Re: Arnold Kling on Tyler Cowen on Canada trucker convoy/BLM:
"I am more sympathetic to police than I am to Canadian health officials. What Tyler calls 'mood affiliation' would lead me to arrive at a position that is more in sympathy with the truckers and less with BLM than Tyler’s apparent [initial] views. But I agree that a heuristic of looking for rigorous thinking is worth using. A shorthand way of saying it is 'Show your work.' I think that if you are looking for clear, rigorous thinking, don’t look to any 21st-century mass movement."
I don't use a heuristic of "rigorous thinking" to make up mind about protests (the convoy, BLM, etc.) My principal heuristic: Is the protest an instance of *civil disobedience* against *tyranny of the majority* and/or *tyranny of 'experts'*?
This heuristic checks two basic boxes: form (civil disobedience) and substance (defense of minority rights).
As far as I can tell, pandemic restrictions and mandates in Canada are instances of tyranny of the majority and tyranny of 'experts' (public-health officials).
Arnold says, "Show your work." The burden of proof for restrictions and mandates is on the authorities. (Presumption of individual liberty.) Have the authorities shown clear and convincing evidence that restrictions and mandates yield great net benefits in public health?
Re: mood affiliation. Yes, I trust the motivations of most of the truckers more than I trust the motivations of most of the elites. Truckers and nurses braved the front lines in the early stage of the pandemic, when there was radical uncertainty about virulence and lethality. I have no reason to mistrust their sense of 'station and duty'.
One may agree with Martin Gurri, that "revolts of the public" aren't substitutes for governance. However, one may nonetheless support specific revolts of the public that rely on civil disobedience to abrogate unnecessary restrictions or mandates.
PS: Compare (a) Tyler Cowen's advice (20 January 2022) to a group conservative-libertarian students who chafe at arbitrary pandemic restrictions at Yale University and (b) public resistance by conservative-libertarian students to arbitrary pandemic restrictions at the University of Chicago:
"Don't make it a crusade. [... .] If you're a top-line university adminstrator, and especially at a place like Yale, the pressures you're under and the number of constituents you have to cater to is so extreme, those are very frustrated people, they're not very free, they're kind of enslaved. [... .] Bear with it. Get rid of some of the stupidest [restrictions]. The other stuff you want to get rid of, you can do so more sustainably two weeks from now. [...] A little bit of patience now goes a long way." (Cue times: 21:00 and 33:00)
A key issue for any protest is "what is the policy wanted"?
For truckers - end vaccine mandates. << seems VERY specific, limited, political issue.
For BLM - end "systemic racism" << it's already illegal - altho AA racism against whites is already practiced, and increasingly against successful Asians. Not good. Protesting for "impossible" to achieve "equal results"? With unpunished violence, and many killed? Hundreds of violent, deadly protests for ...to be against racism.
For Jan 6 against questionable elections, against official Biden win << Biden won, whether stolen (like JFK vs Nixon?) or not. BUT - many election rules were changed and signature verification was questionable. (In CA, less than 1% were rejected for election with mail-in, but over 20% were rejected in recall of Newsome.)
Cowen's comments to the students only work if you think that you can concede the COVID hawks point but hope that case counts never go back up and we don't have to think about it again.
But I feel like we just did that with the Delta and Omicron waves. If there is another wave, and we've all agreed that "this is the proper way to respond to a wave of cases", then you are stuck.
Moreover, I think that we are in an interative game here. Two years of this bullshit was too much. We need decision makers to understand that when the next crises comes up, if they pull anything like this, that the pushback will be so bad its not worth it.
I get that lots of people want to "just move on in two weeks and pretend it didn't happen." That's a fine sentiment and all, but not if "pretend it didn't happen" means "learn nothing and do something similar again next time."
To your points: More than 2 weeks (almost 4 weeks) have passed since Tyler Cowen advised Yale students to be patient for 2 weeks, but restrictions remain in place at Yale.
"When I hear that a particular group defends liberty . . . while this is partially true it makes me nervous. As a whole, they also seem to believe a lot of nonsense . . . . Fair numbers of them seem to hold offensive beliefs as well."
Could not the same be said of many who participated in the American Revolution; the slavery abolitionist movement; the Normandy invasion; the Jim Crow demonstrations; etc.? Shouldn't the Canadian protest be judged by its aims and means, rather than the moral and intellectual perfection of its participants?
Someone at MR pointed out that a good heuristic here is whether the "movement" has specific and limited aims which can be fulfilled, or open ended aims which are interpreted by its leaders.
If limited aims then you can discuss those aims, and if you agree to them then the movement will dissolve. The Truckers wanting COVID restrictions to end is an example.
If open ended, like BLM and so many calls for "social justice" are, then the leadership matters since the leaders will constantly be re-interpreting what social justice means and there is no particular thing you can do to satisfy and end the "movement."
On the one hand: the truckers didn't have a cell phone video of a guy dying at the hands of state officials to generate sympathy the way the BLM folks did. On the other hand, there is no paranoid conspiracy theory among the truckers that has sucked in even one tenth as many people as Systemic Racism and White Privilege. So yeah, not Tyler's best moment.
I have not attempted to rigorously fact-check the Guardian article that Tyler Cowen cites, but it calls opposition to vaccine mandates "anti-vax" sentiment, and claims that "there is no basis" for claims that the PM should be investigated for fascism. The first is a rather novel usage of the term. The second claim has not aged well in the week since it was written: Trudeau has invoked, for the first time ever, emergency powers to fight the protest. Such tell-tales make me skeptical that the rest of the article is fair, rather than engaging in nutpicking.
One could write a similar hatchet piece for an awful lot of establishment politicians. Should we treat the US government as illegitimate because the current president shows signs of dementia, promised to appoint a Supreme Court judge on a racist and sexist basis, committed plagiarism, selected an anti-vax veep, and engages a serial fabulist as press secretary? To borrow a phrase, "ugh", yet that is essentially the form and level of argument employed by The Guardian.
[Edited to fix editorial errors in the second paragraph.]
"Actually, the most reliable institution for generating social benefits that are rigorously calculated is a profit-seeking firm."
For sure. But what if the people you would like to benefit have neither money nor marketable skills? Then a for profit firm is unlikely to be of much help.
One thing that should be highlighted is that the "smart" (rational/analytical/elite) side of the Canadian conflict has invested itself in a position that is so deeply irrational and motivated by emotion.
Everyone concedes at this point that the trucker vaccine mandate is pointless. Rather than simply drop it (which would likely make the entire conflict go away), these supposed rational elites are sowing fear (mostly among themselves) to rationalize continuing to impose the admittedly irrational policy.
There's no rational solution here because neither side is behaving rationally. Crediting one side with more rationality is like crediting a guy poking a bear with a stick for being clearly smarter than the bear.
Cowen, and I have been a daily reader of his and Tabarrok's blog for nearly 20 years, is trying to keep his writing gigs at, first, the NYTimes, and now Bloomberg. It was painful watching him contort himself this way- I was a big fan at one time. Now I just find it amusing.
Agreed, and I am in largely the same place. I think Cowen as caught respectability disease pretty badly over the past decade or so. (I wrote about it above.) Putting his points about BLM next to his truckers point really drives it home. I wonder if he has changed his mind on BLM after all the looting and burning, or perhaps the many millions of dollars of donations that the founders spent on fancy homes for themselves?
I wish more charitable giving was based on prior results & people. Not what they promise for the future, but what they've done in the past, with what resources - and who verifies work done.
I don't much like the "Pony Express" because it seems to me to be a content-free slogan. What kind of "government operating system" would be more resilient and dynamic? Or at a minimum, less opposed to the resilience and dynamism of innovation, entrepreneurship and business?
Crickets.
Extra point: OK to innovation and entrepreneurship. Business? Be careful there. To the extent a business can capture market or governmental power, they're an impediment to the dynamism of innovation and entrepreneurship.
I liked your comments about Canadian truckers vs. BLM. Also, I generally don't have the patience to read or listen to interviews, but I thought the excerpt of Michael Eisenberg's comments was good. And yes, it's pretty similar to your comments about progressivism and dynamism.
An addendum: Blocking traffic was one of the tactics of BLM activists. While better than rioting, I didn't care for it (though was not personally affected by it). More to the point, though, I think it cost them support because a lot of people were upset at having things disrupted like that. I expect the same is true for the trucker blockades.
Eh, blocking transportation is a very old protest tactic.
Striking railway workers in Russia 1905 for example, which forced the Tsar to agree to a constitution.
Crippling transportation is a mid point between civil disobedience and actual violence.
At the end of the day your opinion of whether its justified or not will depend on your opinion of the goals being sought and whether people tried less disruptive means first but were rebuffed.
"Not sure what it is, but there has to be a better way of resisting".
Maybe, maybe not. If resistance to legitimate lawful authority is effective it is also at least somewhat insurrectionary and if not 'treason' then maybe a few micro-treasons. The more things get out of hand, the closer to actual treason things get, and we all know the penalty for treason.
At any rate, be careful what you wish for.
Depends what you mean by 'better'. If it's 'more effective' in terms of pressuring TPTB to reverse course when they think they have sufficient political support to win elections, then then that is unfortunately synonymous with 'painfully disruptive', since otherwise, why would they care?
Road blocking and demonstrating without permits are traditionally considered paradigmatic instances of non-violent civil disobedience. But that doesn't mean they aren't illegal, which they are and should be. Unlike Cowen I can be consistent in saying that anyone doing these things should simply be arrested whether they want an independent India or to defund the police or to end vaccine mandates or to occupy wall street or to overturn an election result.
I can extent principled sympathy for their 'aims' (such as they are) when there is overlap with my own values, but I am not fooling myself to pretend that when I do so I am not sympathizing with people who are nevertheless acting like criminals and who ought to be treated like criminals.
On the other hand, it remains legal (for the time being - though probably not for much longer when bad people are doing it for bad reasons) to peacefully abstain from entering into voluntary transactions and arrangements, so long as one isn't doing so in a way that affects protected groups in a disproportionate manner (though, duh, that is always going to be the charge anyway.)
And if enough people can conspire to do this in a strategic manner such that most of them actually sticks with it even at high, short-term personal cost, then to say the level of potential disruption would be 'painful' enough to make the pips squeak would be to understate things in the extreme.
Until now, no one has quite figured out how to implement the set of mechanisms necessary to secure and maintain such a degree of solidarity in matters of the kinds of civil resistance likely to be effective in the contemporary context. But there are people working on it. Then again, if you don't like how polarized things are now, just wait until the phase change that happens when these things are up and running and kick off the full Lebanonization of society.
Inconveniencing the general public with one's protest is probably almost always worse than doing nothing IMO. I suspect the only times it has worked (e.g., the civil rights protests of the 50s/60s) is because it provoked a response from authorities that was far more disturbing. If the police start ruthlessly beating the truckers blocking the streets then they may garner sympathy. But in general, if your method is going to ruin ordinary people's days or cost them money, then unless you expect it'll also get you beaten with a rubber hose by a cop on camera, it's probably not a good tactic.
Re: Arnold Kling on Tyler Cowen on Canada trucker convoy/BLM:
"I am more sympathetic to police than I am to Canadian health officials. What Tyler calls 'mood affiliation' would lead me to arrive at a position that is more in sympathy with the truckers and less with BLM than Tyler’s apparent [initial] views. But I agree that a heuristic of looking for rigorous thinking is worth using. A shorthand way of saying it is 'Show your work.' I think that if you are looking for clear, rigorous thinking, don’t look to any 21st-century mass movement."
I don't use a heuristic of "rigorous thinking" to make up mind about protests (the convoy, BLM, etc.) My principal heuristic: Is the protest an instance of *civil disobedience* against *tyranny of the majority* and/or *tyranny of 'experts'*?
This heuristic checks two basic boxes: form (civil disobedience) and substance (defense of minority rights).
As far as I can tell, pandemic restrictions and mandates in Canada are instances of tyranny of the majority and tyranny of 'experts' (public-health officials).
Arnold says, "Show your work." The burden of proof for restrictions and mandates is on the authorities. (Presumption of individual liberty.) Have the authorities shown clear and convincing evidence that restrictions and mandates yield great net benefits in public health?
Re: mood affiliation. Yes, I trust the motivations of most of the truckers more than I trust the motivations of most of the elites. Truckers and nurses braved the front lines in the early stage of the pandemic, when there was radical uncertainty about virulence and lethality. I have no reason to mistrust their sense of 'station and duty'.
One may agree with Martin Gurri, that "revolts of the public" aren't substitutes for governance. However, one may nonetheless support specific revolts of the public that rely on civil disobedience to abrogate unnecessary restrictions or mandates.
PS: Compare (a) Tyler Cowen's advice (20 January 2022) to a group conservative-libertarian students who chafe at arbitrary pandemic restrictions at Yale University and (b) public resistance by conservative-libertarian students to arbitrary pandemic restrictions at the University of Chicago:
(a):
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/01/my-talk-at-yale-on-university-covid-policy-and-how-universities-really-work.html
"Don't make it a crusade. [... .] If you're a top-line university adminstrator, and especially at a place like Yale, the pressures you're under and the number of constituents you have to cater to is so extreme, those are very frustrated people, they're not very free, they're kind of enslaved. [... .] Bear with it. Get rid of some of the stupidest [restrictions]. The other stuff you want to get rid of, you can do so more sustainably two weeks from now. [...] A little bit of patience now goes a long way." (Cue times: 21:00 and 33:00)
(b):
https://thechicagothinker.com/
A key issue for any protest is "what is the policy wanted"?
For truckers - end vaccine mandates. << seems VERY specific, limited, political issue.
For BLM - end "systemic racism" << it's already illegal - altho AA racism against whites is already practiced, and increasingly against successful Asians. Not good. Protesting for "impossible" to achieve "equal results"? With unpunished violence, and many killed? Hundreds of violent, deadly protests for ...to be against racism.
For Jan 6 against questionable elections, against official Biden win << Biden won, whether stolen (like JFK vs Nixon?) or not. BUT - many election rules were changed and signature verification was questionable. (In CA, less than 1% were rejected for election with mail-in, but over 20% were rejected in recall of Newsome.)
Cowen's comments to the students only work if you think that you can concede the COVID hawks point but hope that case counts never go back up and we don't have to think about it again.
But I feel like we just did that with the Delta and Omicron waves. If there is another wave, and we've all agreed that "this is the proper way to respond to a wave of cases", then you are stuck.
Moreover, I think that we are in an interative game here. Two years of this bullshit was too much. We need decision makers to understand that when the next crises comes up, if they pull anything like this, that the pushback will be so bad its not worth it.
I get that lots of people want to "just move on in two weeks and pretend it didn't happen." That's a fine sentiment and all, but not if "pretend it didn't happen" means "learn nothing and do something similar again next time."
To your points: More than 2 weeks (almost 4 weeks) have passed since Tyler Cowen advised Yale students to be patient for 2 weeks, but restrictions remain in place at Yale.
"When I hear that a particular group defends liberty . . . while this is partially true it makes me nervous. As a whole, they also seem to believe a lot of nonsense . . . . Fair numbers of them seem to hold offensive beliefs as well."
Could not the same be said of many who participated in the American Revolution; the slavery abolitionist movement; the Normandy invasion; the Jim Crow demonstrations; etc.? Shouldn't the Canadian protest be judged by its aims and means, rather than the moral and intellectual perfection of its participants?
Someone at MR pointed out that a good heuristic here is whether the "movement" has specific and limited aims which can be fulfilled, or open ended aims which are interpreted by its leaders.
If limited aims then you can discuss those aims, and if you agree to them then the movement will dissolve. The Truckers wanting COVID restrictions to end is an example.
If open ended, like BLM and so many calls for "social justice" are, then the leadership matters since the leaders will constantly be re-interpreting what social justice means and there is no particular thing you can do to satisfy and end the "movement."
On the one hand: the truckers didn't have a cell phone video of a guy dying at the hands of state officials to generate sympathy the way the BLM folks did. On the other hand, there is no paranoid conspiracy theory among the truckers that has sucked in even one tenth as many people as Systemic Racism and White Privilege. So yeah, not Tyler's best moment.
Both excellent points.
I got a video that will get you riled up.
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1489709114489925632?cxt=HHwWgMCrvf-iwawpAAAA
I have not attempted to rigorously fact-check the Guardian article that Tyler Cowen cites, but it calls opposition to vaccine mandates "anti-vax" sentiment, and claims that "there is no basis" for claims that the PM should be investigated for fascism. The first is a rather novel usage of the term. The second claim has not aged well in the week since it was written: Trudeau has invoked, for the first time ever, emergency powers to fight the protest. Such tell-tales make me skeptical that the rest of the article is fair, rather than engaging in nutpicking.
One could write a similar hatchet piece for an awful lot of establishment politicians. Should we treat the US government as illegitimate because the current president shows signs of dementia, promised to appoint a Supreme Court judge on a racist and sexist basis, committed plagiarism, selected an anti-vax veep, and engages a serial fabulist as press secretary? To borrow a phrase, "ugh", yet that is essentially the form and level of argument employed by The Guardian.
[Edited to fix editorial errors in the second paragraph.]
"Actually, the most reliable institution for generating social benefits that are rigorously calculated is a profit-seeking firm."
For sure. But what if the people you would like to benefit have neither money nor marketable skills? Then a for profit firm is unlikely to be of much help.
One thing that should be highlighted is that the "smart" (rational/analytical/elite) side of the Canadian conflict has invested itself in a position that is so deeply irrational and motivated by emotion.
Everyone concedes at this point that the trucker vaccine mandate is pointless. Rather than simply drop it (which would likely make the entire conflict go away), these supposed rational elites are sowing fear (mostly among themselves) to rationalize continuing to impose the admittedly irrational policy.
There's no rational solution here because neither side is behaving rationally. Crediting one side with more rationality is like crediting a guy poking a bear with a stick for being clearly smarter than the bear.
Cowen, and I have been a daily reader of his and Tabarrok's blog for nearly 20 years, is trying to keep his writing gigs at, first, the NYTimes, and now Bloomberg. It was painful watching him contort himself this way- I was a big fan at one time. Now I just find it amusing.
Agreed, and I am in largely the same place. I think Cowen as caught respectability disease pretty badly over the past decade or so. (I wrote about it above.) Putting his points about BLM next to his truckers point really drives it home. I wonder if he has changed his mind on BLM after all the looting and burning, or perhaps the many millions of dollars of donations that the founders spent on fancy homes for themselves?
I wish more charitable giving was based on prior results & people. Not what they promise for the future, but what they've done in the past, with what resources - and who verifies work done.
I don't much like the "Pony Express" because it seems to me to be a content-free slogan. What kind of "government operating system" would be more resilient and dynamic? Or at a minimum, less opposed to the resilience and dynamism of innovation, entrepreneurship and business?
Crickets.
Extra point: OK to innovation and entrepreneurship. Business? Be careful there. To the extent a business can capture market or governmental power, they're an impediment to the dynamism of innovation and entrepreneurship.
Re: Progressivism vs. Dynamism, Ezra Klein’s latest piece may be of interest.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/12/opinion/yellen-supply-side-liberalism.html
I liked your comments about Canadian truckers vs. BLM. Also, I generally don't have the patience to read or listen to interviews, but I thought the excerpt of Michael Eisenberg's comments was good. And yes, it's pretty similar to your comments about progressivism and dynamism.
An addendum: Blocking traffic was one of the tactics of BLM activists. While better than rioting, I didn't care for it (though was not personally affected by it). More to the point, though, I think it cost them support because a lot of people were upset at having things disrupted like that. I expect the same is true for the trucker blockades.
Eh, blocking transportation is a very old protest tactic.
Striking railway workers in Russia 1905 for example, which forced the Tsar to agree to a constitution.
Crippling transportation is a mid point between civil disobedience and actual violence.
At the end of the day your opinion of whether its justified or not will depend on your opinion of the goals being sought and whether people tried less disruptive means first but were rebuffed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1905)
"Not sure what it is, but there has to be a better way of resisting".
Maybe, maybe not. If resistance to legitimate lawful authority is effective it is also at least somewhat insurrectionary and if not 'treason' then maybe a few micro-treasons. The more things get out of hand, the closer to actual treason things get, and we all know the penalty for treason.
At any rate, be careful what you wish for.
Depends what you mean by 'better'. If it's 'more effective' in terms of pressuring TPTB to reverse course when they think they have sufficient political support to win elections, then then that is unfortunately synonymous with 'painfully disruptive', since otherwise, why would they care?
Road blocking and demonstrating without permits are traditionally considered paradigmatic instances of non-violent civil disobedience. But that doesn't mean they aren't illegal, which they are and should be. Unlike Cowen I can be consistent in saying that anyone doing these things should simply be arrested whether they want an independent India or to defund the police or to end vaccine mandates or to occupy wall street or to overturn an election result.
I can extent principled sympathy for their 'aims' (such as they are) when there is overlap with my own values, but I am not fooling myself to pretend that when I do so I am not sympathizing with people who are nevertheless acting like criminals and who ought to be treated like criminals.
On the other hand, it remains legal (for the time being - though probably not for much longer when bad people are doing it for bad reasons) to peacefully abstain from entering into voluntary transactions and arrangements, so long as one isn't doing so in a way that affects protected groups in a disproportionate manner (though, duh, that is always going to be the charge anyway.)
And if enough people can conspire to do this in a strategic manner such that most of them actually sticks with it even at high, short-term personal cost, then to say the level of potential disruption would be 'painful' enough to make the pips squeak would be to understate things in the extreme.
Until now, no one has quite figured out how to implement the set of mechanisms necessary to secure and maintain such a degree of solidarity in matters of the kinds of civil resistance likely to be effective in the contemporary context. But there are people working on it. Then again, if you don't like how polarized things are now, just wait until the phase change that happens when these things are up and running and kick off the full Lebanonization of society.
Inconveniencing the general public with one's protest is probably almost always worse than doing nothing IMO. I suspect the only times it has worked (e.g., the civil rights protests of the 50s/60s) is because it provoked a response from authorities that was far more disturbing. If the police start ruthlessly beating the truckers blocking the streets then they may garner sympathy. But in general, if your method is going to ruin ordinary people's days or cost them money, then unless you expect it'll also get you beaten with a rubber hose by a cop on camera, it's probably not a good tactic.
These guys got hacked: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/givesendgo-hacked-names-of-freedom-convoy-donors-leaked