Category Archives: Tyler Cowen is my Favorite Blogger
A Dual Monarchy?
Which Hungary?
On the ground nationalist conservatism looks more liberal than you might think.
The Hungarian capital has changed a lot since it became a Mecca for global right-wingers—it’s more international and lively than ever. Most striking is the flourishing of the former Jewish quarter, home to Europe’s largest synagogue and now one of its most hopping bar scenes. Just as populist economics do not immediately cause market mayhem, rule by Christian nationalists doesn’t necessarily make everything drab and provincial.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
In almost every respect, it is vitally important to note, the Hungarian government is profoundly anti-conservative. It is deeply corrupt, treating the free market as a joke, with one man directing vast amounts of state funds to his friends and cronies in return for their support. Its free press is under siege, with “nearly 80 percent of the market for political and public affairs news … financed by sources decided by the ruling party.” State advertising is a huge part of media budgets, and Viktor Orbàn ensures it goes to his outlets. Its government monitors the Internet for violations of the moral order, forcing one university to leave the country entirely, while setting up a heavily subsidized complex of pro-Orbàn right-wing institutions to rival the left’s.
What makes a good podcast?
A podcast really works when it is the dramatic unfolding of a story and mood between the guest and host.
Julia Galef did a podcast with me which has not (yet) been released. My guess is that by Tyler’s standards it worked, since Julia really brought out my state of depression and contrasted with it. To exaggerate, it was Mary Poppins meets “Have a nice day.”
When I judge a podcast, I use more mundane criteria.
Did anyone say anything that I did not expect? Robert Wright does this. I forget which podcast, but out of nowhere he questioned the right of government to interfere with international trade using rhetoric that could have come straight from Don Boudreaux.
Did the host ask the Devil’s Advocate questions that needed to be asked? Russ Roberts usually succeeds. Robert Wright again. I have observed Ezra Klein failing to do this, and I found the results painful.
Did they avoid the use of profanity? I know that cursing can be a way to sound “cool,” but not to me–I have outgrown my adolescence.
I think it’s actually difficult to spell out what makes for a good podcast. Tyler is right that the interpersonal dynamics have a lot to do with it. I find it hard to articulate what works and what does not.
An interesting question is whether reading a transcript ends up being more efficient/rewarding than listening to the podcast. I am inclined to say yes. But are there counter-examples in which hearing the voice is more compelling? Jordan Peterson perhaps?
Is it 2016?
I thought of the 2016 election as Bobo vs. anti-Bobo.
David Brooks himself writes,
over the past two decades, the rapidly growing economic, cultural, and social power of the bobos has generated a global backlash that is growing more and more vicious, deranged, and apocalyptic. And yet this backlash is not without basis. The bobos—or X people, or the creative class, or whatever you want to call them—have coalesced into an insular, intermarrying Brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech. Worse, those of us in this class have had a hard time admitting our power, much less using it responsibly.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
Brooks concludes,
The bobos didn’t set out to be an elite, dominating class. We just fit ourselves into a system that rewarded a certain type of achievement, and then gave our children the resources that would allow them to prosper in that system too. But, blind to our own power, we have created enormous inequalities—financial inequalities and more painful inequalities of respect. The task before us is to dismantle the system that raised us.
The essay struck me as somewhat off base. Sometimes he describes bobos as 1960s liberals. At other times he describes them as wokists. They cannot be both simultaneously (many may have been both sequentially).
Brooks writes,
The creative class has converted cultural attainment into economic privilege and vice versa. It controls what Jonathan Rauch describes in his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge, as the epistemic regime—the massive network of academics and analysts who determine what is true. Most of all, it possesses the power of consecration; it determines what gets recognized and esteemed, and what gets disdained and dismissed. The web, of course, has democratized tastemaking, giving more people access to megaphones. But the setters of elite taste still tend to be graduates of selective universities living in creative-class enclaves. If you feel seen in society, that’s because the creative class sees you; if you feel unseen, that’s because this class does not.
But the wokists do not really believe in truth. They tell you what is ok to believe, and they do not care so much about empirical truth in the old-fashioned sense.
The industrial revolution: how did workers eat?
There was an Industrial Revolution, and it was slow.
The debate’s been over for two decades. The gradualists, armed with new growth accounting techniques, have won, exorcising forever the Ashtonian vision of an eighteenth-century leap into exponential growth. Where historians once thought the spinning jenny, steam engine, and factory system the immediate preconditions of England’s dramatic transformation, they now accept that these advances emerged in a trickle in a few tiny sectors.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I believe that that the gradualists may have it wrong. Here is a clue, from later in Kedrofsky’s essay.
And a growing share of the population moved out of agriculture and into that increasingly-recognizable branch of manufacturing—from 33.9 percent in 1759 to 45.6 percent in 1851.
How did these manufacturing workers eat? There had to be a significant increase in agricultural productivity. But I am guessing that a lot of the increase did not take place on farms. Here is Wikipedia.
The British Agricultural Revolution, or Second Agricultural Revolution, was an unprecedented increase in agricultural production in Britain arising from increases in labour and land productivity between the mid-17th and late 19th centuries. Agricultural output grew faster than the population over the century to 1770, and thereafter productivity remained among the highest in the world. This increase in the food supply contributed to the rapid growth of population in England and Wales, from 5.5 million in 1700 to over 9 million by 1801, though domestic production gave way increasingly to food imports in the nineteenth century as the population more than tripled to over 35 million
I want to focus on the last point, about food imports. Borrowing a trope from David Friedman, I would say that British manufacturing workers were very productive at growing foodstuffs. They produced manufactured goods, put them on ships, and the ships came back with foodstuffs.
Suppose that productivity did not change in either agriculture or manufacturing between 1800 and 1850. A worker could produce a bushel of grain per day either year, and a worker could produce a bolt of cloth per day either year. But if you can trade a bolt of cloth for two bushels of grain, and you move some workers out of agriculture and into manufacturing, that worker now produces twice as much grain.
Adam Smith and David Ricardo knew more about how living standards improve than do modern productivity historians. And my guess is that the transformation that people who were alive around 1800 were seeing with their own eyes was real, today’s gradualists notwithstanding.
UPDATE: A commenter points to Anton Howes.
The push thesis implies agricultural productivity was an original cause of England’s structural transformation; the pull thesis that it was a result. The evidence, I think, is in favour of a pull — specifically one caused by the dramatic growth of London’s trade.
On the larger question, Howes is a gradualist.
Price discrimination explains everything
Tyler Cowen writes about what should be taught more in econ grad school,
Price discrimination. They do it to you more and more! Or perhaps you are striving to do it to others. This is typically covered in a first-year sequence, but how many second-year students really have mastered when it is welfare-improving or not? How it relates to product tying? When it is sustainable against entry or not?
If I were in charge of undergraduate economics, no one would come to graduate school needing to learn about price discrimination. When I taught AP economics in high school, I taught that price discrimination explains everything. That is, most real-world business practices that might seem odd can be explained as attempts to charge more for consumers with the least elastic demand. An intermediate undergraduate microeconomics course ought to spend a lot of time on the topic of price discrimination.
The fundamental question that economic grad schools face is whether to teach math or economics. When I was in grad school, the answer was to teach math. The case for teaching math is that to succeed in the profession you need to be able to “use the tools.”
I think that, at the margin, economics graduate students should study more economics. Economic history is very much worth studying. Financial institutions are worth studying. Calomiris and Haber invites the reader to contemplate financial institutions, history, and public choice.
Intangible factors in the economy are worth studying. You could spend at least a semester with a course on organizational capital, institutions, innovation, trust, etc.
Todd vs. Henrich
“Policy Tensor writes,”
[IF] Henrich is right, Todd must be wrong about the archaic character of the Western nuclear family. Examination of the evidence shows that Todd is right and Henrich is wrong. The reason is simple — we can rule out the Henrich hypothesis. The alternate hypothesis is that the Church’s war against cousin marriage was directed at the nobles, who did indeed practice it in a manner that isolated them from the dominant family system of their societies. Just as socialism could spread easily over the exogamous communitarian anthropological base and found itself blocked on its boundaries and Islam likewise for the endogamous communitarian base, the Church’s influence may have been greatest in exogamous anthropological terrain. In other words, the alternate hypothesis inverts the causal arrow between family systems and the Church’s influence. The correlation between them is explained by a causal vector pointing in the reverse direction — the exogamous anthropological base explains the extent of medieval Christendom.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. This is not lowering by very much my probability that Henrich is right.
The populist intellectual oxymoron
You could maybe split it up that way. Tea Party masses, the largest base of the party. Old GOP elites and intellectuals, somewhat discredited and disconnected in the eyes of these masses. Then you have the rising intellectuals, who are not yet discredited but are almost as disconnected from the actual voters as the people they want to replace.
I recommend the entire post (the quote is from his response to a comment). Pointer from Tyler Cowen. The question in his blog post might be:
Can Trump-adjacent intellectuals connect with Trump supporters?
Greer argues in the negative, and so would I. The Trump-adjacent intellectuals are attached to elitist projects to make society in a conservative image, and that cannot be reconciled with populism in this country. Trump supporters are the descendants of what David Hackett Fischer called the Scots-Irish borderers, who are independent-minded and thus resistant to elite projects. Conservatives like Patrick Deneen or the Claremont crowd remind Greer of the Puritan strain, which the borderers detest.
In that sense, libertarian intellectuals are a better match for Trump supporters. The biggest disconnect between libertarian intellectuals and populists is on the issue of immigration. But there are other key differences. Libertarian intellectuals are, well, intellectual, and populists are not. Libertarian intellectuals disdain political heroes. Meanwhile, populists are fond of their Andrew Jacksons, Patrick Buchanans, and Donald Trumps. Libertarians are pacifist by philosophy, and populists are fighters by nature. Libertarians are globalist “anywheres” (they want to send vaccines to India) and populists are localist “somewheres.” (The anywhere/somewhere meme comes from David Goodhart.)
So I am skeptical of the ability of any intellectuals on the right to connect with the populists.
Intellectuals on the left, although they are an elite, are good at connecting to marginalized elements in society. They held on to the borderers for a long time by claiming to be their champions against Wall Street and by winking at Southern segregation, while in the North they claimed to be the champions of marginalized urban ethnics.
The borderers are now up for grabs, as Donald Trump was able to show. But today, elite intellectuals on the left are supplemented by an expanded class of the credentialed-but-not-educated (to borrow Glenn Reynolds’ term), who have college degrees yet work in professions that actually require little advanced knowledge of science or the humanities. These lumpenintellectuals, in coalition with blacks and others who identify as marginalized ethnics, make up a formidable Democratic voting block.
There was an old cartoon, popular among information technology professionals, in which someone says, “I don’t have a solution. But I admire your problem.” That is what I would say to conservative intellectuals these days.
Did David Brooks go Straussian?
This NYT column is a sandwich. It starts and ends with a denunciation of conservatives for continued support for Donald Trump and continued “flight 93” thinking. But in the middle are these two paragraphs:
Over the last decade or so, as illiberalism, cancel culture and all the rest have arisen within the universities and elite institutions on the left, dozens of publications and organizations have sprung up. They have drawn a sharp line between progressives who believe in liberal free speech norms, and those who don’t.
There are new and transformed magazines and movements like American Purpose, Persuasion, Counterweight, Arc Digital, Tablet and Liberties that point out the excesses of the social justice movement and distinguish between those who think speech is a mutual exploration to seek truth and those who think speech is a structure of domination to perpetuate systems of privilege.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Given an NYT audience, if you want them to pay attention to those paragraphs, wouldn’t you have to hide them in the sandwich?
1960 vs. 2020: entrepreneurship and inequality
You could get rich from starting your own company in 1890 and in 2020, but in 1960 it was not really a viable option. You couldn’t break through the oligopolies to get at the markets. So the prestigious route in 1960 was not to start your own company, but to work your way up the corporate ladder at an existing one.
He concludes,
It’s easier now to start and grow a company than it has ever been. That means more people start them, that those who do get better terms from investors, and that the resulting companies become more valuable. Once you understand how these mechanisms work, and that startups were suppressed for most of the 20th century, you don’t have to resort to some vague right turn the country took under Reagan to explain why America’s Gini coefficient is increasing.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.