An Insight

When politics are used to allocate resources, the resources all end up being allocated to politics. - P.J. O'Rourke

— Cerebral Wisdom (@CerebralWisdom) May 7, 2023

 

I see wonderful things

Using its strong back legs, the basilisk lizard, aka the Jesus Christ lizard, pushes down so fast and so hard with its feet that it never sinks further than a few inches below the surface of the water

[BBC Earth: https://t.co/CJcPVZnG9n]pic.twitter.com/4J5CNvfMJy

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 9, 2023

 

Offbeat humor

I'm a professor of Latin. My pronouns are 𝘪𝘴, 𝘦𝘪𝘶𝘴, 𝘦𝘪, 𝘦𝘶𝘮, 𝘦𝘰, and I expect my students and colleagues to memorize them and use correctly. https://t.co/KINxWNSIuc

— Jake 🇺🇸 (@omni_american) May 8, 2023

 

Data Talks

San Francisco is experiencing its biggest commercial real estate crisis. 31% vacancy across-the-board and some buildings are 80%. It is not pretty. pic.twitter.com/7BQ5pgmcEh

— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) May 8, 2023

 

The Classical Liberal is inherently humble, accepting the limitations of man

From The Humble Capitalist by Richard Hanania.  The subheading is The central planning fallacy never dies.  

Take the issue of whether a nation should have an industrial policy, which is defined as a strategic effort to develop specific parts of a national economy, or manufacturing in general. A country may decide it wants to, say, manufacture cars, rather than let the market send price signals about what its citizens should be doing.

When I hear such plans, I’m taken aback by the faith it puts in intellectuals and politicians. At most, I think the smartest human beings might be capable of being small cogs in vast machines that no one can understand or control. I trust that the guy who runs a single car factory, or the logistics manager of a major hotel chain, might know what he’s doing in his limited domain. I am, in contrast, inherently suspicious of those who think they have answers to questions like “What kinds of jobs should most people have?” or “Which goods should we manufacture at home instead of buying from China?” If you believe that you have 20 extra IQ points on proponents of industrial policy, but it would take a superhuman AI to even have the possibility of doing central planning well, is that arrogance or humility? Sounds like arrogance relative to fellow humans, but humility in the sense of understanding your limitations.

Markets take into account the information necessary to allocate goods and resources in efficient ways. Through the price system and individuals making decisions that they’re directly responsible for, they provide answers to an endless array of questions that no central planner can even begin to consider and weigh in their entirety.

Is your nation any good at making cars? Are the people culturally or temperamentally suited for that kind of work? Would forcing them to manufacture their own cars make them better off than just doing whatever produces the most value and then buying cars from other nations? Are you sure, from all the goods and labor it takes to produce a car, the market can’t figure out a better way to create wealth or make technological breakthroughs? Can the supply chains for each product that goes into making a car be put together at a reasonable cost? What are the second and third order effects of distributing resources toward what are, based on the choices of those who could risk their own money, inefficient uses?

Many conservatives who support industrial policy seem to see economic efficiency as no more than a secondary concern. They somehow think manufacturing jobs are better for people getting married, forming families, and instilling virtue. As someone with a background in the social sciences, I find the idea that one can not only plan an economy, but also predict the cultural impacts of an economic policy to be absurd. That project is way beyond any tools that we have. Just because in previous decades the US had better manufacturing jobs and higher rates of family formation does not mean one can recreate through trade policy the culture of Eisenhower’s America. This is pure cargo cultism.

I like that - "cargo cultism" as a term for the rent seeking mind in the national policy context.

Orestes Pursued by the Furies, 1862 by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (French, 1825–1905)

Orestes Pursued by the Furies, 1862 by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (French, 1825–1905)

Click to enlarge.

But there is always a market for the authoritarian statist view. Regrettably.

From ‘Power and Progress’ Review: Technology and the New Leviathan, a book review by Deirdre N. McCloskey.  The subheading is Two economists argue that, in the face .  of world-changing innovation, the state can make better decisions for society than the free market.

The book is Power and Progress by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson.  I do not know Johnson but I have a number of Acemoglu's books.  He writes on topics of interest to me but I rarely more than skim his work.  He is traditional statist authoritarian.   McCloskey is a classical liberal.  The two world views do not mesh, principally because the statist authoritarian worldview is so profoundly and consistently wrong about how the world works and so consistently disastrous in terms of consequences to people.

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson have written a long, eloquent book arguing that technological progress is a decidedly mixed bag. They believe that the power of the state can and should be used to select the best of the goodies from the bag. The state, they argue, can do a better job than the market of selecting technologies and making investments to implement them.

Mr. Acemoglu is a prolific economist and a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize; his MIT colleague Mr. Johnson is an economist and professor of management. In “Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity” they claim that the billions of daily decisions by you and me—to venture on a new purchase or a new job or a new idea—do not “automatically” turn out optimally for ourselves or society. In particular, poor workers are not always helped by new technology. The invisible hand of human creativity and innovation, in the authors’ analysis, requires the wise guidance of the state.

This is a perspective many voters increasingly agree with—and politicians from Elizabeth Warren to Marco Rubio. We are children, bad children (viewed from the right) or sad children (viewed from the left). Bad or sad, as children we need to be taken in hand. Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson warmly admire the U.S. Progressive Movement of the late 19th century as a model for their statism: experts taking child-citizens in hand.

The strange history of ‘vitalism’ in America, technocracy on the rise, Henry Threadgill’s musical odyssey and more.

The authors begin with the questionable assertion that the most prevalent attitude toward technology today is a heedless optimism. “Every day,” they write, “we hear . . . that we are heading relentlessly toward a better world, thanks to unprecedented advances in technology.” Their chapters then skip briskly through history—from the agricultural revolution of the neolithic era, to the industrial revolution of the 19th century, to the Western postwar economic expansion of the 20th century—seeking to show how at each turn new innovations tended to empower certain sections of society at the expense of others. The “power” that concerns them, in other words, is private power.

Since the 1920s, economists from John Maynard Keynes to Paul Samuelson to Joseph Stiglitz have been claiming, with increasing self-assurance though with surprisingly little evidence beyond the blackboard, that (1) private arrangements work poorly, (2) the state knows better, and (3) we therefore need more state. Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson have long believed in this anti-liberal syllogism. Statism recommends a growing Leviathan, as Mr. Acemoglu argued equally eloquently in “Why Nations Fail,” a 2012 book with James Robinson.

We need, in other words, the legislation currently being pushed by left and right to try again the policies of antitrust, trade protection, minimum wage and, above all, subsidy for certain technologies. Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson are especially eager to regulate digital technologies such as artificial intelligence. “Technology should be steered in a direction that best uses a workforce’s skills,” they write, “and education should . . . adapt to new skill requirements.” How the administrators of the Economic Development Administration at the Department of Commerce would know the new direction to steer, or the new skills required, remains a sacred mystery.

Choosing a path for a society and its economy is not the only role of Leviathan; distributing economic justice is equally important. “Government subsidies for developing more socially beneficial technologies,” the authors declare, “are one of the most powerful means of redirecting technology in a market economy.” Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson regard the private economy as an inequality machine.

In former times, they write, “shared benefits appeared only when landowning and religious elites were not dominant enough to impose their vision and extract all the surplus from new technologies.” Today we need the state to use its powers “to induce the private sector to move away from excessive automation and surveillance, and toward more worker-friendly technologies.” Fear of surveillance is a major theme of the book; therefore “antitrust should be considered as a complementary tool to the more fundamental aim of redirecting technology away from automation, surveillance, data collection, and digital advertising.”

“Power and Progress” puts forward a new statist agenda and argues against a foolish reliance on individual discovery and free entry into jobs and markets. Well, so what? What’s wrong with their case for a new Leviathan, so long as it is advised by certain economists from MIT?

McCloskey then refutes the authoritarian statist argument based both on evidence and logic.  It is useful to refute the perennial balderdash of the authoritarian statist.  No matter how good their intentions and no matter how eloquently they write, the authoritarian statist worldview is repugnant.  Morally, philosophically, and empirically.  

But there is always a market for the authoritarian statist view.  Regrettably.  

Identities and category errors

From The Queers Versus The Homosexuals by Andrew Sullivan.  The subheading is We are in a new era. And the erasure of gay men and lesbians is intensifying.

Do you remember the homosexual?

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? He was, for a period, a key figure in the conversation about gay rights. He was Will in “Will And Grace,” or Keith in “Six Feet Under,” or Cam in “Modern Family” — a normie-enough dude randomly distributed across the human population and country. Once invisible and closeted, the AIDS epidemic exposed him without mercy in every state in the country. With this unexpected visibility, and in the wake of hundreds of thousands of young corpses, the survivors built a movement that won every gay and lesbian the right to be free from discrimination and to marry and serve openly — and proudly — in the military.

It was the most speedily successful civil rights story in memory. Its case for equality was simple and clear: including us in existing institutions needn’t change anything in heterosexual life. “Live and let live” in equality and dignity was the idea. And the most powerful force behind this success was the emergence of so many ordinary gays and lesbians — of all races, religions, backgrounds, classes, and politics — who told their own story. America discovered what I had discovered the first time I went into a gay bar: these people were not the stereotypes I was told about. They were not some strange, alien tribe. They were just like every other human, part of our families and communities; and we cared about each other.

What would happen if and when we won the battle was always an open question. The question of transgender rights — associated with but very different from gay rights — remained unresolved. But in the new climate of acceptance, transgender people also became increasingly visible and accepted, and they too won a stunning victory in the Supreme Court. The Bostock decision in June 2020 gave those who identified as the opposite sex full civil rights protection. Yes, there were still skirmishes over cakes. But with equal rights, and growing toleration, it seemed as if we’d achieved a settlement that would allow us all — straight, gay, and trans — a chance to get on with our lives in freedom.

And now? Back in culture war hell.

If you read the MSM, you’ll be told this war is back because the GOP has, for cynical reasons, become an even more unhinged hate-machine, now dedicated once again to “targeting the freedom and dignity of queer people,” as one NYT columnist writes today. You will, in fact, almost never see a news story that isn’t premised on this idea. And it’s obviously true that some on the right have never really accepted gay equality and have jumped at a new opening to undo gay integration and dignity — and the rawness of some of the homophobia and transphobia out there right now is palpable. The resurrection of bathroom bills and the move to curtail the rights of trans adults are repulsive and dumb.

But when you examine the other issues at stake — public schools teaching the concepts of queer and gender theory to kindergartners on up, sex changes for children before puberty, the housing of biological males with women in prisons and rape shelters, and biological males competing with women in sports — you realize we are far beyond what the gay rights movement once stood for. It’s these initiatives from the far left that are new; and the backlash is quite obviously a reaction to the capture of the gay rights movement by queer social justice activists.

This originally caught my eye owing to the headline which would fall into the category of "Unexpected Headlines in My Time."

But there is an additional insight in what Sullivan is saying.  

I am accustomed to thinking about institutional capture when it comes to fanatical ideological movements and the culture wars.  

While it is not his main point, it is an important point and I have read and heard it expressed in may ways over the past few months but never in terms of institutional capture.

It’s these initiatives from the far left that are new; and the backlash is quite obviously a reaction to the capture of the gay rights movement by queer social justice activists.

The argument would be that LGBT is an institution (obviously not a governmental institution but certainly a semi-formalized institution until recently representing the interests of its members, primarily L and G interests.  

But then the LGBT institution was captured by the Trans movement and the associated ideologues.  Parties who did not share or wish to advance or protect the achievements of the LG part of the coalition.  

Is LGBT an institution?  I can see multiple arguments pro and con but I suspect the weight of the arguments falls on, yes, they are an institution.  I have thought of them more as movement and, certainly, at one time they were definitely a movement.  But they achieved their primary objectives.  What was left was less of a movement and more a residual of the institution and that is what has been captured.

An interesting way of thinking about it.

History

By showcasing every documented battle in human history, this map emphasizes the importance of the European project.

Happy #EuropeDay 🇪🇺 pic.twitter.com/DTF8NWEBUV

— Xavi Ruiz (@xruiztru) May 9, 2023

 

An Insight

Sober perseverance is more effective than enthusiastic emotions, which are all too capable of being transferred, with little difficulty, to something different each day. - Vaclav Havel

— Cerebral Wisdom (@CerebralWisdom) May 7, 2023