"One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive."
― Hannah Arendt
The successful totalitarian is the one able to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive. Don't explain economics with facts. Invent an entity that's responsible for what people don't like.
Yes. This comment motivated me to re-read Arnold’s post on asymmetric insights. Here’s my favorite part: “Changing minds is a process that involves other people coming to trust your side more than the other side. You don’t get that process going by dismissing them with asymmetric insights.”
I don't think people realize how much eight years of lawfare and use of state apparatus to "get Trump" traumatized him and his people (with many seeing assassination attempts as an expectable result of demonizing him). There is a real desire for revenge, and it can make people do stupid things.
It makes me think of various social justice excesses: group X feels it has been done wrong and wants to hurt the group that is thought to have done it.
Shane Goldmacher on X complains, "One person close to the president summed up the White House’s political strategy succinctly: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” What Texas and the redistricting wars reveal about our politics."
Kurt Schlichter replies: "That’s a totally unexpected response by a guy they tried to frame and put in prison for the rest of his life, then tried to kill."
I would have thought that most Americans would have wanted to "Get Trump" after he planned and instigated an armed insurrection to overthrow a free election. You must not have ever lived in NYC. If you had, you would know that this has always been his MO. He learned it sucking at the teat (or whatever) of Roy Cohn. If you don't know who he is, look him up.
Yeah, sure. It's not a statistic, it's a person actively working to undermine the administration because they're blah blah blah.... It's not a fact, it's a motive for revenge...or something.
In the 20s and 30s there seems to have been a problem (which it would take a man from Missouri to kind of solve, but people don't seem to remember that aspect of the drama much; even the Brits were unwilling, too arrogant or blind to look across to America and say, hey, there's another way, seems pretty A-OK).
That problem was there appeared but two bad choices.
I was reading yesterday a biography of T.S. Eliot, a man whom wisdom eluded, at least so far in the book - and this sentence about the wild, unmoored searching about for their political commitments, of himself and his literary cohort, almost made me laugh: "The poet Hugh McDiarmid, later a communist, published 'A Plea for a Scottish Fascism'".
And yet here we are again, with nothing but two bad choices. (And a bad time for it, with an economy that seems now to depend on a puff of vapor called AI which is going to eat the countryside and use up all our water.)
The left whose excesses readers of this blog know well, and the far-right nutcase ideologues who get the most airtime, on the right, and the ear of our either cognitively-limited or more likely, ideologically captured*, governor, very well-limned in this piece:
Ideology is difficult of definition, but it always represents a narrowing, a loss of information, and the fanaticism of the ideologue is necessarily opposed to order and to tradition.
Deeper: ideologues do not have the conservative's instinct that tradition, being evolutionarily given, should not be discarded *lightly*.
Conservatives are first and foremost defenders of traditions, empirically-tested beliefs about society and human nature.
Ideologues oppose tradition, and favor ideals such as equality which are not empirically defensible. They appeal to reason or authority as justification.
There is only one way to know if something is true: empirically.
Ideologues don't want you to believe that, for a minute.
But don't ideologues believe that what they believe is indeed empirically true? In fact, don't they often put down conservatives as romantic unempirical believers in tradition?
I can't help thinking of the story of Charles Napier. In 1828, the new British governor-general of India decided to do away with the practice of sati, where a man's widow was burned to death on his funeral pyre.
"After the ban, Balochi priests in the Sindh region complained to the British Governor, Charles Napier about what they claimed was a meddlement in a sacred custom of their nation. Napier replied: 'Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property.'" wikipedia
He had his custom, his values; they had theirs, which he was able to override, for a time.
I am a conservative. I take aspirin when I have a headache, rather than, I don’t know drawing the curtains to make the room dark and stuffy and getting out the smelling salts.
(Now it’s true, if I have a fever, I depart from the rest of you in “letting it do its work” 😀. But I don’t do weird stuff with cups on the back.)
Cupping, i.e. applying heated glass cups to the patient's back, was still being used in Soviet medicine in the 1970s (in Russian 'postavit banki'). When I studied in Leningrad during that period, an American woman in my program landed in the hospital with pneumonia, and they treated her that way. She showed us her back when we visited her in the hospital, and it looked like she had been attacked by a giant octopus.
Ever since I learned that high temperatures make things harder for many pathogens, I do too. Unless the temperature goes above 102 and starts hurting me more than the pathogens are.
"Heterodox bloggers rise to the top by being good writers—whether what they say is true or not has little bearing on their success." Yes. I pay to read and enjoy the writing of Freddie deBoer. Near as I can tell Mr deBoer is very good on understanding and reporting statistics on educational methods and results, which came together in an excellent book The Cult of the Smart (like everyone else, he is a conservative on what he knows best). But he is also a dedicated Marxist with various self-reported mental issues and has many cultural interests that intersect with my life not at all. But even as an elderly white MAGA, I am happy to pay to read Mr deBoer, including those many times when I disagree with him or do not understand him or am not really interested in the topic at hand . . . he is just that good a writer.
That's exactly the way I feel about Freddie. "The Cult of Smart" is a great book until near the end, when it turns into a commercial for Bernie Sanders
I guess I had forgotten the Bernie ending. Apparently my brain has the superpower of filtering out the stupid parts while still enjoying Mr deBoer's writing.
I had always been a Mr 100% Free Market . . . but Mr deBoer (and recent macro experience) for all his Bernie boosting has helped convinced me that (1) the market is not always or even often "free" and (2) the market is being controlled by people whose interest is not the well being of the rest of the nation . . . and, therefore, if the government is going to be used to promote one interest over another, we conservatives have an interest in making sure the government thumb is on the side of the scale of America and Americans first.
Sure, that sounds good. Americans first. But, I'm a globalist, the bane of American First-ers. I like smart people with smart businesses and where they happen to be located is not my priority.
Well, I guess that makes you, in popular parlance, an "anywhere" person as opposed to a "somewhere" person . . . or cloud person vs dirt person. A citizen of the world rather than a particular country. Your choice . . . but I am personally happy to see citizens of my particular family, community, state, and nation having preference. Too many globalists, certainly excluding your own benevolent self, seem like the Hunger Games elite.
Growing up in a very small town, I lived in situations where the locals ruled who could get or do anything, and of course those things that everyone wanted went to the small town version of the Hunger Games elite. IOW, America First doesn't mean things go to the smart, the hungry, the hard workers...although that sometimes happened...but most things went to the favored few of the connected elite. America First just seems like a way to justify small mindedness and localism. Outsiders need not apply.
Most of the failures you see I suspect are caused by various government interventions - what percentage well intentioned, what percentage crony-based I cannot say - rather than actual market failures.
That said, there is indeed one thing that Trump, Bernie and I all agree on that you are suggesting here: “the system is rigged”.
Crony capitalism is indeed badness.
Less government, less powerful government is usually the correct answer.
He is definitely my favorite mentally ill Marxist. I find myself reading about all sorts of topics that I ordinarily wouldn't because his style is so distinctive. He does opine on matters where he is out of his depth. For example, his recent demand that the New York Fed retract a working paper was pretty funny. What is the Fed supposed to do, announce that this paper we posted to get feedback isn't worthy of feedback? It is almost like deBoer doesn't have any graduate training in economics at all.
It seemed to me a thoroughly illegitimate subject for economists (not that that is unusual these days) or for the Fed and although commenters blamed Trump, rather provided grist for rethinking the role of the Fed or at least its budget.
I find myself thinking of him as wanting to live on an island he totally controls, while the rest of the world is Marxist and he can vsist that world as he wishes, but can retreat to hisisland at will.
I think he's a bit trapped for career purposes in his Marxism as an identity, a hook, part of his family legacy perhaps. It is not a subject that he is ever moved to write about.
"It is not a subject that he is ever moved to write about."
I seem to recall him mentioning that his upbringing was very much "on the left"--but I don't recall him ever going into it. I can't help thinking here of Steven Jay Gould. He gave an interview for a very favorable cover story in Newsweek and said that he had learned Marxism at his father's knee. When he was questioned about it later, he coyly replied, "I didn't say I believed it."
That was one I skimmed . . . but I think the point was that the paper (whether valid or not) was on some cultural topic the Fed had no business dealing with.
Economists learn tools that are applicable to a wide variety of situations and most good economists write about multiple topics. The New York Fed is going to have a hard time attracting economists if they are restricted to topics that sound like they are Fed topics. A really hard thing in economics is getting a dataset, so if economists get a dataset about involuntary commitment they are going to be miffed if their employer tells them they can't use it.
Also, economists are better are evaluating questions like the one in the working paper than psychiatrists. Psychiatrists are trained to practice psychiatry, they do not take years of stats on how to make causal inference from observational data. That's what economists do.
But the topic was "involuntary psychiatric hospitalization," which seems pretty far outside the Fed wheelhouse. And, according to Mr deBoer anyhow, their data set and methodology were not applied appropriately and resulted in a destructive conclusion.
He spends 977 words explaining how people who are involuntarily committed to a hospital are different than people who are committed. If the writers of the paper didn't know that it would be embarrassing for them. However, they do know that. The entire instrumental variables approach is to address that very fact.
Some doctors are less likely to commit people than others. If too many people were being committed in general, then you might expect the patients of these doctors to have better outcomes than patients of doctors that commit a lot of people. Is the paper perfect? What paper is? But those 977 words makes it clear that he doesn't understand the technique he is critiquing.
You may be entirely correct. However, another way of looking at it, let's just say for imaginary example, the Fed office where the writer works has 20 staff members. One of those 20 has enough time on his or her hands to address a topic not actually Fed related. So, we can infer from this that the hypothetical Fed office needs no more than 19 staff members.
“Today, left-activist spaces are dominated by the college-educated, many of whom grew up in affluence and have never worked a day at a physically or emotionally demanding job. The inability to recruit from the working class and the uneducated has been a consistent source of frustration among leftist thinkers. Worse, there are now many in progressive spaces who decry the white working class — an immense group that still exerts heavy influence on American politics — as an inherently and permanently racist and bigoted class. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as left-leaning disdain for uneducated white workers and voters results in leftist cultural and communicative practices that seem tailor-made to reject the support of that large bloc. Left activists refuse to engage with the complexity of, for example, the millions of voters who supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but Donald Trump in 2016. This is, strategically, a kind of madness; any successful future for the left-of-center requires expanding our coalition and dreaming big when it comes to convincing disaffected lower-wage citizens to support us.“
Same. I love his writing despite considering myself a small c conservative. I dont agree with him on everything but im willing to read his point of view always. He just had a baby. Adorable.
I often find myself wanting to express a general appreciation for AK's postings, commentary I have been following almost from the beginning twenty years ago. It seems to me that today's discussion is a good time to say thanks, for it is a superb example of his singular approach to thinking and blogging, a key element of which is honesty, a virtue he embraces even when it might hurt, and one which too many of today's thinkers appear to forsake.
I mostly agree, tho AK’s TDS comes thru a bit too often. Can a slut-jerk, bragging, hotel developer, vulgar speaking, NY style low class salesman really have good policies? Or results?
Hope to see specific humility & honesty by Arnold as the econ results of his tariff policies become actual news.
"He is a man who did not deserve to be reduced to a national punchline surrounded by a vague penumbra of scandal."
Sure he deserved it, except the situation was more than a vague penumbra of scandal. He was clearly selling the appearance of access to the POTUS and doing it for serious paydays in the tens of millions. Maybe the Trump effect has made us immune to the idea of selling influence is a scandal.
That the mope is even in the news in any form is an embarrassment.
You don't know what you're talking about. Hunter Biden spent decades earning his PhD and in the oil fields and in the gas pipeline sector becoming one of the world's top experts and most experienced and successful energy company executives in the world, who also happens to be perfectly fluent in several eastern European and southeast Asian languages, which is perfectly valid and of course the only reason he was eagerly recruited and paid millions of dollars to sit on those boards of foreign energy companies where everything is above board and with air tight legal compliance despite being intimately intertwined with the political personalities of some of the most corrupt countries in the world.
Ok, I think I've exceeded even my generous allotment for sarcasm with that one, lol.
That's not only about the most delusional take on Hunter Biden I've seen but it includes a pretty fair strawman of conservative/Republican views of him. I don't think anybody supposes he (or his uncle or step-mother) are some sort of malevolent criminal genius based on the pretty naked grifting they've done. They're simply the Temu knock-off of the Clinton Foundation. It's also pretty common for conservatives to note that the death of his mother and brother, and the obvious triangle between his brother, his father, and himself, was probably a source of great distress to him and likely exacerbated by the temptations attending proximity to political power.
Agree. Hunter is not evil, he is under the sway of demons more than average, but anyone who believes in such things should not judge Hunter, for we all are sinners and all have, do, and will continue to err.
I agree. I don’t think people should say he’s evil is my point, though I think Bentham is generally a really bad thinker, and it’s remarkable to me who reads him. I’m beginning to downgrade their judgement though. At first I’d look at Cowen impression of Yglesias as something that made Yglesias worth another look. Overtime I’ve found that in fact these guys are just in a certain context and the signals are different than when you’re not paying attention to anything these guys do besides their intellectual output.
"Bentham" starts with a straw man argument aimed at a false premise - that Hunter was "painted" as a "criminal mastermind." "Bentham" does not identify just who did this "painting" and which crimes Hunter "masterminded." I think more accurately Hunter was a loser and drug user who engaged in low level criminal activity because he thought (correctly in retrospect) that laws he considered petty did not apply to him - tax evasion, gun and drug possession.
Yah, Bentham is a bit like Richard Hanania was until recently: a smart young guy who writes interesting things with WAY too much self-confidence, and is often just completely wrong about some of them.
[Hanania with his TDS of the last many months is no longer interesting. Or even if he might have the occasional interesting thing to say, I wouldn’t know, as I can no longer stomach reading him.]
Hunter Biden is a lying crook, but he came across as an authentic lying crook in the interview. Which is, sadly, preferable to someone like Kamala who is either unable or unwilling to tell us what she really thinks about anything.
So much that I agree with here. But I’ll just say thank you calling out foul language. I don’t want to be inundated with profanity when I check the news or browse Substack posts.
My usage of profanity is indeed a bit more than AK’s claim of Scott Alexander’s one in ten thousand. But it’s not a whole lot more.
I do it sparsely but in non-zero quantity to draw attention to a point. And I don’t believe I’ve ever writing something “profanity-laced”, unless one’s definition of that term is any number more than zero.
Regarding what Arnold here calls the "realm of conspiracy theory," we live in a world where elected officials, media, and many others routinely lie or engage in BS, i.e, they are simply indifferent to whether there is any truth to their utterances. Harry Frankfurt wrote a worthwhile essay on the latter, actually entitled "On Bullshit." (Pardon the language, but here it is unavoidable.) Such actors speak not with the intention of honestly communicating anything, but in order to produce some desired effect. Anyone paying attention to public affairs and trying to understand what is really going on is forced to speculate as to inconsistencies in such statements or their clash with other known facts, and to propose alternative explanations and possible motivations and it is through the circulation of such speculations that eventually a better picture can sometimes emerge. Of course, the liars and BS'ers and their supporters try to suppress that process through labeling such speculation "conspiracy theory." I need not list for Arnold's readers the numerous facts that were in recent years originally labeled conspiracy theories by the usual suspects but subsequently proven true. So dismissing anything as a conspiracy theory unfortunately tends to put one in that camp. Better to simply point out that the speculation lacks adequate foundation.
Never met a person other than myself that actually read Frankfurt all those years ago or even knew that paper existed, much love.
Edit: TIL'ed the paper was just rediscovered and is going viral, even made Drudge. I remember I read it the week after it was published and was so novel I saved the PDF then and added it to my personally library.
For me, profanity-laced dialog is an indicator of one or all of the following:
Lack of creativity or careless use of language – you can’t find another word to express yourself?
Lower IQ – limited vocabulary and a corresponding deficiency of critical thinking skills.
Lack of respect – the speaker can be a Pretty Smart Person but doesn’t care about offending anyone or are deliberately trying to induce angry responses…pretty common in social media.
Consequently, my willingness to pay attention declines.
I don't care for all the f- bombs, but it's going too far to draw such confident conclusions about character about it. It has much less meaning, weight, and implication. It's more of a "to a first approximation, you are your five closest friends / socialization partners" kind of thing, the linguistic convention of a subculture. I've moved from f-bomb- heavy work environments to ones where one would be risking ostracized for slipping even once. And even working in the more vulgar places, one finds oneself code-switching to clean up one's act at home or in more polite company. Admittedly it does become a bad habit, and controlling or breaking it does require a lot of self awareness, regulation, discipline, and social savvy.
There is code-switching sometimes. In certain cultures, the profanity effectively conveys sincerity, authenticity, and intensity/urgency. It also bears a cost when used loosely, which is why it retains communication value.
“I also find myself suspicious of provocateurs. The provocateur, like the combative crusader, is seeking attention. That is how Richard Hanania strikes me. Bryan Caplan is another provocateur. I trust his most well-researched views, but on other topics (such as psychiatry) he has not shown me enough work to be convincing.” Great conversation starter. Thank you for this.
This edges into the territory of what I think about all of our blogger provocateurs. They've got a viewpoint, they articulate it well, and now they're a thing producing income via extemporization. Since no well is bottomless, they can't continue to pump out essays without venturing into territory where they're not particularly knowledgeable in order to fill column inches. Eventually, they all make leaps into topics where they have no experience or ability to analyze, and you get Noah talking about China, or Hanania talking about...whatever it is he talks about nowadays. (I stopped reading him a while back.)
Arnold seems to hold up pretty well. At worst, some particular thing he writes about doesn't interest me, but he manages to avoid going off on tangents wherein he clearly is outside his knowledge base.
Well said. None of us are invulnerable to the temptations of power, status, material accumulation, and reach. Power tends to corrupt. We all have to work against these temptations.
I would say we need better definitions of success—those that focus on peace of mind, mentoring, and character—not necessarily popular notions of success.
There are three types of writers - controversialists, contrarians, and confessionalists. Controversialists have a knack for controversy - Megan McArdle is the best example of this but Ezra Klein always seems to find himself in the middle of a controversy. Contrarians are data focused writers like Yglesias or Sailer who are are continuing in the Slate tradition of contrarian hot takes. And confessionalists are people like TNC or Brooks or Douthat or most female writers who are writing from their personal perspective. Of course some are a mix of the styles.
I don't listen to Rogan much but I recently listen to his interviews of Stephen Pinker and Bernie Sanders. Both were very interesting. Both exposed what I think are huge gaps in Rogan's education. Be that it may, Bernie's desire for government to provide far more than it already does sounded rather absurd to me. Rogan agreed with pretty much all of it.
Arnold, What would change your mind about the Szasz/Caplan thesis that at least 80% of diagnoses of 'mental illness' are medicalized excuses for regrettable behavior and/or justifications for coercion of 'patients'?
Greatly enjoy your Substack, for all the reasons you lay out here.
Re Weinstein and Covid, I’d say not as much a correct prediction as repeating what I understand as received epidemiological wisdom about viruses. I guess it’s distinctly possible that some mutations could be deadlier, but longer term, viruses tend to be most lethal in their early stages and mutate to less lethal and more contagious variants. Because nature tends to select for viruses that spread fast but don’t quickly kill their hosts. Happy to be corrected!
Per the Krugman....this might apply....
"One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive."
― Hannah Arendt
The successful totalitarian is the one able to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive. Don't explain economics with facts. Invent an entity that's responsible for what people don't like.
Yes. This comment motivated me to re-read Arnold’s post on asymmetric insights. Here’s my favorite part: “Changing minds is a process that involves other people coming to trust your side more than the other side. You don’t get that process going by dismissing them with asymmetric insights.”
That's good.
Like firing the head of the Bureau of Labor statistics for publishing a set of disappointing payroll numbers.
I don't think people realize how much eight years of lawfare and use of state apparatus to "get Trump" traumatized him and his people (with many seeing assassination attempts as an expectable result of demonizing him). There is a real desire for revenge, and it can make people do stupid things.
It makes me think of various social justice excesses: group X feels it has been done wrong and wants to hurt the group that is thought to have done it.
See, for example, yesterday: https://instapundit.com/735945/
Shane Goldmacher on X complains, "One person close to the president summed up the White House’s political strategy succinctly: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” What Texas and the redistricting wars reveal about our politics."
Kurt Schlichter replies: "That’s a totally unexpected response by a guy they tried to frame and put in prison for the rest of his life, then tried to kill."
I would have thought that most Americans would have wanted to "Get Trump" after he planned and instigated an armed insurrection to overthrow a free election. You must not have ever lived in NYC. If you had, you would know that this has always been his MO. He learned it sucking at the teat (or whatever) of Roy Cohn. If you don't know who he is, look him up.
Yeah, sure. It's not a statistic, it's a person actively working to undermine the administration because they're blah blah blah.... It's not a fact, it's a motive for revenge...or something.
In the 20s and 30s there seems to have been a problem (which it would take a man from Missouri to kind of solve, but people don't seem to remember that aspect of the drama much; even the Brits were unwilling, too arrogant or blind to look across to America and say, hey, there's another way, seems pretty A-OK).
That problem was there appeared but two bad choices.
I was reading yesterday a biography of T.S. Eliot, a man whom wisdom eluded, at least so far in the book - and this sentence about the wild, unmoored searching about for their political commitments, of himself and his literary cohort, almost made me laugh: "The poet Hugh McDiarmid, later a communist, published 'A Plea for a Scottish Fascism'".
And yet here we are again, with nothing but two bad choices. (And a bad time for it, with an economy that seems now to depend on a puff of vapor called AI which is going to eat the countryside and use up all our water.)
The left whose excesses readers of this blog know well, and the far-right nutcase ideologues who get the most airtime, on the right, and the ear of our either cognitively-limited or more likely, ideologically captured*, governor, very well-limned in this piece:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/jacobs-well-texas-greg-abbott-veto/
It doesn't matter whom I believe. My values are my own, and they have no representation. I do not seem to be unique in this regard.
*Your usual reminder: ideology is not and can never be, conservative.
"ideology is not and can never be, conservative."
Could you explain why you believe that?
Ideology is difficult of definition, but it always represents a narrowing, a loss of information, and the fanaticism of the ideologue is necessarily opposed to order and to tradition.
Deeper: ideologues do not have the conservative's instinct that tradition, being evolutionarily given, should not be discarded *lightly*.
Conservatives are first and foremost defenders of traditions, empirically-tested beliefs about society and human nature.
Ideologues oppose tradition, and favor ideals such as equality which are not empirically defensible. They appeal to reason or authority as justification.
There is only one way to know if something is true: empirically.
Ideologues don't want you to believe that, for a minute.
Thanks.
But don't ideologues believe that what they believe is indeed empirically true? In fact, don't they often put down conservatives as romantic unempirical believers in tradition?
I can't help thinking of the story of Charles Napier. In 1828, the new British governor-general of India decided to do away with the practice of sati, where a man's widow was burned to death on his funeral pyre.
"After the ban, Balochi priests in the Sindh region complained to the British Governor, Charles Napier about what they claimed was a meddlement in a sacred custom of their nation. Napier replied: 'Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property.'" wikipedia
He had his custom, his values; they had theirs, which he was able to override, for a time.
I am a conservative. I take aspirin when I have a headache, rather than, I don’t know drawing the curtains to make the room dark and stuffy and getting out the smelling salts.
(Now it’s true, if I have a fever, I depart from the rest of you in “letting it do its work” 😀. But I don’t do weird stuff with cups on the back.)
Cupping, i.e. applying heated glass cups to the patient's back, was still being used in Soviet medicine in the 1970s (in Russian 'postavit banki'). When I studied in Leningrad during that period, an American woman in my program landed in the hospital with pneumonia, and they treated her that way. She showed us her back when we visited her in the hospital, and it looked like she had been attacked by a giant octopus.
Ever since I learned that high temperatures make things harder for many pathogens, I do too. Unless the temperature goes above 102 and starts hurting me more than the pathogens are.
"Heterodox bloggers rise to the top by being good writers—whether what they say is true or not has little bearing on their success." Yes. I pay to read and enjoy the writing of Freddie deBoer. Near as I can tell Mr deBoer is very good on understanding and reporting statistics on educational methods and results, which came together in an excellent book The Cult of the Smart (like everyone else, he is a conservative on what he knows best). But he is also a dedicated Marxist with various self-reported mental issues and has many cultural interests that intersect with my life not at all. But even as an elderly white MAGA, I am happy to pay to read Mr deBoer, including those many times when I disagree with him or do not understand him or am not really interested in the topic at hand . . . he is just that good a writer.
That's exactly the way I feel about Freddie. "The Cult of Smart" is a great book until near the end, when it turns into a commercial for Bernie Sanders
I guess I had forgotten the Bernie ending. Apparently my brain has the superpower of filtering out the stupid parts while still enjoying Mr deBoer's writing.
Right. For me, his descent into Bernie-ism let all the air out the rest of the book.
I had always been a Mr 100% Free Market . . . but Mr deBoer (and recent macro experience) for all his Bernie boosting has helped convinced me that (1) the market is not always or even often "free" and (2) the market is being controlled by people whose interest is not the well being of the rest of the nation . . . and, therefore, if the government is going to be used to promote one interest over another, we conservatives have an interest in making sure the government thumb is on the side of the scale of America and Americans first.
Sure, that sounds good. Americans first. But, I'm a globalist, the bane of American First-ers. I like smart people with smart businesses and where they happen to be located is not my priority.
Well, I guess that makes you, in popular parlance, an "anywhere" person as opposed to a "somewhere" person . . . or cloud person vs dirt person. A citizen of the world rather than a particular country. Your choice . . . but I am personally happy to see citizens of my particular family, community, state, and nation having preference. Too many globalists, certainly excluding your own benevolent self, seem like the Hunger Games elite.
Growing up in a very small town, I lived in situations where the locals ruled who could get or do anything, and of course those things that everyone wanted went to the small town version of the Hunger Games elite. IOW, America First doesn't mean things go to the smart, the hungry, the hard workers...although that sometimes happened...but most things went to the favored few of the connected elite. America First just seems like a way to justify small mindedness and localism. Outsiders need not apply.
I've never seen that work out well.
The left has always enjoyed calling America, falsely, against 50 states’ worth of evidence, a “no place”.
It was only a matter of time before the left’s (supposed) enemies, libertarians, took up the idea. “We can use this!”
Hard to control the life of a bad idea.
As AK says, “Markets fail. use markets.”
Most of the failures you see I suspect are caused by various government interventions - what percentage well intentioned, what percentage crony-based I cannot say - rather than actual market failures.
That said, there is indeed one thing that Trump, Bernie and I all agree on that you are suggesting here: “the system is rigged”.
Crony capitalism is indeed badness.
Less government, less powerful government is usually the correct answer.
He is definitely my favorite mentally ill Marxist. I find myself reading about all sorts of topics that I ordinarily wouldn't because his style is so distinctive. He does opine on matters where he is out of his depth. For example, his recent demand that the New York Fed retract a working paper was pretty funny. What is the Fed supposed to do, announce that this paper we posted to get feedback isn't worthy of feedback? It is almost like deBoer doesn't have any graduate training in economics at all.
It seemed to me a thoroughly illegitimate subject for economists (not that that is unusual these days) or for the Fed and although commenters blamed Trump, rather provided grist for rethinking the role of the Fed or at least its budget.
This. my favorite mentally ill Marxist.
I find myself thinking of him as wanting to live on an island he totally controls, while the rest of the world is Marxist and he can vsist that world as he wishes, but can retreat to hisisland at will.
I think he's a bit trapped for career purposes in his Marxism as an identity, a hook, part of his family legacy perhaps. It is not a subject that he is ever moved to write about.
"It is not a subject that he is ever moved to write about."
I seem to recall him mentioning that his upbringing was very much "on the left"--but I don't recall him ever going into it. I can't help thinking here of Steven Jay Gould. He gave an interview for a very favorable cover story in Newsweek and said that he had learned Marxism at his father's knee. When he was questioned about it later, he coyly replied, "I didn't say I believed it."
That is a typical Marxist answer/dodge.
That was one I skimmed . . . but I think the point was that the paper (whether valid or not) was on some cultural topic the Fed had no business dealing with.
Economists learn tools that are applicable to a wide variety of situations and most good economists write about multiple topics. The New York Fed is going to have a hard time attracting economists if they are restricted to topics that sound like they are Fed topics. A really hard thing in economics is getting a dataset, so if economists get a dataset about involuntary commitment they are going to be miffed if their employer tells them they can't use it.
Also, economists are better are evaluating questions like the one in the working paper than psychiatrists. Psychiatrists are trained to practice psychiatry, they do not take years of stats on how to make causal inference from observational data. That's what economists do.
But the topic was "involuntary psychiatric hospitalization," which seems pretty far outside the Fed wheelhouse. And, according to Mr deBoer anyhow, their data set and methodology were not applied appropriately and resulted in a destructive conclusion.
He spends 977 words explaining how people who are involuntarily committed to a hospital are different than people who are committed. If the writers of the paper didn't know that it would be embarrassing for them. However, they do know that. The entire instrumental variables approach is to address that very fact.
Some doctors are less likely to commit people than others. If too many people were being committed in general, then you might expect the patients of these doctors to have better outcomes than patients of doctors that commit a lot of people. Is the paper perfect? What paper is? But those 977 words makes it clear that he doesn't understand the technique he is critiquing.
You may be entirely correct. However, another way of looking at it, let's just say for imaginary example, the Fed office where the writer works has 20 staff members. One of those 20 has enough time on his or her hands to address a topic not actually Fed related. So, we can infer from this that the hypothetical Fed office needs no more than 19 staff members.
Quoting Fredrick DeBoer:
“Today, left-activist spaces are dominated by the college-educated, many of whom grew up in affluence and have never worked a day at a physically or emotionally demanding job. The inability to recruit from the working class and the uneducated has been a consistent source of frustration among leftist thinkers. Worse, there are now many in progressive spaces who decry the white working class — an immense group that still exerts heavy influence on American politics — as an inherently and permanently racist and bigoted class. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as left-leaning disdain for uneducated white workers and voters results in leftist cultural and communicative practices that seem tailor-made to reject the support of that large bloc. Left activists refuse to engage with the complexity of, for example, the millions of voters who supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but Donald Trump in 2016. This is, strategically, a kind of madness; any successful future for the left-of-center requires expanding our coalition and dreaming big when it comes to convincing disaffected lower-wage citizens to support us.“
https://scoutbooks.substack.com/p/how-will-the-democratic-party-get
Same. I love his writing despite considering myself a small c conservative. I dont agree with him on everything but im willing to read his point of view always. He just had a baby. Adorable.
I often find myself wanting to express a general appreciation for AK's postings, commentary I have been following almost from the beginning twenty years ago. It seems to me that today's discussion is a good time to say thanks, for it is a superb example of his singular approach to thinking and blogging, a key element of which is honesty, a virtue he embraces even when it might hurt, and one which too many of today's thinkers appear to forsake.
I mostly agree, tho AK’s TDS comes thru a bit too often. Can a slut-jerk, bragging, hotel developer, vulgar speaking, NY style low class salesman really have good policies? Or results?
Hope to see specific humility & honesty by Arnold as the econ results of his tariff policies become actual news.
"He is a man who did not deserve to be reduced to a national punchline surrounded by a vague penumbra of scandal."
Sure he deserved it, except the situation was more than a vague penumbra of scandal. He was clearly selling the appearance of access to the POTUS and doing it for serious paydays in the tens of millions. Maybe the Trump effect has made us immune to the idea of selling influence is a scandal.
That the mope is even in the news in any form is an embarrassment.
You don't know what you're talking about. Hunter Biden spent decades earning his PhD and in the oil fields and in the gas pipeline sector becoming one of the world's top experts and most experienced and successful energy company executives in the world, who also happens to be perfectly fluent in several eastern European and southeast Asian languages, which is perfectly valid and of course the only reason he was eagerly recruited and paid millions of dollars to sit on those boards of foreign energy companies where everything is above board and with air tight legal compliance despite being intimately intertwined with the political personalities of some of the most corrupt countries in the world.
Ok, I think I've exceeded even my generous allotment for sarcasm with that one, lol.
Good one.
..not sure why you are blaming Trump or “the Trump effect” for your otherwise excellent take.
You mean Trump the businessman playing by the rules the politicians set and paying for influence?
Or are you suggesting that Trump the president sells influence for money (as leftists claim)?
The worst of what Hunter did predates Trump’s entry to the political scene.
I'm not sure what all that means, but it doesn't matter. They're all scum AFAIC.
That's not only about the most delusional take on Hunter Biden I've seen but it includes a pretty fair strawman of conservative/Republican views of him. I don't think anybody supposes he (or his uncle or step-mother) are some sort of malevolent criminal genius based on the pretty naked grifting they've done. They're simply the Temu knock-off of the Clinton Foundation. It's also pretty common for conservatives to note that the death of his mother and brother, and the obvious triangle between his brother, his father, and himself, was probably a source of great distress to him and likely exacerbated by the temptations attending proximity to political power.
"Temu knock-off" lol. Love it
"the Temu knock-off of the Clinton Foundation"
What a great line.
Agree. Hunter is not evil, he is under the sway of demons more than average, but anyone who believes in such things should not judge Hunter, for we all are sinners and all have, do, and will continue to err.
There's a difference in judging Hunter and judging what he says.
I agree. I don’t think people should say he’s evil is my point, though I think Bentham is generally a really bad thinker, and it’s remarkable to me who reads him. I’m beginning to downgrade their judgement though. At first I’d look at Cowen impression of Yglesias as something that made Yglesias worth another look. Overtime I’ve found that in fact these guys are just in a certain context and the signals are different than when you’re not paying attention to anything these guys do besides their intellectual output.
Evil? That's a high bar. The most credible charges against Hunter may not rise that high, but they are still pretty awful.
Yes exactly. He did very bad things, and the hyperbole of loud mouth yappers with podcasts isn’t my primary concern. Bentham is such a dullard.
I'm sure his brother dying and then deciding to date his widow for 3 years was very distressing. That is such unbelievable scumbag behavior.
"Bentham" starts with a straw man argument aimed at a false premise - that Hunter was "painted" as a "criminal mastermind." "Bentham" does not identify just who did this "painting" and which crimes Hunter "masterminded." I think more accurately Hunter was a loser and drug user who engaged in low level criminal activity because he thought (correctly in retrospect) that laws he considered petty did not apply to him - tax evasion, gun and drug possession.
Yah, Bentham is a bit like Richard Hanania was until recently: a smart young guy who writes interesting things with WAY too much self-confidence, and is often just completely wrong about some of them.
[Hanania with his TDS of the last many months is no longer interesting. Or even if he might have the occasional interesting thing to say, I wouldn’t know, as I can no longer stomach reading him.]
Hunter Biden is a lying crook, but he came across as an authentic lying crook in the interview. Which is, sadly, preferable to someone like Kamala who is either unable or unwilling to tell us what she really thinks about anything.
So much that I agree with here. But I’ll just say thank you calling out foul language. I don’t want to be inundated with profanity when I check the news or browse Substack posts.
Regarding this—thank you for thanking Arnold.
Andy G—Would you mind cleaning up your language? See your note from 5 days ago criticizing Dan Williams.
My usage of profanity is indeed a bit more than AK’s claim of Scott Alexander’s one in ten thousand. But it’s not a whole lot more.
I do it sparsely but in non-zero quantity to draw attention to a point. And I don’t believe I’ve ever writing something “profanity-laced”, unless one’s definition of that term is any number more than zero.
My apologies that it is not your cup of tea.
I believe it detracts from your point and brings (undesirable) attention to you.
Regarding what Arnold here calls the "realm of conspiracy theory," we live in a world where elected officials, media, and many others routinely lie or engage in BS, i.e, they are simply indifferent to whether there is any truth to their utterances. Harry Frankfurt wrote a worthwhile essay on the latter, actually entitled "On Bullshit." (Pardon the language, but here it is unavoidable.) Such actors speak not with the intention of honestly communicating anything, but in order to produce some desired effect. Anyone paying attention to public affairs and trying to understand what is really going on is forced to speculate as to inconsistencies in such statements or their clash with other known facts, and to propose alternative explanations and possible motivations and it is through the circulation of such speculations that eventually a better picture can sometimes emerge. Of course, the liars and BS'ers and their supporters try to suppress that process through labeling such speculation "conspiracy theory." I need not list for Arnold's readers the numerous facts that were in recent years originally labeled conspiracy theories by the usual suspects but subsequently proven true. So dismissing anything as a conspiracy theory unfortunately tends to put one in that camp. Better to simply point out that the speculation lacks adequate foundation.
Never met a person other than myself that actually read Frankfurt all those years ago or even knew that paper existed, much love.
Edit: TIL'ed the paper was just rediscovered and is going viral, even made Drudge. I remember I read it the week after it was published and was so novel I saved the PDF then and added it to my personally library.
For me, profanity-laced dialog is an indicator of one or all of the following:
Lack of creativity or careless use of language – you can’t find another word to express yourself?
Lower IQ – limited vocabulary and a corresponding deficiency of critical thinking skills.
Lack of respect – the speaker can be a Pretty Smart Person but doesn’t care about offending anyone or are deliberately trying to induce angry responses…pretty common in social media.
Consequently, my willingness to pay attention declines.
I don't care for all the f- bombs, but it's going too far to draw such confident conclusions about character about it. It has much less meaning, weight, and implication. It's more of a "to a first approximation, you are your five closest friends / socialization partners" kind of thing, the linguistic convention of a subculture. I've moved from f-bomb- heavy work environments to ones where one would be risking ostracized for slipping even once. And even working in the more vulgar places, one finds oneself code-switching to clean up one's act at home or in more polite company. Admittedly it does become a bad habit, and controlling or breaking it does require a lot of self awareness, regulation, discipline, and social savvy.
There is code-switching sometimes. In certain cultures, the profanity effectively conveys sincerity, authenticity, and intensity/urgency. It also bears a cost when used loosely, which is why it retains communication value.
Of course, I must admit to occasional lapse but do not see justification for dialogue with every fifth word f-bomb. As you say, it is a bad habit.
“I also find myself suspicious of provocateurs. The provocateur, like the combative crusader, is seeking attention. That is how Richard Hanania strikes me. Bryan Caplan is another provocateur. I trust his most well-researched views, but on other topics (such as psychiatry) he has not shown me enough work to be convincing.” Great conversation starter. Thank you for this.
This edges into the territory of what I think about all of our blogger provocateurs. They've got a viewpoint, they articulate it well, and now they're a thing producing income via extemporization. Since no well is bottomless, they can't continue to pump out essays without venturing into territory where they're not particularly knowledgeable in order to fill column inches. Eventually, they all make leaps into topics where they have no experience or ability to analyze, and you get Noah talking about China, or Hanania talking about...whatever it is he talks about nowadays. (I stopped reading him a while back.)
Arnold seems to hold up pretty well. At worst, some particular thing he writes about doesn't interest me, but he manages to avoid going off on tangents wherein he clearly is outside his knowledge base.
Well said. None of us are invulnerable to the temptations of power, status, material accumulation, and reach. Power tends to corrupt. We all have to work against these temptations.
I would say we need better definitions of success—those that focus on peace of mind, mentoring, and character—not necessarily popular notions of success.
There are three types of writers - controversialists, contrarians, and confessionalists. Controversialists have a knack for controversy - Megan McArdle is the best example of this but Ezra Klein always seems to find himself in the middle of a controversy. Contrarians are data focused writers like Yglesias or Sailer who are are continuing in the Slate tradition of contrarian hot takes. And confessionalists are people like TNC or Brooks or Douthat or most female writers who are writing from their personal perspective. Of course some are a mix of the styles.
I don't listen to Rogan much but I recently listen to his interviews of Stephen Pinker and Bernie Sanders. Both were very interesting. Both exposed what I think are huge gaps in Rogan's education. Be that it may, Bernie's desire for government to provide far more than it already does sounded rather absurd to me. Rogan agreed with pretty much all of it.
Concerning the epistemic crisis, today's essay by Frank Furedi is excellent: https://frankfuredi.substack.com/p/epistemic-crisis-a-bad-case-of-truth?publication_id=1032541&post_id=169824770&isFreemail=false&r=984j4&triedRedirect=true
Arnold, What would change your mind about the Szasz/Caplan thesis that at least 80% of diagnoses of 'mental illness' are medicalized excuses for regrettable behavior and/or justifications for coercion of 'patients'?
Greatly enjoy your Substack, for all the reasons you lay out here.
Re Weinstein and Covid, I’d say not as much a correct prediction as repeating what I understand as received epidemiological wisdom about viruses. I guess it’s distinctly possible that some mutations could be deadlier, but longer term, viruses tend to be most lethal in their early stages and mutate to less lethal and more contagious variants. Because nature tends to select for viruses that spread fast but don’t quickly kill their hosts. Happy to be corrected!
I agree that it should have been standard analysis, but he was the only one articulating it. The so-called experts were just saying "Run and hide!"