An excellent podcast with Russ Roberts. One excerpt:
When you deprive people of the chance and the necessity of acting heroically and generously for other people, you deprive them of a fundamental part of what it means to be human, what it means to have a meaningful life; and a fundamental way of feeling content and happy in your life.
All sorts of interesting thoughts in the conversation. I may be tempted to annotate it.
In general, we can see Russ expanding into more non-economic topics. I think this may be right.
When Russ and I were students, professors taught us to defend capitalism as an economic system. The neoclassical model of factor rewards was a defense of the distributional aspects of capitalism. Macroeconomics was a claim that economic downturns, rather than reflecting ever-deepening systemic crises, could be managed and contained.
What we are seeing now is a much broader assault on our entire social system and its values. Does liberal democracy suffer from a spiritual void which new ideologies are trying to fill?
Straight economics does not seem sufficient to answer the contemporary progressive left. The Intellectual Dark Web is where we are groping for better approaches.
Separation of church and state is great provides one still has a church – or temple.
However if there’s just a state, it will subsume the role of church.
>What we are seeing now is a much broader assault on our entire social system and its values. Does liberal democracy suffer from a spiritual void which new ideologies are trying to fill?
What does this mean? An assault by the left against cultural institutions? I don’t see liberal democracy going away anytime soon in spite of Trump and occasional protests Europe.
There is a quote stuck in my head, perhaps from Charles Murray, along the lines of this:
“You occupy a valuable place in society if you would be missed in your absence.”
This sounds like a low bar in some ways–it doesn’t mean being irreplaceable, but just being needed or noticed when you show up at work, or after you get out of bed, or when you are sending out emails and Christmas cards, or smiling at someone and brightening his day.
I am often uncomfortable quoting Charles Murray, since people with a knee-jerk hatred of the _The Bell Curve_ think he is toxic. He’s either a Burke or a Burke manque, in constrast to David Brooks who to my mind is a Burke manque. The word is manqué, if the diacritics work.
Another quote that comes to mind is this. “If you want to know how happy someone is, don’t ask them about their bank account. Ask them to count their friends.”
That’s garbled, but you get the point. The quote may be canonical and crystalized, but probably not.
I agree with his statement and another related statement.
When you deprive people of the opportunity to be grateful, you are
depriving them of a fundamental part of what it means to be human, what it means to have a meaningful life; and a fundamental way of feeling content and happy in your life.
Also, when you deprive people of an opportunity to contribute by making a meaningful change in the local community…
Another quote paraphrase: “The class war is over. Rich people won.”
I think Trumpism is a reaction to this fact. Attacks on trade. Attacks on the (((Fed))). Attacks on China. Immigrants. Shareholders.
What is the great outrage today? AOC proposing a 70% marginal tax rate on incomes over $10,000,000. Ten million! I saw a photo of Dwight Eisenhower someone dredged up for the occasion. Those were the days. Is this really so radical? Look at the polls. Of Republicans!!
So what assault? Who is assaulting? What values? I think some of us are fighting the last war. That war has already been won. The new war…I think you would be surprised at who is on what side.
Voters regret makes momentum toward elitist rule. In the USA we hear that his is a democracy and we vote improperly, and we sometimes believe it. We are not a democracy, but a republic. Europe has given up much proportional democracy in favor of Euro bureaucrats. The we get France where the working class cannot seem to get any feedback from their vote.
The democratic system works because the individual vote is proportional to its effect and happens close to simultaneous. The flow of government goods is less volatile, we would not have entire generations stuck with a huge debt bill they never voted for. Like France, the vote is long past, the debt long overdue, and current voters robbed of their democracy of their vote in the matter. Result? Debt repudiation, it can be no other way.
Janan Ganesh: “Rich democracies may have to live with a caucus of permanently aggrieved voters amounting to a quarter or a third of the whole.”
So he can live with that. (He’s a columnist for the Financial Times.)
Plus: “A seething minority is still a minority.” Even when it’s 52%, like Brexit? When 71% of the French have “no confidence” in Macron?
Capitalism is not an economic system. It is a legal system -property rights and contract law. Who may own property and what they may do with it are decisions made by law that determine what sort of capitalism you get. Communism is just capitalism with all property rights transferred to the state and all production run as a huge conglomerate.
The inherent calculation problem of conglomerates is felt by General Electric just as it is by Lenin, Inc. The distinctive feature of what we call wealthy states is pluralism, not capitalism.
Better approaches in terms of arguments and rhetoric? I’m not optimistic.
One can imagine persuasion as a kind of “optimization subject to constraints” problem. The big constraint is “discourse in the shadow of the guillotine”, with constraints like the edge of the Overton window, and which means that there are too many things one cannot say without becoming completely radioactive, and which leads to no critical mass of individuals with very high social status – which is critical to soft influence – lending their prestige to those claims.
If the constraints are severe enough, and backed up by sufficiently robust social consequences, then one may simply have to accept that there simply is no possible acceptable solution to one’s problem in the curtailed space of options.
If one comes to this conclusion, then that leads to an unfortunate “Discourse Is Over” judgment about the future of how politics gets done in our society from now on, which is by means of domination via exercise of hard power instead of persuasion via exercise of soft power when arguments had at least some hope of mattering.
This is part of the political transition taking place all across the developed world as the implementation of the implications of progressive morality and ideology starts to run into increasingly unpleasant and dysfunctional territory, and once again threaten society’s main engines of material prosperity and technological progress.
Unless you can convince the progressives that it’s possible for them to go too far with their ideology and morality, to absurd and insane lengths, and that there are higher, transcending values to which they must adhere in order to defend against this prospect, the prospect of productive argumentation is truly hopeless.
When voice is no longer possibly effective as a means of opposition, then people give up on talking and turn to institutional and structural political tactics to defend their positions against further undesirable encroachment. My view is that the development of new institutions which accomplish this is what whatever is left of the smart non-progressive opposition had better be concentrating all their intellectual firepower on, and what they ought to be spending their reputational capital on, and in the short term, if there is to be any hope whatsoever.
Answering the progressive left is about figuring government programs on a coherent vs incoherent axis. This is strictly economics, or mostly logistics.
We can determine what federal programs work in California and Montana, we can observe that Montana does not have a huge intermediate state level education organization. So, both left and right can rule out certain federal education programs that assume a large intermediate role, and in the possibilities remaining, find a funding solution fair to both big and large states. We kind of did this with social security, made the payment system a coherent factor of the distribution so it doe not effect intermediate volatility. We did not do this for either Obamacare nor No Child left Behind; and we should have known better, left or right. Both left and right should have noticed, right away, especially in California; that we would get a decade of volatility as the program is adjusted back to coherency between large and small. We all has the recent experience of NCLB in our heads, at the time. Left or right.
Let me pollute the blog with another example, healthcare. We want federal government to deliver efficient subsidies, and we consider medicine a fungible market. What does the medicine of every town in America have in common? Emergency ambulance and emergency medical; probably the most uniform thing about medicine. Just fund that at the federal level, directly, federal employees. It seems weird, where is all the medical morality voters want to buy? It is not there, just a mechanical choice for subsidies that avoid problem number one, scale. It works, peddle the morality tales elsewhere.
I will credit your good intentions, but I think you’re wrong. (a) I’ve a good impression of Montana universities, but to be candid, they’re not the equivalent in size or quality of UCLA or UC Berkeley, let along the non-state schools like Stanford and Cal-tech. (b) California schools are required to provide at least some instruction in the native language for students who do not speak English or are learning that language. At last count, Los Angeles public schools were teaching students in 99 different languages. This is probably not the case in Montana. (c) Many California schools stay open several hours after classes end as a refuge for kids who would otherwise be on their own because their parents are working. Granted, this isn’t exactly an educational issue.
What I’m trying to suggest is that California and Montana are different places with different issues, and that simply cutting out everything in the California education system that doesn’t have a counterpart in Montana would not be a Good Thing. It isn’t strictly economics.
When AGDP inflation, which none of these technology prophets wants to talk about, falls out of the equation, the argument that “we need technical progress to spur growth” turns into… simply the hedonic treadmill. It expands to “2013 isn’t fun enough, so let’s get more and better technology to make 2014 more fun than 2013, because otherwise our fun sensors are all burned out and 2014 will be boo-oring.”
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/03/sam-altman-is-not-blithering-idiot/
Yeah I think Hayek, Mises and Rothbard all understood that economics had to have a moral foundation. That’s why they also ventured into sociology and religion in their later years. The left lost the economic argument with the collapse of communism in the 90s and have been fishing for a reason to be. They now attack on three fronts – environmentalism, race/gender, and morality. On the last one, they say capitalism may make some of us richer but it’s immoral because of inequality.
PS, the most relevant book for defending capitalism today is Helmut Schoeck’s “Envy: a Theory of Social Behavior.”
Would someone try to convince me that “What we are seeing now is a much broader assault on our entire social system and its values” is true? As an (older) millenial, this doesn’t seem self-evident to me. Is this something that would seem self-evident to Boomers? Why? Again, what social system, what values? Does a system to be cynically gamed count as a permanent and stable social system and set of values? That is how I experienced the US growing up. What about that has changed (except perhaps many people realizing that they are living in a system in which they will never be “winners”)?
Easiest example to demonstrate is the value of “free speech” as a general social value reflective of the mid 20th Century legal development of First Amendment doctrine, and of insistence on general tolerance of free expression and open discourse even when participants articulate unpopular sentiments, which goes back at least as far back as enlightenment era liberalism, depending on how you want to define things.
Compare this to today’s typical progressive attitudes regarding the appropriate restrictions on speech, and responses to offensive or ‘hate’ speech.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/09/18/views-among-college-students-regarding-the-first-amendment-results-from-a-new-survey/
Notice, that while, legally, First Amendment jurisprudence recognizes no ‘Hate Speech’ distinction at all which would be unworthy of protection, fully half of college women think that hate speech is “not protected”. 57% of college men think it’s ok to disrupt a presentation by controversial speakers by loudly shouting to the point no one can hear the speaker.
Yikes. But also, compared to the attitude just a generation or two ago, this represents a real sea change in attitudes regarding these issues.
Perhaps this is nowhere better illustrated than the almost reversal of the ACLU’s position in the last 40 years, see, e.g., Wendy Kaminer’s recent criticisms of that shift.
“First, colleges and universities are places where intellectual debate should flourish.”
Um, isn’t the point of college to get a degree so you can get a job? What does intellectual debate have to do with anything? (Tongue planted firmly in cheek.)
More seriously, why shouldn’t the speech norms of a workplace predominate on most college campuses? Not all, but very few colleges/universities are anything other than a business place. That seems to me a direct result of the commercialization of higher education (College, Inc.).
Also, is there any data about what students believed about First Amendment protection of “hate speech” in decades prior? It is hard to know with confidence if anything has changed if you don’t have that kind of data.