We are getting dumber, not brighter. I haven't read the book and now won't do so, but this last part of the review made me think of the old Far Side cartoon where the scientist is explaining his idea on a chalkboard to a colleague with an inserted "then a miracle occurs" in the middle of the equations.
It's actually by Sydney Harris. He used to do regular cartoons for Science magazine, which is where I think the cartoon first appeared. A nice in-focus reproduction is here:
There seem to be 2 competing stories about our current (relative) breakdown in cooperation:
1) An economic scarcity story, consistent with the EROI framework (migration, inflation, supply chain/ network frictions, cost disease in housing/education/health-care/government)
2) A social/spiritual story, where generalized discontent applies independently of material conditions.
There are ways to square these stories, but there seems a tension between them, with ramifications for the optimal responses. Story 1 is probably an "easier" or at least simpler fix. If story 2 is truly independent, things get tougher.
I think that both are true, and work on each other in a circular way. Economic scarcity increases due to bad centralized planning socialist policies. The drives more discontent, which drives people to demand (erroneously) more bad centralized socialist policies. There isn't really a first step, just a question of how difficult to the ratchet is to move in one direction or the other. The fix, unfortunately, seems to require people to abjure asking for more bad policy to deal with issue 2. So there might not be a practicable fix without collapse that teaches a generation or to to stop wanting bad policies.
I agree there is a strong pull in this direction but it is important to remember it doesn't have continue to complete failure. Sweden in the 1990's might be the best counter-example.
Agreed. I would add a third way: for the upper middle class, economic scarcity is such a non-issue that they have little else to do but obsess over their relative status.
The energy scarcity thesis is so obviously silly that I now interpret it as a Straussian signal. The Straussian interpretation of ATOE is that *of course* we all know good and well what (actually, ahem, who) is to blame for the crumbling of the general social trust and cooperation level. But "Discourse In The Shadow Of The Guillotine" means no one can just come out and say it and get a book printed by a mainstream publisher. But it one is going to change you-know-who's minds but forced to avoid naming and any direct criticism of the sort that will just cause reflexive and defensive circling of the wagons, then one must concoct some abstract and impersonal """explanation""" that provides a Socially Acceptable Excuse for why we are all changing the elite consensus view about something but without anybody having to admit that anything they or their party every did or believed was wrong.
So, yadda yadda, energy surplus, photosynthesis or fired meat or whatever, and voila, and of course Diversity Is Our Strength, and we can all step away from the edge of the cliff of nearly destroying all our valuable social institutions just to win the next election. It doesn't make any sense, but it doesn't have to and indeed it's not even supposed to make any sense. If we all just pretend together that it is some novel insight that has some kind of persuasive meaning, then we can socially rationalize taking our collective finger off the self-destruct button.
But how do these people avoid embarrassment from taking such obviously silly theses as if they were the literal truth? Many of them are actually pretty smart and smart people love nothing better than point out instances of their peers being stupid. They must somehow coordinate around the tactic of going along with the joke, wink-wink nod-nod, without overtly communicating that the joke is actually a joke. Strauss may have described somewhere how this is done, but I don't know, I'm still reading that Hayek. Perhaps it's just a matter of the problem that caused a given Straussian signal to be emitted having crossed the threshold of being palpable and threatening enough for the need to coordinate to be readily apparent to a large majority of those on whose cooperation the efficacy of the signal depends, without much overt communication. Having personally participated in a successful instance of such a coordination, albeit not around a Straussian joke, I am ready to be persuaded that that's all there is to it.
Those are questions of the highest significance. I have some thoughts on them, but that's too much and too out-of-scope from the Original Post for laying out here.
I'd briefly note however that the tenets of the progressive state religion regarding claims about human reality is Exhibit A for smart people going along with obviously silly and easily falsifiable claims. They have built up the whole "jealously possessive religion toolkit" with their robust carrots-and-sticks social incentive apparatus such that they all believe six impossible things before breakfast and obviously feel entirely free to express these ludicrous claims without any fear whatsoever about being embarrassed by anyone or paying any price whatsoever for any of it.
Still, those are about core beliefs and not the rationalizations for their excuses to sustain Auster's "Unprincipled Exceptions" and which are supposed to """explain""" those obvious deviations from the implications of the core beliefs in ways that we are all supposed to pretend don't simply, you know, flatly contradict those core beliefs. The most infamous of these is the "good schools" SAE for why progressives don't take advantage of rents as low as one third that of what they're paying for otherwise 'comparable' properties in locations just a few miles away from where they are struggling to satisfy the lease or mortgage.
In that example, the obvious and embarrassing falsifications comes from *both* sides. People to your right will say like Wolters or Weissberg say it's, "Bad Students, Not Bad Schools". Meanwhile those to your left - especially the childless as they increasingly are - will accuse you of, well, lying and making an excuse, while secretly believing exactly what those on the right believe. Still, the excuse has survived a long time.
I wish I had read this series before reading the book. I was disappointed with the book.
It started with bold claims of a scientific paradigm that would point the way to wide scale human progress. Within the same chapter it just makes up 4 scientific laws, none of which qualified as a law, and one of which is already a theory (evolution). I think what he wanted to say was that he had an organizing structure which included 4 ways to frame or think about problems and solutions. From there it really rambled on with various thoughts on issues such as education, intelligence, race and gender, immigration and whatever.
I usually take summary notes on every book I read. On this one I am not sure what the point would be.
I like Theory of Everybody/ Everything books. Like Guns, Germs, and Steel, which set a pretty high bar. More recently, and perhaps importantly, The Goodness Paradox.
It’s great for Arnold to review a book. When he likes one, and then I read it*, it’s good. I was already planning on not reading this, so your negativity confirms my bias, strengthens my Bayesian prior.
*The Mind Club, and Thinking, Fast and Slow, come to mind.
Tho now I’m almost too busy reading good substack essays to read more books, and reading and writing comments takes some time, too.
Based on my reading of your excerpts I would describe this book as wandering. In this post you used the term vague. I think that’s appropriate. Considering a basketball shooting analogy, it seems like he has a couple of money shots in his quiver but his overall shooting percentage is too low for him to be GOAT, nor in the top 10, (using language from this week’s Econtalk with Tyler Cowen), nor reliable as a starter in the NBA. It still seems like a valuable read for you and worth your time. Thanks for sharing.
By the way, as I was listening to the Econtalk this week, “Tyler Cowen on the Goat of Economics,” I was thinking about your Fantasy Intellectual Teams. It seems like there’s a great deal of potential to inspire people read top intellectuals by writing books like this. I’m not as interested in the economics as Russ and Tyler, but I’d be interested in other versions of this GOAT book. For example, I’d like to see a GOAT book series that examines progressive, conservative and libertarian intellectuals. That’s three different books. These would be follow-ons to your Three Languages of Politics. You could rank progressive intellectuals on the oppressor-oppressed axis, and other criteria like free-speech, and economic literacy. Ditto for conservative and progressive intellectuals.
For those not familiar, here’s the episode description.
Who is the greatest economist of all time? In Tyler Cowen's eclectic view, you need both breadth and depth, macro and micro. You can't have been too wrong--and you need to be mostly right. You have to have had a lasting impact, and done both theory and empirical work. If you meet all these criteria, you may just be history's greatest economist. Listen as Cowen talks about his new and freely accessible book GOAT with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Along the way to crowning a winner, Cowen offers original insights into what shaped the theories and worldviews of the greatest economists of all time. Cowen and Roberts also talk about the evolution of economics from a field concerned mainly with ideas to one that mostly grapples with empirical challenges.
I'm not sure if by society you mean US, western world, or something else. Likewise, I don't know what outcome you see as analogous to not recovering from cancer. That said,
How many different cancers has US already recovered from?
I don't think any human analogy works well because a peak comes rather early and the end is not only inevitable but has a rather predictable maximum.
For his athlete analogy, I think it better to note that training has gotten far better and few records where the competition is entirely individual last long. (Yes, I'm saying things have never been better.)
For your cancer analogy, I prefer a different athlete analogy that requires ignoring inevitable decline and retirement. There is some probability of a career ending injury during one's prime. We can disagree on the probability but it's not 0 or 1.
"The president who steals from the people to enrich her family ..."
I am curious how one is able to tell that this is an example to others, which they emulate out of frustration; or if it is what people aspire to themselves - i.e. what other point could there be to becoming president? It reminds me of those cringe-y things where they ask children (or proactively suggest to them), what do you want to be? Occasionally doctor, but more usually it's "I wanna be a lawyer, I'm gonna be a lawyer". No, they don't want to *be* a lawyer.
Also, can I just say how funny it is that in an era when "diversity" reigns at least in terms of its frequency of use, that someone should write a "Theory of Everyone". What if there is no Everyone? Can we live with that? Are we grown-up enough to live with that?
I suppose the question is, "Just how similar are we?" One perspective by Shakespeare's Shylock:
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?
We are getting dumber, not brighter. I haven't read the book and now won't do so, but this last part of the review made me think of the old Far Side cartoon where the scientist is explaining his idea on a chalkboard to a colleague with an inserted "then a miracle occurs" in the middle of the equations.
"So now you'd better stop, and rebuild all your ruins. For peace and trust can win the day, despite of all your losing."
For such a famous song, this is the first time I have ever read anyone quote it in a comment.
It's actually by Sydney Harris. He used to do regular cartoons for Science magazine, which is where I think the cartoon first appeared. A nice in-focus reproduction is here:
https://twitter.com/jswatz/status/1261366045077409792/photo/1
Yes, you are correct, Roger- that is the cartoon I had in mind.
There seem to be 2 competing stories about our current (relative) breakdown in cooperation:
1) An economic scarcity story, consistent with the EROI framework (migration, inflation, supply chain/ network frictions, cost disease in housing/education/health-care/government)
2) A social/spiritual story, where generalized discontent applies independently of material conditions.
There are ways to square these stories, but there seems a tension between them, with ramifications for the optimal responses. Story 1 is probably an "easier" or at least simpler fix. If story 2 is truly independent, things get tougher.
I think that both are true, and work on each other in a circular way. Economic scarcity increases due to bad centralized planning socialist policies. The drives more discontent, which drives people to demand (erroneously) more bad centralized socialist policies. There isn't really a first step, just a question of how difficult to the ratchet is to move in one direction or the other. The fix, unfortunately, seems to require people to abjure asking for more bad policy to deal with issue 2. So there might not be a practicable fix without collapse that teaches a generation or to to stop wanting bad policies.
you have come close to reinventing what Bryan Caplan calls The Idea Trap.
I don't remember Caplan naming it as such, but I have spent enough time with him I have probably absorbed his idea and forgot it was his entirely :D
I agree there is a strong pull in this direction but it is important to remember it doesn't have continue to complete failure. Sweden in the 1990's might be the best counter-example.
Agreed. I would add a third way: for the upper middle class, economic scarcity is such a non-issue that they have little else to do but obsess over their relative status.
The energy scarcity thesis is so obviously silly that I now interpret it as a Straussian signal. The Straussian interpretation of ATOE is that *of course* we all know good and well what (actually, ahem, who) is to blame for the crumbling of the general social trust and cooperation level. But "Discourse In The Shadow Of The Guillotine" means no one can just come out and say it and get a book printed by a mainstream publisher. But it one is going to change you-know-who's minds but forced to avoid naming and any direct criticism of the sort that will just cause reflexive and defensive circling of the wagons, then one must concoct some abstract and impersonal """explanation""" that provides a Socially Acceptable Excuse for why we are all changing the elite consensus view about something but without anybody having to admit that anything they or their party every did or believed was wrong.
So, yadda yadda, energy surplus, photosynthesis or fired meat or whatever, and voila, and of course Diversity Is Our Strength, and we can all step away from the edge of the cliff of nearly destroying all our valuable social institutions just to win the next election. It doesn't make any sense, but it doesn't have to and indeed it's not even supposed to make any sense. If we all just pretend together that it is some novel insight that has some kind of persuasive meaning, then we can socially rationalize taking our collective finger off the self-destruct button.
But how do these people avoid embarrassment from taking such obviously silly theses as if they were the literal truth? Many of them are actually pretty smart and smart people love nothing better than point out instances of their peers being stupid. They must somehow coordinate around the tactic of going along with the joke, wink-wink nod-nod, without overtly communicating that the joke is actually a joke. Strauss may have described somewhere how this is done, but I don't know, I'm still reading that Hayek. Perhaps it's just a matter of the problem that caused a given Straussian signal to be emitted having crossed the threshold of being palpable and threatening enough for the need to coordinate to be readily apparent to a large majority of those on whose cooperation the efficacy of the signal depends, without much overt communication. Having personally participated in a successful instance of such a coordination, albeit not around a Straussian joke, I am ready to be persuaded that that's all there is to it.
Those are questions of the highest significance. I have some thoughts on them, but that's too much and too out-of-scope from the Original Post for laying out here.
I'd briefly note however that the tenets of the progressive state religion regarding claims about human reality is Exhibit A for smart people going along with obviously silly and easily falsifiable claims. They have built up the whole "jealously possessive religion toolkit" with their robust carrots-and-sticks social incentive apparatus such that they all believe six impossible things before breakfast and obviously feel entirely free to express these ludicrous claims without any fear whatsoever about being embarrassed by anyone or paying any price whatsoever for any of it.
Still, those are about core beliefs and not the rationalizations for their excuses to sustain Auster's "Unprincipled Exceptions" and which are supposed to """explain""" those obvious deviations from the implications of the core beliefs in ways that we are all supposed to pretend don't simply, you know, flatly contradict those core beliefs. The most infamous of these is the "good schools" SAE for why progressives don't take advantage of rents as low as one third that of what they're paying for otherwise 'comparable' properties in locations just a few miles away from where they are struggling to satisfy the lease or mortgage.
In that example, the obvious and embarrassing falsifications comes from *both* sides. People to your right will say like Wolters or Weissberg say it's, "Bad Students, Not Bad Schools". Meanwhile those to your left - especially the childless as they increasingly are - will accuse you of, well, lying and making an excuse, while secretly believing exactly what those on the right believe. Still, the excuse has survived a long time.
I wish I had read this series before reading the book. I was disappointed with the book.
It started with bold claims of a scientific paradigm that would point the way to wide scale human progress. Within the same chapter it just makes up 4 scientific laws, none of which qualified as a law, and one of which is already a theory (evolution). I think what he wanted to say was that he had an organizing structure which included 4 ways to frame or think about problems and solutions. From there it really rambled on with various thoughts on issues such as education, intelligence, race and gender, immigration and whatever.
I usually take summary notes on every book I read. On this one I am not sure what the point would be.
I like Theory of Everybody/ Everything books. Like Guns, Germs, and Steel, which set a pretty high bar. More recently, and perhaps importantly, The Goodness Paradox.
It’s great for Arnold to review a book. When he likes one, and then I read it*, it’s good. I was already planning on not reading this, so your negativity confirms my bias, strengthens my Bayesian prior.
*The Mind Club, and Thinking, Fast and Slow, come to mind.
Tho now I’m almost too busy reading good substack essays to read more books, and reading and writing comments takes some time, too.
Based on my reading of your excerpts I would describe this book as wandering. In this post you used the term vague. I think that’s appropriate. Considering a basketball shooting analogy, it seems like he has a couple of money shots in his quiver but his overall shooting percentage is too low for him to be GOAT, nor in the top 10, (using language from this week’s Econtalk with Tyler Cowen), nor reliable as a starter in the NBA. It still seems like a valuable read for you and worth your time. Thanks for sharing.
By the way, as I was listening to the Econtalk this week, “Tyler Cowen on the Goat of Economics,” I was thinking about your Fantasy Intellectual Teams. It seems like there’s a great deal of potential to inspire people read top intellectuals by writing books like this. I’m not as interested in the economics as Russ and Tyler, but I’d be interested in other versions of this GOAT book. For example, I’d like to see a GOAT book series that examines progressive, conservative and libertarian intellectuals. That’s three different books. These would be follow-ons to your Three Languages of Politics. You could rank progressive intellectuals on the oppressor-oppressed axis, and other criteria like free-speech, and economic literacy. Ditto for conservative and progressive intellectuals.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/econtalk/id135066958?i=1000636641460
For those not familiar, here’s the episode description.
Who is the greatest economist of all time? In Tyler Cowen's eclectic view, you need both breadth and depth, macro and micro. You can't have been too wrong--and you need to be mostly right. You have to have had a lasting impact, and done both theory and empirical work. If you meet all these criteria, you may just be history's greatest economist. Listen as Cowen talks about his new and freely accessible book GOAT with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Along the way to crowning a winner, Cowen offers original insights into what shaped the theories and worldviews of the greatest economists of all time. Cowen and Roberts also talk about the evolution of economics from a field concerned mainly with ideas to one that mostly grapples with empirical challenges.
I'm not sure if by society you mean US, western world, or something else. Likewise, I don't know what outcome you see as analogous to not recovering from cancer. That said,
How many different cancers has US already recovered from?
I don't think any human analogy works well because a peak comes rather early and the end is not only inevitable but has a rather predictable maximum.
For his athlete analogy, I think it better to note that training has gotten far better and few records where the competition is entirely individual last long. (Yes, I'm saying things have never been better.)
For your cancer analogy, I prefer a different athlete analogy that requires ignoring inevitable decline and retirement. There is some probability of a career ending injury during one's prime. We can disagree on the probability but it's not 0 or 1.
"The president who steals from the people to enrich her family ..."
I am curious how one is able to tell that this is an example to others, which they emulate out of frustration; or if it is what people aspire to themselves - i.e. what other point could there be to becoming president? It reminds me of those cringe-y things where they ask children (or proactively suggest to them), what do you want to be? Occasionally doctor, but more usually it's "I wanna be a lawyer, I'm gonna be a lawyer". No, they don't want to *be* a lawyer.
Also, can I just say how funny it is that in an era when "diversity" reigns at least in terms of its frequency of use, that someone should write a "Theory of Everyone". What if there is no Everyone? Can we live with that? Are we grown-up enough to live with that?
I suppose the question is, "Just how similar are we?" One perspective by Shakespeare's Shylock:
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?