Arnold, at the beginning of the essay, you distinguish between "name recognition and idea penetration." But that gets lost in the rest of the essay. It has been said that a "classic" is a book that you read and say "there's nothing new here" because the ideas have become commonplace. It seems to me that some of the people you mention have largely been forgotten but their new ideas are now old ideas that everyone knows.
The ice caps came down and ground up mountains into fine dust, putting minerals in the soil and compressing and digging depressions and when receding melted into them to create large lakes. Thousands of years later you tell a prosperous farmer enjoying his hot summer day off with some boating and fishing that "All this was done by the glacier," and he looks around and asks, "What glacier?"
I agree a lot gets lost in AK's post but in fairness, it would need to be many times longer to cover so much ground with the specificity you suggest. Be that as it may, it's worth noting he acknowledged the point you make multiple times for people he nonetheless labeled fallers.
Agreed. Since he brought it up, I was disappointed that he didn't do more with it. I wanted more depth, and wouldn't have minded a longer post at all. This had a feel of gossip.
On Freud, I have always liked Camille Paglia’s assessment “overrated as a scientist, still underrated as an artist” - the ideas of Freud (and -> Jung -> Joseph Campbell) have so penetrated narrative arts I don’t think it’s possible to say they have fallen that much, they are part of the firmament. Certainly we arn’t explaining major swings world history with toilet training practice, yet just this week I heard a teenager describe her mom as “anal about dog hair on the couch”
I suggest Freud's dream interpretation book and Civilization and its Discontents. One area in which Freud is still highly influential is in family law in most states: most "best interests of the child" statutes are based on Anna Freud's formulation, so when an American fights for custody, they must present their actions and inclinations to be judged in a Freudian manner, often mediated by dueling expert witnesses certified in their expertise as advanced Freudian shamans.
Freud's concept of the individual is particularly worth considering in comparison to liberal theory, with its emphasis on the state as the facilitator of free-willed individuals. The liberal individual is not the same as the Freudian individual. The Freudian concept of the individual only really triumphed in the post-war period in the US, and despite all the pooh-poohing of Freud as something that has been left behind, in truth it's hard to understand the modern left and its goals to dismantle all instruments of repression without understanding its debts to Freud. So, although Freud has definitely fallen off completely in terms of his conscious influence, rather appropriately, he is one of the largest subconscious influences on our culture, the original manufacturer of the postmodern fishbowl.
Yes, to your last point. A lot of Freud's ideas have simply disappeared into the woodwork. They've affect our thinking, but we no longer associate the ideas with the man.
Also, and here I'm addressing the OP, very little of his work was published in the 19th century. If you look at the Wikipedia entry you'll see almost all of his books were published in the 20th century. "The Interpretation of Dreams" is the only major work published in the 19th century, 1899. Peak Freud was probably the 1950s.
"the modern left and its goals to dismantle all instruments of repression"
That may have been part of the left in the 1950s but I don't think it is today. If anything, the opposite. In the 1950s and '60s, lefties were free speech absolutists. Righties were censoring them. Now that they often have the power to suppress (repress?), other's speech, they are often pro-censorship. In fact, (Coase's 1974 "The Market for Goods and the Market for Ideas" has an inkling of what was to come), if you believe that people's "economic" decisions are often wrong because of incorrect information, influence by the wrong people, greed, etc., so are their "social" and "personal" decisions. And if you need good, educated people to guide the economy, you also need them to guide the rest of what people do. They need to be "engineers of the human soul" (the term is Stalin's; I suspect most lefties would be embarrassed by that).
Thus, the attempt to control what people say and, to a large extent, what people think on college campuses.
Perhaps "repression" is not the exact right word for this. People on the left don't think they are repressing basic desires. They are just filling in a blank slate or overwriting the bad things capitalism/racism/heteronormativity/the patriarchy have put into people. But it's pretty similar.
(Wow, I hadn't realized this is the 50th anniversary of TMFGATMFI. Will there be a conference this year? A volume with updates and criticisms? Even a panel at the American Economic Association at the end of the year?)
So there is a repression in the Freudian sense of the term, and there is the similar method of repression as a political concept. The postmodern left would crib from Popper and tell you that anything can be tolerated except the intolerant. It is then proper e.g. to suppress hate speech because permitting it would itself be making society intolerant to minority viewpoints and the full participation of minorities.
If I am reproducing the novel theory of gender dysphoria correctly, the theory goes that some children have primordial inclinations to perform as if they were a different sex. The conservative and religious strain of society commands that child to repress that primordial desire, and that repression leads to neurosis. Freud himself would probably recommend psychoanalysis as the safe and proper way to for the patient to express their repressed thoughts and desires to treat dysphoria and the ensuing neurosis. The Freudian way to treat it would be to ask "Hmmm, now tell me about your mother." The post-everything way to do it is to have a child molester pretending to be a therapist on Roblox tell the patient "Hmmm, maybe Oedipus was right all along and you should just let it all out."
The post-Freudian world accepts Freud's frame, but instead the entire world is supposed to be the stage of the psychodrama rather than to leave repressive institutions and ways of belief in place. Our contemporaries mostly see repression and perhaps civilization itself as the root cause of human distress. All primordial desires should be unleashed without limits (except the ones that they don't like). So I think a lot of leftists would not really see the kind of contradiction that Coase might have because they believe that some kinds of primordial expressions are more important to unleash than others. They also see some kinds of individuals and groups as more deserving of protection and priority than others. They would give you an Oscar Wilde quote about hobgoblins, small minds, and consistency. Maybe one of them can chime in and tell me that I'm a bad boy.
That quote is actually from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self Reliance", back in 1841:
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
Oscar Wilde sounded somewhat similar in 1885's "The Relation of Dress to Art: A Note in Black and White on Mr. Whistler's Lecture":
"Nor do I feel quite sure that Mr. Whistler has been himself always true to the dogma he seems to lay down, that a painter should paint only the dress of his age and of his actual surroundings: far be it from me to burden a butterfly with the heavy responsibility of its past: I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN OF OPINION THAT CONSISTENCY IS THE LAST REFUGE OF THE UNIMAGINATIVE [capitalization added]: but have we not all seen, and most of us admired, a picture from his hand of exquisite English girls strolling by an opal sea in the fantastic dresses of Japan? Has not Tite Street been thrilled with the tidings that the models of Chelsea were posing to the master, in peplums, for pastels? Whatever comes from Mr. Whistler's brush is far too perfect in its loveliness to stand or fall by any intellectual dogmas on art, even by his own: for Beauty is justified of all her children, and cares nothing for explanations: but it is impossible to look through any collection of modern pictures in London, from Burlington House to the Grosvenor Gallery, without feeling that the professional model is ruining painting and reducing it to a condition of mere pose and pastiche."
I pulled the quotes from a wikipedia article, "Emerson and Wilde on Consistency".
Disagree on Nozick - he rose to fame for his critique of Rawls and egalitarianism, but oddly enough the last, widely unread chapter of Anarchy, State, Utopia is one of the intellectual foundations of startup cities, charter cities, etc.
Rawls will disappear once universities stop requiring people to read him.
Wittgenstein is a faller. Philosophical problems do not go away even when we clarify concepts. And in fact there is a good definition of a game.
I found it ironic that Joseph Heath described G. A. Cohen as being disturbed by Nozick's AS&U undermining Marxism, only to find most American political philosophers didn't care because they were Rawlsian egalitarians. https://josephheath.substack.com/p/john-rawls-and-the-death-of-western He mentions that Rawls' Theory of Justice never critiqued Marx despite (in his view) killing it, but not that Nozick's argument was directed at Rawls.
Surprised Derrida does not appear. IMHO a huge riser. tl:dr version: Other 20th century philosophers of language were focused on exactly how words+grammars create correspondences with the real world (Russell, Chomsky, Kripke, Putnam etc.). E.g. huge discussion about whether words are descriptors or designators. Whether grammars are universal. Derrida claimed that most speech doesn't create any correspondence with the outside world, discourse is its own world. I think that LLMs are a home run for Derrida. They don't have any grammars, they don't have any model of the outside world, and they converse just like people. Natural language programs based on grammars were awful.
Fun post. Because much of history is forgotten, most people are doomed to be Fallers. The lucky ones are those who do not fall as quickly, while only the true superstars can hope to maintain/rise for some period of time.
Others you could consider in political science would be Sam Huntington - maybe a riser for his work on state capacity, but a faller for Clash of Civilizations, though that work still gets mentioned. Charles Tilly is in the same sphere but probably less well-known even back then. Edward Banfield (Moral Basis of a Backward Society) is maybe returning through Joe Henrich & WEIRD. Were there other culturalists, but b/c that's having its moment? How about C. Wright Mills and the power elite? Making a comeback as ideas but not a name?
I made it just past the halfway mark in this post before realizing how ignorant I am. I have some catching up to do. Arnold - thanks again for raising expectations. Got the Albion’s Seed right here next to me. I’ll get right on it.
I didn't even recognize at least half the names and many more I know nothing about. Of the ones I'm familiar, I'd have a hard time writing a paragraph on their main idea(s) and significance for most or all.
I'm glad I'm not alone. Do you think Arnold can write a good paragraph for each one? I propose a new game show: Jeopardy for Intellectuals hosted by Arnold Kling. Now available on Zoom TV.
Maybe he can do better than us but we could write them. The bigger issue is identifying the right people to include. Surely he can do that better than us. But well enough? IDK.
I'm really bad at remembering what to put on lists. Favorites are a little easier and I'd say these aren't strictly intellectuals. Haidt, Pinker, McWhorter, Fryer, more mixed feelings on Levitt, Peterson, Summers, Stossel, Maher, and Brooks. Recently deceased might include MFriedman and Kahneman.
For living I would go with Russ Roberts, James Otteson, Arnold Kling, Dan Klein, David Friedman, Robert Higgs, P.J. Hill, Matt Ridley and Don Boudreaux. That's without thinking about it too hard.
20th century deceased, Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Julian Simon.
Pre-20th: Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell.
I'm pretty biased toward econ, libertarians and the Scottish Enlightenment.
Freud may be a faller, but if you associate him with the sexualization of identity, then he has created a widely adopted foundational framework for how people see themselves, with pivotal downstream consequences in society.
In some ways, identity is today less sexualized. At work, one is supposed to treat colleagues of the opposite sex exactly the same as one does colleagues of the same sex. Both sexes are supposed not just to have equal rights but to be considered pretty much the same. Female reporters in male locker rooms? What's the big deal? Nobody today would talk about "the male principle" or "the female principle" though that was not at all uncommon in the 19th century.
The name that I see constantly from a vast range of writers in a vast range of disciplines is Hayek. His elaborations on the broader idea that decentralized competitive striving can lead to knowledge is something that I see cropping up in just about everything I read, and I read a lot. Maybe this says more about me than Hayek, but I suspect he is the real intellectual superstar on this list. The closest thing to a Darwin or A Smith of the 20th C.
"He thought that the leaders of these giants cultivated a myth of entrepreneurship to hide their immense power and quasi-permanent status. In his prime, his books were bestsellers and many educated Americans were familiar with his line of thinking. Today, he is little read, and the business world has experienced considerable disruption."
Today, US corporations are Brobdingnagian oligopolist behemoths, who never innovate*, vindicating his point perfectly.
FIXED!
* how many new products from goog, aapl over the last decade?
…or at minimum, if he is a Faller, he is not much of a Faller.
I think in this case Arnold is conflating not in current fashion with leading politicians with his ranking criteria for everyone else. Although I can’t deny that the economics profession seems to have taken a left turn (how sharp a left turn I’m not expert enough to judge, but it clearly has turned to the left in the last 25 years).
1. His concept of a two-tiered system with the market system and the "industrial system" of big business and government overlaying it is implicitly accepted by everyone, especially people who are mindful and informed of public choice. Thought of course Galbraith himself was not.
2. Certainly, Galbraith's concepts continue to serve as the basic playbook for how big business and government operates. Wokeism's march through institutions and governance is evidence for Galbraith's vision of corporate power as a transmission mechanism. He was undoubtedly correct and prescient about that even when he failed to see that this power would be used for more than maintaining narrow commercial interests of artificial monopolies.
Arnold, at the beginning of the essay, you distinguish between "name recognition and idea penetration." But that gets lost in the rest of the essay. It has been said that a "classic" is a book that you read and say "there's nothing new here" because the ideas have become commonplace. It seems to me that some of the people you mention have largely been forgotten but their new ideas are now old ideas that everyone knows.
The ice caps came down and ground up mountains into fine dust, putting minerals in the soil and compressing and digging depressions and when receding melted into them to create large lakes. Thousands of years later you tell a prosperous farmer enjoying his hot summer day off with some boating and fishing that "All this was done by the glacier," and he looks around and asks, "What glacier?"
Rawls should be exhibit A here.
New ideas become old - wonderful reminder.
I agree a lot gets lost in AK's post but in fairness, it would need to be many times longer to cover so much ground with the specificity you suggest. Be that as it may, it's worth noting he acknowledged the point you make multiple times for people he nonetheless labeled fallers.
Agreed. Since he brought it up, I was disappointed that he didn't do more with it. I wanted more depth, and wouldn't have minded a longer post at all. This had a feel of gossip.
On Freud, I have always liked Camille Paglia’s assessment “overrated as a scientist, still underrated as an artist” - the ideas of Freud (and -> Jung -> Joseph Campbell) have so penetrated narrative arts I don’t think it’s possible to say they have fallen that much, they are part of the firmament. Certainly we arn’t explaining major swings world history with toilet training practice, yet just this week I heard a teenager describe her mom as “anal about dog hair on the couch”
I suggest Freud's dream interpretation book and Civilization and its Discontents. One area in which Freud is still highly influential is in family law in most states: most "best interests of the child" statutes are based on Anna Freud's formulation, so when an American fights for custody, they must present their actions and inclinations to be judged in a Freudian manner, often mediated by dueling expert witnesses certified in their expertise as advanced Freudian shamans.
Freud's concept of the individual is particularly worth considering in comparison to liberal theory, with its emphasis on the state as the facilitator of free-willed individuals. The liberal individual is not the same as the Freudian individual. The Freudian concept of the individual only really triumphed in the post-war period in the US, and despite all the pooh-poohing of Freud as something that has been left behind, in truth it's hard to understand the modern left and its goals to dismantle all instruments of repression without understanding its debts to Freud. So, although Freud has definitely fallen off completely in terms of his conscious influence, rather appropriately, he is one of the largest subconscious influences on our culture, the original manufacturer of the postmodern fishbowl.
Yes, to your last point. A lot of Freud's ideas have simply disappeared into the woodwork. They've affect our thinking, but we no longer associate the ideas with the man.
Also, and here I'm addressing the OP, very little of his work was published in the 19th century. If you look at the Wikipedia entry you'll see almost all of his books were published in the 20th century. "The Interpretation of Dreams" is the only major work published in the 19th century, 1899. Peak Freud was probably the 1950s.
"the modern left and its goals to dismantle all instruments of repression"
That may have been part of the left in the 1950s but I don't think it is today. If anything, the opposite. In the 1950s and '60s, lefties were free speech absolutists. Righties were censoring them. Now that they often have the power to suppress (repress?), other's speech, they are often pro-censorship. In fact, (Coase's 1974 "The Market for Goods and the Market for Ideas" has an inkling of what was to come), if you believe that people's "economic" decisions are often wrong because of incorrect information, influence by the wrong people, greed, etc., so are their "social" and "personal" decisions. And if you need good, educated people to guide the economy, you also need them to guide the rest of what people do. They need to be "engineers of the human soul" (the term is Stalin's; I suspect most lefties would be embarrassed by that).
Thus, the attempt to control what people say and, to a large extent, what people think on college campuses.
Perhaps "repression" is not the exact right word for this. People on the left don't think they are repressing basic desires. They are just filling in a blank slate or overwriting the bad things capitalism/racism/heteronormativity/the patriarchy have put into people. But it's pretty similar.
(Wow, I hadn't realized this is the 50th anniversary of TMFGATMFI. Will there be a conference this year? A volume with updates and criticisms? Even a panel at the American Economic Association at the end of the year?)
So there is a repression in the Freudian sense of the term, and there is the similar method of repression as a political concept. The postmodern left would crib from Popper and tell you that anything can be tolerated except the intolerant. It is then proper e.g. to suppress hate speech because permitting it would itself be making society intolerant to minority viewpoints and the full participation of minorities.
If I am reproducing the novel theory of gender dysphoria correctly, the theory goes that some children have primordial inclinations to perform as if they were a different sex. The conservative and religious strain of society commands that child to repress that primordial desire, and that repression leads to neurosis. Freud himself would probably recommend psychoanalysis as the safe and proper way to for the patient to express their repressed thoughts and desires to treat dysphoria and the ensuing neurosis. The Freudian way to treat it would be to ask "Hmmm, now tell me about your mother." The post-everything way to do it is to have a child molester pretending to be a therapist on Roblox tell the patient "Hmmm, maybe Oedipus was right all along and you should just let it all out."
The post-Freudian world accepts Freud's frame, but instead the entire world is supposed to be the stage of the psychodrama rather than to leave repressive institutions and ways of belief in place. Our contemporaries mostly see repression and perhaps civilization itself as the root cause of human distress. All primordial desires should be unleashed without limits (except the ones that they don't like). So I think a lot of leftists would not really see the kind of contradiction that Coase might have because they believe that some kinds of primordial expressions are more important to unleash than others. They also see some kinds of individuals and groups as more deserving of protection and priority than others. They would give you an Oscar Wilde quote about hobgoblins, small minds, and consistency. Maybe one of them can chime in and tell me that I'm a bad boy.
That quote is actually from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self Reliance", back in 1841:
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
Oscar Wilde sounded somewhat similar in 1885's "The Relation of Dress to Art: A Note in Black and White on Mr. Whistler's Lecture":
"Nor do I feel quite sure that Mr. Whistler has been himself always true to the dogma he seems to lay down, that a painter should paint only the dress of his age and of his actual surroundings: far be it from me to burden a butterfly with the heavy responsibility of its past: I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN OF OPINION THAT CONSISTENCY IS THE LAST REFUGE OF THE UNIMAGINATIVE [capitalization added]: but have we not all seen, and most of us admired, a picture from his hand of exquisite English girls strolling by an opal sea in the fantastic dresses of Japan? Has not Tite Street been thrilled with the tidings that the models of Chelsea were posing to the master, in peplums, for pastels? Whatever comes from Mr. Whistler's brush is far too perfect in its loveliness to stand or fall by any intellectual dogmas on art, even by his own: for Beauty is justified of all her children, and cares nothing for explanations: but it is impossible to look through any collection of modern pictures in London, from Burlington House to the Grosvenor Gallery, without feeling that the professional model is ruining painting and reducing it to a condition of mere pose and pastiche."
I pulled the quotes from a wikipedia article, "Emerson and Wilde on Consistency".
Disagree on Nozick - he rose to fame for his critique of Rawls and egalitarianism, but oddly enough the last, widely unread chapter of Anarchy, State, Utopia is one of the intellectual foundations of startup cities, charter cities, etc.
Rawls will disappear once universities stop requiring people to read him.
Wittgenstein is a faller. Philosophical problems do not go away even when we clarify concepts. And in fact there is a good definition of a game.
I found it ironic that Joseph Heath described G. A. Cohen as being disturbed by Nozick's AS&U undermining Marxism, only to find most American political philosophers didn't care because they were Rawlsian egalitarians. https://josephheath.substack.com/p/john-rawls-and-the-death-of-western He mentions that Rawls' Theory of Justice never critiqued Marx despite (in his view) killing it, but not that Nozick's argument was directed at Rawls.
I think you meant Mark Granovetter. Matt was the famous bridge player.
There are some wild bits on how J Edgar Hoover was taken in by psychoanalysis in this book https://www.amazon.com/G-Man-Hoover-Making-American-Century/dp/0670025372
How so?
Surprised Derrida does not appear. IMHO a huge riser. tl:dr version: Other 20th century philosophers of language were focused on exactly how words+grammars create correspondences with the real world (Russell, Chomsky, Kripke, Putnam etc.). E.g. huge discussion about whether words are descriptors or designators. Whether grammars are universal. Derrida claimed that most speech doesn't create any correspondence with the outside world, discourse is its own world. I think that LLMs are a home run for Derrida. They don't have any grammars, they don't have any model of the outside world, and they converse just like people. Natural language programs based on grammars were awful.
Fun post. Because much of history is forgotten, most people are doomed to be Fallers. The lucky ones are those who do not fall as quickly, while only the true superstars can hope to maintain/rise for some period of time.
Others you could consider in political science would be Sam Huntington - maybe a riser for his work on state capacity, but a faller for Clash of Civilizations, though that work still gets mentioned. Charles Tilly is in the same sphere but probably less well-known even back then. Edward Banfield (Moral Basis of a Backward Society) is maybe returning through Joe Henrich & WEIRD. Were there other culturalists, but b/c that's having its moment? How about C. Wright Mills and the power elite? Making a comeback as ideas but not a name?
I made it just past the halfway mark in this post before realizing how ignorant I am. I have some catching up to do. Arnold - thanks again for raising expectations. Got the Albion’s Seed right here next to me. I’ll get right on it.
You made it halfway? Congrats on that.
I didn't even recognize at least half the names and many more I know nothing about. Of the ones I'm familiar, I'd have a hard time writing a paragraph on their main idea(s) and significance for most or all.
I'm glad I'm not alone. Do you think Arnold can write a good paragraph for each one? I propose a new game show: Jeopardy for Intellectuals hosted by Arnold Kling. Now available on Zoom TV.
Maybe he can do better than us but we could write them. The bigger issue is identifying the right people to include. Surely he can do that better than us. But well enough? IDK.
Might make a fun party activity. Probably more important to focus on the top 5 or 10 intellectuals. What would your list include?
IDK.
I'm really bad at remembering what to put on lists. Favorites are a little easier and I'd say these aren't strictly intellectuals. Haidt, Pinker, McWhorter, Fryer, more mixed feelings on Levitt, Peterson, Summers, Stossel, Maher, and Brooks. Recently deceased might include MFriedman and Kahneman.
Not Gladwell, TFriedman, Krugman, or Chomsky.
You?
For living I would go with Russ Roberts, James Otteson, Arnold Kling, Dan Klein, David Friedman, Robert Higgs, P.J. Hill, Matt Ridley and Don Boudreaux. That's without thinking about it too hard.
20th century deceased, Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Julian Simon.
Pre-20th: Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell.
I'm pretty biased toward econ, libertarians and the Scottish Enlightenment.
Stossel would be a popularizer or pundit rather than an intellectual.
Freud may be a faller, but if you associate him with the sexualization of identity, then he has created a widely adopted foundational framework for how people see themselves, with pivotal downstream consequences in society.
In some ways, identity is today less sexualized. At work, one is supposed to treat colleagues of the opposite sex exactly the same as one does colleagues of the same sex. Both sexes are supposed not just to have equal rights but to be considered pretty much the same. Female reporters in male locker rooms? What's the big deal? Nobody today would talk about "the male principle" or "the female principle" though that was not at all uncommon in the 19th century.
This site is a ranking of basically how much Wikipedia interest there is in a given person, or type of person, e.g. philosophers:
https://pantheon.world/explore/rankings?show=people&years=-3501,2023&occupation=PHILOSOPHER
The name that I see constantly from a vast range of writers in a vast range of disciplines is Hayek. His elaborations on the broader idea that decentralized competitive striving can lead to knowledge is something that I see cropping up in just about everything I read, and I read a lot. Maybe this says more about me than Hayek, but I suspect he is the real intellectual superstar on this list. The closest thing to a Darwin or A Smith of the 20th C.
"He thought that the leaders of these giants cultivated a myth of entrepreneurship to hide their immense power and quasi-permanent status. In his prime, his books were bestsellers and many educated Americans were familiar with his line of thinking. Today, he is little read, and the business world has experienced considerable disruption."
Today, US corporations are Brobdingnagian oligopolist behemoths, who never innovate*, vindicating his point perfectly.
FIXED!
* how many new products from goog, aapl over the last decade?
I think Milton Friedman is a riser, but that maybe because of the crowd i associate with.
…or at minimum, if he is a Faller, he is not much of a Faller.
I think in this case Arnold is conflating not in current fashion with leading politicians with his ranking criteria for everyone else. Although I can’t deny that the economics profession seems to have taken a left turn (how sharp a left turn I’m not expert enough to judge, but it clearly has turned to the left in the last 25 years).
Is Galbraith really a faller?
1. His concept of a two-tiered system with the market system and the "industrial system" of big business and government overlaying it is implicitly accepted by everyone, especially people who are mindful and informed of public choice. Thought of course Galbraith himself was not.
2. Certainly, Galbraith's concepts continue to serve as the basic playbook for how big business and government operates. Wokeism's march through institutions and governance is evidence for Galbraith's vision of corporate power as a transmission mechanism. He was undoubtedly correct and prescient about that even when he failed to see that this power would be used for more than maintaining narrow commercial interests of artificial monopolies.