Building institutions for human flourishing
and lots of other highlights from the web for your Easter break!
It's so good having a discerning editor choosing interesting things to read. It used to be called a "magazine".
Dennis Glover
How economics forgot its subject matter
Here’s the introduction to a recent essay of mine. Shoot me a return email if you’d like access to the full thing in Google Docs:
The organising ideas in a field of inquiry and the way they are deployed should improve the practitioners’ understanding of reality. Often, however, ideas gain a breadth of application that capaciously exceeds their appropriate scope. I illustrate this claim by taking a central presumption of neoclassical economics that economic life is paradigmatically about trade-offs. So ingrained is this idea that it may come as a shock to hear it questioned. Then again, as Mark Twain is reputed to have said, it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, but what you know for sure that just ain't so.
Here’s a simple example of the kind of thing I have in mind. In the 1970s, it was presumed there was a necessary trade-off between the cost and quality of manufactured goods. But Toyota developed a profoundly different production system in which getting it ‘right first time’ dramatically improved both quality and production cost.
By the mid-1980s, the two car models with the highest build quality were luxury Mercedes Sports (assembled with more inspectors per car than any other) and the Toyota Corolla — assembled without any inspectors at all! Is it too much to expect that economics would be fascinated with such phenomena and bringing more of them into being?
Building institutions for human flourishing
I really enjoyed this conversation with my friend Peyton Bowman and I explore this tantalising suggestion in Elinor Ostrom’s speech accepting the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics:
Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century. Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans.
We explore various ways in which the world we’ve built following the first strategy predicated on people’s self-interestedness has undermined the better angels of our nature. And we explore the institutions we might build to embrace the second strategy — to build the institutions of human flourishing.
Without suggesting we can set the clock back, we look at what we’ve lost in amateur and community based sport as sport has become more professionalised and commercialised.
We then discuss various ways in which people put boundaries around competition — for instance with rules against conflict of interest.
And we look at something I think is a big deal. I call them “de-competitive” institutions. These involve mechanisms of selection which are not competitive. This is particularly interesting where merit is selected without competition between the population from whom the most meritorious are selected.
We conclude with a quick look at something we'll explore later in greater depth. Hyper-competition produces ‘fast-foodification’ — a process whereby competitive strategies frustrate the development of better habits of mind and body.
Though there are a few slides, you'll be able to easily follow along without looking at them. If you'd like to see them, they're here. The video can be seen above, while the audio is here.
The Failure of Russia’s Media Elite
My favourite of the articles I read this week.
I like to read things that open my eyes a little — which I’m a sucker for if I can connect it with things I already know — like how media works in this country. Similarly to Russia as it turns out.
I initially did not believe Russian public-opinion polls showing that a majority of citizens supported the war in Ukraine. After all, polls in authoritarian states are unreliable. So, I started asking the opinion of acquaintances in Russia, all around 60 years old, with whom I had not been in touch for 20 years. To my surprise, 80-90% of them supported the war. These people have known me since I was born and were friends with my parents. But they preferred to listen to Russian state television than to my arguments.…
Contempt for mass-media audiences has long been rooted in the minds of Russia’s intelligentsia. Even when it was possible to launch new independent outlets, focused on a narrow audience of clever people who would hear or read other clever people explain how the world worked. This meant that educated and relatively wealthy readers, at least, had access to high-quality information for the past 20 years.
Unfortunately, nobody wanted to produce quality content for the mass market. While Putin would not allow such an independent media initiative now, it was possible to start one in the 2000s. Putin, by contrast, understood that state television and tabloids are key to gaining and maintaining political influence. He did not have a media monopoly, and Russia’s internet penetration rate is about 85%, so most people had access to alternative sources of information. But the only person who tried to produce a quality product for a mass audience was the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, whose videos regularly received millions of views. This is the main reason why Putin tried to kill him. When he failed, he put Navalny in jail.
Believe the autocrat: nuclear is on the table
I skipped large chunks that didn’t seem to add much, but the first highlight below opened up whole new worlds of anxiety for me — so you have been warned.
And the other passages below stood out.
What do you think is a path out of this current war?
I don't think peace in good faith is possible. The best-case scenario is a long pause in the fighting necessitated by Russia's clear military failure. From Putin point of view, it would be a temporary respite for Russia to regroup and strike again. But if we're lucky maybe he'll die. That's the best-case scenario.
Worst-case scenario, a nuclear strike.
Is that the worst-case scenario but an infinitesimally small possibility in your mind?
It's not at all small. Rule No. 1 is to listen to and believe the autocrat. [This is a reference to this article “Revisiting “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” which is well worth reading.] Putin keeps reminding the world that Russia has nuclear weapons. … If it’s on the table, as Chekhov teaches us, it is going to strike sooner or later. Of course, there is still the question of whether he will die sooner than he pushes the nuclear button.
In an interview with Karaganov [an influential foreign policy expert in Kremlin-adjacent circles] he goes on about how the NATO treaty is basically fiction and how Article Five doesn't obligate NATO countries to come to the defense of other members. This is a very important idea in both Russian and Ukrainian foreign policy circles for different reasons. Nothing happens automatically in NATO. If it's a war of nerves, NATO is likely to lose because of its lethargic, complicated structure.
Russia is essentially saying, What are you going to do if we fire a tactical nuclear weapon at a military airport in Poland? This is something that they see themselves justified in potentially doing because those military airports are being used to supply military equipment to Ukraine. Considering there's no automatic response, do you want to be drawn into a shooting war with Russia?
On Zelensky
The most extraordinary political speaker we have seen over the last month and a half is Zelensky, right?
He models political speech. It is not about policy, and it is not about military strategy. It's about people. No matter who he is addressing, he's addressing people directly. He's speaking directly to their experience. Whether he's addressing the Italian Parliament or the Knesset, he talks about the experience of the people in the room. When he's addressing Russians, he's addressing their experience, including their experience of watching him speak and then asking them for something. When he's addressing Ukrainian people, he's offering them care and understanding. He doesn't talk about it in terms of policy.
On hypocrisy
Europeans are saying, Well, it's impossible for us to give up Russian gas. What does impossible mean? Impossible means expensive. Impossible means it would cause great hardship to actual Europeans. So it would cause the kind of hardship caused if they went to war. Wars are expensive for the countries prosecuting them, and they're also risky to the lives of their citizens. What they’re trying to do with sanctions is prosecute a war without incurring great expense and without creating actual hardship for the citizens of their countries.
It's like the fantasy of the drone war.
Exactly. So in that context, talking about the great battle for democracy and how we're all fighting for it rings hollow, because we're not all fighting for it. We're fighting for it only as long as it doesn't cost us too much or doesn't jeopardize the reelection prospects of the current governments in any Western European country.
The West is aiding Ukrainians while wiring Russia money every day for oil and gas.
Democracy and internal and external freedom: a warning for our time
In my capacious ignorance, I’d never heard of B R Ambedkar, a fascinating Indian founding father.
Unlike Gandhi, Nehru, Subhas Bose and Bhagat Singh, he didn’t fight against British imperialism. In fact, he supported British rule and until mid-1946 struggled to ensure that the British did not leave India so early. His primary fight was against the Hindu evil of untouchability. …
He was a severe critic of Mahatma Gandhi and the politics of the Indian National Congress for fighting only the external evil of foreign rule while ignoring the cancerous disease within the Hindu community. … Gandhi, on his part, expressed “the highest regard” for Ambedkar, and added, “He has every right to be bitter”.
The central question for Ambedkar was: Why did the great men of that faith not rise in revolt against such abominable caste inequality?
And his warning to the Constituent Assembly’s last meeting speaks loudly to our own time:
“In politics, we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality… We must remove this contradiction at the earliest moment, or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up”.
Female Empowerment Shouldn’t Mean We Have to Imitate Men
Not a brilliant article, but to quote my favourite comedian Stewart Lee, I agreed the fuck out of it.
For years now, there’s been a popular mainstream-left movement to address the gender gap between high-earning (often tech-oriented) career paths dominated by men, and lower-earning, care-oriented or human-oriented careers dominated by women. …
But there’s a part of this movement that’s slowly shifted from the idea that “women can do anything” to the idea that women want the same things men do, in equal statistical proportion, and so anything less than 50-50 parity reflects either discrimination or patriarchal brainwashing. This conflicts with the widely observed phenomenon whereby, even as young as preschool, girls are more likely to express a preference for care-oriented activities
We could look at the higher number of little girls who aspire to be nurses and say, good for you! You’ve chosen an intellectually and physically challenging vocation that’s essential to human health. … Instead, we too often say, poor thing, you’ve been brainwashed, wouldn’t you rather be coding videogames? In Politics, Aristotle wrote that a female is an incomplete male, or a deformed one. This outdated slur on females is 23 centuries old, yet it often feels like it’s made a comeback through the back door of progressivism.
What’s an Opsimath and why would you chuck in your job to become one?
Fascinating essay by Henry Oliver who, at the age of 35 has chucked in his job to write a book.
The middle-class capture of apprenticeship
I wasn’t much of a reader of the FT until I attended Kilkenomics, which, being (lightly) sponsored by the FT, is heavily attended its columnists. And many of them are first rate. (Could we have some great columnists in Australia please — or perhaps just one?) In any event, Sarah O’Connor does their employment beat and she’s always interesting and full of facts.
In England, something strange has happened to apprenticeships since government reforms five years ago. There has been a sharp drop in the number of entry-level apprenticeships and apprentices are now just as likely to live in the poshest areas as the poorest ones.
Yes folks, after a review that found that existing apprenticeships were too short and represented ‘cream-skimming’ by providers rather than serious training, they required apprenticeships to be at least 12 months. And guess what happened? Cream-skimming by providers! Whodda thunk? Now apprentices often do MBAs, come from the wealthy suburbs and work for big, wealthy oligopolistic corporations.
Makes you wonder whether competitive models should necessarily be the go-to option for difficult policy problems doesn’t it? Luckily we don’t have any problems like that here in the land of (an increased number of) droughts and flooding rains.
Or return this email if you’re desperate to read it.
Rob Henderson on Kahneman’s latest on Noise
I’m fairly familiar with Daniel Kahneman’s stuff and, I know he has the Nobel Prize and all. I’m even prejudiced in favour of Israelis. His Thinking Fast and Slow has some good stories of his exploits which empirically test various presumptions of prevailing practice in ways that show their weaknesses and often replace them with something better. So good on him.
But I don’t think he’s a particularly deep thinker. He helped found the discipline of ‘behavioural economics’ by documenting numerous ‘cognitive biases’. But as various people from Gerd Gigerenza to Nassim Taleb argue, framing our extraordinary cognitive capabilities as marred by a bunch of cognitive biases puts the cart before the horse. They’re only ‘biases’ once you’ve imposed a convenient framing of the problem that enables you to calculate the optimal strategy. And you can’t do that without pacifying the nature of the actual world we must navigate with various assumptions that remove genuine uncertainty and replace it with calculable risk — the kind that lets you calculate your chances and optimise your strategy.
Now his latest book is on Noise. It’s got interesting stuff in it. And like Kahnemann’s earlier stuff, it’s well suited to management. But the fact that different people’s estimates differ dramatically isn’t surprising if those estimates contain a high degree of judgement. The real message here is a simpler one. Kahneman does make it, but it still somehow gets lost in the hoopla about his putative discovery of the importance of this phenomenon of ‘noise’. It’s this: that when people’s judgements differ dramatically, that’s a sign that our expertise may add little. So our systems of decision making should take that into account rather than role-play their expertise.
Andreas Ortmann cites chapter and verse suggesting that you should not be impressed.
Anyway, here’s Rob Henderson:
Most organizations prefer consensus and harmony over dissent and conflict. Indeed, the book points out that “The procedures in place often seem expressly designed to minimize the frequency of exposure to actual disagreements and, when such disagreements happen, to explain them away.”
Noise contains a story from a university professor who was helping his admissions office review its decision process. He explained their process for selecting applicants. First, a person read an application file, rated it, and then handed it off with ratings to a second reader, who also rated it. As you can imagine, the first rater holds much more sway than the second, who might be reluctant to challenge the initial evaluation. The professor suggested masking the first reader’s ratings so as not to influence the second reader.
In other words, he suggested they use the “wisdom of crowds” method rather than the “madness of crowds” approach. The school’s reply: “We used to do that, but it resulted in so many disagreements that we switched to the current system.”
Four philosophers x 2
Wittgenstein, Cassirer, Heidegger, and Benjamin Walk into a Bar … or make that Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch.
A review of two group biographies: Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians and Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb’s The Women Are Up to Something.
OK — As you probably know by now superb biographies of four people at a time — especially if they’re philosophers (at least ones with something to say) are a bit of a thing for me at least judging by my sampling from this genre. So I found this review intriguing.
Ukraine
Can the Revolution in German Foreign Policy Last?
Hint: No.
A good piece on Germany and the return of war to Europe
The melancholy truth about the Western response to Russian aggression is that it has changed in degree but not in kind since Putin first invaded Ukraine in 2014. Putin’s premeditated mass murder of civilians in Bucha was preceded by his premeditated mass murder of civilians in eastern Ukraine, and before that in Aleppo, and Grozny. Notwithstanding these outrages, no great effort was made to impede Putin’s bloody search for imperial glory. Nowhere has this inaction been more apparent than in German statecraft. After each ghastly instance of Russian terror, it has proceeded through three stages: first, professions of shock; second, impotence and inaction; third, a stubborn unwillingness to diminish his future resources or foil his future schemes.
It’s hard to know which of these facts is the most shameful, since each of them has been calamitous. But taken together, they suggest a deep rot at the heart of the European “model” that looks likely to persist for many years to come.
I did everything I could to help Russia: Bill Clinton
Well no you didn’t Bill. You should have vigorously pushed for a new Marshall Plan for Russia. Nevertheless, an interesting and, as so often, a persuasive contribution.
Meanwhile …
