For the first hour, it reminds me of conversations I occasionally had at home as a teenager, in which I would climb onto an intellectual ledge and my father would try to gently talk me down. Here, Tyler plays the role of my father.
At one hour and six minutes, Tyler himself climbs onto a ledge. In talking about the stagnation that began in 1973, he speaks of the “feminization” of our society.
One possibility is that he was thinking, “Our society reduced its rate of risk-taking and novelty-seeking. Women tend to like risk-taking and novelty-seeking less than men. Therefore, it is fair to speak of feminization.”
The first two statements are controversial, but suppose that they are true. The conclusion still does not follow. We need some link that connects the premises to the conclusion at the level of society. Did women, starting around 1973, acquire significant power to direct corporate investment and/or the regulatory apparatus? Or did men in these positions lose their, er, manhood around this time? I don’t think that’s a ledge you want to stand on.
Another interpretation of “feminization” works much better but is somewhat less interesting. That is, we can say that because of the decline of manufacturing and the rise of the New Commanding Heights industries of education and health care, employment opportunities for women improved while those for men worsened. At the same time, widening the door for women to enroll in universities was like opening up professional sports to African-Americans in that the formerly-excluded were able to compete effectively and some of the formerly-protected were left worse off.
This latter interpretation allows “feminization” to explain why earnings of the median working-age male have shown at best disappointing growth over the past 35 years. But it does not work as a broad sociological explanation for other phenomena, such as a slowdown in scientific discovery or an apparent decline in the productivity of civil engineering.
About 15 minutes later in the podcast, Eric tries to interest Tyler in a comparison of mainstream and heterodox thinkers. Tyler will have none of it. He says that we are the last generation that will understand the distinction. His view appears to be that institutional brand names, such as “New York Times” or “Harvard Economics Department” will not impress the Internet generation.
So where does that lead? What becomes of what Eric would call society’s “sense-making apparatus”? One scary scenario is that it doesn’t get any better than it is today, so that the loss of the information Leviathans with which we grew up will lead to a sort of Hobbesian “war of all against all.” A more optimistic scenario would be a “cream rises” outcome in which to attain broad credibility you have to rise to a very high level of intellectual rigor. Think of Scott Alexander as an example.
“Loss of manhood” is a provocative way to put it, but levels of machismo and general encouragement of traditional masculine virtues can indeed vary a lot over time in the same society, and, if you tried to compare them side by side, I think the real ledge one would be standing on would be to claim that , that there *hasn’t* been an obvious reduction in these archetypal characteristics in the past few generations. Whether ones views this as progress or degeneration is debatable and another matter, but the fact that it happened is not, in my opinion, reasonably debatable.
As a comparison, military analysts such as Edward Luttwak complain about and warn against ‘bureaucratization’ (for instance, in his 1968 book, Coup d’Etat) and the emergence of ‘bureaucratic mindset’ in the general staff and officer corps in general, and of the patterns of corporate interaction brought about by the incentives individuals face in less risk-tolerant organizations
Historically, such bureaucratization has happened to militaries through space and time, and so it is always a cultural condition one should watch out for and try to prevent or repair. Now, it would be rhetorically provocative when observing such changes to claim that the soldiers had lost their ‘warrior ethos’ or something like that, but it would also be accurate.
Now, one might try to be more PC-Orwellian and academically clinical in terminology and just say “more risk averse” or something, but such efforts hurt effective communication more than they help. It takes the hot blood out of our language, turning a solid phrase into squishy euphemisms via ‘exsanguinary deflation’, which, amusingly is both literally and metaphorically a form of feminization.
You mean, like the military bureaucracy suddenly finding four trillion in hard assets threatened by cheap UAVs, made defunct?
No the bureaucratitis is not doing much about those obsolete assets and living in “let’s pretend” world while still getting paid for decades.
Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma, head of armed forces. Go see the guy, explain to him that the Texas Space Cadets was the dumbest, most obvious political off in decades; a true money loser.
@Handle
It would be interesting to muse on what happens when a society seems to do one thing really well, and so begins to conceive of all others things in reference to that, and attempt to order them on the same lines.
That’s vague, but the concrete example would be that the USA is quite good at business (all quibbles and criticisms aside, taken the sweep of world history, I don’t think any other culture has ever been so good at business).
The unavoidable result seems to be people asking, “What if we ran X like a business?” with the enthymeme that “like a business is a good thing.”
1. What if we ran the government like a business?
2. What if ran the Church like a business?
3. What if ran the charity like a business?
And so forth.
I think success is more frightening than failure for some of those (particularly #2), and sadly we are succeeding.
stagnation that began in 1973
It really like Tyler is going male identity politics here and should a helluva a lot better.
How about 1973 was the year of the first Oil Embargo which led to the 1974 Recession that sent unemployment to 9.4%? (I consider the Oil Embargo crisis a Black Swan event here.)
1) I view the US generally has economic Up and Down cycles and the 1974 Recession was the start of 8 year recessionary years (1974 – 82) in which we saw the end of the manufacturer based economy. The post WW2 were good years with lots of growth and incomes going up for all classes but it depended on cheap oil, strong dollar, and working class wages increasing.
2) Other evidence the post WW2 economy:
2a) The high point of manufacturing jobs was Spring 1980.
2b) Real wages for non-managerial workers fell from 1974 – 1994 and only has had modest increases.
2c) This 1974 -82 was the Japanese Inc. manufacturing model.
3) How about labor supply growth would be high points in the 1970s? Or how about new business growth after 1955 saw it’s highpoint in 1978? (Also the 1960s had terrible new business growth if you look at the data the lowest any decade in WW2.)
The Post WW2 had a society and economy that was good to working class men and it seems the economy has moved since 1974.
Re: last two paragraphs on loss of information leviathan
There are many avenues to social sense making and fragmentation is not the enemy. Reading the post I was reminded of a recent Chatham House piece on “Dutchification”: https://www.chathamhouse.org/expert/comment/don-t-be-afraid-political-fragmentation#
It demonstrates that the allegedly cosmopolitan should be a lot more pluralist if they want to distinguish themselves from the “populists” who allegedly are intolerant of differences. The folks labeled populists are overwhelmingly independent voters untied to any ideology except perhaps the desire for pragmatic results.
That a leading voice of cosmopolitan supremacy is perplexed because the hicks in the sticks refuse to conform to their assigned labels expectations says a lot about cosmopolitans. Stop trying to impose expectations on political independents and offer substantive pragmatic policies and you will be left with a lot fewer questions.
Apologies for for the tangent semi-related to the question of the timing of important social changes.
Gurri and Haidt point to social media as ‘the big new change’ that makes it a candidate for causal explanation for other recent changes.
A general counterargument for which there are several distinct varieties is merely to point to other alternative candidates that are big recent changes.
One of those could be fiscal “chickens coming home to roost” / “sow the wind, reap the whirlwind” combined with aging of baby boomers whose kids are of lower than hoped-for numbers and levels of productivity.
Lots of very generous pension promises, not enough money to pay for everything, so “service-delivery insolvency,” and/or more taxes, pension cuts, etc … lots of pain to be allocated and no one wants to be the one holding the bag, so political actions to go begger someone else instead.
So, this is in part a time of squeezing and looming belt-tightening stretching into the foreseeable future, and anxiety about who gets stuck with the bill.
Governments are stuck with little option but making no-win moves that are highly unpopular, leading to widespread and prolonged tensions.
That certainly is a lot of the explanation for the strikes in France right now–and the yellow vests before that.
But in America I get the feeling that very few people think anything will come home to roost because they don’t realize there are any chickens out there. They really think that there’s plenty of money around to do all the things that they think are necessary to live the life they expect to be accustomed to. In other words, nothing is looming because there’s enough for everyone, now and in the future.
I do not know of a single politician warning about anything looming. Well, except for “climate change”, which is also the only looming I hear from the respectable media.
Good point about France, and perhaps the case is that they are simply farther along the fiscal squeeze curve (or, more evocative, deeper along the spiral down the drain) for this particular problem, with tensions exacerbated by a greater degree of public dependence on the public fisc, more severe demographic imbalance, and the fact that the state can’t use extra inflation and devaluation to help adjust past promises to current realities, because of the Euro.
In a way, we might finally be seeing the manifestation of some of nasty consequences predicted by “starve the beast” theories of fiscal imprudence.
The theory is that in a social democracy there is no hope of ‘self control’ without the discipline being forced upon the system by countervailing forces, that is, no way for prudence (always unpopular) to win the day politically when there is still any possibility of more, popular imprudence.
Thus, largesse and political clientalism will always expand until it hits some hard wall (with the “starve the beast” suggesstion that, since this is the case, one might as well immanentize that eschaton before too many new programs get invented and implemented, because history proves they are always irreversible as a practica matter.)
That is, there is a kind of “Political Laffer Curve” in which politicians and technocrats are simply stuck in a such a bind that they can’t promise or deliver any more without counterproductive consequences, and that being in this bind is the only thing that enables any of them to stand up to public pressure and political resistance.
The trouble is that the level of public dissatisfaction, anxiety, and unrest once one gets to that point is likely to both be very high, and to stay at that high level, because there’s nothing to be done about it which won’t make things even worse. “Have a nice day.”
The US economy doesn’t look like it’s capable of delivering expansion surprises to the upside anymore. In that world, people focus on the zero-sum politics and attempt to grow their slice of the pie at the cost of a neighbor’s.
Blumenthal explains why:
This is the weakest capital spending cycle of all time in biggest boom in corporate bond issuance of all time. So where has the money gone? Two words: financial engineering (i.e., stock buybacks).
That explains why earnings per share has been inflated and that is the biggest reason why we’ve had this ongoing powerful bull market in equities in the context of the weakest overall economic recovery of all time.
It’s one thing to say you’ve had $4 trillion in corporate bond issuance to finance capital expenditure, you could say we are then going to have a productivity cycle that will lead to some internally generated rate of return that will then go to cover debt servicing costs. That hasn’t happened.
You’ve got this symbiotic relationship where you’ve got this massive corporate bond issuance financing stock buybacks.
It’s what I call smoke and mirrors
Regarding 1973, wasn’t that the beginning of modern container shipping growth at scale (and it’s reduction on demand for US manufacturing labor)? ..
https://www.freightos.com/the-history-of-the-shipping-container/
http://www.worldshipping.org/about-the-industry/liner-ships/container-ship-design
Thanks for those links. They’re quite useful to me, though on a matter unrelated to the Cowen/Weinstein conversation, which just begs for, you know, a Straussian reading. (Or whatever)
“A more optimistic scenario would be a “cream rises” outcome in which to attain broad credibility you have to rise to a very high level of intellectual rigor. Think of Scott Alexander as an example.”
I find that on any subject that I know well, Scott Alexander spouts fashionable rubbish. This isn’t just quibbling with your example, it undermines your scenario. This isn’t cream rising, it’s just another “all” against “all”.
What information and communication technologies have done is to demolish the idea of “cream”. They were all posers in the past and are unmasked now. A cult may assemble around a personality, but that is not an indication of merit.
At SSC, it’s put up or shut up. You don’t get to make unsupported assertions and be taken seriously, which is probably why you’re not there. And if you’re right, they’ll update.
[this blog discourages personal attacks among commenters–ed.]
So predictable that there’s no mention of the term PATENT in a discussion of tech. Apropos of something, around 1970 the laws were written in the US with an anti-patent stance (anti-trade, anti-monopoly) and with the rise of disco and the tail end of the hippie culture we got wage stagnation and a decline of hard industries and innovation, coincidence? Probably. But patents should be mentioned nevertheless.
Economists should stick to micro.
In our dreams, baby, in our dreams…
But as long as there is a political macro, economics will follow. It would be interesting, though, to hear their individual answers to this question: “Do you think you, with or without a team of your choice, could plan the economy better than the free market?”
A more interesting question would be, “If you could head the government and have sufficient power, how do you think you could improve the economy?”
I suspect most economists (micro- and macro-) would have a very long list. Dierdre McCloskey has written some scathing stuff about economists’ hubris.
Regarding the apparent stagnation, I wonder if there is a clue from a recent EconTalk episode.
https://www.idiosyncraticwhisk.com/2019/12/the-divergence-in-incomes-and-in.html?m=0
The writer Lawrence Durrell, lived and worked in Paris during the interwar years. Said WWI took the lives of 1.5 million Frenchmen and the manhood of France as a whole.