The post is here. Among other items, it mentions an essay by Richard Hanania.
Richard Hanania argues that the left is ideological while conservatives are tribal. Thus, when Democrats are in power they enact their agenda, while Republicans, whether in power or not, merely emit war whoops.
…Hanania’s thesis came up during the first meeting of our seminar, when we talked about contemporary political engagement. I plan to include my notes from the seminar in a separate essay.
My review of A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century is here. Again, I conclude on a quibbling note.
In short, almost every reference to “market” is pejorative. But one could easily argue that the market is an expensive, long-lasting trait and thus should be presumed to be adaptive. Unfortunately, WH seem to see no reason to investigate what positive functions it serves and what trade-offs might exist in attempting to do away with it or regulate it.
In general, although I found the sermons in WH interesting and worthwhile, I felt that the book suffered from a framework in which the individual engages in a lonely battle with the natural and social environment.
I review The Money Illusion. I conclude on a skeptical note:
Would an NGDP futures market provide a reliable guide for discretionary monetary policy? That seems like an empirical question. But my guess is that if NGDP can be accurately forecast by speculators, then the market NGDP forecast can already be extracted from the above-mentioned indicators.
An assertion that you made a better forecast of NGDP than the Fed did in 2007, even if that assertion is true, does not prove your case. If I were a market monetarist, articulating an NGDP forecasting algorithm derived from market indicators, and demonstrating its reliability through a variety of historical episodes, would be high on my research agenda.
while valid concerns about app-tracking, facial recognition, and police surveillance remain a legitimate topic of political and journalistic interest, the other half of the debate is being neglected. The emergence of new cultural norms has seen citizens broadcast aspects of their personal lives that had hitherto remained out of public view. Missing from the latest eruption of public outrage targeting Big Tech and Mark Zuckerberg is an acknowledgement that we voluntarily agreed to surrender our privacy and that we may never get it back.
I relate this to moral dyad theory. We tend to simplify a complex situation by identifying one participant as having agency and the other participant as helplessly being imposed upon. So we think of Facebook the corporation as the former and the users of Facebook as the latter.
I review The Mind Club, one of the most insightful books that few people have read.
Wegner and Grey say that we use two different approaches for trying to enter the minds of others. When we try to understand their feelings, we use simulation. We try to imagine ourselves in a similar situation. When we try to understand their actions, we use theorizing. We try to imagine the chain of reasoning that someone used in order to arrive at an action.
It seems that often we can understand either feelings or motives, but not both. When we perceive only feelings, we see a moral patient. When we see only motives, we see a moral agent.
Although the book was written several years before the death of George Floyd, it clearly anticipates the frequent depiction of Floyd with the features of a big baby.
My latest essay is on Steven Pinker’s latest book. I once was in a book club that read Daniel Pink’s Free Agent Nation and then Pinker’s The Blank Slate. A participant suggested that for our next book we needed to find an author named Pinkest.
From a book review by Alberto Mingardi:
Controlling (“governing”) immigration means imposing restrictions upon natives too. They will be less “at ease” in their hiring people or buying things from strangers whose legal status they would not otherwise be interested in knowing. It also means a further increase in red tape and in requiring documents from people, exacerbating an unfortunate trend in contemporary nation states. Kukathas points to a simple and yet often forgotten fact: immigration control means controlling more those who are not immigrants. It means, for example, checking on factories to make sure every worker is documented; to make sure that families are not employing a maid who does not have a regular permit to stay in that country
We live in an age where Fear Of Others’ Liberty is on the march.
In a review of Jonathan Sacks’ Morality, I write
I think that the problems of loneliness and loss of meaning that Sacks identifies are due to a breakdown of covenants at a small-scale level. I wish that families were larger and stronger. I wish that neighborhoods had more continuity. I wish that the school environment for children could be informal rather than bureaucratic. I wish that long-term friendships were more prevalent.
For more on these topics, see the biography of
Alexis de Tocqueville in the Online Library of Liberty; and the EconTalk podcast episode Yuval Levin on The Fractured Republic. See also “Camping-Trip Economics vs. Woolen-Coat Economics,” by Arnold Kling, Library of Economics and Liberty, Feb. 2, 2015.
But at the macro level, I think we are better off with a society of contract than with a society of covenant. The more weight we place on “We” at the national level, the less room for the sort of community that I would like to see at a local level. As we think in terms of larger scale, I think it helps to lose the “We.”
On p. 33, he writes,
it’s far easier to understand inflation and deflation if we think in terms of explaining changes in the value of money than if we try to imagine the factors that would be changing the prices of each and every good, service, and asset in the economy.
During much of the Great Inflation [1966-1981, in his telling], people did try to explain the problem by searching for factors that were pushing up specific wages and prices. Indeed, in a sense the Great Inflation was caused by this misconception.
As I see it, we are seeing the same misconception this year. But on his blog, Sumner seems to disagree. He is willing to buy into the theory that we are facing transitory supply shocks in a few sectors. I think the main reason he goes with this story is that trust in the forecasting ability of financial markets is part of his worldview. But financial markets got it wrong during the Great Inflation, also.
I have just started the book. I am sure I will have more to say about it at a later date.
the need for our beliefs to connect or respond to reality has become increasingly unimportant. We are free to believe literally anything, from the wildest alt-right QAnon political conspiracies to the wackiest Gwyneth Paltrow health-nut fantasies of the contemporary wellness movement. None of it really matters—the lights still come on in your house, your car still runs, the grocery stores remain stocked with food. As nanotechnology expert J. Storrs Hall puts it, humans have an enormous capacity to hold beliefs not because they are true, but because they are advantageous to hold.
Society functions best when people of high status are truth-seekers.
Potter’s new book is On Decline: Stagnation, Nostalgia, and Why Every Year is the Worst Year Ever. Have a nice day.