
November 22, 2010 at 12:20 am
Michael, you are dealing with people here who don’t recognize the concepts of right or wrong. (This is also true of la Moldbug, obscured though it is by his pseudo-aristocratic posturing. The irony of Moldbug’s project is that his moral nihilism obviates his project; he calls for a new aristocracy, a neo-19th century and gets…well, you’ve no doubt seen his comments posts.
November 23, 2010 at 3:02 am
don’t have time to give a deep reply, but I’ve been exposed to Oakeshott, indirectly, through Andrew Sullivan.
November 26, 2010 at 7:14 am
“Do you deal empirically with the determination that murder, rape, or stealing are wrong?”
Yes, if you’re not going to hide, blinkered behind commission/ommission bias.
If you’re putting certain principles over agent persistence it seems to me that you’re effictively captured by the algorithm of that “principle”.
There seems to me to be some sort of force field preventing your large class of thinkers from directly engaging commission/ommssion bias. I guess it’s a very large agent class that prefers to feel threshhold pure than to more narrowly optimize persistence odds.
November 26, 2010 at 5:29 pm
HA, you are an amazingly vile little man. Why are you even alive at all?
November 21, 2010 at 11:48 pm
I view politicians as a naturally parasitic class. At worst they are simply destructive. So far Obama strikes as more the efficiently parasitic than simply destructive type.
The “teleo” prefix generally indicates having a purpose, as in “promiscuous teleology“. Some righties say the state should serve minimal functions and that the higher teleos of achieving some vision of the good life for the citizenry threatens totalitarianism or something like that.
Redistribution is generally considered categorically distinct from the provision of public goods. Public goods are things markets simply won’t provide (or some inefficiently low amount), redistribution is because some parts of society can’t afford what is considered a decent standard of living. I agree with you on “legitimate”, I’ve discussed that word before here. I don’t have any moral commitment to egalitarianism, so I just say I’m not in favor of the welfare state.
November 26, 2010 at 7:09 am
“I view politicians as a naturally parasitic class.”
Can you elaborate on that? Because it seems poseurish to me to call politicians a “naturally parasitic class”.
I think a fair definition of parasite incorporates it being an entity which a system is better off without. It’s not clear to me that a system is better off without politicians, unless you start defining them circularly.
November 26, 2010 at 8:04 am
A couple of Fields medalists kicking it in a wordpress blog comments section on how to optimize public administration:
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/if-politicians-were-mathematicians/
November 27, 2010 at 7:08 am
Awesome bits of eccentric, politically incorrect “news”. I have no idea the accuracy.
http://gfactor.blogspot.com/
November 27, 2010 at 10:29 am
These insights would seem to me to apply to politics, hollywood, and mundane microsocial competitions that that we are all enmeshed in. I’ll try to expand on this later.
http://www.cs.duke.edu/wrane/
November 27, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Studying small teams:
http://sonic.northwestern.edu/people/mei/research.htm
We’re a small team, the participants in this comment thread (TGGP, Michael, Flenser, John Sabotta, and me, HA). My sense is that TGGP, Michael, and myself add a lot of value to the team, Flenser may add some, and John Sabotta adds very little.
November 28, 2010 at 6:46 pm
I’ve been (in typically passive-aggressive style) rebuked by the little Aspie twat, HA. Oh noes! Still, unlike you, these arn’t the people I admire:
He shouted Ai-ya-aa! Ai-ya-aa! as if he knew that if he lay down he was going to be murdered. But a nurse then said in Chinese, “Sleep, sleep” She went on “Sleep, sleep, Drug give.” – Japanese style Chinese…He lay down. She was even prouder than me. She giggled. The demon’s face is not a fearful face. It’s a face wreathed in smiles.
You present a face of sweet reason in your posts, you are wreathed in impenetrable social-science gibberish and you are a demon. Or a would-be demon. When you claim that vivisection and medical experimentation would be acceptable in order to “maximize your persistence odds” (i.e. extend your miserable life at the expense of the innocent) you are assuming the aspect of the demon. Your entire cynical apparatus of obsfucation is directed solely (if ineptly) to dehumanize those you’d like to sacrifice to your well-being and to realize a world without moral values, which you imagine would be to your advantage. Of course, you are too much of a weakling and a coward and a hopeless anonymous nerd to actually ever do anything. But still…
I asked the doctor who was about to administer lumbar anesthesia if he wasn’t going to disinfect the point of injection.”What are you talking about? We’re going to kill him.” he replied.
…it should have been you on that table, since you approve so much.
(Quotes from JAPAN AT WAR; AN ORAL HISTORY by Haruko Taya Cook & Theodore F. Cook.)
(To the inattentive: Our HA has expressed his enthusiasm for Unit 731 and the work of Dr. Ishii – thus the quotes. Don’t let him near sharp objects.)
November 28, 2010 at 6:54 pm
And this team business is rubbish. I probably have some differences with Michael and Flenser, but we’d more or less understand each other. TGGP* is a contrarian machine, like the Chipster but not whiny and obtuse (“I’ve lost friends over this!” I can hear the Chipster moan, to say, Adam Palfrey)and you, HA, are a demon, third class. No team there.
*And also he is Burgess Meredith, playing the proprietor of the Chamber of Horrors.
November 28, 2010 at 7:38 pm
Your criticism has gotten smarter and more entertaining, but I think you still don’t take me on directly, although you’re getting closer.
Grapple head on with commission/ommission bias. It’s lonely here, and you’re showing me that you’ve got the mind for it. It’s immature of us to condemn the most constraint-lax medical researchers because of the vivid horror of what they committed, while giving a relative pass to huge body of work by the incompetent medical researchers and the overconstrained. I think this strongly applies to the present where large opportunities to increase medical knowledge that benefit most of us are given up because of an immature and irrational desire to maintain our feeling of purity grounded in in commission/ommission bias.
It’s wasteful, hedonic extraction on your part to heckle one of the few voices you can find grappling with this, hopeless anonymous nerd though I may be.
To be fair, TGGP isn’t a contrarian machine -it makes him happy but most times he’ll choose the side of the epistemological angels over his contrarian happy place.
November 29, 2010 at 11:53 pm
Your take on my contrarianism sounds accurate enough. I suppose I get some contrarian satisfaction from deviating from coontrarianism at times.
November 28, 2010 at 12:28 pm
I think there’s a typo in this article, but it means to say that China plans to spend 15% of GDP on R&D, (and 10% of GDP specifically on basic research) in 2020.
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/11/china-hopes-to-boost-basic-research.html
I poked around a little and the largest organizational expenditure I found was large multinationakl pharmaceutical companies that spend 18% of revenue on R&D.
November 28, 2010 at 1:59 pm
“The true problem this country is facing is too many people and not enough productive employment, and also too many skimmers attached to the productive sectors of the economy. Mainly FIRE sector skimmers — tax preparers, payday loaners, investors buying up “income properties”, plus also the medical sector skimmers with their trillion in economic rents, the military-industrial sector . . .”
I’m sympathetic to this analysis, although it might be notable that they miss the education industry (although maybe that’s trickier, because education investment may not be too high in absolute value, but just in specific allocation).
I’d summarize it to: Need more engineers, need fewer lawyers, doctors, real estate agents, soldiers, and weapons.
November 28, 2010 at 7:11 pm
Politicians live off of taxpayers and spend their time spending taxpayer money. The amount they receive from the taxpayeys is not determined by anything taxpayers agree to, but what laws they themselves set. Parasites also live off their hosts and determine for themselves how much to take.
If you are asking me my opinion on the relative merits of anarchy, though I think it gets too short a shrift in most discussions I am at the end undecided. Leaving aside the option of government without politicians, the best argument I’ve heard against anarchy is that government is inevitable. This is compatible with an Mancur Olson-esque preference for a stationary bandit over a roving bandit. Do I consider the stationary bandit still a bandit/parasite? Yes.
From the Fields medalist link:
“I just wonder how much difference it would make if politicians understood enough mathematics to be able to understand an argument of more than one sentence. Or to put it more accurately, what would it be like if the following rules of political life were no longer accepted?”
Sounds like what he really means is if the audience of politicians understood enough. If the populace were both intelligent and rational presumably we would have much better policies. They would still be rationally ignorant, but Donald Wittman’s “The Myth of Democratic Failure” says that shouldn’t cause that much harm.
I downloaded Chris Brand’s book a while back. Like most books I download, I have never read it.
It seems rather limited for the workshop to just look at “aversarial and non-cooperative environments”, although maybe they means something other than what I think. Games like choose-which-side-of-the-road-to-drive-on are also interesting.
Hadn’t though to view this as a “team”. We don’t have a collective goal, and Sabotta may view frustrating the participants as a victory.
Who are you quoting about “The true problem this country is facing”? Most economists don’t think having too many people is a problem (particularly for first-world nations). More people means more scale and possible gains from trade. The problem of growing skimmer clout is the focus of Olson’s “Rise and Decline of Nations”, which I recently finished. The bloggerat Macroeconomic Resilience has integrated Olson’s theory with Minsky’s instability theory and Leijonhufvud’s corridor hypothesis. I still find Scott Sumner’s story the most persuasive. That blogger, Ashwin Parameswaran, cites the decision theory work of Gerd Gigerenzer, which may be of interest to H.A.
I more often hear that there aren’t enough doctors because of the AMA cartel. This isn’t just a line among hardcore libertarians but is also part of Dean Baker’s tu quoque in The Conservative Nanny State (downloadable from here). I agree with the rest, with defense spending being particularly obviously egregiously high in the U.S.
November 29, 2010 at 12:52 am
This has turned into an open-thread, so I’m moving my checked books list here.
The Enterprise of Law by Bruce Benson
Demonic Males by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson
Bureaucracy by James Q Wilson
Consilience by Edward O Wilson
Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan
Future Wars: The World’s Most Dangerous Flashpoints by Trevor Dupuy
The Nurture Assumption by Judith Harris
Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe
The Bell Curve by Murray and Herrnstein
The Israel Lobby by Walt and Mearsheimer
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennet
Reflections on France by Edmund Burke
Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville
Coup Detat: A Practical Handbook by Edward Luttwak
Background to Betrayal by Hilaire du Berrier
Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory by Randall Collins
Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fisher
The Triumph of Conservatism by Gabriel Kolko
Seeing Like a State by James Scott
Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker
Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War by Pat Buchanan
A Farewell to Alms by Greg Clark
The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine
The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston
East of the Sun by Benson Bobrick
From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun
The Cult of the Presidency by Gene Healy
Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham
The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
The Culture of Defeat by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Hystories by Elaine Showalter
Violence and Social Orders by Douglass North
The Death and Life of American Cities by Jane Jacobs
The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann
War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin
The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter
The End of Time by Julian Barbour
From Plato to Nato by David Gress
Plague Time by Paul Ewald
Order Without Law by Robert Ellickson
Off the Books by Sudhir Venkatesh
Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean Carroll
The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier
Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade
Crime and Human Nature by Richard Herrnstein and James Q Wilson
From Eternity to Here, by Sean Carroll
The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
House of Cards by Robyn Dawes
Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb
Law and Revolution by Paul Berman
The Problems of Physics by Anthony Leggette (for the condensed matter section)
The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi
The Horse, the Wheel and Language by David W. Anthony
Crisis and Leviathan by Robert Higgs
Rise and Decline of Nations by Mancur Olson
Exit, Voice and Loyalty by Albert O. Hirschman
I suppose I could use a break from grand thesis/theory building and more detail-rich history. I’m considering Empires of the Silk Road by Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires and Barbarians by Peter Heather, Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed, This Time It’s Different by Reinhardt & Rogoff and any number of books by Philip Jenkins.
November 29, 2010 at 11:51 pm
It appears that Art Garfunkel has outdone me. We’ll see how things turn out when I am 40 years older.
I am still lacking in statistical competency. I don’t persist with online lessons, requiring a physical book to see through to completion.
November 29, 2010 at 1:25 am
TGGP,
How about a checked competencies/literacies list?
I’ve been going in that direction rather than books.
November 29, 2010 at 1:26 am
Btw, impressive list.
November 29, 2010 at 1:34 am
“Politicians live off of taxpayers and spend their time spending taxpayer money. The amount they receive from the taxpayeys is not determined by anything taxpayers agree to, but what laws they themselves set. Parasites also live off their hosts and determine for themselves how much to take.
If you are asking me my opinion on the relative merits of anarchy, though I think it gets too short a shrift in most discussions I am at the end undecided. Leaving aside the option of government without politicians, the best argument I’ve heard against anarchy is that government is inevitable. This is compatible with an Mancur Olson-esque preference for a stationary bandit over a roving bandit. Do I consider the stationary bandit still a bandit/parasite? Yes.”
This argument seems very weak to me. It seems to me to reduce to “I like calling politicians parasites, so I do.” I think a politician’s value is in helping agents overcome coordination costs (this is different from claiming that all do, an anti-snark caveat I feel I have to add based on moments of bad faith in your past, TGGP). There’s an economic benefit there (not just efficient parisitism) and so I think it’s poseurish to categorically class politicians as parasites.
November 29, 2010 at 11:43 pm
There’s no scientific law I’m aware of that says creature we view as parasitical on individual hosts can’t help overcome certain coordination problems. It would just have to be established for any particular case. But the defining feature of parasites (which stated above as applying to politicians) make them parasites.
December 2, 2010 at 3:32 pm
Don’t hear much about this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lazear
but he seems weirdly undistinguished sandwiched between bernanke and romer as CEA chair. Also notable that the meltdown happened on his watch, but I don’t recall hearing his name much.
December 3, 2010 at 9:59 pm
I was about to say I’d heard of him mentioned on EconLog, but I confused him with Ed Leamer (I had in fact read references to him there, but I don’t remember them distinctly). I had heard of his tournament theory before, but I just didn’t know who to associate with it.