If I forget to put up a link, just Google for it. Tyler Cowen had a conversation with Steven Pinker. I found two moments interesting.
1. Tyler posed a scenario in which anyone with $10,000 could afford to blow up a large part of a major city. He asked how long it would be before someone carried out such a deed. The implication is that in spite of past trends in which rates of violence are down, we should not be optimistic about the future.
Pinker objected that it might never become that inexpensive to destroy a city. He also seemed to suggest that somehow our culture might evolve so that nobody would want to do that.
Another way to treat the scenario is to say that yes, it could happen, but it could still happen in a context in which the overall rate of violence is declining. One or two such explosions would not destroy civilization. But if people believe that it is becoming commonplace, then we would be in big trouble.
The David Brin solution is the transparent society, in which surveillance is effective. Brin’s solution to the threat of tyranny is to have ordinary people able to see into and affect their government at the same time as government can identify threats of mass destruction.
2. At the end, Bryan Caplan asks Pinker if there is not a conflict between Pinker’s view of the triumph of reasons and the fact that Pinker thinks that many intelligent people are wrong on important issues. I thought that Pinker was flummoxed by this question.
First of all, Pinker recommended “naming and shaming” those who would quash free speech. I think that “naming and shaming” is itself a form of speech suppression.
I would define the problem as bad ideas becoming fashionable among intellectual elites. A big part of the problem is that there is not a good feedback mechanism between the bad ideas and their consequences. The people who proclaim their allegiance to socialism do not have to live in Venezuela. They do not even have to live in Denmark. They get to impose regulations on others’ lifestyles, while reducing regulations that might impinge on their own.
Look for the full pinker/Cowen convo release including transcript on Wednesday (2) morning.
-Jeff
One aspect I have hated about Trump’s campaign is how ‘Dark’ he is painting 2016 and glorious our past used to be. Even if you like Reagan years, that was the height of the crime wave and for minority communities it was f***** hell. And do you remember how f*** up South America used to be in 1960 -1990? And even with the diminished role of local churches and so on, Almost all social statistics are vastly better today than in 1988.
1) I think the primary reason is young people are avoiding marriage and kids until they are 30 but this is creating real structure issues.
2) And aren’t we VASTLY Exaggerating the terrorist threat? Terrorism is way down compared to 30 – 50 years.
3) There are probably a number of things that ‘experts are getting wrong. However isn’t the world better off today than any other time before 1990?
Survey’s show a majority of white Americans believe America was better off 50 years ago then today. A great deal of economic and social statistics would agree with them.
Something fundamental broke in America during the late 60s freakout and never got put together again. The fluctuations that have happened since then are small patatoes. Crime is a good example, who cares abut 1990 vs 2016. Compare 1960 vs 2016 and its awful.
Re: #2, I agree with your comments, but it seems like it’s not just a weak feedback mechanism at work, though. For example, “starchitects” can design buildings that look like trash heaps, charge millions of dollars for them, and the purchaser is stuck with it for twenty odd years or until it starts falling apart (which sometimes comes first), and yet, the purchaser doesn’t, I think, feel cheated and the architect’s reputation only improves. These people and their creations are, it seems, passing a kind of market test. A lot of modern art would fit this description, too.
It seems like human status signalling necessarily involves calling some ugly things pretty, some stupid ideas smart, some overpriced things a great value, etc.
“I would define the problem as bad ideas becoming fashionable among intellectual elites. A big part of the problem is that there is not a good feedback mechanism between the bad ideas and their consequences.”
Dr. Kling: I like this formulation.
One of the clearest examples of this phenomenon is the Washington foreign policy consensus that favors the injection of American military power into a wide range of foreign conflicts in which the US has little if anything at stake. A dispassionate review of America’s military interventions since WWII, particularly our decades-old involvement in the Middle East, provides mounds of evidence that the ideas driving the policy have been bad ones. The ideas persist despite their bad consequences, and those ideas are likely to be given new life in a Clinton administration.
Indeed–as an aside–I have long been flummoxed by your (self-described) “Jacksonian” foreign policy views, given their basic dissonance with Libertarianism–in contrast to the consistent non-interventionism argued by foreign policy scholars at Cato, for instance.
Denmark has a market economy.