Category Archives: Politics

Intellectual decadence

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I linked to Ross Douthat’s substack on decadence and the intellectuals the other day, but today I want to comment on its main theme.

Which brings us back to the question of traditionalism and dynamism, and their potential interaction: If you’ve had a cultural revolution that cleared too much ground, razed too many bastions and led to a kind of cultural debasement and forgetting, you probably need to go backward, or least turn that way for recollection, before you can hope to go forward once again.

He thinks that starting in the 1960s, our culture threw away too much that was of value. We will have to rediscover it or else suffer from bad ideas.

I certainly think that this will be the case in economics, which as you know I believe is on the Road to Sociology. This will mean a great forgetting of the ideas of Hayek, Buchanan, and Sowell. Those few students who seek out those ideas will have insights into the horrid policy regimes under which they will have the misfortune to live.

What about these FITs?

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Ross Douthat writes,

if called upon to name the most important thinkers since the year 2000, assessed purely for their influence, with no comment on quality, I might list (working my way backward in time) Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Jordan Peterson (14), Peter Thiel (70), Yuval Noah Harari, Steven Pinker (110), Tyler Cowen (2), Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michelle Alexander, Slavoj Žižek, Andrew Sullivan (35), Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (10), Peter Singer, Samantha Power, my colleague Thomas Friedman … at now we’re back at the turn of the millennium. Religious thinkers? Well, Dawkins and Pinker and Kendi, of course — but okay, more exactly, perhaps James Martin, Rod Dreher (104), Charles Taylor, David Bentley Hart and Tim Keller. (In another ten years I might add a post-liberal Catholic, but not yet.)

Some of these writers are impressive; some less so. Many are journalists, in practice or in spirit — an important occupation, but maybe not the ideal one for generating great works. Will many of them adorn a Great Books curriculum in 2075, if such an antiquated thing exists? I’m doubtful.

The numbers in parentheses are the numbers that they were chosen in the Fantasy Intellectual Teams draft I held on Saturday. Douthat himself was the 44th pick. Among columnists, he was picked ahead of Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, David Brooks, Paul Krugman, and Peggy Noonan, but behind Megan McArdle.

Of course, he does not use quantitative scoring criteria. His idea of “influence” probably correlates best with my “meme” category.

Admitting mistakes

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In a podcast with Russ Roberts (pick 5), Megan McArdle (pick 38) says,

I can go back and say, yeah, I can’t smooth away into memory and conveniently misremember how I felt about the Iraq war, how I felt about what we should do about the Financial Crisis, and on and on and on and on and on. And, in fact, I wrote a very embarrassing column about the Financial Crisis when the Bear Stearns collapse happened: that we just we’re involved in a garden-variety recession; don’t freak out. This is not that big a deal, we shouldn’t bail them out. Well. So, I think that that is healthy, but most people obviously don’t do that. And so, you end up in a place where most people think that they know better than they actually do, what’s going to happen in the world.

Reading this, I thought of a new FITs scoring category for a future season: admissions of past errors (A’s). But admissions of the type “I was wrong. X is even more of an idiot than I thought” would not count.

The top 150 intellectuals, selected competitively

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We held the Fantasy Intellectual Teams draft on Saturday. 10 owners competed. The owners came from the readership of this blog, and they themselves are not public figures in any way. The intellectuals they chose are shown below in the order they were selected. Because one owner arrived well after the draft had begun, the order in which teams picked was a bit mixed up.

Scoring for this season, which starts April 1 and ends June 30, is based on three categories:

(M) memes. These are phrases that are associated with a certain intellectual. For example, Black Swan is associated with Taleb (pick 31). If during the season the term Black Swan is used in at least three prominent places (well-known podcast or blog, newspaper, new book), that scores one M for Taleb. No more than one M per season for each catch-phrase. Richard Dawkins, who coined the term “meme,” was not chosen, although picking him would have guaranteed his owner at least one meme point.

(B) bets. An intellectual scores a B by expressing a belief in quantitative probabilistic terms. Oddly enough, Annie Duke, who would be credited with a meme if the phrase “Thinking in Bets” were to appear three times during the season, was not selected, either.

(S) steel-manning. The intellectual presents a point of view with which he or she disagrees in a way that someone who holds that point of view would consider to be representative. It is the opposite of straw-manning. I believe that Peter Thiel (pick 70) coined the term, or at least popularized it, and his owner is all but certain to pick up an M point. S’s are most likely to be earned by bloggers and podcasters and least likely to be earned by tweets or political speeches. They are more likely to be earned by centrists than by hard-core Red or Blue team members.

Tyler Cowen (pick 2) is a solid three-category player. He sometimes states beliefs in terms of probabilities, he tries to steel-man (although at times he can be too terse to earn a point), and he has meme candidates, such as Great Stagnation or “mood affiliation.”

Scott Alexander (pick 4) is likely to be a monster in the S and B categories.

I think that for next season I would add a category (R), for summarizing the research on two (or more) sides of a controversial issue. I would score one R for every 2 examples. I don’t want to give away an R to someone who just looks at research on a single topic during the season. Adding the (R) category would make Tyler and Scott even stronger candidates.

I will note that I thought that about a third of the picks reflected mood affiliation, and I would not have chosen them. I don’t want to pick on any owner in particular, but I’ll just say that I don’t think politicians will score points, and I will not be rooting for whoever took Oren Cass. By the end of this season, all of the picks will have track records, and those should inform owners who compete in a follow-up season.

I would caution the reader not to pay too much attention to relative ranking within this list. If there had been ten drafts, with ten different sets of owners, the average order would represent a consensus rank. But with only one iteration, the results reflect individual idiosyncrasies. In your comments, I am not interested in what picks you don’t like or what picks you think should have gone higher. I am interested in suggestions for intellectuals who seem likely to earn at least 3 points but who were not chosen.

Much as I poor-mouth my connections, I can brag by saying that in recent years I have had lunch and/or exchanged text messages with pick numbers 2, 5, 13, 32, 37, 38, 42, 95, 97, 132, and 147. I have met several others in person, but not recently. I believe that a social graph of the picks would show Tyler Cowen (2) and Marc Andreessen (97) as having the most dense connections with other picks.

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Monopoly power or minority power?

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Cameron Harwick writes,

We do not see predatory pricing, collusion, or cartelization among the tech giants. What we do see are those giants acting as vehicles for the ideological rents being sought and extracted by the specialized labor cultures they employ. Economically this counts as market power just the same, but the mode of exercise is quite different.

Pointer from Megan McArdle’s column.

He argues that tech workers are progressive, and they have power over their employers, which enables them to force employers to cater to progressive demands, including cancellation of conservatives.

But my guess is that the majority of workers in tech firms are not progressive. Instead, we are seeing what Nassim Taleb calls minority power. If a minority feels strongly about something, and the majority does not feel strongly in the opposite direction, the minority wins. For example, most people do not care if the food they buy has a “heckscher,” a symbol that the food has been deemed kosher by an authority (there are actually something like 600 different authorities). But it is easier for big food manufacturers to pay an authority to inspect themselves and provide a heckscher than it is to blow off the relatively small number of Orthodox Jews who want only kosher food.

Getting back to corporate wokeness in response to employees, I think that the problem is that the employees who are not into enforcement of extreme progressive orthodoxy are like the people who do not care about buying kosher food. They do not feel strongly enough, so that it is the intense minority that has the power.

Academic intimidation: some data

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Eric Kaufmann writes,

between a fifth and a half of academics would discriminate against the Right in grants, papers, or promotion bids. On a four-person panel, this means that the likelihood of a conservative encountering at least one biased assessor is pushing toward certainty.

The essay is a useful attempt to document the problem. Kaufmann’s solution consisting of more government intervention, strikes me as a bad idea in the current environment. The Democrats will not want to intervene, and the Republicans will only provoke backlash from the institutions if they intervene.

I look at it this way. The intimidators are anti-intellectual, and they deserve low status. Conservative intellectuals deserve higher status. Our best hope is that the we achieve cultural change that gives people the status they deserve.

Douthat vs. Macaes

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Ross Douthat writes,

So American virtualism, Maçaes might reasonably argue, has actually done a better job of mastering the coronavirus challenge than European realism. Yes, the American tendency to make war on reality can look ridiculous and embarrassing, it can produce all kinds of weird partisan myths and extreme behaviors … but it’s also connected to greater optimism and wider imaginative horizons, both of which have contributed to America’s unfinished but faster-than-expected escape from the coronavirus era.

I think this is a plausible interpretation of recent events. But that’s as far as I can go with Maçaes, because merely proving that America is less decadent than Europe doesn’t prove that we’re on the cusp of a general American renaissance. In the particular case of the Covid vaccines, yes, our war on reality cashed out in actual real-world solutions to the pandemic. But I don’t see that achievement necessarily being duplicated in other realms where virtualism holds sway. What I see instead, relative to the American past, is a consistent failure to make the leap back to reality, to apply the fantasy to the world as it exists, in a way that succeeds in leaving an undeniable alteration, a fundamental mark.

This probably qualifies as a steel-manning. But the season has not started.

Postjournalism

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Andrey Mir’s Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers would have made my list of best books of 2020 except that I only recently read it. I recommend the entire book, even though Mir’s writing is repetitive. A few quick thoughts.

When I was growing up, you needed to read the sports section to see all the box scores, you needed the financial pages to look up specific stocks, and you turned to the comics section for entertainment.

Mir points out that advertising is what really supported the newspapers. In fact, although he does not say this, it was classified advertising that really paid the bills.

In a sense, the news and opinion that came bundled with your sports, financial news and comics was included courtesy of the advertisers. Mir points out that the advertisers were better off without angry, negative, divisive news and editorial content. Journalists were free to uphold standards for objectivity, because advertisers did not mind.

Then advertising went away. And you could get your sports and financial information from specialty web sites, and newspaper comics were no longer a compelling form of entertainment. So newspapers lost their readers, and their advertisers.

Staying in business required a different revenue model, which turned out to be donation via subscription. To motivate what Mir calls donscriptions, newspapers had to take strong stands. The survivors–WaPo and NYT–succeeded at this. Their readers look to these publications to validate their world view. Objectivity becomes a luxury that the papers can no longer afford–too much objectivity and readers will cancel their donscriptions.

Mir predicts a big drop in news site activity with Mr. Trump out of the White House. Already that looks like a good call.

Organized resistance

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1. Academic Freedom Alliance. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

The AFA seeks to counteract pressures on employers to take actions against employees whose views, statements, or teachings they may disapprove or dislike. We oppose such pressures from the government, college or university officials, and individuals or groups inside or outside colleges and universities.

I clicked on “members” and it seems like a prestigious list. FITS candidates include Cowen, Pinker, Haidt. . .

2. Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. Pointer from a commenter. This one looks even better.

Increasingly, American institutions — colleges and universities, businesses, government, the media and even our children’s schools — are enforcing a cynical and intolerant orthodoxy. This orthodoxy requires us to view each other based on immutable characteristics like skin color, gender and sexual orientation. It pits us against one another, and diminishes what it means to be human.

And check out their Board of Advisors. FITS candidates include Kmele Foster, Coleman Hughes, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Pinker, Pluckrose. . .

It looks like they are ready to take the fight to the K-12 sector, where I believe it may be most needed. I think this one is worth joining.

Matt Yglesias for B’s?

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Scott Alexander writes,

The best we can hope for is people with a good win-loss record. But how do you measure win-loss record? Lots of people worked on this (especially Philip Tetlock) and we ended up with the kind of probabilistic predictions a lot of people use now.

He points to a paywalled substack post by Matt Yglesias which demonstrates thinking in bets. If that post had gone up during the Fantasy Intellectual Teams season, Yglesias would have scored a whole bunch of B’s for his owner.