Anyone else notice that our political “elites” and to a lesser degree our intellectual “elites” aren’t that elite? This whole train of thought rests on the assumption that folks with power are not only altruistic in some way, but also very wise. I haven’t seen evidence of either.
Most policies seem to follow “something must be done. This is something. Therefore this must be done.” Start showing a deep understanding of issues and propose modest, well thought out policies- then maybe you earn the title of “elite”.
I think what we want in leaders is 'humble' and 'wise'. Instead we get 'merely clever' and 'not even clever, but I can and do score well on tests + wow can I ever follow somebody I think is clever'. And what is worse, a good many members of the 'merely clever' class think that wisdom can be dispensed with altogether. 'Wisdom is a crutch for those people who just aren't smart enough' seems to be the motto. This often goes together with a belief that 'humility is just insufficient self-esteem'.
So I am fine with the clever intellectuals coming up with new proposed solutions to problems. But I want somebody else, better yet 'a lot of somebody else'es doing the evaluation of whether this is something to pursue. A lot of the time, this is exactly what the market provides. You thought your new product was a very shiny clever idea, but we aren't buying it because we aren't fools and can see the downsides that you missed. No 'product/market fit' in the jargon.
We have a lot of intellectual ideas which would fail the 'product/market fit' criteria if only the marketplace of ideas worked the same way that the marketplace for goods and services did. But the creative destruction of bad intellectual ideas does not happen in this way. They keep resurfacing like the proverbial bad penny.
Agree. The elites of generations 1 through X built the system and understand the foundation. We are at generation X+2 or more. These “elites” do not understand the foundational principles that make everything “work”. They spent all of their formative years following a formula that get into the best schools that will then admit them to the clerisy which rules “benevolently” without understanding. The system is breaking down and they don’t know why because they don’t understand the underlying architecture, and even actively deride “state school” types who do. Thus the only solution is - apply the previous formula harder.
One of the worst distortions we have seen is in the financial system where the money printer has not only created cantillionares without corresponding merit, it has performed as a magnet to attract a lot of the highest potential human capital into spending their time and energy fueling an escalating financialization of everything. The excessive borrowing from the future has funded less and less valuable enterprises and left us with a horrible bill to pay and due to our intellectual rot - no way to constructively plan that attack. Using leverage to fund Google (no matter what it has become lately) was likely a net benefit to society over time. Money lent at a 1% rate over the last half decade has funded a lot of trash. Those closest to the money printer have benefited, and the rest of us will be paying the bill for the next 10-20 years. Look no further than Sam Bankman Fried (Scam Bankster Fraud). Who gives this clown billions to run his ponzi crypto casino without looking at his ridiculous balance sheet? Who? Blackrock, Sequoia, SoftBank, Tiger Global, etc…. The “elite”
I have to stop writing. Buy Bitcoin. Self Custody. Think independently.
I think it's great when markets are allowed to function naturally or are targeted to address problems. The difficulty is there is a long list of problems where markets are unlikely to help much, certainly not solve them or be the entire answer.
What about all the people who can't care for themselves one way or another? Whether disabled, drug addicted, or can't afford food shelter, health care, etc.?
How many immigrants do we admit, which ones, and how do we address the ones who come illegally?
Private prisons anyone?
How do we solve more murders?
Pollution prevention?
Transportation systems?
Etc.
Even when markets might help address some of the difficult issues for capitalism, it takes really good govt to implement and manage them. Maybe better than is realistic in most cases.
Looks like we want very different things, in that I want legislation to absolutely limit what governments and private actors can do in the way of nudging, by criminalising a lot of psychological manipulation as instances of fraud and deceit.
I have no idea how you reached any understanding of what I want and I know I don't understand what you want. That said, I know we would both like markets to play a greater role in our economy and society more generally. I also expressed doubts that we can effectively use markets in all situations. Are you suggesting we can implement markets for anything and everything?
I thought you said that you wanted nudge units to succeed and grow. I want their powers to be strictly limitied, and a lot of what they do to be criminalised. Sounds like we want differernt things to me. I think it is immoral to deceive people to manipulate them to do what you want, but of course the difficult thing that needs to be made explicit is 'what is deceit'? Oliver Cromwell banned the use of makeup as unlawfully deceitful. That's not on my list of things that need banning. Reasonable people can and will disagree as to where the line between 'presenting the information in the best possible light' and 'intentionally misleading others' should be drawn, but then that is why legislating is difficult.
I suppose I should have guess "psychological manipulation" meant nudge units but it just seemed too unbelievable to me that you thought that was criminal.
My understanding of nudge is to set things up so people are more likely to do what is judged to be in their best interest and maybe good for society too. And just as importantly, to avoid unintentionally setting things up to push people towards decisions that are judged to be bad. Nudge requires or forces no particular behavior.
Two of the best known examples are defaulting 401k contributions to a level that gets the employer's full match, unless the person decides to do something different, and displaying food in school cafeterias so that healthier choices are more visible and more likely to be chosen than chips, soda, desserts, etc. Do you disagree with these examples? Would you rather the default be no 401k contributions and unhealthy food most prominent? How is that better or less manipulative?
We have all kinds of laws and government actions that try to get people to do the right things. Our legal system's primary intent is to get people to not do bad things. We have campaigns to get people to get vaccines and health checks, education and training, join the Arrmy, and many other things. Surely you don't think govt should do none of these things. Do you prefer we do them badly?
Even if they were terrible at determining what was in the best interest, I'd hardly call nudge units criminal. Or are you aware of examples where nudge units don't do what they are supposed to? I'm perplexed.
Null, It would seem to me you are describing politicians rather accurately but I've never understood the term elite to refer to politicians. And intellectual definitely doesn't refer to politicians.
Leaders are rarely the ones who do best on tests. Just look at Biden. Politicians are like him more often than not. Maybe political appointees are a little better, maybe not. As for think tanks and advisors, I have no clue who would be better. Seems like a problem without a solution.
Tyler Cowen is a fool, as are most of the academics of today. That I didn't understand that 15 years ago makes me ashamed today. It took their response to the COVID idiocy to pound that into my head, but I can see it now.
The government's performance is always under market judgment, but the legal and illegal coercion at its hand means that its failures are cataclysmic in the end rather than the occasional screw-up at isolated areas in a vast ocean of activity. The failures are correlated across all its activities at once when coercion and unlimited funds stop working. The United States and its first world allies are at that stage where the failures are now just beginning to impact their ordinary citizens (our failures have been impacting the third world citizens for the last 50 years). We are getting the government we deserve good and hard.
Whether anti-intellectualism is a problem or not depends upon how you define "intellectualism" and what is the context. If we look at the STEM areas, the intelligent use of the mathematics associated with general relativity allows my iPhone to know its location. That is not a problem. The engineer was using the relevant variables that can describe the problem within a specified accuracy. His description of the problem is also general and appears to apply to the entire known universe. He was using an intellectual capacity to understand reality. I don't detect much resistance to that.
The so-called intellectual in the social science and humanities often appears to be someone with charisma and a large vocabulary who doesn't necessarily understand or acknowledge all the relevant variables of the issues he is dealing with. The exclusion of relevant parameters is an excellent way of hiding reality from yourself and others. It is often rationally (or subconsciously) used by intellectuals to obtain the impressions they desire.
Often soft-area intellectuals adopt and misuse the language in STEM areas while spouting nonsense or leaving out relevant factors. They can go on for hours using assumptions about their infinite abilities to understand the world, while not being willing or able to demonstrate that understanding by putting their own skin in the game. They are often successful in convincing others that their beliefs are actually valid, whether they believe in a deity or a conspiracy or other delusions about the world.
It is very common for public intellectuals to exclude highly relevant parameters or assume variables are constant in their thinking. A prime example of this is the Modern Monetary Theory's exclusion of inflation. Another is all our discussions as to the check-box grouping of humanity which excludes individual and cultural variance within each check-box group, as if the color of one's skin or the components of one's genitals are the primary criteria which should be used in all sorts of areas.
I suggest it is possible that we don't have enough anti-intellectualism. That might make us able to see that in the soft, unscientific areas of academia and beyond, the intellectual is a naked king imposing his group thinking onto policy.
That's a very good article, and it captures my own disagreement with Cowen's piece better than I could have. Even though I am one of those horrible neocons who prefers Bush-Ryan-Romney politics to Trump.
Tyler was carefully misleading in his wording saying "[classical liberals believe] in the possibility of trustworthy, well-functioning elites". Well functioning elites are only possible within a skeptical framework of norms and institutions. That framework is called a classically-liberal constitution. And it is leftish elites who have been rebelling against those constraints for at least a century now.
The only reason a liberal constitution could aspire to defy gravity and constrain the very people who govern is that it also hands power to the people and hence to populist "thinkers [who] are far more skeptical of elites".
It looks to me that what you define as naive realism is nothing else than modern marxism: supposed technocrats who think they know better, supported by an ideologized mass, leveraging a self assigned ethical superiority. think about the Covid management, climate, immigration etc...
My beef with todays "intellectuals" is they seem incredibly stubborn and hard-headed. They embrace a thesis and stick to it all while counter-evidence challenges what they claim.
Take the "living-wage". Critics have said that paying people to not work, or enabling them to work less is not sustainable. You will end up with a shortage of workers and this will create economic pain. And at the individual level people who are trained to avoid hard work miss out on learning what they are capable of doing
The past year especially has shown these concerns to be true. The economy has been harmed by a worker shortage. It seems more older people are working restaurants jobs than young adults. Do the young adults have jobs? If not what are they choosing to do and why? I wish the intellectuals were openly discussing the tradeoffs and costs of social welfare, especially as evidence shows inadequacies in popular social theories.
The other issue with a focus on "solving problems" is the tendency to see problems that need solving cropping up everywhere, much like nails attract hammers.
This reminds me of fractals. Is a set of sovereign states a “marketplace”? Assuming you’re right about the power of markets, then in the marketplace of governments, the most marketplacish ones will grow and dominate. Seems true.
Fortunately most problem do not require an all powerful state. Economist often look for the lowest-powered state possible. The naïve environmentalist thinks we need to regulate every CO2 producing activity which would indeed require a pretty nearly all powerful state. Economists say, no, all you need is a state that can levy an excise tax on CO2 emissions, something even pretty weak states can do.
Everything governments touch turn to dust. Crowds may be wise but in a democracy the people who know the least get to make all the decisions. Earth has been and will be and nothing can change the radiative equilibrium temperature of a sphere in space except the solar output. I think the markets can do it all better as long as the government takes a slice of transactions which all damage stability.
Sorry, I was totally befuddled by Broughel's article. I'm no expert on Cowen but when Broughel says Cowen is skeptical of intellectuals, that sounds right to me. Everyone should be, including intellectuals. In what universe is that any like anti-intellectualism?
but rather about how many on both the left and the right put too much faith in the abilities of intellectuals to guide the evolution of human progress.
Maybe it amounts to the same thing, but I'd say the abilities of the wrong "intellectuals to guide .... We needed experts to figure out the most cost effective way to reduce the spread of the CORONA virus, but CDC did not do this. We really need to know how to reduce the increase and eventually reverse the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, but the folks at COP n are not providing it.
To your second point, they first need to prove that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere actually causes something, not merely correlates with it before worrying about the cost. Similarly, proving an intervention actually reduces the spread of the disease is necessary before you can figure out if it is cost effective, unless the cost is so negligible that it makes sense to simply try it. Universal masking vs the 'two weeks (aka years) to flatten the curve" is a good example.
I agree. I just think that the causal link between CO2 increase in the atmosphere and climate changes is well established, although the strength and mechanisms of the change are still evolving. If you do not agree, _I_ will certainly not be able to persuade you.
In contrast (in my mind) the strength and mechanism of the causal link between NPI's and spread of infection was not well established, indeed CDC made little if any effort to establish it. Absence any reliable information, the varied and politicized response to CDC recommendations is not surprising.
The link to the therapeutic effect of vaccines WAS well established and I think the investments in vaccine development and deployment had high rates of return. [They could have been higher if FDA had accelerated the approval of the vaccines as much as producers accelerated development and CDC had recommended first dose first and fractional dosing early on when production capacity was less than demand.]
The link between vaccines and the spread of the virus, on the other hand, was not well established and may very well have been slight. Again, CDC did not even attempt to establish this link which is the only non-paternalistic reason to mandate vaccine use.
"I think that the best protection from naïve realism is having ideas tested in the market rather than imposed by monopoly government."
Agreed. But this implies dividing up problems that can be solved by markets and those that cannot. There is no market in NPI during a pandemic and not one we should rely on unaided in vaccine development. There is no market in which those that benefit (everybody) and those who are harmed (everybody) by increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere can agree on a price for the emissions and how the revenue should be distributed. There is a market that determines how much income unskilled workers should received, but lots of people, not just the unskilled workers, don't like the results.
Does the premium price paid for beachfront property indicate what the market believes about models of rising sea levels?
From the beginning of the pandemic different localities had different NPI policies. This created an experiment of preventive measures. Later in the pandemic we saw Florida draw tourists and population growth as the state was perceived as favorable to those who opposed Covid policies such as masks and school closures.
If we view the market as the freedom of choice we can more greatly appreciate the freedom and the information markets provide.
I'd very much like to see an analysis of costs and benefits of different levels and kinds of NPI in different places. My criticism of CDC is that they did not provide public and individual decision makers with the tools and information about how to design and employ cost effective NPI. I expect ex-post analyses will show that costs exceeded benefits in most places. [A difficulty will be that a lot of the "costs" and "benefits" are not marketed goods or services but we should make the effort.]
The issue of property values and climate change is that hazard insurance premia may not reflect the best modeling of expected future hazards plus some reliance on FEMA-type assistance. This seems especially to be a problem with wild-fire and hurricane risks. Taleb points out that people are not very good at trading off small certain losses against large uncertain gains.
Neither of these issues are very clearly market/non-market.
Anyone else notice that our political “elites” and to a lesser degree our intellectual “elites” aren’t that elite? This whole train of thought rests on the assumption that folks with power are not only altruistic in some way, but also very wise. I haven’t seen evidence of either.
Most policies seem to follow “something must be done. This is something. Therefore this must be done.” Start showing a deep understanding of issues and propose modest, well thought out policies- then maybe you earn the title of “elite”.
I think what we want in leaders is 'humble' and 'wise'. Instead we get 'merely clever' and 'not even clever, but I can and do score well on tests + wow can I ever follow somebody I think is clever'. And what is worse, a good many members of the 'merely clever' class think that wisdom can be dispensed with altogether. 'Wisdom is a crutch for those people who just aren't smart enough' seems to be the motto. This often goes together with a belief that 'humility is just insufficient self-esteem'.
So I am fine with the clever intellectuals coming up with new proposed solutions to problems. But I want somebody else, better yet 'a lot of somebody else'es doing the evaluation of whether this is something to pursue. A lot of the time, this is exactly what the market provides. You thought your new product was a very shiny clever idea, but we aren't buying it because we aren't fools and can see the downsides that you missed. No 'product/market fit' in the jargon.
We have a lot of intellectual ideas which would fail the 'product/market fit' criteria if only the marketplace of ideas worked the same way that the marketplace for goods and services did. But the creative destruction of bad intellectual ideas does not happen in this way. They keep resurfacing like the proverbial bad penny.
Agree. The elites of generations 1 through X built the system and understand the foundation. We are at generation X+2 or more. These “elites” do not understand the foundational principles that make everything “work”. They spent all of their formative years following a formula that get into the best schools that will then admit them to the clerisy which rules “benevolently” without understanding. The system is breaking down and they don’t know why because they don’t understand the underlying architecture, and even actively deride “state school” types who do. Thus the only solution is - apply the previous formula harder.
One of the worst distortions we have seen is in the financial system where the money printer has not only created cantillionares without corresponding merit, it has performed as a magnet to attract a lot of the highest potential human capital into spending their time and energy fueling an escalating financialization of everything. The excessive borrowing from the future has funded less and less valuable enterprises and left us with a horrible bill to pay and due to our intellectual rot - no way to constructively plan that attack. Using leverage to fund Google (no matter what it has become lately) was likely a net benefit to society over time. Money lent at a 1% rate over the last half decade has funded a lot of trash. Those closest to the money printer have benefited, and the rest of us will be paying the bill for the next 10-20 years. Look no further than Sam Bankman Fried (Scam Bankster Fraud). Who gives this clown billions to run his ponzi crypto casino without looking at his ridiculous balance sheet? Who? Blackrock, Sequoia, SoftBank, Tiger Global, etc…. The “elite”
I have to stop writing. Buy Bitcoin. Self Custody. Think independently.
I think it's great when markets are allowed to function naturally or are targeted to address problems. The difficulty is there is a long list of problems where markets are unlikely to help much, certainly not solve them or be the entire answer.
What about all the people who can't care for themselves one way or another? Whether disabled, drug addicted, or can't afford food shelter, health care, etc.?
How many immigrants do we admit, which ones, and how do we address the ones who come illegally?
Private prisons anyone?
How do we solve more murders?
Pollution prevention?
Transportation systems?
Etc.
Even when markets might help address some of the difficult issues for capitalism, it takes really good govt to implement and manage them. Maybe better than is realistic in most cases.
We can always hope efforts like this succeed and grow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_Insights_Team
Looks like we want very different things, in that I want legislation to absolutely limit what governments and private actors can do in the way of nudging, by criminalising a lot of psychological manipulation as instances of fraud and deceit.
I have no idea how you reached any understanding of what I want and I know I don't understand what you want. That said, I know we would both like markets to play a greater role in our economy and society more generally. I also expressed doubts that we can effectively use markets in all situations. Are you suggesting we can implement markets for anything and everything?
I thought you said that you wanted nudge units to succeed and grow. I want their powers to be strictly limitied, and a lot of what they do to be criminalised. Sounds like we want differernt things to me. I think it is immoral to deceive people to manipulate them to do what you want, but of course the difficult thing that needs to be made explicit is 'what is deceit'? Oliver Cromwell banned the use of makeup as unlawfully deceitful. That's not on my list of things that need banning. Reasonable people can and will disagree as to where the line between 'presenting the information in the best possible light' and 'intentionally misleading others' should be drawn, but then that is why legislating is difficult.
I suppose I should have guess "psychological manipulation" meant nudge units but it just seemed too unbelievable to me that you thought that was criminal.
My understanding of nudge is to set things up so people are more likely to do what is judged to be in their best interest and maybe good for society too. And just as importantly, to avoid unintentionally setting things up to push people towards decisions that are judged to be bad. Nudge requires or forces no particular behavior.
Two of the best known examples are defaulting 401k contributions to a level that gets the employer's full match, unless the person decides to do something different, and displaying food in school cafeterias so that healthier choices are more visible and more likely to be chosen than chips, soda, desserts, etc. Do you disagree with these examples? Would you rather the default be no 401k contributions and unhealthy food most prominent? How is that better or less manipulative?
We have all kinds of laws and government actions that try to get people to do the right things. Our legal system's primary intent is to get people to not do bad things. We have campaigns to get people to get vaccines and health checks, education and training, join the Arrmy, and many other things. Surely you don't think govt should do none of these things. Do you prefer we do them badly?
Even if they were terrible at determining what was in the best interest, I'd hardly call nudge units criminal. Or are you aware of examples where nudge units don't do what they are supposed to? I'm perplexed.
Most intellectuals are not.
Null, It would seem to me you are describing politicians rather accurately but I've never understood the term elite to refer to politicians. And intellectual definitely doesn't refer to politicians.
I wasn't thinking so much of the politicians as the senior members of government agencies and various Think Tanks and advisors.
Leaders are rarely the ones who do best on tests. Just look at Biden. Politicians are like him more often than not. Maybe political appointees are a little better, maybe not. As for think tanks and advisors, I have no clue who would be better. Seems like a problem without a solution.
Tyler Cowen is a fool, as are most of the academics of today. That I didn't understand that 15 years ago makes me ashamed today. It took their response to the COVID idiocy to pound that into my head, but I can see it now.
The government's performance is always under market judgment, but the legal and illegal coercion at its hand means that its failures are cataclysmic in the end rather than the occasional screw-up at isolated areas in a vast ocean of activity. The failures are correlated across all its activities at once when coercion and unlimited funds stop working. The United States and its first world allies are at that stage where the failures are now just beginning to impact their ordinary citizens (our failures have been impacting the third world citizens for the last 50 years). We are getting the government we deserve good and hard.
I agree with some of what you write but not all. Be that as it may, I have no clue why you think any of that makes Cowen a fool.
Anyone who thinks David Brooks, Ezra Klein, and Matt Yglesias have anything worth listening to is fool by definition.
By YOUR definition :)
Let me guess, Thomas, you think highly of all three. This is unsurprising, but I already knew you were a fool.
Whether anti-intellectualism is a problem or not depends upon how you define "intellectualism" and what is the context. If we look at the STEM areas, the intelligent use of the mathematics associated with general relativity allows my iPhone to know its location. That is not a problem. The engineer was using the relevant variables that can describe the problem within a specified accuracy. His description of the problem is also general and appears to apply to the entire known universe. He was using an intellectual capacity to understand reality. I don't detect much resistance to that.
The so-called intellectual in the social science and humanities often appears to be someone with charisma and a large vocabulary who doesn't necessarily understand or acknowledge all the relevant variables of the issues he is dealing with. The exclusion of relevant parameters is an excellent way of hiding reality from yourself and others. It is often rationally (or subconsciously) used by intellectuals to obtain the impressions they desire.
Often soft-area intellectuals adopt and misuse the language in STEM areas while spouting nonsense or leaving out relevant factors. They can go on for hours using assumptions about their infinite abilities to understand the world, while not being willing or able to demonstrate that understanding by putting their own skin in the game. They are often successful in convincing others that their beliefs are actually valid, whether they believe in a deity or a conspiracy or other delusions about the world.
It is very common for public intellectuals to exclude highly relevant parameters or assume variables are constant in their thinking. A prime example of this is the Modern Monetary Theory's exclusion of inflation. Another is all our discussions as to the check-box grouping of humanity which excludes individual and cultural variance within each check-box group, as if the color of one's skin or the components of one's genitals are the primary criteria which should be used in all sorts of areas.
I suggest it is possible that we don't have enough anti-intellectualism. That might make us able to see that in the soft, unscientific areas of academia and beyond, the intellectual is a naked king imposing his group thinking onto policy.
That's a very good article, and it captures my own disagreement with Cowen's piece better than I could have. Even though I am one of those horrible neocons who prefers Bush-Ryan-Romney politics to Trump.
Tyler was carefully misleading in his wording saying "[classical liberals believe] in the possibility of trustworthy, well-functioning elites". Well functioning elites are only possible within a skeptical framework of norms and institutions. That framework is called a classically-liberal constitution. And it is leftish elites who have been rebelling against those constraints for at least a century now.
The only reason a liberal constitution could aspire to defy gravity and constrain the very people who govern is that it also hands power to the people and hence to populist "thinkers [who] are far more skeptical of elites".
It looks to me that what you define as naive realism is nothing else than modern marxism: supposed technocrats who think they know better, supported by an ideologized mass, leveraging a self assigned ethical superiority. think about the Covid management, climate, immigration etc...
Certainly has some similarities in attitude with Marxism but seems a bit of a stretch to say it is Marxism.
My beef with todays "intellectuals" is they seem incredibly stubborn and hard-headed. They embrace a thesis and stick to it all while counter-evidence challenges what they claim.
Take the "living-wage". Critics have said that paying people to not work, or enabling them to work less is not sustainable. You will end up with a shortage of workers and this will create economic pain. And at the individual level people who are trained to avoid hard work miss out on learning what they are capable of doing
The past year especially has shown these concerns to be true. The economy has been harmed by a worker shortage. It seems more older people are working restaurants jobs than young adults. Do the young adults have jobs? If not what are they choosing to do and why? I wish the intellectuals were openly discussing the tradeoffs and costs of social welfare, especially as evidence shows inadequacies in popular social theories.
The other issue with a focus on "solving problems" is the tendency to see problems that need solving cropping up everywhere, much like nails attract hammers.
This reminds me of fractals. Is a set of sovereign states a “marketplace”? Assuming you’re right about the power of markets, then in the marketplace of governments, the most marketplacish ones will grow and dominate. Seems true.
You seem to find utility in classifying people as fools or not.
Fortunately most problem do not require an all powerful state. Economist often look for the lowest-powered state possible. The naïve environmentalist thinks we need to regulate every CO2 producing activity which would indeed require a pretty nearly all powerful state. Economists say, no, all you need is a state that can levy an excise tax on CO2 emissions, something even pretty weak states can do.
Everything governments touch turn to dust. Crowds may be wise but in a democracy the people who know the least get to make all the decisions. Earth has been and will be and nothing can change the radiative equilibrium temperature of a sphere in space except the solar output. I think the markets can do it all better as long as the government takes a slice of transactions which all damage stability.
The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell takes on this subject in depth.
Sorry, I was totally befuddled by Broughel's article. I'm no expert on Cowen but when Broughel says Cowen is skeptical of intellectuals, that sounds right to me. Everyone should be, including intellectuals. In what universe is that any like anti-intellectualism?
but rather about how many on both the left and the right put too much faith in the abilities of intellectuals to guide the evolution of human progress.
Maybe it amounts to the same thing, but I'd say the abilities of the wrong "intellectuals to guide .... We needed experts to figure out the most cost effective way to reduce the spread of the CORONA virus, but CDC did not do this. We really need to know how to reduce the increase and eventually reverse the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, but the folks at COP n are not providing it.
To your second point, they first need to prove that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere actually causes something, not merely correlates with it before worrying about the cost. Similarly, proving an intervention actually reduces the spread of the disease is necessary before you can figure out if it is cost effective, unless the cost is so negligible that it makes sense to simply try it. Universal masking vs the 'two weeks (aka years) to flatten the curve" is a good example.
I agree. I just think that the causal link between CO2 increase in the atmosphere and climate changes is well established, although the strength and mechanisms of the change are still evolving. If you do not agree, _I_ will certainly not be able to persuade you.
In contrast (in my mind) the strength and mechanism of the causal link between NPI's and spread of infection was not well established, indeed CDC made little if any effort to establish it. Absence any reliable information, the varied and politicized response to CDC recommendations is not surprising.
The link to the therapeutic effect of vaccines WAS well established and I think the investments in vaccine development and deployment had high rates of return. [They could have been higher if FDA had accelerated the approval of the vaccines as much as producers accelerated development and CDC had recommended first dose first and fractional dosing early on when production capacity was less than demand.]
The link between vaccines and the spread of the virus, on the other hand, was not well established and may very well have been slight. Again, CDC did not even attempt to establish this link which is the only non-paternalistic reason to mandate vaccine use.
"I think that the best protection from naïve realism is having ideas tested in the market rather than imposed by monopoly government."
Agreed. But this implies dividing up problems that can be solved by markets and those that cannot. There is no market in NPI during a pandemic and not one we should rely on unaided in vaccine development. There is no market in which those that benefit (everybody) and those who are harmed (everybody) by increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere can agree on a price for the emissions and how the revenue should be distributed. There is a market that determines how much income unskilled workers should received, but lots of people, not just the unskilled workers, don't like the results.
Does the premium price paid for beachfront property indicate what the market believes about models of rising sea levels?
From the beginning of the pandemic different localities had different NPI policies. This created an experiment of preventive measures. Later in the pandemic we saw Florida draw tourists and population growth as the state was perceived as favorable to those who opposed Covid policies such as masks and school closures.
If we view the market as the freedom of choice we can more greatly appreciate the freedom and the information markets provide.
I'd very much like to see an analysis of costs and benefits of different levels and kinds of NPI in different places. My criticism of CDC is that they did not provide public and individual decision makers with the tools and information about how to design and employ cost effective NPI. I expect ex-post analyses will show that costs exceeded benefits in most places. [A difficulty will be that a lot of the "costs" and "benefits" are not marketed goods or services but we should make the effort.]
The issue of property values and climate change is that hazard insurance premia may not reflect the best modeling of expected future hazards plus some reliance on FEMA-type assistance. This seems especially to be a problem with wild-fire and hurricane risks. Taleb points out that people are not very good at trading off small certain losses against large uncertain gains.
Neither of these issues are very clearly market/non-market.
I hope you posted this right in comment thread of Tyler's original post. It's almost too perfect.
No one ever comments on Cowen because the comments are so bad. :)