1. Kling and Gurri (self-recommending).
2. In a podcast with Jeff Schechtman, Martin Gurri said,
So there’s existential meaning that people try to extract from politics in a very utopian way. I am of course one who believes that you are not going to get that from politics. That’s not what politics is about. So part of the anger is fed by the fact that I’m asking for the government to give meaning to my life, and I mean how is that going to happen?
And also this:
the internet can be seen as bringing the public and the elites into kind of an unbearable proximity, and the reaction of the public has been anger, and the reaction of the elites has been to fly as high up into the top of the pyramid to escape.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
NOTE TO KLING: Someone needs to fix the channel information in the Mercatus “The Bridge” RSS feed.
Self-recommending indeed. After being frustrated that the search in my Pocket Casts app couldn’t find the podcast, I looked at the RSS source and noticed that the title and description fields are wrong or incomplete. These fields are what podcast search engines index.
My Bad (partly). The RSS feed I was looking at was for the Blog for the podcast. The Soundcloud feed for The Bridge (Mercatus) Podcast has the correct fields but for some reason can’t be found in the Pocket Casts app/search-engine.
I don’t know if the underlying problem is with Soundcloud forcing everything through their app or some other reason. Sorry for the confusion.
Podcast apps and linking is a mess. Why we complain about Twitter but not companies like Soundcloud and Apple that practice “rent seeking via app capture” is beyond me.
I give up; the Mercatus podcast feed/system is broken. A search in the iTunes Store for “Mercatus Center” shows other podcasts like “Conversations with Tyler” but not “The Bridge”.
Sadly, RSS peaked a long time ago and many places neither know nor care how to make it work as a legacy option on the web page management dashboard tools. Lots of other places either no longer maintain it, abandoned it, never had it in the first place, cripple it (e.g., only the first few words show up), or even actively thwart it, or any attempt to access the content without opening up an app or actual web page and exposing your device to various scripts and trackers. The big tech companies divested themselves of the reader software projects long ago.
“The internet is for
porntracking.”RSS is the technology underlying podcasts, both audio and video: RSS with attachments.
A broken podcast feed is like a season of football broadcasts where no one realized the satellite truck is malfunctioning. If you can’t find a podcast in iTunes it doesn’t exist.
the 2nd podcast has a proper RSS feed but the title prevents it from being found in iTunes or Pocket Casts using the search term “who what why”. You have to use the Title in the RSS “WhoWhatWhy’s Podcasts”.
All that work making the podcasts and the market reach is miniscule because someone didn’t think through the repercussions of what they were typing in a web form and the people who should care aren’t tech literate enough to notice.
Book referenced by Martin Gurri in the closing of the talk is Why Most Things Fail (Wikipedia):
Is there a converse insight? For instance, if you are looking at a sector in which survival and success is correlated strongly with age, and the failures are concentrated in new attempts to compete, then there is probably special about how that sector really works.
For instance, compare the age of global top universities with their prestige. A confounder was that geographical limits of the reach of these institutions were once very important, and so when considering exceptions, ask whether despite its relative youth it is nevertheless “the oldest around” in its region.
Attempt #2 at a response, this is not a good day for web technology in my life.
The podcast Q&A concluded with a question about book recommendations to learn more. I know Gurri’s, Kling’s, and Yuval Levin’s books but I had to look up the fourth and I thought others here might find the link useful.
I don’t know the book’s core insight nor it’s converse. [Physical] engineering is built around failure analysis and medicine embraces Morbidity and Mortality reports/presentations. “Normal Accidents” was one of the most influential books for me. I don’t know if this one is a more modern torch bearer but careful failure analysis seems to be ignored outside of the traditional applied science fields.
“KLING: You see Trump doing the same thing, saying the Justice Department is corrupt. Whose Justice Department is this?”
This is a common misconception. The reality in the US Government is that the President is not really the CEO of the Executive Branch, and in many instances, and especially in the legal realm, nothing even close. Depending on your perspective this is either a good thing or a huge problem or a bit of both, depending on the context.
In general, “personnel is policy”, and if you don’t get to pick and control the personnel, you don’t control the policy, and in such circumstances it is perfectly legitimate and no failure to accept responsibility to complain about people you don’t control doing things you don’t like.
A classic example of this is the Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy. One doesn’t have to be a jaundiced arch-cynic to find it hard to distinguish the investigatory findings from “Ok when Democrats do it, not when Republicans do it,” (as with DACA). In this case, it was in terms of it being improper only in the way it was done openly, but had it been done secretly in the usual way – that is, by not “retaining” or “firing” anyone, but of letting everyone go, and then “rehiring” only the people you like, filling the empty spots also with people you like, like Clinton did – well, that’s would have been proper. Ok, sure.
That was before social media, but I think it had something to do with the lost of faith, trust, and confidence in institutions.
One doesn’t have to get all “deep state swamp!” about this to recognize that the failure mode of this state of affairs is that officials who oppose the President, often permanent civil servants or appointee holdovers from a previous administration, can abuse their position and authority in order to undermine his policy and even harm him personally. Everybody knows about leaks, but there are plenty of subtle, clever, and plausibly-deniable ways to cooperate with lawfare efforts, and that’s why this is often the way it’s done.
This is a great point and ultimately describes a bias we all have in ascribing intentional human agency to things that are just structural. Was Dick Cheney illegally exposing an under cover CIA operative or was he righteously responding tit-for-tat to what he perceived as Valerie Plame undermining national security for her political husband?
In corrupt societies in which officials are extremely partisan and not actually trustworthy, neutral professionals, the only question that matters is “Who decides?”
Republicans face two enormous disadvantages when the game is played that way, which is why the game is played that way.
First, most of the government employees in a position to play favorites are Democrats. And second if it goes to trial in the typical place, the finder of “””fact””” is often a jury composed of DC residents, where Clinton beat Trump 91% to 4%.
The guy’s name was Dick Armitage, not Dick Cheney. (And not Karl Rove either. Or Scooter Libby.)
Michael Novak: “Late in my hour-long interview with Armitage, I asked why the CIA had sent Wilson–lacking intelligence experience, nuclear policy or recent contact with Niger–on the African mission. He told the Washington Post last week that his answer was: ‘I don’t know, but I think his wife worked out there.'”
Again, Michael Novak: “He was a foremost internal skeptic of the administration’s war policy, and I long had opposed military intervention in Iraq. Zealous foes of George W. Bush transformed me improbably into the president’s lapdog. But they cannot fit Armitage into the left-wing fantasy of a well-crafted White House conspiracy to destroy Joe and Valerie Wilson.”
If it was legal to put Scooter Libby in prison because Dick Armitage talked to Michael Novak, I wouldn’t say it was right. I’d say it was an abuse of power, with Stephen Colbert and Katie Couric cheering it on.
Well, well, well, Spud fell in the well. I was obviously wrong, over attribution of the role of human agents with ill intent played no part. This is like some kind of fractal bias, one cannot give an example of the bias without triggering the bias itself. Or maybe, one cannot think of an example of the bias that isn’t tainted by the bias itself.
Robert Novak, not Michael Novak
Blast from the past. The original “Emailzzz.” You were one of the”lock her up”s, right?
“the internet can be seen as bringing the public and the elites into kind of an unbearable proximity, ”
—
Boy is this ever true.
You get one of these bozo Swamp politicians blundering and people like me will scorch them on our blogs for eternity. And it is effective. The bonehead discovers the internet age and actually being to think first and speak second.
I think Gurri sees the the side effects of the “Information Revolution” clearly but he misattributes these effects to a layered hierarchy with Elites at the top and the Public at the bottom.
The Eric Weinstein podcast that Kling linked to recently explained the anti-immigrant and anti-elite sentiment of Trump/Brexit supporters more convincingly, for me. Weinstein says that many people view the system/swamp as a Ponzi Scheme, a hierarchical tree structure rather than a tiered hierarchy, in which people at the top of the tree/pyramid only win if they can keep the scheme going. Trump/Credit supporters want to collapse the scheme but denying new blood at the bottom.
If you think of Kling’s TLP model as three groups with key memes that they embrace, I think the Ponzi Scheme meme is key for a fourth language/group. I have previously misinterpreted as a zero-sum meme as the key to this group.
“A growing nation is the greatest Ponzi game ever contrived,” Paul Samuelson said in 1967, “and that is a fact, not a paradox.”
“Well,” answered Paul Krugman in 1996, “the Ponzi game will soon be over, thanks to changing demographics, so that the typical recipient henceforth will get only about as much as he or she put in (and today’s young may well get less than they put in).”
You could call them defunct economists, but many people who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves to guys like that, aren’t they?