A reader requested this. He asked whether I arrived at my views rapidly or in stages. He wanted to know about my economic views, but I decided to include my political views as well.
Short answer: very gradually, in stages that are not easy to demarcate.
Let’s start with my parents. Both were secular Jews, and both were unusually highly educated. My father obtained a Ph.D in political science from Washington University in 1949. My mother obtained a BA in journalism from the University of Missouri in the early 1940s.
Although he was devoutly non-religious, my father was bitter about what the Nazis did to Jews and very alert to anti-semitism. He gratefully supported Franklin Roosevelt, seeing Roosevelt’s main opposition coming not from the Republican Party but from Father Coughlin, a populist with a wide following and a vaguely socialist ideology who became a Nazi sympathizer in the late 1930s.
My father’s sister also had outstanding aptitude as a student, but she ended up committing her life to the Communist Party. She married a machinist who was a Communist union agitator, and not even the revelations of the 1950s could dissuade them. Communist ideology was a good fit for her overbearing, self-righteous temperament. My father and she did not get along.
Even so, my aunt introduced my father to one of her female Communist friends, a woman with a very different temperament who eventually became his wife. By the time they were married, he had talked her out of Communism. But in 1956 she was brought before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.
When I was growing up, my mother and some of her friends were in the League of Women Voters, which is pretty far from the Communist Party. The political figure that my parents admired the most when I was growing up was Adlai Stevenson. The one they hated the most was Richard Nixon, who while in Congress has been a leader of the anti-Communist crusade that had threatened to imprison my mother.
Many liberals in the early 1960s romanticized President Kennedy, but my parents did not feel strongly about him either way. The Kennedy Administration was interested in Latin America and in stopping Communism there. My father had done relevant research and the Kennedy foreign policy team was fond of academics, so I think that my father might have been able to obtain research grants from the national security apparatus and even a mid-level position in the government had he wanted. But I think that he was naive when these sorts of opportunities were vaguely dangled in front of him, and he also lacked the sense of entitlement that and understanding of how to play that game that a WASP in that era would have possessed. I draw an analogy with the way that many years later I failed to appreciate it when I had started my Internet business and a banker hinted that he wanted to make an investment. I did not know how the game worked and I also lacked self-assurance, so I failed to pursue the offer.
Long story short, as I was growing up, my parents were liberal Democrats, but without anything like the passion that you see in liberal Democrats today, or that some other liberal Democrats had back then.
The first political stand I can remember taking was in 1965, around my eleventh birthday. My father was in Princeton on a sabbatical, and I was in 6th grade there. To promote racial integration, the school district collected all of the area’s 6th graders into the same school, dividing us up into many classes. That Spring, the entire 6th grade participated in a model Organization of the American States, and by chance I was placed in the delegation representing the Dominican Republic. This country was in the process of being invaded by the United States, in order to avert a Communist coup.
I cannot remember why, but with my encouragement our delegation took a strong stand against the invasion. We cited the OAS charter. We expressed resentment at U.S. intervention in our affairs. Our position was poorly received by my fellow 6th-graders, whose instincts were to be patriotic in support of America, regardless of which nation they were supposed to represent in the exercise.
1965 was the year that President Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam and that opposition to that war began to build. I felt drawn to the anti-war viewpoint, although again I do not remember why. There were plenty of reasons for someone to be against the Vietnam War–I just don’t recall which ones I held at the time.
By 1968, I was a 14-year-old volunteer for the anti-war candidacy of Eugene McCarthy. I went with a group to hand out flyers in the Pruitt-Igoe projects. There was hardly anyone there to receive a flyer. More pleasant was a rally held at a stadium (I remember it being Busch Stadium, but that seems unlikely) at which I wore a home-made button that said “Gene’s machine.” I weighed less than 100 pounds at that time, and I looked several years younger than my age. Grown-ups at the rally smiled fondly at me and my button.
In November of 1969, many of my high school classmates and I participated in the “Vietnam moratorium,” a one-day nationwide protest. In 1970 and 1971 a smaller group of us attended events at Washington University. I remember our being scoffed at by one of the campus radicals there for wanting to “work within the system.”
When I left home for Swarthmore College in 1971, I was expecting to deepen my left-wing political thinking. Swarthmore has always been a bastion of left-wing radicalism, but that had nothing to do with my decision to go there. What attracted me was that it had been co-ed since its founding. There were relatively few co-ed colleges at the time, and at an all-male college one only would encounter women at weekend parties with a lot of noise and drinking. I feared that would put me at a huge disadvantage.
Ironically, Swarthmore was where I began my odyssey toward the right. Several factors were involved. One was that the radical students were, if anything, less intelligent and less persuasive than my high school crowd.
Another was that one of the most charismatic radical figures around the campus was Lyn Marcus, leader of something called the National Caucus of Labor Committees, a Trotskyite group. I heard him speak a couple of times, and he was very erudite. I could not follow what he said, and it soon occurred to me and others that his group was a cult. He would eventually change his name to Lyndon LaRouche, dropping the Communist theories for what many describe as right-wing ideas. One can argue that his ideas are hard to place on any rational spectrum (I have not read this book). Anyway, here was a left-wing group that was a disappointment to me.
Another factor was reading The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam. Although Halberstam was unsparing in his criticism of the American involvement in Vietnam and the anti-Communist framework he regarded as behind that involvement, I came away from the book with a less anti-American view than I held prior to reading it. I saw our intervention as less of an evil and more of a tragic mistake.
Most important in affecting my outlook were my economics courses. Any economics course will move you away from total reliance on the intention heuristic, which says that morality just comes down to intentions. Instead, you see a complex system in which different outcomes come not so much from different intentions as from different incentives.
I ended up taking most of my econ courses with Bernie Saffran, whose views were sometimes progressive, sometimes conservative, and sometimes libertarian. Mostly, he was open-minded, very intelligent, and a great teacher. He praised Milton Friedman, saying that Friedman and Samuelson taught the same price theory, but Friedman took it more seriously in formulating policy views.
Probably the main factor in changing my outlook at Swarthmore was where I fell socially. I was a straight rather than a hippie. In high school, hippies and straights were friends, and some people were a little of both. At Swarthmore for some reason, that was not the case. The hippies were really out there, and the straights were really naive–one of my friends later aptly came up with the expression “Swarthmore virgin types.” The bright-line divide concerned use of drugs. The students who smoked pot did so a lot. And then you had those that never tried it. I was in the latter category.
Even the straights tended to be on the left, but they were not so noisy about it. And some of the straights were even even conservative. I was still on the left, but I felt a slight pull in the other direction.
In short, I left Swarthmore in 1975 still on the left, but “set up” to potentially change.
I spent 1975-1976 as a research assistant, first at the Congressional Budget Office and then at the Fed. That year also helped “set me up” to change in that I saw close up the gap between the pristine theory of economic policy found in textbooks and the practical shortcomings of the processes of modeling/forecasting and political decision-making.
In 1976, I was sufficiently motivated to begin graduate school in economics, at MIT. The years 1976-1980 were the height of the “macro wars,” in which MIT and its allied departments fought against Chicago and its allied departments over issues of macroeconomic theory. I identified really strongly with “our” team. We were Keynesian/interventionist and they were monetarist/anti-interventionist. Thus, “our” team was very left on economic matters and “their” team was very conservative on economic matters. But “their” team included some people who were on the left on social issues.
To a large extent, the MIT approach to economics rubbed me the wrong way. I never liked the mathematical masturbation that was extolled as economic modeling. I could not have articulated an alternative, but I sensed that the way that we were being trained was misguided.
In 1980, my wife and I were vacationing in Israel when President Carter ordered and then aborted a mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran. This failure brought American international prestige to its lowest point of my lifetime. We had already been humiliated in Vietnam. Our economy had been exposed as vulnerable to the Arab oil embargo. The Iranian revolutionaries had captured and was holding officials from our embassy. And now there was this bungled rescue attempt.
What struck me was how demoralizing this was for Israelis. It made me realize that American weakness could affect other people, even if Americans still felt safe. I wanted America to be respected in the world. I was fed up with Carter, who I viewed as ineffectual. I was happy when Ronald Reagan defeated him, although I don’t think I would have described myself as a conservative or as a Republican.
I was mostly just obnoxiously contrarian (haven’t changed, have I?). I voted against the incumbent in 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984(!), 1988 (I count Bush as the incumbent, and I voted for Dukakis), 1992, and 1996 (so against Clinton, having voted for him four years earlier). By 1996 I really disliked the Democrats on health care (the Hillary Clinton/Ira Magaziner plan seemed truly awful). But in 2000 I voted for Gore. On the other hand, when he challenged the election results, I thought that was so unseemly that I would have voted against him if they had held another election in December.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I worked at Freddie Mac. A real-world business was nothing like the models I learned about in economics. From the inside, the biggest organizational challenge appeared to be achieving co-ordination in the face of interdepartmental conflict. Working in business played an important role in helping me to appreciate the importance of radical uncertainty and intangible factors that are too often assumed away in mainstream economics. I think that every economist should be required to work at least a year in business, rather then try to do economics with no real-world experience whatsoever.
In 1994, I was one of the first people to try to start a business on the World Wide Web. Around 1995, I was invited to be a guest speaker by someone who taught an evening course, possibly as an adjunct, in the GMU economics department. I can’t remember his name, but he struck me as eccentric and really deeply into the World Wide Web. At that time, hardly anyone was into the Web, which is why my business floundered at first. He invited me to lunch with colleagues, who asked me what I knew about Austrian economics. I knew nothing about it, other than what Paul Samuelson had taught (correctly as it turns out) about Bohm-Bawerk’s capital theory. This contact with GMU and Austrian economics made no impression on me.
By 2000, I no longer had an Internet business. I was on to the next phase of my career, of book-writing, teaching, and blogging. I guess at that point I was of no particular stripe politically.
The September 11, 2001 attacks pushed me toward conservatism. I was reading blogs like Instapundit and Asymmetric Information.
I was writing my own home-made blog, Great Questions of Economics. Soon, Russ Roberts, who I did not know personally, approached me about having the blog hosted by the library of economics and liberty, which I had never heard of. I jumped at the chance to be able to use professional blogging software. That became EconLog. Through this connection with the library of economics and liberty, I gradually became acquainted with some libertarians and with libertarian ideas.
In around 2003, I also started writing for TechCentralStation, known as TCSdaily. My TCS essays on economics were mostly mainstream, with somewhat of a free-market bent. I collected some of them in Learning Economics, which I self-published. But when I wrote on the intersection between economics and the Internet, I saw that mainstream economics did not cover intangible factors well. TCS editor Nick Schulz and I eventually wrote a book about that.
On TCS I wrote several pieces on the health care issue, and I saw it as an area where the benefits of government intervention were over-rated. I think these essays interested Cato, leading them to invite me to write the book Crisis of Abundance.
When Russ Roberts moved from Washington U. to GMU, I got to know him personally. I also got to know some of the other GMU libertarians, like Bryan Caplan, Don Boudreaux, and Tyler Cowen. I gradually became more acquainted with Austrian economics and with libertarian ideas. Until that point, I don’t think I would have described myself as libertarian.
Overall, my journey away from the left and away from mainstream economics as partly intellectual, partly emotional. Politically, my emotions were triggered by finding myself on the straight side of the hippie-straight divide at Swarthmore, finding myself in Israel as the U.S. experienced humiliation in Iran, and seeing the 9-11 attacks as an indication of some violent tendencies in the Islamic world.
As far as economics is concerned, one emotional factor is that being around a group of professors never thrilled me. Most academics are happy in their bubble in a way that I could not be. I was much more stimulated by the people I encountered in business, both at Freddie Mac and in my own venture. Along those lines, I note that Tyler Cowen in his “conversations” and Russ Roberts in “econtalk” have increasingly stepped outside of economics and even academia altogether in selecting guests.
Back when I was in graduate school, I resented the emphasis on mathematical technique and models. I wanted to be an academic economist, but that would have required undertaking analysis by starting with a piece of paper and writing down equations. I much prefer going about it the way I do now, trying to come at it from a broad perspective that includes anthropology, psychology, sociology, history, political science, and business experience.
In hindsight, my intellectual style is to be cross-disciplinary. But for a young economist, the most viable career path seems to be the opposite: write papers that demonstrate your ability to use a narrow set of tools. One might call it sub-disciplinary. The evolutionary pressures tend to select against those with my approach.
Obviously, I have not stuck with the same world view my whole life. That keeps my from wanting to place a large intellectual bet on my political views. I have somewhat more confidence in my skepticism toward mainstream economics. I suspect that there is very little in my book Specialization and Trade that I will ever wish to revise or retract.
Thank your for writing this. I find it very fascinating and admirable when people change their attitudes and convictions change over time. There is just so much to learn in life that one can’t possibly keep the same position without ossifying.
Personally I started out quite left leaning and socialist. But I soon realized that most reasons for being a socialist or left-leaning person are after all very personal and psychological. I say that because for me therapy and also some economics classes put me on the path to broadly speaking individualism.
Appreciate the grand tour, and would frankly wish for even more depth and discussion of the major ideas that influenced you along the way, along with those you feel yourself to have promulgated. Thanks very much.
Yes, thank you for this post. Very interesting indeed. Would also be interested to hear more about your time with homefair.com.
I’ve been reading you since your TCS days, identifying early on with your cross-disciplinary attitude, the one element seemingly always present and increasingly conceptualized in your thinking as you relate in your intellectual odyssey from left to right. I, too, grew up in the ’60s, but never felt aligned spiritually or politically with the war protesters of the day, most of whom came across to me as shallow and conformist, propelled more by youthful romanticism than independent and serious thought. I started as a liberal arts student precisely because I not only wanted to know a little bit about everything but because I sensed one could never capture all the variables that come into play in decision-making. This approach gravitated me toward economics, and its applied form, marketing, precisely because these disciplines were cross-disciplinary. I taught these subjects for a while but left academia for the same reasons you elucidate and soon founded my own entrepreneurial venture, in effect deciding to practice what I had been preaching. This is all by way of giving you some insight into one of your long-time followers (Do bloggers, like editors and writers, ever get enough feedback?). Your latest post also offers an opportunity to thank you for many years of appreciative reading.
Any economics course will move you away from total reliance on the intention heuristic, which says that morality just comes down to intentions.
With any luck, basic philosophy courses should do the same.
Wonderful story, Arnold! Thanks for sharing.
“ In hindsight, my intellectual style is to be cross-disciplinary. But for a young economist, the most viable career path seems to be the opposite: write papers that demonstrate your ability to use a narrow set of tools. One might call it sub-disciplinary. The evolutionary pressures tend to select against those with my approach.”
Would you caution young economists against your career path?
This isn’t specific to Economics. Most (all?) of IT suffers from the same problem.
Let me be the lone wolf of support of specialization, at least at the beginning of a career. Specialization, especially but not limited to economics, requires the practitioner to delve deep, very deep, to be recognized within whatever niche she’s opporating in. Only in these bowels do you acquire a deep sense of the nuances and underlying assumptions behind the theory let alone the practical limiting reality of the data and the incentive structures affecting both.
Luckily for us readers of blogs like Arnold’s and John Cochrane’s Grump Economist or listeners to podcasts like Tyler’s or Russ’s, narrow practicioners can emerge as generalist with these deeply embedded appreciation for cross-application of ideas like incentives and unintended consequences and price equilibriums (the latter, IMO, is where the math comes in).
Great post, I loved it and learned from it. I had assumed you were a libertarian since Swarthmore days.
That said, “mathematical masturbation” is perhaps an overly judgmental term for a blog with the motto “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree”.
Most interesting.
But I must ask, are you also opposed to statistical techniques in empirical economics?
The most irritating thing I found with “Austrian” economics (which I encountered from other grad students but not faculty at UCLA) was a rejection of the use of data and statistics, which made Austrian economics more of a philosophy than a science. I have found that students exclusively educated in Austrian economics have a hard time finding jobs in the real world. They are like those in Critical Legal Studies but without the fashionable politics.
On the day of the Vietnam Moratorium we had debates in most of my classes. Our Geometry teacher complimented the quality of the arguments on both sides of the debate. That was only one day. During High School we had many an argument about Vietnam, abortion, civil rights, you name it. I never lost a friend nor did I ever incur the wrath of the administration over anything anyone said.
The day after St. Patrick’s day the Italians in school organized St. Luigi’s day. We all dressed up like mobsters and many carried plastic tommy guns around. The teachers and the principal just laughed.
I can’t imagine anything like this going on in today’s world. If you tried to debate pronoun use you’d be expelled. St. Luigi’s day would no doubt result in a SWAT raid.
I enjoyed this. I would have liked to have heard more about how you think you came to your “Null Hypothesis” views on certain questions.
Very much enjoyed this essay. Identified w/ a fair amount of it. Fr. Charles Coughlin’s name just came up in conversation the other day (I’m Catholic). Remarkable that he’s not better known in history.
Was the first, I think, to leverage radio and cultivate a cult-like following.
Thanks for writing this.
Echoing some of the others here, I too assumed you were libertarian / right-leaning from early on, so it was great to see your evolution over time and some of the influences you’ve identified.
At age 36 I have gone through an somewhat similar transition from left to center on many issues – and at various times have written up some of the personal, professional and intellectual reasons for this.
I wonder if others or Arnold might comment on the speed of change of what the ‘left’ and ‘right’ represent in past years in comparison with the time frame that Arnold lays out. It seems to me that the change in the what the left/right stood for remained fairly stable or shifted slowly between say 1960 and 2000, versus 2000 to today. However, perhaps I am off the mark in saying that?
Wording it differently, it seems to me in describing my shifting views from 2000-present, I would need to be constantly referencing the change in the left/right at the same time in order to make the journey intelligible.
Cheers
Joe
Public Choice is notably absent. Did that have any impact on your thinking at some point? I recall an interview with George Will where he was asked what made him a libertarian. His answer was simply “Public Choice”.
Very interesting and nice to understand how one has grown intellectually. I for one reject the divide of Left vs. Right, Conservative vs. Liberal and instead look to emphasize what does plain old common sense suggest, taking in to account basic principles that have are time tested.
Nice post. So how do you process economic and other data?
“The order proper to a city is being well-manned; to a body, beauty; to a soul, wisdom; to a deed, excellence; and to a discourse, truth–and the opposites of these are disorder. And the praiseworthy man and woman and discourse and work and city-state and deed one must honor with praise, while one must assign blame to the unworthy–for it is equal error and ignorance to blame the praiseworthy and to praise the blameworthy.”
-Gorgias
Congratulations on a praiseworthy story.
Great post. I started veering rightward (well, libertarianward) in/after college as well. I over-esteemed ‘liberal intelligentsia’ up until I encountered in reality and was underwhelmed.
Regarding math and econ: would I be correct in speculating that you probably don’t think there are any big practical implications of the Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu theorem, and the (theoretical) failure of general equilibrium theory? Most market-oriented economists seem to think it doesn’t matter much. Some other economists seem to think that the case for markets hinges critically on the existence of unique general equilibrium solutions. I think the former are right but have a nagging feeling that I can’t ‘prove’ it.
Quite an interesting biographical sketch, Arnold. I’ve been following your career since our days at the Fed, and have always found your path and output to be fascinating. We’ve had many parallel experiences in terms of training and real world experiences, including in private sector business, but somehow wound up in different places philosophically, especially regarding economics. Perhaps because I’ve stuck with a career in investments, I’ve found empirical analysis to be more of an asset than you might let on. (Very briefly, every investment decision requires models and forecasts about future events, whether implicitly or explicitly.)
One other parallel in our paths is that training in economics has tilted my place on the political spectrum toward the right. I still think of myself as progressive, at least in terms of objectives if not means, but I suspect today’s “progressives” and Dems would consider me to the right of the Democratic Party. I often say I’d be a libertarian if I thought it could work in a practical setting. Similar to Friedman’s using the model of perfect competition as the basis of policy prescriptions, I find the pure individualism of libertarianism to be impractical, for example, when institutional and market failures, the commons (social goods), and behavioral economics come into play.
It would be fine to hear more from you, Matt, and any comments you have on Arnold’s posts.
academic economists tend to miss it when they build their “models,” particularly of the GDP factory.
I think that Arnold is more against macro folk trying to model US GDP as if it is a factory – I, too, believe it’s a mistake expect a US “GDP factory” model to be very useful.
For any investment decision, models and forecasts are important, and when used well, should guide the decision. A good model will make explicit the uncertainty of most (all???) of the key assumed future values, like revenue, which will determine the return on investment.
The excellent value of such models for specific investment decision making under uncertainty, doesn’t necessarily carry up into making a good model of the whole economy.
Thank you for writing this. I deeply respect a candid, self-effacing contemplation of one’s major influences. This reads as someone who has done a respectable amount of introspection and paradigm actualization.
I enjoyed the history of your parents and your early years, as it paints a myopic, yet sincere history of how a young eager mind can be swayed by the time and place they live in. For my part, I anticipate if I ever write a similar synopsis, I will too write that the contemporary themes and environment I live in have shaped my perception of economic theory.
What I find most interesting – and perhaps this wasn’t the point of this post – is why you find economics useful. You have lived through tumultuous times, both politically and economically. One of the reasons I stopped following your blog is because my paradigm differs from yours: I feel as though economics(at its broadest sense) ought to be directed toward human elements. Does the current administration’s economic forces promote, or inhibit, economic growth. Secondarily, and perhaps more importantly, does it advance growth based on American ideals: meritocracy, risk, hard-work etc.
If these are ideals which should not realize the benefits of economic growth, which ideals are more appropriate? You eschew mathematical analysis for its own sake according to your post, but from the posts I followed for quite some time, it appears that economics holds value only to the extent that it can defeat “radical leftists”. I have no doubt you are committed to your craft, I look rather to the young Kling who bent and bowed according to new ideas of his time, to teach the next generation what it means to be an economist.
This is great; I followed you a few years later at Swarthmore (and only took the Micro Seminar from Bernie Saffran) and then headed to Chicago so we ended up in similar places though my route was a bit quicker.
I would like to hear more about your time at Freddie Mac. I owned stock in it for a number of years until 2001 and followed it some after that. The story is well known: it got too aggressive in taking on interest rate risk by retaining MBS, had more trouble managing that risk and eventually crashed and burned. Implicit government guarantee made it an excellent business for a long time. I would think you would be appalled by Freddie.
I thought it was wrong to take on interest rate risk. But the surprising thing is that what killed Freddie and Fannie was credit risk. I blame the regime change that was engineered by Freddie’s board See this essay and read the book if you are interested.
Note that there is an important typographical error in that essay. The paragraph beginning “He sent an email directly. . .” should be indented. It is a quote from the book, and the email went to the book’s author, not to me.
Thanks so much for writing this, Arnold. You should think about writing a short autobiography.
Your note about erudite Lyn Marcus, who becomes Lyndon LaRouche, is quite relevant because some Slovak Christian intellectuals were interested in him in the 90s, soon after the Velvet Revolution. They didn’t believe me when I called him a quack (haven’t read his book, either.)
I agree with you that the way we fought the Vietnam war, and left and allowed the commies to take over, was tragic. I now support pushing for market economies as a much higher priority than “democracy”. China’s growth, and recently Vietnam’s, is based on their markets working towards more effective Specialization and Trade. Even without political freedom.
Your memories of childhood and your parents seem very genuine and healthy. You don’t mention Boy Scouts, so I guess that wasn’t for you, or at most not important. For me, with a problematic drinking father, Boy Scouts was great.
I’ve been very happy to follow you, off & on a bit depending on my own job reqs, since your Tech Central Station days, as well as you and your two co-authors at EconLog. (With David sometimes commenting here, too.)
Your econ book, Specialization and Trade, is fantastic. It should be required additional reading for all econ majors, especially those doing deep econometrics.
From MR, about the overwhelming complexity of specialization and trade: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/specialization-and-trade-a-re-introduction-to-economics.html
academic economists tend to miss it when they build their “models,” particularly of the GDP factory. … (Tyler quoting Arnold)
My story is roughly parallel to yours, but it takes more twists and turns. Go here https://politicsandprosperity.com/about/ and scroll to “Beliefs” under “Temperament, Intelligence, and Beliefs”.
Arnold: I very much enjoyed your autobiography here.
I wonder if the GMU (or GMU-connected) economist whose name you can’t recall is Ed Dolan? Ed was never a member of our full-time faculty at GMU, but – at least during my first stint at GMU, starting in the mid-1980s, Ed was a popular adjunct. And he had some celebrity as a result of his editing the 1974 volume, Foundations of Austrian Economics.
Don