Noah Smith on Tamerlane; Peter Savodnik on neoliberals; Tyler Cowen on Woke Diplomacy; Martin Gurri on the media war; The Zvi on how to use Twitter; Kling on Dark Triad leaders
I was surprised that your Klaas review did not bring up the issue of competitive governments. I see the challenge of avoiding Dark Triad leaders on a consistent basis as impossible. The only solution is to allow as many "exit" options as possible at every level, unbundling government services, thereby forcing service providers to compete on quality, cost, and the satisfaction of niches. "Let a Thousand Nations Bloom," support new jurisdictions around the world along with ever greater autonomy for Native American jurisdictions within the US. Monopolistic control always results in Dark Triad domination. Competitive service provision in does not systematically avoid Dark Triad leaders, but it does reward quality service provision while limiting the damage done by Dark Triad leaders. If a particular Dark Triad leader improves quality and reduces cost, so be it. But once they begin serving their own needs at the expense of those of their customers, they lose market share.
The possibility of "destroying" the Russian economy is not, in reality, on the table, but supporters of sanctions act as if it is. The way to destroy an economy is to first blow up as many cities as you can and then to flood the country with millions of hostile infantry. Alternatively, you can obliterate the country with nuclear bombs. Nothing short of either of those options can destroy a national economy. Russia is significantly more dependent on trade than the United States, on a percentage GDP basis, but only a portion of a portion of those trade partners are impacted by the sanctions. Further, as happened in every other wartime blockade/sanctions regime, neutrals just bank the difference.
Supporters of sanctions frame it as a humane and politically feasible alternative to war, but it is necessarily self-harming because the only people you can enforce the sanctions on are your own entities and to some extent those of your closest allies. Sanctions supporters portray it in language as if they are the same as bombs and invasions ("this will destroy country X") but the impacts are manifestly different because no capital is destroyed and no humans are directly killed. It is not even the same as a siege or blockade because land border crossings are hard to monitor and unless you are destroying ports and raiding shipping, there is no complete interdiction of sea trade. In this round of sanctions the chief harmed parties are in Europe, and because of political reality, it will mean we have to bail out Europe, not that Europeans will just be allowed to be unemployed by the hundreds of millions. This is another way the sanctions party can pretend that it's cost-free -- just forcing US taxpayers to indirectly foot the bill via the bailouts which will be needed to sustain civilized life in Europe. Also, the crowing about cutting Russia off from US multinationals is sort of stupid, because those multinationals would not be in Russia if they were not earning a profit. That is forcing US companies to absorb the costs of the war policy. They're crowing about an action that leads to the expropriation of American enterprises and the loss of massive revenues. That is a bad trend line: it does not lead to increased global US business success. In the same way that there are nonlinear gains from trade, trade redirection also creates nonlinear losses. The sanctions are not necessarily "destroying" trade, but just redirecting it on a long term basis to the new China-lead TPP trading bloc and elsewhere.
I chuckle when people like Noah Smith write on such topics in that smug and confident tone in line with the pretense that they actually know what they're talking about, but whenever so doing reveal themselves to be a minimum of three degrees of separation removed from anyone who has any knowledge about or experience with military matters.
In fact, Smith has it almost exactly backwards. The fact is that the military gets *practically nothing* of usefulness from the many years its recruits have spent being 'educated' because for the vast majority of people the current education system is an almost unfathomable waste of time and money. So the military presumes it has to start almost from scratch to teach new personnel how to do their job. This is just the combination of two truths: "The Null Hypothesis meets The Case Against Education." School teaches most people mostly nothing, and what they do learn later has almost nothing whatsoever to do with their schooling.
You might say, "Ok, well, at least literacy right? It has to save some time and money that new recruits are able to read and write?" No, and Brandt wrote a good article about this, "Drafting U.S. Literacy." https://sci-hub.st/10.2307/4140731
The short version is that in WWII, by early 1944 things were getting kind of desperate in the run-up to D-Day and also troop demographics were disproportionately white, something people apparently cared about even before Twitter, somehow.
So instead of rejecting them, the Army just dropped its former literacy requirement and started trying to teach these guys to read. Which it did. With 95% success rate. In only two months. And, I'm guessing for such a tiny fraction of the amount of money we currently throw in a burn pit - oh, excuse the typo, I mean, "public school" - that if you showed the ratio to Noah Smith his head would explode.
True, there are a few skills that, in practice, the military prefers one to have learned prior to joining the service. But none of these are taught well in the public school system. For example, having a lot of experience at being a mechanic. But that's a special exception, not the rule.
In fact, the military is one of the biggest and most important pedagogical institutions in the country and actually cares whether people learn what they need to know. It invests billions into actually real human capital (as opposed to fake version of 'years of schooling' or credentials) and then releases it in the form of veterans free of charge as a private and public good to be used by individuals and other organizations. This is actually ironically compatible with Smith's proposal in a way, but I'm sure running his statist problems through *the military* is not what he had in mind.
The military is more effective at teaching that the university-modelled education system because it teaches with as much hands-on experience and on-the-job training as possible, not to mention the, ahem, very personal attention you can get which, while hardly pleasant, can have very impressive results. Motivation is key to learning, and they have ways to motivate you, private.
Now, most people know this, but think it's just about how to kill people, break things, and operate equipment with almost no equivalent or application to civilian life for the vast majority of people and jobs. That's part of it, sure, and those are important jobs.
But there are also plenty of skills which do overlap into the generic workforce. It is also good substitute for another area where public school (and culture, and family life) often fails, which is "Hansonian Education" of adequately preparing children for working life in an industrial society by getting young men and women to practice the basics of discipline, teamwork, diligence, conscientiousness, reliability, self-regulation, punctuality, obedience to authority, and so forth, probably at the last moment of their youths when the 'intervention' still has a chance to work to effect positive change over one's whole lifetime in literally transformative experiences.
What is also an aspect of Hansonian Education is that by giving very young people early experience of working environments where managing people and working in teams effectively are critically important and where standards and results matter (or, ugh, once used to), it arms them, so to speak, with the ability to integrate into the organizational capital of other similar, results-oriented entities. Many, many successful veterans will attribute their success in life to lessons they learned while in the service, and this is a real and common phenomenon. These are neither just a few anecdotes nor a kind of selective nostalgia or fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.
is the decision by the american deep state not to enforce certain laws (emigration from south america, petty theft by black people etc) a case of deregulation ?
"Not a government that intervenes everywhere Noah Smith thinks it should. State capacity is inversely related to state extensiveness."
I do not see many places where the State intervenes unnecessarily (maybe farm price supports, the Jones Act?), but rather intervenes incorrectly, not on the basis of good cost benefit analysis.
Re: the Klaas book, I think an underappreciated obstacle to good governance is that the process of governance, especially on a super-Dunbar scale, is extremely boring, indeed stultifying, to most smart and capable people. The exceptions are Leslie Knope types, and sometimes you can build good institutions by attracting these types: I served on a civil grand jury (a sort of local government watchdog) that was like this and produced what I thought were excellent reports. But the more real power an institution has, the harder it is to do this.
So you have to have some other incentive to overcome boredom to avoid being dominated by a combination of dullards and people who love power for its own sake. For corporate management the motivator is a high salary, and this is also one of the reasons Singapore famously works so well. For nonprofits, love of the nonprofit's mission can convince good people to endure the boredom. For neighborhood associations or New England town meetings, a personal direct stake in the decisions made can motivate participation.
But I wonder if there is mechanism design headroom to change how governance is done in a way that makes it less boring. Gamification? Novel protocols for deliberation? I lack all relevant expertise but maybe some enterprising social scientist could pick it up.
I was surprised that your Klaas review did not bring up the issue of competitive governments. I see the challenge of avoiding Dark Triad leaders on a consistent basis as impossible. The only solution is to allow as many "exit" options as possible at every level, unbundling government services, thereby forcing service providers to compete on quality, cost, and the satisfaction of niches. "Let a Thousand Nations Bloom," support new jurisdictions around the world along with ever greater autonomy for Native American jurisdictions within the US. Monopolistic control always results in Dark Triad domination. Competitive service provision in does not systematically avoid Dark Triad leaders, but it does reward quality service provision while limiting the damage done by Dark Triad leaders. If a particular Dark Triad leader improves quality and reduces cost, so be it. But once they begin serving their own needs at the expense of those of their customers, they lose market share.
The possibility of "destroying" the Russian economy is not, in reality, on the table, but supporters of sanctions act as if it is. The way to destroy an economy is to first blow up as many cities as you can and then to flood the country with millions of hostile infantry. Alternatively, you can obliterate the country with nuclear bombs. Nothing short of either of those options can destroy a national economy. Russia is significantly more dependent on trade than the United States, on a percentage GDP basis, but only a portion of a portion of those trade partners are impacted by the sanctions. Further, as happened in every other wartime blockade/sanctions regime, neutrals just bank the difference.
Supporters of sanctions frame it as a humane and politically feasible alternative to war, but it is necessarily self-harming because the only people you can enforce the sanctions on are your own entities and to some extent those of your closest allies. Sanctions supporters portray it in language as if they are the same as bombs and invasions ("this will destroy country X") but the impacts are manifestly different because no capital is destroyed and no humans are directly killed. It is not even the same as a siege or blockade because land border crossings are hard to monitor and unless you are destroying ports and raiding shipping, there is no complete interdiction of sea trade. In this round of sanctions the chief harmed parties are in Europe, and because of political reality, it will mean we have to bail out Europe, not that Europeans will just be allowed to be unemployed by the hundreds of millions. This is another way the sanctions party can pretend that it's cost-free -- just forcing US taxpayers to indirectly foot the bill via the bailouts which will be needed to sustain civilized life in Europe. Also, the crowing about cutting Russia off from US multinationals is sort of stupid, because those multinationals would not be in Russia if they were not earning a profit. That is forcing US companies to absorb the costs of the war policy. They're crowing about an action that leads to the expropriation of American enterprises and the loss of massive revenues. That is a bad trend line: it does not lead to increased global US business success. In the same way that there are nonlinear gains from trade, trade redirection also creates nonlinear losses. The sanctions are not necessarily "destroying" trade, but just redirecting it on a long term basis to the new China-lead TPP trading bloc and elsewhere.
"a literate and educated recruitment pool ... "
I chuckle when people like Noah Smith write on such topics in that smug and confident tone in line with the pretense that they actually know what they're talking about, but whenever so doing reveal themselves to be a minimum of three degrees of separation removed from anyone who has any knowledge about or experience with military matters.
In fact, Smith has it almost exactly backwards. The fact is that the military gets *practically nothing* of usefulness from the many years its recruits have spent being 'educated' because for the vast majority of people the current education system is an almost unfathomable waste of time and money. So the military presumes it has to start almost from scratch to teach new personnel how to do their job. This is just the combination of two truths: "The Null Hypothesis meets The Case Against Education." School teaches most people mostly nothing, and what they do learn later has almost nothing whatsoever to do with their schooling.
You might say, "Ok, well, at least literacy right? It has to save some time and money that new recruits are able to read and write?" No, and Brandt wrote a good article about this, "Drafting U.S. Literacy." https://sci-hub.st/10.2307/4140731
The short version is that in WWII, by early 1944 things were getting kind of desperate in the run-up to D-Day and also troop demographics were disproportionately white, something people apparently cared about even before Twitter, somehow.
So instead of rejecting them, the Army just dropped its former literacy requirement and started trying to teach these guys to read. Which it did. With 95% success rate. In only two months. And, I'm guessing for such a tiny fraction of the amount of money we currently throw in a burn pit - oh, excuse the typo, I mean, "public school" - that if you showed the ratio to Noah Smith his head would explode.
True, there are a few skills that, in practice, the military prefers one to have learned prior to joining the service. But none of these are taught well in the public school system. For example, having a lot of experience at being a mechanic. But that's a special exception, not the rule.
In fact, the military is one of the biggest and most important pedagogical institutions in the country and actually cares whether people learn what they need to know. It invests billions into actually real human capital (as opposed to fake version of 'years of schooling' or credentials) and then releases it in the form of veterans free of charge as a private and public good to be used by individuals and other organizations. This is actually ironically compatible with Smith's proposal in a way, but I'm sure running his statist problems through *the military* is not what he had in mind.
The military is more effective at teaching that the university-modelled education system because it teaches with as much hands-on experience and on-the-job training as possible, not to mention the, ahem, very personal attention you can get which, while hardly pleasant, can have very impressive results. Motivation is key to learning, and they have ways to motivate you, private.
Now, most people know this, but think it's just about how to kill people, break things, and operate equipment with almost no equivalent or application to civilian life for the vast majority of people and jobs. That's part of it, sure, and those are important jobs.
But there are also plenty of skills which do overlap into the generic workforce. It is also good substitute for another area where public school (and culture, and family life) often fails, which is "Hansonian Education" of adequately preparing children for working life in an industrial society by getting young men and women to practice the basics of discipline, teamwork, diligence, conscientiousness, reliability, self-regulation, punctuality, obedience to authority, and so forth, probably at the last moment of their youths when the 'intervention' still has a chance to work to effect positive change over one's whole lifetime in literally transformative experiences.
What is also an aspect of Hansonian Education is that by giving very young people early experience of working environments where managing people and working in teams effectively are critically important and where standards and results matter (or, ugh, once used to), it arms them, so to speak, with the ability to integrate into the organizational capital of other similar, results-oriented entities. Many, many successful veterans will attribute their success in life to lessons they learned while in the service, and this is a real and common phenomenon. These are neither just a few anecdotes nor a kind of selective nostalgia or fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.
is the decision by the american deep state not to enforce certain laws (emigration from south america, petty theft by black people etc) a case of deregulation ?
"Not a government that intervenes everywhere Noah Smith thinks it should. State capacity is inversely related to state extensiveness."
I do not see many places where the State intervenes unnecessarily (maybe farm price supports, the Jones Act?), but rather intervenes incorrectly, not on the basis of good cost benefit analysis.
Re: the Klaas book, I think an underappreciated obstacle to good governance is that the process of governance, especially on a super-Dunbar scale, is extremely boring, indeed stultifying, to most smart and capable people. The exceptions are Leslie Knope types, and sometimes you can build good institutions by attracting these types: I served on a civil grand jury (a sort of local government watchdog) that was like this and produced what I thought were excellent reports. But the more real power an institution has, the harder it is to do this.
So you have to have some other incentive to overcome boredom to avoid being dominated by a combination of dullards and people who love power for its own sake. For corporate management the motivator is a high salary, and this is also one of the reasons Singapore famously works so well. For nonprofits, love of the nonprofit's mission can convince good people to endure the boredom. For neighborhood associations or New England town meetings, a personal direct stake in the decisions made can motivate participation.
But I wonder if there is mechanism design headroom to change how governance is done in a way that makes it less boring. Gamification? Novel protocols for deliberation? I lack all relevant expertise but maybe some enterprising social scientist could pick it up.