7 thoughts on “Notes from the Institutional Irrationality seminar”
I was hoping for that Handle-Levin debate, but alas, due to scheduling conflicts, it was not to be. Heh, probably for the best.
He said that if he were to write the book today, he would put more emphasis on the need for better institutional performance in order to restore trust in institutions. He noted that a reader of his book, and especially a reader of Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge, might come away with the mistaken impression that the institutions were working fine but for the mistrust that has emerged.
They would come away with that mistaken impression because that’s the one which Levin’s writing clearly conveyed. It’s the most frequent point which appears in my notes on his book, and why I maintain that the most charitable read of it – whether or not it’s what Levin actually intended – is a Straussian one about the need for the GOPe to shut up the Trumps of the world and prevent something like that from ever happening again.
Now, one can’t blame him for this because, after all, it’s pretty incoherent to say simultaneously that institutions ought to really reassert their formative role and function in molding and influencing their members to maintain high standards of personal character and conduct, while at the same time complaining that, boy, it really seems like many of our key institutions and/or the leadership thereof have become quite corrupt, politicized, spineless, and even fundamentally incompetent at their purported primary missions.
But, if they can’t be relied upon to be good at anything else, then why in the world should we trust them to be good at personal formation and salutary disciplining of members along those lines?
Indeed, a book that says that many institutions have stopped being good at forming people and also at doing a lot of other very important things points to a need to redo one’s diagnosis to discover what is obviously a much deeper and more fundamental problem than personal brand-building rogue elephants who are only out for themselves.
You put the irony of calling for trust in institutions that are *both* negligent in their duty *and* incompetent in their mission this way: “If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs! If we had eggs.” We have neither ham nor eggs.
Actually, such an exercise is even worse for the thesis of the book. Look over the past 18 months of the complaints about the FDA and CDC and other “our regulatory state is failing us” posts that one can read at Marginal Revolution. As an example, the rest of the world had a variety of good, cheap, rapid tests a long time ago. America – almost uniquely – failed on every dimension.
Now, sure, there are some prominent personalities involved, but it turns out their role in these failures was minimal and negligible. By and large, when you try to follow the trail and track down the root causes of all those MR complaints you end up with completely faceless and anonymous bureaucrats who have no personal brand and make zero effort to build one and who are, it would seem, nearly completely insulated from public opinion (or even awareness) and nearly so from political pressure. You are talking about people who, to the extent they have been influenced, have indeed been almost entirely formed in the usual way by the institutions associated with their profession and and position.
The book advises us to not take a “burn them down and start over” approach, but now Levin seems to place a lot of hope in new institutions and to see old ones like academia as almost hopelessly degenerated without much reasonably likelihood of regeneration.
That seems to imply that the big question in not whether to trust or distrust institutions in general, but how to tell when one should indeed distrust and give up on most old, failing institutions, and discern when to give new ones at least a fair shot to gradually earn one’s trust, and being open-minded to the idea of fairly radical overhaul of the elements of the whole structural framework that got us to this sorry spot.
Related and worth reading is Handle’s comment from yesterday, November 5, 2021 at 11:13 am .
Excellent comment. Perhaps a short, albeit somewhat obscure, rephrase would be “Do the times call for an Erasmus or a Luther?”
I too regret I was unable to participate in the zoom. One wonders what Levin’s take, and for that matter Kling’s as well, would be on the Virginia parents asserting a role in their children’s schooling. Somehow I suspect that they are horrified by the dirty rabble trying to fly the plane, a job fit only for experts. But who knows? I suspect that the legacy GOP won’t hesitate to throw the newly elected Republicans under the bus at the first opportunity.
“Levin says that we are going through a period of fragmentation and decentralization.”
This is hard to square with “average is over” trends in centralization and the dominance of Big Prestigious Winners across many domains. I don’t know how Levin defined ‘decentralization’ or ‘fragmentation’, but the usual meanings of those terms simply does not fit with out observations.
Consider: We are told that in the post-war era there were all different kinds of elites and the various different kinds of groups with different origins, interests, and personalities generated a genuine variety and diversity of perspectives, which in turn discouraged constant obnoxious injections into matters of political controversy because one had to worry about all those sources of disagreement and opposition.
We are also told that various mechanisms – but most importantly the role of the top universities – have almost entirely leveled this terrain and that all the formerly differing kinds of elites have converged towards confident consensus on many issues. Social Media companies are tending to increasingly restrict the range of what can be said without penalty. How is that ‘fragmentation and decentralization’ and not ‘conformity and unification’? E.g., “Woke Capitalism”.
So, these claims simply don’t make sense together unless one is going to start playing word games and adding subtle deviations from the ordinary semantic meaning of terms.
Now, maybe one could use ‘fragmentation’ in the class-based sense of Charles Murray, that is, “Coming Apart”, but those class-based disparities now look the same all over, no matter where you go, and so represent yet another source of uniformity in lived experience. What sense does all the political effort going into ‘YIMBY’ and against zoning restrictions make if the essence of the problem is that we are continuing to hyper-urbanize and centralize on a few Big Winner Cities? Because, after all, there is plenty of cheap, empty, lightly-regulated land out there. But that same phenomenon is happening all over the world.
So, all the elites – and to greater extent the younger they are – tend to believe and say the same things, live in a few key places, and attend a few key universities which all teach the same things, read the same few media sources, worship at the same altar of the ‘woke religion’ and so forth. If anything, the kind of complaint you are likely to find in the various non-progressive camps is that there isn’t *enough* competition, fragmentation, variety, etc. and that the problem precisely is contending with a phenomenon that is repeatedly able to use the influence deriving from its control of the most prestigious institutions to coordinate a monolithic front of simultaneous policy and action from its decentralized elements.
Levin made exactly this point about consolidation of elites. What he meant by fragmentation is that people (including both elites and non-elites) do not have shared experiences and outlooks. We no longer have mass media, major religion, or even unified political parties
Yes, I mentioned he made that observation about elites. But my point precisely was that this is inconsistent with also claiming that there is decentralization and fragmentation. Elites do indeed now have those “shared experiences and outlooks”, whereas that wasn’t as true in the past.
“We no longer have mass media, major religion, or even unified political parties.”
On the contrary, we absolutely do. We all share a clear social status hierarchy and are influenced by powerful means of mass communication to know without a doubt what the people at the top of that hierarchy believe, how to affiliate with and show loyalty to them, and how to make oneself their target for penalty. It’s like the sun to which faces the head of every sunflower.
Yes, that doesn’t quite resemble the particular organized and hierarchical forms that were common a few generations ago, but this does not at all negate the fact that those institutions have been replaced by substitutes which fulfill the same harmonizing social role and function.
After all, one must ask, how did all those elites *get* so consolidated in the first place?
It does no good to say “the universities”, or “journalism” which merely raises the question of how they and the elites that run them got to be so uniform as well.
Consider two observations you have made recently, that (1) progressivism and wokeness is like a religion in a lot of ways (something the right has pointed out about ‘secular’ leftist politics for generations), and (2) modern digital communications tech and social media means people can practice a religion together without having to congregate at the same time and place to do so.
Actually, not having a particular time and place makes things even worse, because now there is no break or sense of division between the sacred and mundane, and one practices (i.e., collectively participates in) one’s all-encompassing political-religion 24/7, anywhere and everywhere, regarding everyone and everything.
As to “unified political parties” – I have argued before that a lot of the polarization talk tends to understate divisions in the past (e.g., “Days of Rage”) and overstate divisions today. The ideological tension and disarray in the GOP is not characteristic of the Democratic party where the arguments about any radical progressive proposal centers on questions of expediency, not principle.
You make a good point about the seeming contradiction between his claims about the consolidation of elites and simultaneous fragmentation, but I think the distinction is between the old system and the new ones coming about through the internet. Why do you think the elites are consolidating so much if not to fight off the barbarians at the gate?
Why did Disney acquire Pixar, Marvel, LucasFilm, Fox, and so on, if not to fight off the barbarian horde on youtube? Now, you and Levin might not acknowledge these youtube creators or part-time Uber drivers because they are not “elites,” but the fact is they are destroying the existing system from without. A complete political neophyte used the internet to win the Presidency with his first political campaign, despite being almost universally derided by your so-called “elites!”
“At some point these industries stabilize and people band together and form industry associations, lobbying groups, the MPAA and things like that and then they start exerting serious political power. The problem in tech is by the time you get these companies to the point where they fully accept the nature of the challenge and they are run by the kind of people who understand all this stuff, they’re no longer relevant. It’s some new set of people and some new set of companies where all the issues are. And those people again are the super iconoclastic disagreeable types who don’t want to work together and don’t want to do the traditional thing.”
While current Big Tech has grown more massive than any prior tech companies, I don’t see that tech churn settling down, and our current Big Tech is already in decline.
In other words, the current consolidation of the old elite is best understood as a last gasp to preserve their old system, before it is destroyed by new decentralized systems that are now coming together online.
I was hoping for that Handle-Levin debate, but alas, due to scheduling conflicts, it was not to be. Heh, probably for the best.
They would come away with that mistaken impression because that’s the one which Levin’s writing clearly conveyed. It’s the most frequent point which appears in my notes on his book, and why I maintain that the most charitable read of it – whether or not it’s what Levin actually intended – is a Straussian one about the need for the GOPe to shut up the Trumps of the world and prevent something like that from ever happening again.
Now, one can’t blame him for this because, after all, it’s pretty incoherent to say simultaneously that institutions ought to really reassert their formative role and function in molding and influencing their members to maintain high standards of personal character and conduct, while at the same time complaining that, boy, it really seems like many of our key institutions and/or the leadership thereof have become quite corrupt, politicized, spineless, and even fundamentally incompetent at their purported primary missions.
But, if they can’t be relied upon to be good at anything else, then why in the world should we trust them to be good at personal formation and salutary disciplining of members along those lines?
Indeed, a book that says that many institutions have stopped being good at forming people and also at doing a lot of other very important things points to a need to redo one’s diagnosis to discover what is obviously a much deeper and more fundamental problem than personal brand-building rogue elephants who are only out for themselves.
You put the irony of calling for trust in institutions that are *both* negligent in their duty *and* incompetent in their mission this way: “If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs! If we had eggs.” We have neither ham nor eggs.
Actually, such an exercise is even worse for the thesis of the book. Look over the past 18 months of the complaints about the FDA and CDC and other “our regulatory state is failing us” posts that one can read at Marginal Revolution. As an example, the rest of the world had a variety of good, cheap, rapid tests a long time ago. America – almost uniquely – failed on every dimension.
Now, sure, there are some prominent personalities involved, but it turns out their role in these failures was minimal and negligible. By and large, when you try to follow the trail and track down the root causes of all those MR complaints you end up with completely faceless and anonymous bureaucrats who have no personal brand and make zero effort to build one and who are, it would seem, nearly completely insulated from public opinion (or even awareness) and nearly so from political pressure. You are talking about people who, to the extent they have been influenced, have indeed been almost entirely formed in the usual way by the institutions associated with their profession and and position.
The book advises us to not take a “burn them down and start over” approach, but now Levin seems to place a lot of hope in new institutions and to see old ones like academia as almost hopelessly degenerated without much reasonably likelihood of regeneration.
That seems to imply that the big question in not whether to trust or distrust institutions in general, but how to tell when one should indeed distrust and give up on most old, failing institutions, and discern when to give new ones at least a fair shot to gradually earn one’s trust, and being open-minded to the idea of fairly radical overhaul of the elements of the whole structural framework that got us to this sorry spot.
Related and worth reading is Handle’s comment from yesterday, November 5, 2021 at 11:13 am .
Excellent comment. Perhaps a short, albeit somewhat obscure, rephrase would be “Do the times call for an Erasmus or a Luther?”
I too regret I was unable to participate in the zoom. One wonders what Levin’s take, and for that matter Kling’s as well, would be on the Virginia parents asserting a role in their children’s schooling. Somehow I suspect that they are horrified by the dirty rabble trying to fly the plane, a job fit only for experts. But who knows? I suspect that the legacy GOP won’t hesitate to throw the newly elected Republicans under the bus at the first opportunity.
“Levin says that we are going through a period of fragmentation and decentralization.”
This is hard to square with “average is over” trends in centralization and the dominance of Big Prestigious Winners across many domains. I don’t know how Levin defined ‘decentralization’ or ‘fragmentation’, but the usual meanings of those terms simply does not fit with out observations.
Consider: We are told that in the post-war era there were all different kinds of elites and the various different kinds of groups with different origins, interests, and personalities generated a genuine variety and diversity of perspectives, which in turn discouraged constant obnoxious injections into matters of political controversy because one had to worry about all those sources of disagreement and opposition.
We are also told that various mechanisms – but most importantly the role of the top universities – have almost entirely leveled this terrain and that all the formerly differing kinds of elites have converged towards confident consensus on many issues. Social Media companies are tending to increasingly restrict the range of what can be said without penalty. How is that ‘fragmentation and decentralization’ and not ‘conformity and unification’? E.g., “Woke Capitalism”.
So, these claims simply don’t make sense together unless one is going to start playing word games and adding subtle deviations from the ordinary semantic meaning of terms.
Now, maybe one could use ‘fragmentation’ in the class-based sense of Charles Murray, that is, “Coming Apart”, but those class-based disparities now look the same all over, no matter where you go, and so represent yet another source of uniformity in lived experience. What sense does all the political effort going into ‘YIMBY’ and against zoning restrictions make if the essence of the problem is that we are continuing to hyper-urbanize and centralize on a few Big Winner Cities? Because, after all, there is plenty of cheap, empty, lightly-regulated land out there. But that same phenomenon is happening all over the world.
So, all the elites – and to greater extent the younger they are – tend to believe and say the same things, live in a few key places, and attend a few key universities which all teach the same things, read the same few media sources, worship at the same altar of the ‘woke religion’ and so forth. If anything, the kind of complaint you are likely to find in the various non-progressive camps is that there isn’t *enough* competition, fragmentation, variety, etc. and that the problem precisely is contending with a phenomenon that is repeatedly able to use the influence deriving from its control of the most prestigious institutions to coordinate a monolithic front of simultaneous policy and action from its decentralized elements.
Levin made exactly this point about consolidation of elites. What he meant by fragmentation is that people (including both elites and non-elites) do not have shared experiences and outlooks. We no longer have mass media, major religion, or even unified political parties
Yes, I mentioned he made that observation about elites. But my point precisely was that this is inconsistent with also claiming that there is decentralization and fragmentation. Elites do indeed now have those “shared experiences and outlooks”, whereas that wasn’t as true in the past.
“We no longer have mass media, major religion, or even unified political parties.”
On the contrary, we absolutely do. We all share a clear social status hierarchy and are influenced by powerful means of mass communication to know without a doubt what the people at the top of that hierarchy believe, how to affiliate with and show loyalty to them, and how to make oneself their target for penalty. It’s like the sun to which faces the head of every sunflower.
Yes, that doesn’t quite resemble the particular organized and hierarchical forms that were common a few generations ago, but this does not at all negate the fact that those institutions have been replaced by substitutes which fulfill the same harmonizing social role and function.
After all, one must ask, how did all those elites *get* so consolidated in the first place?
It does no good to say “the universities”, or “journalism” which merely raises the question of how they and the elites that run them got to be so uniform as well.
Consider two observations you have made recently, that (1) progressivism and wokeness is like a religion in a lot of ways (something the right has pointed out about ‘secular’ leftist politics for generations), and (2) modern digital communications tech and social media means people can practice a religion together without having to congregate at the same time and place to do so.
Actually, not having a particular time and place makes things even worse, because now there is no break or sense of division between the sacred and mundane, and one practices (i.e., collectively participates in) one’s all-encompassing political-religion 24/7, anywhere and everywhere, regarding everyone and everything.
As to “unified political parties” – I have argued before that a lot of the polarization talk tends to understate divisions in the past (e.g., “Days of Rage”) and overstate divisions today. The ideological tension and disarray in the GOP is not characteristic of the Democratic party where the arguments about any radical progressive proposal centers on questions of expediency, not principle.
You make a good point about the seeming contradiction between his claims about the consolidation of elites and simultaneous fragmentation, but I think the distinction is between the old system and the new ones coming about through the internet. Why do you think the elites are consolidating so much if not to fight off the barbarians at the gate?
Why did Disney acquire Pixar, Marvel, LucasFilm, Fox, and so on, if not to fight off the barbarian horde on youtube? Now, you and Levin might not acknowledge these youtube creators or part-time Uber drivers because they are not “elites,” but the fact is they are destroying the existing system from without. A complete political neophyte used the internet to win the Presidency with his first political campaign, despite being almost universally derided by your so-called “elites!”
Of course, the old elites are trying to take over or pressure any new ones who rise up- consider all the pressure being placed on Facebook’s Zuckerberg by the ridiculous “whistleblower” Haugen, clearly a tool of the old elites- and there has certainly been a consolidation of Big Tech, but neither can last. The VC Andreesen notes that he’s given up trying to build a tech lobby, because every decade it’s a new set of hard-headed, contrarian elites with power in tech:
“At some point these industries stabilize and people band together and form industry associations, lobbying groups, the MPAA and things like that and then they start exerting serious political power. The problem in tech is by the time you get these companies to the point where they fully accept the nature of the challenge and they are run by the kind of people who understand all this stuff, they’re no longer relevant. It’s some new set of people and some new set of companies where all the issues are. And those people again are the super iconoclastic disagreeable types who don’t want to work together and don’t want to do the traditional thing.”
While current Big Tech has grown more massive than any prior tech companies, I don’t see that tech churn settling down, and our current Big Tech is already in decline.
In other words, the current consolidation of the old elite is best understood as a last gasp to preserve their old system, before it is destroyed by new decentralized systems that are now coming together online.