Our discussion of the economy; Matt Goodwin on the revolt of the UK elites; Alice Evans on collectivist culture; Ted Gioia on social epistemology; Robert Solow interviewed by Steve Levitt
Solow is a good example of my impression of the extraordinary average physical longevity of many famous modem economists. He's 98! Friedman and Samuelson both made it to 94, Schelling to 95, Galbraith 97, Coase to 102. Hayek was 92. Lucas and Knight both died young at only 85. Irving Fisher only to 80, but keep in mind he was born shortly after the Civil War and so still long before most of the good stuff in modern medicine. Keynes is the real outlier, died after a series of heart attacks at 62, probably because exacerbated by all the opium and amobarbital Janos Plesch was giving him in 1946, and otherwise he might have gone on for decades: both his parents made it to 97, which for someone born in 1850s Britain was pretty good!
Not a robust statistical study, but enough to spur someone to look into it. Lends some extra weight to the hypothesis that high IQ is largely "health" in the sense of lower genetic load and fewer "spelling mistakes" that tend in aggregate to decrease the average age of death.
Kling has repeatedly said Trump and Trump voters have thrown libertarians under the bus.
There are a lot of libertarians who like Trump, or at least disliked Biden and the Democrats much more: Pundits like John Stossel, Dave Smith, David Rubin. Also Trump staffers like Art Laffer, Stephen Moore, Larry Kudlow, Casey B Mulligan, and maybe Scott Atlas too. Those are the ones that come to mind.
From June 2023, "The Koch Network raised over $70 million to defeat Trump in the Republican Primary."
Koch was equally opposed to Trump in 2016. Charles Koch did an interview with the WSJ (https://www.wsj.com/articles/charles-koch-says-his-partisanship-was-a-mistake-11605286893) saying that supporting the Tea Party and fiscal restraint was a failure and he regretted doing that. His focus moving forward was to build bridges with the left and focus on immigration (open borders) and criminal justice reform. That is Koch + CATO throwing Trump and Republican voters, and arguably even much of libertarian principles under the bus not the other way around.
“Most Brits think our economy is rigged to favour the rich and...” This would be Cradle-to-Grave welfare statist Britain, whose population expect others to provide for them what they don’t provide for themselves, who believe ‘free’ healthcare is a Right - the National Health Service a religion - and who believe they have a Right to other people’s money - especially if ‘rich’ - (to be taken by the State) to be spent on them? It is an economy in which the inhabitants sold their souls to the Devil, Socialism, in 1945, and is rigged so that everybody is entitled to live off each other - a mutually parasitical society - each deluded in believing they can suck more blood out of the other parasites than the others suck out of them. General Elections are de facto auctions where votes are sold to the highest bidder, the one who offers the most free stuff and lots of it. ‘Great’ Britain indeed. (I’m English.)
This is well said. I'm no fan of our university sheep-dipped ruling liberal elite or of the politicians that front it but the malaise runs much deeper. Perhaps post war Britain is an advanced case of Western democratic liberalism's greatest flaw - its tendency to flatter 'ordinary folk', absolving them of any personal responsibility for the mess we're in.
Analyses almost always fight shy of this and instead look for some kind of bogey - whether it's 'the elite' or 'politicians' or 'economic forces' - as a locus for blame in order that an illusion can be maintained that absolves 'ordinary decent folk' of blame. (Matt Goodwin's plausible but shallow analyses are a case in point here.)
To take another context, it is an almost universal conceit that the horrors of The Cultural Revolution were all about Mao and his gang. The truth is much darker. Mao would have been nothing without tens of millions of biddable, favour-seeking, grudge-bearing 'ordinary folk'.
That’s right. If a Body Politic elects those who govern, the whole responsibility for the outcome is theirs. If not why have voting? But consider: elected rulers with unlimited tax raising powers which can be enforced by the coercive powers of the State (Magna Carta was supposed to have put an end to that) and universal suffrage. This gives the rulers a huge slush fund with which to bribe the electorate which soon enough figured this out - bribery and corruption was inevitable, the most guileful politicians, the crony class, and voters with the sharpest elbows being the net beneficiaries.
Well said! 2 years in London paying 55% tax while being blamed for the ‘08 financial crash was educational. The England I read about In books growing up was definitely gone by then.
The financial crisis was a case of blaming the bartender instead of the party organisers when the brawling broke out. It was the culmination of political intervention into markets going back to Bill Clinton and his regulation to get lenders to give mortgages to high risk individuals (aka Blacks) by using federal (taxpayers) money to underwrite them - it was good politics to win over the Black vote - it encouraged reckless lending which together with too low interest rates led to mis-allocation of resources in the economy, the collapse of the property market, toxic mortgage backed securities and all that followed. That’s a rather over simple explanation, but it gives the gist.
Sadly - the England of my grand parents, parents and my youth was sacrificed on the alter of ‘equality’, redistribution of wealth, cultural and constitutional vandalism, and ‘modernisation’ for its own sake. London isn’t England, it never was, but the metropolitan elite who infest it, impose their ideas on the Shires and Counties like never before. We need to sharpen the pitchforks.
This agricultural labor intensity requirement as an explanation of cultural difference is something I have seen a few times. W. Keith Campbell even mentions it in the new Science of Narcissism with regard to wheat farming having the potential to produce more narcissism due to the lack of collectivity required in relation to rice farming, this is asserted without any research from China showing higher narcissism levels in the North or where wheat farming was prevalent, only the implication that this could account for westerners being more individualistic and hence more narcissistic. There is some research within the last 5 to 7 years comparing the United States and Japan with regard to the construal level as an attempt to see if there are difference in psychological outlook between the two cultures. They generally find that there is not a difference. In one it actually came out that people in Japan seemed to value individualism and nonconformity even more than those in the west, the exact opposite finding they were looking for. I don't doubt for one second an ongoing gene culture coevolution process with regard to to the structure of society with agricultural intensity being a factor prior to the very recent present. If one reads Razib Khan's stuff this may need to be pushed back in time farther to get a better sense of the psychological inputs that may have contributed some to these cultural differences. There was pottery in Japan 15,000 years ago, 7,000 years before there was pottery in Europe and the Middle East. Why would one need pots if they were not sedentary and how does this genetic and sedentary continuity affect psychological genetic evolution to the present? There was also greater genetic continuity in the last 30,000 years in China, Korea, and Japan than in a lot of the rest of the world, Europe especially. The people of Europe are roughly a tenth this old in terms of genetics and geography being aligned. China, Korea, and Japan with regard to cultural tightness coming mainly from agricultural intensity can also be pushed back on by the Turchin meta-ethnic frontier hypothesis for China and the reforming of their empire over and over again. So one might actually see similarities between these countries for entirely different reasons, even if there is an agricultural factor contributing in the same direction in all cases.
Correction: It was not the construal level, but self construal literature, which Evans did link to. There was some construal level studies that did not show a difference, the self construal when focusing on aggregating different scales as Evans link does show some differences.
I think the average Brit also feels a sense of confusion and discouragement due to being told over and over again, usually by the elite, that the UK is in a state of terminal decline. Which considering actual data on the economy, education, research, productivity is not warranted:
Solow is a good example of my impression of the extraordinary average physical longevity of many famous modem economists. He's 98! Friedman and Samuelson both made it to 94, Schelling to 95, Galbraith 97, Coase to 102. Hayek was 92. Lucas and Knight both died young at only 85. Irving Fisher only to 80, but keep in mind he was born shortly after the Civil War and so still long before most of the good stuff in modern medicine. Keynes is the real outlier, died after a series of heart attacks at 62, probably because exacerbated by all the opium and amobarbital Janos Plesch was giving him in 1946, and otherwise he might have gone on for decades: both his parents made it to 97, which for someone born in 1850s Britain was pretty good!
Not a robust statistical study, but enough to spur someone to look into it. Lends some extra weight to the hypothesis that high IQ is largely "health" in the sense of lower genetic load and fewer "spelling mistakes" that tend in aggregate to decrease the average age of death.
There has to be some compensation for the boring life of an economist!
Kling has repeatedly said Trump and Trump voters have thrown libertarians under the bus.
There are a lot of libertarians who like Trump, or at least disliked Biden and the Democrats much more: Pundits like John Stossel, Dave Smith, David Rubin. Also Trump staffers like Art Laffer, Stephen Moore, Larry Kudlow, Casey B Mulligan, and maybe Scott Atlas too. Those are the ones that come to mind.
From June 2023, "The Koch Network raised over $70 million to defeat Trump in the Republican Primary."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/us/politics/koch-network-trump-2024.html
Koch was equally opposed to Trump in 2016. Charles Koch did an interview with the WSJ (https://www.wsj.com/articles/charles-koch-says-his-partisanship-was-a-mistake-11605286893) saying that supporting the Tea Party and fiscal restraint was a failure and he regretted doing that. His focus moving forward was to build bridges with the left and focus on immigration (open borders) and criminal justice reform. That is Koch + CATO throwing Trump and Republican voters, and arguably even much of libertarian principles under the bus not the other way around.
“Most Brits think our economy is rigged to favour the rich and...” This would be Cradle-to-Grave welfare statist Britain, whose population expect others to provide for them what they don’t provide for themselves, who believe ‘free’ healthcare is a Right - the National Health Service a religion - and who believe they have a Right to other people’s money - especially if ‘rich’ - (to be taken by the State) to be spent on them? It is an economy in which the inhabitants sold their souls to the Devil, Socialism, in 1945, and is rigged so that everybody is entitled to live off each other - a mutually parasitical society - each deluded in believing they can suck more blood out of the other parasites than the others suck out of them. General Elections are de facto auctions where votes are sold to the highest bidder, the one who offers the most free stuff and lots of it. ‘Great’ Britain indeed. (I’m English.)
This is well said. I'm no fan of our university sheep-dipped ruling liberal elite or of the politicians that front it but the malaise runs much deeper. Perhaps post war Britain is an advanced case of Western democratic liberalism's greatest flaw - its tendency to flatter 'ordinary folk', absolving them of any personal responsibility for the mess we're in.
Analyses almost always fight shy of this and instead look for some kind of bogey - whether it's 'the elite' or 'politicians' or 'economic forces' - as a locus for blame in order that an illusion can be maintained that absolves 'ordinary decent folk' of blame. (Matt Goodwin's plausible but shallow analyses are a case in point here.)
To take another context, it is an almost universal conceit that the horrors of The Cultural Revolution were all about Mao and his gang. The truth is much darker. Mao would have been nothing without tens of millions of biddable, favour-seeking, grudge-bearing 'ordinary folk'.
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
That’s right. If a Body Politic elects those who govern, the whole responsibility for the outcome is theirs. If not why have voting? But consider: elected rulers with unlimited tax raising powers which can be enforced by the coercive powers of the State (Magna Carta was supposed to have put an end to that) and universal suffrage. This gives the rulers a huge slush fund with which to bribe the electorate which soon enough figured this out - bribery and corruption was inevitable, the most guileful politicians, the crony class, and voters with the sharpest elbows being the net beneficiaries.
Well said! 2 years in London paying 55% tax while being blamed for the ‘08 financial crash was educational. The England I read about In books growing up was definitely gone by then.
The financial crisis was a case of blaming the bartender instead of the party organisers when the brawling broke out. It was the culmination of political intervention into markets going back to Bill Clinton and his regulation to get lenders to give mortgages to high risk individuals (aka Blacks) by using federal (taxpayers) money to underwrite them - it was good politics to win over the Black vote - it encouraged reckless lending which together with too low interest rates led to mis-allocation of resources in the economy, the collapse of the property market, toxic mortgage backed securities and all that followed. That’s a rather over simple explanation, but it gives the gist.
Sadly - the England of my grand parents, parents and my youth was sacrificed on the alter of ‘equality’, redistribution of wealth, cultural and constitutional vandalism, and ‘modernisation’ for its own sake. London isn’t England, it never was, but the metropolitan elite who infest it, impose their ideas on the Shires and Counties like never before. We need to sharpen the pitchforks.
Re: Evans,
This agricultural labor intensity requirement as an explanation of cultural difference is something I have seen a few times. W. Keith Campbell even mentions it in the new Science of Narcissism with regard to wheat farming having the potential to produce more narcissism due to the lack of collectivity required in relation to rice farming, this is asserted without any research from China showing higher narcissism levels in the North or where wheat farming was prevalent, only the implication that this could account for westerners being more individualistic and hence more narcissistic. There is some research within the last 5 to 7 years comparing the United States and Japan with regard to the construal level as an attempt to see if there are difference in psychological outlook between the two cultures. They generally find that there is not a difference. In one it actually came out that people in Japan seemed to value individualism and nonconformity even more than those in the west, the exact opposite finding they were looking for. I don't doubt for one second an ongoing gene culture coevolution process with regard to to the structure of society with agricultural intensity being a factor prior to the very recent present. If one reads Razib Khan's stuff this may need to be pushed back in time farther to get a better sense of the psychological inputs that may have contributed some to these cultural differences. There was pottery in Japan 15,000 years ago, 7,000 years before there was pottery in Europe and the Middle East. Why would one need pots if they were not sedentary and how does this genetic and sedentary continuity affect psychological genetic evolution to the present? There was also greater genetic continuity in the last 30,000 years in China, Korea, and Japan than in a lot of the rest of the world, Europe especially. The people of Europe are roughly a tenth this old in terms of genetics and geography being aligned. China, Korea, and Japan with regard to cultural tightness coming mainly from agricultural intensity can also be pushed back on by the Turchin meta-ethnic frontier hypothesis for China and the reforming of their empire over and over again. So one might actually see similarities between these countries for entirely different reasons, even if there is an agricultural factor contributing in the same direction in all cases.
Correction: It was not the construal level, but self construal literature, which Evans did link to. There was some construal level studies that did not show a difference, the self construal when focusing on aggregating different scales as Evans link does show some differences.
poor libertarians
there's a 20$ bill on the political table but you can't expect THEM to pick it up
it has pleb cooties on it
and if they reach for it the cathedral might not invite them to the next faculty event
thax
pointless mathematical models are why I quit university with just a Masters and ended up in banking rather than a PhD.
I think the average Brit also feels a sense of confusion and discouragement due to being told over and over again, usually by the elite, that the UK is in a state of terminal decline. Which considering actual data on the economy, education, research, productivity is not warranted:
https://javiero.substack.com/p/is-albion-sinking
https://javiero.substack.com/p/is-the-uk-a-zombie-nation