> But he [Rauch] nonetheless presents the elite press, the intelligence community, and the public health bureaucracy (to name three examples) as noble victims of the Morlocks who aim to discredit them. His problem is that he never gets around to the myriad ways these institutions have abandoned the epistemology that he ascribes to them, and in doing so have discredited themselves.
I credit Kling with linking and introducing me to the excellent Eli Lake rebuttal. I credit Kling with saying "Rauch has a blind spot with respect to the political biases of the FBI." Rauch is not just wrong, but absurdly wrong. Unfortunately, I'm noticing that our generous host Kling, whom I've read for 20+ years is much more on the Rauch side of the issue than on the Eli Lake side.
Sorry, Arnold. Your poor discussion of institutions reminded me of how lost Douglass North was about institutions (yes, he won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering contributions to institutional economics but at the end of his long career he used the term social orders). In Spanish, the meaning is clear: organization, a structured group of people acting together to achieve a particular goal. In English, in addition to organization, institution means a set of rules for a particular set of social interactions. The institution of journalism is about a set of rules. The NYT as an institution refers usually to the organization but sometimes to some non-enforceable rules governing the interactions between editors and readers (indeed, the editors want to believe readers are their captive audience). I prefer to use the terms norms and organizations. A country's law is the set of norms enforced by the legitimate power of government but in every country many sets of norms coexist and some may be as important as law albeit enforceable by the fear of losing reputation. The lack of serious discussion about the details of norms and organizations has been a major constraint to the expansion of institutional economics.
I vote for "the supply side (people who have a high opinion of themselves fight harder to get to the top)".
The Founders foresaw this, and tried to erect checks and balances to minimize the damage such people could do.
It worked fairly well for a few centuries, but now, the sociopaths are getting the upper hand.
Where are the first two paradoxes covered? Sorry - a bit lost with the move to substack.
Eli Lake wrote:
> But he [Rauch] nonetheless presents the elite press, the intelligence community, and the public health bureaucracy (to name three examples) as noble victims of the Morlocks who aim to discredit them. His problem is that he never gets around to the myriad ways these institutions have abandoned the epistemology that he ascribes to them, and in doing so have discredited themselves.
I credit Kling with linking and introducing me to the excellent Eli Lake rebuttal. I credit Kling with saying "Rauch has a blind spot with respect to the political biases of the FBI." Rauch is not just wrong, but absurdly wrong. Unfortunately, I'm noticing that our generous host Kling, whom I've read for 20+ years is much more on the Rauch side of the issue than on the Eli Lake side.
Sorry, Arnold. Your poor discussion of institutions reminded me of how lost Douglass North was about institutions (yes, he won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering contributions to institutional economics but at the end of his long career he used the term social orders). In Spanish, the meaning is clear: organization, a structured group of people acting together to achieve a particular goal. In English, in addition to organization, institution means a set of rules for a particular set of social interactions. The institution of journalism is about a set of rules. The NYT as an institution refers usually to the organization but sometimes to some non-enforceable rules governing the interactions between editors and readers (indeed, the editors want to believe readers are their captive audience). I prefer to use the terms norms and organizations. A country's law is the set of norms enforced by the legitimate power of government but in every country many sets of norms coexist and some may be as important as law albeit enforceable by the fear of losing reputation. The lack of serious discussion about the details of norms and organizations has been a major constraint to the expansion of institutional economics.