#
What are the values we look for in a thinker? When I ask this question, I don't mean values
#
in the sense of ethical values or even political values, like freedom or tradition etc etc,
#
but values in the way one thinks about the world, which apply to the act of thinking
#
itself. For example, I value people who keep an open mind about the world, who are always
#
questioning their priors, who do not rush to judgement, who are not scared of complexity.
#
By default, these are then people who also like to engage with people they may not agree
#
with, because after all, they are open to engaging with ideas they may not initially
#
agree with. Being a thinker of this sort, with an ethic for rigour, with no ego, sets
#
off a virtuous cycle, in which you are always sharpening your thinking and seeing the world
#
better. And yet, around us, the kind of thinking that dominates is just the opposite. People
#
come to one view of the world, become dogmatic about it, are too lazy to challenge their
#
own thinking, and are quick to rush to judgement on others, which is basically an act of ego,
#
because when we judge someone, it makes us feel more virtuous or more knowledgeable than
#
the person we are judging. This sets off a vicious cycle, in which we adopt a fixed view
#
of the world, which is always a simplistic caricature of this complex universe, and we
#
stop thinking, and we stop engaging, and we become tribal animals as the world goes to
#
hell. This is so tempting, it takes so little effort, it can get us plodded from our ideological
#
tribe, and one way past it is self-reflection, so we can be unflinchingly clear about why
#
we think what we think. Another good practice to pick up is what my guest today calls slow
#
political thinking. To take a deeper dive into this concept, keep listening.
#
Welcome to the Scene on the On Scene. My guest today is a great economist, a great
#
thinker, in fact, Arno Kling, an early blogger and an author of many books, including one
#
seminal masterpiece I have spoken about many times on this show, The Three Languages of
#
Politics. In that book, Kling spoke about why so much political discourse today is people
#
shouting past each other and not actually talking to each other. This is because each
#
of our political tribes value different first principles and can reach positions that are
#
coherent from those first principles, but which appear either wrong or even evil to
#
the other side. And to better understand this complex world, to better understand each other,
#
we need to take this into account. Go out and buy the book right now, you can read it
#
in one sitting. Another of Arno's books I'd recommend is Specialization and Trade, which
#
is a wonderful primer on basic economic principles. Arno is also active on Substack, and I always
#
find his work thought-provoking. This conversation took place on July 18th while I was in Washington,
#
D.C. recording episodes for a couple of weeks. Arnold invited me over to his home and we
#
recorded this in his basement. We spoke about his great book, about his life, about the
#
state of the world, about the state of American politics, and it was such a joy for me to
#
talk with a thinker I admired so much. So do go out, buy his books, and listen to this
#
conversation. But first, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't. It's a plea from
#
me to check out my latest labor of love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting with my good
#
friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah. We've called it Everything is Everything. Every week, we'll
#
speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound to the profane, from
#
the exalted to the everyday. We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames
#
with which we try to understand the world. Please join us on our journey and please support
#
us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
The show is called Everything is Everything. Please do check it out.
#
Anil, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
I've wanted to have you on the show for the longest time because very often when I talk
#
about a political discourse, I recommend your book, The Three Languages of Politics. When,
#
you know, the first edition of that came out, I loved it so much. I read it in one
#
sitting and I recently, you know, read the newer edition that you came out with where
#
you account for Donald Trump and so on and so forth. And I was sort of thinking about
#
the changing times, like someone you know who I recorded with a long time back though
#
my show was much shorter than was David Bowes and he passed away recently. In fact, if he
#
hadn't, I would have reached out to him now to see if I could actually meet him because
#
he's been someone who shaped my thinking a lot. And while when you wrote a recent
#
sub-stack post on Bowes, you spoke about how he was a man who always saw the glass half
#
full while you described yourself as temperamentally pessimistic, which is how I think of myself
#
as well. You know, I think of myself as, you know, this pessimism of the intellect, optimism
#
of the will, that you do what you have to do, but you know, the world is in a bad place.
#
And I was recently chatting with some friends of mine back in India and we were talking
#
about the landscape of ideas and the discourse and all of that. And we were a bit morose
#
because we thought we've been doing this for 30 years, 20 years, 30 years. In our respective
#
cases, we've been writing columns and now doing podcasts and all of that. But nothing
#
has changed. If anything, the discourse has become more surreal, it's kind of become worse
#
and all of that. You know, you've got the rise of populism across the world. You wrote
#
another subtract piece about what's going on now in these 2024 elections is not just
#
a choice between two inadequate presidents. It is a crisis. It is a full-blown crisis.
#
So can I ask you the larger question that if you sort of sit back and just think about
#
the times, like when I was young, I had the illusion and I'm sure you must have believed
#
the same thing, that the arc of history goes in a good direction, right? And sometimes
#
I wonder, so what is your sense of, you know, doing the kind of writing and the work and
#
the thinking that you've done over the decades? What is your sense where we are now? You know,
#
what do you feel about your temperamental pessimism, as you put it, and Bose's always
#
glass half full view? How do you see the world?
#
Wow, that's a big question. Bose was always saying this is a great libertarian moment,
#
like when, you know, when a lot of people seem to be libertarians, he would say this
#
is a libertarian moment. When there were some popular ideas that were not libertarian but
#
seemed to be failing, he would say this is a great libertarian moment because those ideas
#
are failing. I think right now, I just see libertarians as under the bus. And so if you
#
think libertarians have a valuable contribution to make, this is not a good time. So the latest
#
news is, as we record this, is the Republican National Convention, where Donald Trump has
#
just anointed JD Vance as his successor, and several people have pointed out that this really
#
puts the Reagan conservatives, the establishment Republicans, as I'm going to put it in a post
#
tomorrow, they're sitting under the bus next to us as libertarians. So that is not a great
#
thing. On the other hand, there's always looking at technology, and there's the Silicon Valley
#
view of the world tends to be optimistic. Ray Kurzweil, the longtime inventor and author,
#
used to say that regulations are like stones in the river. They don't stop the river. And
#
he's always, you know, took, you know, very optimistic, aggressive view of technology.
#
And those people are somewhat vindicated by the development of these large language models,
#
which really came out of nowhere. And they have me pretty excited. I think it has the
#
potential to be something like the World Wide Web. We can state the case pro and con on
#
that. But if it does prove to be as important an innovation as that, that would really be
#
a big deal and might very well overcome all the sort of the bad politics that's taking
#
place. You know, that resonates with something that I sometimes think about that where many
#
political movements have failed, technology can actually, you know, take liberalism forward
#
by just empowering individuals in different ways. And that leads me to thinking about
#
another theme that I've been thinking about for a long time in one of your recent posts
#
on Substract touched on it also, and which is about the splintering of the mainstream.
#
Like, you know, across domains, what I have found that the mainstream is crumbling, and
#
nothing really is taking its place. For example, in the media, you know, in the 80s and 90s,
#
you had the large newspapers, you had a broad consensus on the truth. You know, the Wall Street
#
Journal might be slightly right of center, the New York Times might be slightly left,
#
but you had a broad shared understanding of the world. And that dissipated completely.
#
And I think it's a damn good thing that it did, that the means of production were in
#
everybody's hands. And you and I also, you know, have been bloggers. And overall, it's
#
a great net positive. But the result of that is that there no longer is a consensus on
#
the truth. You have sort of narrative battles everywhere, and that's what politics has come
#
down to. And I think across various fields, I think, I look at journalism, I look at
#
entertainment, I've even speculated that nation states are a kind of mainstream whose
#
influence is diminishing, you know, and you've written exactly about that way, you know,
#
written here, quote, ever since the axial age, people have had durable collective
#
identities, we had religious identities, we had national identities, I speculate that
#
these will fade away. People will feel loyal to smaller groups and they will be willing
#
to switch loyalties often. Governments will be much weaker than they are today. And then
#
you go on across various different domains. And I wonder if that's a connected thought
#
that even if our politics is becoming more polarized and vitiated and ugly, that, you
#
know, that society can find other ways. And that, you know, the oppressive power of the
#
state could be getting in some ways, less relevant, whereas the pessimistic view of
#
that would be that, oh, my God, the state has much more power today, because, you know,
#
they can surveil you much better state legibility, what the state can see in James C.
#
Scott's term, you know, has just gone up. So what is kind of your sense of this
#
interesting changing world, where at one level, the politics might be what it is, but
#
things are happening in society with technology, with markets, which, you know, are also
#
going in interesting directions? Yeah, I guess they're both strong centrifugal
#
forces and strong centripetal forces. And it's, it is hard to read for all the things
#
you say. It's interesting that the three major elections this year all show centrists kind
#
of falling apart. Macron falls apart in France. The center right in the UK falls apart. I
#
guess Starmer supposedly represents the center left, but I don't think he has, he may not
#
be durably near the center, and he may not be durably powerful. And of course, in this
#
country, you have Trump, who is certainly not part of any establishment, and then Biden
#
will probably in desperation move left to try to salvage something. So the, you know,
#
from that perspective, the center seems to not be holding. On the other hand, as you
#
point out, they should, the governments, you know, if they use surveillance technology,
#
maybe if they get control of how to use artificial intelligence, they might be in a very strong
#
position. But I think the forces of fracturing are probably the important ones. And in some
#
ways, other than militarily, the nation state becomes sort of an anomaly. People, people
#
really don't want all the same policies in the United, in every state in the United States.
#
And I remember looking at the 10 largest states by population, and all of them had severe
#
government governance problems, except for the United States. Any, any state with a population
#
over 100 million, other than the United States, the government is, seems almost dysfunctional.
#
And I'll even accuse India of being like that, I may be wrong. But just, you know, Iran,
#
China, you know, all these countries where they really have difficulty keeping a central, an
#
effective central government without dealing with tons of corruption and authoritarianism, schisms.
#
It's, so the countries that do the best seem to have problems with the central government.
#
They have populations between five and 10 million. That's where sort of people like Denmark and
#
Switzerland fit in. So maybe that, maybe the, it's the larger states that are having the most
#
difficulty dealing with, dealing with the current technological economic environment.
#
So recently I got to thinking about, you know, the, how historical accidents can set about a kind of
#
part dependence which can shape a country. For example, if you look at the American Constitution
#
and the values embodied in it as it came about, you know, it's natural to look at the circumstances
#
of his coming about and say that, okay, there is no surprise that individual liberty is at the center of
#
it. It's no surprise, it's a surprise that federalism and genuine federalism is such a part of
#
the American design as it were. And it's like a fortunate accident and it's carried on.
#
And if you look at India, you know, in India in 1947 when we gained independence, the country was
#
essentially falling apart. You had partition, of course, but you also had hundreds of princely states
#
which hadn't yet agreed to join the union. At the time, our constitution framers, you know, were
#
sitting in Delhi trying to frame the constitution. There was no knowing if the center would hold.
#
And because of that, they centralized power massively, which is why, you know, we pay lip service to
#
federalism, but we're not federal at all. Power is deeply centralized. The state does every everything
#
in a top down way. We essentially took the colonial architecture that the British had left behind
#
and used it to, you know, rule the people instead of serving them. And I think about how such
#
historical accidents can actually shape a nation and set that part dependence because once you have
#
that constitution and once you have the design of the state as it were, then it's really hard to change
#
it and it lingers. And some guys can get lucky like the U.S. did. Other nations may get unlucky.
#
And, you know, so do you think of, you know, what the role that historical contingency can play and
#
how after that inertia and ossification can just take over and it becomes difficult to bring about change?
#
Possibly. Can I just change the train of thought a little bit? India, I mean, the only
#
book I've ever read on India is by somebody who's controversial and unpopular in India, and that's
#
Naipaul, A Million Mutinies Now. And that looks like a country that couldn't possibly hold together
#
naturally. Was he right then? Is he right now? I think Joan Robinson once said, whatever you say about
#
India, the opposite is also true. So Naipaul was right and Naipaul was wrong in the sense that the
#
country kind of held together. But at the same time, there are fractures in our society which are getting
#
exacerbated today. But I continue to be hopeful that, you know, I mean, it's a battle to be fought.
#
I don't think Naipaul was either right or wrong. In his time, I think he, you know, I mean, with
#
hindsight, it's easy to say that we did hold together for 78 years. But with hindsight, it is
#
also easy to say that, you know, our governance went to hell, the design of the state, the balance
#
between the state and society was completely fraught. Yeah, the picture that I got was sort of
#
everybody living in a little niche and thinking that their niche was the world, you know, was the
#
entire state. And I could see the whole world becoming like that, where, you know, somebody, you
#
know, is part of some online group that has a set of beliefs and understandings about the world and
#
cares about things and just doesn't really register that much with others. And anyway, that may be a
#
model where we're headed. And again, this goes back to, you know, well, we don't have a unifying
#
religion, we don't have a common understanding of what the United States is all about. Contrary to
#
the efforts at the Republican National Convention to say, you know, USA and, you know, sort of to
#
that kind of basic patriotic understanding will give way to people just having very, very different
#
views, you know, sort of, I guess, the fable about the blind men and the elephant would be a
#
description where everybody has a different picture of what really what the country is about, what the
#
world is about, what life is about, and sort of how that how that will play out, right, whether it will
#
mean that I guess the question is, how do you have peace in a society like that, especially if some of
#
those groups are really organized around violence? Ideally, if you didn't have the problem of
#
violence, that could be a great world, right? Everybody, you know, lives in their own little faction
#
and they pursue the things that they want to pursue, and it's a utopia. But when they have friction
#
with each other and the potential for violence, then it could become the opposite of utopia.
#
I think what can, like the journey that I've seen in India is that, like, firstly, I think it's part of the
#
human condition that we all live in little niches in our heads. You've got a world inside our head, and that's
#
our vision of the world. And that's part of the human condition. I think it's, however, a part of the part of
#
us that is perhaps exacerbated by technology, because technology can put us all in these little grooves or
#
little niches. Like you've got another column talking about something that I absorbed through doing the show.
#
Like, you know, many of my guests are in their 60s and 70s and their 50s and whatever. And when I ask them
#
about their early influences, like the books and films that meant a lot to them, they'll pretty much come up
#
with the same kind of names, right? So we have that shared common cultural bedrock. And as you pointed out
#
in one of your subtract pieces, that's no longer the case today, in the sense that creators and influencers
#
have their 15 minutes of fame. There are all of these little niches which are not talking to each other.
#
And that's happened in a cultural sense. And I also think about it happening in a worldview kind of sense,
#
because where once you had a broad consensus in the world, today you get taken into narrower niches almost
#
as an unintended consequence of algorithms that don't intend to do that. They just intend to give you what you want.
#
For example, something I worry about is this, that say I'm a 15-year-old kid in a small town in India.
#
I get my first phone. And on that phone, somebody sends me, say, a raging right-wing video. And I watch that.
#
And it's full of hate and whatever. After that, the algo takes over. Because I watch that, it'll recommend more stuff
#
like that to me. And then it becomes my whole world. And then it becomes natural for me to assume that someone
#
who doesn't share this worldview is evil. Not just wrong, but evil. And something that you've eloquently written
#
about in your book as well. And so we get into all these little silos. And they're either silos of one or they're
#
small tribal silos. But what I found as a countervailing force to that is that in the real world, I think of urbanization
#
as a great force for good. That people move more and more to cities. And then you're part of larger economic networks.
#
And it's your self-interest to coexist peacefully. It's in your self-interest to not discriminate, to co-exist
#
with others, to let those differences kind of go by. And it's not a panacea for the ills of the world.
#
But markets and cities are a mechanism through which we can live in cooperation and peacefully without violence.
#
So that would kind of have been my rosy-eyed, almost glass half-full view of how things should be.
#
But actually, it's not quite that simple, right? So what do you think are the pros and cons of what you just described?
#
That people get into, you know, they form little conclaves of the mind, as it were, or little sort of tribal silos like that.
#
What are the pros and the cons of that? Because like one pro that, of course, comes to my mind is that it's great for
#
self-actualization. You don't just have to listen to the one mainstream star who made it big.
#
You can actually find exactly your kind of music and your kind of groove. And that's great. That's amazing.
#
But at the same time, a big con is that we stop talking to each other and perhaps respecting each other and so on and so forth.
#
So in your view, what are the pros and the cons of the way society is shaping up?
#
Well, of course, there are a lot of realms, and I would think music is one of them, where the fact that I,
#
let's say I like hip-hop and you like classical or whatever, it doesn't, we don't interfere with each other.
#
It's when there's going to be conflict and we have to deal with it. So you talk about living in a city.
#
Well, you know, what if your neighbor likes to blast loud music? How do you confront that?
#
And in a small town, people naturally know each other and they work through those things.
#
In a city, you probably call the police and say, yeah, my neighbor is making too much noise.
#
So you have the advantage of being able to find like-minded people in a city or in the global village,
#
as McLuhan describes it, because we have kind of a global village.
#
Like if you want to be an online chess player, you don't need to have any chess players like you in your city.
#
You just can play chess with people around the world, and that has revived a certain kind of chess playing.
#
Oddly enough, given that computers are the best chess players, you know, personal chess playing is picked up.
#
I'll give another example that you wouldn't think that the online world would promote, and that's Israeli dancing, which I do.
#
And that was really altered during the pandemic because people started doing it online, which you can think of as really strange.
#
So again, when these things don't conflict with each other, great.
#
But when people are doing, when they do have conflicts, then it gets exacerbated because of all these things that you talked about.
#
You get reinforced in your own views and you think of people with different views as evil.
#
And I just also worry about just the sheer ability of people to organize and mobilize around hostility and violence.
#
So, you know, the protest movements that sort of, you know, they blew up during the Black Lives Matter period or, you know, now against the, you know, the Gaza War.
#
That's a sort of a frightening environment.
#
You spoke earlier about, you know, centrists are, you know, getting massacred everywhere.
#
And I used to sort of think about, you know, that centrism is always going to be a core part of any electoral system because of, you know, the median voter theorem.
#
That you swing to the right or to the left for the primaries, but, you know, eventually you kind of come back together.
#
You know, when I think of the 2016 elections in America, for example, my sense was, yeah, okay, it's going to be Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush.
#
They are both kind of centrists.
#
They're from different parties.
#
But, you know, so there's a small difference in the interest groups that might cater to each of them, but they're really similar.
#
And instead of Jeb Bush, we had Trump and the party completely went haywire.
#
Not even a turn to the right, a turn to something completely different in the kind of nationalism they espoused.
#
And similarly, you've had, you know, extremism coming up on the left, though it doesn't yet reflect in a choice of precedent.
#
But, you know, you've had that movement to the fringes.
#
And my sense was that I think social media sort of exacerbated that and changed the incentives of online behavior.
#
So you were incentivized to be more and more extreme.
#
And, you know, nothing nuanced or something that recognized the truth in different positions could really survive in that environment.
#
So what is your sense of that?
#
Because everything that you wrote about in the three languages of politics, for example, or political polarization itself, has existed forever.
#
As long as there has been politics, these tendencies have been there.
#
But does technology and social media make it worse?
#
I think the first of all, I don't think they're just three languages anymore.
#
I think there are quite a few political factions and they don't they don't seem to coalesce in any sensible way.
#
I think France is kind of the scariest leading indicator there where you have the, you know,
#
so you have the National Rally is kind of the largest party.
#
But they get, you know, strategically cut off or reduced by the other parties.
#
And that but now it's not clear what's going to happen with with what is it?
#
France Unbound or whatever. What is it?
#
The the Melanchons, you know, really kind of Bolshevik type of party where, you know,
#
he's a very ruthless, very hardline leader.
#
And he has the largest subset within the the left coalition, which is the largest coalition,
#
but it itself is not nowhere near a majority.
#
So that's just a severely divided and gridlocked situation.
#
The United States maybe structurally won't have that because we have a different voting system.
#
But underneath it, there are probably a half a dozen political parties.
#
If we had a proportional representation system,
#
there would probably be at least a half a dozen different political parties in this country.
#
And as in France, there would be no natural coalition within those.
#
There would just be these these very incompatible groups.
#
So anyway, that's the pessimistic take on, you know, that's the underlying politics.
#
We may get we'll get artificial victories.
#
You know, maybe Republicans will win very big.
#
But because there are so many different underlying parties,
#
some people on the Republican who vote Republican are going to be very disturbed by what they get.
#
And so I don't think there's going to be any kind of durable majority,
#
either Republican or Democrat, as long as there are these latent multiple parties.
#
You know, carrying that thought for further,
#
do you think that our political systems, such as first pass or post voting and so on,
#
that our political systems and institutions are an artifact of an earlier time and they aren't relevant today,
#
but change happens so slowly that nothing has really taken its place,
#
that, you know, like all of these systems and institutions and structures that exist,
#
exist to cater to a particular kind of world and a particular kind of reality.
#
And I think what's happened over the last few decades is that that particular kind of world
#
and that reality has changed rapidly and continues to change.
#
And yet we are left with those artifacts, those old structures, which may not serve the needs of modern times.
#
So what do you think about that?
#
Are there fundamental ways in which, you know, there's a mismatch there,
#
that we've designed for a world that doesn't exist and there is no design for the world that we are now in?
#
Yeah, I don't know how you would design things now.
#
Like a lot of people want to reform the American electoral system with things like ranked choice voting.
#
The thinking was that, well, if people vote, you know, they specify their first choice, second, third, and so on,
#
that what will end up happening a lot is second choices will win and the second choices will be moderate.
#
I'm not sure that would happen now.
#
I think if you had all these latent parties that could then come forward under a ranked choice voting system,
#
again, you might come up with something like France, where just maybe it's not even clear that that Macron would be everyone's second choice.
#
And even if he were, he doesn't have he doesn't have the legitimacy to lead the country.
#
So the things that I do seem to work again are smaller countries.
#
I mean, something like Switzerland, it's small, it's extremely federalized.
#
It's that to me seems to be well suited to the Internet age.
#
Another example that's very different would be Singapore seems to be well suited just because you have a very strong bureaucracy and a strong point of view.
#
Now, some people I've talked to people from Singapore who say that it's just too authoritarian for them.
#
It is very centralized as Switzerland sounds better to me.
#
But I don't know what the problems are in Switzerland, whether there are big problems or not.
#
But I think I'm not I'm not optimistic about the large countries, the countries with more than 50 million people coming up with coming up with solutions.
#
My sense has always been that the size of a country ought to matter only if you're thinking in a top down central planning kind of way.
#
If you are looking at a decentralized system, then it really shouldn't matter.
#
I think the problem with all the large countries is that they're not decentralized enough.
#
That's certainly the problem with India, that if you decentralize much more to the local level and followed the principle of subsidiarity that a government only does what only it can do.
#
So whatever can be done at the most local level happens there.
#
And then you start taking steps up from there and you set a broad framework where the government just do the rule of law.
#
And, you know, you don't interfere with the way society functions.
#
You know, that would kind of help.
#
But the point that you're making is that that's irrelevant that, you know, size matters anyway.
#
Well, the question is, how do you keep federalism from degrading down to what it has the way you describe it in India and the way I would describe it in the United States?
#
I mean, the United States has gotten to the point where, you know, California is acting like the government of the whole country and Washington is acting like it can micromanage California and Texas.
#
And it's not working in the ideal federalist way.
#
And so then I would ask, you know, how does Switzerland maintain its federalism?
#
Is its federalism decaying?
#
Is it going to become more centralized?
#
I don't know enough about it, but that would be an interesting case study.
#
I don't know enough about federalism either.
#
But I would say that one reason India is not as decentralized as it should be is just that founding moment where we centralized all the power and we got unlucky in that sense.
#
And now turning it back is really hard because no one who has power is ever going to give it away.
#
Like, how do you reform the state?
#
The state just grows and grows.
#
Yeah, but that but that also says that that that also that model also predicts that the United States will become more centralized.
#
And that prediction seems true.
#
It also predicts that Switzerland will become more centralized.
#
And yet I don't think that has happened.
#
So then you I think you go to sort of cultural stories and how did you know, for a long time, the American culture was it was just very hard to unify.
#
Washington could not, going back to James C. Scott, that the country was illegible to Washington when you didn't have modern transportation and modern communications.
#
And somehow I suspect in Switzerland, the culture is so strongly decentralized, in part because people speak different languages.
#
And here the culture just no longer supports it.
#
We're too interconnected in terms of communication and transportation.
#
There's just not enough sentiment for, you know, for decentralized polity or whatever.
#
What do you think is sort of the role or the feedback loop between culture and the institutions that exist?
#
For example, the economist Jagdish Bhagwati about 25 years ago, I think made the observation that the culture in China seems to be profit seeking.
#
The culture in India seems to be rent seeking.
#
And indeed, what I often found growing up in India is that anyone who wanted to start a business wanted to start it because he wanted to kind of not because he wanted to serve a need that was out there,
#
which, you know, you would think of as a legitimate purpose for a business, but, you know, to exploit others or to collude with the state in some way and be part of the rent seeking and all of that.
#
And my sort of unflashed out theory for that is that it's not that we are culturally like that as a people.
#
My theory was that the institutions played a part in it, that when you had a deeply oppressive state that controlled, you know, especially till 1991,
#
till we liberalized the state, controlled absolutely everything and determined how much you could produce in your factories and how much you could not, what you could do or what you could not do, what you could consume and what you could not.
#
And in that mindset where you cannot, you know, thrive through free enterprise, the mindset becomes sort of rent seeking.
#
And then, of course, we liberalized in 1991 partly.
#
So we are a much freer economy now than we were then, though I think we've kind of there's been a little bit of backsliding on that as well.
#
But how much do you think what is a feedback loop between culture and the nature of the state?
#
How do they play into each other?
#
Because again, I think like America was very lucky in its founding moment that individual liberty became sort of a core part.
#
And do you feel that culture and the nature of the state also play into each other in different ways?
#
Yeah, I think, you know, certain institutional structures select for certain types of people and certain types of people probably select for certain types of people.
#
I can say it's a feedback loop and I certainly wouldn't put all on one or all on the other.
#
Let's talk about your life now.
#
So, you know, tell me, you know, where were you born?
#
What was your childhood like?
#
OK, so let me start with my father.
#
He was born between in a small town on the border of Russia and Poland.
#
It's kind of gone back and forth between those and sort of, you know, Russian Jewish parents.
#
And during pogroms and right toward the end of the Russian Revolution, they moved to America and they moved to St. Louis, which is in the middle of America.
#
So where so my facially, I look like my father, but he was almost six feet tall.
#
And I my height takes after my mother, who was much closer to five feet tall.
#
He somehow became a natural academic.
#
So his you know, he rejected his parents.
#
They seemed very backward to him.
#
They spoke Yiddish and they just lived in this sort of Jewish immigrant world.
#
And he wanted to get out of that in the worst way.
#
So when I get to know him after I'm born, he smokes a pipe.
#
He dresses in the kind of tweed of a British academic.
#
He was at Washington University his entire life.
#
And he just, you know, academic life to him was like water to a fish.
#
I mean, when he's in it, he's fine.
#
When he's out of it, he just doesn't look, you know, can function.
#
So I have some of his look.
#
I have maybe a different type of intelligence.
#
But I just never felt a good fit with academia.
#
I mean, even, you know, like as a college student, I mean, I was very interested in ideas.
#
But there was an urge to be active and to do things.
#
So like, to me, the most rewarding and the most creative
#
and the part of my life where I learned the most was periods when I was in business.
#
So in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was with Freddie Mac.
#
And that was, as I like to say, before it became famous.
#
And then I started one of the first web-based, you know,
#
businesses in 1994, and that was several years of intense experience.
#
I do need, I think, to back away from that kind of activity.
#
I think I'm one of those people who gets overstimulated in a situation
#
where I'm seeing a lot of new people and kind of need to back away from that.
#
That's kind of a classic characteristic of introverts.
#
Although otherwise, I'm not an introvert in any way.
#
So again, Measuring Against My Father, I see what a real academic is like.
#
I go, I'm not that. I'm not that person.
#
I found, I think they're very intelligent people in the business world.
#
They're coping with lots of different problems.
#
And I like that there's the pressure of being in that world.
#
You can't just sort of say, I wrote a paper and now that's some great accomplishment.
#
You know, you're dealing with, not just dealing with customers,
#
but all the problems that you have to deal with.
#
I'm fascinated with the way large organizations run
#
and how they differ from small start-ups and just small firms in general.
#
So anyway, that's some description of my life.
#
I don't know. You asked sort of where I grew up.
#
I grew up in St. Louis.
#
My father really spent a lot of time there.
#
I grew up in St. Louis.
#
My father really spent essentially his entire career at Washington University.
#
St. Louis is, I think, if you want to turn a sociologist loose in the world,
#
I'd say go to St. Louis because it was always very Balkanized.
#
It's often been in the news about problems of race relations,
#
like the Ferguson, which was one of the first incidents in the Black Lives Matter movement.
#
It's very much a baseball town and not a basketball town.
#
That's another interesting, just an interesting sociological story.
#
Everyone my age grew up wanting to hold a bat the way Stan Musial did.
#
Stan Musial was a great player in the 40s and the 50s, had this very unique way of standing,
#
and everyone, every kid grew up wanting to be like that.
#
And I was very athletically oriented as a kid.
#
I would walk on my hands for long distances.
#
I could hold a handstand for a long time.
#
And I really, if I'd been bigger, I would have probably done all sorts of athletic stuff
#
because that's what I really enjoyed.
#
And, you know, to this day, I think the dancing I do is kind of derivative of that,
#
that I just, I need a lot of physical activity.
#
But I'll say another thing about growing up there through the first, through elementary school,
#
there was not a child of color in any of my classes.
#
The variation in social class among the whites was enormous,
#
much bigger than anything you would see nowadays.
#
I mean, everything from business owners to what you would call sort of white trash,
#
almost like what J.D. Vance would describe his background as.
#
There were a few people like that on my street who were just, you know, very dysfunctional,
#
would physically fight one another.
#
Like, you know, one mother would shake another mother's, this happened,
#
shake another mother's head against the curb.
#
I mean, so it was, but at the same time, a lot of those kids grew up to be, you know, professionals.
#
And so just tremendous variety, but no, but very segregated.
#
And then when I'm 10 years old, that neighborhood started to integrate, but we end up moving out.
#
And anyway, that's another sort of sociological political story of how things like that happened.
#
You know, it sort of, it was a manufacturing center.
#
It was one of the biggest cities in the country because it had, it was well located in terms of rivers.
#
I mean, this is, you know, 150 years ago, it's one of the biggest cities.
#
Well located in terms of rivers, gets the railroads, and had, you know, was a big manufacturing center,
#
let's say in the middle of the 20th century for shoes, for, well, they used to say first in booze,
#
first in shoes because it had beer, Anheuser-Busch, it had chemicals, it had McDonald Aircraft,
#
which became McDonald Douglas.
#
And so it had, it was really a major manufacturing center.
#
Now, if you go there, it's all Washington University, St. Louis University, and hospitals.
#
It's a classic transition away from manufacturing to health care and education.
#
So it's interesting in that respect.
#
Social scientists could spend a lot of time there.
#
When I talk to a news reporter, he works for Washington Monthly about St. Louis, and he thinks it's fascinating.
#
He says it's a colony now, you know, that because all the former manufacturing things are foreign owned,
#
even the brewery is now foreign owned.
#
And so none of the major businesses are owned by local people anymore.
#
So it's become a colony.
#
Is that necessarily a bad thing?
#
It's strange in that it means that the owners of the businesses don't have a stake in the local community.
#
And so, you know, when I was growing up, they had a definite stake in the community and they were really, you know,
#
they were organized and met together and tried to improve the community.
#
No, I think it is a problem.
#
And I think that the cities that are now being dominated by universities and hospitals,
#
and that would be St. Louis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, I think they do have a harder time holding together.
#
That just doesn't attract the sort of business owners and leaders who like to get together and say,
#
well, let's fix this. Let's, you know, let's redevelop this.
#
They're just they're in the communities, but not of the communities.
#
And so you don't, you know, in sort of small to mid-sized towns, when you have big business leaders,
#
they really try to make sure that the town works, that the schools work, that the police work.
#
And I think you lose that in these places that are dominated by the hospitals and universities
#
because you just don't have that kind of entrepreneur mindset.
#
I mean, hospitals and universities, whatever they are, they're not entrepreneurial.
#
They're not, you know, go get them. Let's get the problem solved.
#
Let's get everyone's heads together and fix this. So they're not as well run.
#
Is it inevitable that cities become like this or are there particular circumstances that led to these cities becoming like this?
#
Well, if you look at sort of long term trends in industries, you know, going back many years,
#
the trend is from education and health care to get consume a bigger part of the economy
#
and for manufacturing and agriculture to be a smaller part.
#
Now, of course, we just have the Republican convention full of people saying we're going to make things
#
and we're going to be manufacturing, it's going to be made in USA.
#
The trend is that just not there.
#
The most of, you know, the share of consumption that's intangible, whether it's entertainment, education, health care,
#
and that's just that's an inevitable trend.
#
And then I think I guess it just hit maybe it hit certain cities first.
#
And that may be more of a path dependence thing.
#
So Pittsburgh had Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh and that and it had some some good hospitals.
#
And Washington University was known for its medical school.
#
So you have this tandem of the university and the medical school.
#
Cleveland, probably the same thing.
#
Do you think that there's a danger of sort of a great flattening sound which happens where, you know,
#
homogenization begins to take place, where cities grow and, you know, companies grow and achieve scale and all of that
#
in the sense that, like, I think we can go in two different directions.
#
And I've seen that in India. So in the Indian context, let me talk about what I mean by the great flattening sound
#
that we have many, many, many, many languages and those languages that don't have an army are called dialects.
#
So we have many languages and many dialects.
#
And what will typically happen is that there will be a big city.
#
Let's, for example, let's say Delhi. So the main language in Delhi would be Hindi, right?
#
And you'd have many dialects of Hindi from surrounding areas like, you know, Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, whatever,
#
which are spoken in different villages and towns.
#
But when a kid goes to Delhi, you know, the pressure to conform is there.
#
He's made to feel infra dig if he speaks in his dialect.
#
And the pressure to conform is there and therefore he will become a Hindi speaker.
#
And in other cultural ways, I'm just using language as a metaphor of sorts.
#
In other cultural ways, there will be a homogenization, a certain way of talking, a certain way of doing things.
#
And the beautiful diversity that otherwise existed will gradually wither away.
#
Dialects will die gradually and so on and so forth.
#
And that's one way in which, you know, movements happen.
#
A great sort of metaphor for this is something called the Cavendish banana.
#
So India first gave this kind of banana to the world, which is now called the Cavendish banana.
#
And we have many, many, many varieties of bananas, but this particular banana came to the West.
#
And it happens to be an efficient banana. It doesn't have much character, but it's efficient.
#
It can store well. It looks uniform.
#
So it just took over the West and then the West exported it back to India.
#
And now all our local varieties are going because the Cavendish banana, which has returned to us,
#
is taking over and becoming the default banana.
#
And at one level, this kind of homogenization.
#
And obviously both the language and the banana are a metaphor for a deeper sort of cultural flattening.
#
And at one level, it's a problem.
#
But what I've also recently seen is that the same forces that led to this technology and markets
#
can also lead to a move in the opposite direction,
#
where you can actually preserve a little individual idiosyncrasies,
#
where local cultures can assert themselves, can find their own spaces, can be profitable within that.
#
Like there is a startup in India called Stage.in, who call themselves a Netflix for Bharat.
#
But it is not a Netflix in the Indian languages.
#
It is a Netflix in the Indian dialects, which were otherwise dying.
#
And it's just taken off massively.
#
And people tell him that earlier I would feel a little ashamed and infraday of, you know, speaking like this.
#
But now I feel proud and it's kind of going in the other direction as well.
#
So what have you seen of this tussle between the great flattening sound of homogenization
#
and which I sense is part of the reason all of these cities you mentioned end up sort of being similar in this sense.
#
And at the same time, there is an empowerment that technology gives you that could take you in the other direction.
#
So what are sort of your observations on this over here?
#
Again, that's sort of you have the centrifugal forces and the centripetal forces, and they're both at work.
#
So if you go to St. Louis and Cincinnati, you'll see a lot of the same restaurant chains,
#
but they still have their distinctive foods that they can tell you about and that they're proud of.
#
And in fact, they will now export them.
#
So there's a certain type of pizza that's in St. Louis that has this really disgusting cheese.
#
It tastes good, but it's really disgusting.
#
And you can now import it. You can now go online and you can get your St. Louis pizza.
#
So, yeah, there'll just be a lot of churn in kind of both directions.
#
Let's go back to, you know, talking about not so much your father, but something you said about him,
#
where you said he was a natural academic and you spoke about how he took to academia like a fish to water.
#
And I want to ask you, because academia has also changed so much over the decades,
#
that in that context, what was water? What was fish?
#
Like, what is the academic way of life? What is the pursuit?
#
What makes you what is a pursuit and what makes you temperamentally suited to that pursuit?
#
Okay, so at that time, I would say certain types of conversations.
#
So, you know, nobody ever talked about stock car racing or wrestling.
#
So there's a lot more conversation on so-called high culture.
#
There probably always was a fair amount of political uniformity.
#
I mean, there was, you know, there might have been conservatives,
#
but the conservative-liberal divide wasn't what it is now.
#
And just a tremendous focus on academic status.
#
I mean, you know, you're just very aware of, you know, who stands where in the status hierarchy.
#
And I'm trying to think sort of what, and again, what bothered me about it is it's sort of,
#
it's like it's like flying around the world and never landing.
#
You know, never, you know, the ideas never get tested in a real world sense.
#
But, you know, one of the courses that my father taught was politics in the novel.
#
So he would bring in literature and stuff.
#
And he was a very, I don't know, broadly popular teacher,
#
but some he had a very profound effect on several students that they would years later would come back.
#
And when he died, one of his former students gave a million dollars to the university in his memory.
#
And he believed a lot in what C.P. Snow calls the two cultures.
#
That is, there's a literary culture and then there's the sort of more scientific culture.
#
And he saw himself as only part of the literary culture.
#
He couldn't do math at all.
#
He was always, you know, admiring that I could do math and computers and stuff.
#
And actually that probably is a lot of what got me away from academia was just the computer
#
and being able to code it and get feedback from it and, you know, living in that world.
#
But this, you know, he brought in sort of some famous writers because he became an administrator
#
and he built up the English department and so on.
#
So that kind of a literary culture just doesn't exist outside of academia anymore.
#
And that's sort of odd in that it was very much outside of academia.
#
So, you know, 75 years ago, if you were in journalism, chances are you hadn't gone to college.
#
And if you were a writer, you didn't go to the University of Iowa's writing school.
#
You just lived in the world and became a writer.
#
So that's something that's very different now.
#
When I think of, you know, looking at academia from the outside,
#
it seems to me that within academia, you know, scholars have got more and more siloed
#
into specializations and hyper specializations, the chance of finding a renaissance man or woman as it were,
#
someone with broad ranging interests is, you know, far less.
#
They seem to me to be outliers.
#
And a lot of academia, especially in the social sciences, perhaps certainly in the social sciences,
#
have no relation with the real world at all.
#
You know, your beautiful phrase, just flying around and never landing seems like such a perfect description of that.
#
And I increasingly think that more and more in our knowledge society, if I can call it that,
#
you know, more and more the groundbreaking knowledge will come from people who do engage with the real world,
#
who do land, who do remain in the real world.
#
Like, for example, you've written many books, but you haven't written many books by being in the academy all your life and studying stuff.
#
You went out there, you started a business, you've written a book about, you know,
#
what that journey was like of starting that business and running it.
#
And, you know, you sold it, you went through all the struggles in the real world.
#
And your sort of knowledge comes from there.
#
And similarly, I think a lot of the fine thinkers of today are people in the real world.
#
Yeah, I strongly believe that, that some of the real sort of intellectuals are out there in the business world.
#
I mean, you know, people like Patrick Collison or Eric Thornburg or these people.
#
And I actually think that their minds are actually, you know, stronger,
#
which is, you know, you wouldn't have necessarily said, you know, 50 years ago.
#
And I was just a very different type of person.
#
The type of person who founded a business in the 1950s was like a real earthy type person who didn't have much education at all.
#
And the notion that of a Ph.D. becoming a top executive would have seemed really strange in 1950.
#
It seems, you know, a lot more normal now.
#
But I actually, you know, once proposed, you know, maybe a year ago or so on my substack
#
that you create a virtual university where the faculty would be people in business.
#
And my point, you know, there are people in business who can teach a classics course as well as any classics professor.
#
That just happens to be a hobby, a side interest.
#
So like you say, you're more likely to find a Renaissance person there.
#
And, you know, my thinking was, well, if most of what you need from your college is sort of entree into jobs,
#
then why don't you just get somebody who already has a network of business contacts
#
and get them to write your recommendations for you and introduce you to other businesses.
#
So that's what I've had many random ideas that I haven't followed through on.
#
And that's that's one of them is just create a network of business people
#
who would be sort of mentors and guides to people who would learn without going to a campus,
#
but would instead occasionally like four or five times a year, meet in retreats,
#
go to retreats with their fellow students and professors and then otherwise communicate online.
#
So let me ask you a question that I asked many of my guests in different contexts,
#
which is this that if you were to reboot civilization, say you have the human race, we are wired the way we are,
#
the hardware and the operating system is the same, but you reboot civilization.
#
So the course of history doesn't necessarily follow along the same paths.
#
How would education evolve?
#
Because a lot of what it looks like today is historical accidents,
#
but a lot of what it looks like today would also be inevitable because of human nature and the way we relate to each other.
#
So I tend to ask this question to tease out what is essential and unavoidable
#
and also what is just a historical accident and we shouldn't take it for granted.
#
Like when I look at our current education system, I feel it's deeply broken.
#
Again, it's an artifact.
#
You know, you look at schools, kids of the same age studying together,
#
you're creating workers for the industrial revolution makes absolutely no sense in modern times.
#
And yet we've normalized it, we don't really think about it.
#
So if I can ask you to sort of take a step back, strip away everything about the way things are in education,
#
how would we learn as a fundamental question rather than, you know, you even use the word education,
#
but how would we learn about the world and what are the other ways in which that could have happened?
#
So I think human nature is for people to learn from based on prestige.
#
If you're prestigious, to me, I'll, you know, I will try to copy you.
#
So yeah, learning in some sense is copying people with prestige.
#
And so if you want to redesign an educational system,
#
you have to kind of reconfigure the prestige hierarchy.
#
And so right now, as it exists, Harvard is still way up there in terms of a prestige hierarchy.
#
They're doing an awful lot to try to dive down from that.
#
I think that's, I guess that's my first thought.
#
Fundamentally, we learn by copying people who are prestigious.
#
And if you want to change that, you change where the prestige is.
#
Let's, you know, go back to your journey.
#
I'm very interested in how you were shaped.
#
Like, you know, what were the elements that shaped you?
#
Like you've got this beautiful biographical note on your website,
#
which I'll link from the show notes where, you know, you talk about growing up,
#
the role that, you know, your passions like dancing meant to you, for example.
#
And you speak about how body self-esteem was an important thing for you,
#
the handstands that you kind of mentioned.
#
And I think of, you know, when we are growing up, all of us,
#
there are these two simultaneous quests that we are on.
#
And one quest is to fit in with everyone else.
#
And you've spoken about, you know, how at different points,
#
that was a problem for you, especially when as a kid,
#
your family had stints in Princeton and Clayton and you didn't know kids there.
#
Everybody knew everybody else.
#
So I think one anxiety that we often deal with is a struggle to fit in.
#
And how does one do that?
#
And a simultaneous anxiety, which goes side by side is also,
#
it's not so much an anxiety, but a quest to find yourself.
#
Like, who am I? What do I want to do with my life? Et cetera, et cetera.
#
So tell me about, you know, that shaping of yourself across these two dimensions.
#
Well, the issue of fitting in was always a big challenge for me.
#
I really wanted to. I mean, I didn't, you know,
#
but I had so many peculiar characteristics and I wasn't, you know,
#
I guess I wasn't willing slash able to kind of shave off the peculiarities.
#
I mean, somebody who became a writer, I heard secondhand,
#
used to describe me as having this very peculiar way of standing.
#
You know, just, he was just struck by like, I don't know,
#
how I would kind of bounce up and down or, you know, just very odd.
#
I had very peculiar, you know, strong, was very picky eater, all sorts of things.
#
And so I skipped a grade because I could read when I was in kindergarten.
#
So they just moved me through first grade in a month at the end of kindergarten.
#
So I had skipped a grade and I was short and I reached puberty late.
#
So you put all that together.
#
And I'm a freshman in high school and weighing 85 pounds, which was absurdly small.
#
And no brothers or sisters to kind of socialize me.
#
A father who's an academic, so he can't relate to me in any kind of, you know,
#
here's what a normal kid does.
#
So I was just, I was such an oddball and I was so wanted to not be an oddball.
#
Finally achieved that, you know, in my 20s.
#
But yeah, you're right.
#
That, that, you know, for me was a big issue.
#
And I'd say in terms of finding myself, I just, I had no role models outside of academia for so long
#
that, you know, I just went, I just went along this path to become a professor,
#
even though it wasn't really the best path for me.
#
So that was, so I'd say I struggled kind of in both dimensions.
#
I also say politically, I was very much on the left for, you know,
#
through my at least early 20s, mid 20s.
#
And it was a very gradual process of moving off that.
#
Yeah, very gradual process.
#
Tell me about that process.
#
I mean, initially, I think when one is young, it's natural to be on the left
#
because it makes you feel virtuous because you're saying virtuous things and et cetera, et cetera.
#
And also you're naturally anti-establishment.
#
You know, there's this old, I think, cliche about how if you're not a communist at 18, you don't have a heart.
#
If you are still one at 25, you don't have a brain.
#
But leaving that aside, what was that journey in the way that you looked at the world?
#
Like, how did you arrive at frameworks and models of the world?
#
So let's say in high school, the Vietnam War is heating up.
#
And that was something that was pretty hard for young people to accept.
#
And but a lot of the anti-war movement really was, you know, America's terrible.
#
It's kind of like the, you know, the far left today.
#
And, you know, without I mean, I couldn't it's almost can't reproduce my line of thinking,
#
but I just fell in with that that point of view.
#
And I think it's very natural to think of good and evil as residing in people and not to take a systemic view.
#
So, you know, a folk economic view is that, you know, businesses are born making profits and they exploit people.
#
So I think the my journey away from the left starts a little bit when I'm taking economics courses
#
and I'm seeing supply and demand and these are these are impersonal forces.
#
And it's just a different way of looking at the world that doesn't personalize results and doesn't attribute them to good and evil.
#
It's supply and demand aren't good and evil.
#
They're just they're just forces out of that that make a lot of sense.
#
And also in college, the you know, I saw a lot of different people on the left.
#
There was something called the National Caucus of Labor Committees,
#
which is sort of a Trotsky group headed by a fellow named Lyndon LaRouche, who was just a cult leader.
#
And he actually moved way to the right, you know, years later.
#
But you see these people in a cult and you go, oh, they're pretty lost.
#
And then I saw sort of the more standard student left and they they were just they were too nihilistic for my taste.
#
And they just weren't that bright.
#
And I think that, you know, that's a bit of a turn off.
#
And then somewhere along the way, I read Halberstam's book on the Vietnam War.
#
And that's a big influence because he's not giving the Noam Chomsky.
#
You know, we're in Vietnam because we're trying to expand our markets.
#
He's really describing the mindset of, you know, it's politically bad to lose another country to the communists.
#
And we think we know how to manage conflict.
#
It gets really into the mindset of these people.
#
And he hates, you know, he hates the Johnson administration and those people, but he doesn't have this.
#
He has their motives more correct and their motives are more complicated.
#
And so that really that that was a very influential to me because I it just I didn't I lost the sort of mindless conspiratorial view of the left at that time.
#
And I'd say another event that in my left to right journey is my wife and I took a honeymoon in Israel.
#
And while we're there, there's the attempted hostage hostage rescue that failed.
#
Carter sent helicopters to try to rescue the hostages from Iran.
#
And just seeing how demoralizing that was for the Israelis, how much they care about American strength.
#
And I'm sure that's still true.
#
If America, you know, when America withdrew withdrew from Afghanistan in a humiliating way this year,
#
I'm sure that the most demoralized people in the world about that were the Israelis because they really want they want America to be strong.
#
So that that was a very different perspective than you come from, you know, being, you know, an antiwar activist to see people rooting for America and disappointed when it when America is humiliated.
#
And yeah, I think that was a big change.
#
So by that point, I'm sort of rooting for Reagan to beat Carter because Carter has humiliated America.
#
And I can see what you know, how, you know, how that's not a good thing.
#
But I'd say at that point, I'm still not really on the right.
#
I'd say I only become firmly on the right sometime in the 2000s.
#
And I think that might be well, OK, a couple of things.
#
You know, again, I see people who hate America and I don't like them.
#
I mean, I'm grateful for America.
#
So I think that that kind of stirred some patriotism.
#
And and I guess over time, I saw sort of the the benefits of neoliberalism, the economic benefits.
#
And then when I started, so I started an economics blog in, I don't know, 2000, 2001, maybe, probably 2001.
#
And I just wrote my own software to to do it.
#
And it was it was a pain to maintain it because it was my own software.
#
And Russ Roberts contacted me and asked if I'd like to do it for Liberty Fund.
#
I said, well, they will they handle the software for me?
#
He said, yes. I said, sold.
#
And so that gets me into, you know, I started to learn more about libertarian thought, which I knew nothing about before.
#
And so then I became more attracted to it.
#
And to this day, I think my first I always say my first pass on any policy issues to run it through a libertarian filter.
#
Like, what would a libertarian say?
#
I don't always end up there, but that's that's my first the first pass.
#
So and it's mostly a filter that says I'm skeptical that the centralized planner knows enough and is incented enough to to be as successful as you always assume.
#
You don't you don't assume that just because because you can in your head, you think you know the solution to a problem that therefore government will you can count on government to implement your solution and it will solve the problem.
#
I used to edit a policy magazine called Prakriti.
#
And my first filter for evaluating any policy was to ask myself two questions that does this do either one of the above?
#
Does it enhance individual freedom?
#
Or if freedom stays the same, does it use a market mechanism to increase efficiency?
#
You know, one of those two and not because I was dramatic about those.
#
But what I tended to find most of the time was that if there was a problem with some public policy or if there was a problem in a particular situation, the way to get to it quickest was often to simply ask the question, where is the coercion?
#
So if I would just ask that question, where is the coercion?
#
You would find out what the problem is, which is usually either with the state doing something or not taking care of, you know, coercions in some other sort of element.
#
But that's an aside to kind of get back to college.
#
Like when we are young, the tendency often is that you take a framework and it seems to explain the world and then it's tempting to just get cognitively lazy and just stick to that for the rest of your life.
#
Like so many people do.
#
And that becomes your one hammer for every nail.
#
And you clearly didn't do that in the sense that you were moving about, you know.
#
Elsewhere, you've spoken about the macro wars of the time that you were in graduate school, you know, the Schengenism on the one hand.
#
And you mentioned that you felt closest to where Solo was.
#
What are the habits of mind which make you one of those people who's always questioning everything, who's doing that kind of slow thinking as, you know, you would put it in your book.
#
Where you're not just jumping instinctively to whatever fits your priors, but you're examining everything.
#
Most importantly, you remain open to changing your mind and being challenged against the real world.
#
Well, I don't know, you know, maybe that's just a personality.
#
But certainly every influential person I can think of has thought that way.
#
So you start with my father who had this what he called the first iron law of social science, which is sometimes it's this way and sometimes it's that way.
#
You know, there really aren't any iron laws.
#
He would also say things like daddy is not always right and daddy is not always wrong.
#
So he, you know, certainly if that either by nature or nurture, he sort of inculcated a willingness to see things from different perspectives.
#
My main college professor was a guy named Bernie Safran.
#
He was very hard to pin down ideologically, and he would assign papers from the far left to the far right.
#
I think he was pretty much an admirer of Milton Friedman.
#
He he would occasionally drop a statement like Friedman and Samuelson teach the same price theory, but Friedman applies it to policy.
#
And but he and one of his catch phrases would say, oh, I'm willing to be wrong.
#
You know, sort of like you can talk me, go ahead, try to talk me out of something.
#
So he was another person who really wanted to encourage you to see things from different perspectives.
#
And I think just, you know, the the types of writers or intellectuals I'm attracted to are probably people like that.
#
I mean, Tyler Cowan is another example who's always likes to tweak his readers by saying things that he knows will annoy them.
#
And that's, you know, so people like that.
#
What I also kind of noticed about your journey is that you were early to jump into new things even before they were kind of formed, in a sense, being an iconoclast.
#
Like you started home fair in ninety four and you've mentioned at one point that you didn't even know how to kind of set it up in terms of the technology or, you know, how the website would function.
#
And someone that I could do what I couldn't do was get connect my my office, the computer in my, you know, home office to the Internet because the trumpet windsock that you needed was was beyond me.
#
It was really wasn't till August of nineteen ninety five that a civilian could get onto the Internet.
#
And there I was for a year and a half sitting there.
#
And as somebody put it, you've congratulations, you've set up your lemonade stand on the moon.
#
Now you just have to wait for the astronauts to get there.
#
Yeah, I there are certain things that I think I have a very emotional reaction to to certain technologies.
#
There's this novel, I guess it's supposed to be a kid's story, The Wind in the Willows.
#
And this character is loves horse drawn carts and then his horse drawn cart gets ridden off the road by a car.
#
And then he just falls in love with cars.
#
He just says, Oh, I've got to have cars.
#
And so I do react very emotionally to technology.
#
So the World Wide Web, I just fell in love with, you know, said and a little of it was just the governance structure.
#
Like in 93, Vinton Cerf gave a talk.
#
I don't think he I think he was the substitute speaker at some MIT thing.
#
He described the Internet governance and the you know, just the way things changed in the Internet is you get a bunch of engineers together called Internet Engineering Task Forces.
#
They propose a solution.
#
They put out a paper and and it becomes a standard if nobody objects.
#
And, you know, that just there was a just in time government.
#
They come up with the solution and then they dissolve themselves.
#
And the government, it's sort of the opposite.
#
It sort of see a problem, you know, create some permanent organization and never solve the problem.
#
So there was just this beauty in that between that and then seeing Mosaic, the first graphical World Wide Web browser, I just fell in love with it.
#
I said, this has got to work.
#
And that proved to be right.
#
I mean, there were a lot of there were plenty of people who doubted it at the time.
#
There's just a podcast a few weeks ago with Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz in which Mark Andreessen talks about how many people didn't believe it was going to be a big deal.
#
At the time, you know, they had all the reasons why why the Web would never be a business.
#
We'd be worth anything from a business standpoint.
#
But I I believed in it.
#
Then I had doubted it because I suffered through my first year and a half.
#
But then it just it did take off.
#
I do I feel that way about the new A.I. stuff.
#
I think it's just if I were 15 years younger, I would just be on that.
#
I didn't I did not feel that way about crypto.
#
I mean, there are some people who are like, you know, in love with crypto.
#
And I don't I just I think my problem with crypto is it's it's like as an individual,
#
I don't want to try to figure out how to create, store and remember crypto.
#
But if I have a third party do it, I it's like I'm defeating the whole purpose because I'm setting myself up to be,
#
you know, exploited, robbed or whatever.
#
So I just think there's this fundamental contradiction that is a technology.
#
It's too hard for an individual to jump on himself.
#
And then if you get somebody else to be your intermediary, you've, you know, in some sense, just destroyed the purpose of it.
#
Another area in which you were early was actually blogging.
#
Like, you know, you started something called the Internet Bubble Monitor in 1999, which is really early.
#
And, you know, because I started in 2003 and I was one of the early bloggers in India.
#
And it felt like such a liberation at the time, because like I often say that the world for creators just changed completely.
#
And it changed first when it came to the written word, because you had the means of production.
#
You were not beholden to gatekeepers. You were not beholden to a format.
#
You did not have to follow a new cycle, a bunch of different reasons.
#
And the interaction among people at the time.
#
So you remember the time when there was this thing called Trackback.
#
And that was very powerful where you could, you know, I could write a blog post.
#
And the fact that I'd written about your post would show up on your post.
#
And I think that died because of a phenomenon called Trackback spam.
#
People were abusing that.
#
But that was great. So it was highly interactive.
#
It was a great, you know, you can really have conversations using it.
#
So, yeah, I mean, I'm one of these people who's very romantic about the blogging age.
#
And I'm basically using Substack as a blogging device, trying to sort of reproduce what it was then.
#
And I didn't fall, I have not fallen in love with Twitter, as some people have,
#
because it doesn't have this conversational.
#
And the likes and follows and all that stuff that's too quantitative and competitive, I think.
#
I much prefer the conversational tone of blogs.
#
No, I fell in love with the blogging, you're right.
#
And it suits me, I think it suits my writing style very well,
#
because I have a terse, concise writing style and a journalistic.
#
I learned very early to take a journalistic approach, just get to the point, you know,
#
start with the five W's and so on, as opposed to a more florid, discursive writing style.
#
Like when I see something where like five paragraphs in,
#
the person hasn't even told you what his main point is going to be,
#
I just want to, you know, shake the person, say no, no, don't write like that.
#
Don't give me this long, flowery, indirect introduction.
#
Just hit me with the point, be like, write like a journalist.
#
And in a sense, blogging would incentivize that kind of writing,
#
because if you wanted to build up a following, you had to respect your readers,
#
you couldn't waste their time, you had to give them value.
#
I have a couple of questions about blogging here, broader questions,
#
and one is how did it shape you as a thinker?
#
Like writing and thinking, I always, you know, tell my writing students that they are related.
#
The more you write, the better you will think,
#
because you're constantly not just discovering how you think,
#
but you're testing your ideas against the real world.
#
With blogging, you had those brushes up against the real world,
#
feedback loops, et cetera, et cetera.
#
You were part of a larger conversation.
#
So take me through those years, like, for me, I remember it energized me,
#
that I would just end up knowing more, thinking better,
#
simply because I was writing all the time.
#
What was it like for you?
#
Yeah, I think one thing is you observe your thought process,
#
because, you know, you see, you get very quick feedback,
#
either from comments or other bloggers.
#
So you really get, you know, observe, you see your mistakes very quickly and clearly.
#
You know, so one thing, one habit I developed was scheduling ahead of time.
#
And what that does is two things.
#
One is when the current thing comes up,
#
I know that if I'm, let's say, you know, typically I'm scheduling,
#
let's say, five days ahead.
#
So I know, for example, that five days from now,
#
what I have to say about the Trump assassination attempt isn't going to mean anything.
#
So I just don't write about it.
#
You know, I only write about the current thing if I think that something I say about it
#
five days from now will still be, you know, be relevant part of the conversation.
#
The other thing is that I edit between over that five day period.
#
So every day I look at the scheduled posts and rewrite them and revise them,
#
typically shortening them, making them punchy, getting to the point quickly.
#
So that's, you know, I just learned that as a habit,
#
which is another reason why I hate Twitter, right?
#
Because Twitter, the whole object of the game is almost to be the first one out of the box with your take.
#
My other broader question is, you know, earlier at one point, I think just before we started recording,
#
you mentioned that you might read a book from 20 years ago and it feels very dated.
#
It no longer feels relevant and all of that.
#
It no longer feels relevant.
#
It's just frustrating because the person seems to be talking around and around and around.
#
And I'll just give you an example.
#
A very influential book for me, extremely influential, is The Cash Nexus by Neil Ferguson.
#
And it really gets at how important the central bank was
#
for financing government debt so that the government could go to war.
#
You know, it's a very interesting thesis.
#
I don't think it's very widely spread.
#
Most people think of central banks,
#
oh, well, they're supposed to control inflation, unemployment.
#
They control the economy. No.
#
No, they're really key function for many years.
#
And I would argue still today for a central bank is to make sure the government can market its debt.
#
So a very influential book, almost unreadable today.
#
I mean, he just he's just got so much throat clearing and anecdotes
#
and relation showing that he understands current culture.
#
You know, you can imagine a professor giving a two hour lecture
#
where they are, you know, using cultural references to pop music and talking all around.
#
And they're only making one point, but they're spending two hours doing it.
#
That I think, you know, it's hard.
#
Books have a hard time now because, you know, you couldn't even write that book now.
#
You couldn't even put that book out.
#
I mean, the typical nonfiction book is trying to throw you lots of charts
#
and relevant anecdotes and data.
#
And even that there, most of them, you know, don't are not cost effective in terms of time.
#
Like if I could if I can read, you know, a hundred substack posts in the time it takes to read one book.
#
Well, chances are I'm going to get more out of those hundred substack posts.
#
So perfect time to segue to this larger question.
#
And the larger question is that, you know, the way economists will speak of the stock in the flow of money.
#
I think of the stock in the flow of intellectual content.
#
Like I have started thinking about how the blog posts that we do,
#
perhaps my podcast episodes, the columns that we write, the newsletter posts that we do, they are like flow.
#
We are just putting stuff out there. It is super important to do that.
#
It helps us be better thinkers. It runs up against the real world.
#
And it can influence people and change their way of thinking.
#
Like for me, it really mattered in the 2000s where I could read you and Russ Robertson Econlogue,
#
where I could read Tyler and Alex on marginal revolution and so on and so forth.
#
In fact, all three of them have been on my show.
#
So I've kind of finished that circle with you today.
#
But so it is great for readers and is great for the writers.
#
But it is transient. It disappears. It vanishes.
#
Which is why you don't have collections of columns.
#
And that's the problem with flow.
#
And for stock, what I would think of is that books are stock.
#
That you write a book and if it is a good book, I mean 95% of everything is crap, that's Sturgeon's law.
#
But if you write a good book, it can become part of the foundational base of knowledge for someone else.
#
Like Philip Larkin has this great phrase in another context where he says,
#
And I love that metaphor of the coastal shelf.
#
And I think that's how knowledge is built.
#
That you have sedimentary layer upon sedimentary layer.
#
And that's rarely the flow activities like your blogs and podcasts.
#
It's the stock activities like the books or, you know,
#
Milton Friedman doing a documentary series like Free to Choose or whatever form it may take.
#
And I'm just coming at, like, how would you think about this business of producing knowledge and putting it out there?
#
Because in a sense, you've done both.
#
I loved your blog at the time that, you know, you were writing it for maybe those five years in the 80s.
#
And equally, I think the Three Languages of Politics is for me, it's a stock book.
#
It's a foundational book. It taught me a lot.
#
And I just regard that very, very highly.
#
I have no idea how successful that book has been.
#
But it's been influential to me and I keep recommending it to people.
#
And I know many other people have been shaped by it.
#
But what's your broader sense of the stock and flow situation?
#
That's an interesting way of putting it.
#
Occasionally, I get people who will say, you know,
#
I was really influenced by this sentence you wrote 15 years ago on your blog.
#
You know, so there's a little bit of a stock contribution there.
#
But as I told you, I think this was before we started recording that.
#
You know, a few days ago, I sort of got an idea for an outline of a book.
#
And I'm going to put the outline on my substack.
#
But I say usually I, you know, I let those ideas go.
#
But I guess the urge does come from sort of wanting to have something
#
that, you know, like, say, is more of a stock than a flow
#
that is something that is more permanent.
#
So that's just something interesting to think about.
#
Have you thought about your writing as just something that you like doing and it's interesting?
#
Or have you also felt some kind of responsibility that I've got to do this, that it's important?
#
You know, is there a feeling of a sense of purpose behind it as well?
#
Yeah, I think that definitely feel a sense of purpose for it.
#
You know, I'll say that, you know, if I were to go back and try to have a purpose-driven life,
#
I think I would spend a lot of it in a sort of in the Silicon Valley environment
#
where people are encouraging me and pushing me to do business ideas.
#
I'm not, you know, I say that, and yet I know that it was very stressful emotionally.
#
Like, again, it's sort of like the difference between being at a party with a lot of people
#
and, wow, this is interesting and, oh, look, I can talk to this person and, you know,
#
just get a lot of stimulation from that.
#
And yet I know I need the time to process it.
#
So I think even if I had spent a lot of my life, a lot more of my life in the business and startup world,
#
I would have had to step out of it for a while and try writing as a way of processing.
#
But I do think of that as sort of more purpose satisfying and the writing is more self-indulgent in that sense.
#
But maybe, but I think of myself as being very extreme on the conscientiousness scale.
#
So I really don't want to go a day, let a day go by without a post.
#
And I don't know who I think I owe that to, but somehow I feel like I owe that to my readers.
#
It feels like an obligation.
#
Yeah. I mean, not a hateful obligation, but an obligation.
#
Tell me also about teaching.
#
What I was sort of intrigued by is that you spend a lot of time teaching in schools,
#
in high school, as opposed to, you know, academics would rather teach in fancy universities and blah, blah, blah.
#
But why was that and what is the difference and how do you teach differently when you're teaching to high schoolers?
#
Does it force you to think with more clarity about whatever you're teaching?
#
I'd say just say, I just couldn't love the college students.
#
I mean, it was a very transactional situation at George Mason.
#
You know, they're just they want to, you know, get the course requirement met and move on.
#
It's not like my high school students were necessarily intellectually oriented, although some of them were.
#
But it's just much more of a relationship.
#
And so you really you end up loving them most of the time, hating them some of the time.
#
I mean, because sometimes they don't behave or they seem obtuse more because of the not behaving.
#
I used to describe it as they that a high school senior was halfway between a college senior and an eighth grader.
#
And they would bounce between those extremes.
#
And some days I'd walk in with with a beautiful idea for the college student and be confronted with the eighth graders and be very disappointed with that.
#
But also it was just, you know, on average, they were just brighter than the college students, brighter and more motivated.
#
You know, it's a private high school for modern Orthodox Jewish kids.
#
And, you know, they're from this background, you know, of, you know, Jews, very, very pro education and their parents inculcating them.
#
You know, that they they have to do well in school and fairly easy environment to teach in.
#
And when every kid is walking in there and you know that if if they're not doing their best, if you would just call their parents, their parents will ream them out and make sure they do something differently.
#
What was odd was the last few years, I felt like I was getting out of touch with them from it.
#
And I thought it was me getting older.
#
But now from what I see in research and this is similar to what I saw there, it's they're actually getting younger.
#
Like Jean Twenge says that 18 is the new 14.
#
Or, yeah, that, you know, they're not getting driver's licenses, they're not dating and they're just they don't have the kind of the sassiness and the sarcasm that I was used to.
#
Well, I guess Jonathan Heights theory is it's all the smartphone or the way kids are being raised nowadays.
#
Yeah, I guess I'm more inclined to do the way the kids are raised nowadays story.
#
I've been reading a lot recently about, you know, the difference between having a neighborhood where kids are out in the street and playing by themselves versus, you know,
#
they're being chauffeured to adult supervised activities or they're sitting home on a screen.
#
I just, you know, for me, naturally, growing up, I, you know, I was out of the house all the time.
#
And, you know, play, you know, accidentally breaking windows, playing, playing with a bat and ball or going on a bike ride or losing my shoes in the mud or whatever, whatever you're doing.
#
But out all day, never, you know, not on a screen, never alone.
#
And then when we moved into this neighborhood, not this house, but another house in this neighborhood, our kids had the same kind of childhood.
#
You know, they there were three girls next door and our three daughters and they're all playing and there were kids all around the cul-de-sac.
#
And so our kids were never home.
#
And that's just become very, very unusual.
#
So kids are spending all their time either on a screen or in an adult supervised activity.
#
And I think there's, I don't know, this is this is me being an old man.
#
I think there's something bad about that.
#
Go out and negotiate with other kids and, you know, form your gang and come up with your own rules, do your own play acting.
#
It's something I think about a lot also.
#
And I, again, I don't want to be nostalgic for the sake of it or judgmental on what the world is like.
#
And I think of the pros and the cons that at one hand, like I was just telling someone yesterday that, oh my God, I wish I was 20 today because it's such an exciting time.
#
All the knowledge of the world is at your fingertips or the opportunities seem endless.
#
But at the same time, much as, you know, there was a scarcity of books and music that I had access to when I was growing up back in the day, I did have a lot of leisure time to think I did have to go out and play, etc, etc.
#
And the texture of life was different.
#
I think I often think about the rhythm in which we spend our days that if you're scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, swiping, swiping, swiping, it's a very choppy rhythm of the mind.
#
And that can affect the way you think that can affect your capacity to focus and to go deep into any kind of work.
#
And lest it sound like I am passing judgment on, you know, young kids today, I'm actually in a sense lamenting what has happened to me as well.
#
I will often find that instead of sitting and reading a book for a couple of hours, I'll just spend a couple of hours on Twitter or Instagram just doom scrolling and completely mindless.
#
And at the end of it, I'm stupider than I was before.
#
And again, this shift has taken place, not because of the evil intent of someone.
#
All these tech giants are just trying to maximize engagement.
#
And in that process, they end up amplifying instincts we already have a hardwired with.
#
And some of them tend to be, you know, instincts like this and the urge for constant dopamine.
#
And you've also got a recent substract post about that as well.
#
So what is your sense about the textures of a thinker's life?
#
You know, how you read books, how you write.
#
Do you feel that thinkers today will fundamentally be doing the job differently just because of the way the world is?
#
I mean, for me, I do a lot of my creative work on a bicycle.
#
I can go on a bike ride for hours.
#
I mean, hours, I'm going to, you know, I don't cover a whole lot of mileage relative to those hours, but I am there.
#
And, you know, in theory, I guess you could look at your smartphone on a bike, but in practice you don't.
#
I mean, you know, like I took a walk this morning and I was probably I have to admit I was probably on my phone for three quarters of the walk.
#
So the walk didn't do it for me, although most walks do a lot of like it used to be I was doing more.
#
You know, I would be, you know, doing a talk for, you know, like, you know, maybe once a month or not even at that, you know, once every couple of months.
#
And for a talk, I would spend hours walking, honing that talk down to what I wanted, you know, rehearsing and whatever.
#
So usually I can do a lot of thinking while I'm walking.
#
But biking is the best because you absolutely you can't be you'll crash into something if you focus on a phone.
#
So I do a lot of thinking there.
#
And so when you talk about the pace and the structure that that's really helpful.
#
I remember when I was younger and read, I would put on music and that helped with reading.
#
Now, I don't my brain doesn't work that way anymore.
#
And I don't have a solution for reading.
#
I have a I probably cannot stick with a book for more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time.
#
And I don't know what to do about that.
#
And that's and some of it I blame the books on that.
#
They they're not information dense, as I said, the the blogs tend to be more information dense.
#
But even so, sometimes you you would like to go ahead and sink sink into a book.
#
Yeah. So yeah, you're right.
#
It is going to change the way people think.
#
I mean, there's some some people think it's going to it's going to be completely haywire that we're not going to be able to sort of reason logically anymore.
#
We're just going to be jumping from thought to thought.
#
I mean, I'm a little more hopeful for that, partly from the experience of this podcast.
#
Like when I began this podcast seven years ago, I thought people have short attention spans and got to hook them in the first 15 seconds.
#
Episode should be 10 minutes, 20 minutes.
#
And my longest episode was like nine hours, 53 minutes released, you know, three weeks back.
#
And it's just got a phenomenal reception.
#
And what I've realized is that we contain multitudes.
#
So there is a time where I am in a scrolling and swiping mode.
#
But people also want to go deep.
#
And when the rest of the media is a mile wide and an inch deep, then, you know, they value it at depth.
#
Like, you know, my other counter to the short attention span is that back in the day, you would have your typical Hollywood film is about 90 minutes or two hours.
#
Right. And today, when people start binge watching a show on an OTT platform, you're going to, you know, sit, you can sit and watch 10 hours at a go easily because you're just engrossed in it.
#
So I think that at one level, it is true.
#
And I lamented in myself that the rhythms can be, you know, shorter and choppier and you really have to control your smartphone usage.
#
But at another level, I think the hunger is there.
#
You know, ultimately, people who make any kinds of content, they can't they shouldn't make an excuse about, oh, people don't have attention spans anymore.
#
You give them compelling content, they will spend the time, they will consume it.
#
Yeah, I'd say one thing and this is I think my problem with podcasts is for long form.
#
I like my rhythm is read, process, read, process podcast.
#
It's like, you know, I didn't get a chance to process that thought.
#
Now you're onto the next one and I didn't get it.
#
That's a fair point. I mean, I think different media have their own advantages and disadvantages.
#
I think what happens with podcasts is that number one, people tend to listen when they're a captive audience, like on a bicycle, for example.
#
Yeah. So you're a captive audience.
#
You're working out or you're commuting or you're doing errands and people listen at higher speeds and which is easy to do because the brain can actually take in 500 words a minute.
#
So, you know, it normalizes very fast.
#
And therefore, like I did a three hour episode with the economist Karthik Moolithar on education and he speaks fast and someone transcribed it and it was 45,000 words.
#
And I'm thinking you're getting 45,000 words of directed conversation in 90 minutes because if you're listening to it at double speed and you're not going to be able to read that much of a book that fast.
#
Right. So I agree with you that that slow state where you read a paragraph and you think about something and your mind goes somewhere else.
#
That process isn't there, but at least you're listening to that conversation and you're getting introduced to something.
#
And I hope many of the people listening to this will, you know, buy your books and think about it, engage with your substrate.
#
And so it's part of that process.
#
Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't realize that you that you could process that much because, you know, I think of myself as reading fast.
#
But, well, that's my the other thing I'll pitch for reading as a long form thing is that you can skim.
#
I mean, I often talk about I read a book outside in, you know, I read what's on the cover.
#
Like what will the blurb say? What about the author?
#
What's what is the summary? And then I read the introduction and I read the conclusion.
#
And then I look at the table of contents, I say, well, you know, how are you going to deal with this issue?
#
Oh, is this chapter going to do it? So that's harder to do with a podcast.
#
But yeah, I think it definitely I can see where it would be easier to stay focused on a podcast.
#
Like the classic thing is somebody's jogging.
#
Well, if you're jogging and you've got that in your ear, you know, it's not like you're going to all of a sudden say, I'll check my email.
#
You know, you really you stick with it.
#
So before we go in for a break, one question following up from something you said about your teaching experiences,
#
which is you mentioned that the college kids you taught would be more transactional and not so, you know, plugged in,
#
whereas the high schoolers were much more plugged in.
#
And I'm just thinking about and perhaps this is a human condition, perhaps this is society.
#
But I'm thinking about the process of growing up where in an ideal kind of childhood, you got a lot of leisure time.
#
You're following your excitements and your passions and picking up hobbies and your mind is free.
#
And I worry that at some stage in our lives, what tends to happen is that everything become can become goal directed,
#
whereas, oh, I got to do these courses and et cetera, et cetera, because that's the job I want to get.
#
And when I get the job, you know, if you're an academic, I got to get tenure track.
#
I got to publish in the journals.
#
This is a fashion of the day. This is what will get me funding.
#
And there's a certain I mean, the life gets sucked out of people in that kind of process.
#
So do you think there's something to that?
#
Do you think that there is something that that's something that everyone should watch out for that kind of when you get on a groove,
#
then just becoming an automaton on that groove and the life getting sucked out of you?
#
Yeah, I would worry about that.
#
I think, yeah, people need time, their own time and not not to be always doing things for the to get to the next step in their career.
#
Let's take a quick break and continue after that.
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it?
#
Well, I'd love to help you.
#
Since April 2020, I've enjoyed teaching 27 cohorts of my online course, the art of clear writing and an online community has now sprung up of all my past students.
#
We have workshops and newsletter to showcase the work of students and vibrant community interaction in the course itself through four webinars spread over four weekends.
#
I share all I know about the craft and practice of clear writing.
#
There are many exercises, much interaction and a lovely and lively community at the end of it.
#
The course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST or about a hundred and fifty dollars.
#
If you're interested, head on over to register at indiancut.com slash clear writing.
#
That's indiancut.com slash clear writing.
#
Being a good writer doesn't require God given talent, just a willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm still sitting here with Arno Klink chatting about ideas and I want to talk about your book, The Three Languages of Politics and the ideas in that.
#
But before that, I also want to ask about how you sort of arrived at that openness of thinking about the world.
#
Because when I first heard of you in the early 2000s, it was as being one of the libertarian bloggers, quote unquote.
#
And for me, it was incredibly refreshing because these ideas simply were not there back in our discourse.
#
And luckily, the Internet allows you to access the world's knowledge and to form communities of choice as opposed to communities of circumstance.
#
So it was revealing for me.
#
But I think also there is a tendency there and there is a reason I don't anymore, though I'll identify with all those values, but I don't use that label anymore.
#
I don't use any labels anymore is because those labels tend to take you into tribalistic directions.
#
And then it becomes, oh, you libertarians did this or you progressives did this or you conservatives or this, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And of course, we have our own tribes back home as well.
#
But I do understand the allure of those labels, the allure of the tribal affiliation, in which case there is a danger that you will constantly disdain people on the other side.
#
And you will always find yourself to be the one who is full of virtue and who is enlightened.
#
Was that ever a trap for you?
#
Like, is it has it always been a habit of your mind, perhaps because you're engaging with the real world constantly.
#
You've been an entrepreneur that you don't really care about one point of view or another.
#
You just want to test everything against the real world and therefore you have to be open.
#
Yeah, I think having a habit of challenging people on your own side is a good habit.
#
And I think I've probably had it for a long time.
#
And again, the people that I've most wanted to imitate were people who challenged people on their own side.
#
Again, Bernie Safran, if you took one point of view, he would push back and give you the other point of view.
#
And Tyler Cowan, again, you can tell he enjoys it when he knows that he's annoying his audience.
#
I certainly don't do things to that extreme, but I will write a post knowing that I'm going to get flak from a lot of people in the audience.
#
And I get now several unsubscribes for every post that I do.
#
It's remarkable to me that the net is still positive, that the number of subscribers to my sub stack is still growing because I get so many unsubscribes.
#
By the way, I don't think that is because you piss people off.
#
I think every time I put a post as well, like I have about 10,000 followers or whatever, every time I put a post as well, there are a bunch of unsubscribes, but the net is always positive.
#
I think it's just that somebody sees it in their inbox and realizes, oh, I don't read this anymore.
#
And they unsubscribe, which is, I think, broadly sensible. You can't hold it against them.
#
Well, but I do notice spikes when I say something that's a little bit more extreme or just especially ones that counter people on the right.
#
I think I've drawn, I've really selected a lot of new right type people, even though I'm not so much new right myself somehow.
#
I guess it's sort of any port in a storm.
#
I guess they feel like, well, I don't always denounce Trump, even though I do announce a fair amount.
#
And in fact, yeah, we'll see how many unsubscribes I get.
#
I think it's tomorrow I've scheduled something where I have a few of my, let's say I'm less than flattering to JD Vance.
#
I'll just say that. And he's the current thing.
#
We are recording this in July 18th, so dear listener, you can check out Arnold's subtract poster of July 19th and see what you feel about it.
#
And I wonder if a lot of ideological affiliation happens not because of what you're for, but what you're against.
#
Like I remember I did an episode on Hindutva once with Akar Patel, the Indian writer and thinker, and he made a great point.
#
He said, I know what Hindutva is against, right? You're basically anti-Muslim. So I know what Hindutva is against.
#
What is it for? What is your positive vision in this? You know, very little there per se.
#
And similarly, earlier you mentioned about how the anti-American sentiment of the Chomskyites at the time of the Vietnam War could be a put off for some people, you know, and could, you know, just make you see that could turn you against them.
#
Do you think that a lot of politics today is driven by what people are against rather than what they are for, where people on the right will look at the left and see the complete chaos in the far left, the woke excesses, you know, and just say that, man, we've got to be against that.
#
And equally, the people on the left will just look at Donald Trump and they'll be like, what the fuck, you know. So does that also drive a lot of affiliation?
#
Yeah. And it's a simple heuristic. And I think it allows people to reach closure. So, you know, there's a lot of ambiguity really in politics, if you think about it.
#
I think in my post for the July 19th, I say that, you know, most people would say on a scale of one to ten on evaluating Trump, they're either one or they're ten.
#
And I say, I'm kind of between three and four. And that's, you know, that's not typical.
#
And I think so most of these things really have some complexity and some ambiguity to them.
#
But one way to simplify that is, well, if I'm sure that I hate Trump, like, you know, I was talking to somebody who's a conservative and she says, I'm going to vote for Biden if he's a corpse because she's a never Trumper.
#
And it really does. It enables you to reach closure and not have to not have to carry the ambiguity with you.
#
So, yeah, it's very good. I think I mentioned on my sub stack, I went to this, you know, the National Conservative Convention, even though I'm probably somewhere between a two and a three.
#
National conservatism. I'm not a not a big fan. I'm becoming less of a fan every day.
#
And the one guy said, I can't really define national conservatism, but I can tell you that it's against international progressivism.
#
And I thought, well, I could be against international progressivism.
#
And I thought that, you know, but that's that's probably the best, you know, the most broad, broadly acceptable definition of national conservatism you can come up with is what it's against.
#
There's this term, Eric Weinstein, who's also been on the show, he coined this term, the intellectual dark web.
#
And I think Barry Weiss wrote a piece about it for NYT.
#
And it was about this bunch of thinkers whose only common thread was what they were against.
#
They were otherwise widely different in terms of what they were for, whether you're looking at Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson or the Weinsteins or whoever, even Dawkins by some accounts.
#
But what they're against is common. And I just find this such a sort of a weird way to arrive at a particular place.
#
Let's talk about the book now. You know, what struck me about the book and you know, the first version of the three languages of politics came out in 2013, of course, before, you know, Twitter got to where it is, where it eventually got, where it just got more and more polarised and it was madness.
#
But there's a sentence from the book that sums up modern social media so well, where you write, our political debates are not debates, but are instead vehement expressions of tribal anger.
#
Right. And I find that more and more we are constantly speaking past each other.
#
And I want you to sort of elaborate, you know, for my listeners on what the core thesis of your book is.
#
Like, why is that? Why is it that everything is tribal anger and constructive discussions are so hard?
#
So, yeah, one of my lines is that I first wrote the book, I was, you know, I saw that there was a lot of anger in political discussions and I wanted to counter that.
#
And since then, it's not anger anymore. It's outrage.
#
So it's, yeah, I think that's the question that my book has a hard time answering.
#
So people love the classification system that I have.
#
So the simple classification system is that the progressive looks at people through an oppressor oppressed lens.
#
And you're the bad guy if you're the oppressor and you're a good guy if you're the oppressed.
#
And the conservative looks at a civilization versus barbarism,
#
that the good people are the people who defend civilization and the bad people are the people who try to knock it down.
#
And the libertarian looks at a liberty coercion axis and good people are people who fight for liberty
#
and the bad people are people who have, you know, favor of government coercion.
#
So that's a very simple model. And people, when they hear it, they say, that really, that helps organize things.
#
Like just lately with the Gaza war, it works almost perfectly.
#
Like if you want to explain why somebody sides with the Palestinians, it's because they're going to go with the oppressor oppressed framing.
#
And if you want to have somebody side with the Israelis, they'll talk in civilization barbarism terms.
#
The hard part of the book, and the parts that got rewritten and expanded the most,
#
is this question that you're raising of sort of what is it that makes people talk past each other this way.
#
And that gets into a lot of speculation about social psychology.
#
That, first of all, I think people use these axes to demonize the other side, that that's the main use.
#
It's not like someone sits there and thinks, well, how am I going to think about the Palestinian conflict?
#
Well, who's the oppressor? Who is the oppressed?
#
It's more like, how am I going to describe the people that I hate or the people that I'm against?
#
And I'll say, well, they're on the side of oppression, or they're on the side of barbarism, or whatever.
#
And so that raises the question, well, why do people want to organize things that way?
#
Why do they want to make sure they can demonize their opponents and signal to their friends that they understand that their opponents are demons?
#
And so that suggests that maybe that's what tribalism is kind of about,
#
is being able to use symbols, including language, to identify your own tribe.
#
And then you also use that language to be able to say to the people in your tribe, the other tribe is bad.
#
They are a blank. They're on the side of oppression, or they're on the side of barbarism.
#
So here's something that I kind of think about that, one, my instinctive response to every issue is, of course, from where I stand,
#
where I look at individual freedom and be outraged if that is infringed in any way, and I'll speak out against coercion.
#
And people often normalize the state, but don't realize that the state is the biggest locus of coercion.
#
Every act of government is an act of violence, as I once put it in one of my column headlines.
#
Here's a question, though. One way of thinking about this is that, let's say that you're progressive and I'm libertarian, right?
#
And you care about some kind, something on the oppressor, oppressed axis, and you're like, oh, you know, we've got to help group X because they're oppressed.
#
And I come at you and say that, yeah, I agree with you. I'll speak to you on your terms. I agree with you. We've got to help group X.
#
And the best way of doing that is through economic freedom so they can get prosperous enough to be liberated, right?
#
So I'm just taking one random argument for the sake of it.
#
And what this would be doing is that this would be appealing to consequences and then saying that these are the means that will get you there.
#
Whereas another way of thinking about it is that you could say that I don't care about the consequences.
#
Freedom is a core value or equality is a core value or tradition is a core value and the consequences don't really matter to me.
#
I'm closed off to all of that. This is a core value. You cannot mess with it.
#
So how does one think about that? Like when, you know, you arrive when like I often ask myself this question that, OK, I value freedom, but I value freedom.
#
It's easy for me to value freedom because at an instinctual level, I can look at it as a deontological goal that this is my first principle.
#
Individual agency, consent, all these things matter.
#
And equally, I can say it leads to the best consequences in the world, right?
#
But what if you decouple those two, like which of those comes first for you?
#
Like Robert Nozick has this great thought experiment about the experience machine, right?
#
So if I create a thought experiment for you right now, and I think I asked David Bose this as well at the end of our conversation.
#
If I create a machine and a thought experiment which is the socialist calculation machine and that machine has plugged into the neuron of every person in the world
#
and they not only know what they want now, but they know what she will want tomorrow and the day after.
#
And that takes away the issue of freedom and prices and perfect central planning is possible in this deeply dystopian world.
#
Would freedom still matter to you?
#
Let me take one step back.
#
There's this guy, Jeffrey Friedman, who died I guess about a year and a half ago,
#
who said that libertarians tend to jump from one thing to another.
#
Like if they're having trouble making the deontological argument, they'll make the utilitarian argument.
#
If they're having trouble making the utilitarian argument, they'll make the deontological one.
#
So what you're doing in your thought experiment is you're taking away the utilitarian argument and saying, well, would you rest solely on that?
#
Yeah, I don't know. I guess I'm going to reject the experiment.
#
I think David did the same thing. It's a tough question.
#
Yeah, I think it's a challenge to combine those things without feeling like you're just using one when the other is weak or something.
#
I think it's very hard to settle your feelings philosophically.
#
I don't sit there and think, well, Kling has the following set of axioms and therefore his beliefs follow from that.
#
I accept the fact that I've got various emotional reactions to things and I think that's the way most...
#
I sort of picture people as starting with some emotional affiliations like, I really like this person or I really like this country or whatever
#
and then work their way down to some rationales, but then finally work their way into these demonization approaches.
#
I guess I would say you pick your tribe. Once you've picked your tribe, you tend to use that tribe's language, especially when you're demonizing another tribe.
#
That's kind of my picture of it as opposed to you work out your political philosophy and go from there.
#
You might think that's your model, but I don't think that's psychologically what happens.
#
Actually, in a sense, in your book, you do point out that different frames can fit different parts of history.
#
For example, you speak about how when the civil rights movement happened, the progressive frame is perfect there.
#
That's what you need because there is great oppression and that framework just works perfectly.
#
You speak about how an urban crime in the 1970s went up, the conservative frame is great because order matters.
#
Order in society matters and things seem like they're breaking down.
#
And when it comes to something like the criminalization of marijuana with all the decades-long knock-on effects that it had on society, the libertarian frame is great.
#
Although I'm starting to back away from that.
#
I still don't like the state coercion, but we haven't arrived at the utopian solution on that yet.
#
For a moment, let me ask you a provocative question that these are, as you correctly said, the three languages of politics.
#
They are languages of politics. This is a rhetoric you've nailed all of that down.
#
How many of the people who profess to be part of these tribes actually believe in these principles or actually believe in these frames?
#
Because what we have seen more and more in recent times is that tribalism trumps all.
#
And I didn't mean it as a pun, but I guess tribalism trumps all because what we've seen with the Republican Party, for example,
#
is that as you've also written about in your subtract posts, the Reaganite Republican Party is basically dead.
#
Republicans who you thought will stand for free trade and will stand for certain principles have abandoned those principles completely
#
and given themselves over to a demagogue who stands for nothing any conservative from 20 years ago would ever approve of.
#
Yeah, well, the fourth language that's kind of emerged is kind of the somewhere versus anywhere language.
#
That is, there are the people who are very cosmopolitan and could live anywhere.
#
They would be happier in Prague than in Peoria.
#
And then there are the people who live in Peoria and would never want to even visit Prague.
#
So that's become a fourth kind of axis, and there may be others out there.
#
But ultimately, it's the tribalism, and the tribalism, I guess, can be based on many different things, right?
#
So people say, well, Trump is appealing to racists.
#
But actually, what he most appeals to is people who have kind of an honor culture framework.
#
That is, they want to insult other people.
#
They want to react very strongly to insults.
#
They're willing to fight over things.
#
You know, so when his recent, the recent assassination attempt where he puts his fist in the air, goes fight, fight, fight.
#
That's a real honor culture kind of behavior.
#
And that's actually, inner city blacks are also an honor culture.
#
So their instinctive reaction is likely to be very, very, feel much more comfortable with him than with Barack Obama or Kamala Harris.
#
You know, on the one hand, the skin color makes them want to feel like affiliate with Obama.
#
But the style of rhetoric and conduct and reactions, I'm sure they have a much higher affinity with Trump.
#
So if you didn't show the skin colors and you just showed the behavior,
#
inner city blacks would prefer Trump to Obama by probably a wide margin.
#
So anyway, I think the central phenomenon is the tribalism.
#
And then the principles are almost like a little bit of decoration around that, around that central thing.
#
So the question, you know, people say, who do I feel an affinity with?
#
And once they know who they feel an affinity with, then they can kind of coalesce around a set of sort of political positions that they can all share.
#
And then especially they can coalesce around who it is that they hate, that they don't like.
#
So the populist right, they sort of know that the college educated anywhere's hold them in contempt and the college educated anywhere's do hold them in contempt.
#
And so you have that tribal opposition.
#
And that's that's really the the poll around which a lot of this is taking place.
#
I mean, that's I mean, I assume that national rally in France is the somewheres in France and Macron represents the anywheres.
#
I don't know what what how the left is viewed, how the far left, you know, where they stand on that.
#
Maybe they're I don't know.
#
Maybe I think, you know, for example, I don't know where the yellow vest movement is.
#
Is it a left wing movement or is it is it part of a national rally type?
#
I mean, in the UK, clearly the traditional Tories are really part of the anywhere class.
#
And the reform is appealing to the somewhere class.
#
And that's obviously those those polls are strong.
#
And who knows where Starmer will try to, you know, where he's going to try to fit in or where he, you know,
#
my guess is probably more in the anywhere class.
#
And if he does, then that'll probably cause those polls to get stronger in both directions.
#
And, you know, in the U.S., obviously, Trump is for the somewhere appeals to the somewhere class.
#
But it's just it's how people naturally feel like who feels like me and who threatens people like me.
#
And then they once they sort out along those dimensions, then they know who threatens them.
#
And they they start they keep using language that emphasizes that threat.
#
So in the U.S., the progressives just keep saying that Trump's a fascist and he's a threat to our democracy.
#
And the Trump people, you know, if you go to the Republican convention, if you replay the speeches,
#
it's all about the elites who don't like America.
#
And Vance is saying, you know, seven generations of my people have been are buried in this cemetery in Kentucky.
#
And I'm going to be buried there.
#
I like, you know, my grandchildren bury me there.
#
You know, he's he's giving the somewhere pitch a perfect pitch on that, whether he really believes it.
#
You know, I read that news today.
#
And in your book, you talk about how what each of the tribes will tend to do is they will tend to take the least charitable interpretation of anything their opponent does.
#
And in the morning, there was a news about how Vance saying this makes him automatically racist.
#
It was interpreted as racist.
#
And I'm like, there you go again.
#
You're taking the literally the least charitable view instead of just being charitable.
#
And, you know, like and and there's this great book by Jan Werner Muller called What is Populism?
#
I've done an episode of my YouTube show on that as well.
#
And the one common element that is common to all populist movements across the world, including in India, is anti-elitism.
#
So I love this frame of yours somewhere versus anywhere that really kind of sums it up.
#
Like I came across like at a personal level, moving away from the political.
#
I came across this beautiful phrase a guest of mine Sugata Srinivasaraju used many episodes ago.
#
And the phrase was rooted cosmopolitanism.
#
And he described himself as a rooted cosmopolitan that you can be at home anywhere in the world,
#
but you also have a strong sense of where you are from and it matters to you.
#
And that culture and the community is ingrained in you in a very good reaffirming way and not in a toxic, exclusive, excluding way.
#
And my lament for myself was that I've always kind of prided myself on the cosmopolitanism and not being rooted enough.
#
And that's just a lament I have, which I guess one can fix if one wants to with time.
#
So somewhere, anywhere frame just makes a lot of sort of sense to me.
#
And I want to kind of take you somewhere now.
#
And this is somewhere back in time.
#
This is prehistory where we are living in tribes and where what you describe as our operating system is evolving.
#
Like in your book, you've got this lovely distinction between our hardware, which is our bodies and all of that.
#
The operating system, which is a way we are wired and then the cultural applications.
#
And I think of part of the grand enlightenment project or the grand human project is being able to mitigate our operating system or being able to work around it.
#
We are wired in good ways.
#
We are wired in bad ways.
#
And obviously just saying good and bad is subjective, but we are wired for tribalism.
#
But we are also wired for altruism and we are wired for both good things and bad things.
#
And what increasingly has been happening is that the bad parts of our hardwiring, as it were, have kind of been amplified by social media, by politics, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And tribalism being the kind of key to that.
#
I mean, even this attraction for the strong leader like Trump raising his fist like that with blood on his ear is such an I mean, it appeals to a primal part of you.
#
That is a kind of strong leader you want your leader to be when you're in a prehistoric tribe.
#
You want the most badass guy out there.
#
So how much of and you've got a great passage on it in your book as well.
#
How much do we need to take human nature into account while thinking about modern politics?
#
Yeah, well, I think the your point that some to some extent we're trying to fight human nature.
#
I mean, that's I guess Freud had the phrase civilization and its enemies that can't do you have to take tribalism is given.
#
Do you think you can actually rewire human brains so that they're not tribalist?
#
Yeah, I think a lot of cultural evolution and a lot of institutions have tried to overcome that.
#
So I think of you can think of people as playing games at three levels as an individual, as a group or tribe and as a society.
#
So if you're super individualistic, you will cheat on your group and your group tends to impose loyalty through norms and direct observation.
#
They can see you and they say, you know, you've got to wear this kind of clothing.
#
You've got to listen to this kind of music.
#
And you've got to obey these kinds of moral strictures.
#
And a group can be either very, very tight, very loyal or maybe not so loyal.
#
And then you have society, which is composed of these groups.
#
And one of the interesting things is that if the groups are too strong, the society can't control them.
#
So you get clans who are so loyal to one another as clans that they really won't obey the law.
#
You know, the Sicilian mafia will not obey the law because they're so close to one another as clans.
#
So these three levels of these games, it's an interesting challenge to try to get them to work because you want the groups to be functional.
#
You want the individual to be able to get a lot of what they want, but not to cheat on the group.
#
You want the group to be functional, but you don't want them to be so tightly wound up with each other that the rest of society that they cheat the rest of society.
#
So it's an institutional challenge. It's a cultural norm challenge.
#
And arguably the nature of that challenge has changed with the Internet.
#
So the process of group formation may be different.
#
The people may be observing other groups that they used to not observe, that they used to be able to keep out of their minds.
#
And I think most importantly is some of the institutional solutions to conflict are not working.
#
We don't have the legitimate establishment anymore. We don't have the legitimate media anymore.
#
And how we're going to reconfigure institutional structures is, I think, is up in the air.
#
I think the institutional structures that worked from starting in the 17th century and up through the 20th century don't seem to be institutional structures that we can sustain now.
#
So I have my question of is the United States too big? Is India too big?
#
And people ask about whether electoral systems can continue to work.
#
Do our universities work anymore? Journalism doesn't seem to work anymore.
#
And then the question is, if these institutional structures fail, does tribalism then get completely out of hand?
#
And we just can't get along and conflicts get out of hand.
#
Can you specify what you mean precisely by institutional structures that in the past could have controlled tribalism but no longer are able to?
#
Institutional structures include like, let's say there were huge economies of scale in media in the 20th century.
#
So it says you had just three television networks, you had the major newspapers, and the little guy couldn't get heard.
#
And the advantage of that is we had an apparent consensus and people who were outside of that consensus couldn't organize.
#
The disadvantage is that if the consensus happened to be very misguided, it could just take you off in a bad direction.
#
And in any case, we can't go back to that.
#
You cannot suppress dissident people from organizing in an internet world, or it's very hard to.
#
You have to be like Iran or China to do that, and that probably isn't the right institutional structure.
#
Although it could end up being that. That could be where the equilibrium heads.
#
But in a non repressive society, what kind of institutional structure are you going to have when dissidents are able to organize?
#
I also think about the way incentives play out.
#
For example, if you're a young person today, you go on social media, it's very comforting to find a tribe of people that you can belong to.
#
Now, back in the day, what would happen is when I was 20, I might have had all kinds of weird opinions, but I'm not putting them out there.
#
There's no need to double down on them. I can keep changing my mind.
#
No one's watching me. No one is taking screenshots.
#
Today, what happens is you go out there, the incentive is to find belonging in an ideological tribe.
#
And once you join it, the incentive is always to raise your status within your tribe by attacking people on the other side, never arguments,
#
or attacking people on your own side for not being pure enough and so on and so forth.
#
And it's a race to the bottom.
#
And you've similarly got this wonderful paragraph in your book where you write about the incentives of political pundits.
#
And you write, consider three goals that a political pundit might have.
#
One goal might be to open the minds of people on the other side.
#
Another goal might be to open the minds of people on the pundit's own side.
#
A third goal might be to close the minds of people on the pundit's own side.
#
Nearly all the punditry that appears in the various media today serves only the third goal, which is to close the minds on your own side.
#
And I'm just thinking of incentives that, of course, it will be that way.
#
Because you're taking a huge risk by speaking to the other side or by telling people on your own side that, hey, they might be wrong.
#
There's something they need to know.
#
It's so much easier to just preach to the choir and play that particular game.
#
And it then feels like a race to the bottom.
#
And my personal, almost optimistic sense is that the noise we hear on social media is really two vocal minorities shouting at each other.
#
The silent majority is sensible and it gets it.
#
But the point is that the noise drowns out the silence, obviously.
#
No, I think in this environment, you have to feel very secure in order, especially to challenge your own side.
#
Like, again, Tyler will do that.
#
Matt Iglesias, who's on the progressive side, will very often challenge people on his own side.
#
You have a lovely newsletter post on him as well of doing that just now.
#
Yeah, that's another mid-July post.
#
But he has to be very secure, both kind of emotionally and financially, to be able to do that.
#
There's a phrase that people use about people on social media, audience capture, that once you kind of establish yourself as being part of one tribe,
#
you become captured by your audience and you just have to keep satisfying that tribe.
#
You can't question them.
#
And there's a lot of that, a lot of that.
#
Again, there are people who dream of alternative institutional structures, myself included.
#
I had this idea that I called fantasy intellectual teams,
#
where I would develop a grading system that graded people on non-tribalistic, open-minded thinking.
#
And then individuals could then pick teams, like say, oh, I pick Tyler Cowan, I pick Robert Wright, I pick Matt Iglesias.
#
And based on who they pick, it would be like competing to do well.
#
And actually, with these AIs, you could actually implement that.
#
The hard part of implementing that was being able to grade all this content.
#
Well, now you can just run all this content through an AI and train the AI how to grade people.
#
So that would be a really different intellectual structure and would hopefully,
#
instead of raising the prestige of the most tribal, satisfying tribal people,
#
would raise the prestige of people who are most open-minded and fair-minded and charitable to those who disagree.
#
And there are other people who've come up with other schemes that maybe aren't as complex and weird as that.
#
And I think the availability of these AIs and their ability to just process all this stuff,
#
I think maybe we'll see something like that, where instead of people being rated by how many retweets they get,
#
they get rated by systems that evaluate the objectivity or fairness of their thinking.
#
And then if you're right that that's really what most people would like to see,
#
then those other, again, institutional structures, which may be a fancy term,
#
but could elevate the different sorts of people.
#
And so you wouldn't have the shouting minority be the most prominent people.
#
I think the shouters are in the minority, but the majority will either suffer from rational ignorance or cognitive laziness,
#
because what happens when an issue breaks is that the comfortable thing to do is pick a heuristic and judge it on the basis of that heuristic and simply go by that.
#
There's no appetite for complexity.
#
Plus, I figure if we were to gamify the system like this, where you are actually creating a new prestige system based on openness,
#
it would then be an incentive to be open for the sake of it and people might not take stands where they need to take a stand.
#
Yeah, that'd be a risk. But I think, I guess I don't think of the people that I would assign high prestige to as people who would be, you know, suffer from analysis paralysis.
#
So, yeah, I mean, yeah, I think this is my opinion.
#
The people that I think are good thinkers, I would be happy to see them have a lot more prestige.
#
Maybe that's kind of an automatic way of thinking about it.
#
But rather than saying that libertarians should have the most prestige or, you know, people who have the conservative slash libertarian view should have the most prestige.
#
I think people who have the ability to steel man the other side, to understand the weaknesses in their own position and who have a willing,
#
you know, who were able to say I would change their mind, I would change my mind if such and such happened.
#
Those people, if you gave those people the most prestige, I think the world would be a better place.
#
So I often, you know, when I think about how I've kind of evolved my frameworks of looking at the world,
#
I think that as far as facts are concerned, I'm always open to be challenged and proved wrong and all of that.
#
The world is deeply complex, you know, I can be corrected.
#
As far as values are concerned, I am by now fairly rigid on the things that I value like freedom, agency, autonomy, consent, etc.
#
What is it like for you? Like what part of your belief system is something that is non-negotiable?
#
And what are you open to changing? Like what, you know, what are the big things in which you've changed your mind over the years?
#
I think, you know, in terms of the three axes, I've definitely shifted way more toward liberty, coercion and toward civilization barbarism
#
and away from an oppressor oppressed framework.
#
Yeah. So what are sort of my deepest values and what are my shallowest values at this point?
#
I think if you scratch, you would find me as an elitist that I really want an elite to be a deserving elite.
#
And I really am bothered by people who I think of as undeserving elites,
#
people who either I think are too selfishly motivated or just not that intelligent.
#
Aren't most elites undeservingly elite?
#
I think we've gotten to a point where in some realms we're not selecting for the right people.
#
But I would say as of 1975, let's say the top college professors were probably the right people to be the top college professors.
#
I would say in general, the top business people, they've got a lot of luck, but they've also got plenty of skill.
#
I think if you randomly swapped out the CEOs of the top 200 companies for sort of random mid-level managers,
#
you would make those companies a lot worse and be a lot less effective.
#
Again, there's a fair amount of luck to it, but I think a lot of it is skill.
#
I mean, the incentives in the business world go in the right direction. You have to perform or you're in trouble.
#
Whereas I guess in academia, there's no feedback loop with the real world.
#
Well, there used to be, I think, a decent feedback.
#
The peer review and the tenure process and all that was, I think, pretty effective.
#
I think it just became corrupted and gamed over time.
#
And one of my views about systems that rank people is that they do get gamed over time.
#
So if I'm running a business and I say, all right, I'm going to compensate my salespeople this way,
#
within two or three years, maybe a little longer, they're going to figure out how to get a lot of income
#
with very little effort and real contribution to my company.
#
So I have to keep tweaking my compensation system to try to stay ahead of being gamed.
#
And I think what's happened in the academic world is that the system has been in place so long
#
that the successful people are now the people who know how to game it
#
and not the people who are doing the best research or the best teaching.
#
And so that's my view of how those institutions have decayed.
#
And that's something that we need to fix or else the universities are just not going to be centers of excellence anymore.
#
There's a great phrase I learned through your book, which is a phrase that I want to try to practice.
#
Instincts come in the way, but I want to try to practice and I want to inculcate in myself.
#
And that's slow political thinking. So tell me about slow political thinking.
#
I guess that would mean trying to take the most charitable view of the other side.
#
Instead of trying to explain someone's beliefs as a psychological problem or an evil tendency,
#
just say, well, how would a logical, reasonable person come to that point of view?
#
And I've realized over time, and really not over time, over the last 10 years, seeing people behave on social media,
#
that it is the most tempting thing in the world to come to judgment always, to judge other people,
#
because every time you judge someone, you are implicitly showcasing your own virtue or knowledge or both,
#
because you're judging them on either for being bad or for being stupid.
#
And you're simplifying your process, right? You're achieving closure really easily.
#
In an ambiguous situation, if you can disambiguate it, that saves your effort.
#
And one of the easiest ways to disambiguate it is to dismiss the other person.
#
Okay, I don't have to listen to it. How often do you see that?
#
You'll see somebody say, I remember so-and-so said this about the Iraq War.
#
Therefore, I never have to listen to them about anything again.
#
So, the willingness to tolerate ambiguity, I think that's another characteristic of people that I admire
#
and I think should have prestige, is to live with the ambiguity of a question.
#
I mean, that was the characteristic of Solo, that he, in fact, he would say,
#
whenever I read something by John Kenneth Galbraith, it makes me think about how great markets are.
#
And whenever I read something about Milton Friedman, all I can think about is market failure
#
and that ability to deal with ambiguity and not just sort of say,
#
well, you know, Galbraith once said this and therefore you can dismiss everything he says.
#
That's slow thinking and that's what I admire.
#
Is it harder and harder in these times?
#
Well, yeah, reaction time is rewarded, fast reaction time, especially on Twitter.
#
And again, I actually try to force myself against that by scheduling posts in advance.
#
Yeah, anytime you reward reaction time, obviously you don't reward people for dealing with ambiguity.
#
One of the trends that it took me a long time to come to terms with is how slow change can happen.
#
Like I think of the tragic example in the 19th century of Ignace Semmelweis,
#
who was a guy who first showed that before a surgery, if you wash your hands,
#
you're immediately cutting down on infection and deaths.
#
And he was laughed at, treated as a heretic all his life, even though he demonstrated it conclusively,
#
he died in a lunatic asylum.
#
Similarly, there's John Snow, who I think circa 1848 got out of paper,
#
showing that cholera was caused by contaminated water.
#
And he was ignored for about half a century, in which time millions of people, especially in India, died,
#
because this basic fact that he had proved was not taken into account.
#
And there is this whole cliche of how paradigms change one funeral at a time.
#
The pace of change is really slow.
#
So what is there in the world of economics today where you feel that they haven't changed fast enough,
#
that they are just wrong, like in what sense are they not washing their hands or treating their water?
#
A lot of things. I think the most thing is the emphasis on tangible factors of production.
#
So labor and capital. And first of all, labor is very heterogeneous.
#
There's a lot of difference between somebody working in a field and somebody working at the desk on a computer.
#
And capital is very heterogeneous.
#
And there are many different types of capital that people have to come to terms with.
#
There's social capital, there's knowledge capital, there's all sorts of human capital.
#
So what I call the neoclassical world, the way I picture the history is,
#
first you have Karl Marx saying that capital exploits labor.
#
And so he has this simple capital labor dichotomy.
#
And then the neoclassical reaction to that is to say,
#
well, we can show that labor and capital each earn their marginal product.
#
But it's still got the same, you know, same homogeneous capital, homogeneous labor way of thinking.
#
And we're so dependent on that now.
#
I have a post scheduled about that I call at the moment lies, damn lies, and the productivity data,
#
because everyone focuses on the productivity trend went like this and like this.
#
And there's data out there that goes out to the third, fourth decimal place.
#
And you can interpret that data all you want.
#
I think it's like barely got the order of magnitude right, if that.
#
So, you know, that's unfortunately why I don't have like it's one thing to say, well, now I have a cure for cholera.
#
I don't have a cure for measuring productivity.
#
All I can say is you're way over interpreting changes in the measures that are out there.
#
So and that's so I'm sort of caught there in that I sort of know things that I don't think work well.
#
I don't think macroeconomic.
#
I don't think anything where we aggregate works well.
#
I don't think macroeconomics works well.
#
I don't think the neoclassical measures of productivity and returns to labor and capital work well.
#
You know, what works well is supply and demand that that works really well.
#
And I think economists have lots of interesting things to say when they about things like,
#
you know, different types of goods and market structures and things like that.
#
But this overall question that people care about of somehow labor versus capital or productivity and the standard of living,
#
I think we way overstate what we know.
#
I've had economists, friends of mine, tell me something that really baffled me.
#
So maybe you can shed some light on it, which is their contention is that computers and technology,
#
especially computers with regard to computers, haven't raised productivity.
#
And I'm like that simply cannot be true.
#
Like, even if you look at a comparative laptop of the same price between today and 20 years ago, I can do so much more.
#
So and my instinct is that they must be measuring it wrong if they say that productivity hasn't gone up because of computers.
#
What's your take on that?
#
I just think it's yeah, we don't we ought to be at least agnostic, definitely not be confident in one direction or the other.
#
Again, this post will talk about things like that, that just as an example,
#
we spend as human beings in the developed world so much more of our life not in the labor force than we used to.
#
So we'll stay in school till we're in the late 20s.
#
We will retire at 65 and live to 90.
#
That never used 70 years ago.
#
That wasn't happening at all.
#
Does that really get counted in the productivity statistics?
#
I mean, sort of in that there's less labor input, but the sort of the value of that to us,
#
the kind of, you know, of just being alive doesn't doesn't get counted.
#
Yeah, just the way your life changes because of a computer.
#
I don't think it's I just don't think we have ways to really measure that the fact that you knew.
#
Look, the fact that we're here.
#
OK, how did you communicate with me?
#
Could you have done that?
#
No. How did you get here?
#
How did you get from Mercatus to here?
#
Could we have done that?
#
Could you have done that?
#
No. You know, the your Uber driver didn't have to worry about how to get here.
#
He just followed the map.
#
Just like one of my lines in this forthcoming post is how would you compare the quality of your cell phone in 2024
#
to your smartphone in 1974?
#
Well, it's a trick question.
#
There was it didn't exist.
#
Anyway, so I guess my line is we know that life has improved.
#
We know that you wouldn't want to go back 50 years and, you know, have root canal surgery when root canal was synonymous with torture.
#
As opposed to now, where it's like a non-event, you know, take some time.
#
But it's it's not you know, you don't experience real pain.
#
It's you just I think you just have to go with your gut.
#
I guess I'd rather go with my gut than than try to look at the official productivity statistics,
#
which I just don't think they can they can measure what the satisfaction that you get from goods or what the inputs really were to produce them.
#
You mentioned how I got here this morning and I keep telling people that we normalize this stuff.
#
We are surrounded by magic.
#
Thirty years ago, you told me that there'd be something like maps.
#
I'm never going to get lost again.
#
I can read any book I want to at this moment in time.
#
We take it for granted.
#
I mean, just thinking about it should just fill us with with so much joy.
#
And, you know, I've taken a lot of your time today.
#
So that that comedy routine with the I think it's Louis C.K. on the plane.
#
And you're mad because the Wi-Fi is not working.
#
Here you are on this machine that can take you from one part, half the side of the country to another in a few hours.
#
You're like mad that the Wi-Fi is not working.
#
And that too when they just introduce the Wi-Fi.
#
It's a great gag by Louis C.K.
#
I'll link it from the show notes.
#
So my last question to you is about joy.
#
It's for me and my listeners.
#
I recommend books, music, films, anything that fills you with joy and so much joy that you want to share it with the world.
#
Well, it's hard because what I enjoy most is this Israeli dancing,
#
which has this huge barriers to entry now because there you really need to know two or three hundred dances before you can go to a session and feel like you can participate.
#
So, you know, the kids who do it now, the kids who overcome those barriers to entry,
#
they're like they must be on YouTube all the time because they're and they're you know,
#
some of them will do dances from like the night that were composed in the 1970s that I never learned.
#
So I'd say I think, you know, different people can do different things.
#
I think that some form of physical activity, I think I recommend it does.
#
But whatever it is, I mean, for me, bicycling is a big one and the dancing is a big one.
#
But whatever does it, I mean, there I mean, there are people for whom travel is just the greatest thing.
#
I mean, Tyler, clearly I have friends who like all they can talk about as well.
#
My next trip is here. My next trip is there.
#
Doesn't appeal to me, but that doesn't mean that they're not enjoying it.
#
So I don't know. Does that answer your question well enough?
#
It answers my question well enough.
#
And, you know, with dancing, I remember you, you know, again written about it on your website
#
where you point out this particular dance you really like.
#
I hope I pronounce it right, called Ad or Haboker.
#
Yeah, I just looked at it last night just to make sure I was remembering it. Yes.
#
Yeah, and you pointed out about how it's like, you know, there are light circles of about eight people
#
and the dance keeps building up momentum and at no point can you drop hands
#
or the person next to you will just careen out of the circle.
#
And I looked at it as a metaphor for society about how we, you know, all in all these unseen subtle ways,
#
you know, rely on each other and, you know, there's something really interesting there.
#
And by the way, you know, your last answer might well be interpreted as advice to people to go out walking or running or cycling.
#
And chances are, if this is a podcast, they probably are walking or running or cycling as they listen to this.
#
Arnold, thank you so much for your time. You've been really generous. I appreciate it.
#
Okay, thank you. Hope it works.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
The production of the show, you can go over to seen unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking.
