And also other topics. The link goes to a Twitter post with a video.
Judge for yourself, but to me it sounds like he is telling a PSST story. He says that, for better or worse, the UK spent the last twenty years working with a set of rules on trade in services with other European countries, and now that those rules have been cast into doubt by the Brexit vote, the British economy is in trouble. It is a very different take from that of those who think in GDP-factory terms.
Also, in my other post today, I mention an event on plutocracy co-sponsored by the Hudson Institute and The American Interest. Tyler Cowen makes remarks that have little or nothing to do with the article that he wrote for the event. Two of his more provocative opinions:
1. Steven Pinker may be wrong. Rather than mass violence following a benign trend, it could be cyclical. When there is a long peace, people become complacent, they allow bad leaders to take power and to run amok, and you get mass violence again. (Cowen argues that there are more countries now run by bad people than was the case a couple of decades ago)
2. Joseph McCarthy was not wrong. There were Soviet agents in influential positions. Regardless of what you think of that, the relevant point is that today Chinese and Russian plutocrats may have their tentacles in the U.S. and may be subtly causing the U.S. to be less of a liberal capitalist nation and more of a cronyist plutocracy.
Off topic to the post, but I thought of you, Arnold, and the three-axes model in Trump’s speech last night on the following line:
“We are going to defeat the barbarians of ISIS”
http://www.scoopnest.com/user/BostonGlobe/756321605224103936
I had exactly the same thought!
My Arnold contra Arnold thought was that there may be an analogous “null hypothesis” in dealing with terrorists as to the one for education.
On McCarthy, I recommend Blacklisted by History, and other recent works that have been informed by the details made available following release of some Venona files. Bottom line, he and Whittaker Changers weren’ ‘wrong’ about all those traitors and agents, of which there were indeed plenty.
However, he failed to recognize that most of that eras establishment’s sympathies for Communism were entirely home-grown and sincere even for otherwise loyal patriots who would never have cooperated with the Soviets. The agents of foreign powers were the tip of an iceberg, and the domestic problem ran much deeper
But there is the rub.
To me the trouble with McCarthy is not that he was wrong about the existence of communists. But that his eagerness to deal with it violated the spirit, and perhaps even the letter, of due process.
If home-grown, loyal, communists are in influential positions in your country, well that’s just a lemon that free polity must suck up.
Loyal to what?
Theoretically, PSST should be highly scale dependent, unlike GDP, which should be to some extent linearly additive. So I’m inclined to think that PSST effects of reshaping the bonds between two very large bodies should be much smaller (on the collective) than the effects of breaking the many more numerous bonds, say, within a local community.
This only holds when the communities were already structured into metapopulations; with a bias to local association. Splitting a large digraph (network) into two generally is catastrophic for the total number of edges (effective relationships) if the edges are uniformly or randomly distributed with respect to the plane of division.
With respect to both Cowen’s points, it seems appropriate to bring out that Macaulay quote:
We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell
us that society has reached a turning point, that we have
seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with
just as much apparent reason … On what principle is it
that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are
to expect nothing but deterioration before us.
Neither Macaulay, nor Pinker nor any other optimist (Matt Ridley and Hans Rosling come to mind) ever believed that the state of the world improved monotonically always and everywhere. A temporary negative trend doesn’t prove Pinker wrong. Even the 20th century mass catastrophes of the world wars and Stalinist and Maoist genocides were only temporary setbacks in the trend toward longer, healthier, wealthier, less violent lives. So Cowen’s degree of pessimism seems unwarranted and the proposed mechanisms rather… odd. Peace -> complacency -> bad leaders -> war? Don’t we already have an established connection between economic stagnation and illiberal tendencies as a good explanation for why the world might have become a more illiberal place after 2008? And Russian and Chinese influence? Really? Why would this suddenly become effective now vs during the actual cold war?
“Why would this suddenly become effective now vs during the actual Cold War.”
Because now we think we’ve won?
I don’t get Tyler’s point on the history of leaders. Of course, leaders always look worse today than yesteryear because our thoughts immediately thinks Lincoln, Washington, Reagan and FDR while not Buchanan, Wilson or Hoover. (This is not just political…I bet most great baseball players today would have been players 50 or even 100 years ago.) Every single President, including Bush and Carter, in my lifetime has higher positive ratings today than they did while in office. I still say our leaders today are way better than the leaders of Europe in 1914 and I wish people would stop saying this era is very violent. We have enormous peace and prosperity 1992 – 2005 and we are in a deflationary cycle.
I think that economists that come out strongly against Brexit need to have full disclosure. That is they need to say if they been to conferences or had speeches/articles paid for by the EU.