Category Archives: books and book reviews

Razib Khan on ISIS

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He writes,

Being a good parent, friend, and a consummate professional. But not everyone is a parent, and not everyone has a rich network of friends, or a fulfilling profession. Ideologies like communism, and religious-political movements like Islamism, are egalitarian in offering up the possibilities of heroism for everyone by becoming part of a grand revolutionary story.

There is much more at the link. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I am reading Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, by Roger Scruton, the British conservative philosopher. Most of you will not want to read it, because it mostly discusses European philosophers. But I came away with some interesting ideas to chew on, and I may attempt to write an essay on the book. One of his points is that the left-right lens through which we view politics is designed not to be analytically sound but instead to tilt things in favor of Communists. The idea is to put fascism on the far right and Communism on the far left. Since everybody hates fascism, the implication is that you should like Communism, or at least cut it some slack.

I think that a more useful organizing axis for political movements might be satisfied vs. disaffected. People who support Hillary or Jeb are satisfied. They do not want to rock the boat. People who support Trump or Sanders are somewhat disaffected. Extremist groups, like ISIS, appeal to people who are extremely disaffected.

Where would you put libertarians on this axis? I would put them much closer to the satisfied end. As ticked off as they are about government and politics, they tend to be basically happy with their own lives.

Noah Smith’s Five Books

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He writes,

2015 is the perfect year for me to list my recommendations, since this was a particularly epic time for books about the discipline of economics. In no particular order, here is a short list of good ones:

He goes on to cite books by Bernanke, Rodrik, Thaler, Ebenstein, and Tetlock. Interestingly, all of these books were on my radar screen, but I have not read through any of them, because of issues with the authors that rubbed me the wrong way.

My issue with Bernanke is that I believe that the driver of policy during the financial crisis was Hank Paulson. Bernanke’s role was to make Paulson’s bailout of his Wall Street cronies look intellectually respectable. Maybe I’ll read Bernanke’s book on my trip. I need to make sure that I am reading it with an open mind, but I fear that I will be inclined to view it as just more lipstick on Paulson’s pig.

My issue with Rodrik is that while he correctly sees that economic interventions often are based on analysis that is narrow and imperfectly informed, he thinks that interventionism is still the way to go.

My issue with Thaler is that he does not share Rodrik’s awareness of how economists’ imperfect knowledge can mess things up.

My issue with Ebenstein is that what I think is wrong with Chicago economics is not what he thinks is wrong with it.

My issue with Tetlock is that I don’t buy the reliability of what he does. And what exactly is a superforecaster? Winston Churchill had a horrible record of being wrong on many things. He was wrong during the abdication crisis. He was wrong about Indian independence. He was wrong to return England to the pre-war gold parity. But he happened to be right about Hitler. Probably any sort of “base rate” prediction would have been that Hitler would mellow once he took office and the Nazis could be easily managed. A Tetlockian superforecaster probably would have behaved more like Chamberlain.

Justin Fox on Academic Journals

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He writes,

in economics almost every paper of significance is now available in some form free on the Internet before it is published in a journal. Yet economics journals that keep their articles behind paywalls and charge hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for library subscriptions continue to thrive.

This is apparently because the journal editors and referees are still needed to certify the quality of research, certification that informs hiring and tenure decisions and provides information on the relative quality of university academic departments. Also, scholars who want to cite others’ work in their own academic papers need access to the published versions to make sure they get the wording and the page numbers right.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.
These days, I am seeing the world through Martin Gurri’s lenses, as a conflict between the uncredentialed public and the credentialed elites. Thanks to the Internet, the uncredentialed public now has as much access to information as the credentialed elites. One consequence of this is that institutions like accreditation, selective college admission, faculty tenure, and publication come to be seen less and less as essential tools to promote scholarly quality and more and more as artificial gate-keeping.

The Quotable Martin Gurri

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In The Revolt of the Public, he writes,

The rhetoric of democratic politics seems to have gotten out of whack with the reality of what democratic governments can achieve.

Actually, his book has many quotable soundbites, but this one is very central to his main theme. The public has become more informed about the failures of government, but politicians are not encouraging people to lower their expectations. On the contrary, the competitive equilibrium seems to lead toward politicians making ever more extravagant promises.

How to Defeat ISIS

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In most cases, civilized soldiers have defeated primitive warriors only when they adopted the latter’s tactics. In the history of European expansion, soldiers repeatedly had to abandon their civilized techniques and weaphons to win against even the more primitive opponents. The unorthodox techniques adopted were smaller, more mobile units; abandonment of artillery and use of lighter smaller arms; open formations and skirmishing tactics; increased reliance on ambushes, raids, and surprise attacks on settlements; destruction of the enemy’s economic infrastructure (habitations, foodstores, livestock, and means of transport); a strategy of attrition against the enemy manpower; relentless pursuit to take advantage of civilization’s superior logistics; and extensive use of natives as scouts and auxiliaries.

This is from Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, published in 1996, as quoted in Peter Turchin’s Ultrasociety. Turchin goes on to write,

There is no question that civilized states almost always prevail against tribal warriors in the end, but they do so primarily because they are large-scale societies fighting small-scale societies. . .guerrillas simply avoid battles against the numerically and technologically superior government forces.

Both primitive warriors and modern guerrillas rely not on brute force but on mobility, stealth, and surprise.

And a few pages later,

The distinguishing characteristic of human combat is the ability to strike from a distance coupled with mobility.

Actually, on the topic of defeating ISIS, I confess to being to the dovish side of President Obama at this point. I think that an actual war to defeat ISIS would be bloody and brutal. Meanwhile, it strikes me as wrong to be engaging in acts of war with no formal declaration of war and at best a vague commitment to winning.

If the point of not sending in our people (I hate the term “boots on the ground”–as if we were talking about inanimate leather artifacts) is that this is someone else’s war, then I think that is an argument for staying out of it altogether. The counter-argument is that ISIS are really bad people, they could get worse before they get better, and some of their badness spills over into this country. Maybe the counter-argument is right, and I could see myself making it at some point. But as of this moment, I think that on balance the better policy is to avoid involvement altogether.

Separately, Amar Bhide arrives at the same conclusion, but by a slightly different route, stressing the evils of colonialism. I think Bhide assigns too much blame to colonial history, when there are also other sources of problems in the region. For example, I doubt that anyone would try to trace the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict to western imperialism.

Jim Tankersley on Matt Ridley

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Tankersley writes,

Matt Ridley shares America’s eroding faith in institutions, but he doesn’t much believe in supervillains. He is a true libertarian, to an extreme you rarely see in American public discourse.

Similarly, I wrote that He offers full-frontal libertarianism.

Unfortunately, Tankersley goes on to say

In the world Ridley sketches in the book, everything will eventually work itself out for the better, thanks to free markets and survival of the fittest — so no one feels any obligation to try to change things for the good.

This is a straw man. No libertarian, including Ridley, expresses such a point view. Libertarianism is perfectly compatible with individuals feeling an obligation to change things for the good. What libertarianism rejects is the notion of equating “changing things for the good” with government planning and coercion. The day to day commercial activities of people change things for the good in an inexorable fashion, although the process works by trial and error, so it is never flawless. The attempts by politicians and government officials to change things for the good tend to work out less well on average.

From the Comments

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On Debate is not about Debate

Back in the 1950’s, let’s say, I read your views in a book or magazine and wished to argue with them, I might have sent a letter to the editor or written an article of my own — preferably for a publication with high status (The New Criterion, say) or salience (Architectural Review) or visibility.(The Saturday Evening Post). I’d have to be reflective, I’d have to argue logically, I’d have to consider objections to my comments, etc. My piece would have to pass scrutiny by an editor and possibly be revised. And after that I’d have to wait for it to be published and for others to react, This was a slow process.

On the internet, I can react to opinions almost as quickly as I encounter them, with little screening for sense or relevance or accuracy. I can indulge my emotions IMMEDIATELY, which sadly provokes quick responses. And to make matters worse, a major source of satisfaction for internet commentators is getting their comments in particularly quickly, both to be noticed (“I’M FURZT DUDES!”) and to shape the discussion which follows.

I’m not sure if there’s a cure for this. My heart longs for the good old days of Little Magazines and earnest journalists living in garrets and Concerned Readers from the provinces penning their long Letters To the Editor. But that environment rested on exclusivity and economic supports of advertising and subscriptions which aren’t easily duplicated on the internet. It seems irrecoverable.

I would say that the Internet has given us three things, all of which are mixed blessings. I expect that Martin Gurri’s book, which I have just started [UPDATE: well, actually I have finished it, but as you know I work a lot with scheduling posts in advance, in part to discipline myself against reacting instantly], will speak to these.

1. More sources of information.

2. Less centralized filtering of information.

3. The ability to react instantly.

It is possible that all three of these are harmful to our culture. But I think that (1) and (2) can be more of a plus than a minus. (3) is what worries me. We are training people not to reflect, not to be charitable to those who disagree, not to try to open minds but to close minds–especially the minds of people who are inclined to agree with us. We encourage put-downs and “this one chart proves….” and ad hominem arguments.

My e-book The Three Languages of Politics describes the result: a strongly tribalized political culture, in which communication consists of signals that simplify issues so that they fall on each person’s preferred axis.

Martin Gurri on Today’s News

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Maybe in a few weeks I will have forgotten about Martin Gurri and moved on to something else, but right now I am viewing everything in the newspaper through the lenses he provides in The Revolt of the Public.

One of Gurri’s themes is that elites now make unrealistic promises to the public, and the public soon discovers this, discrediting the elites. So, in today’s WaPo, the lead story is about world leaders denouncing the North Korean test of a hydrogen bomb. The public is going to view this as a government failure. After all, back in the Clinton Administration, they reached a deal with North Korea that was supposed to keep it from going nuclear altogether. The WaPo buries the issue of the Iran deal in a different story, and there the spin is that the Iran deal is a success because Obama paid attention to it while he let North Korea slip his mind. My guess is that this talking point is not going to work with the public.

The second top front-page story is headlined Germany targets a surge in vitriol (the digital version uses different wording but gives the same message). Later down in the story, you read about the New Year’s Eve rampage in Cologne that was “allegedly committed by gangs of young Arab and North African men.” My guess is that the public thinks that the lead story is the rampage, not the vitriol. And the public sees the rampage as evidence of government failure in its promise to absorb immigrants without problems. (Of course, I am over-generalizing when I say “the” public, but you can be sure that I am describing a significant segment of the population.)

UPDATE: A Failure by Germany’s Elite.

Another of Gurri’s themes is that the elites are blindsided by the public. The elites take it for granted that they are competent and that their authority will be respected. When the public revolts, the elites’ first inclination is to go into denial.

Martin Gurri on the political implications of communications technology

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I have just about finished reading The Revolt of the Public. It is an important book, but not easy to digest. I give Virginia Postrel a lot of credit for boiling it down fairly well, but there is more to it than fit in her write-up.

Back in the 1990s, a lot of people tried to forecast the impact of the Internet on politics. Libertarians thought that it would lead to a more libertarian world. Social democrats thought it would lead to a more social democratic world. I don’t recall any conservative prognostications.

Gurri says it could lead to a more nihilistic world, one in which newly-empowered outsiders tear down elite control structures but are then left with the question, “Now what?”

Gurri says that elite insiders have difficulty coming to terms with the revolutionary implications of the new communications environment. Cue Ross Douthat, trying to explain why he did not foresee the Donald Trump phenomenon.

Now if I wanted to avoid giving Trump his due, I could claim that I didn’t underestimate him, I misread everyone else — from the voters supporting him despite his demagoguery to the right-wing entertainers willing to forgive his ideological deviations.

In fact, I lean toward that view. There was a market niche available, and Trump happened to fill it. Some of it reflects his individual skill, but I am not inclined to put too much emphasis on that.

The point about “right-wing entertainers” is well taken. For years, conservative talk radio personalities have railed against “RINO’s” (Republicans in Name Only) and claimed that if the Republicans stopped nominating me-too candidates and instead ran a real conservative for President they would win. The way that I look at it, anyone who really believed in the need for Republicans to nominate someone reliably conservative would prefer almost any Republican candidate in the race other than Trump. (I am hardly alone in that view.) But it seems that the talk radio hosts are happy to toss prior convictions out the window in order to excite their listeners.

I keep going back to the 1960s. In 1964, Barry Goldwater was nominated by an insurgency, and he got crushed. I think that in 2016 the insurgent candidate with the highest chance of getting the nomination (and I put his chances at well under 50 percent) is not Donald Trump, but Bernie Sanders. And I think that if Sanders is nominated, then he will get crushed.

In any case, Gurri provides the best analytical framework I have come across for understanding current politics, both here and in other countries. Ross Douthat should give it a read.

My Review of Scott Sumner’s The Midas Paradox

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The book offers a historical interpretation of the Great Depression as a monetary phenomenon. My review is here. This paragraph may be a bit terse:

The price index that Sumner uses is the Wholesale Price Index. This is a volatile index that largely excludes finished goods and instead tracks goods that are intermediate inputs to other producers. From the standpoint of those final-goods producers, an increase in the WPI indicates not a positive demand shock but an adverse supply shock. Sumner did not succeed in convincing me that the causality runs from increases (decreases) in the WPI to increases (decreases) in output, rather than the other way around.

Suppose that the idea is that when monetary policy is expansionary, prices for finished goods go up and nominal wages remain sticky. Then producers will increase output, and this will raise the demand for goods that are intermediate inputs. The price of intermediate goods could rise by a much higher percentage than the price of finished goods, provided that intermediate goods are not a large share of the cost of producing finished goods and provided that the supply of intermediate goods is somewhat inelastic.

Using this story, the Wholesale Price Index is not really the “P” that goes into the real wage rate, W/P. Instead, it is an indicator that production is rising (or is expected to rise). We still have to take in on faith that a decrease in W/P is what caused the rise (or expected rise) in production.