I thought I would wait a week to do this, but I came up with so much good material in a couple of days that I posted this. A taste:
The challenge for us as a society is to better align “get-ahead” with “understand reality.” In a sense, the Fantasy Intellectual Teams project is an attempt to do that, by using a scoring system that prioritizes the type of discourse that is associated with “understand reality.”
Honestly, the primary benefit of the FITs process was to keep our host relevant. His steadfast refusal to engage with Twitter left him vulnerable to becoming outdated. Perhaps Substack is the appropriate middle ground?
Megan McArdle wrote a number of pieces on railroads when she had a blog. Her father had been involved with railroads and she thought high speed rail in the northeast corridor was impossible.
1) You need long stretches of straight track, with Amtrak getting priority. But the tracks in the northeast aren’t straight for large portions of the route, and the corridor is too built up to significantly rebuild them or lay totally new track. Right now the tracks are run by freight railroads who are more concerned about their own trains.
2) High speed means few stops. How many people would fly if the plane stopped at Westwood, Providence, New London, New Haven, and Stamford? But the present “high speed” train (the Acela) from Boston to New York stops at all of them. However, if you make the train a non-stop, you will be accused of denying people service they deserve. “Why have an Amtrak at all if it’s going to make hardly any stops?” A good question.
Who cares at this point? Take an Uber or a plane already…and, heaven forbid that you actually drive a car to your destination.
Off topic: This Axios story shows that the manufactured durables backlog has been lower than the pre-pandemic level the entire time since 2020 January. This means inflation in durables since vaccinations started can be explained by failure to order inventory before the vaccinations. This in accord with the report in media that automakers simply didn’t order enough semiconductors. A person can also say that we will never know if the pandemic creates conditions where we fail to produce durables. If the order is not placed it is more difficult to determine whether the order could have been filled. Note media also report that client computers and server shipments were way up in 2020 compared to 2019.
https://www.axios.com/american-manufacturers-have-some-work-to-do-b28a746b-7397-4593-9e1a-7270bdcd99aa.html
People might say quantitative easing caused inflation or they might say places of production will ventilate and sick people will stay home and we can produce as much durable product as before the pandemic.
You wrote… “I think that we should be careful about characterizing academics as inherently unwise.”
This makes sense. Notice that Hanania wrote that Tetlock… “found that the forecasting abilities of subject-matter experts were no better than educated laymen when it came to predicting geopolitical events and economic outcomes”. No better. Declined to claim “worse”. In other words, approximately equal.
The laymen get their information by reading what the media report experts said. Without the experts presumably the laymen would have fared worse.