What is Rauchway Saying Here?

America’s unquestioned economic authority began to ebb in the 1960s and vanished completely when President Richard Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system in 1971. Since then globalization has begun to work without a guarantor, and America has returned to its older ways….. Yet it is also true that today, as before WWI, American military potential remains untapped. If the US were to spend as high a proportion of its money on defense as it did at the height of the cold war around 1960 it would account for about 2/3 of the military spending around the globe. The American power to fight, as with the American power to fight disease, remains in reserve…. The case of the world crisis of 1915-1945 teaches us that powerful nations must act occasionally, if not continuously, to preserve global openness if it is to last  (Eric Rauchway, Favored Among Nations, pp. 170-172; abridged and paraphrased).

It seem to me he is saying 1.) that WWI and WWII were the result of America’s refusal to participate fully in the world system, 2.) that when Nixon went of the gold standard he did something terrible, 3.) that in recent years the US has been too passive with regard to the world economic order, and 4.) the US needs to more fully develop its military potential, despite spending more on the military than the next five or so nations combined.

None of this makes any sense at all. So what is Rauchway really saying? To me he sounds like Niall Ferguson.

 

Nate Silver the shithead savant

ABSTRACT: “Shithead savant” should become a technical term in the social science branch of Science Studies, along with “trained incapacity” and “occupational psychosis”.

EXCLUSIVE! MUST CREDIT JOHN EMERSON!

Nate Silver is a shithead savant — he’s much brighter than you and me but he’s capable of missing the point even when it’s crawling up his ass. For some reason, the Republicans have been spending millions a year on voter discouragement for decades, and for some reason, for the last several years they’ve been running a nationally coordinated voter discouragement campaign involving every Republican governor, Secretary of State, or state legislature in the country — but don’t worry, it won’t make much difference, says Silver.

College Republican crooks like Karl Rove are ten times smarter than PolSci PhDs like Nate Silver. That counterintuitive fact should be carved in the tombstone of the Democratic Party. (If you call Silver media and not political — well, the media need their own tombstone.)

“Only 2%”. 2% isn’t even a close election, it’s a solid victory.

Chris Hayes on this topic.

 

Reasonable conspiracy theories

I am not one for conspiracy theories. Occam’s razor generally leads one to prefer explanations involving incompetence or individual malfeasance over larger, complex, well-orchestrated wrong-doing.

That’s a malicious caricature of what a conspiracy is. A conspiracy is several people secretly working together toward a wrongful goal, using wrongful methods.

Conspiracies are common in history. Not only do criminals and revolutionaries often work secretly, so do many legitimate organizations (intelligence organizations, secret police, political groups) and these often act wrongfully.

Conspirators are gamblers.  Sometimes conspiracies succeed and sometimes they fail.  Conspirators don’t expect to get total control of everything; they just intervene secretly and maliciously in a situation in the hopes of getting whatever they hope to get.   It’s like baseball — batting .333 is success. There’s plenty of stupidity and chance and incompetence involved in any situation, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t conspiracy too.

Some of the things Enron did were conspiratorial. Secrecy, dishonesty, lawbreaking, coordinated activity. Their scheme almost worked. Examples can be multiplied.

Liberals have brainwashed themselves into laughing scornfully whenever a conspiracy is spoken of, and they also are too willing to grant the intellectual honesty of their opponents. Often a political argument consists of one side saying whatever is  necessary to buy time until a fait accompli has been achieved. Spokesmen who seem stupid aren’t necessarily stupid themselves; they’ve just correctly estimated the stupidity of their audience.

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and post-WWII anti-communist conspiracy theories  led liberals to assume that all conspiracy theories are false. They also had an ulterior motive. People who talk about conspiracies are thereby confessing that they’re outsiders. But liberals all think that they’re insiders, and it’s uncool for insiders to get all upset about business as usual (i.e., the normal dishonesty which makes the system function) . Conspiracists are ejected from the old boys network because they threaten to blow the cover of some of the other insiders.

Conspiracism starts with the conviction that the system is stacked against you and that you can never win, and liberals don’t want to believe that. As the conservative triumph starts to bite, maybe some of them will wise up.

From a comment  here.

 

Has social science really helped us much?

The special snowflake principle is the same principle of hope and dream that causes people to start restaurants and other small businesses, or to play the lottery. On the average it’s a gift from hopeful people to shrewd people, and it is one of the driving forces of American life.

On the other side, this hopeful principle is counterbalanced by the complacent normalization principle, which says that it’s reasonable to plan on the basis of the average outcome and to ignore the outliers and long tails. The normalization principle is the ruling principle of our triumphant Democratic Party.

When entrepreneurs and high-stakes gamblers guess right on an exception, they can change the game permanently.

“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

“I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’”

“Know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold them”

Etc.

 

Godwin Alert

(A response to Brad DeLong’s lament about the feckless “moderate Republicans”, who may exist, but will never oppose the Republican Party).

Conservatives generally have always been willing to support the worst demagogues if that’s what’s needed. Hitler got a lot of support from people who despised him.

In the post mortem on the Late Great USA one chapter will be “Liberals Never Knew What Hit Them”. It’s a war, not a debate or an argument or a discussion or a negotiation. And the other side is organized and disciplined, and our side is wandering around in circles sucking their fingers.

“Organized”: actually, it’s a conspiracy but that word can’t be used. Hillary was right in every way. Many many players do not acknowledge which side they are on, but instead pretend to be thoughtful, concerned citizens and neutral professionals. Many flatly lie about their commitments and associations. Millions of dollars change hands.

Liberals have been screaming “conspiracy theory” for so long that they can’t recognize a conspiracy even when it’s killing them. (Yes, children, the reason why the English language includes the word “conspiracy” is because conspiracies do exist in this world, and right here in the US, too! — not just in Foreign wog lands, or in the evil Caliphate.)

Another reason that liberals won’t talk about conspiracy is that if you ever use that evil word,  you’re confessing that you’re an outsider, and liberals identify as insiders. Liberals are cool technocrats who calmly explain things to other, lesser people and help keep the lid on things that way –  not alarmists who are capable of noticing when they’ve lost almost everything.

Here’s neutral Wiki smearing Hillary as a conspiracy theorist:

“Vast right-wing conspiracy” was a conspiracy theory advanced by then First Lady of the United States Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1998 in defense of her husband, President Bill Clinton, and his administration during the Lewinsky scandal, characterizing the Lewinsky charges as the latest in a long, organized, collaborative series of charges by Clinton’s political enemies… After the Starr investigation revealed the Lewinsky affair, and precipitated a deposition wherein it was suggested that Bill Clinton may have committed perjury, some conservatives began to mock the VRWC phrase. ^…The term ‘Vast Right Wing Conspiracy’ continues to be used only for tongue-in-cheek satire.[

But there WAS and still IS a vast rightwing conspiracy. The anti-Clinton conspiracy was documented by Lyons, Conason, Brock, and others. And even though Hillary is a model (centrist) liberal, she used the c-word and had to be punished. Bad Hillary!

 

It’s politics, not economic science

Liberals and centrists need to figure out* that a significant conservative block WANTS pain and WANTS inequality and thinks that they are intrinsically good, godly, natural things and that without them the world is a worse place.

And that they are willing to harm the economy and even reduce their own absolute wealth in order to get the pain and inequality they want. (Though they plan to increase their relative wealth). After 1900 some Southern leaders knew that the steps they were taking to protect white supremacy came at the cost of continued underdevelopment, and they supported white supremacy anyway.

Beyond that, liberals and moderates need to know that some conservatives are long shot gamblers, not utility maximizers, and that they are willing to take big, rationally unjustifiable chances. Dick Cheney is a recent example. The Hunt Brothers trying to corner the precious metals market is a historic example.

*Figure of speech here. They won’t figure it out.

Link

 

How I Became a Troll

(Mark Thoma’s link to Daniel Little’s review of Putnam and Walsh ‘s The End of Value Free Economics gives me a chance to explain why I’m such a horrible person.)

In economics value is swallowed up by price. I was actually taught that in about 1966 by an economist who thought that this was a good thing. Through the market, price supposedly aggregates the values of all individuals into an objective public value. This is not “normative” (and thus, in a pluralist world, biased and non-universal)  because it’s just a way of allowing the individuals in any group to establish a group value — economics itself is supposedly value-neutral.

This is wrong at many levels. For example, the method of aggregation tacitly assumes or imposes specific sorts of values and suppresses others. The claim to universality (derivative from the claim to neutrality) is bogus —  economics is a normative system which interprets value as price and suppresses all other approaches to value. The claim to Science is equally bogus, since economics does not have the univocity, exactness, and certainty of physics. (Some areas of physics, anyway). But for decades these two arguments have been very effectively used to discredit the opposition to whichever economic orthodoxy was in power at any given time.

It was hoped that by this method major issues of public policy could be taken out of the mess of the political process and protected from the Mussolinis and Lenins. It was also hoped that by this method an expert elite could be created to manage the big questions public life without external interference from the populace. The first hope was pardonable but wishful, and the second was self-serving.

This rather abstract methodological principle has had major policy consequences — without it, Ayn Rand’s disciple Alan Greenspan would not have had the power to cripple to global economy.

I’ve been living under the domination of this crap for 46 years now and I’ve always known it was crap. The majority of my mainstream friends during that era, and some of my radical friends, swallowed the whole boatload and repeated its principles as though they were self-evidently true. Many of them still do. Minds are changing far more slowly than social reality itself is, and by the time my friends in the lumpen-intelligentsia have changed their minds, we will be living in an authoritarian neoliberal world and all these questions will be moot.

So that’s how I became a troll.

ADDENDUM I

One of the unfortunate things is that most liberal economists are attached to the science myth and the value-free myth, and the best alternative methodological models I’ve found come from conservatives. F.H. Knight and  Hayek and the other Austrians did not accept the science myth or the overambitious claims to predictivity, and James Buchanan (the public choice theorist) described economics as half science and half political theory. Buchanan is a Southerner (a self-confessed redneck) and his conservative Madisonian political theory is about what you’d expect from a plantation owner (which Buchanan’s father sort of was) thrown into the 20th century.

ADDENDUM II (from Thoma’s comments).

JOHN M:

J. Random Schmoe: Going splat is a bad thing.
J. Random Psycho: Going splat is a good thing.
They both agree: If you fall a mile, you will go splat.

The first two are value judgments. The third is a fact. Science only addresses the third statement.

Often, when discussing the third statement, they will express the sentiment of the first statement. But that’s just the scientist being humane and decent. The scientist can only speak with authority about the third statement.

The scientist might even point out a situation where the third statement is false. For example, the Vomit Comet falls close to a mile without going splat. Anything in orbit falls continuously without going splat.

MY RESPONSE:

ou’re repeating the myths. The myth that economics is a descriptive science, and the myth that economists is descriptive and not prescriptive.

As I said, for the last 45 years, whenever I have tried to question these myths, the response has almost always been simply to repeat the myths without bothering to argue in their defense. And that’s exactly what you just did.

The key point here is that these myths have had harmful effects and can no longer just be assumed. It’s quite normal to accept the conventions of a society or an intellectual discipline when things are going well, but now that economics has disastrously failed us, you have to look at the foundational myths — these two along with many others.