The wages of another low dishonest decade and some other reading/listening
Ukraine
And here was I thinking things were like we were back in the 1930s. Well, it has been like that. But this week’s events make me think of an earlier time. In 1937 prominent American political commentator Walter Lippmann had published The Good Society. He began his book by lamenting the naïvete of the first book he’d published 25 years before, just before the outbreak of WWI. His words speak to our own time, to the naïvete and triumphal carelessness with which we welcomed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dividends of hyper-connected globalism without troubling ourselves with the detail or the downsides:
The general scheme of the human future seemed fairly clear to me then. … I had no premonition that the long peace which had lasted since Waterloo was soon to … end. I did not understand the prophetic warning of my teacher … that there might be a war which would unsettle the foundations of society – indeed I was unable to imagine such a war and I did not know what were the foundations which might be unsettled.
For in that generation most men had forgotten the labors that had made them prosperous, the struggles that had made them free, the victories that had given them peace. They took for granted, like the oxygen they breathed and the solid ground beneath their feet, the first and last things of western civilisation.
Keating
I don’t know how actively he pushed these things when he was in government, but Paul Keating has spoken for many years about how the West failed in its response to its triumph in the unipolar moment of 1989. This tweet reminds us of that fact.
Two posts from Branko Milanovic
I highly recommend this analysis, though he wrote it, and I placed it in this mailout before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine took place.
The unexpected immortality of Karl Marx
Another excellent essay
Continuing echos of Mal Meninga’s 30 second political career
Peyton and I kept thinking about Mal Maninga’s 30-second political career — which we discussed last week and this conversation was the result. I thought it was a particularly exciting discussion.
Love, truth, freedom and flattery: Mal Meninga, King Lear and good governance
Democracy works to exclude everyday people
And here is an interview I did on 2GB in which I outlined the potential of citizens’ juries to represent all those people — like Mal Meninga — who don’t get heard because they don’t assert themselves and/or if they do are not listened to. I thought it went very well.
From the 2GB website:
Luke Grant is joined by Dr. Nicholas Gruen, Lateral Economics’ CEO & Index author and a thinker who doesn’t mind challenging the norms and we love that on this programme.
Most people would say those who occupy seats in our various parliaments and councils are not always seen as being in touch with us ordinary folk or even worse, not always putting our best interests first in their deliberations.
Today we should be seeking to balance representation by election with representation by sortation as occurs, in juries by random selection from the citizenry.
Luke and Mr. Gruen discuss doing politics better with an old idea that may just have found relevance today.
Download this podcast here. [You can also download it from my channel. NG.]
The Vocation of a Lawyer and the Virtues
The lecturer, Prof. Ryan Meade explores the virtues, itself a worthwhile thing to do given how much our intuitions about such things have atrophied owing to the triumph of Enlightenment reductionism. A here’s a line which has gone into my in-tray marked “ponder as deeply as your tiny mind will permit”.
"Vice always comes disguised as virtue. No exceptions".
Martin Wolf on economists oversimplifying their stories
A great column from Martin Wolf.
A big lesson of history is that if economists think they understand how the macroeconomy works, they will be wrong. In the 1930s, the conventional wisdom was that the economy was self-stabilising. In the 1960s, it was that inflation expectations and money did not matter. In the 1980s, it was that only money mattered. In the 2000s, it was that credit expansion would not destabilise the financial system. In 2020, it was that money was irrelevant. Again and again, we fall in love with naive stories. We want to believe the economy is a simple mechanism, but it is not …
As former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King powerfully argues, central bankers also have to reconsider some of their recent doctrines. Just as the financial crisis showed that banking matters, so this inflationary upsurge shows that money matters. It also indicates that forward guidance assumes more knowledge than anybody possesses. Central banks may explain their reaction function, but cannot say what they are going to do, because they do not know what the economy will do. Last but not least, average inflation targeting is surely stillborn. It never made sense to target future inflation in the light of past mistakes. Is the US Federal Reserve really going to lower inflation below 2 per cent in order to make up for a prolonged overshoot? What does make sense is to reassert its determination to hit its forward-looking target. But it is also possible we are going to see a degree of financial instability that will force deeper thinking on this, too.
Though it may be behind a paywall …
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