Pathetic pandering by pseudo public intellectuals

From My Conversation with Audrey Tang by Tyler Cowen.  I used to enjoy his economics blog, Marginal Revolution, a lot.  Lots of well filtered research, smart commenters, good discussion topics.  

Of late, he seems to have suffered the common academic infection of seeing himself as an intellectual celebrity, making glib judgments on topics well past his expertise, indulging in academic arcana with "straussian" this and "coursean" that and "solve for the equilibrium."  I think he is attempting to be humorously ironic but it comes across as pointlessly preening.

Still worth checking in on but not as compelling as it used to be.  

He also suffers the public intellectual's instinctive vice of denigrating their own country and culture for no reason other than to curry favor.  The Australians call it cultural cringe.  It may be unwarranted in Australia but it is at least understandable given their convict origins (long outgrown) and their remoteness at the fringe of global trade patterns.  

For American academics/intellectuals, in the most prosperous, innovative, diverse and inclusive country in the world, it merely comes across as sadly and embarrassingly ignorant.  Consequently, I enjoyed Tang's response to Cowen's cringe.  

COWEN: Now, my country, the United States, has made many, many mistakes at an almost metaphysical level. What is it in the United States that those mistakes have come from? What’s our deeper failing behind all those mistakes?

TANG: I don’t know. Isn’t America this grand experiment to keep making mistakes and correcting them in the open and share it with the world? That’s the American experiment.

COWEN: Have we started correcting them yet?

TANG: I’m sure that you have.

As indeed we have and are.  Unbeknownst to public intellectuals playing their status games.