Weekend reading 29th Jan 2022
Did free trade lead to World War 1 and so to World War 2 Will it lead to World War 3?
A fascinating post from great Eastern European economist Branko Milanovic. Free (or at least freer) trade is a pretty good recipe for productivity growth. But it arguably makes the world a brittler place.
‘Dirtying up’
In a Twitter thread, Peter Cribbet mentioned the term ‘dirtying up’ which I’d not heard before linking to this Hitchens piece explaining it.
The main operating principle of the Mob is known as "dirtying up". The thing is to make certain that as many people are implicated as possible. Not only does this remove the incentive or the temptation to squeal, but it also ensures that a number of otherwise respectable people will have an interest in preventing any disclosure. A true corporate godfather will have spent time dirtying up journalists as well as lawyers, politicians and the forces of criminal justice. The corruption must be so widespread that any whistleblower will be accused of spoiling things for everybody.
To which I replied
China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom & Vast Corruption
A really good presentation on how China’s growth coincided not with the reduction of corruption but with the kind of corruption that took place — in a very similar way to the way the same process operated in the nineteenth-century West.
It surprised me that this was a novel idea. And yet, at least if the speaker is to be believed, because economists had an independent ‘corruption index’ they could look up, they just went from there to presume that there was some simple connection between corruption and growth. (Actually, it doesn’t surprise me —but it does disappoint me!)
It’s all worth listening to with very good questions. And if you plan to stop listening, jump to 45.30 — or so for a very interesting discussion of how Xi is dismantling critical power-sharing norms and so, perhaps undermining China’s long-term prosperity and wellbeing.
More Andrew Sullivan podcasting
Another interesting and heartfelt discussion.
The release of the Herald/Age Lateral Economics (HALE) Index of wellbeing
The newspapers formerly known as the Fairfax press covered Lateral Economics’ updating of our index to look at the wellbeing effects of COVID. Because we estimated the wellbeing cost of increased mental illness at $13 Billion I got lots of invitations to discuss the findings. Here was one on an ‘overnight’ radio program which, mercifully was prerecorded and below it is a short interview on 2cc which was quite fun.
Will American democracy collapse
A friend sent me this article which I recommend — for its sense of urgency something it seems most people think can’t happen to the Great Republic. Nevertheless it’s by an academic who seems under the impression that the only sources of information on the subject are from fellow academics. My friend asked me what I thought of the piece, I responded:
I strongly agree with the case made and with its urgency
I’m afraid I found his kow-towing to ‘experts’ pretty hard to take. Most of the issues are things on which ‘experts’ can certainly add something. But lots of experts have lots of different views. And virtually all the questions we want to ask are ‘out of sample’, so to speak, so judgement and breadth are of the essence.
None of us can know much about how things will unfold, though I have no problems with how alarmed the author is. But there are plenty of people from which one might want to learn. Journalists who’ve studied such things elsewhere. Historians, ex-statespeople, and layfolks who one finds insightful.
Yet the evidence for author’s arguments are almost invariably some academic study somewhere, or some academic who’s been studying some thing for a long time. It may come as a surprise to the author but academia and the rigours of peer review are poorly suited to training people in good judgement about these things.
Quit your job
A rather high blown case for the pro
On Academia
A dark interview with someone who begins by saying that having nothing to do with universities, he doesn’t feel the need to say bad things about them — then he proceeds to utterly rip in. Highly intellectualised and I doubt it will be to everyone’s taste. I enjoyed it, in part because of the incongruity of this bomb-thrower sounding like Woody Allen. I sent it to a friend with this guarded recommendation and half an hour later got back this reply:
I’ve only listened to the 18:37 mark and am riveted to the point of tears. So far nothing has been said that couldn’t be raised to a higher power and still be true. I’m aware of private talk to the same effect, however no one would dare be so candid in public. Universities are hyper sensitive on the point of their own significance. I started life by caring a lot about universities, and now I argue for their abolition - quite a journey, and not one I at all anticipated! LOL
Covid and the Brittle West
An interesting reflection from Bruno Maçães Former Portuguese Secretary of State for European Affairs. I found its thesis a little overloaded. Was it about the East Asian’s sense of pragmatism, or Western decadence and how confident could one be that the choices made reflected the values or principles he was arguing they did. (Without tying the material down to closer arguments it was not just unconvincing, but unclear exactly what was being said. The author responded to my complaints about the lack of facts backing up the argument on Twitter claiming that it was all there in his book.
The West isn’t dying – its ideas live on in China: What the Western world confronts is not the threatening advance of alien civilisations, but its own dark shadows moving through China and Russia.
By John Gray
The New Statesman let’s you read 3 articles in a month for free. This is worth spending one of your tokens on.
Stories showing humankind evolving towards liberal values are parodies of monotheism in which a mythical logic in history replaces a redemptive providence. Knock away this myth, and the liberal way of life can be seen to have been an historical accident. In time the regimes created by Xi and Putin will crumble. But if the long drift of history is any guide, they will be succeeded by anarchy and new despotisms.
While Western liberalism may be largely defunct, illiberal Western ideas are shaping the future. The West is not dying but alive in the tyrannies that now threaten it. Unable to grasp this paradoxical reality, our elites are left looking on blankly as the world they have taken for granted slips into the shadows.
Strong stuff
Nicholas, Thanks for another post with lots of interesting pieces. But I have an exception to take with your remarks concerning the Thomas Homer-Dixon article. I think you picked the wrong exemplar of academic insularity. Having read Homer-Dixon's excellent trilogy, Ingenuity Gap, Upside of Down, and Commanding Hope, all written for general audiences, I've been extremely impressed (and surprised) about how far he ranges from academia and within academia, often going deep outside his own field of political science. For his books, I've sometimes wondered as an academic how he received the funding necessary to do some of the field work that he did for those books. In addition, two of the individuals he quoted by name are journalists. (David Frum is also a former W. Bush speechwriter; Stephen Marche a Canadian "novelist & journalist."). Of the two academics he quoted by name, I know of Jack Goldstone, who wrote a terrific book about the conditions leading to the English and French revolutions. Not man on the street stuff, I admit, but still, I think these folks do some field work (and archive research) such that any academic insularity is minimized. And I do agree that all too often an ivory tower exists. Just much less so in this particular case.