tweeters maintained that no one who was a prominent writer and thinker in the aughts has aged well through the 2010s.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who offers some characteristically terse and contrarian suggestions for how a public intellectual might maintain a long shelf life.
I would note the irony of using Twitter to sniff at others’ short shelf lives. My other thoughts:
1. What do we mean by “shelf life?” To me, it means being a focal point for discussion for a long time. I would focus on the shelf life of one’s ideas rather than on one’s personal shelf life. For example, Paul Krugman has had a long personal shelf life, but I can think of only one of his ideas–the liquidity trap–as having a long shelf life, and very little of his personal shelf life depends on that idea.
2. Note that an idea does not have to be accepted universally to have a long shelf life. Many of us do not buy the liquidity trap.
3. Note that an idea does not have to hold up well to have a long shelf life. “The End of History” has enjoyed a long shelf life.
4. Catchy phrases help an idea’s shelf life. Bell Curve, Bowling Alone, The Long Tail. John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson were skilled at producing phrases that caught on.
5. The Original Position is another great catch phrase. I think that Rawls has enjoyed a much longer shelf life than he deserved. Perhaps because his book had at least one other great catch phrase, Justice as Fairness.
6. r>g is another compelling catch phrase. Who would have thought?
6. Tyler is good at coming up with phrases that catch on: Great Stagnation, Average is Over. Others who have coined more than one successful catch phrase include Steven Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, and Peter Thiel.
7. Robin Hanson probably has come up with more ideas that deserve a long shelf life than anyone I can think of, but he needs better catch-phrases.
8. I have plenty of ideas with good catch phrases: Null Hypothesis, PSST, Suits vs. Geeks, stimulate demand and restrict supply, three axes, etc. But they don’t get picked up and amplified by other people. Perhaps because I have not followed Tyler’s second rule of advice, which is “Avoid criticizing other public intellectuals.” Maybe that’s really the most important rule of all.
Every generation appears in default court, once as a plaintiff and 40 years later as defendant.
The new generation develops ‘This time is different’ theory and drops a prior pill; henceforth becoming useless intellectuals. The GDP factory loses market share. Look at velocity dropping, that in central banking losing market share to the auto pricing bots. Delong ‘s favorite, Solow growth theory has never equilibriated in his entire career, yet he still drags the students through the nonsense.
There has never been any basis for separating capital and labor. Yet, once the priors pill is swallowed the economist needs to have some dialectic to prove the imminent arrival of Godot. Godot never comes, instead we get war crimes tribunal needed to banish the latest version of ‘This time is different’. Economists have been wandering the wilderness since Marx, and even to this day we have libertarians advocating the socialization of the precious metals industry, completely lost in a 200 year old defunct debate. A repeating pattern.
Sailer is a master at catchphrases, but “don’t be outside the Overton window” is another rule. I’d note that for his audience his shelf life has been quite long indeed, and deservedly so. “Affordable Family Formation”, “Invade the World, Invite the World”, “Occam’s Butterknife”, “volunteer auxiliary thought police”, “Most Important Graph in the World”, “first rule of female journalism”, “flight from white”, “war on noticing”, “leapfrogging loyalties”, “hate hoax”.
“Social Media Warriors” never caught on, but should have.
“The Sailer strategy” is not a catchphrase, but the 2016 presidential election looked more like it than the GOP conventional wisdom from many previous elections.
And Sailer was first prominent public commenter to actually use his brain about the Rolling Stone rape hoax scandal. Is there a more unfairly maligned pubic intellectual in our time?
My very first through before going to the comments section was “Robin Hanson should hire Steve Sailer to come up with his catchphrases.”
Makes sense. Robin is a wonky intellectual and Steve is a statistics minded marketing guy.
Given Steve’s attachment to HBD, Robin would probably have to hire him secretly. The only “respectable” public intellectual I know to praise Steve is Charles Murray, and of course he’s not respectable to most so what has he got to lose.
P.S. The NYTimes interview on Steve Sailer was pretty funny.
Sailer actually has a triplet for that one catchphrase:
“Invade the World
Invite the World
In Debt to the World.”
It gets traction because it fits reality.
Other Sailerisms include
The Megaphone
Magic Dirt
Affordable Family Formation
The Narrative
“Let’s talk about my hair”
Not all of these were coined by him
= – = – = – =
The folks at Instapundit have some good maxims. I associate it with Glenn Reynolds but it’s obviously a multi-person operation.
Sailer sometimes is so sarcastic that he turns off people not already prone to taking him seriously. The same could be true of the folks at Instapundit.
Another way to ask about “intellectual shelf life” in terms of catch phrases is the extent to which that person’s phrases became part of the language and are the first sayings people reach for when trying to express some still-relevant concept.
I think Shakespeare gets the #1 spot here for everyday phrases, but Orwell would be near the top for conceptual terms, and indeed the previous post here used “1984” as shorthand. CrimeStop and NewSpeak and Two Minutes Hate are still relevant ideas.
In a more just world, Sailer’s phrases which give labels to the concepts which characterize various pathologies of our intellectual class are in Orwell’s league, and in a more just world, would be as commonly known.
“The Narrative” in caps probably was invented by Stephen Hunter, the fine movie critic and thriller novelist.
I believe “Magic Dirt” comes from Vox Day. I then added “Tragic Dirt.”
But I also get a huge number of comments, so some of what is attributed to me came from my commenters. For example, I recall picking up “The Megaphone” from a commenter.
I think the “meme” is the correct abstraction. It is the collection of memes and how they evolve that define a culture. Some people are good meme generators. Others are good meme propagators. For a new meme to have a significant cultural impact, mainstream propagation must occur.
Human minds have evolved to focus on social cues that currently manifest as an over emphasis on the traits that define celebrity. If you want a meme to spread you have to embrace the celebrity aspects of meme propogation. We still need a human face as the perceived “public intellectual” but I think successful future memes will require a multifunctional team of specialists behind the public face, or perhaps even a full blown multi-team organization at or above Dunbar size.
As a side note, I’m feeling overly moderated by Kling’s comment plug-in.
“Robin Hanson probably has come up with more ideas that deserve a long shelf life than anyone I can think of, but he needs better catch-phrases.” I’m probably guilty as charged.
I think you can get excessively into brevity, such as with shortening emulations to “ems”. Such shortenings often develop naturally when lots of people are using a word and get too lazy to say the whole thing all the time, but more often it’s just you doing it which is like speaking your own private jargon.
Perhaps this is a kind of market failure in the ideas market: a failure to take advantage of potential gains from specialization and trade.
The guys who design and build the car are not the guys who market and sell the car, for good reason.
But the guys who come up with new ideas are often the same guys expected to do most of the work expressing and promoting it, and persuading people, even though that type of intellectual salesmanship might not be their comparative advantage.
There are also people who seem to be good intellectual salesmen, but who aren’t good at coming up with good ideas, maybe the intellectual equivalent of a champion dealer in shoddy goods.
Yes, there are editors and publishers that try to suggest revisions they think will be more popular or work better, or who reserve the right to pick headlines or titles that are more attention grabbing, since they are in the business of knowing such things and more expert in what works to grab attention than the typical author. But it seems to me that the changes are usually relatively minor as regards substance and jargon.
Part of the problem is that the exposing people to and selling ideas doesn’t necessarily make any money, so one lacks any good way to pay salesmen. But it’s not unknown to see original thinkers attract or recruit intellectual disciples better at persuasion and conversion who go on to more successfully communicate the idea to the masses than the original thinker could, when the source of motivation is status, fame, or something else besides money.
And if the idea isn’t going to make money for the original thinker, their own idea generation may have been motivated by such non-pecuniary factors, in which case they want to be directly associated with the idea to personally realize on any fame or status it might provide them in an exclusive, monopolistic way, and the explicit presence of marketing intermediaries might undermine that goal. But the whole trade of ghostwriting involves people who write for quality and agree not to get in the way the accrual of the benefits of public attribution to the named author.
There are also ‘popularizers’, but they don’t necessarily coordinate at all with the original thinker, and they are usually associated not with better expression of the idea to people who can understand it at it’s full intellectual level, but presenting a more digestible, accessible, and dumbed-down version of the idea, to people who couldn’t.
Another part of the problem is that for cars salesmen usually have to take the product as given and don’t change it. But for ideas, better formulation and expression for better marketing may involve enough changing of the words used to communicate ideas that it approaches difficult “translation” work, from the language of the original thinker into language more effective with the intended audience. Translating to enhance marketability is different from translation or marketing alone, and is more like ghost-writing someone’s story in high quality written style after they tell it you in their own words in informal verbal style.
Indeed, related to ‘translation’ is the category of ‘interpreter’ who like a popularizer may come after and not coordinate at all with the original thinker, but who is trying to tell the same-intellectual-audience what “X really meant”, in a way that seems to be what I’m suggesting here, polishing up the ideas for superior marketability. Keynes is a common X, and this is like the disciple example above but separated by space and time.
One advantage of this separation could be to reduce the potential for embarrassing conflicts or inconsistencies when there is a demand or opportunity to provide a clarification or supplement to the work.
If you can’t or won’t pay an idea salesman, and aren’t the best salesman yourself, then perhaps the direct or indirect good-salesman-disciple route is one’s best hope, but then that just introduces the meta-level problem of how to market to your disciplines and motivate them to create and market the more marketable version of your ideas.
One might object that if one can’t market to the target audience then one probably doesn’t have what it takes to meta-market to disciples either, but I think these are very different skills and it’s not hard to think of examples where this is the case. At any rate, if one had both skills, one could still want to focus on meta-marketing as a more efficient way of marketing overall.
Malcolm Gladwell is extremely good at popularizing academics’ ideas. He provides a useful service.
I criticized him in the past for not being very good at distinguishing between good and bad ideas that strike his fancy. My impression is he has become more self-aware of that weakness he has.
The problem 10 years ago was not that Malcolm was popularizing ideas, some good and some bad, but that his reputation had gotten too inflated so that all the ideas he pushed were seen as being genius-level, when many were obviously wrong. But his reputation has come back down to earth since then, so little harm is now done by his pushing the occasional bad idea.
If you add up all the good ideas that Gladwell has popularized over the years, it’s an impressive list.
This post is the definition of damning with faint praise. But I’ll take it. 🙂
Incidentally, I occasionally talk of Hanson’s Law: 90 per cent of everything is posturing.
+1.
Why haven’t I seen that anywhere? I searched for it and found it nowhere.
I made it up, but I got the idea from reading lots of Robin Hanson. Also I’m bound by Stigler’s Law of Eponymy to call it Hanson’s Law, especially as he’s a Professor and I’m just some guy on the internet.
Hanson has said something similar:
Food isn’t about Nutrition
Clothes aren’t about Comfort
Bedrooms aren’t about Sleep
Marriage isn’t about Romance
Talk isn’t about Info
Laughter isn’t about Jokes
Charity isn’t about Helping
Church isn’t about God
Art isn’t about Insight
Medicine isn’t about Health
Consulting isn’t about Advice
School isn’t about Learning
Research isn’t about Progress
Politics isn’t about Policy
Thanks!
Most of these are top notch, at least as tricky hypotheses to be developed with readily available examples.
Many individuals (I’m one and not the only one) could start listing examples on the fly.
It would be fun to crowd-source examples and then have committees of those involved hammer out a first draft essay.
Maybe it’s just me and my economist friends, but this piece by Krugman has more shelf life than anything else he wrote: https://slate.com/business/1997/03/in-praise-of-cheap-labor.html
I don’t think it’s just you, although I beat Krugman to it in the pages of Fortune by a year or two.
But the two other things I would credit Krugman for that have lasted are (1) pretty much every essay in Pop Internationalism, which are popular, not academic pieces, but are carefully argued and memorable, and (2) what got him the Nobel Prize–his work on monopolistic competition and trade.
Sometimes there is more to naming things than just catch-phrases:
COVID-19 == Coronavirus Disease 2019
In case you care, you’ve had more effect on my thinking than Tyler and I’ve read you both nearly every day for over a decade. Robin does have you beat though, at least for me.
How does one break into the ranks of public intellectuals. Is the ability to turn a phrase a threshold requirement ? Does the tendency to speak in subject and predicate sentences qualify one? Must one wear a bow-tie? Must one address oneself and others as” one”, as in “ must one”? I am about to retire from
the practice of law and my friends are imploring me to pursue a new career as a public intellectual , but they base their encouragement solely on my nagging tendency to speak in subject and predicate sentences. Please advise.
How does one break into the ranks of public intellectuals.
———
The collective action of intelligent search engines. The singularity has been birthed.
Richard:
Rigorously mimic the actions of Greta Thunberg.
(Way simpler than complying with any/all of those other prerequisites things you mentioned.)
Blogging took off in the aughts and many of those bloggers are still blogging such that they qualify as having an extended shelf life. What sets apart the most popular and influential bloggers is a sense of curiosity about many topics. That certainly describes Dr Kling, Reynolds, Cowen, Hanson, Sailer, and others mentioned above. Russ Roberts got started in the aughts, I believe, and it is his wife-ranging interests and curiosity that set him apart as a top level public intellectual. Ann Althouse, Joanne Jacobs, Jo Nova are others who fit this pattern. More didactic bloggers, for example, Don Boudreaux, I think manage to continue to retain a readership because of their willingness to cite and quote from a plethora of sources. I would note that many bloggers whom I would not necessarily feel compelled to go to their website on a daily basis, I nevertheless am very happy to read on a daily basis because they offer easy email subscriptions. Timothy Taylor always has an interesting new email each day that evinces curiosity.
Frankly, the aughts seem like a fountain of enduring public intellectual talent.
“Pull the Rope Sideways” of Hanson provenance is pretty great.
And ‘Homo Hypocritus’.
personally, I find that Dierdre McCloskey and Bjorn Lomborg have aged well. I find them as compelling & important today as I did in the mid 2000s
I tell you, Deirdre’s textbook she wrote in about 1986 (when she was still Donald) has probably aged very well. I think about it every other day. It’s available as a free PDF at her web site. It says 1982, 2d edition 1985, some translations available or forthcoming, and a new edition is mentioned last year or this? News to me.
Free download, kids. Don’t miss it. Your textbook connection.
Look under the “Books” tab at her website, where her books are listed most recent first.
The book may be harder to grapple with unless you have the lectures in a bricks and mortar classroom also. And I think you would already need to have the undergraduate “Principles of Micro” and “Principles of Macro,” or be adequately motivated to work through a textbook on your own.
Lots of good debates are discussed, especially in cliometrics. But there is a lot more there as well
Thanks for the reference, Charles. The website link is The Applied Theory of Price.
The downloadable pdf is 33MB in size. It is a pdf of images of the book pages rather than reflowable text that can copied.
Here’s a catch phrase:
“No Morality Please, We’re Economists.”
This is another McCloskey-ism, so I’m putting it here.
riffing on “No sex please, we’re British,” in case you couldn’t immediately tell.
I heard Deirdre use it in lectures 30 years ago, with genuine conviction, while discussing initial distribution of resources, Pareto optimality, conditions of static efficiency, etc.
I’m certain she’s written this down repeatedly, though I can’t give you a citation without just internet searching blindly.
= – = – = – = – =
This stance is the opposite of “The Road to Sociology.”
Maybe I’m wrong…
My understanding is that Prof. Kling believes that economics’ “Road to Sociology” involves cheerfully jettisoning the “no morality please” of positive economics and replacing it with something else.
At the limit, “The road to sociology” version of economics involves more reliance on the sort of emotionally loaded (not cold-blooded) analysis and virtue signaling you might find among 200 high schoolers (coed or girls only) during a public discussion about a controversial topic in real life in a public auditorium.
Probably in a lecture hall or public gymnasium where everyone can watch each other in real time and anyone who acts outraged and talks louder gets to win supporters.
It’s the opposite of the stance that generated the Fogel and Engerman question: “what percentage of equilibrium labor earnings were expropriated from American slaves by their owners before abolition?”
Being attached to a major outlet is still pretty important in surviving as a public intellectual it seems. It’s probably not a coincidence that Krugman is the most widely read economist and his blog is at the most rudely read newspaper. Cowen of course writes articles for Bloomberg. Scott Alexander seems like the rare exception as someone who’s become huge just from an independent blog. Having a niche or brand helps too. David Brooks will always be in demand among major outlets as the token ‘sane conservative.’ Andrew Sullivan has practically trademarked the role of being the reasonable moderate trying to understand both sides.
I have been pondering the role of journalists. Every day my opinion changes a little, but here is one.
“The job (empirically observed) of a journalist is to tell people what to think and what opinions to have.” This especially includes what to assume, more or less implicitly.
We think journalists tell us what to know and what the world is like. The average person, if busy with life and responsibilities, relies on the journalist for what to think.
This is where The Narrative comes in. Thanks to Steve Sailer for the pointer to this definition…
From Steven Hunter. Hat tip to Lead And Gold:
http://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2011/05/insider-explains-narrative.html
Note that Harsanyi used the term ‘the original position’ before Rawls.
Good catch phrases can become associated with someone other than their inventor.
It should be accepted, even if sadly, that:
“the Patterns of Sustainable Specialization & Trade” is too long n’ boring to catch on.
“Specialization and Trade” – maybe, tho not as catchy as Supply and Demand.
Truth, and true insights, have a pretty long shelf life. But there are so many truths. (are mine the same as yours? oh, wait, that’s from JC Superstar.)
“The End of History” turned out to be a huge, overhyped, catchy NON-truth, wrongly sold as truth. So as a lesson about how elites can be wrong, it will continue to have a long life. Funny how the shallow lesson “elites can be wrong, very wrong” – is admitted, yet leads to no behavior changes by the elites. So the elites use it to “admit” that they can be wrong, and prove that they’re willing to admit it — and then proceed to be wrong yet NOT admit it.
Like all economists who said Trump’s tariffs on China would be terrible. In fact, it’s 2-5 years late for most company’s to diversify their supply chain away from the lowest cost commie/ socialist (crony-capitalist) country.
Most public UK doom & gloomers will be “wrong” about Brexit being a disaster, if UK trends and actuals are compared to EU, France, or Germany trends & actuals — but the disruptions from China will cause big UK problems that the Brexit foes will claim are mostly Brexit, and the Brexit supporters will claim is mostly China. Not sure if there’s a catch phrase in this blame shifting Brexit idea; “Doom & gloom” is a catch phrase for a general attitude more than an idea.
Maybe change it to “Specialize and Trade” which changes it to something that sounds like a declarative sentence. Or it could be descriptive: “[In the economy ] we specialize and trade.” But that’s too long, too.
Making a catch phrase with anything that ends it “-ation” is probably fighting the elements. My mind just doesn’t work that way.
“Specialize and Exchange” feels more right to me and I’m not sure if it’s a personal preference of one of these innate language rules that I’m not privy to.
Proverbs are funny. Often our best ones were condensed for hundreds of years before they reached us.
A non-native speaker working on his English, who came here as an adult and is now in a nursing home, keeps asking me about this one:
“Finders keepers losers weepers.”
It’s short, punchy, and it works. But it’s weird! The more I look at it the weirder it looks.
To make that into a sentence a schoolmarm would approve of is non trivial. As stated, the proverb doesn’t even have a verb. But that’s the way we say it.
It’s not weird, it’s rhyme. The same is true for “nature vs nurture”, It is alliteration. Linguists and cognitive scientists like Steven Pinker uncover many of the obscure rules. There is an underlying rule to how we list words or names based on vowels, for instance.
Pinker’s “Stuff of Thought” is built around the insights of Beth Levin as listed (literally) in her book “English Verb Classes and Alternations”. The sad part of Levin’s book is that the data is stuck in the dead medium of paper instead of a structured data format with web links. Once Levin’s insight sticks, you can’t see verbs the same way ever again.
I need to go read more Pinker, again. It’s fun, because he’s smart and entertaining and usually right.
Here’s another one:
“get woke, go broke.”
Here is another mind bender. Hum the ABC song. Now hum Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Now hum Mary had a Little Lamb.
Ooops. Baa Baa Black Sheep. Right species, wrong life stage.
Somewhere…somewhere…I read an article or comment about the reliance on frankly childish mottos and slogans in political demonstrations.
The author was fairly conservative. If I recall correctly, he or she thought that leftists had slogans to chant that were more childish and brain dead. Perhaps there were simply more left-leaning rallies at the time.
Exhibit A, was
“Bush lied
People died”
Exhibit B, which I suggest here, is
“Charles Murray go away
Racist Sexist anti-Gay”
I’m not saying I agree with the author.
But it certainly is the case that for many of us, our minds have a module (as Pinker would call it) to run ditties and slogans and jingles that somehow got into our long term memory.
it can be political slogans, lines from Pushkin or Shakespeare, fragments of Puccini arias. Some people have scripture memorized. A lot of what’s in my mind is lyrics from 70s album-oriented rock music.
When you can’t get a ditty out of your head, the term for it might be an “ear worm.” Martin E P Seligman calls the module that runs these ditties in your head “the jingle channel.” It’s in _What you can change and what you can’t_ 1995, and he provides an edxample from Mark Twain and a trolley car conductor’s ditty on which transfer tickets to use.
A few more that come to mind are
“When in doubt, kick it out” (from youth soccer defense)
and one that Solzhenitsyn likes, which rhymes in English,
“Catch on you will when you’re rolling down hill.”
Great insights, Charles. At one point I did a line and character count of popular protest signs in a Google image search. The typical 4:3 dimensions are either portrait or landscape, like most non-square image dimensions, and have 30 characters or less. If you apply Claude Shannon’s Information Theory, protest messages are quite sparse; Twitter messages are book-like in comparison. But this IS the message. This IS the message that makes the front page of a newspaper in the form of an image. There are faces, emotions, fashion, and other human hints of how people feel about that message embedded around that message. Most web images are 50K in size for the nuance, and 30 bytes for the core message which is about the same size as the headline it competes with. The same message makes the news and YouTube in the form of rhyming chants that are quite “catchy”. Protests disseminate information 30 bytes at a time.
I’m fascinated with music specifically because of “the jingle channel” you describe. The cognitive scientists like Pinker speak of “the language loop” which is the “inner voice” in our head. Most of our “Slow Think”, using Daniel Kahneman’s terminology, occurs in this Language Loop. It Spaced Reinforced Learning to move the language specific logic from the Language Loop into the long term “Stuff of Thought” that forms the heuristics that we think of as “mental muscle memory”.
It freaks me out when I occasionally become aware that the song in my “jingle channel” is years/decades old and it includes detailed instrumental flourishes that are much closer to pure recordings than a “Stuff of Thought” representation. The “jingle channel” and the “language loop” operate in parallel. This is freakishly weird and I suspect it is unique to hominids. I suspect that these loops are copies of one another and that the “jingle channel” came first. The question is which hominid species started each “loop” innovation.
If you put too many characters on a protest sign, it can’t be read from any distance. In order to spread your message, you have to condense it–which will probably mean losing all subtlety).
Same with commercial billboards. I have had the experience of driving by a billboard and trying to figure what it’s about, because there are too many characters and they are too small. I wonder at the competence of the people who designed it.
I think the same is true for sports uniforms, Roger Sweeny. The designers often fail to consider whether the design is distinct when seem from the bleachers or as a tiny flash across a TV screen. These designers would benefit from working hand-in-hand with a graphic designer who simultaneously designs a 16×16 pixel icon. Car grills are another reference point. There are many languages to branding.