About one of the links, I write,
The essay is mostly about how LA’s one-party Democratic control is bad, and it includes various structural electoral reforms to try to fix that. To me, it seems like a tremendous feat of cognitive dissonance on the part of Progressives that they can observe how badly a Democratic-run city works and still believe that the left is right about everything.
Angelo Codevilla, who died recently, was an eloquent essayist. A favorite of many people is his 2010 essay on America’s Ruling Class.
while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate — most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans. This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class’s prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans — a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents — lack a vehicle in electoral politics.
Later,
Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. . .In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.
I think that this is actually true. Our lives have become way more complex. In the past, people understood how their tools worked and they could fix things that were broken. A farmer in 1800 probably could fix almost anything on the farm that broke. As recently as the 1950s, many people with no formal training in auto mechanics could fix cars.
Today, I think we are reliant on experts to a much greater extent than ever before. But the relationship between knowledge and power is out of kilter: people with too little knowledge have too much power.
Andrew Gelman gives a wishy-washy answer.
Steven Levitt’s an outsider in academic economics because, before he blazed the Freakonomics trail, it was generally considered second-rate for economists to work on fun little problems instead of the big questions. I often feel like an outsider myself because I do applied statistics and it sometimes seems that theoretical work gets more respect within the statistics profession. I know this feeling is ridiculous—I’m as much of an insider in statistics as Levitt is in economics or Cuomo was in politics—but it’s hard sometimes to avoid having that outsider feeling.
I go back to David Halberstam’s description of Robert Lovett as the ultimate insider. If you wanted to get ahead in the foreign policy world circa 1960, Lovett’s approval was a big factor. Similarly, if you wanted to get ahead in macroeconomics circa 1980, Stan Fischer’s approval was a big factor. In my macro memoir, I contrast Fischer with Robert Shiller. Shiller won a Nobel Prize, and I think everyone would agree that his research had greater impact (setting aside my own mixed feelings about Shiller’s work). But Shiller did not have the same weight within the profession. I think it’s because there is another game going on, aside from the game of doing important research. Call the other game academic politics, if you will. It means pleasing those above you on the totem pole and joining in when someone below you is mocked and scorned. Think of how a member of a teenage gang behaves in order to achieve higher status within the gang. Fischer mastered that game, and Shiller never really bothered to.
The only reason why political and legal systems work is that a lot of hard thinking and work has gone on behind the scenes to insulate the decision-makers from extrinsic incentives, and punish them explicitly if they are discovered to be accepting incentives from the outside. The lack of extrinsic motivation allows the intrinsic motivation to shine through. Furthermore, the lack of transferability allows governance power to be given to specific actors whose intrinsic motivations we trust, avoiding governance power always flowing to “the highest bidder”.
You don’t want the verdict in a trial to go to the highest bidder. You don’t want regulatory policy determined by the highest bidder.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. I do not claim to understand Buterin’s whole post.
I have three new updates. Each includes several links.
1. Keeping up the FITs, No. 11
[Emily Oster] says that she would vaccinate her own children.
I do not want them to get COVID. I am worried about their immune-compromised grandparent. I would like to avoid quarantine and keep them in school. I’m confident in the vaccines and the FDA process.
I would arrive at a different decision. The benefit seems small, almost negligible in the grand scheme of things. Although it is likely that the long-term risks of the vaccine are small, we do not know this. I say leave the kids alone.
2. And No. 12
I discount nearly all claims about aggregate productivity trends. You would not pay attention to “trends” in a poll for a political contest if the differences over time are smaller in magnitude than the margin of error. But economists commit that sin all the time with productivity data.
3. And No. 13.
Tyler Cowen looks at the coverage of President Biden’s economic proposals.
given all the stuff about Biden’s agenda on the internet, there has been remarkably little policy debate about it, and remarkably little attempt to persuade the American public that this spending is a good idea.
…My colleague Arnold Kling put it well: “With the reconciliation bill, there is no attempt to convince the public that it is desirable to enact an enormous child tax credit or to mandate ending use of fossil fuels in a decade. Instead, what we read is that if you’re on the blue team you want the number to be 3.5, but a few Democrats are holding out for something lower.”
Self-recommending, as Tyler would say.
My latest essay is on Steven Pinker’s latest book. I once was in a book club that read Daniel Pink’s Free Agent Nation and then Pinker’s The Blank Slate. A participant suggested that for our next book we needed to find an author named Pinkest.
From Peter J. Wallison and Benjamin Zycher.
There has been no upward trend in the number of “hot” days between 1895 and 2017; 11 of the 12 years with the highest number of such days occurred before 1960. Since 2005, NOAA has maintained the U.S. Climate Reference Network, comprising 114 meticulously maintained temperature stations spaced more or less uniformly across the lower 48 states, along with 21 stations in Alaska and two stations in Hawaii. They are placed to avoid heat-island effects and other such distortions as much as possible. The reported data show no increase in average temperatures over the available 2005-2020 period.
This would be on a weekly basis for eight sessions, with a topic that I call Modern Problems. More at the link.
Tyler Cowen expresses a lot of ideas that sound outlandish. I think he hopes that some of them will turn out to be right, even though not all of them will. I often disagree with his ideas at first, but then sometimes I change my mind. Andrew Sullivan expresses himself fervently, and when I agree with him, I like that. But I do disagree with him on some things. He and Jonathan Rauch overstate the negatives about Donald Trump, in my view. Conversely, there are those who understate those negatives, but I don’t have any strong Trump supporters among my mental list of great minds. Rauch and Sullivan are on that list, and they both frustrate me at times, and I have written about that, particularly about Rauch.
It’s a wide-ranging interview, conducted over email, so I get to be more coherent than in a live interview. Wide-ranging, and I’ll bet you’ll find a new thing or two in it.
Joby Aviation, which plans to begin an electric air taxi service in 2024, is worth more than Lufthansa, EasyJet or JetBlue. Does that seem right? In this market, why not? Heck, earlier this year, Tesla was worth more than the next nine car manufacturers combined, though now only the next six. Beyond Meat, made with pea protein, is worth more than the entire market for peas eaten globally—like the bumper sticker says: Imagine whirled peas. Do fundamentals even matter?
He takes the old-fashioned view, which I share, that fundamentals do matter. But we are in an era in which many people are happy to own assets with no fundamental value, based on confidence that someone else will pay at least as much for those assets. Call it The Bitcoin Era.
I don’t think that anyone can say which is less likely to hold its value: a $30,000 Bitcoin or a $100,000 ten-year Treasury bond.
Kessler blames the Fed for the distortions in asset markets. But I think that this credits the Fed with too much power. I think that in recent decades we have seen intangible assets increase in importance relative to tangible goods. So people have become conditioned to seeing value in things like reputation or corporate culture or regulatory advantage.
But I do think there is such a thing as going overboard in valuing intangible assets. Just as in the public intellectual space the angry partisan hacks have driven real thinkers to the margins, in financial markets the fools have driven the more sober investors to the sidelines.