Expert Failure

From The Wrong Kind of Abundance by Kevin Williamson at The Dispatch.

Zweig intelligently catalogues a number of underlying factors that positioned the American expert class to make all the wrong decisions while trying to make the most of the crisis, putting it to the service of their political and social agendas and, not incidentally, their careers. Those problems include: over reliance on mathematical models that can be tweaked for ideological ends where empirical observation and measurement provide insufficient support for the preferred policy—or would militate against it if taken into account; the fetishization of technology in education, very nicely illustrated by Bill Clinton, ensorcelled by the apparent early promise of the classroom internet, repeating almost verbatim identical claims that had been made about radio in its infancy—and that were made about film and television as well; the moronizing effects of reflexive political tribalism—there was a time when the Trump campaign could complain, with some reason, that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were working to “undermine the public’s confidence in the coming coronavirus vaccine,” ironic as that complaint is to read today with Marjorie Taylor Greene in the House and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the Cabinet; the related self-censorship of the media in the service of narrow partisan interests and dogmatic progressivism; and misalignment of incentives, with policymakers (disproportionately progressive-leaning) captured by special interests (notably Randi Weingarten and the teachers’ unions) and thence producing policy agendas that did not serve the public interest, a situation that would be familiar enough to anybody who had ever read a few pages of F. A. Hayek or James Buchanan.

 (I mean the public-choice economist, not the 15th president.)

About that final point: Reading An Abundance of Caution is a little bit like reading Ezra Klein in the past few years, as ladies and gentlemen of the sort who write for the New Yorker seem to discover phenomena that have been at the center of the liberal-libertarian critique of progressivism for a century or so. When it comes to housing supply, for example, Klein and Matt Yglesias have even discovered that regulation has unintended consequences! You won’t find Hayek’s essays or The Calculus of Consent in Zweig’s index, and, what’s worse, you won’t find very much evidence that the author has read such works—which he should have, given the light a century’s accumulation of economic and political literature might have shed on his subject. .

a great deal of our economic policy debate (as about minimum-wage laws) is shaped by mathematical modeling that cannot be empirically evaluated, because doing so would require a comparison between measurable outcomes and non-measurable counterfactuals. 

“Everything that can be measured is not worth measuring, and everthing that is worth measuring can sometoimes not be measured.”

.



A Conservative Revolution

Some historians contend that the American Revolution was not a revolution readily compared to others in history.  It can be distinguished as a War for Independence or as historian H.W Brands called it, Our First Civil War in his book by that title.  Given its close proximity to our own experience The French Revolution offers insights that illuminate both.  The French and the Americans both attributed their movements to Enlightenment philosophers; the French followed the words of Rousseau and the Americans followed the ideas of Locke and Montesquieu among others. The Enlightenment was a fork in the road and the French and Americans took very different paths.

In The Wrong Kind of Abundance Kevin Williamson at The Dispatch (firewalled) considered the American experience a conservative revolution:

Of course, the political group that we now call, broadly speaking, the American right has always been convulsed by irreconcilable contradictions because the American project itself is founded in a paradox: There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a conservative revolution, but that is approximately what the Founding Fathers carried out. And from the New Deal through to the present, the right has been torn between its conservative tendencies and its revolutionary tendencies. Dwight Eisenhower called himself a “progressive conservative”; William F. Buckley Jr. called himself a ”radical conservative” and insisted that whatever it was his new movement was going to stand for, it was against Eisenhower.

Among the founders, there were plenty of wild-eyed utopians and radicals, but the revolution ended up being led by relatively conservative figures such as George Washington and John Adams (who had originally opposed separating from England) and others of similar temperament, who made the case that they were not so much overturning a legitimate political order as restoring and securing their ancient rights as Englishmen. The American project is a marriage between the forces of conservatism (property and religion) and the forces of radicalism (majoritarianism, disestablishmentarianism, etc.), and, to the extent that the American right acts as a conservator of the American tradition, it feels those contradictions deeply.



The Dangers of the Academic Bubble

From Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen interviews Walter Russell Mead

Excerpt:

COWEN: How would you change or improve the training that goes into America’s foreign policy elite?

MEAD: Well, I would start by trying to draw people’s attention to that, over the last 40 years, there’s been an enormous increase in the number of PhD grads engaged in the formation of American foreign policy. There’s also been an extraordinary decline in the effectiveness of American foreign policy. We really ought to take that to heart.

COWEN: Do you think of it as an advantage that you don’t have a PhD?

MEAD: Huge advantage.

COWEN: How would you describe that advantage?

MEAD: I don’t really believe in disciplines. I see connections between things. I start from reality. I’m not trying to be anti-intellectual here. You need ideas to help you organize your perceptions of reality. But I think there’s a tendency in a lot of social science disciplines — you start from a bunch of really smart, engaged people who have been thinking about a set of questions and say, “We’ll do a lot better if we stop randomly thinking about everything that pops up and try, in some systematic way, to organize our thinking of this.”

I think you do get some gains from that, but you see, over time, the focus of the discipline has this tendency to shift. The discipline tends to become more inward navel-gazing. “What’s the history of our efforts to systematize our thinking about this?” The discipline becomes more and more, in a sense, ideological and internally focused and less pragmatic.

I think that some of the problem, though, is not so much in the intellectual weaknesses of a lot of conventional postgrad education, but simply almost the crime against humanity of having whole generations of smart people spend the first 30, 35 years of their lives in a total bubble, where they’re in this academic setting, and the rule . . . They become socialized into the academy, just as much as prisoners get socialized into the routines of a prison.

HKO thoughts:

Academics from the Kennedy and Johnson administration directed much of the Viet Nam fiasco.

Academics in economics have taken Keynesian ideas to an illogical extreme.

“It’s very hard to argue in logical terms that spending money unwisely is the way to get wealthy.” – Russ Roberts

This is perhaps as simple a refutation of Keynesianism as you will find (though many simple refutations on many different fronts will be found in this book). But because an honest encapsulation of one of the basic tenets of Keynesianism is that unwise, unnecessary spending can be a great promotion of the public good via manipulation of aggregate demand, it is necessary for us to reduce the tenet to its real logical conclusion—that somehow spending money foolishly will create a non-foolish result.

Bahnsen, David L.. There’s No Free Lunch: 250 Economic Truths (p. 266). Post Hill Press. Kindle Edition.

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
-Friedrich von Hayek

I think the genius of the GI Bill after WWII was to take GIs that had a real view of the world at its worst and then provide them with a higher education.  The more foreign policy is directed by academics without this dose of reality the more dangerous they become.

I have been impressed by authors such as Jonah Goldberg (BA- Goucher)  and Kevin Williamson (BA- Yale) who do not possess advanced degrees but write of economics and politics with both intellectual depth and readability.  Like Mead they are free to thread thinking from various disciplines.

Many of the departments of higher academia are plagued by a lack of intellectual diversity.  The atmosphere of ‘wokeness’ and cancel culture is just a form of intellectual McCarthyism.

 

 

 



Republicanism and Aristocracy

Dan McLaughlin expresses a perspective of cultural ‘wokeness’ and its counter reaction in The New Republicanism in National Review.

Republicanism in America was represented as an alternative to monarchy, but the role of monarchy in its relation to aristocracy varied. In British history the role of the monarch transitioned from one of an absolute ruler to one subject to the restraints of a constitution,  determined by the Parliament.  A representative republic inherently included an elite that would rule.  The American republic assumed a virtuous elite that would subdue their personal interest, but it also assumed a virtuousness of the voters that would select leaders for more than the self interest of individual voters.

James Madison serving in the Virginia House of Delegates saw that a dependence on virtue for the success of the republic was wishful thinking and that a divided government was necessary to avoid any concentration of political power.  Government was to be divided vertically through federalism and horizontally through checks and balances augmented by carefully and deliberately staggered terms.

Madison redefined a republic from a form suitable only to a small geography and a homogeneous population to a large and extended republic that would function through multiple factions offsetting each other.  When there were only two religious groups there would be constant hostility, but when there were several they tended to live in peace. Whether the same could be said of economic interests or political interests remained to be seen.  The formation of a two party system allowed for coalitions of factions to achieve common ends.  Reducing a diversity of special interests to two coalitions undermined Madison’s concept of the extended republic.

As the English form of rule evolved the role of the monarch was seen in some views to protect the larger population from the aristocracy.

At our founding the republic was not just an alternative to a monarchy, it was a means of controlling a political aristocracy.  As the economy grew urban and industrial and as the railroads connected the oceans, removing geographical limits to wealth and commerce, we developed a new economic aristocracy that was addressed by the Progressive movement.  The Progressive movement sought to bring the same limits to  concentrations of economic power that the Constitution brought to concentrations of political power.  This created a friction that has defined our political discourse because the political power to address economic concentrations required removing limits on central political power hard wired in the written constitution of the founding.

The third aristocracy identified by McLaughlin is a cultural aristocracy embedded in media, entertainment, higher education, and increasingly in corporations and public schools.  To the extent that this aristocracy projects values and rules that are in conflict with a large portion of the population, there is a reaction similar to that of the previous political and economic aristocracies.

Political control of school curricula and the media should be avoided whether it is from performative politics or an unelected cultural aristocracy.  To a large extent the former has been a reaction to the latter.

The reaction to the new cultural aristocracy is similar to the progressive reaction to the economic aristocracy and the two overlap greatly, but just as the political and economic originally overlapped and pulled apart as the economy developed, the same is happening with the political and the cultural.  Where they once overlapped the cultural is pulling apart from the political, and we seek political power to hold the cultural aristocracy accountable.

 

 

 

 

 



Principles and Ideology

Principles are how the world works. Ideologies are how we want the world to work or how we accept the reality of how we want the world to work.  Principles are not accountable to ideologies; ideologies are accountable to principles.

Solutions that become principles are subject to context. It is the application of context to principles that enables the transition to ideology. Effective solutions can be merely trends and trends are not principles.

Effective ideologies consider principles in context and distinguish principles from trends.  Principles endure from logic.

Our constitution endures because it is based on an understanding of human nature that is permanent, but because human nature is permanent does not mean that our understanding of it does not evolve from our experience.



Liberty is Boring

From Kevin Williamson at National Review, A Marxist Homecoming:

One of the political difficulties of conservatism — and here I mean American conservatism, not the imported kind — is that by its nature it does not offer much in the way of novelty, excitement, or even enthusiasm. It is a philosophy of least-bad options, necessary inconsistency, and moderate expectations. American conservatism is rooted in the values of the American Revolution and the American founding, which are largely liberal values in the classical sense, a source of some confusion to modern conservatives. American conservatism, informed by the liberal Anglo-Protestant commercial culture of our British antecedents, does not offer the romance and pageantry of Europe’s throne-and-altar rightism. It does offer an open society in which those and many other bad ideas can find adherents and be discussed freely.

American conservatives in search of novelty and excitement almost always begin by turning their backs on our ancient liberties, especially our economic liberties, and generally end up under the sway of some foreign caudillo (Franco! Pinochet! Putin! Orbán!) or some exotic fanaticism (Neo-Nationalism! Integralism! Habsburg legitimism!), or else veer off predictably into race obsession and other distasteful enthusiasms of that nature. Because the hatred of adjacent heretics is more intimate and more intense than the hatred of distant infidels, these rightists end up doing things that would be otherwise inexplicable, e.g., making common cause with the Marxists so long as doing so gets up the noses of one or two of the three remaining active neoconservatives and the president of the Libertarian Club of Knockemstiff, Ohio.

You can have the excitement, the radicalism, and the strange new respect for socialism — I’ll take boring old liberty and property rights, and the necessary means to defend them.

HKO

Modern (American) Conservatism is a hard sell. It proposes limits, accepts imperfection, avoids extravagant promises, and understands inconsistencies and tradeoffs.