Category Archives: books and book reviews

Some Gurri nuggets

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From Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, to be released on Nov. 13, with a forward by me.

In business, as in nature, most new trials fail. This is true of every sphere of human activity. Most new government policies fail to meet their intended goals, for example. Most educational reforms fail. Most scientific hypotheses fail. The trial part of trial an error entails mostly error, unless the set of trials is large and competitive enough to produce a possible success, and the system is smart and agile enough tp recognize success and reward it.

Authority has always fostered an illusion of inevitability. For obvious reasons: if an expiration date were stamped on the Federal government, defection from its mandates would begin today.

our species tends to think in terms of narrowly defined problems, and usually pays little attention to the most important feature of these problems: the wider context in which they are embedded. When we think we are solving the problem, we are in fact disrupting the context. Most consequences will then be unintended.

If [Paul] Ormerod is right, most democratic contests today are fought over phantom issues, and democratic politicians, to get elected, must promise to deliver impossibilities. If, in truth, they have displayed excessive partisanship, it may be because team play between political organizations–the tally of wins and losses–retains a reality to which they desperately cling. . .

The nihilist benefits prodigiously from the system he would like to smash. He’s not marginalized–not a street person, not a foresaken soul, not a persecuted minority. . .a radical ingratitude describes the feeling that makes the nihilist tick.

p. 206, 215, 253, 256, and 285-287, respectively. All are even more interesting when spelled out in context.

Book Recommendation

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Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public is now available for pre-order. The release date is a few weeks away.

I raved about the first edition of the book. But this edition is bigger and much better. I contributed a brief forward to this edition, but that is not what makes it better. About 20 percent of the book is an entirely new final chapter that interprets recent events.

Because I wrote the forward, I receive an advanced copy. On page 87, he writes,

The fall of the mediators, all other things being equal, means the end of the regime’s ability to rule by persuasion.

This tightly-packed sentence makes a key point. “The fall of the mediators” means in this case the dispersion of power over information as we move from the broadcast era to the Internet era. Governments could mold the narrative with broadcast media. Governments could convey the impression that their authority was legitimate and respected. With the Internet, too much information leaks out about the failings of governments. Thus, they are unable to “rule by persuasion” and are increasingly reduced to relying on sheer force. As a provocative example, Gurri believes that the Chinese government now is more dependent on force than it would be without the Internet.

The book is a masterpiece, in my opinion.

Oren Cass’ Working Hypothesis

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Oren Cass writes,

a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long-term prosperity and should be the central focus of public policy.

In other words, instead of counting GDP, we should be counting workers with enough income to support families. He goes on to say

if the Working Hypothesis is correct, a basic income would be entirely unresponsive to the nation’s challenges; indeed, the idea represents an explosive charge planted directly at the weakest points in society’s foundation. It would make work optional and render self-reliance moot; consumption would become an entitlement officially disconnected from production. A community in which people capable of making positive contributions are not expected to do so is unlikely to be one that thrives on any dimension in which productive contributions are needed.

Yuval Levin cites this paragraph and praises the book.

But Cass is wrong on the economics. If you object to policies that make earning a living unrewarding, then you should object to the policies we have now and appreciate that a universal basic income would be a huge improvement.

Cass uses rhetoric to make the universal basic income sound anti-work. But it is not. It would be much more pro-work than our patchwork of means-tested programs whose phase-outs create implicit tax rates that average 80 percent on earned income for the bottom fifth of earners.

Apparently, more people need to get up to speed on the basic economics of the UBI.

Yoram Hazony from a three-axes perspective

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How would one evaluate a government, and what does this imply about nationalism vs. trans-nationalism?

For a conservative, the question is how well the government preserves the civilization of the people within its jurisdiction. According to Hazony, this is most likely to occur within a nation-state, that is a state that consists of people with a shared culture. Trans-nationalism threatens to imperil national civilizations.

A progressive might ask whether a government sides with the oppressor or the oppressed. A government must have enough power to overcome oppressors. This might require trans-nationalism, in order to overcome oppressors in particular nations. But nationalism may suffice.

A libertarian might ask whether a government limits its use of coercion. Trans-nationalism sounds like coercion carried to a higher degree. Even nationalism may be too coercive. It should be easy for people to exercise exit. In the United States, federalism was supposed to ensure relatively easy exit, but that is no longer the case.

Thanks to Yuval Levin for suggesting applying the three-axes model to the issues raised by Hazony.

Martin Gurri watch

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Tyler Cowen writes,

Possibly the shorter news cycles are also a result of greater general disillusionment with politics and especially with elites, a theme outlined in Martin Gurri’s forthcoming book “The Revolt of the Public.”

Also, Gurri would say that elites have lost control of the news cycle. The top TV networks and newspapers used to be able to tell the public what is “news.” They could keep a story going if they wanted to. Now, people click away from stories that don’t grab them, so everyone in the media has to behave like a troll. It’s easier to do that with a current story than with last week’s story.

Notes on Nordhaus and Romer

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They are the newest Nobel laureates in economics.

1. They had very different career trajectories. Nordhaus, who is 13 years older, started out as a mediocre empirical macroeconomist, known for working on “the investment function.” His creativity emerged much later in his career. Those of us who are on the heterodox right tend to praise most his papers showing the tremendous drop in the cost of light over the centuries and the low percentage of value of innovation captured by innovators. But he will end up best known for his combination macro-econometric/climate model, which to me is multiplying two instances of faux science together.

Romer produced his most important research much earlier in his career. He detoured into creating Aplia, one of the first computer-based tools for economics teaching. He also detoured into a charter cities project, which fell apart amidst what I call corporate soap opera. He did a brief stint (although longer than I would have predicted) as chief economist for the World Bank.

2. David Warsh, in Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, focused on Romer and Krugman. Warsh saw them as likely Nobel laureates, and he has now been proven correct.

3. Nick Schulz interviewed Romer for our book From Poverty to Prosperity (re-issued as Invisible Wealth. It was one of the best of the interviews.

4. I have never encountered Nordhaus. To me, Romer comes across as prickly, if not outright bitter. He and I have clashed in writing a few times in recent years. Just a week ago, I disagreed with him. I think of him as sharing Krugman’s tendency to impugn the motives of those with whom he disagrees.

Write as if Mrs. Clinton won

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Commenting on my post on the latest book by Francis Fukuyama, a reader emails,

The rise of Trump is the most overdetermined event in recent political history. For a short period following the election, the “this is how we got Trump” chatter was blessedly confined to periodicals and the web. Sadly, we’ve moved well beyond that, to the point where walking around in any bookstore, you can’t help but avoid the voluminous output of pundits, professors, and public intellectuals whose theories claim to be the *one missing explanation* for our societal moment. . .

Any abstract grand theorizing should not rest on the single day whims of 100,000 Midwestern voters. Simple heuristic: If it seems plausible that a book of social commentary would not exist if Trump had lost, or would have an entirely different thesis on the political moment we see either the republic or the world writ large, it does not merit reading.

Another way to put it is to imagine that Mrs. Clinton had won a narrow victory. Would your theory of contemporary sociology still be of interest? If not, then set that theory aside.

Yoram Hazony receives pushback

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1. From Yuval Noah Harari. Without referring to Hazony, Harari writes,

All attempts to divide the world into clear-cut nations have so far resulted in war and genocide. When the heirs of Garibaldi, Mazzini and Mickiewicz managed to overthrow the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, it proved impossible to find a clear line dividing Italians from Slovenes or Poles from Ukrainians.

This had set the stage for the second world war. The key problem with the network of fortresses is that each national fortress wants a bit more land, security and prosperity for itself at the expense of the neighbors, and without the help of universal values and global organisations, rival fortresses cannot agree on any common rules. Walled fortresses are seldom friendly.

Good point. But then he writes this:

Creating a mass global identity need not prove to be an impossible mission. After all, feeling loyal to humankind and to planet Earth is not inherently more difficult than feeling loyal to a nation comprising millions of strangers I have never met and numerous provinces I have never visited. Contrary to common wisdom, there is nothing natural about nationalism.

Harari recognizes that in order to scale up our tribal instincts we seem to require a common enemy. But he thinks that such an enemy could be something impersonal, such as climate change. Uniting all of humanity against impersonal enemies strikes me as a hope with little basis in experience.

2. From Alberto Mingardi, who writes,

One can agree with Hazony that it is naive to assume that “political life is governed largely or exclusively on the basis of the calculations of consenting individuals.” But to assume that governments are just bigger families is the oldest trick of the apologists for interventionism. “Paternalism” never goes with limited government.

Cognitive failure and the financial crisis

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My review of A Crisis of Beliefs, by Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer.

GS directly attack the hypothesis of “rational expectations,” which has dominated the economics profession for forty years. The rational-expectations doctrine holds that when economic actors make decisions that require forecasts, they make optimal use of the available information. They are not guilty of predictable irrationality.

. . .Think of a forecast as employing two types of information about a variable being forecast. One is a “base rate,” which is a very generic property of the variable. The other is “recent information” about that variable or about factors that could affect that variable. Recency-biased forecasting over-weights the recent information and under-weights the base rate.