“In 2000, I started blogging about economics. Russ Roberts found the blog, and he persuaded me to move it to Liberty Fund, where it became EconLog. Liberty Fund in general, and Russ especially, put some formal libertarian shape to my views.“
Thank you Russ. So many of us our grateful for what you’ve done with Econtalk, lib, log and whatnot. Learned so much from you and the other bloggers there, and from Cafe Hayek and Don Boudreaux. Has made an enormous improvement to my life and my family’s life.
Amen. I can honestly say though my journey went in the opposite* direction and mostly as a result of them; I used to be extremely conservative even as a teenager and moved left as a result absorbing much of Russ, et al. Arnold's coining of legamoron and it's essay is easily one of the most personally influential things I ever read and contributed a lot to the person I am today; likewise Russ's econtalk interview where he discusses human dignity around giving to homeless people, I forget the specific lady he was interviewing. (Edit: Erica Sandberg, 2017)
* A byproduct of growing up in poverty, leftism is upper middle class game IMHO.
I read his original essay on it back in I want to say 2005 when I was in a particular strong world view realignment phase of my life. The original I think is lost to history, not even the wayback machine has it though I've always assumed Arnold has a copy squirreled away, maybe he'll post it again some day. I'm curious if he still believes it as a aside, not that his losing the faith would change mine.
" ... the person who coined the phrase 'the marketplace of rationalizations' ... "
If you Google "market for confirmation bias" the earliest hit is from me ten years ago leaving a comment in an Econblog post by Bryan Caplan, before Ben Lockwood used it in a publication as a synonym for his "market for media slant". It's also appeared in comments in some other obscure places like askblog a few times in 2018 and even "In My Tribe" a time or two.
I've read a very large number of posts, articles, and even entire books which could be argued to have a central them of how and why someone moved rightward.
There is a special category of Niemollerian "First they came ..." as in "I got screwed over the minute I deviated from the party line by viscous fanatical zealots who I had naively assumed were good, free-thinking people who would stay my friends, and, now that I recognize it, I must confess that I had been just as bad to all the previous heretics in the sequence to me and I feel pretty scummy about it, but, nevertheless, was marinated in that world for so long that I still can't quite question most other of my former leftist sympathies and commitments."
But then there is what, to an outside observer, is the true, common majority case, but the writers all tell people (and probably themselves) a varieties of different stories. With apologies to Tolstoy, all right-movements are alike, but all stories of right- movement are different in their own way.
What I am referring to is what every political pollster and party strategist has known for decades, and which one can plainly see on an attempt to chart the timeline of political views, which is that there are two dramatic discontinuities around the moments of marriage and then later, parenthood. Very few people are willing to give credit to where credit is due, because it's kind of embarrassing to admit one's ideological beliefs were so untethered from basic truths of the human condition until one had to get mugged by reality and smacked in the head multiple times by the 2x4 of real experience to finally learn the hard way how naive they had once been. This explanation is as commonly true as it is hard on the ego, and thus just as rarely acknowledged and given its fair share of causal attribution.
What made a big difference in my views was when I spent a college semester in an overseas university over 60 years ago, and then traveled around the world. I found that the usual Progressive denigration of the present and past in our country was unduly negative, indeed nihilistic, that there were big problems everywhere and in every culture, and realized that the fatuous dreams of a perfected human condition were absurd,
The bigger problem is that once the parties know which "lifestyle profiles" tend to inelastically favor one side in their voting patterns, the temptation to abuse power and warp policy toward the end of plausibly deniable strategic electorate shaping is irresistible. Thus if becomes realistically impossible to maintain any kind of neutrality and assess such policy questions by the standard of overall public welfare or national interest, and instead every question with remotely possibly downstream impact on the electorate is evaluated under the true test of "But is it good for The Party?"
The really dark implication is that if the parties are able to make such moves in the game, they are incentivized to adjust political, cultural, and economic conditions so as to nudge people toward lifestyles that may make them unhappy and unfulfilled but which they don't conceptualize as being causally attributable to the very policies of the parties they enthusiastically support. When you see "Life of Julia", you are seeing a vision and promise that is downstream of the political fact that single women vote overwhelmingly for the left which cannot help but become interested in 'helping' them remain single.
Here's mine: I was a standard leftist in college, albeit with a civil libertarian streak. This was during the Bush years, and while I was pretty angry at the Neocons and conservatives in general for their deceptive campaigns for war against Iraq, their barbarous use of torture, and their extra-legal domestic surveillance campaigns via the Patriot Act, at the same time I thought a lot of my fellow leftists embarrassed themselves with their hysterical reactions. All the Bushitler talk and the evergreen shouts of "fascism!" I thought were self-discrediting and cringeworthy. Worse, though, was that I couldn't help but notice that Obama and his pals did little to push back on any of this once they got into office, and in some cases went even further. Obama had his own personal kill list, welched on shutting down Guantanamo, and the Patriot Act was renewed again and again with bipartisan support. It was all very disillusioning. And none of the people who had spent the past six years shouting about the surveillance state said a peep. We were not, in fact, the ones we'd been waiting for, apparently; at least not the ones I was waiting for.
Semi-concurrent to that, one summer in college, I read Freakonomics and was fascinated by it; I'd never read a book like that before. Hungry for similar content, I learned the authors had this thing called a blog that they posted new material to fairly regularly, so I started reading that, and I noticed that they often linked to other blogs called EconLog and Marginal Revolution. MR, in particular, had this chap named Alex Tabarrok who espoused what sounded like some pretty principled and well-reasoned views about the proper relationship between citizen and state. He was also the first time I encountered the concept that trade was mutually beneficial: all parties expect to benefit; otherwise they wouldn't choose to trade. This seemed like a very powerful and important idea that my formal education had failed to disseminate. A lot of idiotic leftist complaints about economic outcomes are apparent as such once you recognize this idea.
Another major catalyst for me was the financial crisis. My first job out of college was in the banking industry, mostly doing compliance and risk management consulting for small and mid-sized banks. I couldn't help but think how silly it seemed that, despite having a network of say, 40 branches, our clients still had to submit an application and get written permission from regulators to open #41. Or how much time and effort they put into filling out call reports and TFRs, filing CTRs, and so forth, which I was pretty sure no one in the federal government was actually paying attention to, anyway. So there we were in 2008-09, with the entire financial industry imploding despite the micro-management and oppressive regulatory regime. The whole modern administrative state seemed to me like a vast waste.
After that, I started calling myself a libertarian. I think as I've gotten older and feel like I understand human nature somewhat better, I've evolved in a more conservative direction, but I still have my Don't Tread On Me streak.
The failure to highlight the win-win aspect includes not explicitly noting that Real Wealth increases. That is very clear in Arnold’s fine, underrated Specialization and Trade book. Also far more awkwardly titled The Patterns of Sustainable Specialization of Trade, often noted as PSST here (and only here?).
Arnold, have you read Duncan Foley's essay on his intellectual journey in economics? Starts at Swarthmore:
"The core of the Economics Honors program was the seminar in Economic Theory, taught by Joseph Conard. (The other students were
Peggy Colvin, Michael Manove, Lydia Razran, and Marty Weitzman.) Conard
(already wasting away from the cancer that soon after killed him) managed to
pack the equivalent of two years of graduate level macro- and microeconomic
theory into a single intensive semester. Early on I ran into difficulties with the
theory of consumer choice, because I did not recognize myself as making consistent choices subject to a budget constraint when I went to the candy machine
in the dorm to buy a chocolate bar. When I raised this doubt, probably at
inordinate length, in the seminar, Conard terminated the discussion by saying
”Duncan, perhaps you should study this theory and learn it thoroughly before you criticize it"
I'm a little confused. It seems to me Tversky and Kahneman put gaping holes in that theory and Foley's difficulties with it were far more on target than his prof's rigid adherence to it.
I'm sorry for the poor formatting, this was copied and pasted from a pdf file. Not sure if this is of interest to you or your readers at all, but Foley's essay covers some really interesting ground on the evolution of macroeconomics:
"In my view, the rational expectations assumption which Lucas and Sargent put forward to “close” the Keynesian model, was only a disguised form of the assumption of the existence of complete futures and contingencies markets. When one unpacked the “expectations” language of the rational expectations literature, it turned out that these models assumed that agents formed expectations of futures and contingency prices that were consistent with the aggregate plans being made, and hence were in fact competitive general equilibrium prices in a model of complete futures and contingency markets. Arrow and Debreu had made the assumption of the existence of complete futures and contingency markets to give their version of the Walrasian model the appearance of coping with the real-world problems posed by the uncertainty of the future. To my mind, the rational expectations approach amounted to making the perfect-foresight assumptions that I had already considered and rejected on grounds of unrealism in the course of working with Sidrauski... What the profession took to be an exciting breakthrough in economic theory I saw as a boring and predictable retracing of an already discredited path."
I've never seen it put that way before, but that sounds exactly right.
"In a 1937 paper in Economica, he defined equilibrium as a set of individual plans that could be executed without mutual interference. This allows for the possibility that individual beliefs depend upon local knowledge and differ, provided that these beliefs are not contradicted as plans unfold. This notion of equilibrium is thoroughly modern, dynamic, and unrestrictive—and quite distinct from a general equilibrium model in which prices are uniform and public. Its development by Hayek is a significant—though little recognized—accomplishment in its own right. Indeed, Hayek claimed later in life that it “seems to me in retrospect the most original contribution I have made to the theory of economics."
But Hayek was not particularly interested in the properties of equilibrium itself, and saw the strength of the market economy as arising from the learning and diffusion of new information that it accomplishes in disequilibrium."
My essay in a volume in honor of Foley has more on this
"But they have no difficulty combining conservative lifestyles with liberal Democratic political positions. They are certain that Trump is Hitler and that conservatives who object to radical sex education in schools are book-banning troglodytes. "
College educated Liberals very seldom have children out of wedlock, and even strongly support abortion to avoid that. Yet their Sexual Liberation sexual norms, plus their large welfare, have resulted in 70%+ of Black kids being born and raised without their parents being married.
Lifestyle choices are a combination of personal choices and social norms. The Liberal social norms have a significant influence on that result.
It is striking that Arnold's account of his journey makes no mention of specific books or other writings, except an allusion to Thomas Sowell's _Conflict of Visions_. Doubly remarkable, as Arnold would become a regular book reviewer at EconLib.
My journey was via ideas and authors. I recall three turning points in graduate school and entry to academe.
1. When I undertook to write a dissertation about history of social strife in Sicily, I came to realize that my humanities education was inadequate. I resolved to teach myself rudiments of economics, sociology, and psychology. Starting from the Left, I hit upon Thomas C. Schelling (_Micromotives and Macrobehavior_, and _Choice and Consequence_) and Jon Elster (_Making Sense of Marx_, and _The Cement of Society_). I was hooked on interdisciplinary "methodological individualism." This intellectual framework naturally led also to fine conservative and libertarian scholars; for example Sowell, Robert Sugden, and David Friedman. And ethical individualism.
2. I had a precious opportunity to teach in Columbia University's "great books" course (Thucydides to Freud). I got an education by teaching masterpieces. The canon was under siege by most of the Left. It was evident that the critiques were mostly shallow and wrong-headed, full of jargon and too clever by half.
3. Conservatives, as far as I could tell, wanted to turn back the clock to the traditional humanities. Roger Kimball's incisive, sardonic book, _The Rape of the Masters_, made a vivid case for the traditional approach to art history. I was drawn instead to make an innovative case for the _cognitive_ value of a wide range of masterpieces in literature. Ovid's "contention of Ajax & Ulysses for the armor of Achilles," Dante's _Inferno_, Leopardi's _Canti_, Manzoni's _The Betrothed_, Ishiguro's novels are also contributions to what Arnold calls "cultural analysis" — because great artists have special powers of introspection, observation, insight, description. They enrich our understanding of the mind, psychology, and social norms. My intuition was reinforced by philosopher Bernard Williams' deep book, _Moral Luck_. This approach, which identifies a synthesis of aesthetic and cognitive value in creative arts, may extend naturally to the best creations in popular culture; for example, _The Godfather_ films (I & II) or Julia Michaels' song, "Anxiety."
Perhaps these were the turning points and landmarks of my journey because i somehow improbably gained entry to the (cracking) Ivory Tower.
Same for me. At 17, I came across England's only libertarian bookshop. I read Rothbard's For a New Liberty, then Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (I ended up getting a doctorate in philosophy). The next year, 1982, I read Friedman's Free to Choose, Curtiss's The Tariff Idea, H.L.A. Hart's Law, Liberty, and Morality, Madsen's Private Power: Multinational Corporations and Their Role in the Survival of Our Planet, Rothbard's Power and Market, David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom, Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, Popper's Conjectures and Refutations, Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty, Taylor's The Fundamentals of Austrian Economics, Chris Tame's The Bibliography of Freedom, Machan's Human Rights and Human Liberties, Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State, the Tannehill's The Market for Liberty, Wollstein's Society Without Government, Rand's For the New Intellectual, John Gray's Literature of Liberty: F.A. Hayek and the Rebirth of Classical Liberalism, Kirzner's Competition and Entrepreneurship, and Rand's The New Left.
So, very much formed my views reading books and not people. In England at that time, libertarians were almost completely unknown and I was seen as weird and unaligned with anyone.
Looking at that list for 1982 (which doesn't include any non-politics/economics books such as Hoftstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, I wonder how the heck I read so much.
I think this is just a snippet of his intellectual journey. Or maybe this is just his social journey; a pretty short one. I did do an analysis of Arnold's daily essay-style blog posts and he averages 900 words per post. In 20 of his most recent posts he never goes over 1500 words. Too limiting for a thorough explanation of his journey.
Yeah, Arnold, we would like the full account please, with book references and psychological self-analysis. Where is your Late Confessions?
Lingering question for Arnold: can you say more about why you're obsessed with learning? What do you know about your DNA and family culture that might explain you?
I'm a bit sad that Arnold doesn't include Tech Central Station, where I first started reading him. It's now gone with link rot, but another blogger still going has this 2006 comment about Arnold on 1968:
>> Arnold Kling has posted an article on Tech Central Station* in which he characterizes the conventional wisdom of liberals in 1968 and suggests that:
Most people who were liberals in 1968 still are. Liberals. In 1968.
I was an adult and at least a little politically savvy in 1968 and I think that Mr. Kling has some things right and some things wrong. Here are the articles of faith he ascribes to the liberals of 1968:
1- Anti-Communism was a greater menace than Communism.
2- The planet could not possibly support the population increases that would take place by the end of the twentieth century.
3- Conservatives stood in the way of progress for minorities.
4- Government programs were the best way to lift people out of poverty.
5- What underdeveloped countries needed were large capital investments, financed by foreign aid from the rich countries.
6-Inflation was a cost-push phenomenon, requiring government intervention in wage and price setting.
7-Anyone who is not a liberal must be incorrigibly stupid.
On the Failure of Liberalism, a huge reason "Liberal" policies worked was Rule of Law - Nobody is Above the Law. The Dem media was full of this fine principle in their persecution of Trump.
Yet ... coming to America illegally is Against The Law. Those who support illegal aliens are against Rule of Law, against a pillar of Liberalism.
Few, or none, of the many links Arnold has had on Liberalism and its problems have included this start issue. It is inconsistent to favor illegal aliens and also support Rule of Law, yet many who claim to support Liberalism are inconsistent in that way, as well as often being hypocritical (no indictment of HR Clinton for her illegal email server with Top Secret document, as well as likely evidence of bribery).
It's great to hear more of Arnold's intellectual progress. No Ayn Rand, no Robert Heinlein - my two biggest young influences towards Libertarianism. Not even Uncle Milton's (Friedman) "Free to Choose", which was more preaching to the choir when I read it, along with David D Friedman's "Machinery of Freedom". Plus Decision Analysis courses at Stanford under (too fat until diet) Professor Ron Howard (from MIT). Who just died last month, RIP.
Here's his retirement note (my EES degree became an MSE masters, the econ efficient degree):
(me:) What ai will fail at is giving what decision makers want - certainty about the results of their decisions. Too much of the push for "more data" is actually a doomed search for certainty, tho it does often reduce uncertainty, which helps. I do think ai can formalize Bayesian priors and updates to a greater extent, so I'm a bit hopeful about that.
Most successful entrepreneurs believed, against the 1 in 5 odds, that they would be successful. Most failures did, too. Sometimes I think my knowledge of this reality made me too cautious to start my own business & successfully push it/ dedicate my life to making it successful/ becoming the kind of person one needed to be to run a small successful startup. (Now retired, mostly I'm happy with Slovak wife, 4 kids, 3 grandkids; & blogging hobby.)
Thanks for your mention of Ron Howard. My co-author on a book and many articles, Charley Hooper, counts Ron Howard as one of his most important influences.
Well, I was 26 and just finished up the Peace Corp in 1068 and definitely considered myself a Liberal and a Democrat. (Of course, in those days many Republicans were Liberals, too.) I would not have expressed my feelings that way at the time but I think thee were more or less:
1. “Anti communism” was a greater menace in the US, in US political debate than “Communism.”
2. I probably though that, but with no ill policy implications aside from the desirability of sex education in schools
3. If that meant opposing the voting rights and public accommodations, hostility to homosexuals, I agreed.
4. Low deadweight cost transfers to poor people were (still are) a very good way to reduce poverty.
5. While large flows of public and private capital to developing countries was a very good thing (I eventually went to work for the World Bank) developing countries mainly needed better economic policies and governance.
6. No. Even then I knew that as Milton Freidman said, inflation is always a monetary phenomenon. I did think that a short shot of price control would make monetary policy more effective. (Who knows, maybe it would have been if it had been a short shot)
7. No, I watched Firing Line, but most “conservative” policy advocacy WAS incorrigibly stupid. 😊
It is only inconsistent to favor illegal aliens and also support Rule of Law if you do not believe there should be different Rules for different people. "“One Law for the Lion and Ox is tyranny.”
Poorly framed. Immigration is just another economic policy. We want to allow in, nay, recruit, people who will make net contributions to the economy. My guess is that in practice this would include most of the people who enter illegally (and many more who would enter if they could do so legally, but comprehensive immigration reform will include strict border controls.
With respect to borders, that means Open Borders. Which I would support if there were no tax paid benefits to help people. Like Milton Friedman claimed—but ending the tax funded safety net ain’t gonna happen, tho it IS a tyranny, so the Illegal alien supporters deny honestly supporting Open Borders, but oppose enforcing border laws.
I think you are mistaken in thinking that the availability of transfers to people who enter illegibly is a very important reason for immigration. It's jobs.
Williams discusses his shifting view “in recent years” meaning since about 2016 the year Brexit passed. I am not a paid subscriber and can’t read the whole piece so will forego speculation other than to note that David Cameron was succeeded by Teresa May that year. Both from the Conservative Party, Cameron, I suppose, might be considered right wing for implementing an austerity program that increased taxes and reined in government spending but produced a middling average GDP growth rate of 1.5% during his tenure. In 2016, UK GDP grew 2%. Under May, 2.7% in 2017; 1.4% in 2018, and 1.6% in 2019. Both seem to have performed equally well in controlling the national debt https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_national_debt_analysis
I no longer have any idea, nor care much, whether I am on the left or right. In this century, I can only look back in regret on what became of the projects of the candidates I preferred (Bushes) and offer some respect for some of the candidates I did not prefer (Clinton). Nathan Pinkoski’s recent First Things essay and N.S. Lyons’s response (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-post-cold-war-apotheosis-of-liberal ) summarize the limbo of the populist disaffected with the establishment status quo.
Personally, I date this sense of rootlessness back to the 2000 presidential primary McCain ran, like so many presidential contenders this century, as a populist pledging "a fight to take our government back from the power brokers and special interests, and return it to the people and the noble cause of freedom it was created to serve." This aligned with his campaign finance reform initiatives (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-john-mccain-nearly-made-gop-party-campaign-finance-reform ) Yet I was never able to reconcile myself to a notion of campaign reform that seemed a de facto squashing of free speech.
The principles of incrementalism, localism, prudence, preservation of healthy tradition, deference to expertise, etc., all at one time associated with the right in one way or another, unfortunately no longer seem sufficient to the task of reforming a leviathan incapable of disciplining itself and controlling the national debt or cutting back on the fire hose of regulations. The great tech boom fueling economic growth does little to induce sentiments of don’t worry, be happy, recalling as it does an earlier tech boom. And the forces attempting to impose discipline from outside appear hopelessly over matched by a feckless and unconstrained establishment. Optimism takes ever increasing amounts of effort.
Very interesting. I love this personal kind of post. Writers, especially those who write about economics and politics, often seem to believe that the personal is not that important, but to most humans that isn't the case.
My journey is a little less philosophical. I never saw the inside of a decent school, I didn't have squat, and I had to work shit jobs to dig myself out and up. Bingo.
We might have different ideas about what "Right" means. Working, and understanding hard work and how it creates a successful society, is probably lost on the condescending types that think "Right-ness" is achieved with an advanced degree. Nope.
Yep. Evolution & Economics were my factors, too. Along with History.
All of which contradict the fundamentals of leftism: Humans inherently good, blank slate mutability, egalitarianism, all of which I grew up believing. The first was the hardest to give up.
I wonder if we have a public, mostly functional and necessarily civic version of RFCs in normal society: juries.
For example, "... when an issue arose (a committed crime) a committee of (citizens) would form. They would (vote on) a proposed solution (the verdict) and put it out (to the court). The (verdict) once stabilized, would be implemented. Then the (jury) would go away ... Instead of a perpetual government agency to manage a problem, you would have a temporary organization to solve the problem."
"I refer to DC as 'the culture of no...'" Yesterday I went to a conference on biofuels development. It was organized by a friend of mine. The first speaker was a USDA official who flew to Western Washington State to talk to this small group of about 25. He was excited that a federal program that he had been working on since 2002 was finally being implemented! Twenty-two years! I thought, OMG, if we continue to rely on government programs nothing we're discussing will occur during my lifetime! My organizer friend is a Navy veteran, and he thinks the federal govt. runs as efficiently as the 1980s Navy. Next time I see him I'll ask him if he thinks he'll live to see any of the things he advocates become reality.
Interesting. My journey has been politically to the Left. I've always been very pareto optimal "conservative," But after seeing Republicans after 2000 move away from at least sympathy for taxing net CO2 emissions to denial and from quasi fiscal responsibility to deficits are OK so long are it redistributes income upward, from support for to hostility to immigration reform, and even more recently a bad or worse than Democrats on trade restrictions, I changed my position on who is least bad.
“In 2000, I started blogging about economics. Russ Roberts found the blog, and he persuaded me to move it to Liberty Fund, where it became EconLog. Liberty Fund in general, and Russ especially, put some formal libertarian shape to my views.“
Thank you Russ. So many of us our grateful for what you’ve done with Econtalk, lib, log and whatnot. Learned so much from you and the other bloggers there, and from Cafe Hayek and Don Boudreaux. Has made an enormous improvement to my life and my family’s life.
Amen. I can honestly say though my journey went in the opposite* direction and mostly as a result of them; I used to be extremely conservative even as a teenager and moved left as a result absorbing much of Russ, et al. Arnold's coining of legamoron and it's essay is easily one of the most personally influential things I ever read and contributed a lot to the person I am today; likewise Russ's econtalk interview where he discusses human dignity around giving to homeless people, I forget the specific lady he was interviewing. (Edit: Erica Sandberg, 2017)
* A byproduct of growing up in poverty, leftism is upper middle class game IMHO.
Fascinating! Where do you stand now? I'll have to check out the legamoron piece. Not familiar with this term. I see it here: https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/immigration-laws-and-others-not-enforced/
What year did you first come across legamoron term?
I read his original essay on it back in I want to say 2005 when I was in a particular strong world view realignment phase of my life. The original I think is lost to history, not even the wayback machine has it though I've always assumed Arnold has a copy squirreled away, maybe he'll post it again some day. I'm curious if he still believes it as a aside, not that his losing the faith would change mine.
That’s interesting. The original isn’t there.
I don’t see it here either. Arnold, where is it?
" ... the person who coined the phrase 'the marketplace of rationalizations' ... "
If you Google "market for confirmation bias" the earliest hit is from me ten years ago leaving a comment in an Econblog post by Bryan Caplan, before Ben Lockwood used it in a publication as a synonym for his "market for media slant". It's also appeared in comments in some other obscure places like askblog a few times in 2018 and even "In My Tribe" a time or two.
I think I remember that comment, Handle- was about the Gruber "scandal"?
I've read a very large number of posts, articles, and even entire books which could be argued to have a central them of how and why someone moved rightward.
There is a special category of Niemollerian "First they came ..." as in "I got screwed over the minute I deviated from the party line by viscous fanatical zealots who I had naively assumed were good, free-thinking people who would stay my friends, and, now that I recognize it, I must confess that I had been just as bad to all the previous heretics in the sequence to me and I feel pretty scummy about it, but, nevertheless, was marinated in that world for so long that I still can't quite question most other of my former leftist sympathies and commitments."
But then there is what, to an outside observer, is the true, common majority case, but the writers all tell people (and probably themselves) a varieties of different stories. With apologies to Tolstoy, all right-movements are alike, but all stories of right- movement are different in their own way.
What I am referring to is what every political pollster and party strategist has known for decades, and which one can plainly see on an attempt to chart the timeline of political views, which is that there are two dramatic discontinuities around the moments of marriage and then later, parenthood. Very few people are willing to give credit to where credit is due, because it's kind of embarrassing to admit one's ideological beliefs were so untethered from basic truths of the human condition until one had to get mugged by reality and smacked in the head multiple times by the 2x4 of real experience to finally learn the hard way how naive they had once been. This explanation is as commonly true as it is hard on the ego, and thus just as rarely acknowledged and given its fair share of causal attribution.
What made a big difference in my views was when I spent a college semester in an overseas university over 60 years ago, and then traveled around the world. I found that the usual Progressive denigration of the present and past in our country was unduly negative, indeed nihilistic, that there were big problems everywhere and in every culture, and realized that the fatuous dreams of a perfected human condition were absurd,
I remember thinking when I lived in Bangladesh that living here would turn any US machista into a feminist.
Great explanation for implying why the childless cat ladies have NOT moved towards becoming more conservative.
The bigger problem is that once the parties know which "lifestyle profiles" tend to inelastically favor one side in their voting patterns, the temptation to abuse power and warp policy toward the end of plausibly deniable strategic electorate shaping is irresistible. Thus if becomes realistically impossible to maintain any kind of neutrality and assess such policy questions by the standard of overall public welfare or national interest, and instead every question with remotely possibly downstream impact on the electorate is evaluated under the true test of "But is it good for The Party?"
The really dark implication is that if the parties are able to make such moves in the game, they are incentivized to adjust political, cultural, and economic conditions so as to nudge people toward lifestyles that may make them unhappy and unfulfilled but which they don't conceptualize as being causally attributable to the very policies of the parties they enthusiastically support. When you see "Life of Julia", you are seeing a vision and promise that is downstream of the political fact that single women vote overwhelmingly for the left which cannot help but become interested in 'helping' them remain single.
Here's mine: I was a standard leftist in college, albeit with a civil libertarian streak. This was during the Bush years, and while I was pretty angry at the Neocons and conservatives in general for their deceptive campaigns for war against Iraq, their barbarous use of torture, and their extra-legal domestic surveillance campaigns via the Patriot Act, at the same time I thought a lot of my fellow leftists embarrassed themselves with their hysterical reactions. All the Bushitler talk and the evergreen shouts of "fascism!" I thought were self-discrediting and cringeworthy. Worse, though, was that I couldn't help but notice that Obama and his pals did little to push back on any of this once they got into office, and in some cases went even further. Obama had his own personal kill list, welched on shutting down Guantanamo, and the Patriot Act was renewed again and again with bipartisan support. It was all very disillusioning. And none of the people who had spent the past six years shouting about the surveillance state said a peep. We were not, in fact, the ones we'd been waiting for, apparently; at least not the ones I was waiting for.
Semi-concurrent to that, one summer in college, I read Freakonomics and was fascinated by it; I'd never read a book like that before. Hungry for similar content, I learned the authors had this thing called a blog that they posted new material to fairly regularly, so I started reading that, and I noticed that they often linked to other blogs called EconLog and Marginal Revolution. MR, in particular, had this chap named Alex Tabarrok who espoused what sounded like some pretty principled and well-reasoned views about the proper relationship between citizen and state. He was also the first time I encountered the concept that trade was mutually beneficial: all parties expect to benefit; otherwise they wouldn't choose to trade. This seemed like a very powerful and important idea that my formal education had failed to disseminate. A lot of idiotic leftist complaints about economic outcomes are apparent as such once you recognize this idea.
Another major catalyst for me was the financial crisis. My first job out of college was in the banking industry, mostly doing compliance and risk management consulting for small and mid-sized banks. I couldn't help but think how silly it seemed that, despite having a network of say, 40 branches, our clients still had to submit an application and get written permission from regulators to open #41. Or how much time and effort they put into filling out call reports and TFRs, filing CTRs, and so forth, which I was pretty sure no one in the federal government was actually paying attention to, anyway. So there we were in 2008-09, with the entire financial industry imploding despite the micro-management and oppressive regulatory regime. The whole modern administrative state seemed to me like a vast waste.
After that, I started calling myself a libertarian. I think as I've gotten older and feel like I understand human nature somewhat better, I've evolved in a more conservative direction, but I still have my Don't Tread On Me streak.
The failure to highlight the win-win aspect includes not explicitly noting that Real Wealth increases. That is very clear in Arnold’s fine, underrated Specialization and Trade book. Also far more awkwardly titled The Patterns of Sustainable Specialization of Trade, often noted as PSST here (and only here?).
Arnold, have you read Duncan Foley's essay on his intellectual journey in economics? Starts at Swarthmore:
"The core of the Economics Honors program was the seminar in Economic Theory, taught by Joseph Conard. (The other students were Peggy Colvin, Michael Manove, Lydia Razran, and Marty Weitzman.) Conard (already wasting away from the cancer that soon after killed him) managed to pack the equivalent of two years of graduate level macro- and microeconomic theory into a single intensive semester. Early on I ran into difficulties with the
theory of consumer choice, because I did not recognize myself as making consistent choices subject to a budget constraint when I went to the candy machine in the dorm to buy a chocolate bar. When I raised this doubt, probably at
inordinate length, in the seminar, Conard terminated the discussion by saying
”Duncan, perhaps you should study this theory and learn it thoroughly before you criticize it"
Duncan Foley was one of the two best teachers I had — and truly a fine person.
I'm a little confused. It seems to me Tversky and Kahneman put gaping holes in that theory and Foley's difficulties with it were far more on target than his prof's rigid adherence to it.
I'm sorry for the poor formatting, this was copied and pasted from a pdf file. Not sure if this is of interest to you or your readers at all, but Foley's essay covers some really interesting ground on the evolution of macroeconomics:
https://rajivsethi.substack.com/p/foley-sidrauski-and-the-microfoundations-10-11-20
Swarthmore seems to have had some extraordinary students and faculty at the time.
In the essay, Foley says:
"In my view, the rational expectations assumption which Lucas and Sargent put forward to “close” the Keynesian model, was only a disguised form of the assumption of the existence of complete futures and contingencies markets. When one unpacked the “expectations” language of the rational expectations literature, it turned out that these models assumed that agents formed expectations of futures and contingency prices that were consistent with the aggregate plans being made, and hence were in fact competitive general equilibrium prices in a model of complete futures and contingency markets. Arrow and Debreu had made the assumption of the existence of complete futures and contingency markets to give their version of the Walrasian model the appearance of coping with the real-world problems posed by the uncertainty of the future. To my mind, the rational expectations approach amounted to making the perfect-foresight assumptions that I had already considered and rejected on grounds of unrealism in the course of working with Sidrauski... What the profession took to be an exciting breakthrough in economic theory I saw as a boring and predictable retracing of an already discredited path."
I've never seen it put that way before, but that sounds exactly right.
Yes, it's a very deep insight. Hayek had hinted at something similar in a 1937 paper (original in German in 1928) as discussed here:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.31.3.215
"In a 1937 paper in Economica, he defined equilibrium as a set of individual plans that could be executed without mutual interference. This allows for the possibility that individual beliefs depend upon local knowledge and differ, provided that these beliefs are not contradicted as plans unfold. This notion of equilibrium is thoroughly modern, dynamic, and unrestrictive—and quite distinct from a general equilibrium model in which prices are uniform and public. Its development by Hayek is a significant—though little recognized—accomplishment in its own right. Indeed, Hayek claimed later in life that it “seems to me in retrospect the most original contribution I have made to the theory of economics."
But Hayek was not particularly interested in the properties of equilibrium itself, and saw the strength of the market economy as arising from the learning and diffusion of new information that it accomplishes in disequilibrium."
My essay in a volume in honor of Foley has more on this
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203109502-25/market-ecology-economics-crisis-rajiv-sethi
"But they have no difficulty combining conservative lifestyles with liberal Democratic political positions. They are certain that Trump is Hitler and that conservatives who object to radical sex education in schools are book-banning troglodytes. "
Classic Rob Henderson 'luxury beliefs' in action.
Well, if Trump were a Liberal and Conservative would tell us exactly what kid of sex education in schools they are FOR, it would help.
I've never believed that Liberals are responsible for other people adopting lifestyles they themselves eschew. :)
College educated Liberals very seldom have children out of wedlock, and even strongly support abortion to avoid that. Yet their Sexual Liberation sexual norms, plus their large welfare, have resulted in 70%+ of Black kids being born and raised without their parents being married.
Lifestyle choices are a combination of personal choices and social norms. The Liberal social norms have a significant influence on that result.
How about no sex education in schools! That’s the job of parents 🤓
It is striking that Arnold's account of his journey makes no mention of specific books or other writings, except an allusion to Thomas Sowell's _Conflict of Visions_. Doubly remarkable, as Arnold would become a regular book reviewer at EconLib.
My journey was via ideas and authors. I recall three turning points in graduate school and entry to academe.
1. When I undertook to write a dissertation about history of social strife in Sicily, I came to realize that my humanities education was inadequate. I resolved to teach myself rudiments of economics, sociology, and psychology. Starting from the Left, I hit upon Thomas C. Schelling (_Micromotives and Macrobehavior_, and _Choice and Consequence_) and Jon Elster (_Making Sense of Marx_, and _The Cement of Society_). I was hooked on interdisciplinary "methodological individualism." This intellectual framework naturally led also to fine conservative and libertarian scholars; for example Sowell, Robert Sugden, and David Friedman. And ethical individualism.
2. I had a precious opportunity to teach in Columbia University's "great books" course (Thucydides to Freud). I got an education by teaching masterpieces. The canon was under siege by most of the Left. It was evident that the critiques were mostly shallow and wrong-headed, full of jargon and too clever by half.
3. Conservatives, as far as I could tell, wanted to turn back the clock to the traditional humanities. Roger Kimball's incisive, sardonic book, _The Rape of the Masters_, made a vivid case for the traditional approach to art history. I was drawn instead to make an innovative case for the _cognitive_ value of a wide range of masterpieces in literature. Ovid's "contention of Ajax & Ulysses for the armor of Achilles," Dante's _Inferno_, Leopardi's _Canti_, Manzoni's _The Betrothed_, Ishiguro's novels are also contributions to what Arnold calls "cultural analysis" — because great artists have special powers of introspection, observation, insight, description. They enrich our understanding of the mind, psychology, and social norms. My intuition was reinforced by philosopher Bernard Williams' deep book, _Moral Luck_. This approach, which identifies a synthesis of aesthetic and cognitive value in creative arts, may extend naturally to the best creations in popular culture; for example, _The Godfather_ films (I & II) or Julia Michaels' song, "Anxiety."
Perhaps these were the turning points and landmarks of my journey because i somehow improbably gained entry to the (cracking) Ivory Tower.
Same for me. At 17, I came across England's only libertarian bookshop. I read Rothbard's For a New Liberty, then Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (I ended up getting a doctorate in philosophy). The next year, 1982, I read Friedman's Free to Choose, Curtiss's The Tariff Idea, H.L.A. Hart's Law, Liberty, and Morality, Madsen's Private Power: Multinational Corporations and Their Role in the Survival of Our Planet, Rothbard's Power and Market, David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom, Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, Popper's Conjectures and Refutations, Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty, Taylor's The Fundamentals of Austrian Economics, Chris Tame's The Bibliography of Freedom, Machan's Human Rights and Human Liberties, Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State, the Tannehill's The Market for Liberty, Wollstein's Society Without Government, Rand's For the New Intellectual, John Gray's Literature of Liberty: F.A. Hayek and the Rebirth of Classical Liberalism, Kirzner's Competition and Entrepreneurship, and Rand's The New Left.
So, very much formed my views reading books and not people. In England at that time, libertarians were almost completely unknown and I was seen as weird and unaligned with anyone.
Looking at that list for 1982 (which doesn't include any non-politics/economics books such as Hoftstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, I wonder how the heck I read so much.
I think this is just a snippet of his intellectual journey. Or maybe this is just his social journey; a pretty short one. I did do an analysis of Arnold's daily essay-style blog posts and he averages 900 words per post. In 20 of his most recent posts he never goes over 1500 words. Too limiting for a thorough explanation of his journey.
https://substack.com/@scottgibb/p-151501401
Yeah, Arnold, we would like the full account please, with book references and psychological self-analysis. Where is your Late Confessions?
Lingering question for Arnold: can you say more about why you're obsessed with learning? What do you know about your DNA and family culture that might explain you?
I'm a bit sad that Arnold doesn't include Tech Central Station, where I first started reading him. It's now gone with link rot, but another blogger still going has this 2006 comment about Arnold on 1968:
https://theglitteringeye.com/kling-on-1968/
>> Arnold Kling has posted an article on Tech Central Station* in which he characterizes the conventional wisdom of liberals in 1968 and suggests that:
Most people who were liberals in 1968 still are. Liberals. In 1968.
I was an adult and at least a little politically savvy in 1968 and I think that Mr. Kling has some things right and some things wrong. Here are the articles of faith he ascribes to the liberals of 1968:
1- Anti-Communism was a greater menace than Communism.
2- The planet could not possibly support the population increases that would take place by the end of the twentieth century.
3- Conservatives stood in the way of progress for minorities.
4- Government programs were the best way to lift people out of poverty.
5- What underdeveloped countries needed were large capital investments, financed by foreign aid from the rich countries.
6-Inflation was a cost-push phenomenon, requiring government intervention in wage and price setting.
7-Anyone who is not a liberal must be incorrigibly stupid.
<<
The dead link: http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=012706B
On the Failure of Liberalism, a huge reason "Liberal" policies worked was Rule of Law - Nobody is Above the Law. The Dem media was full of this fine principle in their persecution of Trump.
Yet ... coming to America illegally is Against The Law. Those who support illegal aliens are against Rule of Law, against a pillar of Liberalism.
Few, or none, of the many links Arnold has had on Liberalism and its problems have included this start issue. It is inconsistent to favor illegal aliens and also support Rule of Law, yet many who claim to support Liberalism are inconsistent in that way, as well as often being hypocritical (no indictment of HR Clinton for her illegal email server with Top Secret document, as well as likely evidence of bribery).
It's great to hear more of Arnold's intellectual progress. No Ayn Rand, no Robert Heinlein - my two biggest young influences towards Libertarianism. Not even Uncle Milton's (Friedman) "Free to Choose", which was more preaching to the choir when I read it, along with David D Friedman's "Machinery of Freedom". Plus Decision Analysis courses at Stanford under (too fat until diet) Professor Ron Howard (from MIT). Who just died last month, RIP.
Here's his retirement note (my EES degree became an MSE masters, the econ efficient degree):
https://msande.stanford.edu/research-impact/stories-voices/faculty/after-53-years-stanford-legendary-professor-ron-howard
(me:) What ai will fail at is giving what decision makers want - certainty about the results of their decisions. Too much of the push for "more data" is actually a doomed search for certainty, tho it does often reduce uncertainty, which helps. I do think ai can formalize Bayesian priors and updates to a greater extent, so I'm a bit hopeful about that.
Most successful entrepreneurs believed, against the 1 in 5 odds, that they would be successful. Most failures did, too. Sometimes I think my knowledge of this reality made me too cautious to start my own business & successfully push it/ dedicate my life to making it successful/ becoming the kind of person one needed to be to run a small successful startup. (Now retired, mostly I'm happy with Slovak wife, 4 kids, 3 grandkids; & blogging hobby.)
Thanks for your mention of Ron Howard. My co-author on a book and many articles, Charley Hooper, counts Ron Howard as one of his most important influences.
Well, I was 26 and just finished up the Peace Corp in 1068 and definitely considered myself a Liberal and a Democrat. (Of course, in those days many Republicans were Liberals, too.) I would not have expressed my feelings that way at the time but I think thee were more or less:
1. “Anti communism” was a greater menace in the US, in US political debate than “Communism.”
2. I probably though that, but with no ill policy implications aside from the desirability of sex education in schools
3. If that meant opposing the voting rights and public accommodations, hostility to homosexuals, I agreed.
4. Low deadweight cost transfers to poor people were (still are) a very good way to reduce poverty.
5. While large flows of public and private capital to developing countries was a very good thing (I eventually went to work for the World Bank) developing countries mainly needed better economic policies and governance.
6. No. Even then I knew that as Milton Freidman said, inflation is always a monetary phenomenon. I did think that a short shot of price control would make monetary policy more effective. (Who knows, maybe it would have been if it had been a short shot)
7. No, I watched Firing Line, but most “conservative” policy advocacy WAS incorrigibly stupid. 😊
It is only inconsistent to favor illegal aliens and also support Rule of Law if you do not believe there should be different Rules for different people. "“One Law for the Lion and Ox is tyranny.”
Poorly framed. Immigration is just another economic policy. We want to allow in, nay, recruit, people who will make net contributions to the economy. My guess is that in practice this would include most of the people who enter illegally (and many more who would enter if they could do so legally, but comprehensive immigration reform will include strict border controls.
With respect to borders, that means Open Borders. Which I would support if there were no tax paid benefits to help people. Like Milton Friedman claimed—but ending the tax funded safety net ain’t gonna happen, tho it IS a tyranny, so the Illegal alien supporters deny honestly supporting Open Borders, but oppose enforcing border laws.
Hypocrisy.
I think you are mistaken in thinking that the availability of transfers to people who enter illegibly is a very important reason for immigration. It's jobs.
Williams discusses his shifting view “in recent years” meaning since about 2016 the year Brexit passed. I am not a paid subscriber and can’t read the whole piece so will forego speculation other than to note that David Cameron was succeeded by Teresa May that year. Both from the Conservative Party, Cameron, I suppose, might be considered right wing for implementing an austerity program that increased taxes and reined in government spending but produced a middling average GDP growth rate of 1.5% during his tenure. In 2016, UK GDP grew 2%. Under May, 2.7% in 2017; 1.4% in 2018, and 1.6% in 2019. Both seem to have performed equally well in controlling the national debt https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_national_debt_analysis
and both held government spending at a nearly constant share of GDP. https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_national_spending_analysis with a slight upward trend in tax revenues https://www.ukpublicrevenue.co.uk/ . From this I get the impression of general competence in Conservative Party economic stewardship. One wonders how this might have influenced Williams.
I no longer have any idea, nor care much, whether I am on the left or right. In this century, I can only look back in regret on what became of the projects of the candidates I preferred (Bushes) and offer some respect for some of the candidates I did not prefer (Clinton). Nathan Pinkoski’s recent First Things essay and N.S. Lyons’s response (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-post-cold-war-apotheosis-of-liberal ) summarize the limbo of the populist disaffected with the establishment status quo.
Personally, I date this sense of rootlessness back to the 2000 presidential primary McCain ran, like so many presidential contenders this century, as a populist pledging "a fight to take our government back from the power brokers and special interests, and return it to the people and the noble cause of freedom it was created to serve." This aligned with his campaign finance reform initiatives (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-john-mccain-nearly-made-gop-party-campaign-finance-reform ) Yet I was never able to reconcile myself to a notion of campaign reform that seemed a de facto squashing of free speech.
The principles of incrementalism, localism, prudence, preservation of healthy tradition, deference to expertise, etc., all at one time associated with the right in one way or another, unfortunately no longer seem sufficient to the task of reforming a leviathan incapable of disciplining itself and controlling the national debt or cutting back on the fire hose of regulations. The great tech boom fueling economic growth does little to induce sentiments of don’t worry, be happy, recalling as it does an earlier tech boom. And the forces attempting to impose discipline from outside appear hopelessly over matched by a feckless and unconstrained establishment. Optimism takes ever increasing amounts of effort.
Very interesting. I love this personal kind of post. Writers, especially those who write about economics and politics, often seem to believe that the personal is not that important, but to most humans that isn't the case.
We easily lapse into talk of "Left" and "Right," but it obscures political psychology's multi-dimensionality and fluidity.
My journey is a little less philosophical. I never saw the inside of a decent school, I didn't have squat, and I had to work shit jobs to dig myself out and up. Bingo.
That does not sound "Right" to me.
We might have different ideas about what "Right" means. Working, and understanding hard work and how it creates a successful society, is probably lost on the condescending types that think "Right-ness" is achieved with an advanced degree. Nope.
Yep. Evolution & Economics were my factors, too. Along with History.
All of which contradict the fundamentals of leftism: Humans inherently good, blank slate mutability, egalitarianism, all of which I grew up believing. The first was the hardest to give up.
I wonder if we have a public, mostly functional and necessarily civic version of RFCs in normal society: juries.
For example, "... when an issue arose (a committed crime) a committee of (citizens) would form. They would (vote on) a proposed solution (the verdict) and put it out (to the court). The (verdict) once stabilized, would be implemented. Then the (jury) would go away ... Instead of a perpetual government agency to manage a problem, you would have a temporary organization to solve the problem."
"I refer to DC as 'the culture of no...'" Yesterday I went to a conference on biofuels development. It was organized by a friend of mine. The first speaker was a USDA official who flew to Western Washington State to talk to this small group of about 25. He was excited that a federal program that he had been working on since 2002 was finally being implemented! Twenty-two years! I thought, OMG, if we continue to rely on government programs nothing we're discussing will occur during my lifetime! My organizer friend is a Navy veteran, and he thinks the federal govt. runs as efficiently as the 1980s Navy. Next time I see him I'll ask him if he thinks he'll live to see any of the things he advocates become reality.
Interesting. My journey has been politically to the Left. I've always been very pareto optimal "conservative," But after seeing Republicans after 2000 move away from at least sympathy for taxing net CO2 emissions to denial and from quasi fiscal responsibility to deficits are OK so long are it redistributes income upward, from support for to hostility to immigration reform, and even more recently a bad or worse than Democrats on trade restrictions, I changed my position on who is least bad.