Social Learning Links, 1/28/2025
Barton Swaim on Cipolla on stupidity; Lorenzo Warby on the bureaucracy/activist mindset; Dan Williams offers a syllabus; Bryan Caplan, Rachel Ferguson, and I discuss Huemer's *Progressive Myths*
For the WSJ, Barton Swaim writes about a book from 50 years ago by economic historian Carlo Cipolla.
Cipolla divides people into four categories: helpless, bandit, intelligent and stupid. In any normal interaction between two people, he contends, the helpless person suffers a loss while the other gains. The bandit exacts a benefit while levying a loss on the other. The intelligent person gains while enabling the other person also to gain. The defining trait of the stupid person is that he gains nothing while obliging the other to take a loss.
Cipolla uses this definition of stupidity to argue that well-credentialed elites can behave stupidly. Swaim argues that many of President Biden’s major actions were stupid in that sense. For example,
For three years Mr. Biden made it policy to do nothing on the country’s southern border apart from revoking Mr. Trump’s executive orders. What did he gain from this dereliction?
Conventional economics says that tariffs are stupid. They make both countries worse off. Perhaps the threat of a tariff is not stupid: if you get the other country to comply, and you don’t have to actually impose the tariff, then you have been a successful bandit—at least in the short run.
Swaim accuses elites of stupidity, taking positions that hurt themselves as well as others. I would say that one example of this is the college Presidents who would not stand up for rigor and reason.
…Leftism is the politics of activism inserted into everything. Activism that is power without responsibility, that sanctifies bad/aggressive behaviour. Activism’s moralisation of social aggression attracts the morally disordered—i.e., manipulative, Cluster B personalities, in the Victorian era known as the morally insane—while providing moral cover for them. The more morally grandiose the aims, the greater the cover, and the greater the sanctification of social aggression.
Power itself attracts such personalities—especially power with weak or no accountability.
After you read his essay, re-read If the Doctrine Fits.
The first week explores a radical argument advanced by Walter Lippmann in 1922: that the modern world is too vast, complex, and inaccessible for ordinary citizens to understand. Given this, he argued that more power and influence should be assigned to technical experts allegedly capable of overcoming the epistemic limitations of ordinary citizens. These claims led to a highly significant “debate” with the American philosopher John Dewey over democracy and technocracy. (Given that Lippmann never responded to Dewey’s arguments, “debate” isn’t quite the right word).
Readers of this blog will know that I think Lippmann’s ‘Public Opinion’ is the most important work of political epistemology ever written. Although much discussion of the book focuses on its critique of democracy (at least as democracy has traditionally been understood), its implications are much broader and more profound. It raises deep questions about whether any member of any conceivable political system is in a position to understand the modern world, including experts (as Lippmann would later acknowledge).
This is for a 7-week advanced undergraduate course on political epistemology. Self-recommending1.
Bryan Caplan, Rachel Ferguson, and I discuss Michael Huemer’s Progressive Myths. As Ferguson points out, Huemer’s book models how to be fair in taking a position. And as I point out, he models how to write clearly, instead of hiding behind academic jargon.
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Tyler Cowen coined the term “self-recommending” to describe a product of a person and a project that is so certainly worth looking at that it is self-evidently worth recommending.
“And as I point out, he models how to write clearly, instead of hiding behind academic jargon.“ Lack of academic jargon is one of the best features of Arnold Kling’s and Michael Huemer’s writing. Thank you both.
What appears to be stupid may in fact have rational motivation. Open borders create enormous opportunities for political grift in the form of spending on provision of social services, whose providers obtain lucrative contracts through "pay to play," thus benefiting officials. It may be that most or even all the rhetoric about compassion is nothing more than specious moral cover for this sort of grifting. The activities appear stupid in terms of reasonable assumptions about how a country should be run, but they serve a different purpose.