Closing your mind

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Nat Eliason writes (better link?),

Every time you laugh with your friends about “how stupid Trump voters are,” you do a few things:

You further cement the idea in your head that Trump voter = stupid.

You create greater social consequences for those around you voicing anything pro-Trump, thus encouraging greater homogenization of your social group.

You reduce your ability to reasonably engage with ideas that don’t fit your group’s narrative.

I wrote The Three Languages of Politics in part because I realized that most political statements are made for the purpose not of opening anyone’s mind but instead for the purpose of closing the minds of people on your side. Even though President Trump does not fit into my original three axes, the reaction to him is an example of this mind-closing phenomenon.

I keep thinking that I ought to write something on the topic of socialism. But I don’t want to just write something that would closes the minds of those of you who already oppose socialism. I would want to write something that would engage with and open the minds of those who support socialism.

53 thoughts on “Closing your mind”

  1. So many problems.

    1. What is “socialism in theory” vs. what is “socialism in practice.”

    2. What is “socialism in concrete reality, in its various instantiations,” vs. what is “socialism in the mind of the person you are trying to reach.”

    3. What are the most obvious defects of socialism in practice, in its various instantiations, vs. what are the (probably lesser) defects in the mind of the person you are trying to reach.

    = – = – = – =

    Think hard about your audience? Who are you writing for? Are you writing for people who know what GDP is? Are you writing for people who can tell the difference between the worldwide revenue of a corporation and the GDP of a country?

    = – = – = – =

    The more ignorant one is (both of economics and of history) the better socialism sounds. And it helps to be young–the younger and more idealistic the better.

    = – =

    A major problem in any such discussion is what we mean by socialism? Your average reader may think that socialism is what the Swedes have and communism is what the Soviets and Cambodia and Cuba had (still have, maybe in Cuba). “Put me on the policy train to Denmark, pronto!”

    Most people who advocate socialism probably want more social welfare programs and transfer payments that raise their household income–they never have thought carefully about public (collective?) ownership of the means of production.

    I hazard a guess that advocates of socialism want a strong constitutional order to secure democracy, and protection of individual rights, but higher incomes for themselves and those they deem worthy or needful of higher incomes.

  2. If I already oppose socialism, and then I read an anti-socialist piece by you that gives me new reasons to oppose socialism, have you “closed my mind”?

  3. A socialism book would be timely, and if the target is open-minded young progressives who are just going with the socially high-status flow and following some primitive human psychological impulses, then I think the approach would be of some good friend trying to talk another out of a blind and tragic love for someone who is no good for him. It would require you to be able to pass the Ideological Turing Test for why people – especially those of an intellectual bent – become charmed by the idea, something Nozick attempted with only limited success (Hayek touched on the subject as well in The Intellectuals and Socialism).

    One issue is where to draw the lines between the generally accepted notion of a welfare-state or mixed economy and ‘Socialism’. We already tax high earners a lot for the purpose of subsidy of and redistribution to the rest of the population, so why not a little more generosity? Rawls at least could say that yes, socialism can’t grow and produce wealth as well as market capitalism, but that the implication of this fact combined with the moral weight of diminishing marginal utility of wealth should only be that the tax and redistribution rate should not be minimized but merely optimized for the expected net present value of future welfare. That is, we tolerate capitalism to the extent it helps fund even more future socialism, but no more than that.

    There is also the issue of examples of historical implosions. One can point to North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, the Soviet Union, and pre-Deng China, Cambodia, and even Greece. But then someone in love with what they imagine to be ‘socialism’ will point to Scandinavia or other European countries as ‘success’ stories, and these will have to be explained away as misleading or misinterpreted or just special cases: exceptions which prove the rule.

    Fundamentally there’s no way around engaging with the ethical basis of the ideology, and demonstrating that private property and free-market capitalism is, rightly conceived, more moral than the meretricious ‘sharing and fairness’ morality of contemporary folk-socialism.

  4. The link to the Nat Eliason piece is busted: https://www.nateliason.com/social-disobedience/ Interesting synchronicity between Dr. Kling and Dr. Roberts who did an econtalk yesterday with Charlan Nemeth on her book “In Defense of Troublemakers.” To me at least, there seems to be a lot of overlap.

    As far as writing about socialism goes, it is not clear that the word means anything. Just as capitalism seems to mean whatever the user wants it to mean, so too does socialism. I’m not sure looking at broad topics like socialism or capitalism actually does much good in the abstract. How about discussing the ideal taxation system as a back door entry to approach it on neutral ground?

    On the other hand, if the Republicans lose either or both houses of congress this fall, there will be plenty of specific “socialist” bills to pick apart. We have already begun to get an inkling of what that will look like with Warren’s corporate accountability bill.

  5. I am with Matt Yglesias and Donald Trump is very smart person and seems to be a genius at three things:

    1) He is great self- Promoter and states small accomplishments very well. (In terms of NK almost too well.)
    2) he seems to limit of insults without crossing the line.
    3) He seems to which topics work well for Fox News. Unlike Romney, he promised to protect Social Security which made a difference with the right voters.

    That said some of the ‘dumb’ of Trump voters is intentional narrative to state he represents forgotten America, the WWC. (Google Salena Zito and see she is pushing the narrative too hard.) In terms of polls, he still won the the higher income Americans so he still did well with traditional conservatives as well. More likely Trump won 90%+ traditional conservative Republican voters against a weak opponent
    which gave him an inside straight electoral victory.

    And above narrative worked as all HRC were painted as: Coastal liberal elite or identity politic minorities. (I am not saying there is some truth but it was an exaggeration.)

  6. Part of the problem here is that this is precisely the reaction Trump wants to elicit from his opponents. It is a core organizing principle. He has incessantly trained his base to both expect and resent the outrage, and he knows how to manufacture that outrage on demand. If he doesn’t get enough of a dismissive reaction, he will just ratchet up the behavior until he gets it.

  10. Arnold wrote: “I would want to write something that would engage with and open the minds of those who support socialism.”

    I think it’s pretty hard for an economist, even a political economist to do that. Socialism isn’t about material well-being or the benefit of humankind. It’s about power and emotion (such as envy) and really has nothing whatsoever to do with economics.

  11. Two types of Trump laughter. The normal laughter is at him, a real estate developer meeting the Swamp and getting into hilarious situations.

    The laughter in this post is directed inward, these folks discovered the Swamp won’t solve their social ills and they are a bit angry at themselves form not figuring this out.

  13. I’d really like to read your opinion on where the current political rift stands in Mancur Olson’s “The Rise and Decline of Nations” framework. And whether socialism is the most fertile environment for “distributional coalitions” to grow unchecked.

  15. I find the OP’s and Arnold’s focus on Trump reactionaries to be unfortunate to the larger point of open mindedness. A better selling tactic would have been to offer a competing, and thus balancing anecdote of conservative closed mindedness (“Lock her up!”), or to have left it alone altogether and speak more abstractly.

    • Why exactly is it “closed minded” to think that Hillary Clinton should be locked up for the crimes she committed while in office, actions for which almost any other government employee would certainly be locked up for conducting?

      • That’s a loaded question, so I’d like to preface it with one of my own. What crimes are you talking about?
        But to give you a quick answer, I believe it is closed minded because she already has been investigated and exonerated over and over again by both the FBI and her political opponents.

        • The crimes of intentionally conspiring to mishandle highly classified information and distribute it to individuals without security clearances, and obstruction of justice by spoliation of evidence.

          You are mis-remembering what James Comey did here, which was not “exonerate” her, but the precise opposite, which was to publicly lay out the case that clearly established every single element of 18 USC 793(f), which does not have an ‘intent’ requirement, and can and does operate in cases of gross negligence.

          But then Comey just made up new law and asserted her gross negligence was not sufficient to trigger a prosecution, which came as a surprise to anyone familiar with the other cases in this field.

          Furthermore, he never substantiated a finding of negligence with any evidence or argument, because he couldn’t, because she was caught red-handed (see the IG report). Later on, when copies of the incriminating emails were found on Anthony Weiner’s computer, agents at the New York Field Office forced his hand and he had to reopen the case when it became clear that overwhelming evidence clearly satisfying his made-up intentionality standard now existed.

          The only way to avoid locking Hillary Clinton up at that point was to knowingly engage in willful blindness regarding the evidence and falsely certify that he and his team has reviewed all the emails and found no new incriminating information by means of “technical wizardry”.

          It’s now clear that he misrepresented the facts in several important ways (see https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/08/22/despite_comey_assurance_vast_bulk_of_weiner_laptop_emails_never_examined.html )

          This doesn’t even get into his failure to fulfill his duty of candor towards the FISA court when he both misrepresented and omitted certain facts he knew and was under an obligation to disclose that would bring the evidence provided as justification for special warrant into severe doubt, specifically, that is was an uncorroborated falsification paid for by the political opposition to the targets.

          James Comey merely – but completely deservedly – lost his job. But frankly, he’s also lucky he hasn’t been locked up, or at the very least disbarred.

          What used to be common knowledge among people in the know in this country is that the upper echelons of any administration, Republican or Democrat, to include top figures at the Department of Justice, FBI, and Intelligence Community, are highly politicized and often brazenly dishonest in their public statements, and that it is naive in the extreme to take their word for anything or any of their claims at face value.

          • There have always been both political appointees and career managers in the upper echelons of the federal government. The political appointees are tied to administrations, and leave when they end. The career people want to stay ACROSS DEMOCRATIC AND REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATIONS, and most do so.

            No one that wants to stay in the long term is going to go around undermining current administrations. Why would anyone blow up an opportunity for a 30 year career for a tiny role in undermining an administration that probably won’t work? Its tilting at windmills, and it will get you fired. You learn to avoid such things if you want to stay.

            The deep state meme is insane. Until Trump came along, we rightfully saw career federal employees as risk averse bureaucrats, with overly generous pensions. Now you think they are dark, mysterious secret agents looking to run a shadow government.

          • The decision to prosecute has always included intent. Think back to your military days. Remember when they told us not to put information in our letters that could be classified, but almost everyone did it accidentally anyway? They just didn’t prosecute for that. Cue in the modern era and email. Call your friends who worked in intelligence. Accidentally putting something in a personal email doesn’t get you sent to jail. If it was something pretty obvious or you had to break multiple rules, AND you did it intentionally, then you were in trouble. So, as far as I can tell, they handled Clinton just like they have everyone else in the past. Finally, it is no secret that the DOJ is the most politicized part of any admin. The very fact that Sessions has not re-opened this and prosecuted Clinton makes me pretty sure there wasn’t much to see, and there was no intent.

            Steve

          • HRC ran an off-the-books server and routed her official correspondence though it.

            That is both intent with bells and whistles (steve) and unprecedented (Tom).

            Anyone that has worked with classified documents knows the result should have been Hillary in Leavenworth.

            There is a massive difference between accidentally leaving a Confidential document on a desk during a bathroom run and intentionally routing Top Secret – NOFORN – cabinet level classified material through an unsecured mail server for years. Hand-waving that away as prosecutorial discretion is self-refuting.

      • Fence in the whole DC swamp complex, shut it down, make it a museum of corruption. The Swamp cannot be improved, it only gets worse.

      • Many top officials have had issues with retention of documents, including classified documents. Trump has been repeatedly warned to stop tearing up documents, and there are reports of current white house advisors, including his own family members using private email. Colin Powell was known to have used private email too, and was publicly quoted for his disdain of the document rules.

        Hillary Clinton was a disappointing, sometimes dismal public servant. But calling to lock up your opponent after you win and they retire is much worse than simply close minded. Until now, we have always respected a peaceful transfer of power in this country.

        Citing this kind of stuff is beneath you.

        • Tom, the real irony here is that you are demonstrating exactly what it means to be closed minded. To be closed-minded means to be unreasonably unwilling to adjust one’s beliefs and conclusions in the face of new evidence and argument. Your prior belief is that Hillary Clinton does not deserve to be locked up and it would be wrong or perhaps just violative of informal norms in our political system to call for locking her up, and therefore, people that do so are acting out of pure, stubborn malice without justification.

          But, as I laid out above, that’s not true. I’m trying to open your mind to the possibility that the proposition that “Hillary should be locked up” is legitimate, and that people who call for such an outcome has a valid case, which is, in brief, the one I explicated above.

          And in response, instead of challenging any of those claims, you just repeat your original position, and accuse me of engaging in some kind of sleazy bias, which is I think how a reasonable person would interpret “beneath you.” Open your mind, Tom.

          • Do you really think you have contributed some novel arguments here to the lock her up debate? Or that this story hasn’t been beaten to death? You got me. My mind is indeed closed on this topic.

            I did specifically challenge your claims. I cited several examples where no one is calling for an investigation, much less jail. Your claim that “almost any other government employee would certainly be locked up” is indefensible. In a city swimming in an ocean of classified info, it just doesn’t happen very often. If you were right, there would be hundreds of such cases each year.

            Can you honestly say you want Trump to face charges for destroying classified documents? Are you upset that David Petraeus didn’t have to go to jail?

  16. It’s my general thesis that the only way to actually open minds is to build new relationships. Cementing relationships is the next step, and that involves closing minds.

  17. More important than being “charitable” to people you disagree with (who are frequently fools or knaves or both), is being exacting and uncharitable in examining one’s own views. To cross examine oneself, searching your own opinions for weaknesses, logical flaws and inconsistencies. To consider whether long-supported policies are actually serving their supposed ends – and considering what those ends should be. No one likes doing this, and many purportedly serious people just won’t do it. It seems to me that progressives, libertarians, pro-free-market intellectuals and unreconstructed neoconservatives use Trump’s obvious idiocy, ignorance and knavery, and the silliness of his hardcore base, as an excuse to cease questioning themselves (if they ever did) and double-down on whatever old-time religion they believe in. This is unfortunate.

    Another point: it is more natural to be open-minded about means than about ends. Our political disputes today largely involve disagreements over ends. Very few people are equipped to debate ends coherently, and even if they were, disagreements over ends are not readily ended through ordinary political debate. Hence, an epidemic of close-mindedness.

  18. A really strong way to signal loyalty is to have no awareness of any other points of view. To actually not know, at all, what other tribes think.

    And there really are people who just can’t describe with any degree of accuracy those opinions they don’t themselves support. These people are typically academics and journalists.

    But now and then you meet people who might only be pretending not to understand an argument. They’re smart enough to have understood it, and also to understand that if they were to acknowledge that the argument exists then even that is going to get them in trouble. So they’re better off playing dumb, and insisting loudly that they are ignorant, and proudly so. “I can’t imagine” such and such. “It never occurred to me that” such and such was an idea that other people take seriously.

    These are people who boast about their ignorance as if their ignorance is itself an argument against the idea that they’ve ruled out completely and pre-emptively. Which is the safe option. It’s a strong signal against open-mindedness, and open-mindedness is what every tribe wants to shut down at the get go.

    Being smart enough to understand an alternative point of view is too smart for your own good. It’s disloyal.

    • Even in one on one situations, where there is no audience, my experience is that committed progressives will pretend not to understand an opposing point of view. For them, the sole point of the conversation is to browbeat the other person into conforming by treating the opposing view as irrational nonsense. If the progressive puts aside his own commitments just for a few minutes to consider whether the opposing view is at least, on its own terms, a coherent approach to reality, he might not have an easy, ready-made refutation of it, or he might have to acknowledge that a serious difference in philosophical/moral premises, is the basis of the disagreement.

  19. “Even though President Trump does not fit into my original three axes …” I disagree. He is on the oppressor v. oppressed axis: He sees “real Americans” as oppressed and “elites” as oppressors. Trumpism and progressivism are simply two sides of the same coin. The fourth axis (bobo v. anti-bobo) was unnecessary.

    Don’t sell the original TLP short! It is just as enlightening now as when it first came out.

  20. For those here who are discussing the whole “lock her up” thing and whether the appropriate authorities adequately investigated and cleared Clinton of any wrongdoing, or to the contrary proved inadequate, unwilling, or obstructive to that task, I submit this correspondence of Sen. Ron Johnson.
    https://www.scribd.com/document/367215707/Senator-Ron-Johnson-Letter-to-FBI-Re-Comey-July-5-Statement

    Take note of the investigation chronology described in the Senator’s letter, as well as the editing history of Comey’s memo that exonerated Clinton.
    And …”The decision to prosecute has always included intent” is simply not true. A finding of “mens rea” or intent is not always included as a necessary element in criminal statutes, and to illustrate that you’ll note that under 18 USC 793(e) intent IS a necessary element, whereas under 18 USC 793(f) it is NOT. Under the latter, a finding of gross negligence is sufficient.
    See also Andy McCarthy’s discussion, here:
    https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/military-prosecutions-show-gross-negligence-prosecution-would-not-unfairly-single-out/

    • I agree that what Clinton did was illegal.

      I agree that Comey drafting his memo in advance was unacceptable, and showed his bias towards letting this go. However, to me that is a reflection of the absurdity of the scale of the investigation, and the obviousness of the ultimate considerations.

      I agree that intent is not technically required to prosecute. So what? It is usually used to judge the seriousness of the matter, and it was appropriate here.

      ___

      We rarely put people in jail for such things. We also have an ugly, sloppy legal system, and if you pull it apart, you will see similar failures of procedure and judgement every day.

      The federal government has no idea how to handle security in the modern age. We mostly have leaders who grew up in an analog time that don’t know what they are doing and don’t understand the underlying seriousness of their actions.

      I believe there are hundreds of examples of federal employees engaging in widespread security breaches, many of them more serious than what Clinton did. I’m quite certain the current White House will be found to have done worse than this. We can only fix this through systemic improvements and consistent application of laws and procedures.

      I would have preferred if somewhat more significant censure had been given out, but this is a system wide failure, and our country doesn’t destroy our leaders over such technical and disciplinary failures. There is no way she should actually have gone to jail.

      The obsession with Clinton and these emails, when she is only visible in the rearview mirror, is a pure political manipulation, and has no benefit to the public going forward. She doesn’t matter any more.

      Take Clinton out of the picture, and the outrage disappears for these security issues. And we all know they are still there and they are still widespread.

      It is possible to drill into the actions of anyone and find failures of judgement, inconsistencies and biases. Politicians now know they can scrape up these shortcomings on demand and can assert corruption. We are all doomed if we can’t distinguish between normal human shortcomings and corruption we should act on.

      • >”she is only visible in the rearview mirror, is a pure political manipulation, and has no benefit to the public going forward”

        The benefit is to establish that ‘this is unacceptable’ as a deterrent to future intentional or unintentional misuse by other high officials.

        From what I can tell you’re arguing for one of the following alternative takeaways:

        ‘Grossly negligent/actively criminal behavior is OK so long as the system can be politicized to the point that the behavior is not materially punished by members of the same political group’

        ‘Grossly negligent/actively criminal behavior is OK so long as you can point to someone else doing something you can argue is vaguely similar’

        ‘Grossly negligent/actively criminal behavior is OK because no one can be expected to follow all the laws and rules currently on the books’

        …bear in mind, that whatever precedence you select will be used cheerfully by both sides going forward. Since those appear to be the ‘New Rules’.

  21. Over numerous interactions, it has become clear to me that being open-minded means to many folks how willing you are to accept their beliefs as truth.

  22. I have maintained for years that liberalism is spread by social enforcement, not reason. (Conservatism has a different problem.) Watch Jon Stewart – eyerolling, tones of voice – general vaudevillian expressions. Light on the reasoning (though even he is better than others at providing some actual content). It’s high school all over again, with the cool kids telling you that the jocks aren’t so great, you should listen to them instead.

    I work in a 90% liberal environment – social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, mental-health lawyers. It’s what made me side more often with the conservatives.

    • I know he would sit at a desk, and pretend to deliver news, so I know it could be confusing, but you do know Jon Stewart is a comedian, right?

      Read the comments above by a fairly well read group of mostly conservative posters. Couldn’t you just as easily apply your comments to them too?

  23. In writing something that opens minds — on both sides — may I suggest taking a page from Ronald Coase and elaborating it for the present circumstances ? Socialism is not the universla evil and markets are not the universal panacea — they are both aspects of a scaling problem — or perhaps one can analogize to a phase change in the flow of information on economic needs and capacities

    In “The Nature of the Firm” he pointed out that every firm is a little socialist entity (as is ever family for that matter. The reason being that when market transaction costs are high, it is more efficient to have an internally centralized firm with internal resources allocated on some basis other than price (command or consensus, typically). Inversely, when social remoteness gets large, the risks of trust in command or consensus erode or destroy the efficiencies of dispensing with price.

    From a Hayekian perspective, one can look at information flows as we do with water, and compare that with the intensity of information flows in the economy. Water flows in circumstances that are between freezing and vaporizing. Too little information flow or access and information flow stops and the economy freezes into relative immobility. When information flows become very high, the channelizing of information breaks down and information vaporizes into diffuse forms.

    This represents two different modes of addressing these diffused aspects of information when they reach that level of intensity. In one mode we screen or select information and decompress it by excluding some in preference to other information. This reduces the intensity of the information, “cooling” the information into a denser flowing form we can manage less energetically . This is analogous to the point about closing minds to certain points of view — it is largely an information coping strategy.

    In the other mode we both increase the intensity of information AND add close containment, which is analogous to using steam power. The market exchanges and the new advent of social media, and intensive preference tracking are all examples of this aspect. As with steam, it can create large amounts of power. But intensive information also tends to corrode the social and technical systems used to try to contain and deploy it. These erosive effects (entropy, essentially) build up until there is an either an explosive failure (1929 Crash, the 2008 financial crisis, etc.), or sometimes a systemic loss of power from ongoing and incremental, but cumulatively large, losses of information intensity somewhere (often many places) in the system (the Great Depression, for example). Often, they may combine.

    Large scale socialist failures can show the same dynamics — the Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward being examples of the collapse of systems from information losses throughout. And Nazism, Italian Fascism, the Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge being examples of the ultimately explosive kind of attempted intensive socio-economic information containment for enhanced societal power purposes.

    Anyway, some thoughts to play with: Scaling problems of trust networks, and phase changes in information flows.

  25. A compelling argument would address the distinction between different types of socialism; Sweden and the Khmer Rouge are not the same. Don’t strawman; address the strongest arguments for socialism. For example:
    – Lots of countries have had socialized medicine for decades, and many people who study such things tell us that all of those systems work better than ours. Is that a good argument for socialized medicine in the US? If not, why?
    – German industrial policy seems to work pretty well for industrial workers who aren’t doing well in the US. Is there something horribly wrong with it? Are the flaws worse, for most people, than the benefits?
    Nobody wants to become Russia. Lots of people want to become Sweden (even though it has some drawbacks). Argue against what people actually believe.

    • Socialized healthcare in Sweden operates primarily at the communal level — and not primarly according to national policy. While Sweden socializes health care funding nationally, it is budgeted and operated at a very local level by community boards and so is much more responsive to local trends and needs. This involves the operation of more discrete social factors against overuse and abuse that national operational control could not be responsive to. In a relatively homogeneous culture like Sweden (until recently) this has combined a systemically large scale of fiscal support with a local focus on small scale information flows on needs and usages. Whether it survives in a less homogeneous cultural environment is apparently an experiment that is ongoing.

      As for German workers — the downside is the early channelizing of talent into set paths by testing along known lines of talent or livelihood. I emphasize “known” because the resulting labor market is therefore not as flexible or responsive as that of the US to systemic changes in labor needs. It does not adapt as well to the new or unknown circumstance. In extreme cases, it may even treat such changes as threatening social order. See the 20th century.

      The German labor system has worked in this context of acculturation into German ideas of “Ordnung.” This reflects the broad striving for orderliness by Germans in both public and private circumstances. “Ordnung” is a kind of a priori sensibility that assists in coordination of activities across a wider scope than available direct communication would permit. Such cultural assumptions can form a foundation of more minimal information flows, and can even substitute where direct information is lacking — if, and only if, there is a reasonable correspondence at all points of the required coordination. Japan is a similar situation on this point, but with many variant factors of its own. Again, whether this survives the ongoing losses of that homogeneity remains to be seen.

      • If healthcare should be socialized at a sub-national level, as in Sweden, that’s still socialized health care. Wikipedia has a list of countries with universal health care – apparently Brazil, Canada, Mexico, the UK, Turkey, South Korea, Australia, and a bunch of other countries all have free, universal health care. It looks like the solution space for “free, universal health care that works better than the current American system” is pretty large and includes the countries most culturally similar to the US. If we assume that our system will have flaws and political compromises (like all the others) but won’t be uniquely broken*, it still looks like a good idea.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_universal_health_care

        *If you assume that Americans are uniquely incompetent, then nothing works. But we went to the moon and built the internet, so we’re probably at least as competent as (checks list) Uzbekistan.

        • “If healthcare should be socialized at a sub-national level, as in Sweden, that’s still socialized health care.”

          That kind of nominalism misses the point entirely. That’s like saying (pace Coase) that because a nuclear family is a little socialist healthcare system that a nationalized socialist healthcare system is just one big happy family. This was the Communistic delusion, which was writ especially large.

          The point is that scale matters to policy structure — like with any structure. What scale ? What structure ? There is no one-size-fits-all solution. The proposition that “the solution space for ‘free, universal health care that works better than the current American system” is pretty large ” is utterly unsupported. Every such system is closely bound to its culture and surrounding policy structures. In Coasean terms, they define the external transaction cost constraints that set the boundaries of workable scales. Whether they work or not there is no guarantee or even meaningful suggestion that they’ll work here in different context.

          Homogeneity of culture (like Sweden or Japan) limits transactions costs, and allows larger scales of operational trust that lower such costs. Cultural commitment to an even deeper sense of social order, like the German “Ordnung” sensibility probably allows that extended social system to go even further.

          There is nothing like this in the far larger, far more diverse (in every sense) United States. To say that we could do it if were more like Germans or the Japanese is a simple fantasy wand-waving and nothing less. We aren’t; we’re not going to be; and moreover on the remarkably awful downsides of those particular cultural conditions, again: See the 20th Century.

      • As far as your comments about the German labor system go, I understand and agree. On the other hand, I wasn’t suggesting that we should try to act exactly like Germany. I really, really wasn’t suggesting that – most Germans I’ve met seemed to be having a smugness contest. But that’s based on a small sample (n=4), so it may be a coincidence.

        My point is that Germany (and China, and South Korea) can make industrial policy that works pretty well. It can be done. Many Americans think that attempting to do it here is at least worth considering.

        Also, remember that the alternative isn’t “everything works wonderfully”. The alternative is “our present system where many people take on $40,000 in non-dischargeable college debt and ultimately wind up in minimum-wage jobs anyway continues on its current, unsustainable trajectory”. I’m sure there are other alternatives; feel free to suggest one.

        • The reason why markets work is that they explore precisely the range of workable alternatives with the resources available. No one can come up with a system as efficient as all of us can. They are inelegant, messy and ultimately efficient because they impose the costs of inefficiency at the lowest discrete scales.

          As for education, and especially educational finance from pre-K to post graduate — there is hardly a market to be found. It is a great festering welter of cross-subsidies, state-capitalism, corporatism and cronyism of the worst kinds, and a greater hive of scum and villainy you will never find (to borrow a phrase).

          How to “fix” that politically is lost cause because all the “fixing ” corrupted any hope of systemic efficiency. The best hope is to manage a granular manner of cascading failures and let some kind of market incrementally take over in the clear spaces between. Until then it is a complete mess

          • Markets work well when consumers are well-informed about their needs and the services being offered. In general, those conditions are not met for schoolchildren and many parents, so I wouldn’t expect markets to be an effective solution here. I would expect fraud to be rampant, and that accords with the actual experience of for-profit charter schools.

            Markets work well under some circumstances; but if the necessary preconditions are not (tolerably) met, they predictably fail.

          • @Jay: “Markets work well when consumers are well-informed about their needs and the services being offered.”

            That kind of granularly distributed knowledge is NOT actually a precondition for market efficiency. In fact, markets function to make local ignorance of broader systemic conditions less of a factor by making that information implicit in the priced alternatives — driven by the evolutionary selection of consumers in that market who DO know those things.
            Independent systems of trust and validation arise to cover trust problems that are harder to monetize. This is seen wherever people have to make decisions with resources THEY control and where they have a choice between that use and other competing uses for those resources. Services arise that people pay for to validate the services that are in the market. Concierge value is worth paying for and people do so all the time in various forms — be Consumer Reports, AAA, car reviewers, you name it.

            Markets tame information into manageable elements of of quality/feature versus price. Markets discover the present (and future) valuation of alternative resources and uses — the key bit of information that NO ONE in the market knows individually. It is a form of information that emerges only collectively — and only freely — where our choices make that distributed knowledge known.

            No government system can know it either unless it allows those choices to be made. By foreclosing them, that key information is completely lost and the system flies blind to the ever-changing status of competing resources and needs.

          • So it seems that the key question is whether parents collectively have enough information about schools to make good decisions under realistic constraints of available information, school marketing (fake information that confuses the signal), average parent ability, and lag times in feedback. The best available information that I can think of is the data from school choice initiatives now existing, and the data indicates that school choice is not helpful (a bit harmful on balance, really).

            https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/05/01/why-would-school-choice-improve-outcomes/

  26. Those currently promoting socialism take a static view of wealth: look we have so much wealth (like a bag of coins) it just needs to be redistributed better. They do not see where the wealth came from, that Fred got rich because he found a new way to do something that lowered the cost and people wanted it because it made their lives better. They don’t see that many “rich” people own a plumbing business or several gas stations, not CEOs, and they got rich by working their ass off. When you punitively tax them the economy stagnates quickly because they have no profit to grow their business and hire more people.
    It is also ironic that the same people who hate capitalism act in their own life like capitalists. Did you buy a house? You used capital that other people had put in savings and that you got by shopping banks for the best rate. Do you have a retirement account? It is invested in the stock market which makes you a part owner of lots of businesses. And they look for the best buy when shopping and try to get promoted at work. etc. But they refuse to see it.

  27. Political disagreements aren’t usually about facts; they’re about priorities. Nobody likes taxation and regulation, but only people who think those are the most important problems become libertarians. Nobody likes rape, but hardcore feminists base their entire worldview on opposing rape in all its forms, and everybody else considers it just another crime. If people aren’t listening to your case, it’s most likely because your case offers a solution to problems other than the ones that they care about.

    Rule of thumb: If you engage with people of other political persuasions, you will probably hear objections that don’t seem factually wrong, but don’t seem important. If you hear these objections frequently, then it’s likely that your audience sees the objections as more important than the point you’re trying to make. Adjust your pitch accordingly.

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