In this episode of Policy Provocations, Gene Tunny and I discuss liberty or freedom in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. As I argue, one can think about liberty in the way most of the demonstrators against lockdowns and vaccine or mask mandates did. They asserted their right to be free to make their own decisions. But I think that's freedom as licence. It's important that we not be needlessly constrained. So it is certainly important for people to raise those issues. But the ability to impose constraints is actually fundamental to liberty.
If you think of the London Blitz, imposing blackouts was necessary for preserving liberty. In this case, liberty from German bombing!
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My point is not just that we impose some constraints on people because not doing so imposes harm on others. It is that what really matters to our liberty is the legitimacy of law-making. In that regard what is remarkable is that there are any number of relatively easy ways our constitution can be subverted by would be authoritarians. You'd expect the champions of liberty to be concerned with this. If they were concerned with liberty wouldn't we be making sure that governments don't appoint the Director of Public Prosecutions? If the US Republicans or the Democrats are really concerned about liberty, wouldn't they be bringing plans to the next election to reign in the presidential pardon power. This is as one presidential candidate openly talks about giving himself a pardon from gaol! The blogpost I mention is here. If you prefer listening to the audio, it's here.
Podcasting bloopers: three armed supermodel: SHOCK!!
Self-transformation as an extreme sport
Audience capture is an irresistible force in the world of influencing, because it's not just a conscious process but also an unconscious one. While it may ostensibly appear to be a simple case of influencers making a business decision to create more of the content they believe audiences want, and then being incentivized by engagement numbers to remain in this niche forever, it's actually deeper than that. It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person's identity with one custom-made for the audience.
I thought this was a spoof, especially the picture. Shockingly, it it is not.
In 2016, 24 year old Nicholas Perry wanted to be big online. He started uploading videos to his YouTube channel in which he pursued his passion—playing the violin—and extolled the virtues of veganism. He went largely unnoticed. A year later, he abandoned veganism, citing health concerns. Now free to eat whatever he wanted, he began uploading mukbang videos of himself consuming various dishes while talking to the camera, as if having dinner with a friend.
These new videos quickly found a sizable audience, but as the audience grew, so did their demands. The comments sections of the videos soon became filled with people challenging Perry to eat as much as he physically could. Eager to please, he began to set himself torturous eating challenges, each bigger than the last. His audience applauded, but always demanded more. Soon, he was filming himself eating entire menus of fast food restaurants in one sitting.
In some respects, all his eating paid off; Nikocado Avocado, as Perry is now better known, has amassed over six million subscribers across six channels on YouTube. By satisfying the escalating demands of his audience, he got his wish of blowing up and being big online. But the cost was that he blew up and became big in ways he hadn't anticipated. …
Emily Oster is an economist who's published in one of my least favourite economic genres — using game theory to bring up your kids. Yes, there’s nothing wrong with data and evidence, but if you think its clever to optimise parenting like you might optimise the management of a firm, that it’s all just about defining your outcomes, I wouldn’t want you to be my parent.
But all is forgiven when Emily is telling me that it’s OK to drink half a glass of red wine a night.
The “alcohol is good for you” narrative eroded and, in the past year, seems to have fully collapsed. A number of researchers are now arguing that basically any amount of alcohol is bad for you. …
Public-health advice is sometimes based on a “lexicographic” standard—putting the effects on health first, second, and third, and ignoring other considerations, including enjoyment. … During the coronavirus pandemic, some officials advocated strongly for long-lasting school closures, arguing that keeping kids at home was the only way to prevent in-school spread among students and teachers. That was, in a technical sense, true, but this recommendation failed to consider the enormous costs to children of those closures, which should have been weighed against any benefits. …
In 2018, The Lancetpublished a comprehensive study on the link between alcohol consumption and cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses. It is an extraordinary work of scholarship, combining hundreds of previous papers. And the results indicate an upward trend in cancer, in particular, as alcohol consumption increases. But the effects at moderate levels of drinking—say, one to two drinks a day—are very small. For heart disease, we see the familiar decrease in risk at moderate drinking levels, and an increase with higher amounts.
We cannot conclusively prove that moderate alcohol consumption is totally benign, much less beneficial. Based on the data we have, it also seems extremely unlikely that moderate alcohol consumption is fully “bad” for your health.
I wrote a while back of how often corporate ethics — particularly university corporate ethics operates not by helping to handle difficult issues well, but rather by making them disappear. Thus when I interviewed kids for entry into Monash Uni, the interviewing panel couldn’t speak about 16 ‘protected matters’. If we wanted to understand the student’s point of view, that was irrelevant. Of course making issues disappear actively degrades the extent to which they can be handled well. It seems we might now be seeing AI getting worse and this long tweet — my retweet of which I reproduce below — argues that ‘corporate ethics’ (i.e. organisations trying to stay out of the firing line) are a major cause of the problem.
Skidelsky on Caldwell on Hayek
A terrific 2022 review of the first volume of a biography of Hayek, by Robert Skidelsky, the author of the magnificent multi-volume biog of Keynes.
Hayek’s was a slow-burning flame. He hit the intellectual jackpot with his 1944 book TheRoad to Serfdom, a dire warning that western democracies were on a slippery slope to despotism, a book which influenced Margaret Thatcher. He was also an adroit academic politician and fundraiser, and left an enduring institutional legacy in the Mont Pelerin Society, a sanctuary for free-market thinkers. …
Friedrich von Hayek was born in Vienna in 1899 into a conservative, Christian, German, professional, mildly anti-Semitic family of lower nobility (hence the ‘von’, rather like the British ‘Sir’). Pre-war Vienna was both the cultural capital of Europe – mainly because of its brilliant, recently emancipated Jewish intelligentsia – and the home of destructive racial, religious and social conflicts. This background offers a key to understanding Hayek’s intellectual journey, which was a lifelong quest for a theory of economic order invulnerable to the destructive tendencies of democratic politics. This gave ‘Austrian economics’ its rigid, Platonic character, at odds with the ‘pragmatic’ approach of the politically more secure Anglo-Americans. …
Hayek’s first sortie to Cambridge to explain the slump left his audience baffled. Eventually, Keynes’s assistant Richard Kahn asked: ‘Is it your view that if I went out tomorrow and bought a new overcoat that would increase unemployment?’ ‘Yes,’ Hayek replied, pointing to a blackboard full of triangles, ‘but it would take a very long mathematical argument to explain why.’ Mystification was increased by the fact that students could never tell whether Hayek was speaking English with a strong German accent or German with an English accent.
Over the 1930s most of Hayek’s students at the LSE, notably Nicky Kaldor, defected to the Keynesian camp. The reason is obvious: in the face of the greatest economic catastrophe of modern times, he had no policy to offer except general belt-tightening. The softly spoken, reasonable sounding professor from Vienna with the ambiguous smile turned out to be a sadistic deflationist. Even his patron Lionel Robbins deserted him, writing in his memoirs that Hayek’s attitude ‘was as unsuitable as denying blankets and stimulus to a drunk who had fallen into any icy pond, on the ground that his original trouble was overheating’. Yet Hayek never changed his tune. In the early 1980s he told Thatcher that the only way to kill inflation was to have 20 per cent unemployment for six months.
He more or less gave up technical economics after his battles with Keynes and the Keynesians, and switched to the intellectual course which would eventually bring about his apotheosis.
‘Fascinating’ tweeted this short video of Sister Rosetta Tharpe singing “Didn’t It Rain” in Manchester, England, 1964.
Then I found this further on in the thread. I’d never heard of her
Critique of The Reactionary Mind
Ian Holm as ‘Chesterbro’ Bilbo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring.
I rather liked this ambivalent critique of an obviously bad book. It’s coming from the liberty and free market folks and I’m not much into ideologically motivated writing from the left or right, but it’s entertaining, informative and nicely written.
In his 1950 defense of American liberalism, Lionel Trilling famously said that conservatives expressed themselves in “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” In his recently published The Reactionary Mind: Why “Conservative” Isn’t Enough, Michael Warren Davis seems to celebrate this charge. His book is, at its heart, a series of irritable mental gestures aimed at contemporary liberal and mainstream conservatism nostrums. … The book appears at a time when reactionaries are experiencing something of a boomlet. … What is odd is that Davis’s particular reactionary position is one that has had much less of a share in this boomlet—the old Chestertonian distributist living on his farm, smoking his pipe, and working only to live a modest, cultured life.
The book is difficult to review. On the one hand, Davis does not seem to take himself very seriously, but, on the other hand, he wants to write a serious book. The reviewer is left in a bind. … I have no choice but to treat the entire book as a serious effort, but in doing so I place myself at risk of taking Davis too seriously, to wit, “Come on, man, it’s not that serious.” …
Davis is … a twenty-first-century man attempting to recover the worldview of early twentieth-century British conservative authors like C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and G. K. Chesterton. For Davis, the best life is that lived in a village of farmers and craftsmen capable of living out happy lives unbothered by the excess of industrial capitalism and the secular, bureaucratic state. … “The whole point of reactionary politics,” Davis says, “is to minimize the political.” Davis seems to be speaking for himself; other reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre and Carl Schmitt stoked a friend and enemy distinction precisely to restore the political to its central position and then foment conflict between friends and enemies to yield a result. Davis, on the other hand, is an oddly liberal version of a reactionary.
Reactionary politics historically has sought to use industry and the state to reconstruct a traditional order like the Salazar propaganda poster, “A Lição de Salazar” (Salazar’s Lesson) in which a man enters his house with a knapsack over his shoulder, his wife at the hearth, and his children rushing to greet him. The bottom of the poster says, “Deus, Pátria, Família: A Trilogia da Educação Nacional” (God, Fatherland, Family: The National Education Trilogy). The content of the poster is deeply traditional, but the method of its production was industrial, as many of the same posters were printed and distributed, and it was under the sponsorship of an authoritarian state led by António de Oliveira Salazar. In essence, Davis wants the poster without the regime behind it. More precisely, he wants to live in the poster.
Government releases out of date wellbeing data: SHOCK!!
Politicians have to oppose each other. That’s their job. So the Federal Opposition and its various media outlets attacked the government’s wellbeing framework for some of its data series which were several years old. As you’d expect if they were slow moving series — which most wellbeing data is. Oh well, another day, another dollar. Anyway, Steve Austin has taken to talking to me about such things — for instance in May this year — so we had this enjoyable chat this week.
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Close your eyes and think of a smudged rose coloured blob
(Actually it will help if you leave your eyes open)
Jason Shulman, Dumbo (1941), 2023, chromogenic print, 109 x 145 cm, Ed. of 5. Courtesy Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery
Krugman on what ails Britain
TLDR: “it’s complicated. But as stupid as you thought Brexit was … “while Brexit has probably been a factor in British inflation, it clearly isn’t the whole story.”
Nor is it even the most distinctive aspect of the British divergence. That honor goes to a sharp drop in the percentage of working-age Britons participating in the labor force, which the normally circumspect I.M.F. calls a “spike” in inactivity. Here’s what the numbers look like for Britain:
There was a large rise in the percentage of British adults neither working nor seeking work, especially, although not only, among those over 50. Here, by contrast, are comparable numbers for the United States:
There was only a small rise in inactivity among adults ages 25 to 49 and none at all for other groups, and thanks to lower unemployment, the percentage of older Americans actually working hasn’t declined at all.
The truth is that America has big, long-term problems in providing jobs, especially in lagging regions. But these problems haven’t gotten worse since the pandemic, while Britain’s problems have. Why? According to surveys, Britain, unique among major advanced countries, has seen a surge in older adults leaving the labor force because of long-term sickness — again, something we feared would happen here but didn’t.
Which brings me to the crisis in Britain’s National Health Service, a national icon that appears to be suffering from both inadequate funding and bad management. Why have things gone so wrong for the N.H.S.?
Well, that’s a large subject in itself — and one on which I feel I need to do a lot more research before weighing in.
So let me return to that issue another day, and end this newsletter with a sort of meta lesson from Britain’s problems: Managing an economy in the face of severe shocks is hard. Britain appears to have done this job badly; America, whatever critics of the current administration may say, seems to have handled Covid and its aftermath relatively well.
As ever Isabella Weber continues to be an interesting read on inflation more generally.
How MAGA Republicans plan to make Donald Trump’s second term count
Like Steve Bannon reputedly said “here’s our Hitler”
From that rabble rousing leftist rag The Economist.
In contrast to the slapdash insurgency that captured the White House in 2016, the veterans of Mr Trump’s first term have been years at work. … Even at this early stage, the details are something to behold. Thousand-page policy documents set out ideas that were once outlandish in Republican circles but have now become orthodox: finishing the border wall, raising tariffs on allies and competitors alike, making unfunded tax cuts permanent and ending automatic citizenship for anyone born in the United States. They evince scepticism for NATO and pledge to “end the war on fossil fuels”, by nixing policies designed to limit climate change.
Alongside these proposals is something that aims to revolutionise the structure of government itself. MAGA Republicans believe that they will be able to enact their programme only if they first defang the deep state by making tens of thousands of top civil servants sackable. Around 50,000 officials would be newly subject to being fired at will, under a proposed scheme known as Schedule F.
At the same time, to fill the thousands of political appointments at the top of the American civil service, the America Firsters are creating a “conservative LinkedIn” of candidates whose personal loyalty to Mr Trump is beyond question. Merely expressing qualms about the storming of the Capitol on January 6th 2021 is grounds for disqualification. None of this is a shadowy conspiracy: it is being planned in the open. …. Although checks and balances are an important part of America’s constitutional design, the civil service is not one of the three branches of government it enshrines. …
[T]hese changes would give an overmighty president direct control of the Department of Justice. By being able to sack all of its purported dissenters, the administration would obliterate the norm of legal independence. If so, Trumpian resentment would be channelled into concrete vengeance. … The former president seems obsessed with relitigating his election loss in 2020: “I am your justice,” he thundered to a crowd of supporters this year. “I am your retribution.”
Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald — Moonlight in Vermont
Something heavy: the theory of causal emergence
From a review of Erik Hoel’s new book. And don’t worry too much if you don’t understand it. Before getting underway what is emergence. Well you know that idea that something is nothing more or less than the sum of its parts. The idea of emergence is that parts can combine into things that could not have been anticipated from the quality of the parts. Life emerged over a few hundreds of millions of years from inorganic matter, but when it did something new entered the world, and something that cannot be deduced from the qualities of the original inorganic matter.
A Causal Theory of Emergence
Do not fear the ambiguity of scientific incompleteness. Hoel has one remaining ace up his sleeve. It will seemingly challenge some of the fundamental ways we expect science to work, but it surprisingly still works in a physicalist framework. He’s kept it (mostly) concealed throughout the entire book up to this point: the theory of causal emergence.
“Macroscales can have causal influence above and beyond the microscales they supervene on.” ~ Erik Hoel on the theory of causal emergence
Emergence is a word with heft, but what is actually meant by it. The idea here is essentially that more explanatory information can be available at a higher order than at a lower order of complexity. This is made possible by redundancy (also called degeneracy in biological science) and randomness at the lower levels. For instance, the same mental state is possible under numerous different underlying physical configurations. This observation of emergence is a shocking qualification to scientific reductionism or the idea that understanding the basic units of a system will allow for a causal understanding of that system. In some ways, this seems to violate the truism that a whole can never be more than the sum of its parts. However, the secret door to escape this trap arises from the nature of information across differences of scale. The noise that exists due to redundancy and randomness at small scales has to be corrected for at the large scale, making the effective information available greater at that larger scale.
This is a complex idea, so it bears repeating. Here’s Hoel’s phrasing:
It [causal emergence] holds that the elements and states of macroscales are reducible to underlying microscales without loss, but that the causation of the macroscale is not. At the same time, this “extra” causation is not unexplainable or mysterious. It’s just error correction.
This is a beautiful and exciting finding. It is one that Hoel uses to pry back the fatalism bolted onto discussions of free will (including the use of a brief reference to the senior thesis of one of my favorite author, David Foster Wallace). Emergence enables agency because it makes mental states matter as causal influences. This may be one of the only uses of science I’ve seen that psychologically nurtures the human condition rather than guts its vitality and denigrates its miraculousness. Maybe we really will be able to knit the intrinsic and extrinsic worlds.
Amazing chess tricks: perhaps amazing even for non-chess players
Back down the time-tunnel
You used not to be able to access the better parts of finance if you weren’t a sound chap, so it’s only fitting that we get back there. (Still, I haven’t checked out the tweet, so ‘reader discretion is advised’ (insert alternative Orwellian phrase here.)
Excerpts from a terrific book I’m reading — The German Genius, by Peter Watson
Otto Weininger — brought to you by our semi-regular segment — Fruitcake watch
Also prevalent in Vienna at the time were a number of avowedly rational but in reality frankly scientistic ideas, and they too read oddly now. Chief among these were the theories of Otto Weininger (1880–1903). The son of an anti-Semitic but Jewish goldsmith, Weininger developed into an “overbearing coffee house dandy.” He had a tendency to be withdrawn and taught himself more than eight languages before he left the university and published his undergraduate thesis. Renamed Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) by his editor, the thesis was released in 1903 and became a huge hit. The book was rabidly anti-Semitic and extravagantly misogynist, Weininger putting forward the view that all human behavior can be explained in terms of male and female “protoplasm,” which contributes to each person.
A whole lexicon of neologisms was invented by Weininger to explain his ideas: idioplasm, for example, was his name for sexually undifferentiated tissue; male tissue was arrhenoplasm; and female tissue was thelyplasm. According to him, all the main achievements in history arose because of the masculine principle—all art, literature, and systems of law, for example. The feminine principle, on the other hand, accounted for the negative elements, and all these negative elements converge, Weininger says, in the Jewish race. Commercial success and fame did not settle Weininger’s restless spirit. Later that year he rented a room in the house in Vienna where Beethoven died and shot himself. (“In a city that considered suicide an art, Weininger’s was a masterpiece.”) He was twenty-three.
Thomas Mann: from the “oops” file
Like other intellectuals, Mann also saw the fighting as a clash of cultures, a battle of ideas. His first essay, “Thoughts in Wartime,” written in August 1914, claimed he had seen the war coming, that Germany had been coerced into war by its “envious” adversaries and that, altogether, war was “a tremendous creative event,” helping to stimulate “national unity and moral elevation.”
After “Thoughts in Wartime,” Mann intended to spend the following months and years completing his next major work, Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), which would contain much implied criticism of the corrupt prewar world that had led Europe to the abyss. But that was to reckon without his brother Heinrich. In his own lifetime, Heinrich would pass through the entire political spectrum, from (as we saw earlier) the editor of a racialist publication to become a supporter of Stalin. But in 1916, he published an essay on Émile Zola in a new dissident journal and in the essay there were a number of disparaging references to Thomas. Heinrich insisted that politics were important and he accused his brother of ignoring this dimension.
So upset was Thomas by Heinrich’s attack that he broke into work on The Magic Mountain, and devoted several months to a long essay, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man), which reached the bookshops just before the armistice in 1918. In this work, he discovered that he was more nationalistic than he had anticipated but, more important, he found he was a “profoundly apolitical being.” This was not due to any failings in his education, he said, but as a matter of principle. Politics, he thought, “was not a fit occupation for aristocrats of the spirit.” He therefore wrote about the war, in Walter Lacquer’s words, with great confidence and “almost total abstraction.” “Mann thought of the war mainly as great drama, a conflict of ideas…He had attached certain attributes to the German spirit and also to the French, the Russian and the British; America had no civilisation and did not count.” His view, directly contradictory to Heinrich’s, was that the “ultimate questions of mankind” could not be solved by politics.
A rambling but powerful (and in parts shrewd) critique of democracy, Mann pointed out its weakness and predicted it would not suit the Germans who, he thought, wanted and needed authority. He was dismissive, too, arguing that a democratic Germany would be “boring.” Walter Lacquer again: “He lived to realise that the boredom of the 1910s was greatly preferable to the excitement of the 1930s.”
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