Links to Consider, 7/12

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

The other day, we discussed the state of the economy. We dealt with puzzles about the labor market, the stock market, and the unsustainable budget deficit. Audio below:

Matt Goodwin writes,

Most Brits think our economy is rigged to favour the rich and powerful while many of them now believe globalisation is weakening, not strengthening, our society. Most Brits think immigration has been too high, want to end the failed experiment with mass immigration, and want to control their own borders.

Most Brits loathe Woke political correctness. Most think it’s gone too far, feel unable to challenge the beliefs of the ruling class, think cancel culture is ridiculous, and hate being lectured to by woke corporations which simultaneously avoid tax, undermine workers rights, and fuel growing inequalities.

And yet,

the people who run Britain no longer seem to care about the rest of Britain. They're reshaping the country, they're reshaping our institutions, around an elite, university-educated minority who simply no longer share the values held by many people, and who often look down on the rest of the country.

Years ago, Christopher Lasch wrote The Revolt of the Elites, primarily about America.

From an electoral standpoint, populism in the UK is the proverbial $20 bill (or 20-pound note) lying on the sidewalk. Goodwin is aghast at the refusal of the Conservative Party to pick it up.

In the U.S., many older pundits on the left are equally aghast at the Democratic Party’s refusal to pick up the $20 bill. These pundits remember when the Democrats wanted to show off their union cards, not their pronouns.

On the other side, there are many Republicans eager to pick up that $20 bill, and they are willing to throw libertarians under the bus in order to grab for it.

Alice Evans writes,

East Asians typically prefer social cohesion and harmony, rather than self-expression and individualism. They are ‘culturally tight’. While Latin Americans believe it’s fine to pick and choose your friends, East Asians tend to expect group loyalty.

…The available evidence points to ancestral rice farming, socio-economic threats, Confucianism and institutions. It’s difficult to disentangle their relative importance. Sorry if you think it’s a cop-out, but I’m tempted to believe in a story of mutually reinforcing co-evolution.

In a follow-up post, Evans writes,

Globally, cultural tightness seems more common in places where farming was once extremely labour intensive and necessarily interdependent.

…When farmers were forced to be more economically autonomous, they became much more self-expressive. This echoes a globally even process of structural transformation and cultural individualism.

I would like to see too types of interdependence sorted out. One is, “I can’t produce crops without help.” The other is, “I can bring in the crops myself, but I need a market to exchange them for my consumer needs.” The former I would expect to be collectivist, the latter I would expect to be individualist.

Ted Gioia writes,

Just look at the polluted streams of information in your own life, and try to find a single safe space where the data stream is fresh and clean.

He lists thirty causal factors.

Robert Solow is interviewed by Steve Levitt. My sense is that Levitt is much more well known in the public at large, but Solow has higher status among academic economists. At about minute 15, Solow says that people think that GDP measures well-being, but it actually measures economic activity. I have said this myself, and that indicates how he and I think alike.

I think of economic activity as specialization and trade. We outsource our needs to one another, rather than provide for them ourselves. GDP measures that outsourcing. If I build a deck myself, my labor does not count as GDP. If I pay you to build the deck, then your labor does count as GDP.

Around minute 44, Solow says that if economics had consisted of the sort of pointless mathematical models that became popular in macro, he would not have studied it. I would say that neither he nor I felt at home in economics in the last two decades of the twentieth century. I never took an academic job (unless you count a few years as an adjunct) and instead found fulfillment in business. He stayed on at MIT, but he spent a lot of time on his sailboat, and he did little academic writing, other than the occasional complaint about what macroeconomists were doing.

Substacks referenced above:

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The Roots of Cooperation

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30 Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-pocalypse

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Ep. 1. The Revolution is Failing