Links to Consider, 9/22/2024

Martin Gurri on mistaking the state for God; Andrey Mir on platform economics; Jane Psmith on a book about the despair of our Founding Fathers; Marty Makary on the medical profession

Note: I had trouble getting the post that I wanted scheduled yesterday to go out when I wanted. In case you missed it, it is about Walter Russell Mead’s foreign policy typology. Now, on to today’s post.

Martin Gurri writes,

For reasons too complex to delve into here, the sources of meaning and spirituality began to wither and die. Attendance at religious services, for example, has tumbled precipitously. So has membership in Masonic organizations and participation in sports leagues for both children and adults. Connection to neighborhood and community has largely disappeared—the loss of trust in government in part reflects our lack of trust in one another. Families are broken or nonexistent. A nation of joiners and volunteers first dissolved into a passive TV audience—and finally blew apart, with a rude noise, among the volatile conflicts of the web.

…Hungry for a loftier state of being, many somehow imagine they have found it in bashing the dull machinery of representational government. These seekers have mistaken Leviathan for God, the will to power for the state of grace—and, by exalting political action almost literally to heaven, they have succumbed to what might be called the transcendental temptation. Only politics, they believe, can save the earth. Only politics can establish social justice. Only politics can preserve the “normies” from the pedophiles who run the country.

Andrey Mir writes,

on today’s Internet, reach is king

…The most valuable asset of a platform is connectivity: its ability to reach a sufficient number of users…

It follows that the platform best serving modern users’ interests is monopolistic. If all users gather on a single platform, then all possible matches will happen. Users will benefit the most from only one Facebook, only one Google, only one Amazon, only one X, only one Tinder, and only one car-sharing service.

…The environmental power of the platforms over our digital personalities is limitless. Shadow-banning (the canceling of one’s digital presence on behalf of the regnant ideology) and un-personing (disabling one’s ability to participate in, say, digital banking) have already shown us the contours of the future. The next stage of digital biopolitics will involve social scoring: we will be obliged to live an approved digital life—or pay the price.

Jane Psmith writes,

Why did they despair? Different reasons for different men, obviously, but they fall into four main categories: political partisanship, the relative power balance between the states and the federal government, the poor moral character of the American people, and the sectional divisions that arose over the question of slavery. Rasmussen frames the book as a discussion of the four most famous Founding Fathers, each of whom exemplified one of these reasons (in order: Washington, Hamilton, John Adams, Jefferson)

In a podcast with Russ Roberts, Marty Makary says,

we don't talk about that we need to talk about: General body inflammation, mitochondrial health, food as medicine, micronutrients, the role of the microbiome, and the hormone systems in the body.

…We have the most over-medicated generation in human history. And, the path that we're on is not a good path. Pretty soon every teenager is going to be on multiple medications on the trajectory that we have now.

For me, this brings up an entire issue of how heterodoxy and contrarianism relate to the mainstream. People who are heterodox tend to disagree not only with the mainstream but also with one another. For example, my PSST approach to macroeconomics is heterodox. Modern Monetary Theory is also heterodox. But if you forced me to choose between mainstream macro and MMT, I would choose mainstream macro.

Perhaps if you were forced to choose between mainstream medicine and Makary, you would choose mainstream medicine.

substacks referenced above:

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REVIEW: Fears of a Setting Sun, by Dennis C. Rasmussen

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Mistaking Leviathan for God