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”.
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.
"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.
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”.
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.
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.
"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.