Could someone produce a 1 sentence definition of Straussian that a high school graduate would easily understand?
Straussian means taking what this question asks for and putting a minus sign in front of it.
Some of us are old enough to remember that Peter, Paul, and Mary had a hit song with Straussian lyrics:
But If I Really Say It, The Radio Won’t Play It
Unless I Lay It Between The Lines!
I was puzzling over some of the early picks of the FITs draft. I don’t have a problem with anyone picking Joe Rogan, Steve Sailer, Joel Kotkin, or John Cochrane, but elevating them to the first round? What is it about this blog that attracts readers who would do that?
One hypothesis is that my readers are anti-Straussians. They want forthrightness, not strategic ambiguity. Some of the top picks may not score many points in the game, but they are certainly forthright.
My readers probably associate Straussianism with careerism. The careerist is careful not to say something right when it is the wrong thing to say. Fauci is a careerist. The Zvi (pick 106) isn’t. As Scott Alexander (pick 4) has pointed out, if you want accurate advice about the virus, go with The Zvi.
I could see myself attracting anti-careerists, because there is a fair amount of that in me. I think of careerists as having giving us the Vietnam war, from which many tragic consequences followed. There have been times when my own career-limiting behavior, such as making a sarcastic comment very loudly in Stan Fischer’s class expressing what I thought of the material on his MIT graduate syllabus in monetary economics, seemed to help me in the end, by sending my life in different directions.
One more story. When you can’t stand your boss, my advice is to quietly find a different situation as quickly as you can. Don’t do what I did.
This was more than 30 years ago, and my memory is dim and probably distorted by self-serving bias. But as I recall, a woman on my staff was on maternity leave and she came in to the office for a visit. I was not around. My boss called her into his office to tell her that because of headcount constraints (we had staffing quotas imposed from on high), she would not have a position when her leave was finished.
I think what especially ticked me off when I found out about it was that he had never discussed it with me beforehand. He also did not give me the courtesy of being the one to break the news to her.
I went into his office and threw a tantrum. After a while, he said, “I don’t want to do this, Arnold, but you’re giving me no choice but to fire you.”
The end result was that I changed divisions within the company. It worked to my long-term advantage, just as it worked to my advantage a few years later when I was relieved of a position in a humiliating way, driving me to quit and start my own business. But I would advise my children, my grandchildren, and my blog readers to take better control of their emotions than I did in those days.
if called upon to name the most important thinkers since the year 2000, assessed purely for their influence, with no comment on quality, I might list (working my way backward in time) Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Jordan Peterson (14), Peter Thiel (70), Yuval Noah Harari, Steven Pinker (110), Tyler Cowen (2), Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michelle Alexander, Slavoj Žižek, Andrew Sullivan (35), Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (10), Peter Singer, Samantha Power, my colleague Thomas Friedman … at now we’re back at the turn of the millennium. Religious thinkers? Well, Dawkins and Pinker and Kendi, of course — but okay, more exactly, perhaps James Martin, Rod Dreher (104), Charles Taylor, David Bentley Hart and Tim Keller. (In another ten years I might add a post-liberal Catholic, but not yet.)
Some of these writers are impressive; some less so. Many are journalists, in practice or in spirit — an important occupation, but maybe not the ideal one for generating great works. Will many of them adorn a Great Books curriculum in 2075, if such an antiquated thing exists? I’m doubtful.
The numbers in parentheses are the numbers that they were chosen in the Fantasy Intellectual Teams draft I held on Saturday. Douthat himself was the 44th pick. Among columnists, he was picked ahead of Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, David Brooks, Paul Krugman, and Peggy Noonan, but behind Megan McArdle.
Of course, he does not use quantitative scoring criteria. His idea of “influence” probably correlates best with my “meme” category.
In a podcast with Russ Roberts (pick 5), Megan McArdle (pick 38) says,
I can go back and say, yeah, I can’t smooth away into memory and conveniently misremember how I felt about the Iraq war, how I felt about what we should do about the Financial Crisis, and on and on and on and on and on. And, in fact, I wrote a very embarrassing column about the Financial Crisis when the Bear Stearns collapse happened: that we just we’re involved in a garden-variety recession; don’t freak out. This is not that big a deal, we shouldn’t bail them out. Well. So, I think that that is healthy, but most people obviously don’t do that. And so, you end up in a place where most people think that they know better than they actually do, what’s going to happen in the world.
Reading this, I thought of a new FITs scoring category for a future season: admissions of past errors (A’s). But admissions of the type “I was wrong. X is even more of an idiot than I thought” would not count.
We held the Fantasy Intellectual Teams draft on Saturday. 10 owners competed. The owners came from the readership of this blog, and they themselves are not public figures in any way. The intellectuals they chose are shown below in the order they were selected. Because one owner arrived well after the draft had begun, the order in which teams picked was a bit mixed up.
Scoring for this season, which starts April 1 and ends June 30, is based on three categories:
(M) memes. These are phrases that are associated with a certain intellectual. For example, Black Swan is associated with Taleb (pick 31). If during the season the term Black Swan is used in at least three prominent places (well-known podcast or blog, newspaper, new book), that scores one M for Taleb. No more than one M per season for each catch-phrase. Richard Dawkins, who coined the term “meme,” was not chosen, although picking him would have guaranteed his owner at least one meme point.
(B) bets. An intellectual scores a B by expressing a belief in quantitative probabilistic terms. Oddly enough, Annie Duke, who would be credited with a meme if the phrase “Thinking in Bets” were to appear three times during the season, was not selected, either.
(S) steel-manning. The intellectual presents a point of view with which he or she disagrees in a way that someone who holds that point of view would consider to be representative. It is the opposite of straw-manning. I believe that Peter Thiel (pick 70) coined the term, or at least popularized it, and his owner is all but certain to pick up an M point. S’s are most likely to be earned by bloggers and podcasters and least likely to be earned by tweets or political speeches. They are more likely to be earned by centrists than by hard-core Red or Blue team members.
Tyler Cowen (pick 2) is a solid three-category player. He sometimes states beliefs in terms of probabilities, he tries to steel-man (although at times he can be too terse to earn a point), and he has meme candidates, such as Great Stagnation or “mood affiliation.”
Scott Alexander (pick 4) is likely to be a monster in the S and B categories.
I think that for next season I would add a category (R), for summarizing the research on two (or more) sides of a controversial issue. I would score one R for every 2 examples. I don’t want to give away an R to someone who just looks at research on a single topic during the season. Adding the (R) category would make Tyler and Scott even stronger candidates.
I will note that I thought that about a third of the picks reflected mood affiliation, and I would not have chosen them. I don’t want to pick on any owner in particular, but I’ll just say that I don’t think politicians will score points, and I will not be rooting for whoever took Oren Cass. By the end of this season, all of the picks will have track records, and those should inform owners who compete in a follow-up season.
I would caution the reader not to pay too much attention to relative ranking within this list. If there had been ten drafts, with ten different sets of owners, the average order would represent a consensus rank. But with only one iteration, the results reflect individual idiosyncrasies. In your comments, I am not interested in what picks you don’t like or what picks you think should have gone higher. I am interested in suggestions for intellectuals who seem likely to earn at least 3 points but who were not chosen.
Much as I poor-mouth my connections, I can brag by saying that in recent years I have had lunch and/or exchanged text messages with pick numbers 2, 5, 13, 32, 37, 38, 42, 95, 97, 132, and 147. I have met several others in person, but not recently. I believe that a social graph of the picks would show Tyler Cowen (2) and Marc Andreessen (97) as having the most dense connections with other picks.
We do not see predatory pricing, collusion, or cartelization among the tech giants. What we do see are those giants acting as vehicles for the ideological rents being sought and extracted by the specialized labor cultures they employ. Economically this counts as market power just the same, but the mode of exercise is quite different.
Pointer from Megan McArdle’s column.
He argues that tech workers are progressive, and they have power over their employers, which enables them to force employers to cater to progressive demands, including cancellation of conservatives.
But my guess is that the majority of workers in tech firms are not progressive. Instead, we are seeing what Nassim Taleb calls minority power. If a minority feels strongly about something, and the majority does not feel strongly in the opposite direction, the minority wins. For example, most people do not care if the food they buy has a “heckscher,” a symbol that the food has been deemed kosher by an authority (there are actually something like 600 different authorities). But it is easier for big food manufacturers to pay an authority to inspect themselves and provide a heckscher than it is to blow off the relatively small number of Orthodox Jews who want only kosher food.
Getting back to corporate wokeness in response to employees, I think that the problem is that the employees who are not into enforcement of extreme progressive orthodoxy are like the people who do not care about buying kosher food. They do not feel strongly enough, so that it is the intense minority that has the power.
The goals are to:
Think of this idea as a cross between a multi-author Substack and Tyler’s Emergent Ventures. Think of a producer/editor (me, for example) having a stable of 100 contributors, each of whom contributes on average one essay or podcast about every 20 days, for a total across all contributors of about 5 a day. All contributions would sit behind a single paywall, as in a newspaper subscription. Perhaps it could run on Substack, with the editor handling the administration involved in managing and compensating the contributors.
Each day, a subscriber would receive a newsletter with 200-word summaries of each of the daily contributions, along with a link to each contribution. Assuming 100,000 subscribers each paying $100 a year, that would allow for average compensation of $100,000 a year to each contributor (less after paying for overhead expenses, such as payments to Substack if we were to use that platform).
At first, we would have to get some established contributors to bring in subscribers. These contributors would have to be willing to be paid less than the value of the subscriber base they pull in, so that there would be funds for the new talents.
The editor’s job is to filter contributors, not each individual contribution. As a contributor, you produce your essay or your podcast without interference. The editor acts as an adviser. I would be willing to be an editor without monetary compensation, but as the project scales up there would be paid editors.
I do not have the connections to be able to find enough contributors to pull this off myself. But I think I could with the help of others (Reihan Salam? Tyler?)
It is a project that could scale up with more editors. It is hard to know in advance whether revenue is maximized with one giant bundle or with different bundles based on topics or channels or user-defined packages (it’s like the Cable TV pricing problem in that sense).
At sufficient scale, this project could invade the space of major news media, the advertising-based models of news provided by Google/Twitter/Facebook, and university presses.
[National economic council director] Deese’s wealth has also multiplied dramatically since 2009, when he took his first White House job as Obama’s special assistant for economic policy. In 2015, just a few months into his role as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, Deese reported owning between $81,000 and $215,000 in assets — but now, as a member of the Biden administration, he’s reported between $2 million and $7.2 million in assets. Prior to joining the Biden administration, Deese made $2.3 million in salary from the investment firm BlackRock as the Global Head of Sustainable Investing, compared to the $175,000 in salary he received during his last year as Obama’s deputy OMB director.
Blackrock is the firm that handles the Fed’s investments in private securities. Blackrock also is known for pushing progressive values onto corporations. If your goal is to get rich, there is no need to produce something of value, as long as your ideology and connections work for you.
The New York Times asks ten economists about the risks of “overheating.” I don’t go along with the mainstream macro paradigm, but several of the responses resonated with me, especially Olivier Blanchard’s.
I shall plead Knightian uncertainty. I have no clue as to what happens to inflation and rates, because it is in a part of the space we have not been in for a very long time. Uncertainty about multipliers, uncertainty about the Phillips curve, uncertainty about the dovishness of the Fed, uncertainty about how much of the $1.9 trillion package will turn out to be permanent, uncertainty about the size and the financing of the infrastructure plan. All I know is that any of these pieces could go wrong.
I would have answered the question this way:
1. During the pandemic, many Americans accumulated a lot of paper wealth, as the government printed paper wealth in the form of bonds and the stock market returned to a state of possibly-irrational exuberance. This wealth now hangs over an economy with some supply bottlenecks and a progressive Administration that is likely to exacerbate those bottlenecks. The only way that we avoid price increases is if the people with the wealth choose to spend it very, very gradually.
2. If spending and inflation do pick up, we are going to find that the Fed’s brake pedal does not work. The Fed can try to raise interest rates by, for example, raising the interest rate that it pays on Fedcoin (digital bank reserves). But higher rates will be politically unpalatable, because the interest bill for the government will be too much to bear.
Suppose that the Fed can get past the political objections. Then we will have an experiment to test my heterodox view that government bonds are as inflationary as money. If rates were allowed to rise, the interest bill would send the government’s deficit up. So the government will have to issue more bonds, which in my view are inflationary fuel themselves. In my view, it is up to Congress to stop inflation by cutting deficits.
It’s not that I don’t understand the conventional (monetarist) view of inflation or that I have missed some argument in its favor. So don’t waste your breath calling out my ignorance. We’ll see what happens if and when we run the experiment.
3. As to the question of “overheating,” I think of inflation in terms of phase changes. Just as water changes properties when it boils, an economy changes properties when it goes from low and steady inflation to high and variable inflation. By the time it has changed phases, it is too late to deal with it using mild measures.
Although economists won’t see overheating until it’s too late, historians of this episode will go back and see that in hindsight signs of overheating were evident by early 2021. The digital currency mania and the rally in GameStop will be seen as emblematic of the distortions caused by excessive creation of paper wealth.
The fact that people like Lawrence Summers have been ignored in favor of progressives like Heather Boushey and Jared Bernstein, and deficit hawks like the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget have been left screeching irrelevantly from the sidelines, isn’t just gratifying as spectacle. It suggests a big move in the center of gravity of economic policy debates.
It really does seem that on the big macroeconomic questions, our side is winning.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. He lists a number of propositions, which tend to favor macroeconomic policies that stimulate demand and restrict supply.
For example although he argues (correctly) that there is no bright line between being unemployed and being out of the labor force, he claims that
Work incentives don’t matter.
Suppose you have very high marginal tax rates on work. The “new” theory is that with enough aggregate demand, everyone will work, anyway. As Mason puts it,
Weak demand is an ongoing problem, not just a short-term one. The most serious criticism of the ARPA is, I think, that so many of its provisions are set to phase out at specific dates when they could be permanent (the child tax credit) or linked to economic conditions (the unemployment insurance provisions). This suggests an implicit view that the problems of weak demand and income insecurity are specific to the coronavirus, rather than acute forms of a chronic condition.
I think that if you subsidize demand and restrict supply, then the whole economy will look like education, health care, and real estate, where prices go up and resources are wasted.
John Cochrane has a more detailed critique of this “new” economic theory. One way in which it differs from the conventional wisdom of the 1960s: back then, economists were confident that if inflation broke out, the government could direct businesses to slow the rate at which they increased wages and prices. That theory has not made a comeback, at least so far.