Having lived approximately half my life before the Internet, and half after, the common notion that the Internet broke a stranglehold on information dissemination strikes me as plausible nonsense. The unstated assumption in that notion is that we're talking about *useful* information, and information that the receiver can distinguish from noise. In my experience, it's no easier or harder to get useful information distinguishable from noise today than it was in 1975. The total amount of information flowing is certainly much larger now -- but so is the amount of bullshit, lies, and Tulip Craze ephemera, through which one has to sort. On balance it's a wash.
I don't think this take is accurate, Carl. For one thing, the Internet allows people with a particular dissenting view to quickly find each other and aggregate, reinforce each other's beliefs, groupsource research, etc. So regardless of the quality of the information, common knowledge that one is not alone along with rapid sharpening of talking points and outrage can have a huge effect on social processes.
It certainly does have a huge effect. But not, I am coming to believe, a positive one. So far as I can tell, strangely enough, the facility with which this thing happens acts more to *close* minds, *isolate* people from different viewpoints, and *prevent* useful debate and the free flow of new information. You get an *intense* flow of information that reinforces someone's prejudices or tribal identities, but even less information that challenges them than he would have gotten willy nilly in 1980, unless he bucks his in-group and takes psychologically difficult steps (earning him down-votes beaucoup) to avoid echoing the echo chamber.
Weirdly ironic, but not entirely precedented, in terms of at least the initial effect of new communication technology (TV, radio, and even books and pamphlets in their day). I expect it will settle down eventually, as we get used to it, but I think (1) the effect now is *against* rather than *for* any improved exposure of the generic person to new and paradigm-shifting information, and (2) when it eventually settles down, we'll be back at the status quo ante, with people about as well-informed as they ever were. Id est, I don't think the technology matters very much, its the nature of people that controls their habits of thought and informedness.
I think this opinion has to be based either on confirmation bias, or a very particular definition of 'information.'
Like, I can open Wikipedia on my phone at any moment and learn most anything I want about history, science, recent news, philosophy, trivia, whatever, at any moment. If that accounting is too shallow, I can get on scihub and read the direct research papers on any topic I want. This would have taken many hours and a trip to the library in the past, for a much lower chance of success.
But if by 'information' you mean something like 'the true answer to controversial questions, unsettled science, and long-standing matters of debate', then yeah, the internet can't give us that... but only because that's not something that really exists, in as simple and neutral a format as 'information.' You can get the takes from every side easier than you could have in the past, but that doesn't magically produce a 'correct' answer that's visible to everyone.
In some cases, the information wasn't available because the person had no one who'd teach them-- the story has a feminist framing. In some cases, there's just so much to know, or it's easier to learn from a video than a manual.
I recall they did a bunch of gathering, chanting, and running around, but there were no concerted efforts to actually get past the soldiers who were called in to reinforce the perimeter.
About 1500 people showed up for some "Storm Area 51"-themed music festivals held at a small town a few miles outside the main gates of the base. There were smaller gatherings directly outside three of the gates, with about 1100 people total filtering in and out over the course of the "raid". It sounds like the "raiders" at the two gates on the Lincoln County side of the base were pretty well-behaved for the most part and the authorities just waited them out while they partied and took selfies. The Nye County sheriffs chased away about 40 people from a gate on the other side of the base; I'm not sure if that was driven by the people at the Nye County gate being rowdier or by the Nye County sheriffs taking a harder line than the Lincoln County sheriffs.
A couple of Dutch tourists got caught by military security after driving off-road into an unguarded area of the base perimeter. They got prosecuted for something or other (I'm guessing criminal trespass) and sentenced to three days in jail. One woman tried to walk past the guards at one of the Lincoln County gates and got turned back with a warning. And about half a dozen people got arrested for things like public urination or "alcohol-related offenses".
"We remember the Arab Spring, those few months in 2011 when revolts spread across various Arab countries and longstanding regimes were toppled by protesters with smartphones and Twitter accounts"
No, they weren't. That a provincial American understanding of the situation, by people who have no geopolitical savvy (besides what they read in probably the worst press on the world on the matter, fully in bed with their national interests and unable to think globally - unlike, say, the British and French colonialists of yore) - and if they ever travelled anywere outside the US they just went right for the McDonalds or the local joint annointed by some travel guide.
There were protests in the Arab countries, and regimes were toppled. Like it has been dozens of times in the past. But it had nothing to do with people with "smartphones and Twitter accounts", except that this time around, because of smartphones and Twitter being a thing, there were also people with "smartphones and Twitter accounts" present to document some of them and relate to the US public.
Smartphones and Twitter documented those - and from the skewed perspective of the top 10%, westernized, part of the population, who had nothing to do with the driving force of the protests.
But it makes for a nice story (social media bring democracy) and it makes for nice heroes (like us here, modern, westernized, with smartphones and twitter accounts, who even post in English) as opposed to the disenfranchized, religious, uncool, poor, Arab-speaking masses, closer to white trash or rednecks than to the aspirational US upper 10% middle class that celebrated the Arab Spring.
The accusation that Scott has no geopolitical savvy and knows nothing of the world outside McDonald's is unkind and I'm pretty sure untrue. I am also reasonably certain it's untrue (and still unkind) of the book's author. Please refrain from ad hominem attacks.
Could you please point to some sources (in Arabic, if necessary) on the composition of the protests? Could you please suggest how the uncool masses discovered when and where the protests would happen, since you posit that reading about them on Twitter was not, in fact, the major mechanism?
Hey, Egyptian here. The grandparent is certainly being very unkind toward Scott, but yes, citing social media as the cause for the Arab Spring is like seeing a saudi-arabia-sized oil field with zero security being set on fire by a lighting match, and thinking that the lighting match is the cause. It's certainly *a cause*, but a shallow one, and it would have happened sooner or latter.
A closer model to truth IMO (I tried finding the type of sources you requested but couldn't, so excuse me if the following reeks of "Lived Experience Trumps Anything^TM". Anyone feel free to prove me wrong with sources.) would be that :
1- The Mubarak regime was a fucking nightmare, everybody *knew* it was a fucking nightmare (how could you not when you're living it), and the system was just teetering on the edge of instability; kept in place by sheer willpower and Please-Come-With-Us-To-This-Very-Nice-Security-Compound-At-2AM-To-Have-A-Cup-Of-Tea-While-Discussing-Why-You're-Very-Wrong energy. There was demonstrations as early as 2005, not anything nearly comparable to Jan25th, but angry and grassroots.
2- Then somebody (Khalid Said, peace be upon his soul) got caught saying something Very Wrong, gets taken to This Very Nice Security Compound, is tortured and dies, the horrific images of his dead body is leaked and a facebook page created in his name to broadcast his horrible death and what to do about it.
3- The gods of complex systems and emergent phenomena decide that this would be the end of a 30-year-old repressive regime.
A very telling memory I have is me sitting with my cousins, a bunch of kids, I'm 22 years old now, and discussing whether to hang out at our favorite public library, on Jan28th. This was *after* Jan25th, the 3 days in between were low-intensity demonstrations. The fact that some people weren't taking it seriously (this trickling down to me and my cousins through adults) is indication that this wasn't new, people were demonstrating long before social media. Jan28th turned out to be The Friday Of Anger, where an attempt by the Mubarak regime to quash the demonstration backfired and the revolution reached its first million.
Also Egypt was (is?) behind the times in internet reach and social media reach, think of whatever facebook's reach in your (probably western) country in 2011, dial it back to 2006-2007 numbers, that was probably facebook's reach in Egypt in 2011. The fact that there was a million after just 3 days seems to support that, at best, social media just turned in the key and pumped a few volts into the system for about 1 seconds, then the fuel burned and the engine revved up and kept running on it's own.
> citing social media as the cause for the Arab Spring is like seeing a saudi-arabia-sized oil field with zero security being set on fire by a lighting match, and thinking that the lighting match is the cause. It's certainly *a cause*, but a shallow one, and it would have happened sooner or latter
Such trigger is not so unimportant. There are many regimes that are nightmares, everybody is aware of it and nothing happens.
In such cases trigger and something that triggers coordination is very important.
In communist Poland such trigger was visit of a pope which was quite important point. One of things mentioned by my family is that it made clear how strongly state-controlled TV is lying. And how many people are actually not liking the rulers.
> It's certainly *a cause*, but a shallow one, and it would have happened sooner or latter.
So George Floyd's murder wasn't "the cause" of the BLM protests these past few years, because the simmering racial resentment would have manifested eventually anyway? You could make that case, but I think it rewrites how we view causality. Catalysts are important factors.
Judging by the cases going back to at least Michael Brown, the underlying "simmering" anger was there and waiting for the right case. If it had not been George Floyd, it's quite likely it would have been another case shortly thereafter. Not to say that George Floyd was a bad case or cause, but that it wasn't the real cause. George Floyd was a particularly bad symptom of the concerns specifically being brought forward already. "Say his/her name" was already trending with a list of cases.
An alternate way of looking at it though, is that the simmering anger had been there for a long time, but in years of viral news stories, none of them had been viral *enough* to start a movement, and it took an actually exceptional catalyst, one you don't get every year or two.
I don't think this is quite right either; I think that the succession of viral news stories served to stoke tension, and that the George Floyd story wouldn't have sparked a movement if it had happened years earlier. But I think it's likely that it did take an unusually compelling trigger. If George Floyd's killing hadn't taken place, would some other killing by now have gone viral enough to spark the movement instead? I think it's likely not. And if things go on long enough, maybe, without anything really getting resolved, a portion of the populace which obsessively shares certain topics and pushes them to become viral moves on to other things, like how the virality of gender-related subjects declined with time.
Sorry, that's just not how causality works. If you stack up a chain of dominoes and then knock over the one on the end and cause the rest to crash down, it just doesn't make sense to say "the finger didn't cause the dominoes to fall, clearly they were setup to fall and would have fallen eventually".
"There were protests in the Arab countries, and regimes were toppled. Like it has been dozens of times in the past."
Is that right? Has there been a moment since 1968 when this many Arab regimes were toppled at once (or at least sent into permanent civil war, like Syria)?
IMO this is a too narrow and literal (and rhetorical) question. The point is that these sorts of things are common. There was a moment like that in Europe in 1989. There was a global moment like that in 1968 and 1848 and others. 1989 resulted in a domino effect of toppling regimes, the others didn't. Also, only a minority of the Arab world saw an actual toppling... But similar moments of revolutionary fervor that spread regionally or globally were common. Also, decolonization movements of the 1950s and 1960s.
There were protests in the Arab countries, and regimes were toppled. Like it has been dozens of times in the past. But it had nothing to do with people with "smartphones and Twitter accounts",
Social media didn't play a huge role? In previous times nobody would have hear of a fruit vendor self immolating in some god forsaken village in Tunisia. It went viral and kicked off protests organized people people via phones, because everyone has a phone even in godforsaken villages in Tunisia
Come. People have been sparked to violence by assorted symbols for millenia. War of Jenkin's Ear, et cetera. It may have taken longer for those symbols to do their work, but the mechanics and instability aren't a jot different, just the time-scales, which seems like the least interesting aspect of the phenomenon.
I think you're mistaking the technology for the social mechanisms. A dozen fruit vendors a day sef-immolate in Tunisia, so to speak, and a dozen dozen outraged FB posts/Tweets about the outrages starve and die every day. What's interesting is why one event causes an avalanche and all the rest don't -- and this is true whether the news of the even spreads by Internet meme, broadsheets and pamphlets, or actual bloody shirts being passed from hand to hand.
"It may have taken longer for those symbols to do their work." Exactly.
We may have all been dead before the combination of outrage and organization led to a revolution in Tunisia. Technology affects culture and drastically changes time scales, and the effects may well be amplified where media was previously tightly controlled. Pre social media, it would have been rare to find an Arabic language screed of Ben Ali. People would grumble privately, but the solidarity of a movement could never build up.
"What's interesting is why one event causes an avalanche and all the rest don't"
This is sort of like blaming your diabetes on the donut you ate just before you were diagnosed. A buildup of mass hysteria is not caused by one single event. In 2012 an angry mob attacked the US Embassy in Tunis and looted and burned the American School. Did the attack occur because "The Innocence of Muslims" was released in the US, causing an avalanche?
Nah, I would say blaming the match that lit the fire on social media -- when social media has bupkis to do with providing the tinder and fuel -- is like blaming the last donut you ate for your heart attack. And the fact that the symbols take longer to do their work doesn't mean there were any fewer of them, that the interval between them was longer, or that they brought any less chaos into our lives. I'm sure there's some effect, it just isn't very interesting. Did you know people died of accidents *before* there were cars? They got thrown off horses, fell down wells, went up in flames when the gas valves went bust. The *methods* by which people die in accidents is not especially interesting, compared to the fact that they do, and the psychological reasons they do, and the social effects of their doing so.
I am not sure if you would then say that hypothesizing on the effects of the printing press on society is just not very interesting. But there are plenty of books about megatrends in society and history. So many people find this a fascinating line of inquiry. Suddenly the symbols are different (ubiquitous video of everything), and their means of dissemination is unlike anything humans would have imagined fifty years ago. And this is not some uncontrollable force. Governments can control social media, children can be taught to love it or hate it. The psychological effects of being tethered to a smartphone and the social effects of living in this way.
You need to actually compare similar events. I wrote about this 10 years ago in a post about how technology does not change that much when it comes to things actually happening. Key quote:
"Let’s take the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989 in which I was an eager if extremely marginal participant. On Friday, November 17 a bunch of protesters got roughed up, on November 27, a general strike was held and on December 10, the president resigned. In Egypt, the demonstrations started on January 25, lots of stuff happened, on February 11 the president resigned. The Egyptians have the Czechs beat in their demonstration to resignation time by 5 days (17 v 23). This was the “Twitter” revolution. We didn’t even have mobile phones. Actually, we mostly even didn’t have phones. Is that what all this new global infrastructure has gotten us? Five days off on the toppling of a dictator? Of course, not. Twitter made no difference to what was happening in Egypt, at all, when compared to other revolutoin. If anything Al Jazeera played a bigger role. But on the ground, most people found out about things by being told by someone next to them. Just like we did. We even managed to let the international media up to speed pretty quickly, which could be argued is the main thing Twitter has done in the “Arab Spring”.
Isn't "getting the international media up to speed" - via technology exactly what this is about. People grow angry far more often than they rebel. But now the anger can more easily coalesce into something. Isis is very much fueled by the new forms of global communication. Implicating technology is merely saying that it is one important aspect. Worth hypothesizing about its effects, arguing, but to say the internet made no difference in mass protests of the last 10 years is a bold claim. The sheer amount of stuff online would indicate otherwise.
I was kind of a late adapter of social media and Arab Spring was one of the first major events that I followed through social media. One thing that struck me at the time was how enthusiastic some of my social media contacts (esp on Facebook) were about Arab Spring. Lots of posts, even a very erudite posting with commentary of "Ozymandias" after Mubarak fell. I remember at the time finding it incredibly odd because of *who* among my FB were really getting into it. None of these people had any family, friends, or work ties to the countries involved. And very importantly none of these people were especially enthusiastic about US politics. There was a lot of big stuff that happened domestically in that same time frame (Tea Party, 2010 midterms, Gabby Giffords shooting, Occupy Wall Street) but it didn't attract a lot of interest (negative or positive) from these FB friends. As Arab Spring died down, so did their posts and they didn't seem to really pick up that enthusiasm with other world geopolitics later on.
I've always found it so curious why Arab Spring resonated, albeit briefly, like that with Americans on social media. I've wondered if anyone else noticed this phenomenon and if they have any thoughts on what caused this brief "trend"? I hate to use a flippant term like trendy to describe something as serious as Arab Spring but that's honestly how it seemed to play out in my small world of FB at the time.
Maybe these people don't usually talk politics because they don't want to alienate anyone. But the Arab Spring was comfortable to talk about because being pro-democracy and anti-dictator isn't controversial in the U.S.
That very well could be it. These folks were fairly normie, a bit more Blue leaning than Red. Kind of had a feel of LARP-ing, or rooting for a sports team
Re: Bay of Pigs Invasion: Allan Dulles just did it [invasion]. Thinking that Kennedy would provide air cover [which he had earlier refused to do]. His bet failed-Kennedy held his ground & refused.
I recall that the spooks and generals had previously assured Kennedy that no overt US assistance would be needed for the Bay of Pigs to succeed.
Of course, the spooks and generals were consciously lying, but they reckoned that at that point, Kennedy would have no choice but to escalate. Kennedy stood up to them.
I that's true, seems like a good case of why you should avoid "over-strategizing" (or deceptive tactics), that is, supposing people will think in specific ways and react in specific ways so you can get what you want, often by *proposing the opposite of what's correct*, or divulging false information. Those strategies are brittle because... well, predicting the future is hard and we know much less about other people's behavior and mental state than intuition often indicates. Besides, deceptive tactics have a chance to turn unethical (why is your interpretation better than his?).
Describing the Nixon-Kennedy debates, Kenneth Rexroth criticized Nixon for a totally unfounded claim that Kennedy would intervene in Cuba:
Faceless, the Vice President was able to put a policy of “roll back the Iron Curtain” into his opponent’s mouth. I doubt if this was as effective in the sharper image of television. Likewise, and even more so, this was true of the dispute about intervention in Cuba. The Saturday morning papers all carried outraged cries from conservative politicos all over Latin America who presumably had not seen, but only heard, the show. I talked to no “man on the street,” however simple, who saw the show and who took away the impression that Senator Kennedy had advocated military intervention.
Notwithstanding post 11/22/63 Camelot mythology, as a Senator, Kennedy was an ally of McCarthy (and RFK even more so) until the man became a liability.
More to the point, Kennedy ran for president in 1960 on a platform that Team R in general and Nixon in particular(!) were "soft on communism". Kennedy frequently cited the supposed "missile gap" as evidence.
Eisenhower's famous "military industrial complex" speech is best understood within that context.
This interpretation seems straightforwardly wrong. The invasion plan went ahead on Kennedy's direct order and approval. He was definitely wishy-washy about the level of support he wanted to provide: not concerned about committing U.S. resources, but he wanted to remain completely and plausibly deniable. Once the invasion was underway and it was clear that the U.S. would be implicated, he changed his mind about it all. "Dulles did it" is whitewashing.
Can I ask you, Scott, how on earth do you write such comprehensive book reviews? Do you write your thoughts as you read? Do you read the book twice and only write on the second readthrough? Do you annotate on the margins and later revisit those notes? I'd love to write reviews as good as yours!
(3) Draft outline of the main points I want to hit in the review.
(4) Reread most, or all, of the book. During this second read-through, I take notes about details I want to use to fill in the argument and quotes that I want to include.
(5) Write the review. If the review can be written in sections, I do this during step (4).
(6) Edit what I've written.
This certainly takes much longer than just reading a book, but I have found it to be worth it for at least some books.
But then I have to reread it, which will bias it to make me only review things I like (as opposed to Scott which I think have several times review things he ultimately abhors)
The First Rule of good writing is to have something (worthwhile) to say. I think Scott simply has a lot of experience writing and a lot of experience in relating to culture and various topics. There is an overarching theme in his writing that reflects trying to understand, and critique, civilization. If you approach books likewise, in offering a perspective or a way of grasping the book that relates to useful/interesting conclusions to the reader, then it's very likely to be a good review, and a good read.
The whole coronavirus response seems like a refutation of Gurri's argument, doesn't it?
Despite the general failure of experts and high modernism at everything they tried, the masses enthusiastically lined up behind the "center" and embraced all kinds of what would have seemed impossible policies. In the UK, one reason they were slightly delayed in implementing a lockdown in March 2020 was that they believed it couldn't last more than 2 weeks before the people revolted and they'd lose that option forever. Instead, the UK had one of the longest lasting and most severe lockdowns in the world. No Western government had trouble getting whatever policies they wanted through, but many of their results look pretty crappy, particularly compared against the likes of South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China (assuming you trust them).
Where was the public revolt against the pandemic response? Other than the existing undercurrent of anti vax sentiment in the US, it doesn't look to have materialized.
If Gurri's argument about mistrust of the elites was true, then I would have expected far more pushback. While there were no pandemics in living memory, there were a great deal of pandemic scares: Bird flu, SARS, MERS, Ebola. All of these were hyped up as massive dangers and ended up affecting a tiny subset of the world. I would expect a lot more suspicion of coronavirus than what occurred, if Gurri's thesis were true.
And in the US a great deal of the pushback was fomented by Trump himself. Literally any other president, Republican or Democrat, would have been a lot more measured and certainly less inflammatory. The BLM protests were a confounding factor too in that they fed the general anxiety, led to violence and follow-on counter protests, which led to more violence and so on and so on...
Look at all the straight people who don't remember that we're still in the HIV pandemic! At least that pandemic moved a lot more slowly, so a few years of government stalling had the same effect as a few weeks of government stalling in this one. Also, it turned out that some subpopulations were far more exposed than others, so community-focused responses were able to accomplish things without as much heavy-handed government intervention.
That said, we did have some close calls with SARS, swine flu, Zika, and Ebola, that most people managed to largely ignore. It's a bit hard to tell how the results of those ones affected what people thought about this one.
I mean there really is lacking a formal definition of the word pandemic, but, in the US at least, <40k HIV infections per year (and decreasing!) doesn’t really qualify as what I would intuitively classify as a ‘pandemic’. Especially seeing as we are at ~130k infections per day with covid as of when I write this. You might forgive people for overlooking something affecting 0.0001% of the population.
But I think the bigger thing is that in the early 1990s, this was still clearly rising, and there was nearly uncontrolled spread in most parts of the world. It was much slower than covid fortunately, but clearly a pandemic.
With modern antiretrovirals making treated people unable to spread and enabling prophylactic use for people who might be at risk, we are basically at the point of the HIV pandemic that we will be with covid once the delta wave is clearly subsiding and vaccination is very widespread.
Ah yes, I did fuck up that percentage. I do think you make a good point about HIV in the 90’s, though mostly I was responding to the “we are still in the HIV pandemic”.
To the larger point, I ultimately think that 90’s HIV varies significantly enough from Covid (in kind and quantity) that the closest parallel is the 1919 flu. So I consider it fair to propose that we as a people might act differently if another such situation pops up in the future than we have this go around.
It has materialized. Scott's belief it hasn't is rather interesting. I just watched a video of large scale protests in Paris against their vaccine passports, for example. In Melbourne the police are deploying roadblocks to stop people reaching protests.
What's actually happened is simply that the media's independent spirit has collapsed to the point where they may as well be fully state owned, Soviet style. "We hear no reports of protests -> no protests are happening" is not a valid inference anymore. There could be massive protests every single day and you'd never hear about them unless you were connected to the people going in some way, or keeping an eye on "border" sites. It's also worth noting that outside of places controlled by the "elite axis", enforcement of the rules is very poor - a kind of quiet protest.
As for the masses embracing these measures, they were never allowed to do anything else, were they? In dictatorial systems with large scale information control, it makes little sense to talk about whether people support things or not. Outcomes are unconnected to support, the people who are supposed to measure and report on support won't do so, and people who support the measures may well be doing so because they were lied to anyway. So, what does support of the masses mean? Do the Chinese masses support the CCP, because they haven't engaged in bloody counter-revolution? And of those who do, to what extent is it because they believe what they're told by the government?
They might care, but they are also rational people and know they could a shitfit catch a fist or a pink slip (or, in their worst imaginings, a bullet!) for making a stink.
IT's a weird situation re. precautions, where I imagine people who want strict enforcement ala Singapore style "Take you mask off inside, and we'll take you outside and beat the stupid out of you with sticks" are the majority, but people who would actually be willing to take the last step are a clear minority; as it were.
Lot's of people who will be happy if it happened, very view willing to cut the switch.
This reads like a fully generalized argument against the current world order. Seatbelts, the minimum wage, banks, schools, the job market -- it's all powered by manufactured false consciousness, we all live in a CCP-equivalent but are too blind to see it, so tear it all down. Of course this view can be tempered with an exemption list of what parts of the world order are pleasing enough to us that they get to not be purged with fire for the time being, but then we get into the question of who gets to write the list. This is the sort of thinking that states like to export to other states as a form of silent warfare in hope that they implode and collapse in on themselves.
Ah, but it is a fully generalized argument against the current world order - and rightly so!
To be a citizen in a democratic society is to accept responsibility for its functioning; government by the people (through their elected representatives) means that the people are ultimately sovereign.
The implication is that we shouldn't be taking anything for granted. The fact that we were born into a society with seatbelts, the minimum wage, banks, schools, the job market, etc. in no way implies that this is the natural, immutable, nor necessarily desirable state of affairs. To take a cue from the UK concept of sovereign Parliament: the fact that the Parliament chose to do A at some point in no way prevents it from choosing to do not-A at some future time. Similarly, even codified constitutions can be changed - with sufficient public support; with the mechanism typically set out in the constitution itself.
We can - indeed, ought to - question the status quo. Perhaps, we decide that some aspects are worth keeping now (though not necessarily - in the future). Perhaps, we decide that others are not. What we ought not do, however, is assume that "this is just the way things are".
Who gets to write that list? The citizens do, through the constitutional (written or unwritten) governance mechanism. That's what living in a democratic society means.
Strange you take it that way. It reads to me like pointing out measurement error of public opinion is rife. The American mainstream media is uninterested in measuring or reporting on dissatisfaction with a Democrat president's handling of things, nor are they interested in reporting foreign protests against similar policies. Neither do they want to report things like "Outside of major cities, damned near no one follows the CDC dictates, or thinks they matter." Does that mean those who live in major cities think the dictates are a great idea? Who knows... we just know that, like those living under the CCP, protesting and disobedience has a much higher cost, so we can't take conformity as evidence of agreement.
"The American mainstream media is uninterested in measuring or reporting on dissatisfaction with a Democrat president's handling of things"
If I google news "biden approval rating" there are hundreds of articles on how bad it's gotten, likely caused by the media's own criticism of the Afghanistan withdrawal. So this just seems straightforwardly and obviously false.
The media isn't loyal to Biden personally, they're loyal to the cause. Trump is gone and Biden has no Republican opposition that's any threat, so they don't need to keep Biden specifically in power for the cause, and Afghanistan isn't one of the cause's issues.
I don't know what claim you are defending. The idea that the media doesn't cover opposition to COVID measures, or opposition to Biden, is clearly shown false just by doing some simple searches for articles. Maybe there's a more nuanced version of the argument than what Mike H and Doctor Hammer are saying, but no one has made it yet.
there's a lot of overlap between war profiteers and media barons and US media is extremely jinogistic, insofar as the press turned on Biden it was *because* he left Afghanistan
Not sure whether this counts as "The American mainstream media", but the Economist just had an article about Biden's falling approval rating. Here's a link to them talking about his presidency and ratings so far. https://www.economist.com/president-joe-biden-polls
Minimum wage does seems to be a natural rather than manufactured conciousness. I was somewhat numbed to read the WaPo economics editor write in favour of a national $15 min, fully conversant of things like a million lost jobs and I think even the Seattle study that found paychecks went down due to reduced hours and full time jobs changed to part time
What got me was she knew about earned income tax credits. So you know a $15 min wage may not even increase paychecks even for jobs kept but you breezily pass over an alternative that appears do do everything the minimum hike could hope to do, without downsides?
Her argument was that it would be nice that the draw on tax dollars of the earned income credit would be gone. Great, only to be replaced by people paying for the minimum wage through increased prices that are comparatively regressive versus tax money more proportionately payed by the rich
Who knows, maybe earned income tax credits will catch on in the end when people realize the shininess of the buttons here are in a huge inverse correlation with the effects
I suppose you could do a 'reverse payroll tax' though people would be suspicious of businesses absorbing some of that by tending to pay less. That wouldn't be possible for them at the minimum level at least. And if businesses did tend to pay lower wages that would likely result in more hiring in a reverse effect to the minimum wage
All economists know that the MW kills jobs exactly to the extent that it is effective in raising wages above market rates. And that those thereby pushed out of the labor force will necessarily be the least skilled/educated/competent people. (If you legally have to pay the same for two employees you pick the most capable one, natch). So it's basically shutting the bottom of society out of the labor market.
But the minimum wage is just one of those bad ideas that always has been, and always will be, popular. It just feels good, I guess.
The claim against the minimum wage is that it increases unemployment, not that it reduces hours worked. Where were these million jobs lost in Seattle? Seattle doesn’t have a million people.
The million jobs figure is the CBO's estimate for a national minimum wage. It's in a similar range of what an Ontario government agency projected for the effect of their $15 minimum of about 60,000 jobs when you adjust for the population size
The reduced hours is something I had not heard of until a study on Seattle's $15 minimum increase followed minimum wage earners and found an average reduction in their paycheck from before to after. It turns out there was a previous study in Seattle that found the same as well:
"A 2018 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research[2] found that when Seattle’s minimum wage was increased to $13 per hour back in 2016, total labor hours were reduced between 6 and 7 percent, while wages increased by only 3 percent"
In that case I suspect the loss in labour hours included lost jobs while the newer study followed jobs that continued before and after the increase to $15
This effect is larger than I would have thought as it is often mentioned that the theory is that minimum wage's biggest effect is in future job creation. I really support earned income tax credits as a result - my view is that overly high minimum wages are inevitable and conservative politicians are accomplishing nothing if they don't enact an alternative with as much publicity as possible. At the same time liberal politicians would accomplish far more with non-direct increases to the minimum wage and it would be essentially impossible for conservative politicians to argue against it
The correctly stated theoretical claim is that minimum wages reduce the quantity of labor demanded. This can come in the form of fewer, reduced hours or some combination. The minimum wage is often described solely in terms of it's effect on the number of jobs, and this is a flawed articulation.
> It's a political gamble as Macron faces reelection in April 2022 but the vast majority of French people support him—current surveys come in at around 60-70% and although 35% sympathize with the protesters, 74% were shocked by the comparisons with Nazi Germany and the use of the Jewish star.
> Moreover, the Pass Sanitaire is having its desired effect—more and more people are getting vaccinated and at very fast rates. As reported by The Guardian, at least 7 million French people have been given their first vaccine dose since the government decided to implement the policy. Reservation data on bookings suggest that France will have vaccinated 50 million people over the age of 12 with at least one jab by the end of August.
> In dictatorial systems with large scale information control, it makes little sense to talk about whether people support things or not.
In the west we do not have large scale information control. We have ad-hoc systems run by tech giants in an uncoordinated fashion. If people wanted to organise they certainly can get around them, hence why a minority is able to organise protests in France.
Protests also happening in Italy, Germany, Switzerland.
Regardless, obviously if you simply write off protesters then you will conclude there are no protests and everyone is happy. That is tautology, not argument.
As for people signing up to get vaccinated, what exactly are you arguing with here? That's the whole point of coercion. I didn't argue anywhere that it wouldn't work, only that the claim that the center is actually super popular and loads of people love it doesn't seem to be accurate.
The argument was that the protests are a "public revolt against the pandemic response".
Saying "60-70% support for Macron disproves a revolt" is a counter argument, not a tautology. It's strong evidence that the center's covid response is still popular.
The tautology is saying "France protesting is not proof of anything" and then arguing that the size of the protests proves the measures are popular. Perhaps I am mis-naming my fallacies, but that's definitely a fallacy of some sort.
Citing opinion polls is indeed not fallacious. I do not agree that a policy that has alienated 30-40% of the population can be described as the people "enthusiastically lining up" behind the measures - which was the claim I was originally responding to. You can argue it's popular in a strictly technical sense of >50% poll approvals.
At any rate, these days I am less inclined to believe such polls. It's sort of an open secret in the polling world that polling panels aren't representative across a few variables that normally don't make much difference for their primary use (commercial research), but would in this case. The big one is volunteering for things. The sort of people who respond to polls are deeply unrepresentative in how likely they are to be volunteers - not a big surprise - but it means any poll of the form "what do you think of these people who refuse to volunteer for some pro-social thing" is going to be deeply out of step with the real population.
There's a paper analysing some of these issues from Pew Research here:
"At the other end of the scale, four variables show extremely large biases. These are voting in the 2014 midterm election, (32 percentage points), having volunteered in the past 12 months (29 points), voting in the 2012 presidential election (23 points) and tablet ownership (20 points)"
Sometimes pollsters try to adjust for these factors, but it's all just statistical modelling in the end and very unclear how close they can get for 'new' questions.
In the CA recall, both media elites and polling overestimated the extent of opposition to Newsom's COVID measures (or at least their significance to voters). Just to point out that it can go either way.
In Switzerland it's generally hundreds (very rarely few thousands) protesters.
They scream bloody murder and demand respect for their anti-vaxx stupidity (which I refuse). But since the extension of the health pass on Monday, orders of magnitude of people more have gotten vaccines, every day. Maybe reluctantly, but at least they did.
Thanks for the link! I want to reach through the internet and give a high five to the woman who said "I will live my life the way I have to, but not the way they want me to." Good on her.
I've been hearing about protests, and especially about peaceful protests, not getting into the news for some time.
And on the other side, there doesn't seem to be a comprehensive source for upcoming protests, or at least there wasn't a few years ago when I looked into it.
In the US I constantly hear reports of people protesting vaccines, mask mandates, etc., and vaccine hesitancy is endlessly reported on, to the point where I am a little confused as to what you (and the person you're responding to) are talking about.
France's anti-pass protests were headline news on Le Figaro multiple times. Le Figaro is one of France's largest newspapers. Hardly evidence of the collapse of the media's independent spirit.
Agreed. The covid crisis seems to have sped up the migration of social media back to classic mainstream, largely elite-controlled, media. This killed the book argument and even cause an opposite swing, moving fast toward the CCP model: large scale surveillance and information control making the use of violent repression less frequent (but still a possible last reasort). The "impossible" policies where put in place, fast, with much less protest than I expected because, I think:
*Large % of population happy with such measures. They accept liberty restriction for promise of security. More than accept, they secretly welcomes it when the restriction do not affect them but annoy other people they didn't like (rich tourist, party-going young people,...). I suspect the stay-at-home policies were a joy to some, schadenfreude at its best
*freedom of speech is clearly an empty word now. I suspect it was for quite some time, but now it's clear. Censorship has reached new heigths. It's always to stop fake news, hate speech or scientific fallacies...of course. CCP uses the same reasons...
*police violence has changed in Europe. Not sure it has increased, but it impact different populations. It used to be the usual groups before covid (minorities, poor). Not so anymore, at least not only: videos of violent arrest of "nice" citizens (mothers walking around with young childs, well-off elder people,...) multiplied. I think police hatred has increased outside of its traditional circles (poor minority neighborhood), like it already did with the french "gilet jaunes" episode.
So the power legitimacy decreased, not because they got exposed not having any "miracle button", but because they are more and more exposed using the same tricks as their own foreign anti-democratic bogeymen...
I think the UK lockdown was not as severe as several others in Western Europe. For example, everyone was allowed out of their homes to exercise, which I believe was not the case in Spain or Italy. Lots of people in the UK carried on going out to work.
I'm not saying that the UK lockdown wasn't substantial, just that one would need to carefully compare the rules in place in different countries.
I just spent a few minutes trying to find any coverage of last Saturday's protests in Paris on the BBC site. I tried Google News too. Maybe my searching skills aren't good enough but I can't find any. Actually there are protests all over Europe, but load the BBC topic "anti vaccination movement" and no evidence of any protests is to be found:
The fact that there's been similar protests in France since July is probably a large part of why there's nothing about last weeks. It's no longer news.
Yes, exactly, that story is from July and I found that one too. Seems you're in agreement that there is nothing about last weekend's protests.
Are large-scale protests in Paris more or less newsworthy than "Gen Z fights for unions, one Starbucks at a time" or "Quiz of the week: what got Taylor excited in Belfast?" to name just two stories currently on the front page. To me they are obviously more newsworthy. The fact that neither of us can find anything about what was happening last weekend is exactly the point being made here - the media ignore protests so people think they died out or were just some fringe thing. When it's pointed out that it's not the case suddenly the argument shifts to "protests are happening but they're {french, boring, etc} so it's right that they aren't covered". However, whatever the justification journalists use is, it doesn't really change the original argument - the perception that the moves are loved and protests fizzled out isn't true.
Given that it's said to be the fifth consecutive weekend, perhaps the BBC et al may be forgiven for eventually not bothering to make the ninth consecutive weekend of these protests into a headline.
Surely, if there exists a news blackout against these intrepid anti-vax heroes, it would have been in effect a month ago no less strictly than last week. More to the point, the protests continue to be amply covered in the local/expat media, (see e.g. https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20210911-turnout-down-slightly-for-french-protests-against-covid-19-health-pass ). I'd imagine any agenda-driven media manipulation would prefer to tamp down on local coverage first.
1. I'm not aware of large-scale protests *in the UK* agaisnt lockdown restrictions. That is my first point. (Of course, they may be happening and I'm not seeing them). There have been some over the last 18 months, and they have been reported to various degrees.
2. The UK media has a range of viewpoints and some parts of the mainstream media have been very critical of the measures adopted by the government.
Regarding coverage in the UK media of protests in other countries, the UK media in general does a poor job of reporting about other countries (with the excepton of the USA). Occasionally the media will cover some news from mainland Europe but this is patchy at best. I don't think this is because the UK media is basically cowed by the state; I think it's because most UK readers aren't interested.
Well, right now BBC has a story titled, "French anger at viral bullying of 11 year olds". So not convinced they are uninterested in European news. Agreed that the UK is in a better place media wise than most places; better diversity of ownership and viewpoints, etc (albeit conservative views are more often paywalled).
Rather than stories about France being boring, I find it more likely that journalists feel they have some sort of moral duty to support the government, and covering protests feels like encouraging protests, so they do it to the most minimal extent they can get away with.
Not that I think the exact order of most strict lockdowns matters for the original point: the UK had a long, strict lockdown, and returned to lockdowns later on, despite the gov believing that the public would not bear more than a few weeks
I agree with your general point about the public's acceptance of lockdown.
I recall listening to an interview last year with a behavioural scientist who said that behavioural science would actually expect this response, especially if it is framed as everyone working together against a common external threat, and who criticised the initial government expectation that people wouldn't accept the restrictions. I don't have the reference to hand, unfortunately.
> particularly compared against the likes of South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China (assuming you trust them)
For what it's worth, my friends inside China have repeatedly told me that things went back to normal shortly after the new year in 2020. I trust them.
On my analysis:
In late 2019 / early 2020, everyone in China including the government panicked, and everything got shut down. This meant that over the new year (January 25th through mid-February) most of China had nothing to do but sit around at home thinking about how the government was doing a bad job.
The government realized what was going on, didn't want to start a rebellion against itself, and sent everyone back to work. (Technically, this was implemented by allowing companies to require their employees to come back to work, as long as the company could provide each employee with a mask. A back-to-work mandate was not necessary.) And that was the end of that.
In contrast, the American system ensures that at any given time roughly half the country would like to see the level of popular unrest rising. We got that instead.
I have a friend who was in China for much of last year, staying with a local family, as he was unable to travel back to the UK. The area he was in was in lockdown for several months. This was during the summer.
Not really. In China we STILL have limited travel during vacations, which are the same for most people and therefore for much of us there is no travel allowed. It was not as easy as you say to open a business; the process was bureaucratic but you could re-open by paying a relatively small bribe to party officials. The government did not "send" people back to work. It allowed businesses to open as I said. And the quarantine ended after Covid was brought to very low levels, where it remains to this day.
Well... Lockdown meant that I could work from home, saving a load of cash on transport costs, having a pleasant walk around quiet streets at lunch time and seeing more of the kiddies. That same pattern was replicated for lots of other people, including journalists. I doubt that their are many people who would risk their necks for the right to commute.
Yes, I agree, and as time went on it became more and more annoying to deal with those restrictions. But... those restrictions are now all gone, I am still working from home and in no rush at all to return to office work.
Another factor, perhaps overlooked, is that for a while, crises are quite exciting and people will put up with some inconvenience if it means a break from the daily routine, especially if everyone else is in the same boat.
Good point. The first month of covid, spring 2020 with the first lockdowns, felt like a real life disaster movie, with some exhilarating feeling of humanity fighting an external threat, everybody is in the same boat, time for heroes, etc. it was also the time when hospital workers were applauded every evening at 8pm in my country. This played a significant part in the acceptances of the mesures at the time...thinking of it, it's likely the main factor. The situation is very different now, and this reservoir of good will is not present anymore. I would expect to be in the "find the guilty" phase, but we are not, at least i have this impression. This pleads against the book thesis, it strongly suggest effective control of the main narrative in the society by western gouvernements...
oh yes, and the typical zombie/plague apocalypse (or any other global apocalypse killing a large % of the population). This genre has a significant appeal, for western people at least (not sure about the developing world). Different from "everybody against an external threat", it's more let's restart everything from the ground up, the total humanity reboot appeal. People always feel they will be among the survivors ;-)
"I'd say that on average that the group of people most likely to find the new normal nice were the precise class of people getting to engineer the Covid response."
" I'd say that on average that the group of people most likely to find the new normal nice were the precise class of people getting to engineer the Covid response."
Every time I get het up about some newly discovered stupidness about the response to the Wuhan Flu, I have to calm myself down with the realization that it was good for me personally. Which then makes me angry again.
Sort of how California having effectively legalized shoplifting is good for my own employee stock options.
As Argentus implies, the work from home benefits were very much elite advantages, beneficial for those with remote possible jobs and nice houses. I'd argue the masses would be much more likely to lose their jobs/go on furlough or Tumpbux, much more likely to be forced to continue working on site, and more likely to be frustrated by the pressures of childcare or the lack of city living advantages.
I'm not elite, and I am loving working from home. Granted, I do clerical work which means that as long as I have Internet access, I can keep up with the paperwork and filing it online. If I had to work in retail or any other such job then yes, I couldn't take advantage of it.
But how do we know that the "revolt of the masses" against the elites isn't organized and paid for by the elites? It seems plausible to me that if you "open your eyes and look around" you will find many trends that will ultimately benefit the elites, not the masses. Namely, the elites will make more money selling useless gadgets and even more useless "culture" to the masses, and will be better able to control the indoctrinated masses. Of course, the elites do this hidden in the backstage and try to give the impression that this is a revolt of the masses against the elites. But it is exactly the contrary. Worth thinking about I believe. However, I'll read the book, sounds interesting.
I haven't read Gurri's book, so perhaps he pays credence to this, but the whole dynamic of his work as described here is essentially a transportation of Vilfredo Pareto's (yes, the efficiency guy) theory of elites.
Maybe you're familiar with this, but Pareto characterised the world as having two groups of elites. There are foxes, who deploy deceit and cunning, and are characterised by plurality, scepticism and decentralisation. They're uncomfortable with using force. Then there are lions, who emphasise homogeneity, conformity, traditionalism, ruling through small centralised bureaucracies.
For him, history was a cycle of these two elites eating one another slowly, and using the masses as a weapon to do so. Scott describes the 'foxy' blogosphere on the streets protesting, with no clear intentions. Which makes sense, because as any trickster figure in mythology knows, if you have a set of goals, they're going to be subverted by the world. But in the chaos, things get changed.
I'm not going to work through where present groups of elites fall on the lion-fox axis, but its a useful analytical tool.
The other thing worth mentioning is that in Pareto's eyes, new groups are constantly being politicised in order for the out-of-power elites to wield influence again. I haven't delved deeply enough into the mechanics of this, but it seems intuitive that no group can sustain being politicised at a high level - it is exhausting.
In my head, all of these moments of politicisation work something akin to recalling memories on an Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. A group (or memory, in the analogy) is activated by an elite; the press, a think tank, the government. It hits peak politicisation, then quickly fades away from this point, unless it is constantly reactivated. If it is constantly reactivated, its importance slowly wanes. Politicising that group over and over no longer has the same impact, so the elite must find a new group.
There are other theories of elites - Peter Turchin and cliodynamics is the obvious example, but Gurri's idea feels as though it has been laid out along Pareto's lines.
Very interesting considerations. It is clear to me that similar dynamics are at work in today's world. Why knows which groups will be politicized (and weaponized) next. And I guess the elites are discovering how to hybridize the DNA of lions and foxes. This sounds futuristic but, at the end of the day, all comes down to money, like it has always been.
"history was a cycle of these two elites eating one another slowly"
This sounds very much like an account of *written* history, rather than the history that happened. Seeing as elites can write and love writing about each other, most of the historical writing we have features exactly this kind of exciting, legible, Netflix-worthy political game.
But surely the truth about history is that most of it's random. All these big historical theories... they're just nonsense. No predictive power, no real meaning, just a way of fitting a narrative to a bunch of mainly random events. You might as well study screenwriting.
As with any theory or model, the map isn't the territory. You can approach history idiographically if you want to, but sometimes nomothetic laws and principles are interesting and useful, even if as starting points.
> But surely the truth about history is that most of it's random. All these big historical theories... they're just nonsense. No predictive power, no real meaning, just a way of fitting a narrative to a bunch of mainly random events. You might as well study screenwriting.
The reason I don't necessarily agree with this interpretation is because randomness feels unsatisfying and unhelpful as a guiding principle. There are times when the history might suggest that uncertainty is the right approach, but being uncertain is different to believing things happen at random.
If you want to make this argument I think you're better off in the territory of Derrida and Hayden White, where things are not necessarily random, but artefacts and items have little explanatory power with regard to the past, and instead the historian's interpretation is a reflection of their priorities in the present.
There are many legitimate reasons to dunk on Daphne Leef, but dunking on her because she was "living during a time of unprecedented plenty" and so on is, more or less, a talking point (I won't say whose, to avoid generating unnecessary heat). Never mind the eternal debate about how much better the world could theoretically be made through adding (or removing!) government intervention; During that time Israel faced a debilitating housing crisis, which has only gotten worse since then, and was _the_ major grievance fueling the protests. I'm not an economist but there is strong agreement about this point across the political aisle (both that this specific crisis was the fulcrum point of the protests, and that it is and was actually real).
The housing crisis is definitely feeling like a growing crisis throughout the rich world right now - it's been building since the 1970s, and got to the attention of my tiny slice of the internet in the mid 2000s, but is actually getting mainstream attention by legislatures and the like now.
Agree; even if someone is objectively well-off, well fed, well paid, with the latest gadgets, I *still* think it's not unreasonable for them to be pretty upset about commuting a couple of hours each way to get to the job that allows that wealth. Housing and food are the fundamental costs.
(b): Klingon Promotion (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KlingonPromotion). I suspect at least half of the reason why these movements are so often leaderless is because they eat their own, not even waiting until the revolution is over. And the bigger you are, the more tempting it is to take you down and crown yourself the new leader;
(c): Orwell's theory of revolutions as presented in '1984'. As in, there are the Low, Middle, and Upper classes; revolution is when the Middle class manages to convince the Lower class to overthrow the Upper class and install the former Middle class as the new Upper class, usually with promises of equality and abolishing the class system;
And of course, (d): Epicurean thought, judging by the reference to tending your garden (as former Roman Emperor Diocletian put it, "If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn't dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed." - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletian#cite_ref-208). I'm surprised actually that I can't think of any SSC posts about Epicureanism, given its relationship to Stoicism and Stoicism's relationship to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Epicureanism in general seems very soothing.
That's all I have for today, my thoughts are all over the place without deeper reflection, and I don't have time for that because it's like 4 AM here, I need to go to bed.
Kindly note that Diocletian turned to market gardening and Epicureanism *after* he retired; when in power, he instigated a persecution against Christians and seems to have imposed and maintained peace in the manner of the dictators that US forces head out to topple and replace with democracy:
"On 23 February 303, Diocletian ordered that the newly built church at Nicomedia be razed. He demanded that its scriptures be burned, and seized its precious stores for the treasury.[172] The next day, Diocletian's first "Edict against the Christians" was published. The edict ordered the destruction of Christian scriptures and places of worship across the empire, and prohibited Christians from assembling for worship. Before the end of February, a fire destroyed part of the Imperial palace. Galerius convinced Diocletian that the culprits were Christians, conspirators who had plotted with the eunuchs of the palace. An investigation was commissioned, but no responsible party was found. Executions followed anyway, and the palace eunuchs Dorotheus and Gorgonius were executed. One individual, Peter Cubicularius, was stripped, raised high, and scourged. Salt and vinegar were poured in his wounds, and he was slowly boiled over an open flame. The executions continued until at least 24 April 303, when six individuals, including the bishop Anthimus, were decapitated.
... Diocletian took to wearing a gold crown and jewels, and forbade the use of purple cloth to all but the emperors. His subjects were required to prostrate themselves in his presence (adoratio); the most fortunate were allowed the privilege of kissing the hem of his robe (proskynesis, προσκύνησις). Circuses and basilicas were designed to keep the face of the emperor perpetually in view, and always in a seat of authority. The emperor became a figure of transcendent authority, a man beyond the grip of the masses. His every appearance was stage-managed. This style of presentation was not new – many of its elements were first seen in the reigns of Aurelian and Severus – but it was only under the tetrarchs that it was refined into an explicit system.
In keeping with his move from an ideology of republicanism to one of autocracy, Diocletian's council of advisers, his consilium, differed from those of earlier emperors. He destroyed the Augustan illusion of imperial government as a cooperative affair among emperor, army, and senate. In its place he established an effectively autocratic structure, a shift later epitomized in the institution's name: it would be called a consistorium, not a council."
"Defund the police" seems like a rallying cry at least as impractical as "jail all the corrupt bankers" to me. I don't think this is a good counter example.
Decertifying an election is a bit more concrete, though still impractical, and definitely matches up with a story where people think the elites are all corrupt and bad, and everyone should just listen to the people instead.
These movements were certainly localised to two separate halves of the population, with the other half in firm opposition. But they do both seem characterised by distrust of, and contempt for, established institutions and "elites". Just different elites.
I disagree. Defunding a police budget is actionable, you can cut it by 5%, 50% or 100%, the consequences are yours to enjoy. (It's also not popular)
The latter might appeal to someone frustrated but we're talking about a segment of the private sector. What constitutes corruption and which bankers are you jailing? The tellers? etc.
"There haven't been many big viral protests lately except Black Lives Matter and the 1/6 insurrection, and both seemed to have a perfectly serviceable set of specific demands (defunding the police, decertifying the elections)."
Yeah, I think I'm pushing back on this too. Even if we take it that BLM has one clear, specific, demand - "defund the police" - what does that entail?
No money for police forces at all? No police forces at all? Some police? What kind of police? Take away guns and have unarmed patrol officers as in other countries? Who turns up when someone calls the local Community Harmony Office to report that "There's a crazy guy with a knife who's threatening to stab anyone he sees" and how do they tackle said crazy guy - just stand there and recite affirming slogans to let him know that they validate him in his okayness, now if he'd just put down the knife - okay, so you just stabbed Justin, well that's cool, we're cool...
If you have no idea what you want as a solution, then the demand may be clear, but what will satisfy it? If half the movement wants no police at all, and the other half wants smaller, unarmed police forces, what does the government do in response?
And besides, the BLM has moved on to include trans issues:
I've seen plenty online about it's not an organised movement, the various organisations or activist groups in each city are all separate, there is no centralised set of demands, etc.
Which just makes it even worse to try and find a solution. Which arm of the octopus do you engage with?
All it means is 'make the police play a smaller role in American life'.
There are a hundred different ways you could do this, and being that the slogan comes from the expert-trusting left, they're generally willing to let various experts promote various systems of doing this, let different cities try them as their populace wills, and see what works.
That is all it means? Well, how reassuring. But as you say, there are a hundred different ways to do this. And if there are a hundred different ways, then we do need groups to come out and say "We mean abolish the police force and set up a public safety agency"
But until you get some kind of agreement on what you mean by "defund the police", then it is essentially meaningless. And we've already got social workers struggling to deal with homelessness, until there is going to be a vast change (all the police budget goes on housing) then there won't be enough "rapid response social workers would provide them with housing support and other resources" to get that problem solved fast. What it will mean is what is currently happening: get that bum off the street outside my house, get them into a shelter - and then you have people refusing to go into shelters because they're not allowed drink or take drugs, or that the shelters are too violent.
There is a problem with the American police system, nobody doubts that. But it came about in its present form due to a lot of factors, not the nice myth going around that "police force started off as slave-catchers and that's their function to the present day".
>But until you get some kind of agreement on what you mean by "defund the police", then it is essentially meaningless.
It's really not, though.
It means exactly what I said - reduce the role of the police in everyday life.
I could lay out 100 policies regarding changes to policing policy, and a panel of classifiers would have very high agreement about which ones conform to the 'defund the police' model, and which ones don't. Aside from some borderline cases in the middle, it would be pretty obvious for most policy proposals.
The fact of that agreement means that the phrase carries coherent information. It lets you understand something about the world. It lets you choose which direction to move in when creating or evaluating policy.
Is 'stop climate change' meaningless because it will probably take more than a single policy change to actually accomplish, and therefore the phrase isn't referring to a single policy that everyone agrees on?
Is 'protect human rights' meaningless because humans have a lot of rights that need to be protected in a variety of ways in a variety of situations, and some of those rights are not agreed on by everyone?
Should we not try to stop climate change or protect human rights?
These are top-level slogans that identify an issue and establish a dimensional axis for that issue. People who use these phrases are saying we should devote more resources and thought towards this particular issue, and we should move in this particular direction along the established axis. That's a meaningful proposal that carries a ton of information, even if there are many ways one might move in that direction and further discussion is warranted.
"It means exactly what I said - reduce the role of the police in everyday life."
Ah, so you are just chanting a slogan. You have no interest in what it actually means or what it might entail, you are doing the "it's not MY job to provide a solution".
How do you "reduce"? Fewer beat cops? No cops? Cops as last resort? Armed or unarmed? Let teenagers knife one another, that's been going on historically and we don't need the cops to interfere (as one particularly stupid Twitterer put out before hastily retracting, in the wake of a tragic shooting)?
"Defund the police!" cries A. "Okay, I can see your point, what do you want in particular?" asks B. "It's perfectly simple!" replies A. "Fine, what do you want us to do?" enquires B. "Defund the police!" A reasserts, and round and round the mulberry bush we go.
It's the same as Chesterton says in "The Usual Article":
"In other words, it is exactly as if somebody were to say about the science of medicine: "All I ask is Health; what could be simpler than the beautiful gift of Health? Why not be content to enjoy for ever the glow of youth and the fresh enjoyment of being fit? Why study dry and dismal sciences of anatomy and physiology; why enquire about the whereabouts of obscure organs of the human body? Why pedantically distinguish between what is labelled a poison and what is labelled an antidote, when it is so simple to enjoy Health? Why worry with a minute exactitude about the number of drops of laudanum or the strength of a dose of chloral, when it is so nice to be healthy? Away with your priestly apparatus of stethoscopes and clinical thermometers; with your ritualistic mummery of feeling pulses, putting out tongues, examining teeth, and the rest! The god Aesculapius came on earth solely to inform us that Life is on the whole preferable to Death; and this thought will console many dying persons unattended by doctors."
I've been party to a conversation where a person objected to the goal of "defunding the police" in the presence of a large population of supporters, and an ostensible supporter jumped in to explain that "defund the police" doesn't really mean removing funding from the police, but reforming them, changing their standards from the ground up. And this led to a big argument pileup between supporters as they started noticing that other people around them who supposedly supported "defunding the police" didn't actually represent specific policy agreement with them. A few other people got involved in hashing out the meaning, and no two of them agreed with what the proposal was actually intended to mean, not just to the extent of a percentage amount, but to the extent of a policy direction they would mutually support.
I was actually discussing this with my mother just the other day. She believed that the BLM protests at least attracted awareness to an important social issue even if they haven't yet caused practical social change, but my take was that they've brought us no closer to meaningful social change, because people already had an awareness of police brutality, but the BLM movement didn't elicit any sort of cohesive movement towards actionable social proposals at all, because supporters didn't bother to hash out even a vague platform, but they did galvanize an opposition which would oppose any of their policy proposals, which is much larger than the constituency satisfied with any specific proposal. If 40% of the population will oppose any proposal they identify with "defunding the police," but no more than 20% of the population will rally behind any specific "defund the police" proposal, all such proposals are doomed to fail.
> the BLM movement didn't elicit any sort of cohesive movement towards actionable social proposals at all
I believe the changes it did trigger are local and not national, and the increased awareness is just lubricant to the local activists who have been pushing for such changes for years.
An underreported aspect of BLM is that several cities and states responded with legislation. Colorado ended qualified immunity. Virginia banned no-knock warrants. Tim Scott’s police reform bill has not passed yet but is still a real possibility. There are many others but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head.
“Defund the police!” isn’t a demand, it’s a deepity. Like “smash the patriarchy” it is a statement which has the *shape* and *sound* of a tangible physical demand - let us perform action X upon object Y! - but with a moment’s reflection we realize we have no idea what X or Y are meant to refer to.
Q: Does “defund” literally mean “defund” or is it a metaphor standing in for “apply some as-yet-undefined series of reforms which may or may not involve changing how much we spend on policing”?
A: Nobody knows! Since every conceivable interpretation has its advocates, even the people yelling this slogan in the streets can’t be sure what they mean by it!
Q: Precisely *which* group of police are we talking about performing this ambiguously-defined action upon?
A: Nobody knows! Saying “all of them” is rhetorically satisfying (hence “ACAB”) but nobody *means* all of them - we almost all still want murderers to get arrested and nobody has suggested a not-cop way of accomplishing this so clearly there’s an implied limit but nobody is putting an asterisk on protest signs with small print spelling it out because doing so - trying to make this deepity even slightly *actionable* - would weaken it.
Does defund the police literally mean defund the police?
Yes, to start with.
Which police?
All police. They are so ineffective that it wouldn't actually mater which you funded or defunded.
Then we start trying different reform packages 'till we find one that works better than giving highschool bullies that were too shit to hack it in the corps guns and a license to kill.
This seems to fit the description in the OP of modern protest movements' worldview - "solving problems is easy, so we just need to get rid of the current authorities who are refusing to do so out of pure malice". So I guess this is evidence in favour.
On the object level, I, uh, think that you may be underestimating the kind of crime wave that abolishing all law enforcement with no replacement in place would unleash. For a start, who's going to take the guns away from all the ex-police you just fired?
A) Roaming the streets, stealing stuff, assaulting people at random, murdering people at will.
and
B) Almost totally ineffective at actually preventing any amount of crime, as seen by the fact that police funding totally fails to corelate with crime rates in either direction.
The solution is to stop shoveling money into the bottomless money pit, and try literally anything else.
We can afford to experiment here because, as pointed out above: The cops don't actually do anything!
The issue with this is that they do serve a symbolic function; in that a public statement that the police are striking/defunded/doing a slow work increases the amount of crime, event though cops don't actually prevent or solve crime at a noticeable rate.
It's the pulling out of Afghanistan problem all over again.
I'd be personally willing to eat that risk though; as my experience with cops amounts to them harassing my Mexican co-workers for no reason at great expense, and refusing to even attempt to do their jobs when shit gets stolen.
Giving the state a monopoly on violence is one of the best things we've done as a species. Before that, it was a warlords, protection rackets, and a lot more conflict.
It is in fact possible to spend less money on police, even significant amounts less (plenty of other government departments have dealt with budget cuts in their history!), or to prosecute bank executives who commit fraud for fraud (we did it in the savings & loan crisis! Successfully! With sentences nowhere near the enormity of their crimes, but at least people went to prison.)
The failure to do so is political in both cases, and almost certainly antidemocratically so in the latter.
At least in the spanish case, one of the (many) dichotomies that made the whole "indignados" a stillbirth was that it was mixing old people thinking "I didn't work hard my whole life for this, I expect more" and young ones thinking that the game was rigged against them and they had it worse than their parents, in that rather than going from bad to good, they'll go from good to disaster. I feel that's why there was so much focus on "the system owing me something". Ones because the "put hard work into it", others because they felt they were being treated differently.
The Podemos party tried to ride on this for a while (as well as pretending to be nor-left-nor-right for a little bit, just "anti-elite"). Then it all came burning down, and what Spain got for it was a newly fractioned political landscape that nobody really likes, and that includes a populist-right-wing party Spain thought was vaccinated against for a while post-Franco (the shame and all that). Yay.
I'm skeptical left/right are really solutions to this and find myself more sympathetic to Gurri's framing of Center/Border.
One reason is that elected leaders being unable to do anything due to endless checks and balances doesn't seem to be happening. COVID measures violate at least the Constitution and the Nuremburg code, probably a lot more. Judges noped out, legislatures voted themselves out of existence on the grounds that they're too slow, human rights law turned out to be worthless and so on. In reality what happened is that absolute and total power was instantly granted to a tiny handful of elected leaders, who then delegated all decision making to entirely unelected bureaucrat-dictator-science-kings like Ferguson, Fauci, etc. In the rare cases when they tried to resist doing that, the "central elite axis" or whatever Gurri would call it fought back ferociously to try and impose their will.
The root cause of all this to me seems to be academia. Whenever I try to trace the causes I can't get any further back than that. There are two factors here that interact and overlap:
1. Academia strongly promotes the idea that for any problem there's a miracle button. For any possible topic or question you can imagine, academia will produce an expert professor who claims to fully understand it and have a journal filled with pre-canned solutions.
2. Despite that fact, academia has no strong connection to reality and allows professors to routinely publish pseudo-scientific claims. They can do this because people are conditioned to believe maths=correct, hence the explosion of obfuscatory statistical modelling - it shuts people up and makes them unquestioningly accept the conclusion.
The right is more aware of this problem than the left, or perhaps just more intuitively pre-disposed to doubting the existence of miracle buttons to begin with, but across the board the prevalence of pseudo-science in the literature is very poorly understood and especially amongst the ruling elites, even when they're conservative.
The result is an inexorable replacement of democratic systems with academic con-men of various kinds. Any leader who openly doubts them is immediately assailed by universities and their allies in the media as a "science denier", and those leaders find it very difficult to push back on the detail both because they don't have a strong grip on the maths (and academics have all day in which to obfuscate what they're doing anyway), and because there's just such a huge volume of it that whacking individual bad studies is totally non-scalable.
I don't really know where this goes, but the general sense of unease and 'everything is corrupt' doesn't seem wrong to me. And central/border seems more useful a way to view things as just a continuation of left/right politics. What's happening here isn't a mere continuation. The centre is seizing direct control of power in such a way that I genuinely fear the west is becoming a communist dictatorship via some sort of bloodless revolution, one that consists entirely of mind games, institutional takeover and police suppression.
I agree. We have a leadership class so indebted that they can't start families or buy their first houses The world to them looks hopeless as they struggle with debt and uncertainty. They try to find solace by obedience but do not succeed.
Academia is the new Planter Class, a privileged group with no agency and unable to do anything but go along for the ride. The Planter Class lived off the current stolen labor of their captives, Academia lives off the stolen future labor of theirs. One solution at the end of slavery was forty acres and a mule provided by breaking up the plantations. The world would be a different place if it had happened. What if student debt were repaid by taking the incredible wealth controlled by colleges and universities? How was the prohibition of bankruptcy for student debt enacted? Who championed that?
Center Border is a valuable insight. I am looking forward to what Andrew Yang comes up with. There is a huge Independent group created by the abortion issue driving voters away from the GOP and the incredible incompetence and corruption of the Democrats. I just reread Yang's War On Normal People. With opinion leaders like Musk and a notable group of tech billionaires backing him we could see a revolutionary shift away from the major parties.
I liked this from Gurri: We are living through the early stages of a colossal transformation: from the industrial age to something that doesn’t yet have a name. Many periods of history have been constrained by structural necessity. This isn’t one of them.
For younger elites, trust involves a sort of cosplay of historical conflicts. They put on elaborate rhetorical superhero costumes, and fight mock-epic battles with Nazis, fascists, “patriarchs,” slave-owners, George III, and the like. Because it’s only a game, no one gets seriously hurt – but nothing ever gets settled, either.
This sounds nice, but in a two-party system like in the US, it's really unrealistic...
Also, didn't the republicans re-invent themselves into an anti-elite populist party? Certainly that's the impression I am getting.... which, then, means that if you are "anti-elite", it means you are automatically right-wing, at least in the US....🤔
"Academia strongly promotes the idea that for any problem there's a miracle button. For any possible topic or question you can imagine, academia will produce an expert professor who claims to fully understand it and have a journal filled with pre-canned solutions."
I'm 99% sure that you have never read a real journal article in your life. This is the Buzzfeed version of what "academia" is. We've all seen it in clickbait adverts. But imagining that this is the reality is literally the same thing as thinking someone's Facebook moments are their real life.
Journals almost never give solutions. They're boring, hedged, and mostly about 2 years behind the cutting edge, because publication is slow. And scientists don't claim limitless expertise - that's just the media puff around them.
There are loads of problems with academic research. But the things you describe here are not them.
50,000 hits on Google Scholar for the phrase "policy recommendation" and that's the tip of the iceberg.
My guess is that in a typical year I've read between 80-200 academic papers, which for a non academic is a lot. The higher numbers are from when it was a part of my job. It's not any more, thankfully, but I still read a lot more of them than average. How policy-oriented they are depends on the field. Example: epidemiology is overrun with papers telling governments what to do.
Ok, that was much more concise than my response. I spent too much time in academia not to get my hackles up when someone suggests that academics are totally humble and would never say something like "Well, if we just passed a law requiring X we could solve all these problems."
It just doesn't do what these guys above are claiming. It has no policy recommendations whatsoever.
There probably are papers with policy recs out there. But if you want to know what the average research paper looks like, just go and read some. It's not hidden.
I see I was correct about your understanding. From the background paragraph, literally the first paragraph of the abstract:
"The world is experiencing local/regional hotspots and spikes in the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes COVID-19 disease. We aimed to formulate an applicable epidemiological model to accurately predict and forecast the impact of local outbreaks of COVID-19 to guide the local healthcare demand and capacity, policy-making and public health decisions."
To guide the local healthcare demand and capacity, policy-making and public health decisions. Yup... no recommendations regarding policy at all!
From the Conclusions section of the abstract:
"We have demonstrated that by using local/regional data, our predictive and forecasting model can be utilized to guide the local healthcare demand and capacity, policy-making and public health decisions to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the local population. Understanding how future COVID-19 spikes/waves could possibly affect the regional populations empowers us to ensure the timely commissioning and organization of services. "
"...[E]mpowers us to ensure the timely commissioning and organization of services" So, again, they are saying that if you use their model for policy creation you can mitigate the impact of COVID and be empowered to organize things well.
So yea, everyone, check out the article Phil H linked. It does EXACTLY what I am claiming, and what I am pretty sure Mike H is claiming, which is to say coming up with an expertise tool to tell policy makers how to execute policy to solve some problem.
I don't see a single policy recommendation in the passages you quote. I see a bunch of claims that someone who *has* policy recommendations might use the current paper to guide or refine them, but this paper has zero policy recommendations, at least in the passages you have quoted.
Might I recommend that you consider the relationship between guidance and recommendations? Or should I just provide guidance about that relationship, being recommendations are guidance towards a particular goal. "If you want X, you should do Y" is both guidance and a recommendation.
> I don't see a single policy recommendation in the passages you quote.
It's not explicit, but that's the advantage of using models. All models must have assumptions, and if you want to reach a certain conclusion that will then be used to shape policies, you just need to find the right assumptions that yield those conclusions.
Of course, differentiating well-meaning and honest modelling approaches from ones that are basically assuming the conclusion the researcher's already believe is the trick we haven't fully figured out. The replication crisis has raised enough awareness that paths forward are becoming clearer.
You picked an epidemiology paper at random and it actually says in the abstract that its purpose is to "guide ... policy-making and public health decisions". QED.
It's a distinction without a difference. The models are merely mathematical renderings of whatever the academics believe. If a researcher says "our models predict <bad thing> will happen but also predict it will be averted if you implement these policies we modelled" - which is a typical thing to read in the literature - then this is telling governments what to do.
Way too often I see cases where academics are trying to have their cake and eat it: setting up "science" such that politicians are told there's only a single viable choice, and then washing their hands of the consequences of following that choice. It isn't merely presenting values-neutral tools and passively accepting whatever decisions are made, as can be seen the moment politicians try to stray from the pre-ordained path (=lots of interviews with the media claiming the politicians are horrific science denying neanderthal conservatives who will get everyone killed by ignoring the <bad thing>).
And, to give just a little more context: there really are people who make policy recommendations. But they're not academics. They're called think tanks and lobbyists. This is a real profession that you can go into. It has its own separate systems and organisations and working processes.
Clearly policy recommendations do happen. But it's not usually academic researchers who make them.
""our models predict <bad thing> will happen but also predict it will be averted if you implement these policies we modelled" - which is a typical thing to read in the literature - then this is telling governments what to do."
Maybe some papers say that. The paper under discussion here doesn't though, and I suspect that the frequency of claims like this is overblown.
Much more often, I see claims of the form "our models predict bad thing X will happen if you do Y", but don't even attempt to consider whether some alternative to Y makes this more or less likely, instead leaving that to future research.
This is a weird argument. Consider that H. L. Mencken famously complained about "bughouse professors sweating 4th dimensional economics" being received at the White House about 90 years ago. But we have people here earnestly arguing that 'no, those academics, you never need to tell them to stay in their lane! That's all they do!" I'm seriously baffled at this.
I do: We made X to tell you what policies to do in different situations.
Saying "Consult our magic 8-ball to find out what policy you should do" is only different than saying "You should do policy Y" in that it proports to cover many more situations and many more potential policies. In effect they are saying "In Case A, do Policy X. In case B, do Policy Y, etc." That is at least as bad as saying "We are in Case A, so do Policy X," and probably worse since it proposes to not only know what to do in a specific case, but in many, many different specific cases.
I believe you read a fair bit of academic articles, but I do not believe that you understand them. I further suspect that you do not understand the underlying premise of academia's research program writ large, and how the articles published fit in.
Starting with the underlying premise, the foundational belief within modern academia is that society's problems can be solved by smart people being paid to study the problems at length and then suggesting scientific solutions to those problems to be put into place by government officials. That is the justification for every drop of government funding for research universities, and many (most?) academics fund themselves by acquiring grants to produce the research that solves the problems. For all academics save the tiny fraction of "teaching professors" retaining a job requires publishing X journal articles before ~5 years in a new job. X is something like 2-6 from what I have seen.
So, if you want to work in academia you need to be publishing research that addresses problems that need to be fixed, or perhaps discovering problems that need to be fixed, and generating a body of work that suggests ways to fix these problems. You could argue that in some fields this doesn't apply, like abstract math or physics, but especially in the social sciences you do not have a career if your research suggests "Look, you can't get people to not be poor because some people make choices that will inevitably make them poor." You will never get published, and/or you won't get hired in the first place even if you do you find a journal. All the career points go to claiming to know the solution to the problem and then coming up with reasons why it would have worked if not for those reasons.
And academics don't get famous and make the big bucks for saying "I don't know." Always having an answer and opinion, then fighting really hard later to demonstrate that you were correct, is claiming limitless expertise.
Fraction of faculty employed in 4-year colleges by academic field, in 2014-15:
health sciences (e.g. professors of medicine, nursing, pharmacy): 18%
natural science (e.g. professors of physics, chemistry, math): 12%
humanities (e.g. professors of English lit, ancient Greek, history): 12%
=> social sciences (e.g. professors of sociology, "studies", economics): 11%
fine arts (e.g. professors of music, painting, theater): 8%
business (e.g. the MBA people): 7%
engineering: 6%
education: 5%
I'm guessing it's the social sciences group about which you're talking? I mean, it's hard to see an academic specializing in cardiothoracic surgery, semiconductor physics, ruthenium polymerization catalysts, Chaucer, or non-Abelian group theory (i.e. someone from the other 75%) having the time, let alone the inclination, to publish papers on the big social and political debates of the day.
"Sorry, Dean Wormer, I missed my NIH mid-grant report deadline on account of I was too busy writing up this hard-hitting paper arguing that people who own guns are more likely to have small penes."
"But Professor Dorfman you're an organic chemist. Shouldn't you be working on your promising cancer drug?"
"Yeah well this was really important. I'm sure the NIH will understand."
Social sciences are a big part of it but it's a cultural issue. Obviously, all education research boils down to telling governments what to do. Epidemiology isn't classed as a social science, yet bad epidemiological modelling has run rampant, ruining lives over the past two years.
Consider SAGE's explanation for why they predicted a huge rise in cases after the UK eliminated mask mandates and lockdowns, yet cases actually dropped dramatically just three days later: they hypothesized that the disease was affected by things they hadn't anticipated, like .... (wait for it) .... a period of warm weather, schools being closed and the Euros ending. Because it's just really hard to anticipate that in the summer it will be warmer than in winter, that schools will be closed and that football tournaments come to an end on their planned date. This sort of thing keeps happening because it's just a bunch of amateur R coders trying to simulate the world. They can't do it but the academic system is incapable of even recognizing this, let alone doing something about it.
What about climatology? Is that a natural science? Presumably it is, but it's just like epidemiology. Lots of unvalidated models and dubious practices that would be considered verboten/unscientific in other fields. Lots of time trying to redefine government policy.
So I don't think you can neatly categorize stuff into social science=unreliable, everything else=ok.
No. But then take that to its next logical step, which is that you also can't neatly categorize stuff into academia = unreliable, everything else = ok.
Particularly when even if you throw the epidemiologists and climate studies people into the mix, you are still talking about a small fraction of the people doing research or instruction at universities.
All such categorizations will have fuzzy edges, but academia (or "science") is a pretty homogenous and consistent system worldwide. The institutions are the same, the journal publishers are often the same, the methodologies are similar, and most importantly the incentives are the same. Social scientists write papers in the same way, get peer reviewed in the same way, get money in the same way as epidemiologists, climatologists, chemists, etc. There are of course exceptions, e.g. research funded by corporate grants rather than foundations or government granting agencies. You see that sometimes in computer science. But I believe the system is consistent enough to draw generalized conclusions about.
"Academia strongly promotes the idea that for any problem there's a miracle button. For any possible topic or question you can imagine, academia will produce an expert professor who claims to fully understand it and have a journal filled with pre-canned solutions."
I tend to find the opposite. Academia strongly promotes the idea that for any claimed solution, there are massive problems with it. It's very easy to find academics who criticize. It's much harder to find academics who actually make positive recommendations.
Academics give you what you pay for. If you want a policy recommendation you pay for that. If you want pure science you pay for that. Very few academics choose what to research: funders determine what should be funded, and academics do this because otherwise they have no job. So yes, academics make policy recommendations, but mostly at the request of someone who has paid them to do it. So you might want to think about who is paying them and consider whether they are more worthy of your ire.
I'm loosely defining "academia" in such a way as to include (government) granting agencies. After all the committees which decide which grants to fund are often made up of academics too.
I suspect that's a feature not a bug. Academics do not tend to agree with one another on how funds are best distributed and apart from small fields where a faction have seized control, academics are not going to simply award funding on the basis of political orthodoxy. Since most academics' first loyalty is their research field (even if they disagree with everyone else on it) then they are going to focus funding on that field not some political ideal.
Sure they do. It may not be apparent to people inside it, but academia is saturated with hard left assumptions and worldviews, like the pervasive background assumption that complex social problems can be understood and resolved by small teams of uni-disciplinary professors in an office building.
Consider climatology. You may not think funding it is based on political orthodoxy, but to view this as a good idea requires believing that small teams of academics can successfully write accurate computer simulations of something as complex as the entire climate. It requires an expansive and enormously optimistic take on the intellectual powers of the public sector, and great faith in the effectiveness of committee-based resource allocation, to believe this will yield accurate outcomes. More conservative minded people would say, look, friends, walk before you can run. Figure out why you can't successfully predict local weather systems 3 days in advance before trying to predict global weather 50 years in advance. Then prove to the world you're unambiguously good at this by going into betting markets and getting rich betting on climate events.
But to academia this viewpoint isn't merely unspeakable heresy but often some sort of outright conspiracy theory by ideological extremists, usually blown off with doublespeak of the form "climate isn't weather", with the implication that anyone stupid enough to even point out the connection is a caveman barely worth interacting with.
Now, I don't personally care much about climatology. That's just an example. I have other examples I'm more directly and better informed about, like stupid conspiracy theories about Twitter bots controlling how people vote, or indeed epidemiological modelling. Underneath it all is a near unlimited faith in the powers of centrally planned committees of intellectuals: a core tenet of leftist thought.
"I genuinely fear the west is becoming a communist dictatorship via some sort of bloodless revolution, one that consists entirely of mind games, institutional takeover and police suppression."
This is my fear as well. I don't think I've gotten a single decent night's sleep since the summer of 2020 because of this.
I'm a populist, I'm Team Red, I'm MAGA. No I've never had much use for grand sweeping "miracle buttons" in politics. I've always viewed anything that smacks of utopianism in politics with extreme suspicion. But honestly at this point (and I don't know how alone I am in feeling this or not) I would be very receptive to a "miracle button" not to fix the perpetual problems of human society (like poverty), but simply to STOP this censoring, scolding, smirking, bioshocking, hateful, totalitarianism. Voting is clearly not a miracle button since the centers of power are so deeply embedded in people and institutions that have absolutely zero accountability to the electoral, democratic process.
Lately I've been wondering a lot about what would happen if a sufficiently charismatic leader type figure articulated to the American public something a long the lines of Havel's "Power of the Powerless". (Not exactly "one weird trick" stuff, I know). Only instead of the power being the Soviet state - the power is all the non-state institutions that make up "The Cathedral". At least Bezos doesn't have nukes (yet).
Have you considered that your belief that quarantines violate the Nuremburg Codes and US Constitution isn't actually secretly obvious to everyone who claims to disagree with you?
Indeed, the academic welfare complex stands to undermine truth itself. The entire ecosystem of academia serves as a proving ground for the worst ideas in our society today.
Interpersonally, I also find them to be neurotic, power hungry grifters. Look at their Twitter rants - EconTwitter for example - and tell me these are people you’d want as a neighbor. Hard pass.
> Why did the optimal stable ingroup size change from nation-sized to political-tribe-sized?
Because, for about two decades it seemed that the West and America in particular has crushed or subdued all external enemies worth the name, and seemed to be well equpped to continue to do so, but the promised "end of history" somehow didn't materialize. Who's to blame? The internal outgroup.
There is some context that this review leaves out:
1. Many protest movements in history didn't have specific demands but simply wanted to make their problems more known and asked for more power: The suffragettes are the clearest example of this (votes = political power) but also the communist manifesto is light on the organisation of a new form of government and heavy on workers problems. The class struggle is less about improvements of governance than about defining an ingroup of workers and pitting them against the people who held power back then. The reason for this is simple and has nothing to do with the digital age: unlike concrete demands, demanding more power is easy to explain and won't find much opposition within your ingroup.
2. Who we think of as natural elites ("Mostly young, mostly university-educated, mostly part of their countries' most privileged ethnic groups") are not the people holding power in many countries. In aging Europe the median voter age is over 50 in many places and young people don't have a good representation in Parliament. They don't want to choose right-wing parties for ideological reasons (abortion, drugs, minimum wage) and left wing parties are very concerned about pensions (which young people will have to pay for) and unions. But unions and labor-friendly policies usually mean that old people will keep their jobs in a recession while young people are laid off: Especially Spain has a huge problem with this (youth unemployment got over 50% after the recession: https://labourmarketresearch.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12651-019-0254-3/tables/1). The rise of green parties can in part be explained by the fact that they provide a left wing alternative for young people.
3. Many of the protests where later followed by concrete policy proposals. In the US Occupy Wall Street was followed by Bernie Sanders who laid out concrete proposals to rein in "Wall Street greed". Protests about climate and housing in Germany are increasingly finding their way into policy proposals as well (ceilings on rent, shutting down coal power plants early).
To add another data point to #1: Around the time of the russian revolution, most of the laborers were more interested in violence against the authorities than in the communist ideology.
Gurri seems to have noticed a trend, but I feel like he’s totally on the outside of it. His long historical explanation is itself swallowing the narrative which has been defined by the elite High Modernist crowd. His explanation is a strange Boomer fever dream which is so far off the mark, that it doesn’t make any sense. One cannot find the reasoning of the millennium protestor who is against the establishment by using the narratives and tropes of the establishment.
The supposed prosperity of the elite children he mocks as flailing around like blind nihilistic political noobs which he bashes them with is itself a lie, what prosperity? The reason the educated middle and upper middle class children are so sensitive to this issue is that they in fact expected to build their own prosperity readily. Instead cost disease, inflation, and rigged systems that funnel all the wealth into a few hands of the 1% are what they found.
The children of the poor always expected to be poor and were not surprised to find lives of poverty before them when they reached adulthood. While the richer children who supposedly succeeded in life based on what they were told to do found low paying professional jobs and huge college debt, they used their education and noticed the disparity pretty quickly.
All their lives they were told to jump through the hoops and they’d find a good life. Instead of the endless brunch and easy high paying jobs they were told they would get…they found a rigged system which was corrupt and spinning out financial do nothing, know nothing millionaires at a record pace.
What Gurri can’t seem to do is what almost all Boomer parents can’t do. They cannot for one second listen to their children or anyone else unless it is a person in a position of power who is telling them what to think. If Walter Contrike says this is an age of prosperity, then the young person in front front of them is clearly lying and stupid and lazy.
I think Scott already has the answers. If you combine the wisdom of cost disease where everything is getting harder and even after sending all the women to work full time, even with degrees in two income households….it still isn’t enough to keep your head above water.
Mix in a bit of the wisdom from Seeing Like A State with Métis knowledge and taking the seemingly radical approach of listening to people when they tell you what their problems are…and you’ve got your answer. Cost disease is real and all the young people who have no buffers of wealth or old cheaply bought houses to protect them…they are trying to tell the world what is happening.
They might not be the shape or demographic of canary in the coal mine people want to see and they can use that to dismiss them…but the ‘forever brunch’ crowd is hyper aware that brunch is sadly no longer on the menu due to cost disease.
And they don’t trust anyone who created this world. Gurri nearly says this where he admits to this system of control and his Boomer leave it to beaver world of elite written narratives to rewrite reality…but rather than see why young folks might not want that world where Kennedy’s errors and lies persist instead of the truth about Iraq and Afghanistan or Wall Street crimes comes out…
…he balks at it and comes up with a bizarre red herring of an explanation which no young person feels or agrees with, but he is happy to judge us as nihilistic after taking the bold first step of not listening to a damn thing we are saying.
Things are corrupt and regardless of the fact that they always have been, the elites ability to pull the wool over our eyes is reduced and we don’t like what we see. Are we privileged children for not gladly accepting elite though control?
Meanwhile wealth accumulation is worse than in the gilded age of robber Barrons, monopoly power abounds, state capture by corporations is a naked truth, and cost disease has eaten away at us such that even the children of the middle class feel very poor…even if we have iPhones and people 50 years ago didn’t, so what?
We can’t afford homes, education, healthcare, wages are down in real terms, etc. we have a few bobbles and toys and a fake CPI inflation index instead of the very obvious building blocks of a good life. But that doesn’t fit into some Boomer’s 1950s political narrative of commies vs freedom loving capitalism goons. So obviously we are talking pure nonsense and need to be ignored. When really the rent is too damn high.
I blame the rise of the entertainment and gaming industry. There's more leisure options around nowadays, more things to suck up time and energy for fun.
In the old days, there was less to do, so nobody was bothered by the lack of free time.
There's clearly something to what Argentus says. Also, we have the entrenchment of the idea that expressing one's unique identity is the highest good (an idea spawned in Boomerdom that Wildavsky called "expressive individualism," that grew uninterruptedly over the decades from a fringe idea to a mass expectation).
"Boomer’s 1950s political narrative of commies vs freedom loving capitalism goons. So obviously we are talking pure nonsense and need to be ignored. When really the rent is too damn high." Ed Glaeser is the leading scholarly source documenting the role of land use regulation in increasing housing costs. Market Urbanism is a movement both documenting this trend and promoting YIMBY policies. "The rent is too damn high" in jurisdictions where land use restrictions have restricted supply.
Here is a plausible article that argues that land use restrictions hobble economic activity far more deeply than merely housing costs, this paragraph being one of many distinct cascading effects from limiting urban density through land use regulation,
"The total cost of this regulation-induced sprawl in the United States may be enormous. According to one study, if just three cities – New York City, San Jose and San Francisco – loosened their rules against building denser housing to the national average level of restrictiveness, millions would move to jobs that made the best use of their skills and total US GDP would be 8.9% higher. This would translate into average American wages being $8,775 higher per year. Others go even further. Duranton and Puga estimate that the average income gain from a housing regime that allowed easy building could be around 25%, or around $16,000 more per person per year."
Health care and education are expensive and ineffective largely due to government intervention. Of course one can provide a great, low cost education for one's children cheaply today. Here is my approach to providing a great private education for $3k per year, basically homeschooling plus a few tutors, or jointly hiring a few tutors to create pods,
ISAs allow one to learn coding and other bootcamp skills at low cost with no cash output at all up front.
People who believe in 20th century legacy systems, especially education, rightly feel as if they've been sold a bill of goods. But people who saw that it was fraudulent and began pioneering new paths decades ago have often found great opportunities at low cost. Self-taught coders have had great lives for decades now with little or no upfront cost for their education and it has become easier and easier to learn coding, digital marketing UI/UX, video production, etc. either online or via low cost bootcamps. The suckers who believed that a college degree was intrinsically valuable basically go to General Assembly or a similar bootcamp afterwards if they want New Economy job skills.
The regulatory state is, per Mancur Olson, the result of concentrated interests winning over diffuse interests. Lower cost, higher quality innovators will always be marginalized by the regulatory state. This is in no sense "talking pure nonsense."
Well if it makes you feel any better pretty much every Boomer would have written what you just wrote, almost word for word, 35 years ago. I mean, they'd substitute whatever slang term they had for *their* ignorant fossilized parents, of course.
Talkin' bout my g-g-g-g-generation...! Oh yeah. On the bright side, the Boomers now get to frown and say God damn, kids these days! Unappreciative...mumble mumble...don't know what it's like to have to walk to school five miles, in the rain, uphill both ways.
One thing for which I'll always be grateful, though, is that sex was discovered the year I turned 16. That was pretty lucky.
Similar to Argentus, I'm 34 years old, I'm personally very poor despite coming from an upper middle class family and having a Master's degree, I have almost $100k in student debt, and I've often struggled to find affordable housing due to the rising cost of rent in the NYC area. But despite all that, I feel like you're being quite uncharitable to Gurri, as well as simply missing his point.
The "High Modernist" political-academic-media elites did a terrible job, no doubt about it. I know it, you know it, and Gurri clearly knows it. They lied about the job market and the housing market and the economy, they lied about the benefits of higher education, they lied about the various wars overseas, they lied about the consequences of cigarettes and opiates and high sugar foods. At this point, it's reasonable for people not to trust them. But despite all the lies, much of what the experts say about a topic really is true, and so explicitly *distrusting* everything that the elites say will lead you to be *even more wrong* than trusting everything they say. So will blindly trusting everything that "anti-establishment" sources say: the elites are sometimes honest, but the Alex Joneses and David Ickes of the world never are. I might roll my eyes at someone who believes everything that CNN says, but I'm still going to take them a thousand times more seriously than someone who gets all their information from alt-right blogs or BreadTube videos. Wolf Blitzer is far from infallible, but he's certainly a more reliable source of information than "independent thinkers" like Sargon of Akkad or Thought Slime.
I grew up when Margaret Thatcher was in her pomp and Rock Against Racism marches and the Top Of The Pops TV show drew attention to the daftness of colour prejudice. We (me & mine) hated Thatcher but the only thing that could replace her was a 'nice' centre right and politics got really boring.
My personal thesis is that the state of permaprotest now is more of a pastime, fed by an industry of creative grievance development. That's why there are no specific demands from these various iterations of 'the people' who want anything but *this*. They're having fun showing how aggrieved they are and the elites are trolling them.
I think a lot of the permaprotest people are on the left and of the 'we trust experts, not elites' persuasion.
I think it's totally correct and rational for anyone of that persuasion to not make specific demands beyond 'put more societal resources and urgency behind getting experts to come up with solution to this problem and then implementing them.'
After all, just because you are the most passionate about a problem, doesn't mean you are also the most qualified to come up with and propose a solution. Those are largely separate concerns.
Yeah, good point. I would argue that these days, the right-wing in western society is basically the "we don't trust experts" tribe, and the left-wing is the "we trust experts" tribe, for the most part (there are exceptions, though. E.g. in Germany I would argue that many parts of the left - like the greens or social justice activists - don't like experts in some areas, e.g. when it comes to immigration.) Overall, I guess this is a bit of a shift from what was traditionally associated with the left and right-wing, since traditionally the left-wing was associated with "being against the establishment", while the right-wing was the establishment... this is now turn around it seems....🤔
"Any system that hasn't solved every problem is illegitimate. Solving problems is easy and just requires pressing the 'CAUSE MIRACLE' button."
My first thought on reading this was that my sympathy for the existing institutions of power ('the government') is extremely limited: after pretending that problems are easy to solve and that the low-hanging fruit wasn't picked long ago you don't then get a pass for failing to easily solve them. My second thought was that this lets the US citizenry off the hook: haven't we *demanded* this? That politicians (and CEOs, and University presidents, and...) play this game? Since the topics in the book seem to be more of a set of global phenomena rather than an arcane curiosity of the American system, I'm curious if that rings true elsewhere?
Personally I've never bought this over-arching narrative that as a rule Problems Are Difficult(tm), all the low-hanging fruit have been plucked and there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Of course the set of possibly policy is bounded by a Pareto frontier somewhere out there, but I don't see why we should think current policy has reached anywhere near this frontier. Actually, comparing today and 20 years ago, I can point to several examples of new policy where I can say "this was a net win, it's good they did that". And if I can, why can't I have 20 or 30 more of these? All the fearful talk about Moloch does not make much sense if we concede that actually we live in the best of all possible worlds and all we can do from here on out is trade off one good for the other.
IDK. On one hand, in the abstract, I agree: it's entirely possible (even probable!) that there are easy wins (or at least clear wins, obviously outweigh the downsides) to be had. On the other hand, and more to my point from above, only naive arrogance or utter duplicity (or maybe rampant denial?) could cause e.g. an American politician to promise the same moon that his or her predecessors have promised and repeatedly failed to deliver. I still think that *somewhere* there is a *systemic* impediment to progress, and most are only arguing how to divy up the blame.
Obama didn't promise incremental improvement, he promised "Hope" and "Change". Trump didn't promise incremental improvement, he promised to "Make America Great Again". How much slack one cuts them depends on the level of sympathy for their personalities and aims, but I don't think American government is doing anything all that radically different than it was in 2005.
>I still think that *somewhere* there is a *systemic* impediment to progress, and most are only arguing how to divy up the blame.
I mean, the whole point of these new types of protestors is that they hate the system and want to tear the system down, so maybe they share this insight.
"comparing today and 20 years ago, I can point to several examples of new policy where I can say "this was a net win, it's good they did that". And if I can, why can't I have 20 or 30 more of these?"
We probably can have 20 or 30 more of these. But we don't have any easier means of finding them today than we did 20 years ago. We just have to find them one every few years, for the next several decades (though as technological structures and the resulting social structures change around us, some things that were obvious non-starters in the past might become good ideas, and some things that were obvious good ideas in the past might need to be given up).
Yeah, I think we should by default assume that any problem in the real world which hasn't recently been subjected to massive and disruptive outside intervention is likely in a Nash equilibrium, and is likely miles away from a Pareto equilibrium.
Meaning that there often is a 'miracle button' available that moves you from the current Nash equilibrium to a much better state, but it requires unilaterally forcing a whole bunch of people to do things they don't want to do all at the same time.
> Why did the optimal stable ingroup size change from nation-sized to political-tribe-sized?
It seems to me, from a European perspective, that there exists a fundamental assymetry in how the political tribes approach the "national question": the right tend to be more nationalist, while the left tend to be more internationalist.
From where I sit, it looks like the concept of a nation-sized ingroup has been strongly rejected on the left. Consider modern-day left-wing values like diversity and inclusion - these don't really rhyme well with nationalism, that is homogenous and exclusive almost by definition. People in favour of close international co-operation in order to fix the big issues of climate, poverty, etc., and who would like to see increased immigration, preferably from culturally remote societies, are unlikely to identify the nation as ingroup.
In short, the modern left appears to have chosen "people who think like me, regardless of where they happen to live" as their ingroup - and this naturally leads to defining the outgroup as "people who think differently from me, even (especially) if they live right next door".
This I think is an important point, although note there are internationalist trends of thought on the right as well: the EU is arguably an example of this in action.
Yes, good point. The thing about the right, though, seems to be that these days there aren't necessarily more favourably inclined towards their co-citizens than the left are... I am not sure in which country in Europe you are, but in Germany, it seems to me that the right-wing despises their compatriots even more than the left-wing...a typical German right-wing narrative seems to be that modern Germany is "lost", and that most Germans are "left-green idiots", and that basically it's not worth fighting for the country anymore, and that it makes more sense to immigrate to another country like Canada or at least Austria... Also, these right-wingers in Germany tend to support politicians like Orban or Putin, and they admire countries in eastern Europe.... not exactly what the NSDAP did... in the other hand, it seems to me that most German left-wingers really dislike the eastern European countries, and to some extent even the people from there...on the other hand, they are to some extent proud of modern Germany, particularly because of the events of 2015- what they see as the morally righteous decision by the government regarding the refugees, and also Germany's energy policy, which is held up to be ethically superior. So idk, but it seems to me that this division between outgroups doesn't necessarily apply... you also see this in other countries, e.g. the US or Canada, where right-wingers sympathise with right-wingers in other countries, and tend to disrespect most of their own population, at least if they vote for left-wing parties...
A counterpoint to the 'We demand SOMETHING!' argument. I spent about two years actively involved in extinction rebellion in London, and got a pretty good idea of why this can (sometimes!) be a good strategy:
- Leftist infighting WILL happen to your group if you don't keep the demands as simple as possible. There was a period in 2020 after the George Floyd murder where we came very close as a group to this, even though the vast majority of people agreed with pivoting the focus to include anti-racism. People were often getting really upset at each other over it. There was just so much discussion on it that for three straight months that's all that happened - no actual action.
- How do you make decisions on the minutae of your demands when you're a de-centralised, """leaderless""" movement? How do you get thousands of people loosely connected to each other in space and cyberspace to agree on something? See above. It took us three months of discussion on what should have been a basic point to not even come to a decision. If we had decided to try and agree on whether we should be promoting hydrogen vs heat pumps, what kind of green tourism strategies to adopt, we would have been there forever.
- Keeps it easy for new people to turn up without having to have phd in the movement. All they really need is a 30 minute introduction to get the general idea.
Of course, one of XR's demands was that panels be set up where the public would hammer out the details of those solutions, which I don't think many of the movements in the review had even thought about.
It's debatable, but I have to say they did. They massively raised the profile of the climate crisis in the UK, even if that was part of a wave of publicity that was happening globally at the time. There were also perhaps less important achievements like the UK government declaring a climate emergency and a handful of boroughs and local councils creating citizens assemblies.
Definitely hasn't achieved its demands, but I'm not sure that anyone seriously believed that it would. Its functioned best as an awareness raising organisation.
"Awareness" doesn't accomplish anything by itself, and thus certainly doesn't serve as a counterpoint to Gurri. The problem is that even if the general public thinks it would be nice to stop climate change, they're unwilling to pay for things like carbon taxes:
We were willing to pay carbon taxes in Washington State. The story has been well hashed out in SSC. "The Left" shat in it because it didn't include "inclusive discussion" to add cash handouts to professional leftist agitators and local demands du jour. Lesson learned, good and hard: "carbon" is a leftist club, not an actual leftist goal. Try to make a persuasive argument otherwise.
Well, at least in Canada, all the major left-wing parties (I guess you could consider the liberals to be more centrist, though in Canada they're generally grouped with the left) supported carbon taxes in the last few elections... only the conservative parties opposed carbon taxes, though in the last election, they tried to come up with some kind of carbon tax, though it was really only a half-hearted attempt, since their base doesn't even acknowledge climate change to be happening...
"Definitely hasn't achieved its demands, but I'm not sure that anyone seriously believed that it would. Its functioned best as an awareness raising organisation."
I wasn't aware of it until very recently, and I have to say, I think for most of the protesters going on the protests was their equivalent of "a nice day out": we got to march in company, chant slogans, met people, then went home and felt the warm glow of accomplishment even if all we really did was block a road for a couple of hours while people trying to get to work cursed our names.
I agree that XR probably *decreased* support for green policies. Though IMO it's less because of ill will generated by their tactics (generally that doesn't actually have much of an impact, unless you explicitly go out of your way to be as offensive as possible like e.g. PETA), and more because XR kept making hyper-exaggerated claims about the effects of climate change that were obviously false and contradict what actual climate scientists. While most climate activists were telling people to trust the scientists, you had XR going around saying that the scientists were actually just capitalist lapdogs who were *downplaying* the threat of climate change, which makes the job of more moderate and mainstream climate activists that much harder.
Probably helped increase outright climate change denialism by making ridiculous claims like "climate change will kill 6 billion people by 2050," and then denouncing the *IPCC* as establishment shills for dismissing that obviously false claim as an impossibility.
Correction, the claim was that it would kill 6 people by 2100, not by 2050. Still, actual climate scientists have pointed out that there's no evidence for such a claim whatsoever, and furthermore, not even any plausible mechanism by which that could happen.
There is a fundamental tradeoff between a group being effective and large. Too focused and the group loses members and too unfocused and nothing gets accomplished. That is why change is so hard.
But that's more down to lack of structure and strong leadership than "our demands weren't simple enough".
As you say, if the question had been "hydrogen versus heat pumps", everyone would have sat around yakking for three months with nothing to show at the end of it, because any fool with internet access could throw in his tuppence worth and derail the whole debate.
If, on the other hand, there had been a committee - well, committees are boring and dull and take forever also, but once it has been decided that Kate and Trevor and Sukie and Han Geng will be on the Heat Pump Decision Committee, you have something to work with: only these four to deal with, a deadline, a structure.
"Leftist infighting WILL happen to your group if you don't keep the demands as simple as possible. There was a period in 2020 after the George Floyd murder where we came very close as a group to this, even though the vast majority of people agreed with pivoting the focus to include anti-racism. People were often getting really upset at each other over it. There was just so much discussion on it that for three straight months that's all that happened - no actual action."
Leftist infighting will happen because the different groups on the left have dramatically different goals, and sticking to "simple" (i.e. vague and basically meaningless) slogans to keep them all on the same page basically amounts to deception. If you have one group that thinks "we should reform the police so that they don't keep killing innocent people and getting away with it," and a group that thinks "we should completely abolish the police so we can have an anarcho-communist society with no laws whatsoever," and a third group that thinks "we should abolish the current police forces to make it easier for the workers to revolt and establish a USSR-style authoritarian communist regime, and then build a new police force loyal to our Marxist-Leninist Dictatorship of the Proletarian," then they probably shouldn't be in the same movement to begin with, since any group succeeding would mean that the other two end up becoming useful idiots to be discarded.
Sure, and generally speaking, this has made the right more united historically... but, in the past few decades, with the advent of of the internet and social media, it seems that the right is also quite disunited... I mean there's a big difference between alt-right people who want to block all immigration and remove "undesirable" people from their "nation", and between classical centre-right liberals like the FDP in Germany or maybe Susan Collins, who want a meritocratic society and an immigration system that benefits the economy...
That picture quotes Antonio Gramsci, on organic crisis: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear" (Prison Notebooks, 1930)
That depends on who you consider to be "his ilk". If it's any central bank, then the Great Depression can be laid at their feet. If it's Greenspan specifically, the recessions during his tenure were relatively mild.
I think that 14 years of data is insufficient for testing a hypothesis about how bank governance styles affect recessions. Unfortunately, it's all we got for Greenspan personally. The question many people have is whether Greenspan successfully prevented recessionary impacts, or whether he changed things structurally so that these impacts came in a big crisis in 2008 rather than as several normal sized recessions. (I don't think anyone has the information needed to answer this question.)
Scott's conclusion seems a bit too uncharitable to the theses presented. The anti-elite sentiment is alive and an important factor in politics worldwide:
1) The Yellow Vest protests in France were large and markedly anti-elite; unlike Occupy, they were driven by lower class, working people. (The description of the Spanish youth is also uncharitable, as it ignores massive youth unemployment in Southern European countries).
2)Yes, the left-right distinction is the dominating axis in American politics, but anti-elite sentiment is still discernible on the left side as well. Neither Clinton nor Biden had remotely enthusiastic support on the left side (unlike Bernie), and ideologically aligned Silicon Valley/Big tech is also deeply unpopular.
3) For some reason, scientists were never considered part of the "evil elite", maybe because they are not perceived as being in charge. Therefore, they continue to enjoy higher levels of trust, particularly in the pandemic.
> 3) For some reason, scientists were never considered part of the "evil elite", maybe because they are not perceived as being in charge. Therefore, they continue to enjoy higher levels of trust, particularly in the pandemic.
I fear that this particular bridge is burning as we speak, precisely because of the pandemic.
Yeah, but only on the right, not on the left... I guess there are some scientists which the left-wing dislikes (e.g. migration researchers, or geneticists), but overall being anti-science is now associated strongly with the right, particularly in the US, but also increasingly in other western countries it seems...
Two of the primary “world is going to hell” talking points are climate change and the inadequacy of the welfare state. Obviously a heavy handed welfare state is a tradeoff vs. unemployment, and addressing climate change is a tradeoff vs. quality of life for the working-class people on less-prime real estate where cars are more important. If anything both of those complaints are in favor of the (American) status quo.
> and addressing climate change is a tradeoff vs. quality of life for the working-class people on less-prime real estate where cars are more important
I think this is a false dichotomy that's being pushed for political reasons to make fighting climate change unpopular.
I think we could pretty much solve climate change by switching all power plants to nuclear or renewables and replacing as many gas engines as possible with electric ones. There's no reason this has to be a particular hardship for the average person in their everyday life.
Well, unless electric cars become cheaper, and charging them faster and more convenient, this will still be an inconvenience for many people...e.g. those living in apartments in cities, where they have to keep their cars standing on the street at night...
Because scientists were a cross between magicians and the new clergy. We can only know things through Science, and these are the only certified interpreters of the sacred word. Everything nice we have in the modern world came from Science: cures for diseases, modern conveniences, labour-saving devices, fun things like the Internet and so on.
Hence, scientists are people who cannot be challenged by the laity, who do not have the learning to speak on the topic, and if you make them angry, then it's coal and not presents in your stocking on Christmas Day.
That sounds like a typical right-wing populist talking point... I mean, yes you can inform yourself through the internet, but the sources have to be evaluated for their veracity, and I guess I will stick with those which come from people who have studied these fields, instead if random internet cranks...
Yeah, but in the US, the left has come around to become the party of "trust in elites", especially scientists... while the right has turned into an outright "anti-elite" group, even including previously left-wing positions (e.g. anti-vaccine sentiment) in their positions...
It might be worth pointing out that the "Deep State" under another name ("Sir Humphrey Applebee") is a charachter in the decades old brilliant sitcom Yes Minister. It's not a new concept.
I have a major objection to the "personal responsibility" bit at the end - what do you do about problems that can only be solved at scale? If I'm worried about climate change, I can't build my own nuclear power plant, all I can do is point to the various "BUILD GREEN ENERGY" buttons on the government's console and suggest pushing them.
(In fact, "personal responsibility" can be used as a distraction from buttons you don't want pushed! BP released a calculator to find your personal carbon footprint, which allows them to look environmentally friendly while diverting attention from things that might cause a large-scale change in demand for oil.)
Personal responsibility can have a huge impact on climate change. All the oil we burn and energy we use ultimate goes to service people. It's used in the cars we drive and to produce and transport the products we use. We are collectively the driving force behind carbon emissions.
You may not be able to build your own nuclear power plant, but you can buy renewable energy certificates to cancel out your electricity usage. Other common advice includes carpool/bus/bike/walk, use a fuel efficient car, eat less beef, etc.
Of course, you're just one person. There are 7.8 billion other people. Ideally everyone would take responsibility to reduce their carbon footprint, but many won't. So maybe it feels futile to reduce your emissions when you're such a tiny part of the problem.
But I think you're in the same boat when you vote or complain about the government. Only this way, instead of directly reducing carbon emissions by some small fraction, you're one vote among millions. The advantage is that if the pro-environment movement is strong enough to elect/influence a pro-environment government, the government can pass laws that force everyone to reduce their carbon footprint (e.g. carbon tax). On the flip side, it's all or nothing. If everyone relies solely on the government to effect change instead of personal responsibility, and the pro-environment government doesn't get elected, you get no reduction in emissions.
If only 40% of citizens supported environmental policies, but they also took personal responsibility, bought renewable energy offsets, reduced their carbon footprint, etc., then you still have 40% of the benefit. And when your movement grows to >50% support, then you can finally pass laws forcing the rest of the population to reduce their carbon footprint.
My response to this is the same over and over again: it is much easier to stop one company from producing than it is to stop 100k consumers from consuming. This is the sole reason the personal responsibility point doesn't work. Imagine trying to legislate against the consumer habits of millions of people? Doesn't fly. But now ban a single company from overproducing and the outrage will only be felt after the fact when people can't buy as many steaks as they once could.
That's part of my point. It's easier to implement a top-down carbon-reducing policy... once you have majority support for such a policy. Until then, if you can get 30% of people to take personal responsibility, then at least you have something.
The obvious answer is that you should both vote *and* reduce your personal carbon footprint.
I also get the impression that some people who argue against personal responsibility for climate change just want to be angry at BP and big corporations without having to sacrifice anything themselves. And I think they discount the costs that aren't obvious. Eg: the same people who may not like the idea of a carbon tax that would directly cost them $1000 might support a tax on oil companies, even if that tax made them end up spending $1000 more (because prices of products would rise).
You can't build your own nuclear power plant. You can study the issue well enough to make a sound argument in favor of nuclear power. Then call your local congressman's office and ask which staffer handles energy policy issues, and either talk or write to that staffer with a brief argument in favor of nuclear power and an offer to engage further.
Then go put solar arrays on your roof, because it will take a while to get that reactor built. But all save the highest-profile public issues hinge on which options staffers decide to raise with elected officials who are too busy to do anything but take their word on it and maybe make a quick decision from the top three issues. To a staffer, the difference between "nuclear power is off the table, the public will never go for it" and "nuclear power is controversial but potentially safe and effective, we should consider it" can be just a few friendly personal conversations that, staffers being people-people rather than thing-people, stick out above a screen full of numbers.
You’re right that he doesn’t mention left/right as much as border/center. But his whole thesis (“states can’t solve literally every problem”) screams to me that it’s an argument for fundamentally limited government. This has always been an American right wing perspective, and I get the impression that there’s basically no embrace of this among American left-leaning elites. The one thing I cannot imagine democratic politicians saying is “yes, XYZ is a real problem with real human consequences, but no, the government can’t do anything about it, so it’s better not to try.”
What American people on the right seemed to want (pre-Trump) was for the government to just stop making things worse for people. But what Gurri doesn’t suggest in the book is the possibility that even this isn’t doable.
Gurri says a few times that “networks can tear things down but they can’t build.” I suggest bitcoin both proves this wrong and provides a template for how new systems can be built in the future. Bitcoin is a collaborative project of millions of people around the world. There’s no hierarchy, and it’s entirely voluntary.
Bitcoin is a pile of scams, massive waste of energy just to create a barely usable payment network. Is is so dysfunctional that is used only by criminals, speculators, scammers and has some minor use failed states like Venezuela.
If that is template for future then I prefer no future.
BRB, I am going to delete BTC scam posts from forum that I moderate. Last time I looked in morning, likely there are 20 new ones if no other moderator went through modlog.
"massive waste of energy" Less than the parasitic power draw of all the home electronics staying just on enough to turn on when you press "on" on your remote control. Less than all of the electric clothes dryers. Less than the power consumption of all the credit card reader terminals in the world.
There are many things wrong with BTC. But when a critic trots this particular complaint out, I stop reading, and if possible never read another word written by that critic ever again.
Does "practically free remittances to el salvador" count as substantial? What if bitcoin is used as legal tender by 10 countries with a total population of several hundred million people?
What would cause you to think bitcoin had build something substantial?
I personally have used BTC to pay for contract software development by Indonesian software developers ~7 years ago. The USD to BTC to BTC to IDR to cash-IDR-in-hand had cheaper transaction overhead than Fivrr or Western Union, and the devs got paid in 20 minutes instead of 5 days.
There's definitely a disconnect between reality and elite public opinion on bitcoin. It's very hard to imagine something this controversial being anything but widely misunderstood. People will figure it out eventually; the longer they take to come around, the cheaper we can stack sats :)
One counterpoint is that the neo-institutions which allowed that organization have themselves been hijacked. Most of the major tech companies are being pushed internally in a particular political direction. Twitter at one point had substantial ownership by the Saudis.
In at least that poetic version of events, the noblewoman Elfrida revolts by asserting her beauty before the king instead of hiding it, perhaps from pride and perhaps from spite. Her husband the Earl dies so the king can marry her, and she spends the rest of her life unable to smile in gladness.
The Keepsake is the story of a very privileged woman asserting her power to destroy the existing order in which she lived without care for the consequences, which prove regretful.
And the Revolt of the Public?
"Gurri isn't shy about his contempt for this. Not only were these some of the most privileged people in their respective countries, but (despite the legitimately-sucky 2008 recession), they were living during a time of unprecedented plenty."
That too seems to be a story of privileged people who 'simply assert their own power to achieve what they desire', with - Gurri expects - regretful consequences.
Note there is no historical basis for that story. It seems to conflate Alfred's daughter, presumably Ælfthryth who married the Count (=Earl in the English peerage) of Flanders with the third wife of King Edgar, Alfred's great-grandson, who was called Ælffrida and had previously been married to the Ealdorman (the top noble title before the Danish conquest in 1016 brought in earls) of East Anglia, and who likely got a bad reputation due to her son being the much maligned Æthelræd the Unready, whose failures against the Danes (and coming to power due to the murder of his brother) were rather held against him by the Victorians.
The poem seems focused on the latter person, Aethread's mother, not Alfred's daughter. Bad repute does accrue over her son's bad results, but also over her having (perhaps) had her stepson murdered to clear the way for her son.
We've got nigh-contemporaneous evidence for her having had a first marriage to Aethelwald. Almost anything else is speculative, albeit speculation given much closer in time than we are now - ~150-200 years after the events, for William of Malmesbury. That certainly looks the account the poet is following.
It's also hard for any third wife to follow up the second consort, who was literally sainted. Feast day four days ago. Edgar's daughter by St. Wulfthryth, Edith, also sainted, had her feast day yesterday.
The nicknames for the half-siblings really do tell the tale: Edward the Martyr, Saint Edith... and Aethelred the ill-advised.
I suspect if your step-son gets murdered by your retainers whilst visiting your home, you might come under some suspicion.
Although the only evidence for Edward being particularly religious is his martyrdom, whilst Æthelred seems to have been more concerned with placating God than dealing with Danes (and may have been the driver in getting Edward recognised as a martyr). Considering Edith likely had no choice in her monastic vocation (daughters of the early kings of England married foreign rulers or became religious) it is possible that Æthelred was the most pious of the lot and just had the bad luck to live a long life (he's the third longest-reigning medieval king of England, and the seventh longest-reigning monarch of England) rather than a short or cloistered one. A full life as medieval monarch was hardly condusive to creating a pious image (Louis IX excepted).
I took Gurri's argument to not just be about the impact of increased visibility and criticism on the public mood, but also that the complexity of the administrative state was such that no ordinary citizen, and maybe not many elites, could understand how it functioned or how to change things, further contributing to the vagueness of protests.
You hint towards this in the review but a distinction should be made between actions and outcomes. Democracies can be incredibly fickle where masses demand an outcome that may not be realistic, but there are two other cases:
1. Demanding an outcome that corresponds to rather well known and obvious policy options none of which are politically acceptable (e.g. lowering housing costs) -- usually the minority that actually benefits from the opposite of the outcome (home prices and rents rising forever) is more motivated and better informed on how and what keeps the effect going the way they want it to.
Other example of this might be
2. Explicitly demanding an action that is also not politically acceptable (border enforcement and the political content of public education are examples. But perfectly actionable (Ample evidence that it is done successfully elsewhere and/or in the past)
For example... 'liberal rot in schools' If populist protestors were demanding that public school children be made *more patriotic*, that's demanding an effect to which no practical action might realistically generate. Demanding a particular topic be purged from the curriculum (CRT specifically or racial struggle sessions in general if you believe CRT isn't a real thing) is an action, even if it's a bad action. Acting like conscious decisions made by public officials are the result of passive and inevitable forces of history or progress like some caricature of a libertarian is silly [though often effective]
In general it does make sense for voters to generally demand effects rather than actions because you'll get more consensus on effects. But you do get cases where a specific and perfectly realistic action is demanded and you notice:
1. It's political poison for an elected official to take up the action as a platform
2. If the voters do manage to breach the "Containment election" none of the permanent employees of the government are willing or able to work with the representatives to make the action happen.
3. Some higher governmental body (A supreme court, house of lords) with formal or de-facto veto power comes around and strikes down any attempts at putting the action into place.
There are some modern parallels to this but the one that also comes to my mind is late republican Rome and land reform. The optimates employed every dirty trick to keep it from happening and they kept crying "Tyrant" until they actually got one.
But again, even getting to stage 1 is uncommon since voters *are* generally pretty fickle.
I would question your description of BLM as not fitting this pattern. First, it is a deliberately-leaderless movement. Second, while "defund the police" may be a specific demand, it's one with very low public support and sort of fits the "miracle" scheme because there's no real explanation of what happens next.
Also, various demands have been but forth by BLM-adjacent groups, and they turned into the same universal-issue-grab-bags that characterized Occupy Wall Street, such as from the Movement for Black Lives (https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/) which includes:
- Abolishing all prisons
- Reparations
- Restoring Glass-Steagall
- Ending the Trans-Pacific Partnership
- Progressive tax reform
- "A right to restored land, clean air, clean water and housing and an end to the exploitative privatization of natural resources"
- Labor-organization rights (unspecified, and also not explained as to how they don't already have this)
- Universal healthcare
Also, just in case you weren't sure if this was liberal, all of this is peppered with repeated references to LGBTQ+ people, indigenous people, etc.
I will admit many of these are indeed specific demands but they basically sum to "fix every problem ever" and while some of them might reasonably be accomplished, others are basically fantasies.
The 1/6 example is interesting because clearly that single event had an aspirational goal, but was connected with various groups that are closer to nonsense protest movements - the Proud Boys, various anti-government militias, and ESPECIALLY QAnon (which technically has a leader, albeit one who seems to have vanished and nobody can identify), which has to be the apex version of the "the elites could just press the Miracle button" idea, insofar as it claims they are both not doing that and also secretly molesting and/or murdering children, and its main goal is "arrest basically everybody and try them for their [imagined] crimes".
Notwithstanding these diverse demands, there was in fact a lot of legislative response to BLM. Colorado ended qualified immunity, Virginia banned no-knock warrants, lots of cities banned chokeholds etc. I guess the January 6 version is "election integrity" laws and "audits" in red states.
This is definitely a fair point, although I would think you could say the same thing about some of the other examples given - the Yellow Vests (cited in the comments, not the article) saw a repeal of the gas tax increase in France, for example. Not sure what happened to it, but Netanyahu announced a plan for housing after the protests started in Israel.
I think any large-enough movement, even an incoherent one, will probably spawn some legislation if only because people want to take advantage of it to advance their political careers, or, more charitably, because people want to represent the wishes of their constituents to the degree they can follow them.
Could you be a bit more concrete as to what you mean by this? It strikes me as a strong overstatement in its current form. For example, lots of "the establishment" do not agree with the "defund the police" slogan.
I think this is a key point: "There haven't been many big viral protests lately except Black Lives Matter and the 1/6 insurrection, and both seemed to have a perfectly serviceable set of specific demands (defunding the police, decertifying the elections)."
But I think maybe they are "specific demands" clear to * you * at a high level, but I guarantee you the actual people involved in both are nowhere near that specific, consistent or even agreed upon, and even more to Gurri's point, they are "incoherent" because you can't actually do them.
A million kid march to demand free unicorns for all, even if they elect a single monolithic Dictator of Unicorns who has the strict political discipline to require every kid to sign the Free Unicorn Petition and then you, a relatively well politically informed person, see and understand that demand - is still a Gurri-style protest. Because neither the explicit top-level goal that the public agrees "yes, that's their goal" (or the subconscious-level goal of "y'all should be nicer to us kids who want unicorns") can be done, meaning that same cycle of "we demand X, the Man doesn't provide it, therefore the Man is bad and we should continue having a Revolt of the Public" continues.
yes I recognize physically we could actually defund all the police or decertify the election but A) it won't work to achieve what the people in those protests want, and B) would still be considered a evil failure of The Man and requiring further Protests when they didn't work - I am bundling "... according to the standards of the protestors" into my definition of "will this demand work?"
Btw, connecting this to your previous post : In 2014, when Modi won in India, essentially defeating a member of a dynasty that had held control for 70 years, it was obvious that this was possible due to social media.
There was no way, before social media, to make jokes about the Gandhis, mock them. But social media allowed that and the dam burst.
Do what? Beat the Gandhi? Yes, but it was obviously a weak victory. The coalition did not hold.
Remember there was no real alternative to the Gandhi for 70 years, because they owned all the media and never got interviewed...a bit like royalty. I remember Rajiv Gandhi saying, shortly before I moved to the U.S, "Indians are not ready for independent news media. They need to show responsibility."
I am amazed no one on this page brings up Sonia Gandhi's National Advisory Council, where she ran the country using Manmohan Singh as a puppet, without any accountability herself.
Not one media person has asked her that. Why?!
Not one person, even the pro-BJP asked Rahul Gandhi, in the one interview Rahul submitted to, about his disproportionate assets.
Modi has been called a mass murderer without evidence, by every media outlet, ever since Sonia perceived him, a new CM, as a political threat, but HE is the fascist!
That is Scott Alexander's big error.
Nick Kristoff of the nytimes said that he sees Rahul Gandhi as the prince who ought to win, because hey, he's like a prince. I wonder if he'd be so callous about trusting his own govt, with say Jenna Bush or Chelsea Clinton, because they're like princesses! This was a 2014 Kristoff article endorsing Rahul Gandhi.
If it wasn't for social media, this is the sort of nonsense that would have been out there. And all the 12 years of "What about 2002?".
During the anti Sikh pogrom of 1984, when random Sikhs were targeted and brutally killed (led by Congress party politicians), Rajiv Gandhi declared, "When the earth shakes, some trees will fall.". He was referring to his mother Indira Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh body guards. He was justifying the pogrom against random innocent Sikhs (the "trees" that fell!) by his party.
Does this fall nowhere on the radar of people discussing fascism in India?!
(Rajiv went on to become the next PM, riding on the sympathy wave of his mother's assassination, continuing the dynasty. Was he a fascist PM?)
This is in reference to the previous post on this blog though, and only marginally this post.
His family clearly even now has friendly "agents" in important newspapers like the nytimes, and around the world. How they become agents, I don't know. But they seem so bogus in how they cover India. And so disinterested in India itself except that they'd like to see a Gandhi in power.
"In Spain, the previous forty years had seen the fall of a military dictatorship, its replacement with a liberal democracy, and a quintupling of GDP per capita from $6000 to $32000 a year - "in 2012, four years into the crisis there were more cell phones and cars per person in Spain than in the US". The indignado protesters in Spain had lived through the most peaceful period in Europe's history, an almost unprecedented economic boom, and had technologies and luxuries that previous generations could barely dream of. They had cradle-to-grave free health care, university educations, and they were near the top of their society's class pyramids."
Whatever the other merits of the book, I am skeptical that the new factor he identifies (reaction to the failure of high modernity) can explain a phenomenon that predates it.
I finished "The Revolt Of The Public" about a month ago and thought it was one of the most interesting and stimulating books I've read in a while. The criticism that its descriptions and conclusions are obvious depends, perhaps, on how much time one spends thinking about such things. At least in my own case, I found its distillation of trends and motivations that underlie a lot of contemporary phenomena non-obvious enough to be impressed. It reminded me a lot of evolution (i.e. evolution by natural selection) -- very obvious in retrospect, not at all obvious at the time of its discovery, and great at providing a framework in which a lot of things make sense. For example, being at a university, I've been annoyed / upset by a lot of vague, half-baked pseudo-protests, whose character makes a lot more sense as reflections of what Gurri describes as generally leaderless, aim-less, and deliberately unconstructive "movements" -- "The public opposes, but does not propose" leading to - "... a perpetual feedback loop of failure and negation." [p. 271]
I think the better criticism of the book is in the solutions it puts forth, which seem like wishful thinking. Good solutions are a lot to ask for, though...
Reading the review, I realize I have a slightly different take. Transitioning out of high modernism and into an age of information abundance, people are now attempting to make up their own minds on topics. It turns out figuring things out from first principles is quite hard, and most people are also quite bad at it. So you get things like QAnon adherents parroting "do your own research" but being taken in by often quite silly conspiracy theories. I can't even figure out whether my toddler really needs X ounces of milk a day like the guidelines say, and I'm probably in the top 5% of the population in terms of education and intelligence. Every decision we make is in the fog of war now that we no longer blindly trust some authoritative source to tell us what to do, and it's even worse when you get to big, complex problems like obesity or homelessness or the quality of education. I think all the apparent nihilism and "throw the bums out" protests are a symptom of being unable to come up with better ideas and throwing up your hands and telling other people they should have figured it out for you.
I'd like to think the silver lining is that society as a whole will get better at debating and synthesizing different points of view. I have to admit that I don't see a lot of actual progress, but I assume it's a multi-decade process. I just tend to think that whenever society expends a lot of energy on something, we eventually tend to understand it better. We're still grappling with the new information landscape of Google, Twitter, and whatever else, and we're pretty bad at it so far. In terms of both technology and critical thinking, I'm cautiously optimistic that we'll get better at it, and the result will appear less nihilistic.
How dare you take a long-term perspective. (I think you make a lot of sense, and the throes of transition are not very pretty. Then again, neither were many of the throes of industrialization.)
This is the most important comment in the entire thread. As a species, we tend to suck at dealing with a new thing until we don’t. And once we’ve figured it out, then it becomes a solved problem.
We’re struggling with these new mediums but we struggled with TV and radio too.
There's an easy way to stop illegal immigration, which is to be surrounded by a bunch of countries with equally high living standards as yourself, or that lock their citizens in. I think this is what most European and Asian countries do, to the extent that they do manage to stop illegal immigration.
I mean... Both you and Scott are making a lot of implicit assumptions here. I'd tell you that you're implying immigration is a solved problem in European countries, but I don't think you'd agree with that framing.
But in any case, "the extent that they do manage to stop illegal immigration" is "virtually not at all". It's especially a problem in the EU because countries have open borders between then, but no common immigration policy, which creates toxic incentives.
(This is always something that annoys me when discussing European politics with American audiences. They often conflate "I haven't heard of the problems there" with "They're probably doing fine".)
Yeah... definitely. The American left-wing, especially, seems even more oblivious of European politics than the right-wing, though of course, both are rather uninformed, and use it to their own narratives...(e.g. right-wingers with the "refugees in Sweden crisis", and left-wingers with "free universal healthcare", which isn't quite how it works in Europe...).
> but the biggest and most mainstream of mainstream news organizations, like the New York Times are becoming more trusted and certainly more profitable.
This is really interesting. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post increased their legitimacy with both Trump and Clinton voters*, while Huffington Post decreased with both. CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and Breitbart all polarized to various degrees, where the group that trusted trusted more and the group that distrusted distrusted more. No outlet saw the opposite effect. (Though the delta at e.g. WSJ decreased because R trust increased more than D.)
HuffPo's failures aside, there appears to be a clear pattern that the outlets that saw a general increase in trust are paywalled while the ones that offer a free product polarized. There's quite a lot of speculation that could follow from that, but my first thought is that despite the differences in outcome they're each following their incentives pretty competently.
Interesting point about Huffington Post - now that it's mentioned, I realize that I've heard about it a lot less in recent years. Did Vox take up the place in the market that they used to occupy?
That sounds right at first glance, but hard to verify given the shifting foundations of the wider market. HuffPo has been in a steep decline since at least 2016, but Vox isn't exactly picking up all the readers the former has been losing; IIRC it's losing readership as well, but nowhere as quickly.
This book is more relevant than ever in 2021 and still a must-read. Your dismissiveness is baffling.
In June 2020 a lot of people thought the revolution had come. The two lawyers who tossed a Molotov into a cop car and are now facing decades in jail. The politicians who ran to an "abolish the police" platform. Ross Douthat who tweeted, a month after "The Decadent Society" came out, that this may be a quick end to decadence. And I was like, "Do you even Gurri, bro? This revolt of nihilism will blow over by the fall."
That's also why you can't build left/right institutions simply based on hating the right/left. That's just nihilism again. Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence, and owning the libs/cons isn't the same as building trust or governing. The polarization is a symptom of failing institutions, not a way to fix them.
Speaking of, are you sure you know how to build institutions for the decentralized information age? Should we appoint Zvi to head the CDC, or is the entire centralized structure of the CDC as it exists within the sprawling government hopelessly flawed and the entire thing should be burned down? Do you know where people are actually getting their COVID information from? Where are you getting your information about where people are getting COVID information from, and can you trust it? Those are real questions in 2021, and the answers to them depend on understanding deeply the themes of the book on public trust, information, and nihilism. Anyone who is sure they know what's going is almost certainly wrong, and they could do worse than rereading "The Revolt of the Public Again".
All of the Stripe Press books are gorgeous physical objects. I wonder why? Maybe the operation is run at break-even or even a loss and that allows them to invest more in the printing?
Same reason the small family owned Italian place run by two brothers makes better food than Olive Garden. Same reason the small jewish deli makes better sandwiches than subway. Some people are decidated to aesthetics, and some run large corporations, but few people do both.
I've not read the book, but it sounds to me as though Gurri's ideas hold up better than you give him credit for. Your statement that there haven't been any big protests lately besides the whole Georg Floyd unpleasantness and the storming of the capital seems like a Jupiter sized caveat from my perspective.
Secondly, consider that neither of these protest movements really had leaders, either. Who was leading the Black Lives Matter movement? Nobody. Who organized the 1/6 riot? Beats me. Add to that: the 1/6 rioters, when they stormed into the senate chamber, what did they do? Took selfies, stole a few items, vandalized some stuff, then left. They didn't have any sort of plan, like say, preventing Congress from meeting until they met demands for a recount or something. It was really just an expression of anger and indignation, and a completely over the top one, at that. Seems pretty reminiscent of the earlier protest movements you discussed above.
Additionally, consider that the demand to defund the police is so potentially catastrophic and corrosive that it could only come from people whose relationship to modern society is, to put it mildly, a bit fraught. This strikes me as the reverse of the magic button that solves problems; it's the idea that we can eliminate basic government services like law enforcement and not only will this not create law and order problems, but it will eliminate existing problems with police accountability. This chain of reasoning--police act bad, eliminate the police--makes Greta Thunberg look like Otto Von Bismarck. It may not be nihilistic, exactly, but it is so deranged and sophomoric as to be indistinguishable from nihilism. The protests themselves, with the rioting, looting, burning, beatings, property destruction, etc., were a fairly absurd over-reaction to a handful of admittedly ugly viral videos of police misconduct that have trickled out into public view over the past few years, when you consider that dying at the hands of police under any circumstances is fairly rare in this country.
On the flipside of the ledger, we're laboring through a pandemic which has killed ~5 million people worldwide and made an order of magnitude more very unpleasantly sick, and when public health officials encourage people to do some very simple, common sense things like wear a cloth mask over your nose and mouth in public places and go and get a free vaccine when its available, you get a certain strand of people who are unwilling to do either, because they mistrust this nebulous group they call 'elites' so much, and instead they concoct weird conspiracies about Bill Gates and the deep state to explain what's happening, and more than a few wind up getting sick and dying because they wouldn't protect themselves. They're literally dying from their mistrust of people in positions of authority.
Yes they are. Though, I would say that particularly the right-wing is now susceptible to this type of nihilistic protest... I guess, BLM was a bit of an outlier, but even that movement seems to have clear goals...on the right, it's basically only a reaction to events....e.g. the storming of the US capitol, and the claim that elections were stolen...it seems to me that it's just a quick reaction to an event they dislike, but with no plan behind it... I guess that's why it's called "reactionary politics"...🤔😬
Even with the conclusion, you're giving Gurri a bit too much credit here tbh. All of his predictions were wrong. His descriptions of the problem were tinged with a lot of partisan rhetoric that didn't quite fit the facts. The book got famous because people claimed it predicted Trump, but Gurri himself rejected this and his afterword is a really embarrassing pseudo defense of Trump. If the one thing he gets credits for isn't even right, there's basically no unique insight here.
Along the lines of Scott's point about the miracle button - I'm not so impressed with all this anger of the commoners against the elites. If any given group of commoners had their way and became the ruling class, their way would have its own problems, people would get mad at them, and they would start defending themselves and using lame discourse tricks to insulate themselves from criticism in the same way that the current elites do.
I don't think it's unusual for political protests to be dominated by the educated middle class. One of the Freakonomics books has a chapter saying that terrorists are also drawn from this class, and that similarly this class is more likely to vote than the poor in democracies. They are more politically aware and engaged and have ideologies and thus are more likely to be radical. The same was true of 19th century Europe, where Marx and his associates (university educated socialist theorists) were far more radical than the workers (low-income manual laborers) they claimed to be writing about or fighting for.
The wikipedia article on Bolsheviks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsheviks#2nd_Party_Congress) notes that "Lenin... wanted to limit membership to those who supported the party full-time and worked in complete obedience to the elected party leadership. Martov wanted to extend membership to anyone "who recognises the Party Programme and supports it by material means and by regular personal assistance under the direction of one of the party’s organisations."[7] Lenin believed his plan would develop a core group of professional revolutionaries who would devote their full-time and energy towards developing the party into an organization capable of leading a successful proletarian revolution..."
Who could work in politics full-time? Probably only someone with at least some amount of money already!
I think a recurring theme is that the really destitute are focused on immediate, obvious/material goals: a place to live, food, and safety. The middle class have the luxury of thinking about less tangible concerns, like expression and identity. They also learn how to abstract, think about idealized situations, and apply logic to those abstractions, which makes them think they have found some perfect and unassailable solution. Hence the radicalization.
> The "New Poor" are the most likely source of converts for mass movements, for they recall their former wealth with resentment and blame others for their current misfortune.
> Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. (...) The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim — for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives — is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. (...) From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
"Maybe the occasional tendency of the US to switch party systems has captured the center-vs-border conflict and subsumed it into the broader left-right one."
I'd say we know this didn't happen. Bernie voters didn't become MAGAs. Many of the BLM protests were against the political establishment in Democrat-controlled cities, but that didn't turn them to the right.
What Scott describes as the High Modernist approach does get a lot of pushback from the left. One example area is climate change, with the obvious tension between innovating our way out of the problem and the consumption-limiting degrowth approach. I'd argue that people like Elon Musk and even the EA crowd are quite High Modernist in nature. They're just not the government.
And when most Americans mistrustfully think of 'power' they usually instinctively think of 'government power'. When the philosopher-bureaucrat-scientist-dictator-manager-kings are visionary CEOs, they're applauded, not hectored for their shortcomings. Super-efficient modernist structures are fine as long as they optimise for shareholder value and not, say, minimising obesity or homelessness.
On thing that might have some explanatory power is generational. Young people are great at seeing what is wrong with the status quo and naïve about how hard it is to create better institutions and outcomes. The last time of huge unrest was the 1960s and 1970s when the boomers were coming of age. The current discontent seems similar. Thunberg is a good example, in that she angrily demands something be done but doesn't know how.
In a similar vein, Greta Thunberg saying she is demanding solutions, not providing them, is very far from her demanding that the problem just "magically go away". There are lots of proposed solutions, but they come at a cost and thus require political will. Saying that by protesting, one shows that the will is there in the populace and thus wants to motivate politicians to act on the variety of existing solutions, without reducing the support on just one that may turn out to be less optimal, sound like a very logical approach to me.
By contrast, demanding a scientifically supported complete strategy from anyone protesting anything is just a different way of saying "unless you are a scientist/economist/sociologist/etc, you are not allowed to protest."
Sure, some modern protests seem a bit aimless, but that is not a new phenomenon, otherwise "burn the witches/kill the jews" would not have been a regular product of people protesting there being a plague/famine/crisis/foreigner.
I know you like to write ironically, and not being a native speaker, I may be bad at picking up on that. But in contrast to what you write in the beginning, the book seems to very much not say things that are obviously true now, quite the opposite. Almost all the Arab Spring protests failed, so Gurri's self-provided test simply failed. The various protests that are thrown together are very different in aim, support, coherence, making a grand theory of failing modernism extremely shaky. So I have trouble identifying ANY of the things he says that are patently true now, despite your entry into the text. And your own last paragraph also shows that you do not believe his points at all, easily finding points where is analysis is way off the mark, and then looking for possible answers.
So, what is he saying that makes his book worth reading? Or is the cover really the only good thing? As most, I usually really enjoy your book reviews (the 1001 nights one was awesome), but in this one, you seem to get lost in your own rabbithole so deep that your words do not make it back out to me.
"In a similar vein, Greta Thunberg saying she is demanding solutions, not providing them, is very far from her demanding that the problem just "magically go away". There are lots of proposed solutions, but they come at a cost and thus require political will. Saying that by protesting, one shows that the will is there in the populace"
But is the will there? In order to ameliorate the effects of climate change, if we believe the latest warnings, there will need to be a *huge* change in consumption habits and expectations. Not everyone can be offered a yacht to take them across the ocean, and while it may be symbolic it is not feasible in modern conditions - unless people are willing to go back to "the days of sail" and think for a moment about how that will affect global trade.
The public in general may think that recycling, biking to work, and buying food at farmer's markets will do the trick. In reality, things like thumping great increases in the price of fossil fuels are needed - and what would the American public do if their gas prices starting looking like European petrol prices?
There really is an expectation that there is a magic button and you just have to press it to get things done, and it will be easy and won't require us to give up our little luxuries. Fields of turbines for wind power generation? Solar? These are not simple questions with simple answers, and after a certain point you don't get to say "It's not my job to think about solutions" when you are making demands.
"In a similar vein, Greta Thunberg saying she is demanding solutions, not providing them, is very far from her demanding that the problem just "magically go away". There are lots of proposed solutions, but they come at a cost and thus require political will. "
True, but as near as I can tell the "will" that Thunberg et al feel is lacking is the will to stand up to the Greedy Fat Cats saying "stay away from the Miracle button" and offering nice juicy campaign contributions, on account of not wanting to have to pay more taxes and give up their jet-set lifestyles. Thunberg herself is at least willing to endure a bit of austerity, but I don't think her followers have any doubt that the solutions are known and materially certain to succeed and that the material cost will have low impact on anyone outside the upper classes.
"Miracle Button, but every time you press it the level of every Rich Person's money bin goes down ten centimeters", is still a miracle button for this purpose.
This is an interesting comment. I think it is arguable that the very rich and the economic sector of finance are in fact predatory on the real economy composed basically of natural resource use and manufacturing, in the way John Michael Greer argues from Schumacher-type principles in 'Wealth of Nature'. Recently I have been wondering if one of the biggest issues facing the nation where I live is whether it is possible in our democratic system to rein in 'the Big' -- whether it's Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Tech, I think none of those is actually the friend of either the ordinary people or the earth we live from. I guess at the moment I am asking questions about for inst whether it is actually possible to decrement the rich people's money bin. Is that out of our reach, because they have such a lot of practice at filling the troughs our politicians feed at? Is it possible for the money markets to *not* predate on the commercial enterprises which are able to provide for human needs without destroying the natural systems we depend on?
It is not possible to achieve dramatic results by decrementing rich people's money bins, because there's really not that much money in the bins. Most of what makes the super-rich what they are, is control over the flow of money between middle-class workers and middle-class consumers and the providers of raw materials that make up the goods that make for the generally high standard of living and of state capacity that we take for granted.
Naively sticking someone's greedy socialist paws into those greedy capitalist money flows, is going to break things. Sticking to the parts that we know are safe to tap (the money bins from which the megayachts are paid for) doesn't do all that much. Whether or not it might be possible to cleverly redirect the flow of wealth in more desirable directions is an open question, depending in part on whose desires. But it's not likely to happen as a result of simplistic "we demand solutions" or "arrest the banksters" activisim.
"Most of what makes the super-rich what they are, is control over the flow of money between middle-class workers and middle-class consumers and the providers of raw materials that make up the goods that make for the generally high standard of living and of state capacity that we take for granted. " I think this possibly supports Greer's hypothesis that the tertiary economy is parasitic? I don't think there's a way to argue that he is a socialist, by the way, he's more of a moderate conservative influenced by Burke. I think we already have problems with the tax revenue being wanted in several places at once.
Perhaps I misunderstood the point you were making in your final paragraph:
""Miracle Button, but every time you press it the level of every Rich Person's money bin goes down ten centimeters", is still a miracle button for this purpose."
I was guessing that you were making a point here that it would be possible to tap into the Rich Person's money bin to hit at least some of the High Modernist goals. I had previously been thinking that this is fairly difficult due to the amount of effort the rich generally go for in tax avoidance (with the exception of HM the Queen, because the Crown estates hand over about 85 % of their annual revenue to the public purse.) Because of what I thought was an assertion of yours about the possibility of it, I was speculating about whether it is actually possible to get anything much from that bin, even if there was a widespread agreement that we wanted to try to raid it.
I suppose any kind of 'tax the the rich' effort would attract a socialist label. I was seeing it more as a possible policy goal on conservative grounds, from evaluating whether the capitalists really are benefiting actual industry or merely rent-seeking. I could see that if China manages to rein in predatory capitalism and refocus on material skills, which seems to be a direction of their top level policy, will the rest of us be left with the capitalists (who may actually despite their own claims) depressing the ability of the economies to do useful work in a world of material resource decline, primarily the energy descent of course?
Control of the big money flows is not "parasitic", any more than e.g. your brain is a parasite for insisting on control of your respiratory system. If nobody controls the big money flows, then e.g. Ford Motor Company buys a million tons of cotton instead of a million tons of steel because cotton is something they can buy, cotton is cheap, and that's what the die roll said to do.
The belief that "oh, *that* sort of control, we can do that with just some clerks with spreadsheets", goes back far enough that the spreadsheets were dead-tree ledgers. But it has a very bad track record. There are lots of people who are certain that if you took the spreadsheets away from Greedy Rich People and gave them to properly-motivated clerks, said clerks would find all the places where money is being diverted to Greedy Rich People and redirect it to the Public Good without interfering with the bit where auto factories get their steel. I'm pretty sure they'd botch the job in a big way, if we were fool enough to give it to them.
I'm not against finance in general, but I'm looking for a way to evaluate whether the actions carried out in any way benefit the real world, defined as that one in which people gather natural resources and make them into things people need, and meet the needs of the inhabitants with them. Isn't it possible to make some distinctions about whether the activities of a finance firm are a net benefit or not? I know the finance system is useful for human activities, but I think it goes a long way beyond being useful.
As for your point about Ford, presumably they want to make cars, they are clearly not going to buy cotton just because it's cheap, I get the feeling I must have entirely missed your point here?
I'm saying not all of the finance world is helpful: I guess I am looking for people to help me design friendliness evaluation for finance. Here in the UK we have a lot of the economics and finance sector but the rest of the economy doesn't seem to benefit a lot. Perhaps it's just the shrinking pie effect from energy descent.
To be fair, demanding solutions instead of providing them is perfectly acceptable in other contexts. For example, if I go to McDonalds and the ice cream machine is broken for the 3rd week in a row, it could be reasonable of me to tell them, "I demand you fix your machine before I shop here again". Yes, it would be awesome if I could just go in and fix their machine, but that's not my job. There are professionals who do those sort of things, and, being a software engineer, if I tried fixing it myself I'd probably just make it explode or something.
Or, to use a more salient example, if I'm driving on the highway and see a forest fire, it's reasonable of me to call up 911 and yell, "OMG there's a forest fire you gotta help". They have fire trucks, helicopters, chainsaws, and absurdly strong people trained to use all that equipment. I've got a water bottle and a Kia Soul. I pay my taxes so that I don't [i]have[/i] to spend my days training to deadlift 200 lbs while wearing an asbestos suit.
Sure, as long as you understand that ultimately you're responsible for what happens in your life. To take another example: if your doctor is giving you instructions that aren't helping you, you have to find another doctor, until things work out for you. Many people will stay with their current doctor, and complain that their health isn't the best. But thinking that your doctor should care about your health more than you is a delusion.
But the protests were more as if you went into McDonalds, they asked for your order, and you huffed and puffed about "that's not *my* job, you should just *know* what my order is!" and then getting really angry when they didn't include an ice cream for you. You *wanted* ice cream! They should *know* that! *Everyone* likes ice cream, how can they not know that! In fact, McDonalds should be providing free ice cream for everyone!
Something that bothers me a lot in Scott's writing recently has been the blind pairing of Brexit with Trump, as if they were manifestations of the same broad process. This review perhaps gives us the tools to understand why this is wrong a bit better in the centre and border dichotomy.
From an interested outsider's perspective, I don't disagree that Trump was clearly the beneficiary of a movement against the centre, since he had to overthrow not one but two parties' establishments to get to the presidency, and did so by vague appeals to discontented and marginalised populations. Within a democratic framework that seems to be a clear border uprising, right down to the threats to said democratic framework.
Brexit though was more of a centre versus centre conflict. In 2014 the most powerful centre in the UK was not the Brussels government/bureaucracy/gravy train (I wasn't a fan...) but the national government and parliament in Westminster. And when the Brexit debate started it was a debate about control and sovereignty, not a rejection of elites. It was a question of which set of elites should control some aspects of our life, not an attempt to throw the lot out. Yes, most (but not all) of our governing classes were in favour of EU membership, but there were prominent Eurosceptic voices across the political and media spectra. The leave coalition was a very uneasy mix of nationalists, libertarians, old-style socialists, social democrats and members of the existing liberal-conservative consensus (see our current Prime Minister for example) who judged the EU to have less benefits than harms. What united them was arguably a very modernist view that powers should be centralised in our parliamentary government and not held at different levels with different methods of accountability. That is to say, the unifying vision of the leave party was not to attack the elites but to actually bolster the power of the strongest centre in the UK.
That this came to pass can be seen in the aftermath, when various factions and institutions tried to assert their claims to the stronger power available: the speaker asserting the power of parliament; the attempts of the courts to override government; the formation of the eventually (temporarily presumably) victorious alliance in the Conservative party of Brexiteers and remainers who accepted the result. This was not a fight with the borderers, but the elite trying to accommodate to a unicentral reality.
The media focuses too much on the workers in towns whose former coal mining or steel industries have gone, whilst failing to remember the role of many middle class women who voted for Tony Blair's government a decade earlier, or the millions of university graduates (easily enough to sway the vote) who did want to leave. This narrative, perhaps unconsciously, seeks to explain Brexit as the UK's own Trump moment. It's fun as far as it goes, but the support of the left-behind in former industrial towns is about as close as you get to a parallel between Brexit and Trump.
So, as an appeal to Scott: stop with the right-on conflation of Trump and Brexit. Whilst both perhaps drew on the support of angry communities, only on
...only one actually was a rejection of the centre. Brexit fused anger and centralisation into a campaign to "take back control", a phrase coined by a man who has a belief in the ability of central government to do better
Nicely put. I can see how easy it is to lump Trump and Brexit together. Sometimes it just suits Scott's rhetorical purposes. But I agree that probably.... enough is enough!
Martin Gurri is explicitly saying this. Its not some adventure of logic by the OP. "The 2016 Brexit referendum and election of Donald Trump — both of which were based primarily on the angry repudiation of the status quo — provided further compelling evidence of this public sentiment [of nihilism]"
And I would accept Brexit as a repudiation of the status quo, but not an angry one. It was pretty low key without any violence or really many rallies. Whilst there were angry people involved (on both sides) they were not typical. The leave campaign was optimistic not nihilistic as well. That Gurri makes the same error of classification suggests the media lense on Brexit was rather tuned into Trump rather than what actually happened. To be fair the hardcore minority of remainers who wanted another vote or something to overturn the decision (many of whom were involved in the media) were rather interested in portraying leaving the EU as Trump-style populism, so the media narrative had a source. It's just people accept it too easily.
Well, there certainly was violence with the labour politician being shot... though, I agree that overall Brexit was less nihilistic than the Trump movement... like I wrote above, people like Bozza Johnson or Michael Gove know what their values are at least, while Donnie T seems to be driven by only his (and his supporters) passions...
>The leave coalition was a very uneasy mix of nationalists, libertarians, old-style socialists, social democrats
That tells you Leave is Border. Look at how the UKs officially centrist party the Liberal Democrats are 100% remain. The moderates in the other parties are remainers, too. Remain is centre.
Note that Border is not a synonym for Populist, and Centre is not a synonym for Elite. Prominent leaver Jacob Rees-Mogg is as Elite as they get, but also Border, because he has weird views, for instance.
So any popular revolt against a right- or left-wing dictatorship is likely to be centre attacking the border? Because that appears to be the logic of your view.
Ignoring the classification of the currently woke by UK standards and wanting to raise taxes Liberal Democrats as central (they look to be left of the Labour leadership at least), the centre/border is just a way of expressing centre and periphery, so those who have power and those that don't. It's nothing to do with populism as you say, although by definition most elites will be linked to the centre. It's certainly nothing to do with positioning on the right-left scale. Indeed, the Liberal Democrats, despite actually being in government shortly before as the junior part of a coalition, are pretty well excluded from power so despite being politically of the centre, they are arguably borderers attacking the centre (their strongly pro-Europe position and desire for PR are a definite minority position in the UK).
Also, if you're going to quote me please don't cut off the quote at the point where I flag the contribution of the centre to the leave campaign. Yes, the leave campaign involved a lot of borderers, as did the remain campaign comes to that, but it was led and directed by people from the centre who believed in the centre. Selectively quoting me doesn't change that, just makes your point slightly invalid.
"So any popular revolt against a right- or left-wing dictatorship is likely to be centre attacking the border? Because that appears to be the logic of your view."
What? I never said anything of the kind.
"Yes, the leave campaign involved a lot of borderers, as did the remain campaign "
Only the rank and file of the leave campaign involved more , and more bordery. They had some establishment from figures on board, but that's not what swung it. It's kind of true that some of the establishment was on board with leave, buy it doesn't mask off the fact that populist revolt was really important too.
The liberal democrats might be centrist, but they are definitely not mainstream in the UK...so not necessarily "elites"... similar to how Macron in France represented himself when first running for president in 2017...so you could argue that the "centre" isn't necessarily always the "centre". Of course, there are countries where this is indeed the case, e.g. Canada or the Netherlands...
Good point. I also never understood why so many people tend to group Bozza Johnson with Trump... I think there are very different politicians, despite having similar hairstyles and being populists... Bozza to me seems like a traditional liberal-consevative, who has more or less clear values, even if he changes them if it's opportunistic to do so (e.g. climate change). Donny T, on the other hand, seems like someone who really is driven by his passions, without thinking it through...so, if you will, and if I were to stereotype, Bozza is very British (similar types are Jezza Clarkson and Piers Morgan), while Donny T is very much a yank, similar types like him include Ted Nugent, Graham (the evangelical bloke) and maybe Ice cube (the rapper/actor, especially in 21 jump Street...).
"Gurri isn't shy about his contempt for this. Not only were these some of the most privileged people in their respective countries, but (despite the legitimately-sucky 2008 recession), they were living during a time of unprecedented plenty. [...] The indignado protesters in Spain had lived through the most peaceful period in Europe's history, an almost unprecedented economic boom, and had technologies and luxuries that previous generations could barely dream of."
"In Gurri's telling, High Modernism had always been a failure, but the government-media-academia elite axis had been strong enough to conceal it from the public."
How does Gurri reconcile these two opinions? Wasn't it High Modernism that brought us to this time of unprecedented plenty, with technologies and luxuries that previous generations could barely dream of?
I believe Gurri argues that the rate of improvement has decreased as a result of High Modernism's failures, as well as HM failing to solve particular problems. So prosperity is better, though not as good as it could be, peace is only kind of a result of HM policies (the first half of the 20th century wasn't good for it, and the latter half was good largely in the sense it wasn't in Europe's living room) but things like poverty, homelessness, everyone who goes to college having immediately a high status, high paid and fulfilling job, etc. those things haven't been fulfilled either. Governments promise more and more and deliver less and less, but before that was sort of swept under the rug.
You're probably right that this is what Gurri believes, but it makes him sound...entitled? To use Scott's analogy, High Modernism has already pressed multiple miracle buttons and delivered multiple miracles: antibiotics, vaccines, foods from all over the world, humanity's knowledge at everyone's fingertips, the banishment of famine and war from developed countries, near zero infant mortality, plummeting crime rates...yet Gurri criticizes HM for not delivering miracles even faster?
It was, of course. But modernism's successes become taken for granted, while its failures are constantly talked about. As such, you have postmodernism, neoliberalism, and more generally the retreat from centralized planning to improve anything from the 1970s onward. (And, I'd argue as a direct effect of that, the slowing-down of actual progress - and the Great Stagnation then fuels more of the decentralized protests being described.) Like, it's absolutely true that the traditional media did and does cover up governmental failure, and social media has revealed a lot of incompetence that was already there. But what traditional media has absorbed from social media is not its freedom (it can't, that's not how the business model works by definition) but its hostility - outrage, with sprinklings of fear and/or despair for flavor.
It's something that I've thought of as Internet negativity, but it might just be the nature of intellectual discussion, to emphasize negative emotions (and with social media we're spending much more of our time discussing politics and philosophy). Sometimes a good thing - not settling for minor improvements if there's better possible - but also causing major problems. Building is hard, criticizing is easy. Combine with the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, and you get, well, this.
Maybe more specifically, the points where traditional media fails is in demonstrating authorities (not just the government, of course, but a lot of the time the line between gov't, corporations, and high-class social circles is very blurry, and needless to say mass media itself is a part of the authority structure) being incompetent and/or evil (and sometimes it *is* malice rather than incompetence). So social media has an advantage (whose extent depends on censorship, but the advantage remains so long as it's equally or less censored compared to traditional media, which is probably part of why journalists are lobbying so much for social media censorship - they want journalistic freedom to remain their estate privilege alone) in negative stories. Traditional media then ended up, for whatever reason, trying to compete on the negativity front, maybe as a reaction to when they themselves wound up being targeted. Or maybe it really is just a matter of business models.
But it's a difficult balance. Because on the one hand you need privacy and idealism to make plans, but on the other hand you need the ability for whistleblowers to reveal if the plans are evil, or naysmiths to point out when it'd lead to disaster. At the moment we don't seem to be doing great on either, but then again I'm probably romanticizing the past to a substantial extent, rather than things actually getting worse. The DSA does not suffer from the nihilistic vagueness Occupy had.
If Scott thinks everything in here is obvious, could because Gurri was fairly well-received and influential in the tech/rationalist/libertarian circles Scott is adjacent to? In other words, do these ideas seems obvious now because Gurri is in the water?
I am not convinced that the various protest movements in / since 2011 are more closely related to each other than they are to earlier revolutionary waves. If social media has been massively influential for protests, then we should expect that protests since 2005 have certain things in common that the Vietnam War protests did not - or the revolutions of 1848 - or the peasants' war of 1525.
The most common distinguisher given for social media movements is a lack leaders and institutions. I am skeptical, both that previous protests always had leaders and institutions, and that modern protests usually lack both. Just looking at recent US history, Occupy is no-leaders & no-institutions, the Tea Party is no-leaders & yes-institutions, Democratic Socialism is yes-leaders & yes-institutions, and Trumpism is yes-leader & no-institutions. All of these are given as examples of social media driven protests.
"the cover image - of some sort of classical-goddess-looking person (possibly Democracy? I expect if I were more cultured I would know this) holding a cell phone"
Not necessarily needing to be more cultured; because my mind Works That Way, I identified that as "not a Classical image, it's Victorian early to mid-century idea of Ye Olden Tymes and not pre-Raphaelite, so it's meant to be a queen or noblewoman sometime in the Middle Ages".
Some Googling enabled me to finally track it down, it's an image that's been used for several other purposes but Getty Images have it as "Vintage engraving from 1851 showing Princess Elfrida (Ælfthryth) of Wessex (died June 7, 929), the last child of Alfred the Great, the Saxon King of England and his wife Ealhswith" (unfortunately they don't identify who the original artist was).
Elfrida/Aelfthryth was the third child of Alfred the Great, she married Baldwin, Count of Flanders. Her elder brother was King of Wessex after their father died and her elder sister ruled Mercia (the allied kingdom) as Lady of Mercia. She married Baldwin II, Count of Flanders. One of their descendants, Matilda of Flanders, would go on to marry William the Conqueror, therefore starting the Anglo-Norman line of Kings of England. Through her descendant, Henry I of England, she is also a direct ancestor of the current monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Elizabeth II.
I think the cover artist just picked this at random as "example of old elite plus has hand out that can have something inserted into it" with no deeper meaning. I doubt they even know particularly that it's a 9th century Anglo-Saxon princess.
In at least that poetic version of events, the noblewoman Elfrida revolts by asserting her beauty before the king instead of hiding it, perhaps from pride and perhaps from spite. Her husband the Earl dies so the king can marry her, and she spends the rest of her life unable to smile in gladness.
The Keepsake is the story of a very privileged woman asserting her power to destroy the existing order in which she lived without care for the consequences, which prove regretful.
Reading the poem, they have identified the wrong Elfrida! The Saxon princess, daughter of Alfred the Great, is not the same as the Elfrida who married King Edgar the Peaceful:
In 963, Edgar allegedly killed Earl Æthelwald, his rival in love, near present-day Longparish, Hampshire. The event was commemorated by the Dead Man's Plack, erected in 1825. In 1875, Edward Augustus Freeman debunked the story as a "tissue of romance" in his book, Historic Essays; however, his arguments were rebutted by naturalist William Henry Hudson in his 1920 book Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn.
Edgar was crowned at Bath and along with his wife Ælfthryth was anointed, setting a precedent for a coronation of a queen in England itself.
...About 964/965 Edgar married again, his third relationship, to Ælfthryth, widow of Æthelwald, Ealdorman of East Anglia, Edgar's adopted brother. Ælfthryth was the daughter of Ealdorman Ordgar and his wife, a member of the royal family of Wessex. Legend has it that Edgar heard of Ælfthryth's great beauty and sent Æthelwald to arrange marriage for him (Edgar) but Æthelwald instead married her himself. In retaliation Æthelwald was killed 'in a hunting accident' and Edgar married her as he had wanted. It is not known if this is true or simply romantic fiction."
*This* Elfrida is 10th century noblewoman, and after King Edgar's death, allegedly she was involved in the murder of his first son, Edward the Martyr, so her son - Athelred the Unready - could inherit the throne:
"According to William [of Malmesbury], the beauty of Ordgar's daughter Ælfthryth was reported to King Edgar. Edgar, looking for a Queen, sent Æthelwald to see Ælfthryth, ordering him "to offer her marriage [to Edgar] if her beauty were really equal to report." When she turned out to be just as beautiful as was said, Æthelwald married her himself and reported back to Edgar that she was quite unsuitable. Edgar was eventually told of this, and decided to repay Æthelwald's betrayal in like manner. He said that he would visit the poor woman, which alarmed Æthelwald. He asked Ælfthryth to make herself as unattractive as possible for the king's visit, but she did the opposite. Edgar, quite besotted with her, killed Æthelwald during a hunt.
Edgar had two children before he married Ælfthryth, both of uncertain legitimacy. Edward was probably the son of Æthelflæd, and Eadgifu, later known as Saint Edith of Wilton, was the daughter of Wulfthryth.
Edgar married Ælfthryth in either 964 or 965. ...(I)n 968 Ælfthryth had given birth to a second son who was called Æthelred.
Edgar died in 975 leaving two young sons, Edward and Æthelred. Edward was almost an adult, and his successful claim for the throne was supported by many key figures including Archbishops Dunstan and Oswald and the brother of Ælfthryth's first husband, Æthelwine, Ealdorman of East Anglia. Supporting the unsuccessful claim of Æthelred were Ælfthryth herself (now the Queen dowager) Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester, and Ælfhere, Ealdorman of Mercia.
According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, King Edward was killed at Corfe Castle on 18 March 978, while visiting Ælfthryth. He was apparently killed by servants of the queen, leaving the way clear for her son Æthelred to be installed as king. As the king developed into a cult figure and martyr, a body of literature grew up around his murder, at first implying Ælfthryth's guilt and later accusing her outright. The 12th century monastic chronicle the Liber Eliensis went so far as to accuse her of being a witch, claiming that she had murdered not only the king, but also Abbot Brihtnoth of Ely."
The 'revolt' of the masses against the elite has been a constant concern as to how democracy will indeed devolve from rule by the demos into rule by the mob:
Much of historical writings against democracy were not intended to be opposition to giving everyone a voice (the demos, after all, is the people and the people should be interested in how their society works) but was opposed to the idea of "whoever shouts the loudest makes the rules".
And as Scott points out, it wasn't really the masses revolting, it was a lot of college-educated young people in a generally flourishing society who were expecting jam on it. A mix of idealism and unreality. The statement quoted from OWS reminds me so much of the hyped 2006 book/movie/probably fuzzy slippers and pyjama set as well "The Secret", which basically was "you can have anything you want just by asking and the Universe will provide it".
And it was in the air in the early 2000s, in 2006 the newly-elected Primate of The Episcopal Church pinned her hopes on the Millennium Development Goals (that extreme poverty would be eradicated by 2015; she was too educated and progressive to believe that stuff about "The poor you will have with you always"):
"She is eager to get on with that work, which means focusing on the Episcopal Church’s commitment to the eight Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations, including eradicating extreme poverty, halving hunger and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS, providing universal primary education and ensuring environmental sustainability. “About 40 years ago, some economists got together and said, ‘What would it take to solve abject poverty?’ And they began to do some calculations and said, ‘Well, if the developed nations of the world gave seven-tenths of one percent of their annual incomes, we could do it in a finite length of time.’ If we work on this, it’s possible to achieve these goals by the year 2015. It’s a huge bill, but it’s doable. For the first time in human history, it’s possible to end the worst kind of poverty.”
And then two years down the road came the big economic crash...
Scott's description of High Modernism is the Golden Age SF dream of the glorious future when the technocrats would rule and Science! would provide the answer to every problem, including "psychiatry will make it possible to change people's minds and brains so everyone will function at their best and we'll do away with crime and mental illness". A lot of this kind of forecasting is precisely why I am cool on topics like AI, because we've been there before and sure, *maybe* this time it really will shake out as forecasted, but *maybe* not?
Because of the very fact of progress, enrichment, and government in collaboration with Science! and Industry! solving a lot of the low-hanging fruit problems, the expectations of these protests was indeed "there is a magic button that can solve everything and it's only because of capitalist greed and entrenched sexism and racism and homophobia and all the rest of the -isms and -phobias that the old people in charge are not pressing the button!" After all, Big Government Programmes of the past such as nationalised health services and so on had solved a lot of problems, so the evidence was there that it could be done.
And here we are today. I don't think it's much easier/simpler to break it down into Left versus Right rather than Masses versus Elites; there is that element to it, but it really is a much deeper distrust of authority and authorities. People trusted Cronkite because he looked and sounded like the dependable, trustworthy, authority figure that in the post-war years poured out the benefits from the cornucopia. He was a journalist, when that term was not one of contempt. He was a liberal, when that wasn't damned as being a wicked centrist. This was the benevolent face of authority whom people could trust. And now that has all gone away, whether you're on the right or on the left.
In the 70s we used to have dozens of variants on the "If we can put a man on the Moon*, we can surely solve [insert random social problem here]." Always amazed me, and it seems an endlessly recurrent delusional faith: that all mechanisms are equivalent, and if we have had great success in building a better actual machine why, clearly, it follows we must be in a better position to build a metaphorical machine -- some social construct, protocol, methodology, which we can all follow blindly to Utopia as blindly as we press the button on the iPhone and *shazam* it turns on and (via a P2C2E**) shows us the latest text from Aunt Petunia at home in Des Moines as well as Cousin Fearless on her JYA in Thailand. Amazing! Now why can't we similarly press the button on the iPublicThingy and *shazam* a similar P2C2E shows us God's truth about the progress of COVID, the best way to a prosperous future in which the weather is good and all the children above average.
The best I can imagine is that it stems from the normal wild egoism of H. sapiens: we think we have learned to build iPhones because *we've gotten a lot smarter* than they were in 1870, fiddling about with their primitive wires hung from poles and telegraph keys. Since we're smarter, we *ought* to be able to solve problems they couldn't, right? Stands to reason.
Of course, this is nonsense. We can solve problems like "how to build a smartphone" because to do that we must dance with a brutal, but brutally efficient partner, which is Nature herself. You step on her toes, she smacks you good and hard right away, and you learn not to do it very quickly. You build the machine wrong, you turn it on, it doesn't work, or explodes and kills everyone in the room, and you don't do that any more.
But there is no equivalent for any *other* probem, the building of any metaphorical social machine. If you build a school system, or set of laws, or tax and spending regime, or monetary policy wrong, and turn it on -- certainly bad things happen, but how do you know? There is nothing that reads out on meters, there are no explosions or red-hot smoking wiring. You would indeed have to rely on our collective ability to be honest with ourselves about whether our social institutions are working, and if there is one characteristic of our species that stands out as much as our egoism, it is our ability and tendency to bullshit ourselves.
---------
* My favorite being the sarcastic "fish needs a bicycle" version: "If they can put a man on the Moon, why not all of them?"
I like it! Did you hear the one about the man who ran across Red Square shouting that the Premier is a moron? He was given 12 years: 2 for insulting the Premier, and 10 for revealing state secrets.
Holmes and Watson are camping. Watson wakes up and sees Holmes is in his bedroll staring at the sky. "What do you think this means Watson?"
Watson thinks a moment. "Well Holmes, when I look up at the stars I think about our insignificance in the universe. How small the earth is and how small we are on the earth. All the billions of years that came before us and will come after. And yet our lives are still important. We still live and love and die. For all our insignificance our lives still have meaning."
"Watson you idiot" Holmes says. "It means someone stole our tent!"
Also nicely put. I think this summarizes well the problem with High Modernism: it works for some very specific things (machine type things with good feedback) and works very, very badly for other things (organic complex adaptive system type things without good feedback), but HM's successes in the first field encourage one to expect success in the latter fields. Since humans don't like to admit failure without Nature giving them a clear smack on the nose, those latter types of failures just get those failing to argue endlessly and bloodily that they didn't fail.
You know, there's been a lot of debate about whether what happened on January 6th was a riot or an insurrection, but I'm all for calling it the 1/6 Insurrection, since, after all, if it wasn't exactly an insurrection we can at least agree it was 1/6th of one.
Maybe Greer would get more traction if he wrapped these observations in a Planet-of-Cops-style diatribe. Call it Planet of Karens. What do we want? To talk to the manager!
""in 2012, four years into the crisis there were more cell phones and cars per person in Spain than in the US ..."
Spain had a youth unemployment rate of 50% in 2012.
Seriously, this argument is so FUCKING STUPID that it invalidates the whole line of reasoning that is built upon it. Gurri is a flaming moron who should not be taken seriously.
I don't know when this halcyon stable past with every soul trusting the confident High Modernist Establishment is supposed to be. Certainly hasn't been within the past half century, by personal recollection. Was it in the 80s? Hmm...President Teflon is telling me the government is not the solution, it's the problem, Nuclear Freeze marches, nope. Was it in the 70s? Hmmm....The Pentagon Papers, We Shall Overcome, marches against Tricky Dick's war, nope. Was it in the 50s, maybe, Ward 'n' June Cleaver? Oh dear, we have railroad strikes, "I have here in my hand a list...," the government is lying to me about communist spying (either way), so nope. Maybe in the 30s, the great awesome New Deal in which we all believed? Except you'd have to be deeply ignorant of history to think any such thing.
I think this review basically took Gurri's thesis and applied the American experience of the last 5 years and said: it doesn't match up perfectly. Thats understandable because Scott is American. This falls a bit into a "USA=World" fallacy that disproportionately affects Americans. You guys are like 5% of the planet's population, and you are not representative at all. In Latin America for instance, moderate politicians are the center, while left and right wing authoritarians are fanning the flames of revolt. The Middle East is also a good example, as often they don't match up to the right-left debates. I recently read "The toxoplasma of rage", and I really think that there are some elements of that in here. The incentives are to be in the border! AOC is even trying to be border by wearing that dress IMO
"Mostly young, mostly university-educated, mostly part of their countries' most privileged ethnic groups. Not the kind of people you usually see taking to the streets or building tent cities."
Well, in America these are the people I always associated with protesting. The tent-building was new, perhaps it was due to improvements in camping equipment?
"in 2012, four years into the crisis there were more cell phones and cars per person in Spain than in the US"
I strongly doubt the "more cars" thing.
"They had cradle-to-grave free health care, university educations, and they were near the top of their society's class pyramids."
When the government taxes you 1$ and gives you a coupon for something worth 1$, you might feel like you got back a lot less than 1$. This can be the case for healthcare and especially for education. Some people find education a ticket to a high-paying career, others just see themselves with the same job at age 23 as their Dad got when he was 19 and didn't need a degree. That doesn't feel like "progress."
I read it, thought it was a pretty quick and easy read given the number of pages (it's generously typeset), and also thought there was some valuable advice for people who, whether they admit it or not, are part of the "elite" class (be humble and don't try to BS people for their own good).
But I took issue with a couple of things. First, Gurri made a big deal out of the ability of protests like the Arab spring to overthrow entrenched dictators, and really tried to argue that this was a unique phenomenon enabled by the information "tsunami". But people have been overthrowing entrenched dictators for at least a couple centuries! Russ Roberts briefly brought this up when he interviewed Gurri on EconTalk, and Gurri just kind of dismissed it by saying that those uprisings were different. But were they? I don't know enough detailed history to say, but I felt like he needed to address that in way more detail than he did.
My second critique is that Gurri claims that technocratic elites pretty much always failed to deliver on their promises but since they controlled the flow of information, the bulk of people never realized it. I think that's pretty condescending. The people in power might be able to cover up failures happening half a world away with the help of a sympathetic media, but if middle-class life sucked throughout the middle third of the 20th century, not even an army of Walter Cronkites would be able to hide that fact. Gurri cites a lot of the usual examples of technocratic failure to bolster his case (and believe me, I'm temperamentally sympathetic to that perspective), but I kept thinking of this ACS post
I suspect that American and Western institutions more broadly have actually become less competent and effective. The democratization and rapid spread of information might exacerbate it, but that's not the root cause.
People have been overthrowing dictators for centuries, but the contagion effect of the Arab Spring seemed different. The "look how easy it is to topple a dictator" seemed like a new thing. And powers like North Korea and China are very focused on controlling social media, and I assume this is because it is believed to be potentially destabilizing. Even in Tunisia they quickly passed laws against criticizing politicians and they have jailed bloggers. The nice effect of democratic leaders there have been that even though the economic situation in Tunisia is worse than before the revolution, there is no dictator to topple. Overthrowing you democratically elected government is less satisfying. But of course people were overwhelmingly supportive at first when the president dissolved parliament.
Gurri calls our current government a kind of "zombie democracy". The institutions of the 20th century - legislatures, universities, newspapers - continue to exist. But they are hollow shells, stripped of all legitimacy. Nobody likes or trusts them. They lurch forward, mimicking the motions they took in life, but no longer able to change or make plans or accomplish new things.
This sounds to me like the institutional equivalent of tech debt. Decisions were made; perhaps they were made for expedience, or perhaps they were intended to be robust… but now the outcomes of those decisions has ossified and the institutions are stuck, unable to change or make things better.
"In Spain, the previous forty years had seen the fall of a military dictatorship, its replacement with a liberal democracy, and a quintupling of GDP per capita from $6000 to $32000 a year - "in 2012, four years into the crisis there were more cell phones and cars per person in Spain than in the US". The indignado protesters in Spain had lived through the most peaceful period in Europe's history, an almost unprecedented economic boom, and had technologies and luxuries that previous generations could barely dream of."
An extremely similar dynamic went on in Chile during 2019 (which I guess was too late to be included in the book). During October 2019, there were massive/violent protests all over the country involving widespread destruction of private and public property (most notably, 20 metro stations were pretty much burned to the ground in one night).
Given the scale of the protests you’d think that the this was a country with a long track record of poor economic outcomes. You’d be mistaken, though. Over the preceding 30 years per-capita GDP increased three fold, poverty went down from 45% to 10%, schooling increased, access to university increased, there was a peaceful transition from a dictatorship to a democratic government, and a large etc.
Over the past decade, public discourse has turned against the “old order,” blaming all societal ills on the "rampant neoliberalism" that has dominated Chilean economic policy over the past 30-40 years. All the accomplishments have been swept aside, often by the very politicians involved who lead the country during these decades.
Now Chile is in a very worrisome course to changing its constitution (something that has a very poor track record in Latin America) and throw out the window all the institutions that have made rapid economic progress possible. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
How could something like this happen in Latin America’s most successful nation? There are aspects of the problem that are particular to Chile, no doubt, but I think a large part of the phenomenon is connected to the rise of social media, very much in line with Gurri’s argument.
From what I could observe in Chile, I’ve developed a two-component pet pet theory. First, before social media, politicians would get very constant feedback from their peers (who were relatively sane) and infrequent feedback from voters. Since the political equilibrium was one friendly to a pro-market economic policy, and since economic numbers were strong, everyone on either side of the isle was forced to choose between holding reasonably market-friendly views, or risk being excommunicated. Twitter obliterated this equilibrium. With it, politicians started to get realtime feedback from the median voter and figured that they would do better by catering to their demands. The problem, however, is that the median voter is a paranoid, innumerate, ignoramus (see The Myth of The Rational Voter), so it’s no wonder that the output of the new political equilibrium is a bunch of insane policies.
Second, since social media rewards populist pandering, not only does it force incumbent politicians into a race to the bottom in terms of the quality of public debate, it also forces the system to select the relatively unscrupulous. That the quality of public debate has gone down over the past decade, in Chile and elsewhere, I think is widely agreed. To my mind, this is partly because with social media, democracy became worst at selecting decent politicians.
Anyway. I don’t mean to rant. I just really enjoyed the post and feel like the recent developments in Chile lend credence to Gurri’s theory.
> There haven't been many big viral protests lately except Black Lives Matter and the 1/6 insurrection, and both seemed to have a perfectly serviceable set of specific demands (defunding the police, decertifying the elections).
...this is sarcasm, right? Right?
Minneapolis currently has a ballot initiative to make "defund the police" happen. The actual law it would enact has specific provisions, empowering the city council to do some things and requiring it to do others. The *description* that's actually on the ballot-- written by the city council-- is so vague about what the measure actually does that there were lawsuits and a court ruling to throw it out.
And 1/6-- look, I don't mind calling it an "insurrection", but *there was no plan* and no realistic scenario where it led to Trump remaining in office.
Gurri's title and analysis would seem to owe something to Ortega's "The Revolt of the Masses," a brilliant analysis of the situation before WWII. The major trends we see now bearing fruit were mostly predicted by Sr. Ortega about a century ago.
I don't know why this riled me, but... "boffins"? Really? That's almost exclusively a British usage and it's distracting in this context. "Technocrat" and "nerd" (thanks a lot, Taleb) are near-synonyms that are much more widely understood and still reasonably neutral.
Maybe cause British words sound cooler than merican ones? I mean, just compare "bloke and dude" or "mate and buddy"...or "bruv and bro" ... there's definitely something about these British, innit?...🤔😎
> It's like that thing where someone who warned about the coronavirus on March 1 2020 was a bold visionary, but someone who warned about it on March 20 was a conformist bandwagoner
Surely this is a typo for January or February? The Wuhan lockdown was international news on January 23, and my university (not in China) sent its first mass-email about covid on January 24. I was warning everyone I could to prepare for the pandemic in early February. "The World Health Organization on [March 11] declared the rapidly spreading coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, acknowledging what has seemed clear for some time" https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/11/who-declares-the-coronavirus-outbreak-a-pandemic/
Basically, Washington was a big landowner, and the British policies of not expanding West limited the value of his holdings. The American insurrection was rather profitable for him.
I think part of what's happened is the internationalisation of the left/right tribes. Now that everyone everywhere is connected by the internet, leftists in the US feel more connected with leftists everywhere else in the world than they do with rightists in their own country. And the same with rightists. Even if they're losing elections or their demands are not being heard in their home country, there are other countries - other parts of the leftist/rightist online communities - where they are succeeding. And this motivates them and spurs them on.
In the early days of social media, these tribes had not yet solidified and worked their way through the internet. People were confused and unified enough to just revolt against the great something-or-other. Now we've reverted back to good old fashioned tribalism, albeit in a more internationalist way.
A possible complication to the "things are different now" narrative: you say
> When Martin Luther King marched on Washington, he built an alliance of various civil rights groups, unions, churches, and other large organizations who could turn out their members. He planned the agenda, got funding, ran through an official program of speakers, met with politicians, told them the legislation they wanted, then went home. The protests of 2011 were nothing like that. They were just a bunch of people who read about protests on Twitter and decided to show up.
I don't know enough history to confirm, but in Malcom X's autobiography he disagrees with that, he says the mercy on Washington was originally decentralized and just a lot of people being collectively angry, and that MLK et al took it over/coopted it to make it more palatable. I think he makes it sound like the powers that be basically inserted the ultimate "leaders" to temper the protests.
I guess "a protest can be taken over by a charismatic leader" might still not be viable today, but it feels pretty different then the protest being created by that person.
I'd also argue there's an optimistic side to Gurri's argument that Modernism's failures used to be covered up, because it means that government and society aren't necessarily failing or even doing worse than they have in the past. Our information environment has just changed.
I think an examination of history at least provides some evidence of that being true. Despite the fears around Trump and 01/06, FDR and LBJ, for example, both discussed ballot fraud as if it was commonplace enough to be a nuisance and still accomplished incredible things in a time of general faith in politics and government
Echoing some other comments, I'm surprised you think the revolt of the public is totally over and in America subsumed into the party system. I think the revolt of the public is alive and well, but that elites have become much more adept at coordinated messaging since 2014.
1) the CDC and FDA are given middling trust by rationalist types, privileged, educated, with high expectations, and noticing every institutional failure and mistake. The less educated still have highly varying degrees of mistrust in these institutions, but the ability of that mistrustice spread has been corralled over the course of the pandemic.
2) media companies have reduced the "Rho" of anti-establishment "nihilism" through better coordinated efforts and censorship. This development pushes quite hard against Gurri's thesis. This doesn't mean however that the epistemological anarchy is over, but simply that some forms of it have been temporarily reigned in.
3) the next fight is more likely to be between incumbent institutions and novel institutions, made possible through self-selection into novel institutions.
The problem with mocking a "press Miracle Button" scenario is that sometimes there -is- a miracle button.
I mean, while universal health care is not a perfect solution - see the grumbles that the UK and Canada have with theirs - the US -could- have it too if it would just enact it. It's the blocks built into our political system which have prevented that, and this has been going on for over 70 years now on this particular issue.
Also, homelessness. I keep seeing articles about how the most cost-effective way of dealing with homelessness is to just give them small apartments, and that this is working in a few places trying it (was it Reno?). Maybe this is rebuttable, but I've never seen it either rebutted or widely enacted. Is this a miracle button? I don't know, but I'd like to see the question raised.
New York City spent 3.2 billion on homelessness.[1] Estimates of the homeless population vary widely, using a high estimate from one group of 80,000[2], that divides to 40,000$ per homeless person.
Well, speaking as one of the "blocks" -- I would cheerfully shoot anyone who proposed nationalized universal health care in the US -- I'm pretty happy we exist.
1: The thesis predicts some things correctly, but then other things fail the test
2: Treats some modern events as if they are novel and driven by a "new normal" when in fact they have occurred many times before in the past in ways similar and different (see British Civil war, 1848, 1968, Iran Revolution etc... A few revolts during Roman Republic times come to mind as well)
3: Treats the changing optics and visibility (rants of bloggers reaching thousands vs rants in a local bar reaching two drunk guys) as a change in the actual underlying factors (for example, social unrest occurred when the main form of public communication was stone tablets)
4: The new distrust of "High Modernism" seems a bit paradoxical. The solutions that are often requested are also versions of High Modernism. Much like ancient revolts occurred because natural disasters were considered proof that the king was impious, the illegitimacy of the elite does not mean illegitimacy of the system.
5: Assuming ACX correctly conveyed the analysis of the Arab Spring, then not only was the analysis lacking, it also seems very much distorted by a western frame of mind.
It seems to me that the social mechanisms that might alleviate or fix some of these societal ills are broken because of the large tech monopolies.
If you turn your communications infrastructure into slot machines, silly behaviour is rewarded. Rage clicks are a draw. If it pays to be stupid, some people will be very stupid. Grifters will proliferate.
If we were to shut down or properly these companies that refuse to act ethically, we would solve many of our problems.
I am 73. I have lived through many of the past prophesied events from: I like Ike..,featuring only blue collar, white people, political cartoon commercials...; to the dogs and water hoses of white southern justice..; to ‘why the fuck are we in Viet Naam, man?’..; the Black Panthers.., Chicago 7.., or 8.., or 9...but still no power.
I’ve lived through the breakin’ of Nixon..; to the movie actor calling out the national guard on college campuses; and his wife eventually running the country. Lived through ‘I cannot keep my dick in my pants’ Kennedy..; through ‘I cannot keep my dick in my pants’ Clinton..; to ‘Why are we invading Iraq?’..; to ‘Ok, now we still do not know why we are invading Iraq’.., again..; through ‘now we are calling Jordanians Palestinians”, why?
The only question: Can the Republic a.k.a., the Union of States survive?
The answer is No.
The Union will not survive.
The reason is simple:
The BDS movement is an advanced militarized invasion of the U.S. by those who desire the second rise of The Ottoman Empire.
I don't think you give Gurri enough credit for popularizing the theory that mainstream / traditional institutions have had their sense of legitimacy greatly reduced, and that this is a result of the Internet (which is also leading to the popularization of fringe narratives, and in general totally reshaping our epistemic commons).
Even if he got some details or implications wrong, these are super important trends which are still not appreciated well enough. People do worry about the effect of social media on society but the focus is often on the 'big evil corporations manipulating us' angle without enough appreciation for effects that flow from the structure of the Internet.
Having lived approximately half my life before the Internet, and half after, the common notion that the Internet broke a stranglehold on information dissemination strikes me as plausible nonsense. The unstated assumption in that notion is that we're talking about *useful* information, and information that the receiver can distinguish from noise. In my experience, it's no easier or harder to get useful information distinguishable from noise today than it was in 1975. The total amount of information flowing is certainly much larger now -- but so is the amount of bullshit, lies, and Tulip Craze ephemera, through which one has to sort. On balance it's a wash.
I don't think this take is accurate, Carl. For one thing, the Internet allows people with a particular dissenting view to quickly find each other and aggregate, reinforce each other's beliefs, groupsource research, etc. So regardless of the quality of the information, common knowledge that one is not alone along with rapid sharpening of talking points and outrage can have a huge effect on social processes.
It certainly does have a huge effect. But not, I am coming to believe, a positive one. So far as I can tell, strangely enough, the facility with which this thing happens acts more to *close* minds, *isolate* people from different viewpoints, and *prevent* useful debate and the free flow of new information. You get an *intense* flow of information that reinforces someone's prejudices or tribal identities, but even less information that challenges them than he would have gotten willy nilly in 1980, unless he bucks his in-group and takes psychologically difficult steps (earning him down-votes beaucoup) to avoid echoing the echo chamber.
Weirdly ironic, but not entirely precedented, in terms of at least the initial effect of new communication technology (TV, radio, and even books and pamphlets in their day). I expect it will settle down eventually, as we get used to it, but I think (1) the effect now is *against* rather than *for* any improved exposure of the generic person to new and paradigm-shifting information, and (2) when it eventually settles down, we'll be back at the status quo ante, with people about as well-informed as they ever were. Id est, I don't think the technology matters very much, its the nature of people that controls their habits of thought and informedness.
I think this opinion has to be based either on confirmation bias, or a very particular definition of 'information.'
Like, I can open Wikipedia on my phone at any moment and learn most anything I want about history, science, recent news, philosophy, trivia, whatever, at any moment. If that accounting is too shallow, I can get on scihub and read the direct research papers on any topic I want. This would have taken many hours and a trip to the library in the past, for a much lower chance of success.
But if by 'information' you mean something like 'the true answer to controversial questions, unsettled science, and long-standing matters of debate', then yeah, the internet can't give us that... but only because that's not something that really exists, in as simple and neutral a format as 'information.' You can get the takes from every side easier than you could have in the past, but that doesn't magically produce a 'correct' answer that's visible to everyone.
In at least one area-- repairing things-- youtube has made a tremendous amount of good information available which wasn't available otherwise.
https://lyz.substack.com/p/thank-you-dads-of-youtube
In some cases, the information wasn't available because the person had no one who'd teach them-- the story has a feminist framing. In some cases, there's just so much to know, or it's easier to learn from a video than a manual.
https://www.metafilter.com/192640/On-singleness-self-sufficiency-and-masculinity
Discussion, which includes that it's worth checking out multiple videos for a repair to find out which of them are inaccurate.
Aw, no mention of Storm Area 51?
What ever happened with that? Did people do anything?
I recall they did a bunch of gathering, chanting, and running around, but there were no concerted efforts to actually get past the soldiers who were called in to reinforce the perimeter.
About 1500 people showed up for some "Storm Area 51"-themed music festivals held at a small town a few miles outside the main gates of the base. There were smaller gatherings directly outside three of the gates, with about 1100 people total filtering in and out over the course of the "raid". It sounds like the "raiders" at the two gates on the Lincoln County side of the base were pretty well-behaved for the most part and the authorities just waited them out while they partied and took selfies. The Nye County sheriffs chased away about 40 people from a gate on the other side of the base; I'm not sure if that was driven by the people at the Nye County gate being rowdier or by the Nye County sheriffs taking a harder line than the Lincoln County sheriffs.
A couple of Dutch tourists got caught by military security after driving off-road into an unguarded area of the base perimeter. They got prosecuted for something or other (I'm guessing criminal trespass) and sentenced to three days in jail. One woman tried to walk past the guards at one of the Lincoln County gates and got turned back with a warning. And about half a dozen people got arrested for things like public urination or "alcohol-related offenses".
Burning ET. They should make it an annual thing.
And the world was treated to videos of Naruto running and "Clap Alien Cheeks" signs.
"We remember the Arab Spring, those few months in 2011 when revolts spread across various Arab countries and longstanding regimes were toppled by protesters with smartphones and Twitter accounts"
No, they weren't. That a provincial American understanding of the situation, by people who have no geopolitical savvy (besides what they read in probably the worst press on the world on the matter, fully in bed with their national interests and unable to think globally - unlike, say, the British and French colonialists of yore) - and if they ever travelled anywere outside the US they just went right for the McDonalds or the local joint annointed by some travel guide.
There were protests in the Arab countries, and regimes were toppled. Like it has been dozens of times in the past. But it had nothing to do with people with "smartphones and Twitter accounts", except that this time around, because of smartphones and Twitter being a thing, there were also people with "smartphones and Twitter accounts" present to document some of them and relate to the US public.
Smartphones and Twitter documented those - and from the skewed perspective of the top 10%, westernized, part of the population, who had nothing to do with the driving force of the protests.
But it makes for a nice story (social media bring democracy) and it makes for nice heroes (like us here, modern, westernized, with smartphones and twitter accounts, who even post in English) as opposed to the disenfranchized, religious, uncool, poor, Arab-speaking masses, closer to white trash or rednecks than to the aspirational US upper 10% middle class that celebrated the Arab Spring.
The accusation that Scott has no geopolitical savvy and knows nothing of the world outside McDonald's is unkind and I'm pretty sure untrue. I am also reasonably certain it's untrue (and still unkind) of the book's author. Please refrain from ad hominem attacks.
Could you please point to some sources (in Arabic, if necessary) on the composition of the protests? Could you please suggest how the uncool masses discovered when and where the protests would happen, since you posit that reading about them on Twitter was not, in fact, the major mechanism?
Hey, Egyptian here. The grandparent is certainly being very unkind toward Scott, but yes, citing social media as the cause for the Arab Spring is like seeing a saudi-arabia-sized oil field with zero security being set on fire by a lighting match, and thinking that the lighting match is the cause. It's certainly *a cause*, but a shallow one, and it would have happened sooner or latter.
A closer model to truth IMO (I tried finding the type of sources you requested but couldn't, so excuse me if the following reeks of "Lived Experience Trumps Anything^TM". Anyone feel free to prove me wrong with sources.) would be that :
1- The Mubarak regime was a fucking nightmare, everybody *knew* it was a fucking nightmare (how could you not when you're living it), and the system was just teetering on the edge of instability; kept in place by sheer willpower and Please-Come-With-Us-To-This-Very-Nice-Security-Compound-At-2AM-To-Have-A-Cup-Of-Tea-While-Discussing-Why-You're-Very-Wrong energy. There was demonstrations as early as 2005, not anything nearly comparable to Jan25th, but angry and grassroots.
2- Then somebody (Khalid Said, peace be upon his soul) got caught saying something Very Wrong, gets taken to This Very Nice Security Compound, is tortured and dies, the horrific images of his dead body is leaked and a facebook page created in his name to broadcast his horrible death and what to do about it.
3- The gods of complex systems and emergent phenomena decide that this would be the end of a 30-year-old repressive regime.
A very telling memory I have is me sitting with my cousins, a bunch of kids, I'm 22 years old now, and discussing whether to hang out at our favorite public library, on Jan28th. This was *after* Jan25th, the 3 days in between were low-intensity demonstrations. The fact that some people weren't taking it seriously (this trickling down to me and my cousins through adults) is indication that this wasn't new, people were demonstrating long before social media. Jan28th turned out to be The Friday Of Anger, where an attempt by the Mubarak regime to quash the demonstration backfired and the revolution reached its first million.
Also Egypt was (is?) behind the times in internet reach and social media reach, think of whatever facebook's reach in your (probably western) country in 2011, dial it back to 2006-2007 numbers, that was probably facebook's reach in Egypt in 2011. The fact that there was a million after just 3 days seems to support that, at best, social media just turned in the key and pumped a few volts into the system for about 1 seconds, then the fuel burned and the engine revved up and kept running on it's own.
> citing social media as the cause for the Arab Spring is like seeing a saudi-arabia-sized oil field with zero security being set on fire by a lighting match, and thinking that the lighting match is the cause. It's certainly *a cause*, but a shallow one, and it would have happened sooner or latter
Such trigger is not so unimportant. There are many regimes that are nightmares, everybody is aware of it and nothing happens.
In such cases trigger and something that triggers coordination is very important.
In communist Poland such trigger was visit of a pope which was quite important point. One of things mentioned by my family is that it made clear how strongly state-controlled TV is lying. And how many people are actually not liking the rulers.
> It's certainly *a cause*, but a shallow one, and it would have happened sooner or latter.
So George Floyd's murder wasn't "the cause" of the BLM protests these past few years, because the simmering racial resentment would have manifested eventually anyway? You could make that case, but I think it rewrites how we view causality. Catalysts are important factors.
Judging by the cases going back to at least Michael Brown, the underlying "simmering" anger was there and waiting for the right case. If it had not been George Floyd, it's quite likely it would have been another case shortly thereafter. Not to say that George Floyd was a bad case or cause, but that it wasn't the real cause. George Floyd was a particularly bad symptom of the concerns specifically being brought forward already. "Say his/her name" was already trending with a list of cases.
An alternate way of looking at it though, is that the simmering anger had been there for a long time, but in years of viral news stories, none of them had been viral *enough* to start a movement, and it took an actually exceptional catalyst, one you don't get every year or two.
I don't think this is quite right either; I think that the succession of viral news stories served to stoke tension, and that the George Floyd story wouldn't have sparked a movement if it had happened years earlier. But I think it's likely that it did take an unusually compelling trigger. If George Floyd's killing hadn't taken place, would some other killing by now have gone viral enough to spark the movement instead? I think it's likely not. And if things go on long enough, maybe, without anything really getting resolved, a portion of the populace which obsessively shares certain topics and pushes them to become viral moves on to other things, like how the virality of gender-related subjects declined with time.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture
Sorry, that's just not how causality works. If you stack up a chain of dominoes and then knock over the one on the end and cause the rest to crash down, it just doesn't make sense to say "the finger didn't cause the dominoes to fall, clearly they were setup to fall and would have fallen eventually".
I love it when I can read dispassionate information from people who were there.
Thank you!
"There were protests in the Arab countries, and regimes were toppled. Like it has been dozens of times in the past."
Is that right? Has there been a moment since 1968 when this many Arab regimes were toppled at once (or at least sent into permanent civil war, like Syria)?
IMO this is a too narrow and literal (and rhetorical) question. The point is that these sorts of things are common. There was a moment like that in Europe in 1989. There was a global moment like that in 1968 and 1848 and others. 1989 resulted in a domino effect of toppling regimes, the others didn't. Also, only a minority of the Arab world saw an actual toppling... But similar moments of revolutionary fervor that spread regionally or globally were common. Also, decolonization movements of the 1950s and 1960s.
Balderdash, social media was essential to organizing protests.
There were protests in the Arab countries, and regimes were toppled. Like it has been dozens of times in the past. But it had nothing to do with people with "smartphones and Twitter accounts",
Social media didn't play a huge role? In previous times nobody would have hear of a fruit vendor self immolating in some god forsaken village in Tunisia. It went viral and kicked off protests organized people people via phones, because everyone has a phone even in godforsaken villages in Tunisia
Come. People have been sparked to violence by assorted symbols for millenia. War of Jenkin's Ear, et cetera. It may have taken longer for those symbols to do their work, but the mechanics and instability aren't a jot different, just the time-scales, which seems like the least interesting aspect of the phenomenon.
I think you're mistaking the technology for the social mechanisms. A dozen fruit vendors a day sef-immolate in Tunisia, so to speak, and a dozen dozen outraged FB posts/Tweets about the outrages starve and die every day. What's interesting is why one event causes an avalanche and all the rest don't -- and this is true whether the news of the even spreads by Internet meme, broadsheets and pamphlets, or actual bloody shirts being passed from hand to hand.
"It may have taken longer for those symbols to do their work." Exactly.
We may have all been dead before the combination of outrage and organization led to a revolution in Tunisia. Technology affects culture and drastically changes time scales, and the effects may well be amplified where media was previously tightly controlled. Pre social media, it would have been rare to find an Arabic language screed of Ben Ali. People would grumble privately, but the solidarity of a movement could never build up.
"What's interesting is why one event causes an avalanche and all the rest don't"
This is sort of like blaming your diabetes on the donut you ate just before you were diagnosed. A buildup of mass hysteria is not caused by one single event. In 2012 an angry mob attacked the US Embassy in Tunis and looted and burned the American School. Did the attack occur because "The Innocence of Muslims" was released in the US, causing an avalanche?
Nah, I would say blaming the match that lit the fire on social media -- when social media has bupkis to do with providing the tinder and fuel -- is like blaming the last donut you ate for your heart attack. And the fact that the symbols take longer to do their work doesn't mean there were any fewer of them, that the interval between them was longer, or that they brought any less chaos into our lives. I'm sure there's some effect, it just isn't very interesting. Did you know people died of accidents *before* there were cars? They got thrown off horses, fell down wells, went up in flames when the gas valves went bust. The *methods* by which people die in accidents is not especially interesting, compared to the fact that they do, and the psychological reasons they do, and the social effects of their doing so.
I am not sure if you would then say that hypothesizing on the effects of the printing press on society is just not very interesting. But there are plenty of books about megatrends in society and history. So many people find this a fascinating line of inquiry. Suddenly the symbols are different (ubiquitous video of everything), and their means of dissemination is unlike anything humans would have imagined fifty years ago. And this is not some uncontrollable force. Governments can control social media, children can be taught to love it or hate it. The psychological effects of being tethered to a smartphone and the social effects of living in this way.
You need to actually compare similar events. I wrote about this 10 years ago in a post about how technology does not change that much when it comes to things actually happening. Key quote:
"Let’s take the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989 in which I was an eager if extremely marginal participant. On Friday, November 17 a bunch of protesters got roughed up, on November 27, a general strike was held and on December 10, the president resigned. In Egypt, the demonstrations started on January 25, lots of stuff happened, on February 11 the president resigned. The Egyptians have the Czechs beat in their demonstration to resignation time by 5 days (17 v 23). This was the “Twitter” revolution. We didn’t even have mobile phones. Actually, we mostly even didn’t have phones. Is that what all this new global infrastructure has gotten us? Five days off on the toppling of a dictator? Of course, not. Twitter made no difference to what was happening in Egypt, at all, when compared to other revolutoin. If anything Al Jazeera played a bigger role. But on the ground, most people found out about things by being told by someone next to them. Just like we did. We even managed to let the international media up to speed pretty quickly, which could be argued is the main thing Twitter has done in the “Arab Spring”.
Isn't "getting the international media up to speed" - via technology exactly what this is about. People grow angry far more often than they rebel. But now the anger can more easily coalesce into something. Isis is very much fueled by the new forms of global communication. Implicating technology is merely saying that it is one important aspect. Worth hypothesizing about its effects, arguing, but to say the internet made no difference in mass protests of the last 10 years is a bold claim. The sheer amount of stuff online would indicate otherwise.
What's your evidence for any of this? I was hoping to read something other than mere assertion.
I was kind of a late adapter of social media and Arab Spring was one of the first major events that I followed through social media. One thing that struck me at the time was how enthusiastic some of my social media contacts (esp on Facebook) were about Arab Spring. Lots of posts, even a very erudite posting with commentary of "Ozymandias" after Mubarak fell. I remember at the time finding it incredibly odd because of *who* among my FB were really getting into it. None of these people had any family, friends, or work ties to the countries involved. And very importantly none of these people were especially enthusiastic about US politics. There was a lot of big stuff that happened domestically in that same time frame (Tea Party, 2010 midterms, Gabby Giffords shooting, Occupy Wall Street) but it didn't attract a lot of interest (negative or positive) from these FB friends. As Arab Spring died down, so did their posts and they didn't seem to really pick up that enthusiasm with other world geopolitics later on.
I've always found it so curious why Arab Spring resonated, albeit briefly, like that with Americans on social media. I've wondered if anyone else noticed this phenomenon and if they have any thoughts on what caused this brief "trend"? I hate to use a flippant term like trendy to describe something as serious as Arab Spring but that's honestly how it seemed to play out in my small world of FB at the time.
Maybe these people don't usually talk politics because they don't want to alienate anyone. But the Arab Spring was comfortable to talk about because being pro-democracy and anti-dictator isn't controversial in the U.S.
That very well could be it. These folks were fairly normie, a bit more Blue leaning than Red. Kind of had a feel of LARP-ing, or rooting for a sports team
You don't remember 2014? You wrote quite a bit that year.
He wrote quite a bit every year since, too. I'd imagine 2014 has long been pushed out of memory.
2014 was his clear peak though, if you look at any "best of SSC" list close to half the posts on it will be from that year.
that was the year I discovered him
There's a difference between "remembering 2014" and remembering one's thoughts and attitude on a specific topic during that year.
Scott
Long time reader here
Re: Bay of Pigs Invasion: Allan Dulles just did it [invasion]. Thinking that Kennedy would provide air cover [which he had earlier refused to do]. His bet failed-Kennedy held his ground & refused.
Kennedy fired him.
I recall that the spooks and generals had previously assured Kennedy that no overt US assistance would be needed for the Bay of Pigs to succeed.
Of course, the spooks and generals were consciously lying, but they reckoned that at that point, Kennedy would have no choice but to escalate. Kennedy stood up to them.
n.b. I am not a Camelot nostalgist.
I that's true, seems like a good case of why you should avoid "over-strategizing" (or deceptive tactics), that is, supposing people will think in specific ways and react in specific ways so you can get what you want, often by *proposing the opposite of what's correct*, or divulging false information. Those strategies are brittle because... well, predicting the future is hard and we know much less about other people's behavior and mental state than intuition often indicates. Besides, deceptive tactics have a chance to turn unethical (why is your interpretation better than his?).
Describing the Nixon-Kennedy debates, Kenneth Rexroth criticized Nixon for a totally unfounded claim that Kennedy would intervene in Cuba:
Faceless, the Vice President was able to put a policy of “roll back the Iron Curtain” into his opponent’s mouth. I doubt if this was as effective in the sharper image of television. Likewise, and even more so, this was true of the dispute about intervention in Cuba. The Saturday morning papers all carried outraged cries from conservative politicos all over Latin America who presumably had not seen, but only heard, the show. I talked to no “man on the street,” however simple, who saw the show and who took away the impression that Senator Kennedy had advocated military intervention.
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/index.htm
Notwithstanding post 11/22/63 Camelot mythology, as a Senator, Kennedy was an ally of McCarthy (and RFK even more so) until the man became a liability.
More to the point, Kennedy ran for president in 1960 on a platform that Team R in general and Nixon in particular(!) were "soft on communism". Kennedy frequently cited the supposed "missile gap" as evidence.
Eisenhower's famous "military industrial complex" speech is best understood within that context.
This interpretation seems straightforwardly wrong. The invasion plan went ahead on Kennedy's direct order and approval. He was definitely wishy-washy about the level of support he wanted to provide: not concerned about committing U.S. resources, but he wanted to remain completely and plausibly deniable. Once the invasion was underway and it was clear that the U.S. would be implicated, he changed his mind about it all. "Dulles did it" is whitewashing.
Can I ask you, Scott, how on earth do you write such comprehensive book reviews? Do you write your thoughts as you read? Do you read the book twice and only write on the second readthrough? Do you annotate on the margins and later revisit those notes? I'd love to write reviews as good as yours!
Good question! I was wondering too. I read a lot but trying to explain and critique like this is beyond me. It's intimidating,
I can't speak for Scott, but I also write comprehensive book reviews. You can find them here: http://thechaostician.com/category/books/
My process is something like this:
(1) Read the book.
(2) Decide if I like it enough to write a review.
(3) Draft outline of the main points I want to hit in the review.
(4) Reread most, or all, of the book. During this second read-through, I take notes about details I want to use to fill in the argument and quotes that I want to include.
(5) Write the review. If the review can be written in sections, I do this during step (4).
(6) Edit what I've written.
This certainly takes much longer than just reading a book, but I have found it to be worth it for at least some books.
But then I have to reread it, which will bias it to make me only review things I like (as opposed to Scott which I think have several times review things he ultimately abhors)
The First Rule of good writing is to have something (worthwhile) to say. I think Scott simply has a lot of experience writing and a lot of experience in relating to culture and various topics. There is an overarching theme in his writing that reflects trying to understand, and critique, civilization. If you approach books likewise, in offering a perspective or a way of grasping the book that relates to useful/interesting conclusions to the reader, then it's very likely to be a good review, and a good read.
The whole coronavirus response seems like a refutation of Gurri's argument, doesn't it?
Despite the general failure of experts and high modernism at everything they tried, the masses enthusiastically lined up behind the "center" and embraced all kinds of what would have seemed impossible policies. In the UK, one reason they were slightly delayed in implementing a lockdown in March 2020 was that they believed it couldn't last more than 2 weeks before the people revolted and they'd lose that option forever. Instead, the UK had one of the longest lasting and most severe lockdowns in the world. No Western government had trouble getting whatever policies they wanted through, but many of their results look pretty crappy, particularly compared against the likes of South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China (assuming you trust them).
Where was the public revolt against the pandemic response? Other than the existing undercurrent of anti vax sentiment in the US, it doesn't look to have materialized.
If Gurri's argument about mistrust of the elites was true, then I would have expected far more pushback. While there were no pandemics in living memory, there were a great deal of pandemic scares: Bird flu, SARS, MERS, Ebola. All of these were hyped up as massive dangers and ended up affecting a tiny subset of the world. I would expect a lot more suspicion of coronavirus than what occurred, if Gurri's thesis were true.
And in the US a great deal of the pushback was fomented by Trump himself. Literally any other president, Republican or Democrat, would have been a lot more measured and certainly less inflammatory. The BLM protests were a confounding factor too in that they fed the general anxiety, led to violence and follow-on counter protests, which led to more violence and so on and so on...
Look at all the straight people who don't remember that we're still in the HIV pandemic! At least that pandemic moved a lot more slowly, so a few years of government stalling had the same effect as a few weeks of government stalling in this one. Also, it turned out that some subpopulations were far more exposed than others, so community-focused responses were able to accomplish things without as much heavy-handed government intervention.
That said, we did have some close calls with SARS, swine flu, Zika, and Ebola, that most people managed to largely ignore. It's a bit hard to tell how the results of those ones affected what people thought about this one.
I mean there really is lacking a formal definition of the word pandemic, but, in the US at least, <40k HIV infections per year (and decreasing!) doesn’t really qualify as what I would intuitively classify as a ‘pandemic’. Especially seeing as we are at ~130k infections per day with covid as of when I write this. You might forgive people for overlooking something affecting 0.0001% of the population.
Technically 0.01% of the population per year.
But I think the bigger thing is that in the early 1990s, this was still clearly rising, and there was nearly uncontrolled spread in most parts of the world. It was much slower than covid fortunately, but clearly a pandemic.
With modern antiretrovirals making treated people unable to spread and enabling prophylactic use for people who might be at risk, we are basically at the point of the HIV pandemic that we will be with covid once the delta wave is clearly subsiding and vaccination is very widespread.
Ah yes, I did fuck up that percentage. I do think you make a good point about HIV in the 90’s, though mostly I was responding to the “we are still in the HIV pandemic”.
To the larger point, I ultimately think that 90’s HIV varies significantly enough from Covid (in kind and quantity) that the closest parallel is the 1919 flu. So I consider it fair to propose that we as a people might act differently if another such situation pops up in the future than we have this go around.
It has materialized. Scott's belief it hasn't is rather interesting. I just watched a video of large scale protests in Paris against their vaccine passports, for example. In Melbourne the police are deploying roadblocks to stop people reaching protests.
What's actually happened is simply that the media's independent spirit has collapsed to the point where they may as well be fully state owned, Soviet style. "We hear no reports of protests -> no protests are happening" is not a valid inference anymore. There could be massive protests every single day and you'd never hear about them unless you were connected to the people going in some way, or keeping an eye on "border" sites. It's also worth noting that outside of places controlled by the "elite axis", enforcement of the rules is very poor - a kind of quiet protest.
As for the masses embracing these measures, they were never allowed to do anything else, were they? In dictatorial systems with large scale information control, it makes little sense to talk about whether people support things or not. Outcomes are unconnected to support, the people who are supposed to measure and report on support won't do so, and people who support the measures may well be doing so because they were lied to anyway. So, what does support of the masses mean? Do the Chinese masses support the CCP, because they haven't engaged in bloody counter-revolution? And of those who do, to what extent is it because they believe what they're told by the government?
They might care, but they are also rational people and know they could a shitfit catch a fist or a pink slip (or, in their worst imaginings, a bullet!) for making a stink.
IT's a weird situation re. precautions, where I imagine people who want strict enforcement ala Singapore style "Take you mask off inside, and we'll take you outside and beat the stupid out of you with sticks" are the majority, but people who would actually be willing to take the last step are a clear minority; as it were.
Lot's of people who will be happy if it happened, very view willing to cut the switch.
This reads like a fully generalized argument against the current world order. Seatbelts, the minimum wage, banks, schools, the job market -- it's all powered by manufactured false consciousness, we all live in a CCP-equivalent but are too blind to see it, so tear it all down. Of course this view can be tempered with an exemption list of what parts of the world order are pleasing enough to us that they get to not be purged with fire for the time being, but then we get into the question of who gets to write the list. This is the sort of thinking that states like to export to other states as a form of silent warfare in hope that they implode and collapse in on themselves.
Ah, but it is a fully generalized argument against the current world order - and rightly so!
To be a citizen in a democratic society is to accept responsibility for its functioning; government by the people (through their elected representatives) means that the people are ultimately sovereign.
The implication is that we shouldn't be taking anything for granted. The fact that we were born into a society with seatbelts, the minimum wage, banks, schools, the job market, etc. in no way implies that this is the natural, immutable, nor necessarily desirable state of affairs. To take a cue from the UK concept of sovereign Parliament: the fact that the Parliament chose to do A at some point in no way prevents it from choosing to do not-A at some future time. Similarly, even codified constitutions can be changed - with sufficient public support; with the mechanism typically set out in the constitution itself.
We can - indeed, ought to - question the status quo. Perhaps, we decide that some aspects are worth keeping now (though not necessarily - in the future). Perhaps, we decide that others are not. What we ought not do, however, is assume that "this is just the way things are".
Who gets to write that list? The citizens do, through the constitutional (written or unwritten) governance mechanism. That's what living in a democratic society means.
We tried that. Then the judges just decide that the words on the page don't mean what they say and the government does what it wants, anyways.
I don't quite follow the links there, especially to the job market, schools or banks. Could you elaborate?
Strange you take it that way. It reads to me like pointing out measurement error of public opinion is rife. The American mainstream media is uninterested in measuring or reporting on dissatisfaction with a Democrat president's handling of things, nor are they interested in reporting foreign protests against similar policies. Neither do they want to report things like "Outside of major cities, damned near no one follows the CDC dictates, or thinks they matter." Does that mean those who live in major cities think the dictates are a great idea? Who knows... we just know that, like those living under the CCP, protesting and disobedience has a much higher cost, so we can't take conformity as evidence of agreement.
"The American mainstream media is uninterested in measuring or reporting on dissatisfaction with a Democrat president's handling of things"
If I google news "biden approval rating" there are hundreds of articles on how bad it's gotten, likely caused by the media's own criticism of the Afghanistan withdrawal. So this just seems straightforwardly and obviously false.
The media isn't loyal to Biden personally, they're loyal to the cause. Trump is gone and Biden has no Republican opposition that's any threat, so they don't need to keep Biden specifically in power for the cause, and Afghanistan isn't one of the cause's issues.
I don't know what claim you are defending. The idea that the media doesn't cover opposition to COVID measures, or opposition to Biden, is clearly shown false just by doing some simple searches for articles. Maybe there's a more nuanced version of the argument than what Mike H and Doctor Hammer are saying, but no one has made it yet.
there's a lot of overlap between war profiteers and media barons and US media is extremely jinogistic, insofar as the press turned on Biden it was *because* he left Afghanistan
Not sure whether this counts as "The American mainstream media", but the Economist just had an article about Biden's falling approval rating. Here's a link to them talking about his presidency and ratings so far. https://www.economist.com/president-joe-biden-polls
Minimum wage does seems to be a natural rather than manufactured conciousness. I was somewhat numbed to read the WaPo economics editor write in favour of a national $15 min, fully conversant of things like a million lost jobs and I think even the Seattle study that found paychecks went down due to reduced hours and full time jobs changed to part time
What got me was she knew about earned income tax credits. So you know a $15 min wage may not even increase paychecks even for jobs kept but you breezily pass over an alternative that appears do do everything the minimum hike could hope to do, without downsides?
Her argument was that it would be nice that the draw on tax dollars of the earned income credit would be gone. Great, only to be replaced by people paying for the minimum wage through increased prices that are comparatively regressive versus tax money more proportionately payed by the rich
Who knows, maybe earned income tax credits will catch on in the end when people realize the shininess of the buttons here are in a huge inverse correlation with the effects
I did taxes a few years back, and there were a number of people who qualified for the EIC but had never heard of it.
I suppose you could do a 'reverse payroll tax' though people would be suspicious of businesses absorbing some of that by tending to pay less. That wouldn't be possible for them at the minimum level at least. And if businesses did tend to pay lower wages that would likely result in more hiring in a reverse effect to the minimum wage
Milton Friedman figured this out 60 years ago. Replace the minimum wage (and the whole tangle of welfare and income subsidy programs for that matter) with a "Negative Income Tax." https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w9751/w9751.pdf
All economists know that the MW kills jobs exactly to the extent that it is effective in raising wages above market rates. And that those thereby pushed out of the labor force will necessarily be the least skilled/educated/competent people. (If you legally have to pay the same for two employees you pick the most capable one, natch). So it's basically shutting the bottom of society out of the labor market.
But the minimum wage is just one of those bad ideas that always has been, and always will be, popular. It just feels good, I guess.
The claim against the minimum wage is that it increases unemployment, not that it reduces hours worked. Where were these million jobs lost in Seattle? Seattle doesn’t have a million people.
The million jobs figure is the CBO's estimate for a national minimum wage. It's in a similar range of what an Ontario government agency projected for the effect of their $15 minimum of about 60,000 jobs when you adjust for the population size
The reduced hours is something I had not heard of until a study on Seattle's $15 minimum increase followed minimum wage earners and found an average reduction in their paycheck from before to after. It turns out there was a previous study in Seattle that found the same as well:
"A 2018 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research[2] found that when Seattle’s minimum wage was increased to $13 per hour back in 2016, total labor hours were reduced between 6 and 7 percent, while wages increased by only 3 percent"
https://www.theknowlesgroup.org/blog/an-in-depth-look-at-minimum-wage-in-seattle/
In that case I suspect the loss in labour hours included lost jobs while the newer study followed jobs that continued before and after the increase to $15
This effect is larger than I would have thought as it is often mentioned that the theory is that minimum wage's biggest effect is in future job creation. I really support earned income tax credits as a result - my view is that overly high minimum wages are inevitable and conservative politicians are accomplishing nothing if they don't enact an alternative with as much publicity as possible. At the same time liberal politicians would accomplish far more with non-direct increases to the minimum wage and it would be essentially impossible for conservative politicians to argue against it
The correctly stated theoretical claim is that minimum wages reduce the quantity of labor demanded. This can come in the form of fewer, reduced hours or some combination. The minimum wage is often described solely in terms of it's effect on the number of jobs, and this is a flawed articulation.
As the saying goes: The Sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the French are rioting in the street. France protesting is not proof of anything. If anything the fairly modest opposition for vaccine passports in France suggests that the center is as popular as ever. Cite: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2021/08/08/france-protests-but-vaccine-passport-enforcement-is-working/
> It's a political gamble as Macron faces reelection in April 2022 but the vast majority of French people support him—current surveys come in at around 60-70% and although 35% sympathize with the protesters, 74% were shocked by the comparisons with Nazi Germany and the use of the Jewish star.
> Moreover, the Pass Sanitaire is having its desired effect—more and more people are getting vaccinated and at very fast rates. As reported by The Guardian, at least 7 million French people have been given their first vaccine dose since the government decided to implement the policy. Reservation data on bookings suggest that France will have vaccinated 50 million people over the age of 12 with at least one jab by the end of August.
> In dictatorial systems with large scale information control, it makes little sense to talk about whether people support things or not.
In the west we do not have large scale information control. We have ad-hoc systems run by tech giants in an uncoordinated fashion. If people wanted to organise they certainly can get around them, hence why a minority is able to organise protests in France.
Protests also happening in Italy, Germany, Switzerland.
Regardless, obviously if you simply write off protesters then you will conclude there are no protests and everyone is happy. That is tautology, not argument.
As for people signing up to get vaccinated, what exactly are you arguing with here? That's the whole point of coercion. I didn't argue anywhere that it wouldn't work, only that the claim that the center is actually super popular and loads of people love it doesn't seem to be accurate.
The argument was that the protests are a "public revolt against the pandemic response".
Saying "60-70% support for Macron disproves a revolt" is a counter argument, not a tautology. It's strong evidence that the center's covid response is still popular.
The tautology is saying "France protesting is not proof of anything" and then arguing that the size of the protests proves the measures are popular. Perhaps I am mis-naming my fallacies, but that's definitely a fallacy of some sort.
Citing opinion polls is indeed not fallacious. I do not agree that a policy that has alienated 30-40% of the population can be described as the people "enthusiastically lining up" behind the measures - which was the claim I was originally responding to. You can argue it's popular in a strictly technical sense of >50% poll approvals.
At any rate, these days I am less inclined to believe such polls. It's sort of an open secret in the polling world that polling panels aren't representative across a few variables that normally don't make much difference for their primary use (commercial research), but would in this case. The big one is volunteering for things. The sort of people who respond to polls are deeply unrepresentative in how likely they are to be volunteers - not a big surprise - but it means any poll of the form "what do you think of these people who refuse to volunteer for some pro-social thing" is going to be deeply out of step with the real population.
There's a paper analysing some of these issues from Pew Research here:
https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/01/Weighting-Online-Opt-In-Samples.pdf
"At the other end of the scale, four variables show extremely large biases. These are voting in the 2014 midterm election, (32 percentage points), having volunteered in the past 12 months (29 points), voting in the 2012 presidential election (23 points) and tablet ownership (20 points)"
Sometimes pollsters try to adjust for these factors, but it's all just statistical modelling in the end and very unclear how close they can get for 'new' questions.
In the CA recall, both media elites and polling overestimated the extent of opposition to Newsom's COVID measures (or at least their significance to voters). Just to point out that it can go either way.
In Switzerland it's generally hundreds (very rarely few thousands) protesters.
They scream bloody murder and demand respect for their anti-vaxx stupidity (which I refuse). But since the extension of the health pass on Monday, orders of magnitude of people more have gotten vaccines, every day. Maybe reluctantly, but at least they did.
Everyone is a journalist now. If there is a protest, someone just needs to film it.
And they did, quite professionally! Here you go:
https://odysee.com/@SerebraSana:1/Paris-health-pass-protest-september-11-2021:d?r=FXpupUxQW3YzsZgohzy1URXFe2xTpwyz
That doesn't mean people see it, of course.
Thanks for the link! I want to reach through the internet and give a high five to the woman who said "I will live my life the way I have to, but not the way they want me to." Good on her.
You need to choose one...if you can easily supply evidence of protests, it's not being suppressed effectively.
I've been hearing about protests, and especially about peaceful protests, not getting into the news for some time.
And on the other side, there doesn't seem to be a comprehensive source for upcoming protests, or at least there wasn't a few years ago when I looked into it.
In the US I constantly hear reports of people protesting vaccines, mask mandates, etc., and vaccine hesitancy is endlessly reported on, to the point where I am a little confused as to what you (and the person you're responding to) are talking about.
France's anti-pass protests were headline news on Le Figaro multiple times. Le Figaro is one of France's largest newspapers. Hardly evidence of the collapse of the media's independent spirit.
Agreed. The covid crisis seems to have sped up the migration of social media back to classic mainstream, largely elite-controlled, media. This killed the book argument and even cause an opposite swing, moving fast toward the CCP model: large scale surveillance and information control making the use of violent repression less frequent (but still a possible last reasort). The "impossible" policies where put in place, fast, with much less protest than I expected because, I think:
*Large % of population happy with such measures. They accept liberty restriction for promise of security. More than accept, they secretly welcomes it when the restriction do not affect them but annoy other people they didn't like (rich tourist, party-going young people,...). I suspect the stay-at-home policies were a joy to some, schadenfreude at its best
*freedom of speech is clearly an empty word now. I suspect it was for quite some time, but now it's clear. Censorship has reached new heigths. It's always to stop fake news, hate speech or scientific fallacies...of course. CCP uses the same reasons...
*police violence has changed in Europe. Not sure it has increased, but it impact different populations. It used to be the usual groups before covid (minorities, poor). Not so anymore, at least not only: videos of violent arrest of "nice" citizens (mothers walking around with young childs, well-off elder people,...) multiplied. I think police hatred has increased outside of its traditional circles (poor minority neighborhood), like it already did with the french "gilet jaunes" episode.
So the power legitimacy decreased, not because they got exposed not having any "miracle button", but because they are more and more exposed using the same tricks as their own foreign anti-democratic bogeymen...
Citation needed?
I think the UK lockdown was not as severe as several others in Western Europe. For example, everyone was allowed out of their homes to exercise, which I believe was not the case in Spain or Italy. Lots of people in the UK carried on going out to work.
I'm not saying that the UK lockdown wasn't substantial, just that one would need to carefully compare the rules in place in different countries.
My reply refers to the comment by @sohois, not the comment by Mike H.
FWIW, I don't think Mike H's comment is valid in the UK, both regarding protests and regarding the media.
I just spent a few minutes trying to find any coverage of last Saturday's protests in Paris on the BBC site. I tried Google News too. Maybe my searching skills aren't good enough but I can't find any. Actually there are protests all over Europe, but load the BBC topic "anti vaccination movement" and no evidence of any protests is to be found:
https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/c8eeyd509zet/anti-vaccination-movement
It only took me a minuet to find articles mentioning protests in France:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-57907678
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-57883397
And this one about vaccine passports in the UK came up too
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56202975
The fact that there's been similar protests in France since July is probably a large part of why there's nothing about last weeks. It's no longer news.
Yes, exactly, that story is from July and I found that one too. Seems you're in agreement that there is nothing about last weekend's protests.
Are large-scale protests in Paris more or less newsworthy than "Gen Z fights for unions, one Starbucks at a time" or "Quiz of the week: what got Taylor excited in Belfast?" to name just two stories currently on the front page. To me they are obviously more newsworthy. The fact that neither of us can find anything about what was happening last weekend is exactly the point being made here - the media ignore protests so people think they died out or were just some fringe thing. When it's pointed out that it's not the case suddenly the argument shifts to "protests are happening but they're {french, boring, etc} so it's right that they aren't covered". However, whatever the justification journalists use is, it doesn't really change the original argument - the perception that the moves are loved and protests fizzled out isn't true.
Here's a Guardian article about the protest on August 14th.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/14/fifth-consecutive-weekend-of-protests-in-france-over-covid-pass
Given that it's said to be the fifth consecutive weekend, perhaps the BBC et al may be forgiven for eventually not bothering to make the ninth consecutive weekend of these protests into a headline.
Surely, if there exists a news blackout against these intrepid anti-vax heroes, it would have been in effect a month ago no less strictly than last week. More to the point, the protests continue to be amply covered in the local/expat media, (see e.g. https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20210911-turnout-down-slightly-for-french-protests-against-covid-19-health-pass ). I'd imagine any agenda-driven media manipulation would prefer to tamp down on local coverage first.
My point is two-fold:
1. I'm not aware of large-scale protests *in the UK* agaisnt lockdown restrictions. That is my first point. (Of course, they may be happening and I'm not seeing them). There have been some over the last 18 months, and they have been reported to various degrees.
2. The UK media has a range of viewpoints and some parts of the mainstream media have been very critical of the measures adopted by the government.
Regarding coverage in the UK media of protests in other countries, the UK media in general does a poor job of reporting about other countries (with the excepton of the USA). Occasionally the media will cover some news from mainland Europe but this is patchy at best. I don't think this is because the UK media is basically cowed by the state; I think it's because most UK readers aren't interested.
Well, right now BBC has a story titled, "French anger at viral bullying of 11 year olds". So not convinced they are uninterested in European news. Agreed that the UK is in a better place media wise than most places; better diversity of ownership and viewpoints, etc (albeit conservative views are more often paywalled).
Rather than stories about France being boring, I find it more likely that journalists feel they have some sort of moral duty to support the government, and covering protests feels like encouraging protests, so they do it to the most minimal extent they can get away with.
https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/covid-19-government-response-tracker tracks stringency. Pretty much all of W. Europe had quite strict initial lockdowns, the UK wasn't the most strict, but their first lockdown lasted longest and they continued to be measured as most strict during the summer.
Not that I think the exact order of most strict lockdowns matters for the original point: the UK had a long, strict lockdown, and returned to lockdowns later on, despite the gov believing that the public would not bear more than a few weeks
I agree with your general point about the public's acceptance of lockdown.
I recall listening to an interview last year with a behavioural scientist who said that behavioural science would actually expect this response, especially if it is framed as everyone working together against a common external threat, and who criticised the initial government expectation that people wouldn't accept the restrictions. I don't have the reference to hand, unfortunately.
> particularly compared against the likes of South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China (assuming you trust them)
For what it's worth, my friends inside China have repeatedly told me that things went back to normal shortly after the new year in 2020. I trust them.
On my analysis:
In late 2019 / early 2020, everyone in China including the government panicked, and everything got shut down. This meant that over the new year (January 25th through mid-February) most of China had nothing to do but sit around at home thinking about how the government was doing a bad job.
The government realized what was going on, didn't want to start a rebellion against itself, and sent everyone back to work. (Technically, this was implemented by allowing companies to require their employees to come back to work, as long as the company could provide each employee with a mask. A back-to-work mandate was not necessary.) And that was the end of that.
In contrast, the American system ensures that at any given time roughly half the country would like to see the level of popular unrest rising. We got that instead.
I have a friend who was in China for much of last year, staying with a local family, as he was unable to travel back to the UK. The area he was in was in lockdown for several months. This was during the summer.
Not really. In China we STILL have limited travel during vacations, which are the same for most people and therefore for much of us there is no travel allowed. It was not as easy as you say to open a business; the process was bureaucratic but you could re-open by paying a relatively small bribe to party officials. The government did not "send" people back to work. It allowed businesses to open as I said. And the quarantine ended after Covid was brought to very low levels, where it remains to this day.
Well... Lockdown meant that I could work from home, saving a load of cash on transport costs, having a pleasant walk around quiet streets at lunch time and seeing more of the kiddies. That same pattern was replicated for lots of other people, including journalists. I doubt that their are many people who would risk their necks for the right to commute.
Yes, I agree, and as time went on it became more and more annoying to deal with those restrictions. But... those restrictions are now all gone, I am still working from home and in no rush at all to return to office work.
Another factor, perhaps overlooked, is that for a while, crises are quite exciting and people will put up with some inconvenience if it means a break from the daily routine, especially if everyone else is in the same boat.
Good point. The first month of covid, spring 2020 with the first lockdowns, felt like a real life disaster movie, with some exhilarating feeling of humanity fighting an external threat, everybody is in the same boat, time for heroes, etc. it was also the time when hospital workers were applauded every evening at 8pm in my country. This played a significant part in the acceptances of the mesures at the time...thinking of it, it's likely the main factor. The situation is very different now, and this reservoir of good will is not present anymore. I would expect to be in the "find the guilty" phase, but we are not, at least i have this impression. This pleads against the book thesis, it strongly suggest effective control of the main narrative in the society by western gouvernements...
oh yes, and the typical zombie/plague apocalypse (or any other global apocalypse killing a large % of the population). This genre has a significant appeal, for western people at least (not sure about the developing world). Different from "everybody against an external threat", it's more let's restart everything from the ground up, the total humanity reboot appeal. People always feel they will be among the survivors ;-)
"I'd say that on average that the group of people most likely to find the new normal nice were the precise class of people getting to engineer the Covid response."
This, a thousand times.
" I'd say that on average that the group of people most likely to find the new normal nice were the precise class of people getting to engineer the Covid response."
Every time I get het up about some newly discovered stupidness about the response to the Wuhan Flu, I have to calm myself down with the realization that it was good for me personally. Which then makes me angry again.
Sort of how California having effectively legalized shoplifting is good for my own employee stock options.
As Argentus implies, the work from home benefits were very much elite advantages, beneficial for those with remote possible jobs and nice houses. I'd argue the masses would be much more likely to lose their jobs/go on furlough or Tumpbux, much more likely to be forced to continue working on site, and more likely to be frustrated by the pressures of childcare or the lack of city living advantages.
I'm not elite, and I am loving working from home. Granted, I do clerical work which means that as long as I have Internet access, I can keep up with the paperwork and filing it online. If I had to work in retail or any other such job then yes, I couldn't take advantage of it.
But how do we know that the "revolt of the masses" against the elites isn't organized and paid for by the elites? It seems plausible to me that if you "open your eyes and look around" you will find many trends that will ultimately benefit the elites, not the masses. Namely, the elites will make more money selling useless gadgets and even more useless "culture" to the masses, and will be better able to control the indoctrinated masses. Of course, the elites do this hidden in the backstage and try to give the impression that this is a revolt of the masses against the elites. But it is exactly the contrary. Worth thinking about I believe. However, I'll read the book, sounds interesting.
I haven't read Gurri's book, so perhaps he pays credence to this, but the whole dynamic of his work as described here is essentially a transportation of Vilfredo Pareto's (yes, the efficiency guy) theory of elites.
Maybe you're familiar with this, but Pareto characterised the world as having two groups of elites. There are foxes, who deploy deceit and cunning, and are characterised by plurality, scepticism and decentralisation. They're uncomfortable with using force. Then there are lions, who emphasise homogeneity, conformity, traditionalism, ruling through small centralised bureaucracies.
For him, history was a cycle of these two elites eating one another slowly, and using the masses as a weapon to do so. Scott describes the 'foxy' blogosphere on the streets protesting, with no clear intentions. Which makes sense, because as any trickster figure in mythology knows, if you have a set of goals, they're going to be subverted by the world. But in the chaos, things get changed.
I'm not going to work through where present groups of elites fall on the lion-fox axis, but its a useful analytical tool.
The other thing worth mentioning is that in Pareto's eyes, new groups are constantly being politicised in order for the out-of-power elites to wield influence again. I haven't delved deeply enough into the mechanics of this, but it seems intuitive that no group can sustain being politicised at a high level - it is exhausting.
In my head, all of these moments of politicisation work something akin to recalling memories on an Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. A group (or memory, in the analogy) is activated by an elite; the press, a think tank, the government. It hits peak politicisation, then quickly fades away from this point, unless it is constantly reactivated. If it is constantly reactivated, its importance slowly wanes. Politicising that group over and over no longer has the same impact, so the elite must find a new group.
There are other theories of elites - Peter Turchin and cliodynamics is the obvious example, but Gurri's idea feels as though it has been laid out along Pareto's lines.
Very interesting considerations. It is clear to me that similar dynamics are at work in today's world. Why knows which groups will be politicized (and weaponized) next. And I guess the elites are discovering how to hybridize the DNA of lions and foxes. This sounds futuristic but, at the end of the day, all comes down to money, like it has always been.
"history was a cycle of these two elites eating one another slowly"
This sounds very much like an account of *written* history, rather than the history that happened. Seeing as elites can write and love writing about each other, most of the historical writing we have features exactly this kind of exciting, legible, Netflix-worthy political game.
But surely the truth about history is that most of it's random. All these big historical theories... they're just nonsense. No predictive power, no real meaning, just a way of fitting a narrative to a bunch of mainly random events. You might as well study screenwriting.
As with any theory or model, the map isn't the territory. You can approach history idiographically if you want to, but sometimes nomothetic laws and principles are interesting and useful, even if as starting points.
> But surely the truth about history is that most of it's random. All these big historical theories... they're just nonsense. No predictive power, no real meaning, just a way of fitting a narrative to a bunch of mainly random events. You might as well study screenwriting.
The reason I don't necessarily agree with this interpretation is because randomness feels unsatisfying and unhelpful as a guiding principle. There are times when the history might suggest that uncertainty is the right approach, but being uncertain is different to believing things happen at random.
If you want to make this argument I think you're better off in the territory of Derrida and Hayden White, where things are not necessarily random, but artefacts and items have little explanatory power with regard to the past, and instead the historian's interpretation is a reflection of their priorities in the present.
Sounds similar to Jane Jacobs' Guardian and Trader split.
Thank you for posting this comment, as I had not come across Pareto's thinking on this and it's really helpful to have this model.
Yeats:
The Great Day
Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
typo:
"To adopt, leaders have become “protesters-in-chief”." - I think it should say 'adapt' instead?
2nd to last paragraph of section I, 3nd sentence: "We're learning it can''t." double apostrophe
There are many legitimate reasons to dunk on Daphne Leef, but dunking on her because she was "living during a time of unprecedented plenty" and so on is, more or less, a talking point (I won't say whose, to avoid generating unnecessary heat). Never mind the eternal debate about how much better the world could theoretically be made through adding (or removing!) government intervention; During that time Israel faced a debilitating housing crisis, which has only gotten worse since then, and was _the_ major grievance fueling the protests. I'm not an economist but there is strong agreement about this point across the political aisle (both that this specific crisis was the fulcrum point of the protests, and that it is and was actually real).
Israel's housing crisis is also the driving force behind settlement activity in the West Bank, due to much less regulation there than in Israel.
Yes, it was surprising Ctrl+Fing the Wikipedia article on the protests and not finding a single mention of Palestine.
The housing crisis is definitely feeling like a growing crisis throughout the rich world right now - it's been building since the 1970s, and got to the attention of my tiny slice of the internet in the mid 2000s, but is actually getting mainstream attention by legislatures and the like now.
Agree; even if someone is objectively well-off, well fed, well paid, with the latest gadgets, I *still* think it's not unreasonable for them to be pretty upset about commuting a couple of hours each way to get to the job that allows that wealth. Housing and food are the fundamental costs.
Unsorted thoughts: when reading this, I couldn't help but think of:
(a): Tocqueville's Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocqueville_effect - "As social conditions and opportunities improve, social frustration grows more quickly.");
(b): Klingon Promotion (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KlingonPromotion). I suspect at least half of the reason why these movements are so often leaderless is because they eat their own, not even waiting until the revolution is over. And the bigger you are, the more tempting it is to take you down and crown yourself the new leader;
(c): Orwell's theory of revolutions as presented in '1984'. As in, there are the Low, Middle, and Upper classes; revolution is when the Middle class manages to convince the Lower class to overthrow the Upper class and install the former Middle class as the new Upper class, usually with promises of equality and abolishing the class system;
And of course, (d): Epicurean thought, judging by the reference to tending your garden (as former Roman Emperor Diocletian put it, "If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn't dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed." - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletian#cite_ref-208). I'm surprised actually that I can't think of any SSC posts about Epicureanism, given its relationship to Stoicism and Stoicism's relationship to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Epicureanism in general seems very soothing.
That's all I have for today, my thoughts are all over the place without deeper reflection, and I don't have time for that because it's like 4 AM here, I need to go to bed.
Kindly note that Diocletian turned to market gardening and Epicureanism *after* he retired; when in power, he instigated a persecution against Christians and seems to have imposed and maintained peace in the manner of the dictators that US forces head out to topple and replace with democracy:
"On 23 February 303, Diocletian ordered that the newly built church at Nicomedia be razed. He demanded that its scriptures be burned, and seized its precious stores for the treasury.[172] The next day, Diocletian's first "Edict against the Christians" was published. The edict ordered the destruction of Christian scriptures and places of worship across the empire, and prohibited Christians from assembling for worship. Before the end of February, a fire destroyed part of the Imperial palace. Galerius convinced Diocletian that the culprits were Christians, conspirators who had plotted with the eunuchs of the palace. An investigation was commissioned, but no responsible party was found. Executions followed anyway, and the palace eunuchs Dorotheus and Gorgonius were executed. One individual, Peter Cubicularius, was stripped, raised high, and scourged. Salt and vinegar were poured in his wounds, and he was slowly boiled over an open flame. The executions continued until at least 24 April 303, when six individuals, including the bishop Anthimus, were decapitated.
... Diocletian took to wearing a gold crown and jewels, and forbade the use of purple cloth to all but the emperors. His subjects were required to prostrate themselves in his presence (adoratio); the most fortunate were allowed the privilege of kissing the hem of his robe (proskynesis, προσκύνησις). Circuses and basilicas were designed to keep the face of the emperor perpetually in view, and always in a seat of authority. The emperor became a figure of transcendent authority, a man beyond the grip of the masses. His every appearance was stage-managed. This style of presentation was not new – many of its elements were first seen in the reigns of Aurelian and Severus – but it was only under the tetrarchs that it was refined into an explicit system.
In keeping with his move from an ideology of republicanism to one of autocracy, Diocletian's council of advisers, his consilium, differed from those of earlier emperors. He destroyed the Augustan illusion of imperial government as a cooperative affair among emperor, army, and senate. In its place he established an effectively autocratic structure, a shift later epitomized in the institution's name: it would be called a consistorium, not a council."
"Defund the police" seems like a rallying cry at least as impractical as "jail all the corrupt bankers" to me. I don't think this is a good counter example.
Decertifying an election is a bit more concrete, though still impractical, and definitely matches up with a story where people think the elites are all corrupt and bad, and everyone should just listen to the people instead.
These movements were certainly localised to two separate halves of the population, with the other half in firm opposition. But they do both seem characterised by distrust of, and contempt for, established institutions and "elites". Just different elites.
I disagree. Defunding a police budget is actionable, you can cut it by 5%, 50% or 100%, the consequences are yours to enjoy. (It's also not popular)
The latter might appeal to someone frustrated but we're talking about a segment of the private sector. What constitutes corruption and which bankers are you jailing? The tellers? etc.
"There haven't been many big viral protests lately except Black Lives Matter and the 1/6 insurrection, and both seemed to have a perfectly serviceable set of specific demands (defunding the police, decertifying the elections)."
Yeah, I think I'm pushing back on this too. Even if we take it that BLM has one clear, specific, demand - "defund the police" - what does that entail?
No money for police forces at all? No police forces at all? Some police? What kind of police? Take away guns and have unarmed patrol officers as in other countries? Who turns up when someone calls the local Community Harmony Office to report that "There's a crazy guy with a knife who's threatening to stab anyone he sees" and how do they tackle said crazy guy - just stand there and recite affirming slogans to let him know that they validate him in his okayness, now if he'd just put down the knife - okay, so you just stabbed Justin, well that's cool, we're cool...
If you have no idea what you want as a solution, then the demand may be clear, but what will satisfy it? If half the movement wants no police at all, and the other half wants smaller, unarmed police forces, what does the government do in response?
And besides, the BLM has moved on to include trans issues:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/start-black-lives-matter-lgbtq-lives/story?id=71320450
I've seen plenty online about it's not an organised movement, the various organisations or activist groups in each city are all separate, there is no centralised set of demands, etc.
Which just makes it even worse to try and find a solution. Which arm of the octopus do you engage with?
All it means is 'make the police play a smaller role in American life'.
There are a hundred different ways you could do this, and being that the slogan comes from the expert-trusting left, they're generally willing to let various experts promote various systems of doing this, let different cities try them as their populace wills, and see what works.
That is all it means? Well, how reassuring. But as you say, there are a hundred different ways to do this. And if there are a hundred different ways, then we do need groups to come out and say "We mean abolish the police force and set up a public safety agency"
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/minneapolis-police-abolition/
Or, if this is what they mean, "replace the police with social workers, education, and community programmes"
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2021/05/19/7-myths-about-defunding-the-police-debunked/
Or, if this is what they mean, "I'll take endorsements from anyone even if I have no idea what they want or stand for"
https://www.foxnews.com/media/virginia-sheriff-terry-mcauliffe-defund-police-confrontation
But until you get some kind of agreement on what you mean by "defund the police", then it is essentially meaningless. And we've already got social workers struggling to deal with homelessness, until there is going to be a vast change (all the police budget goes on housing) then there won't be enough "rapid response social workers would provide them with housing support and other resources" to get that problem solved fast. What it will mean is what is currently happening: get that bum off the street outside my house, get them into a shelter - and then you have people refusing to go into shelters because they're not allowed drink or take drugs, or that the shelters are too violent.
There is a problem with the American police system, nobody doubts that. But it came about in its present form due to a lot of factors, not the nice myth going around that "police force started off as slave-catchers and that's their function to the present day".
>But until you get some kind of agreement on what you mean by "defund the police", then it is essentially meaningless.
It's really not, though.
It means exactly what I said - reduce the role of the police in everyday life.
I could lay out 100 policies regarding changes to policing policy, and a panel of classifiers would have very high agreement about which ones conform to the 'defund the police' model, and which ones don't. Aside from some borderline cases in the middle, it would be pretty obvious for most policy proposals.
The fact of that agreement means that the phrase carries coherent information. It lets you understand something about the world. It lets you choose which direction to move in when creating or evaluating policy.
Is 'stop climate change' meaningless because it will probably take more than a single policy change to actually accomplish, and therefore the phrase isn't referring to a single policy that everyone agrees on?
Is 'protect human rights' meaningless because humans have a lot of rights that need to be protected in a variety of ways in a variety of situations, and some of those rights are not agreed on by everyone?
Should we not try to stop climate change or protect human rights?
These are top-level slogans that identify an issue and establish a dimensional axis for that issue. People who use these phrases are saying we should devote more resources and thought towards this particular issue, and we should move in this particular direction along the established axis. That's a meaningful proposal that carries a ton of information, even if there are many ways one might move in that direction and further discussion is warranted.
"It means exactly what I said - reduce the role of the police in everyday life."
Ah, so you are just chanting a slogan. You have no interest in what it actually means or what it might entail, you are doing the "it's not MY job to provide a solution".
How do you "reduce"? Fewer beat cops? No cops? Cops as last resort? Armed or unarmed? Let teenagers knife one another, that's been going on historically and we don't need the cops to interfere (as one particularly stupid Twitterer put out before hastily retracting, in the wake of a tragic shooting)?
"Defund the police!" cries A. "Okay, I can see your point, what do you want in particular?" asks B. "It's perfectly simple!" replies A. "Fine, what do you want us to do?" enquires B. "Defund the police!" A reasserts, and round and round the mulberry bush we go.
It's the same as Chesterton says in "The Usual Article":
"In other words, it is exactly as if somebody were to say about the science of medicine: "All I ask is Health; what could be simpler than the beautiful gift of Health? Why not be content to enjoy for ever the glow of youth and the fresh enjoyment of being fit? Why study dry and dismal sciences of anatomy and physiology; why enquire about the whereabouts of obscure organs of the human body? Why pedantically distinguish between what is labelled a poison and what is labelled an antidote, when it is so simple to enjoy Health? Why worry with a minute exactitude about the number of drops of laudanum or the strength of a dose of chloral, when it is so nice to be healthy? Away with your priestly apparatus of stethoscopes and clinical thermometers; with your ritualistic mummery of feeling pulses, putting out tongues, examining teeth, and the rest! The god Aesculapius came on earth solely to inform us that Life is on the whole preferable to Death; and this thought will console many dying persons unattended by doctors."
I've been party to a conversation where a person objected to the goal of "defunding the police" in the presence of a large population of supporters, and an ostensible supporter jumped in to explain that "defund the police" doesn't really mean removing funding from the police, but reforming them, changing their standards from the ground up. And this led to a big argument pileup between supporters as they started noticing that other people around them who supposedly supported "defunding the police" didn't actually represent specific policy agreement with them. A few other people got involved in hashing out the meaning, and no two of them agreed with what the proposal was actually intended to mean, not just to the extent of a percentage amount, but to the extent of a policy direction they would mutually support.
I was actually discussing this with my mother just the other day. She believed that the BLM protests at least attracted awareness to an important social issue even if they haven't yet caused practical social change, but my take was that they've brought us no closer to meaningful social change, because people already had an awareness of police brutality, but the BLM movement didn't elicit any sort of cohesive movement towards actionable social proposals at all, because supporters didn't bother to hash out even a vague platform, but they did galvanize an opposition which would oppose any of their policy proposals, which is much larger than the constituency satisfied with any specific proposal. If 40% of the population will oppose any proposal they identify with "defunding the police," but no more than 20% of the population will rally behind any specific "defund the police" proposal, all such proposals are doomed to fail.
> the BLM movement didn't elicit any sort of cohesive movement towards actionable social proposals at all
I believe the changes it did trigger are local and not national, and the increased awareness is just lubricant to the local activists who have been pushing for such changes for years.
An underreported aspect of BLM is that several cities and states responded with legislation. Colorado ended qualified immunity. Virginia banned no-knock warrants. Tim Scott’s police reform bill has not passed yet but is still a real possibility. There are many others but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head.
“Defund the police!” isn’t a demand, it’s a deepity. Like “smash the patriarchy” it is a statement which has the *shape* and *sound* of a tangible physical demand - let us perform action X upon object Y! - but with a moment’s reflection we realize we have no idea what X or Y are meant to refer to.
Q: Does “defund” literally mean “defund” or is it a metaphor standing in for “apply some as-yet-undefined series of reforms which may or may not involve changing how much we spend on policing”?
A: Nobody knows! Since every conceivable interpretation has its advocates, even the people yelling this slogan in the streets can’t be sure what they mean by it!
Q: Precisely *which* group of police are we talking about performing this ambiguously-defined action upon?
A: Nobody knows! Saying “all of them” is rhetorically satisfying (hence “ACAB”) but nobody *means* all of them - we almost all still want murderers to get arrested and nobody has suggested a not-cop way of accomplishing this so clearly there’s an implied limit but nobody is putting an asterisk on protest signs with small print spelling it out because doing so - trying to make this deepity even slightly *actionable* - would weaken it.
I mean, I know.
Does defund the police literally mean defund the police?
Yes, to start with.
Which police?
All police. They are so ineffective that it wouldn't actually mater which you funded or defunded.
Then we start trying different reform packages 'till we find one that works better than giving highschool bullies that were too shit to hack it in the corps guns and a license to kill.
This seems to fit the description in the OP of modern protest movements' worldview - "solving problems is easy, so we just need to get rid of the current authorities who are refusing to do so out of pure malice". So I guess this is evidence in favour.
On the object level, I, uh, think that you may be underestimating the kind of crime wave that abolishing all law enforcement with no replacement in place would unleash. For a start, who's going to take the guns away from all the ex-police you just fired?
It seems clear to me.
We are unhappy that the police are:
A) Roaming the streets, stealing stuff, assaulting people at random, murdering people at will.
and
B) Almost totally ineffective at actually preventing any amount of crime, as seen by the fact that police funding totally fails to corelate with crime rates in either direction.
The solution is to stop shoveling money into the bottomless money pit, and try literally anything else.
We can afford to experiment here because, as pointed out above: The cops don't actually do anything!
The issue with this is that they do serve a symbolic function; in that a public statement that the police are striking/defunded/doing a slow work increases the amount of crime, event though cops don't actually prevent or solve crime at a noticeable rate.
It's the pulling out of Afghanistan problem all over again.
I'd be personally willing to eat that risk though; as my experience with cops amounts to them harassing my Mexican co-workers for no reason at great expense, and refusing to even attempt to do their jobs when shit gets stolen.
Giving the state a monopoly on violence is one of the best things we've done as a species. Before that, it was a warlords, protection rackets, and a lot more conflict.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
It's n=1 but CHOP/CHAZ did not do too well in my view. 4 shootings in about a week.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest#Shootings
This does not compare favorably to the number of shootings in the same area prior to the encampment.
It is in fact possible to spend less money on police, even significant amounts less (plenty of other government departments have dealt with budget cuts in their history!), or to prosecute bank executives who commit fraud for fraud (we did it in the savings & loan crisis! Successfully! With sentences nowhere near the enormity of their crimes, but at least people went to prison.)
The failure to do so is political in both cases, and almost certainly antidemocratically so in the latter.
At least in the spanish case, one of the (many) dichotomies that made the whole "indignados" a stillbirth was that it was mixing old people thinking "I didn't work hard my whole life for this, I expect more" and young ones thinking that the game was rigged against them and they had it worse than their parents, in that rather than going from bad to good, they'll go from good to disaster. I feel that's why there was so much focus on "the system owing me something". Ones because the "put hard work into it", others because they felt they were being treated differently.
The Podemos party tried to ride on this for a while (as well as pretending to be nor-left-nor-right for a little bit, just "anti-elite"). Then it all came burning down, and what Spain got for it was a newly fractioned political landscape that nobody really likes, and that includes a populist-right-wing party Spain thought was vaccinated against for a while post-Franco (the shame and all that). Yay.
I'm skeptical left/right are really solutions to this and find myself more sympathetic to Gurri's framing of Center/Border.
One reason is that elected leaders being unable to do anything due to endless checks and balances doesn't seem to be happening. COVID measures violate at least the Constitution and the Nuremburg code, probably a lot more. Judges noped out, legislatures voted themselves out of existence on the grounds that they're too slow, human rights law turned out to be worthless and so on. In reality what happened is that absolute and total power was instantly granted to a tiny handful of elected leaders, who then delegated all decision making to entirely unelected bureaucrat-dictator-science-kings like Ferguson, Fauci, etc. In the rare cases when they tried to resist doing that, the "central elite axis" or whatever Gurri would call it fought back ferociously to try and impose their will.
The root cause of all this to me seems to be academia. Whenever I try to trace the causes I can't get any further back than that. There are two factors here that interact and overlap:
1. Academia strongly promotes the idea that for any problem there's a miracle button. For any possible topic or question you can imagine, academia will produce an expert professor who claims to fully understand it and have a journal filled with pre-canned solutions.
2. Despite that fact, academia has no strong connection to reality and allows professors to routinely publish pseudo-scientific claims. They can do this because people are conditioned to believe maths=correct, hence the explosion of obfuscatory statistical modelling - it shuts people up and makes them unquestioningly accept the conclusion.
The right is more aware of this problem than the left, or perhaps just more intuitively pre-disposed to doubting the existence of miracle buttons to begin with, but across the board the prevalence of pseudo-science in the literature is very poorly understood and especially amongst the ruling elites, even when they're conservative.
The result is an inexorable replacement of democratic systems with academic con-men of various kinds. Any leader who openly doubts them is immediately assailed by universities and their allies in the media as a "science denier", and those leaders find it very difficult to push back on the detail both because they don't have a strong grip on the maths (and academics have all day in which to obfuscate what they're doing anyway), and because there's just such a huge volume of it that whacking individual bad studies is totally non-scalable.
I don't really know where this goes, but the general sense of unease and 'everything is corrupt' doesn't seem wrong to me. And central/border seems more useful a way to view things as just a continuation of left/right politics. What's happening here isn't a mere continuation. The centre is seizing direct control of power in such a way that I genuinely fear the west is becoming a communist dictatorship via some sort of bloodless revolution, one that consists entirely of mind games, institutional takeover and police suppression.
Yes. I make no claim to originality :)
I agree. We have a leadership class so indebted that they can't start families or buy their first houses The world to them looks hopeless as they struggle with debt and uncertainty. They try to find solace by obedience but do not succeed.
Academia is the new Planter Class, a privileged group with no agency and unable to do anything but go along for the ride. The Planter Class lived off the current stolen labor of their captives, Academia lives off the stolen future labor of theirs. One solution at the end of slavery was forty acres and a mule provided by breaking up the plantations. The world would be a different place if it had happened. What if student debt were repaid by taking the incredible wealth controlled by colleges and universities? How was the prohibition of bankruptcy for student debt enacted? Who championed that?
Center Border is a valuable insight. I am looking forward to what Andrew Yang comes up with. There is a huge Independent group created by the abortion issue driving voters away from the GOP and the incredible incompetence and corruption of the Democrats. I just reread Yang's War On Normal People. With opinion leaders like Musk and a notable group of tech billionaires backing him we could see a revolutionary shift away from the major parties.
I liked this from Gurri: We are living through the early stages of a colossal transformation: from the industrial age to something that doesn’t yet have a name. Many periods of history have been constrained by structural necessity. This isn’t one of them.
For younger elites, trust involves a sort of cosplay of historical conflicts. They put on elaborate rhetorical superhero costumes, and fight mock-epic battles with Nazis, fascists, “patriarchs,” slave-owners, George III, and the like. Because it’s only a game, no one gets seriously hurt – but nothing ever gets settled, either.
This sounds nice, but in a two-party system like in the US, it's really unrealistic...
Also, didn't the republicans re-invent themselves into an anti-elite populist party? Certainly that's the impression I am getting.... which, then, means that if you are "anti-elite", it means you are automatically right-wing, at least in the US....🤔
"Academia strongly promotes the idea that for any problem there's a miracle button"
You wouldn't be happy if they had no ideas, either.
"Academia strongly promotes the idea that for any problem there's a miracle button. For any possible topic or question you can imagine, academia will produce an expert professor who claims to fully understand it and have a journal filled with pre-canned solutions."
I'm 99% sure that you have never read a real journal article in your life. This is the Buzzfeed version of what "academia" is. We've all seen it in clickbait adverts. But imagining that this is the reality is literally the same thing as thinking someone's Facebook moments are their real life.
Journals almost never give solutions. They're boring, hedged, and mostly about 2 years behind the cutting edge, because publication is slow. And scientists don't claim limitless expertise - that's just the media puff around them.
There are loads of problems with academic research. But the things you describe here are not them.
50,000 hits on Google Scholar for the phrase "policy recommendation" and that's the tip of the iceberg.
My guess is that in a typical year I've read between 80-200 academic papers, which for a non academic is a lot. The higher numbers are from when it was a part of my job. It's not any more, thankfully, but I still read a lot more of them than average. How policy-oriented they are depends on the field. Example: epidemiology is overrun with papers telling governments what to do.
Ok, that was much more concise than my response. I spent too much time in academia not to get my hackles up when someone suggests that academics are totally humble and would never say something like "Well, if we just passed a law requiring X we could solve all these problems."
Just in case anyone's interested, you can of course check for yourself. I did! This appears to be a fairly major epidemiology journal:
https://academic.oup.com/ije/issue/50/4 (International Journal of Epidemiology)
Much of it is open access. Here's a random paper I clicked on:
https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/50/4/1103/6318123 (Predicting and forecasting the impact of local outbreaks of COVID-19: use of SEIR-D quantitative epidemiological modelling for healthcare demand and capacity)
It just doesn't do what these guys above are claiming. It has no policy recommendations whatsoever.
There probably are papers with policy recs out there. But if you want to know what the average research paper looks like, just go and read some. It's not hidden.
I see I was correct about your understanding. From the background paragraph, literally the first paragraph of the abstract:
"The world is experiencing local/regional hotspots and spikes in the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes COVID-19 disease. We aimed to formulate an applicable epidemiological model to accurately predict and forecast the impact of local outbreaks of COVID-19 to guide the local healthcare demand and capacity, policy-making and public health decisions."
To guide the local healthcare demand and capacity, policy-making and public health decisions. Yup... no recommendations regarding policy at all!
From the Conclusions section of the abstract:
"We have demonstrated that by using local/regional data, our predictive and forecasting model can be utilized to guide the local healthcare demand and capacity, policy-making and public health decisions to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the local population. Understanding how future COVID-19 spikes/waves could possibly affect the regional populations empowers us to ensure the timely commissioning and organization of services. "
"...[E]mpowers us to ensure the timely commissioning and organization of services" So, again, they are saying that if you use their model for policy creation you can mitigate the impact of COVID and be empowered to organize things well.
So yea, everyone, check out the article Phil H linked. It does EXACTLY what I am claiming, and what I am pretty sure Mike H is claiming, which is to say coming up with an expertise tool to tell policy makers how to execute policy to solve some problem.
I don't see a single policy recommendation in the passages you quote. I see a bunch of claims that someone who *has* policy recommendations might use the current paper to guide or refine them, but this paper has zero policy recommendations, at least in the passages you have quoted.
Might I recommend that you consider the relationship between guidance and recommendations? Or should I just provide guidance about that relationship, being recommendations are guidance towards a particular goal. "If you want X, you should do Y" is both guidance and a recommendation.
> I don't see a single policy recommendation in the passages you quote.
It's not explicit, but that's the advantage of using models. All models must have assumptions, and if you want to reach a certain conclusion that will then be used to shape policies, you just need to find the right assumptions that yield those conclusions.
Of course, differentiating well-meaning and honest modelling approaches from ones that are basically assuming the conclusion the researcher's already believe is the trick we haven't fully figured out. The replication crisis has raised enough awareness that paths forward are becoming clearer.
You picked an epidemiology paper at random and it actually says in the abstract that its purpose is to "guide ... policy-making and public health decisions". QED.
"We made X, which can be used in policy decisions" is not the same as "You should do policy Y".
I don't know how to put that any more clearly.
It's a distinction without a difference. The models are merely mathematical renderings of whatever the academics believe. If a researcher says "our models predict <bad thing> will happen but also predict it will be averted if you implement these policies we modelled" - which is a typical thing to read in the literature - then this is telling governments what to do.
Way too often I see cases where academics are trying to have their cake and eat it: setting up "science" such that politicians are told there's only a single viable choice, and then washing their hands of the consequences of following that choice. It isn't merely presenting values-neutral tools and passively accepting whatever decisions are made, as can be seen the moment politicians try to stray from the pre-ordained path (=lots of interviews with the media claiming the politicians are horrific science denying neanderthal conservatives who will get everyone killed by ignoring the <bad thing>).
Again... have you ever met an academic? How many "interviews with the media" do you think the average college researcher conducts?
Everything you're saying is just the TV scientist stereotype.
And, to give just a little more context: there really are people who make policy recommendations. But they're not academics. They're called think tanks and lobbyists. This is a real profession that you can go into. It has its own separate systems and organisations and working processes.
Clearly policy recommendations do happen. But it's not usually academic researchers who make them.
""our models predict <bad thing> will happen but also predict it will be averted if you implement these policies we modelled" - which is a typical thing to read in the literature - then this is telling governments what to do."
Maybe some papers say that. The paper under discussion here doesn't though, and I suspect that the frequency of claims like this is overblown.
Much more often, I see claims of the form "our models predict bad thing X will happen if you do Y", but don't even attempt to consider whether some alternative to Y makes this more or less likely, instead leaving that to future research.
This is a weird argument. Consider that H. L. Mencken famously complained about "bughouse professors sweating 4th dimensional economics" being received at the White House about 90 years ago. But we have people here earnestly arguing that 'no, those academics, you never need to tell them to stay in their lane! That's all they do!" I'm seriously baffled at this.
I do: We made X to tell you what policies to do in different situations.
Saying "Consult our magic 8-ball to find out what policy you should do" is only different than saying "You should do policy Y" in that it proports to cover many more situations and many more potential policies. In effect they are saying "In Case A, do Policy X. In case B, do Policy Y, etc." That is at least as bad as saying "We are in Case A, so do Policy X," and probably worse since it proposes to not only know what to do in a specific case, but in many, many different specific cases.
I believe you read a fair bit of academic articles, but I do not believe that you understand them. I further suspect that you do not understand the underlying premise of academia's research program writ large, and how the articles published fit in.
Starting with the underlying premise, the foundational belief within modern academia is that society's problems can be solved by smart people being paid to study the problems at length and then suggesting scientific solutions to those problems to be put into place by government officials. That is the justification for every drop of government funding for research universities, and many (most?) academics fund themselves by acquiring grants to produce the research that solves the problems. For all academics save the tiny fraction of "teaching professors" retaining a job requires publishing X journal articles before ~5 years in a new job. X is something like 2-6 from what I have seen.
So, if you want to work in academia you need to be publishing research that addresses problems that need to be fixed, or perhaps discovering problems that need to be fixed, and generating a body of work that suggests ways to fix these problems. You could argue that in some fields this doesn't apply, like abstract math or physics, but especially in the social sciences you do not have a career if your research suggests "Look, you can't get people to not be poor because some people make choices that will inevitably make them poor." You will never get published, and/or you won't get hired in the first place even if you do you find a journal. All the career points go to claiming to know the solution to the problem and then coming up with reasons why it would have worked if not for those reasons.
And academics don't get famous and make the big bucks for saying "I don't know." Always having an answer and opinion, then fighting really hard later to demonstrate that you were correct, is claiming limitless expertise.
Some useful data here:
https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/workforce/number-faculty-members-humanities-and-other-fields
Fraction of faculty employed in 4-year colleges by academic field, in 2014-15:
health sciences (e.g. professors of medicine, nursing, pharmacy): 18%
natural science (e.g. professors of physics, chemistry, math): 12%
humanities (e.g. professors of English lit, ancient Greek, history): 12%
=> social sciences (e.g. professors of sociology, "studies", economics): 11%
fine arts (e.g. professors of music, painting, theater): 8%
business (e.g. the MBA people): 7%
engineering: 6%
education: 5%
I'm guessing it's the social sciences group about which you're talking? I mean, it's hard to see an academic specializing in cardiothoracic surgery, semiconductor physics, ruthenium polymerization catalysts, Chaucer, or non-Abelian group theory (i.e. someone from the other 75%) having the time, let alone the inclination, to publish papers on the big social and political debates of the day.
"Sorry, Dean Wormer, I missed my NIH mid-grant report deadline on account of I was too busy writing up this hard-hitting paper arguing that people who own guns are more likely to have small penes."
"But Professor Dorfman you're an organic chemist. Shouldn't you be working on your promising cancer drug?"
"Yeah well this was really important. I'm sure the NIH will understand."
"Um..."
Social sciences are a big part of it but it's a cultural issue. Obviously, all education research boils down to telling governments what to do. Epidemiology isn't classed as a social science, yet bad epidemiological modelling has run rampant, ruining lives over the past two years.
Consider SAGE's explanation for why they predicted a huge rise in cases after the UK eliminated mask mandates and lockdowns, yet cases actually dropped dramatically just three days later: they hypothesized that the disease was affected by things they hadn't anticipated, like .... (wait for it) .... a period of warm weather, schools being closed and the Euros ending. Because it's just really hard to anticipate that in the summer it will be warmer than in winter, that schools will be closed and that football tournaments come to an end on their planned date. This sort of thing keeps happening because it's just a bunch of amateur R coders trying to simulate the world. They can't do it but the academic system is incapable of even recognizing this, let alone doing something about it.
What about climatology? Is that a natural science? Presumably it is, but it's just like epidemiology. Lots of unvalidated models and dubious practices that would be considered verboten/unscientific in other fields. Lots of time trying to redefine government policy.
So I don't think you can neatly categorize stuff into social science=unreliable, everything else=ok.
No. But then take that to its next logical step, which is that you also can't neatly categorize stuff into academia = unreliable, everything else = ok.
Particularly when even if you throw the epidemiologists and climate studies people into the mix, you are still talking about a small fraction of the people doing research or instruction at universities.
All such categorizations will have fuzzy edges, but academia (or "science") is a pretty homogenous and consistent system worldwide. The institutions are the same, the journal publishers are often the same, the methodologies are similar, and most importantly the incentives are the same. Social scientists write papers in the same way, get peer reviewed in the same way, get money in the same way as epidemiologists, climatologists, chemists, etc. There are of course exceptions, e.g. research funded by corporate grants rather than foundations or government granting agencies. You see that sometimes in computer science. But I believe the system is consistent enough to draw generalized conclusions about.
I think your last paragraph is a bit alarmist, but I like the rest of it. Nice formulation.
"Academia strongly promotes the idea that for any problem there's a miracle button. For any possible topic or question you can imagine, academia will produce an expert professor who claims to fully understand it and have a journal filled with pre-canned solutions."
I tend to find the opposite. Academia strongly promotes the idea that for any claimed solution, there are massive problems with it. It's very easy to find academics who criticize. It's much harder to find academics who actually make positive recommendations.
I suspect that's more to do with the fact that academia tends to be ideologically out of lockstep with governments.
Academics give you what you pay for. If you want a policy recommendation you pay for that. If you want pure science you pay for that. Very few academics choose what to research: funders determine what should be funded, and academics do this because otherwise they have no job. So yes, academics make policy recommendations, but mostly at the request of someone who has paid them to do it. So you might want to think about who is paying them and consider whether they are more worthy of your ire.
I'm loosely defining "academia" in such a way as to include (government) granting agencies. After all the committees which decide which grants to fund are often made up of academics too.
I suspect that's a feature not a bug. Academics do not tend to agree with one another on how funds are best distributed and apart from small fields where a faction have seized control, academics are not going to simply award funding on the basis of political orthodoxy. Since most academics' first loyalty is their research field (even if they disagree with everyone else on it) then they are going to focus funding on that field not some political ideal.
Sure they do. It may not be apparent to people inside it, but academia is saturated with hard left assumptions and worldviews, like the pervasive background assumption that complex social problems can be understood and resolved by small teams of uni-disciplinary professors in an office building.
Consider climatology. You may not think funding it is based on political orthodoxy, but to view this as a good idea requires believing that small teams of academics can successfully write accurate computer simulations of something as complex as the entire climate. It requires an expansive and enormously optimistic take on the intellectual powers of the public sector, and great faith in the effectiveness of committee-based resource allocation, to believe this will yield accurate outcomes. More conservative minded people would say, look, friends, walk before you can run. Figure out why you can't successfully predict local weather systems 3 days in advance before trying to predict global weather 50 years in advance. Then prove to the world you're unambiguously good at this by going into betting markets and getting rich betting on climate events.
But to academia this viewpoint isn't merely unspeakable heresy but often some sort of outright conspiracy theory by ideological extremists, usually blown off with doublespeak of the form "climate isn't weather", with the implication that anyone stupid enough to even point out the connection is a caveman barely worth interacting with.
Now, I don't personally care much about climatology. That's just an example. I have other examples I'm more directly and better informed about, like stupid conspiracy theories about Twitter bots controlling how people vote, or indeed epidemiological modelling. Underneath it all is a near unlimited faith in the powers of centrally planned committees of intellectuals: a core tenet of leftist thought.
"I genuinely fear the west is becoming a communist dictatorship via some sort of bloodless revolution, one that consists entirely of mind games, institutional takeover and police suppression."
This is my fear as well. I don't think I've gotten a single decent night's sleep since the summer of 2020 because of this.
I'm a populist, I'm Team Red, I'm MAGA. No I've never had much use for grand sweeping "miracle buttons" in politics. I've always viewed anything that smacks of utopianism in politics with extreme suspicion. But honestly at this point (and I don't know how alone I am in feeling this or not) I would be very receptive to a "miracle button" not to fix the perpetual problems of human society (like poverty), but simply to STOP this censoring, scolding, smirking, bioshocking, hateful, totalitarianism. Voting is clearly not a miracle button since the centers of power are so deeply embedded in people and institutions that have absolutely zero accountability to the electoral, democratic process.
Lately I've been wondering a lot about what would happen if a sufficiently charismatic leader type figure articulated to the American public something a long the lines of Havel's "Power of the Powerless". (Not exactly "one weird trick" stuff, I know). Only instead of the power being the Soviet state - the power is all the non-state institutions that make up "The Cathedral". At least Bezos doesn't have nukes (yet).
Have you considered that your belief that quarantines violate the Nuremburg Codes and US Constitution isn't actually secretly obvious to everyone who claims to disagree with you?
Have you considered that I wasn't only talking about quarantines?
Please explain which COVID measures you are referring to, and which Nuremburg Codes and US Constitutional clauses they violate.
Indeed, the academic welfare complex stands to undermine truth itself. The entire ecosystem of academia serves as a proving ground for the worst ideas in our society today.
Interpersonally, I also find them to be neurotic, power hungry grifters. Look at their Twitter rants - EconTwitter for example - and tell me these are people you’d want as a neighbor. Hard pass.
> Why did the optimal stable ingroup size change from nation-sized to political-tribe-sized?
Because, for about two decades it seemed that the West and America in particular has crushed or subdued all external enemies worth the name, and seemed to be well equpped to continue to do so, but the promised "end of history" somehow didn't materialize. Who's to blame? The internal outgroup.
There is some context that this review leaves out:
1. Many protest movements in history didn't have specific demands but simply wanted to make their problems more known and asked for more power: The suffragettes are the clearest example of this (votes = political power) but also the communist manifesto is light on the organisation of a new form of government and heavy on workers problems. The class struggle is less about improvements of governance than about defining an ingroup of workers and pitting them against the people who held power back then. The reason for this is simple and has nothing to do with the digital age: unlike concrete demands, demanding more power is easy to explain and won't find much opposition within your ingroup.
2. Who we think of as natural elites ("Mostly young, mostly university-educated, mostly part of their countries' most privileged ethnic groups") are not the people holding power in many countries. In aging Europe the median voter age is over 50 in many places and young people don't have a good representation in Parliament. They don't want to choose right-wing parties for ideological reasons (abortion, drugs, minimum wage) and left wing parties are very concerned about pensions (which young people will have to pay for) and unions. But unions and labor-friendly policies usually mean that old people will keep their jobs in a recession while young people are laid off: Especially Spain has a huge problem with this (youth unemployment got over 50% after the recession: https://labourmarketresearch.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12651-019-0254-3/tables/1). The rise of green parties can in part be explained by the fact that they provide a left wing alternative for young people.
3. Many of the protests where later followed by concrete policy proposals. In the US Occupy Wall Street was followed by Bernie Sanders who laid out concrete proposals to rein in "Wall Street greed". Protests about climate and housing in Germany are increasingly finding their way into policy proposals as well (ceilings on rent, shutting down coal power plants early).
Yeah #1 is spot on. Has Scott (or Gurri) ever read *anything* about the French revolution?
To add another data point to #1: Around the time of the russian revolution, most of the laborers were more interested in violence against the authorities than in the communist ideology.
But, er, suffragettes were making a clear and explicit demand that would give them more power.
Gurri seems to have noticed a trend, but I feel like he’s totally on the outside of it. His long historical explanation is itself swallowing the narrative which has been defined by the elite High Modernist crowd. His explanation is a strange Boomer fever dream which is so far off the mark, that it doesn’t make any sense. One cannot find the reasoning of the millennium protestor who is against the establishment by using the narratives and tropes of the establishment.
The supposed prosperity of the elite children he mocks as flailing around like blind nihilistic political noobs which he bashes them with is itself a lie, what prosperity? The reason the educated middle and upper middle class children are so sensitive to this issue is that they in fact expected to build their own prosperity readily. Instead cost disease, inflation, and rigged systems that funnel all the wealth into a few hands of the 1% are what they found.
The children of the poor always expected to be poor and were not surprised to find lives of poverty before them when they reached adulthood. While the richer children who supposedly succeeded in life based on what they were told to do found low paying professional jobs and huge college debt, they used their education and noticed the disparity pretty quickly.
All their lives they were told to jump through the hoops and they’d find a good life. Instead of the endless brunch and easy high paying jobs they were told they would get…they found a rigged system which was corrupt and spinning out financial do nothing, know nothing millionaires at a record pace.
What Gurri can’t seem to do is what almost all Boomer parents can’t do. They cannot for one second listen to their children or anyone else unless it is a person in a position of power who is telling them what to think. If Walter Contrike says this is an age of prosperity, then the young person in front front of them is clearly lying and stupid and lazy.
I think Scott already has the answers. If you combine the wisdom of cost disease where everything is getting harder and even after sending all the women to work full time, even with degrees in two income households….it still isn’t enough to keep your head above water.
Mix in a bit of the wisdom from Seeing Like A State with Métis knowledge and taking the seemingly radical approach of listening to people when they tell you what their problems are…and you’ve got your answer. Cost disease is real and all the young people who have no buffers of wealth or old cheaply bought houses to protect them…they are trying to tell the world what is happening.
They might not be the shape or demographic of canary in the coal mine people want to see and they can use that to dismiss them…but the ‘forever brunch’ crowd is hyper aware that brunch is sadly no longer on the menu due to cost disease.
And they don’t trust anyone who created this world. Gurri nearly says this where he admits to this system of control and his Boomer leave it to beaver world of elite written narratives to rewrite reality…but rather than see why young folks might not want that world where Kennedy’s errors and lies persist instead of the truth about Iraq and Afghanistan or Wall Street crimes comes out…
…he balks at it and comes up with a bizarre red herring of an explanation which no young person feels or agrees with, but he is happy to judge us as nihilistic after taking the bold first step of not listening to a damn thing we are saying.
Things are corrupt and regardless of the fact that they always have been, the elites ability to pull the wool over our eyes is reduced and we don’t like what we see. Are we privileged children for not gladly accepting elite though control?
Meanwhile wealth accumulation is worse than in the gilded age of robber Barrons, monopoly power abounds, state capture by corporations is a naked truth, and cost disease has eaten away at us such that even the children of the middle class feel very poor…even if we have iPhones and people 50 years ago didn’t, so what?
We can’t afford homes, education, healthcare, wages are down in real terms, etc. we have a few bobbles and toys and a fake CPI inflation index instead of the very obvious building blocks of a good life. But that doesn’t fit into some Boomer’s 1950s political narrative of commies vs freedom loving capitalism goons. So obviously we are talking pure nonsense and need to be ignored. When really the rent is too damn high.
I blame the rise of the entertainment and gaming industry. There's more leisure options around nowadays, more things to suck up time and energy for fun.
In the old days, there was less to do, so nobody was bothered by the lack of free time.
Damn the invention of the dishwasher! It destroyed society...
There's clearly something to what Argentus says. Also, we have the entrenchment of the idea that expressing one's unique identity is the highest good (an idea spawned in Boomerdom that Wildavsky called "expressive individualism," that grew uninterruptedly over the decades from a fringe idea to a mass expectation).
"Boomer’s 1950s political narrative of commies vs freedom loving capitalism goons. So obviously we are talking pure nonsense and need to be ignored. When really the rent is too damn high." Ed Glaeser is the leading scholarly source documenting the role of land use regulation in increasing housing costs. Market Urbanism is a movement both documenting this trend and promoting YIMBY policies. "The rent is too damn high" in jurisdictions where land use restrictions have restricted supply.
Here is a plausible article that argues that land use restrictions hobble economic activity far more deeply than merely housing costs, this paragraph being one of many distinct cascading effects from limiting urban density through land use regulation,
"The total cost of this regulation-induced sprawl in the United States may be enormous. According to one study, if just three cities – New York City, San Jose and San Francisco – loosened their rules against building denser housing to the national average level of restrictiveness, millions would move to jobs that made the best use of their skills and total US GDP would be 8.9% higher. This would translate into average American wages being $8,775 higher per year. Others go even further. Duranton and Puga estimate that the average income gain from a housing regime that allowed easy building could be around 25%, or around $16,000 more per person per year."
https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything
Health care and education are expensive and ineffective largely due to government intervention. Of course one can provide a great, low cost education for one's children cheaply today. Here is my approach to providing a great private education for $3k per year, basically homeschooling plus a few tutors, or jointly hiring a few tutors to create pods,
https://flowidealism.medium.com/how-to-give-your-child-an-expensive-private-education-for-3-000-per-year-5d3ba7a240ca
ISAs allow one to learn coding and other bootcamp skills at low cost with no cash output at all up front.
People who believe in 20th century legacy systems, especially education, rightly feel as if they've been sold a bill of goods. But people who saw that it was fraudulent and began pioneering new paths decades ago have often found great opportunities at low cost. Self-taught coders have had great lives for decades now with little or no upfront cost for their education and it has become easier and easier to learn coding, digital marketing UI/UX, video production, etc. either online or via low cost bootcamps. The suckers who believed that a college degree was intrinsically valuable basically go to General Assembly or a similar bootcamp afterwards if they want New Economy job skills.
The regulatory state is, per Mancur Olson, the result of concentrated interests winning over diffuse interests. Lower cost, higher quality innovators will always be marginalized by the regulatory state. This is in no sense "talking pure nonsense."
this this this
Well if it makes you feel any better pretty much every Boomer would have written what you just wrote, almost word for word, 35 years ago. I mean, they'd substitute whatever slang term they had for *their* ignorant fossilized parents, of course.
There were a lot of Boomer kid popular songs about the refusal of the olds to listen to the wise children.
Talkin' bout my g-g-g-g-generation...! Oh yeah. On the bright side, the Boomers now get to frown and say God damn, kids these days! Unappreciative...mumble mumble...don't know what it's like to have to walk to school five miles, in the rain, uphill both ways.
One thing for which I'll always be grateful, though, is that sex was discovered the year I turned 16. That was pretty lucky.
Similar to Argentus, I'm 34 years old, I'm personally very poor despite coming from an upper middle class family and having a Master's degree, I have almost $100k in student debt, and I've often struggled to find affordable housing due to the rising cost of rent in the NYC area. But despite all that, I feel like you're being quite uncharitable to Gurri, as well as simply missing his point.
The "High Modernist" political-academic-media elites did a terrible job, no doubt about it. I know it, you know it, and Gurri clearly knows it. They lied about the job market and the housing market and the economy, they lied about the benefits of higher education, they lied about the various wars overseas, they lied about the consequences of cigarettes and opiates and high sugar foods. At this point, it's reasonable for people not to trust them. But despite all the lies, much of what the experts say about a topic really is true, and so explicitly *distrusting* everything that the elites say will lead you to be *even more wrong* than trusting everything they say. So will blindly trusting everything that "anti-establishment" sources say: the elites are sometimes honest, but the Alex Joneses and David Ickes of the world never are. I might roll my eyes at someone who believes everything that CNN says, but I'm still going to take them a thousand times more seriously than someone who gets all their information from alt-right blogs or BreadTube videos. Wolf Blitzer is far from infallible, but he's certainly a more reliable source of information than "independent thinkers" like Sargon of Akkad or Thought Slime.
I grew up when Margaret Thatcher was in her pomp and Rock Against Racism marches and the Top Of The Pops TV show drew attention to the daftness of colour prejudice. We (me & mine) hated Thatcher but the only thing that could replace her was a 'nice' centre right and politics got really boring.
My personal thesis is that the state of permaprotest now is more of a pastime, fed by an industry of creative grievance development. That's why there are no specific demands from these various iterations of 'the people' who want anything but *this*. They're having fun showing how aggrieved they are and the elites are trolling them.
Perhaps this actually *is* the end of history.
I think a lot of the permaprotest people are on the left and of the 'we trust experts, not elites' persuasion.
I think it's totally correct and rational for anyone of that persuasion to not make specific demands beyond 'put more societal resources and urgency behind getting experts to come up with solution to this problem and then implementing them.'
After all, just because you are the most passionate about a problem, doesn't mean you are also the most qualified to come up with and propose a solution. Those are largely separate concerns.
Yeah, good point. I would argue that these days, the right-wing in western society is basically the "we don't trust experts" tribe, and the left-wing is the "we trust experts" tribe, for the most part (there are exceptions, though. E.g. in Germany I would argue that many parts of the left - like the greens or social justice activists - don't like experts in some areas, e.g. when it comes to immigration.) Overall, I guess this is a bit of a shift from what was traditionally associated with the left and right-wing, since traditionally the left-wing was associated with "being against the establishment", while the right-wing was the establishment... this is now turn around it seems....🤔
"Any system that hasn't solved every problem is illegitimate. Solving problems is easy and just requires pressing the 'CAUSE MIRACLE' button."
My first thought on reading this was that my sympathy for the existing institutions of power ('the government') is extremely limited: after pretending that problems are easy to solve and that the low-hanging fruit wasn't picked long ago you don't then get a pass for failing to easily solve them. My second thought was that this lets the US citizenry off the hook: haven't we *demanded* this? That politicians (and CEOs, and University presidents, and...) play this game? Since the topics in the book seem to be more of a set of global phenomena rather than an arcane curiosity of the American system, I'm curious if that rings true elsewhere?
Personally I've never bought this over-arching narrative that as a rule Problems Are Difficult(tm), all the low-hanging fruit have been plucked and there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Of course the set of possibly policy is bounded by a Pareto frontier somewhere out there, but I don't see why we should think current policy has reached anywhere near this frontier. Actually, comparing today and 20 years ago, I can point to several examples of new policy where I can say "this was a net win, it's good they did that". And if I can, why can't I have 20 or 30 more of these? All the fearful talk about Moloch does not make much sense if we concede that actually we live in the best of all possible worlds and all we can do from here on out is trade off one good for the other.
IDK. On one hand, in the abstract, I agree: it's entirely possible (even probable!) that there are easy wins (or at least clear wins, obviously outweigh the downsides) to be had. On the other hand, and more to my point from above, only naive arrogance or utter duplicity (or maybe rampant denial?) could cause e.g. an American politician to promise the same moon that his or her predecessors have promised and repeatedly failed to deliver. I still think that *somewhere* there is a *systemic* impediment to progress, and most are only arguing how to divy up the blame.
Obama didn't promise incremental improvement, he promised "Hope" and "Change". Trump didn't promise incremental improvement, he promised to "Make America Great Again". How much slack one cuts them depends on the level of sympathy for their personalities and aims, but I don't think American government is doing anything all that radically different than it was in 2005.
>I still think that *somewhere* there is a *systemic* impediment to progress, and most are only arguing how to divy up the blame.
I mean, the whole point of these new types of protestors is that they hate the system and want to tear the system down, so maybe they share this insight.
"comparing today and 20 years ago, I can point to several examples of new policy where I can say "this was a net win, it's good they did that". And if I can, why can't I have 20 or 30 more of these?"
We probably can have 20 or 30 more of these. But we don't have any easier means of finding them today than we did 20 years ago. We just have to find them one every few years, for the next several decades (though as technological structures and the resulting social structures change around us, some things that were obvious non-starters in the past might become good ideas, and some things that were obvious good ideas in the past might need to be given up).
The very fact that you qualify them as "net" wins implies that we *are* at the Pareto frontier.
Yeah, I think we should by default assume that any problem in the real world which hasn't recently been subjected to massive and disruptive outside intervention is likely in a Nash equilibrium, and is likely miles away from a Pareto equilibrium.
Meaning that there often is a 'miracle button' available that moves you from the current Nash equilibrium to a much better state, but it requires unilaterally forcing a whole bunch of people to do things they don't want to do all at the same time.
> Why did the optimal stable ingroup size change from nation-sized to political-tribe-sized?
It seems to me, from a European perspective, that there exists a fundamental assymetry in how the political tribes approach the "national question": the right tend to be more nationalist, while the left tend to be more internationalist.
From where I sit, it looks like the concept of a nation-sized ingroup has been strongly rejected on the left. Consider modern-day left-wing values like diversity and inclusion - these don't really rhyme well with nationalism, that is homogenous and exclusive almost by definition. People in favour of close international co-operation in order to fix the big issues of climate, poverty, etc., and who would like to see increased immigration, preferably from culturally remote societies, are unlikely to identify the nation as ingroup.
In short, the modern left appears to have chosen "people who think like me, regardless of where they happen to live" as their ingroup - and this naturally leads to defining the outgroup as "people who think differently from me, even (especially) if they live right next door".
This I think is an important point, although note there are internationalist trends of thought on the right as well: the EU is arguably an example of this in action.
You are not looking at the right parts of the left. Look at certain sections and you'll see it plunge straight into ethnonationalism.
Which sections?
Anything relating to "indigenous peoples".
Yes, good point. The thing about the right, though, seems to be that these days there aren't necessarily more favourably inclined towards their co-citizens than the left are... I am not sure in which country in Europe you are, but in Germany, it seems to me that the right-wing despises their compatriots even more than the left-wing...a typical German right-wing narrative seems to be that modern Germany is "lost", and that most Germans are "left-green idiots", and that basically it's not worth fighting for the country anymore, and that it makes more sense to immigrate to another country like Canada or at least Austria... Also, these right-wingers in Germany tend to support politicians like Orban or Putin, and they admire countries in eastern Europe.... not exactly what the NSDAP did... in the other hand, it seems to me that most German left-wingers really dislike the eastern European countries, and to some extent even the people from there...on the other hand, they are to some extent proud of modern Germany, particularly because of the events of 2015- what they see as the morally righteous decision by the government regarding the refugees, and also Germany's energy policy, which is held up to be ethically superior. So idk, but it seems to me that this division between outgroups doesn't necessarily apply... you also see this in other countries, e.g. the US or Canada, where right-wingers sympathise with right-wingers in other countries, and tend to disrespect most of their own population, at least if they vote for left-wing parties...
A counterpoint to the 'We demand SOMETHING!' argument. I spent about two years actively involved in extinction rebellion in London, and got a pretty good idea of why this can (sometimes!) be a good strategy:
- Leftist infighting WILL happen to your group if you don't keep the demands as simple as possible. There was a period in 2020 after the George Floyd murder where we came very close as a group to this, even though the vast majority of people agreed with pivoting the focus to include anti-racism. People were often getting really upset at each other over it. There was just so much discussion on it that for three straight months that's all that happened - no actual action.
- How do you make decisions on the minutae of your demands when you're a de-centralised, """leaderless""" movement? How do you get thousands of people loosely connected to each other in space and cyberspace to agree on something? See above. It took us three months of discussion on what should have been a basic point to not even come to a decision. If we had decided to try and agree on whether we should be promoting hydrogen vs heat pumps, what kind of green tourism strategies to adopt, we would have been there forever.
- Keeps it easy for new people to turn up without having to have phd in the movement. All they really need is a 30 minute introduction to get the general idea.
Of course, one of XR's demands was that panels be set up where the public would hammer out the details of those solutions, which I don't think many of the movements in the review had even thought about.
Did XR accomplish anything?
It's debatable, but I have to say they did. They massively raised the profile of the climate crisis in the UK, even if that was part of a wave of publicity that was happening globally at the time. There were also perhaps less important achievements like the UK government declaring a climate emergency and a handful of boroughs and local councils creating citizens assemblies.
Definitely hasn't achieved its demands, but I'm not sure that anyone seriously believed that it would. Its functioned best as an awareness raising organisation.
"Awareness" doesn't accomplish anything by itself, and thus certainly doesn't serve as a counterpoint to Gurri. The problem is that even if the general public thinks it would be nice to stop climate change, they're unwilling to pay for things like carbon taxes:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/climate-left
We were willing to pay carbon taxes in Washington State. The story has been well hashed out in SSC. "The Left" shat in it because it didn't include "inclusive discussion" to add cash handouts to professional leftist agitators and local demands du jour. Lesson learned, good and hard: "carbon" is a leftist club, not an actual leftist goal. Try to make a persuasive argument otherwise.
Climate taxes are unpopular with the general public, which has a lot of populist views at odds with those of economists.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/carbon-tax
Well, at least in Canada, all the major left-wing parties (I guess you could consider the liberals to be more centrist, though in Canada they're generally grouped with the left) supported carbon taxes in the last few elections... only the conservative parties opposed carbon taxes, though in the last election, they tried to come up with some kind of carbon tax, though it was really only a half-hearted attempt, since their base doesn't even acknowledge climate change to be happening...
"Definitely hasn't achieved its demands, but I'm not sure that anyone seriously believed that it would. Its functioned best as an awareness raising organisation."
I wasn't aware of it until very recently, and I have to say, I think for most of the protesters going on the protests was their equivalent of "a nice day out": we got to march in company, chant slogans, met people, then went home and felt the warm glow of accomplishment even if all we really did was block a road for a couple of hours while people trying to get to work cursed our names.
I did wonder as to whether the ill will generated by XR tactics might harden the public against green policies rather than attract them.
I agree that XR probably *decreased* support for green policies. Though IMO it's less because of ill will generated by their tactics (generally that doesn't actually have much of an impact, unless you explicitly go out of your way to be as offensive as possible like e.g. PETA), and more because XR kept making hyper-exaggerated claims about the effects of climate change that were obviously false and contradict what actual climate scientists. While most climate activists were telling people to trust the scientists, you had XR going around saying that the scientists were actually just capitalist lapdogs who were *downplaying* the threat of climate change, which makes the job of more moderate and mainstream climate activists that much harder.
"...claims about the effects of climate change that were obviously false and contradict what actual climate scientists." ...say, publish, claim?
Probably helped increase outright climate change denialism by making ridiculous claims like "climate change will kill 6 billion people by 2050," and then denouncing the *IPCC* as establishment shills for dismissing that obviously false claim as an impossibility.
Wow I seem to have missed that, got any sources?
Correction, the claim was that it would kill 6 people by 2100, not by 2050. Still, actual climate scientists have pointed out that there's no evidence for such a claim whatsoever, and furthermore, not even any plausible mechanism by which that could happen.
https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/prediction-extinction-rebellion-climate-change-will-kill-6-billion-people-unsupported-roger-hallam-bbc/
Ah OK. Roger Hallam is not XR, and he was even explicitly booted out after he made some dodgy holocaust related comments.
There is a fundamental tradeoff between a group being effective and large. Too focused and the group loses members and too unfocused and nothing gets accomplished. That is why change is so hard.
But that's more down to lack of structure and strong leadership than "our demands weren't simple enough".
As you say, if the question had been "hydrogen versus heat pumps", everyone would have sat around yakking for three months with nothing to show at the end of it, because any fool with internet access could throw in his tuppence worth and derail the whole debate.
If, on the other hand, there had been a committee - well, committees are boring and dull and take forever also, but once it has been decided that Kate and Trevor and Sukie and Han Geng will be on the Heat Pump Decision Committee, you have something to work with: only these four to deal with, a deadline, a structure.
btw the answer is heat pumps.
(ok the real answer is Hinkley but let's not get ahead of ourselves)
"Leftist infighting WILL happen to your group if you don't keep the demands as simple as possible. There was a period in 2020 after the George Floyd murder where we came very close as a group to this, even though the vast majority of people agreed with pivoting the focus to include anti-racism. People were often getting really upset at each other over it. There was just so much discussion on it that for three straight months that's all that happened - no actual action."
Leftist infighting will happen because the different groups on the left have dramatically different goals, and sticking to "simple" (i.e. vague and basically meaningless) slogans to keep them all on the same page basically amounts to deception. If you have one group that thinks "we should reform the police so that they don't keep killing innocent people and getting away with it," and a group that thinks "we should completely abolish the police so we can have an anarcho-communist society with no laws whatsoever," and a third group that thinks "we should abolish the current police forces to make it easier for the workers to revolt and establish a USSR-style authoritarian communist regime, and then build a new police force loyal to our Marxist-Leninist Dictatorship of the Proletarian," then they probably shouldn't be in the same movement to begin with, since any group succeeding would mean that the other two end up becoming useful idiots to be discarded.
Sure, and generally speaking, this has made the right more united historically... but, in the past few decades, with the advent of of the internet and social media, it seems that the right is also quite disunited... I mean there's a big difference between alt-right people who want to block all immigration and remove "undesirable" people from their "nation", and between classical centre-right liberals like the FDP in Germany or maybe Susan Collins, who want a meritocratic society and an immigration system that benefits the economy...
That picture quotes Antonio Gramsci, on organic crisis: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear" (Prison Notebooks, 1930)
>Realistically this was all a sham. Alan Greenspan had no idea how to prevent recessions
The last ~40 years are known as "the great moderation" because of how little business cycle volatility there has been compared to the past.
And the Great Recession happened quite shortly after he left the Fed.
I think the question is whether his ilk decreased the average amount of recession, or decreased the number while increasing their size.
That depends on who you consider to be "his ilk". If it's any central bank, then the Great Depression can be laid at their feet. If it's Greenspan specifically, the recessions during his tenure were relatively mild.
I think that 14 years of data is insufficient for testing a hypothesis about how bank governance styles affect recessions. Unfortunately, it's all we got for Greenspan personally. The question many people have is whether Greenspan successfully prevented recessionary impacts, or whether he changed things structurally so that these impacts came in a big crisis in 2008 rather than as several normal sized recessions. (I don't think anyone has the information needed to answer this question.)
Australia avoided ANY recessions for an even longer period of time. The business cycle is not inevitable, its the product of flawed monetary policy.
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/why-australia-hasnt-had-a-recession-in-26-years/
You meant 19 years, not 14.
Even if you think a 19 years isn't long enough, these 19 years didn't exemplify failure of monetary policy.
I too felt that Scott's comment was strange. Had he said Bernanke, it would have made more sense.
Some skepticism about central bank wizardry causing the Great Moderation:
https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/14048.html#author-abstract
Popular column about this sort of research and its findings here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/04/macroegonomics/307319/
Have they looked into Australia?
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/why-australia-hasnt-had-a-recession-in-26-years/
Scott's conclusion seems a bit too uncharitable to the theses presented. The anti-elite sentiment is alive and an important factor in politics worldwide:
1) The Yellow Vest protests in France were large and markedly anti-elite; unlike Occupy, they were driven by lower class, working people. (The description of the Spanish youth is also uncharitable, as it ignores massive youth unemployment in Southern European countries).
2)Yes, the left-right distinction is the dominating axis in American politics, but anti-elite sentiment is still discernible on the left side as well. Neither Clinton nor Biden had remotely enthusiastic support on the left side (unlike Bernie), and ideologically aligned Silicon Valley/Big tech is also deeply unpopular.
3) For some reason, scientists were never considered part of the "evil elite", maybe because they are not perceived as being in charge. Therefore, they continue to enjoy higher levels of trust, particularly in the pandemic.
> 3) For some reason, scientists were never considered part of the "evil elite", maybe because they are not perceived as being in charge. Therefore, they continue to enjoy higher levels of trust, particularly in the pandemic.
I fear that this particular bridge is burning as we speak, precisely because of the pandemic.
Yeah, but only on the right, not on the left... I guess there are some scientists which the left-wing dislikes (e.g. migration researchers, or geneticists), but overall being anti-science is now associated strongly with the right, particularly in the US, but also increasingly in other western countries it seems...
They're not in charge, and they are not rich either. UK science is being decimated by Brexit, and they aren't able to stop that.
Two of the primary “world is going to hell” talking points are climate change and the inadequacy of the welfare state. Obviously a heavy handed welfare state is a tradeoff vs. unemployment, and addressing climate change is a tradeoff vs. quality of life for the working-class people on less-prime real estate where cars are more important. If anything both of those complaints are in favor of the (American) status quo.
> and addressing climate change is a tradeoff vs. quality of life for the working-class people on less-prime real estate where cars are more important
I think this is a false dichotomy that's being pushed for political reasons to make fighting climate change unpopular.
I think we could pretty much solve climate change by switching all power plants to nuclear or renewables and replacing as many gas engines as possible with electric ones. There's no reason this has to be a particular hardship for the average person in their everyday life.
Well, unless electric cars become cheaper, and charging them faster and more convenient, this will still be an inconvenience for many people...e.g. those living in apartments in cities, where they have to keep their cars standing on the street at night...
Because scientists were a cross between magicians and the new clergy. We can only know things through Science, and these are the only certified interpreters of the sacred word. Everything nice we have in the modern world came from Science: cures for diseases, modern conveniences, labour-saving devices, fun things like the Internet and so on.
Hence, scientists are people who cannot be challenged by the laity, who do not have the learning to speak on the topic, and if you make them angry, then it's coal and not presents in your stocking on Christmas Day.
That sounds like a typical right-wing populist talking point... I mean, yes you can inform yourself through the internet, but the sources have to be evaluated for their veracity, and I guess I will stick with those which come from people who have studied these fields, instead if random internet cranks...
Yeah, but in the US, the left has come around to become the party of "trust in elites", especially scientists... while the right has turned into an outright "anti-elite" group, even including previously left-wing positions (e.g. anti-vaccine sentiment) in their positions...
It might be worth pointing out that the "Deep State" under another name ("Sir Humphrey Applebee") is a charachter in the decades old brilliant sitcom Yes Minister. It's not a new concept.
I don't think you get to say things like FDA Delecta Est without implicitly acknowledging that there is a deep state.
I have a major objection to the "personal responsibility" bit at the end - what do you do about problems that can only be solved at scale? If I'm worried about climate change, I can't build my own nuclear power plant, all I can do is point to the various "BUILD GREEN ENERGY" buttons on the government's console and suggest pushing them.
(In fact, "personal responsibility" can be used as a distraction from buttons you don't want pushed! BP released a calculator to find your personal carbon footprint, which allows them to look environmentally friendly while diverting attention from things that might cause a large-scale change in demand for oil.)
Personal responsibility can have a huge impact on climate change. All the oil we burn and energy we use ultimate goes to service people. It's used in the cars we drive and to produce and transport the products we use. We are collectively the driving force behind carbon emissions.
You may not be able to build your own nuclear power plant, but you can buy renewable energy certificates to cancel out your electricity usage. Other common advice includes carpool/bus/bike/walk, use a fuel efficient car, eat less beef, etc.
Of course, you're just one person. There are 7.8 billion other people. Ideally everyone would take responsibility to reduce their carbon footprint, but many won't. So maybe it feels futile to reduce your emissions when you're such a tiny part of the problem.
But I think you're in the same boat when you vote or complain about the government. Only this way, instead of directly reducing carbon emissions by some small fraction, you're one vote among millions. The advantage is that if the pro-environment movement is strong enough to elect/influence a pro-environment government, the government can pass laws that force everyone to reduce their carbon footprint (e.g. carbon tax). On the flip side, it's all or nothing. If everyone relies solely on the government to effect change instead of personal responsibility, and the pro-environment government doesn't get elected, you get no reduction in emissions.
If only 40% of citizens supported environmental policies, but they also took personal responsibility, bought renewable energy offsets, reduced their carbon footprint, etc., then you still have 40% of the benefit. And when your movement grows to >50% support, then you can finally pass laws forcing the rest of the population to reduce their carbon footprint.
My response to this is the same over and over again: it is much easier to stop one company from producing than it is to stop 100k consumers from consuming. This is the sole reason the personal responsibility point doesn't work. Imagine trying to legislate against the consumer habits of millions of people? Doesn't fly. But now ban a single company from overproducing and the outrage will only be felt after the fact when people can't buy as many steaks as they once could.
That reminds me of this revisionist history of American auto safety: https://quillette.com/2021/09/16/lessons-for-big-tech-from-ralph-naders-sack-of-detroit/
That's part of my point. It's easier to implement a top-down carbon-reducing policy... once you have majority support for such a policy. Until then, if you can get 30% of people to take personal responsibility, then at least you have something.
The obvious answer is that you should both vote *and* reduce your personal carbon footprint.
I also get the impression that some people who argue against personal responsibility for climate change just want to be angry at BP and big corporations without having to sacrifice anything themselves. And I think they discount the costs that aren't obvious. Eg: the same people who may not like the idea of a carbon tax that would directly cost them $1000 might support a tax on oil companies, even if that tax made them end up spending $1000 more (because prices of products would rise).
But if you get one company to stop producing and the consumers switch to another brand, then you have not accomplished anything.
You can't build your own nuclear power plant. You can study the issue well enough to make a sound argument in favor of nuclear power. Then call your local congressman's office and ask which staffer handles energy policy issues, and either talk or write to that staffer with a brief argument in favor of nuclear power and an offer to engage further.
Then go put solar arrays on your roof, because it will take a while to get that reactor built. But all save the highest-profile public issues hinge on which options staffers decide to raise with elected officials who are too busy to do anything but take their word on it and maybe make a quick decision from the top three issues. To a staffer, the difference between "nuclear power is off the table, the public will never go for it" and "nuclear power is controversial but potentially safe and effective, we should consider it" can be just a few friendly personal conversations that, staffers being people-people rather than thing-people, stick out above a screen full of numbers.
You’re right that he doesn’t mention left/right as much as border/center. But his whole thesis (“states can’t solve literally every problem”) screams to me that it’s an argument for fundamentally limited government. This has always been an American right wing perspective, and I get the impression that there’s basically no embrace of this among American left-leaning elites. The one thing I cannot imagine democratic politicians saying is “yes, XYZ is a real problem with real human consequences, but no, the government can’t do anything about it, so it’s better not to try.”
What American people on the right seemed to want (pre-Trump) was for the government to just stop making things worse for people. But what Gurri doesn’t suggest in the book is the possibility that even this isn’t doable.
From a the left perspective, government has given up on a bunch of things since the rise of
neoliberalism.
Universal healthcare is a thing that governments can provably do.,that's be we been tried in the US.
Gurri says a few times that “networks can tear things down but they can’t build.” I suggest bitcoin both proves this wrong and provides a template for how new systems can be built in the future. Bitcoin is a collaborative project of millions of people around the world. There’s no hierarchy, and it’s entirely voluntary.
Bitcoin is a pile of scams, massive waste of energy just to create a barely usable payment network. Is is so dysfunctional that is used only by criminals, speculators, scammers and has some minor use failed states like Venezuela.
If that is template for future then I prefer no future.
BRB, I am going to delete BTC scam posts from forum that I moderate. Last time I looked in morning, likely there are 20 new ones if no other moderator went through modlog.
"massive waste of energy" Less than the parasitic power draw of all the home electronics staying just on enough to turn on when you press "on" on your remote control. Less than all of the electric clothes dryers. Less than the power consumption of all the credit card reader terminals in the world.
There are many things wrong with BTC. But when a critic trots this particular complaint out, I stop reading, and if possible never read another word written by that critic ever again.
But bitcoin is just a hobby mixed with a speculation bubble. It's not really 'building' anything substantial.
Does "practically free remittances to el salvador" count as substantial? What if bitcoin is used as legal tender by 10 countries with a total population of several hundred million people?
What would cause you to think bitcoin had build something substantial?
I personally have used BTC to pay for contract software development by Indonesian software developers ~7 years ago. The USD to BTC to BTC to IDR to cash-IDR-in-hand had cheaper transaction overhead than Fivrr or Western Union, and the devs got paid in 20 minutes instead of 5 days.
"BTC is useless" people are the useless ones.
There's definitely a disconnect between reality and elite public opinion on bitcoin. It's very hard to imagine something this controversial being anything but widely misunderstood. People will figure it out eventually; the longer they take to come around, the cheaper we can stack sats :)
One counterpoint is that the neo-institutions which allowed that organization have themselves been hijacked. Most of the major tech companies are being pushed internally in a particular political direction. Twitter at one point had substantial ownership by the Saudis.
The cover is an illustration of Princess Elfrida, daughter of Alfred the Great, by Edward Henry Corbould from an 1850 collection of Victorian poems, "The Keepsake" https://dvpp.uvic.ca/poems/keepsake/1850/pom_5687_elfrida.html
Is there some connection between the Elfrida story and the revolt of the public that I'm missing?
In at least that poetic version of events, the noblewoman Elfrida revolts by asserting her beauty before the king instead of hiding it, perhaps from pride and perhaps from spite. Her husband the Earl dies so the king can marry her, and she spends the rest of her life unable to smile in gladness.
The Keepsake is the story of a very privileged woman asserting her power to destroy the existing order in which she lived without care for the consequences, which prove regretful.
And the Revolt of the Public?
"Gurri isn't shy about his contempt for this. Not only were these some of the most privileged people in their respective countries, but (despite the legitimately-sucky 2008 recession), they were living during a time of unprecedented plenty."
That too seems to be a story of privileged people who 'simply assert their own power to achieve what they desire', with - Gurri expects - regretful consequences.
Note there is no historical basis for that story. It seems to conflate Alfred's daughter, presumably Ælfthryth who married the Count (=Earl in the English peerage) of Flanders with the third wife of King Edgar, Alfred's great-grandson, who was called Ælffrida and had previously been married to the Ealdorman (the top noble title before the Danish conquest in 1016 brought in earls) of East Anglia, and who likely got a bad reputation due to her son being the much maligned Æthelræd the Unready, whose failures against the Danes (and coming to power due to the murder of his brother) were rather held against him by the Victorians.
Confusion in the comment, perhaps.
The poem seems focused on the latter person, Aethread's mother, not Alfred's daughter. Bad repute does accrue over her son's bad results, but also over her having (perhaps) had her stepson murdered to clear the way for her son.
We've got nigh-contemporaneous evidence for her having had a first marriage to Aethelwald. Almost anything else is speculative, albeit speculation given much closer in time than we are now - ~150-200 years after the events, for William of Malmesbury. That certainly looks the account the poet is following.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50778/50778-h/50778-h.htm
It's also hard for any third wife to follow up the second consort, who was literally sainted. Feast day four days ago. Edgar's daughter by St. Wulfthryth, Edith, also sainted, had her feast day yesterday.
The nicknames for the half-siblings really do tell the tale: Edward the Martyr, Saint Edith... and Aethelred the ill-advised.
I suspect if your step-son gets murdered by your retainers whilst visiting your home, you might come under some suspicion.
Although the only evidence for Edward being particularly religious is his martyrdom, whilst Æthelred seems to have been more concerned with placating God than dealing with Danes (and may have been the driver in getting Edward recognised as a martyr). Considering Edith likely had no choice in her monastic vocation (daughters of the early kings of England married foreign rulers or became religious) it is possible that Æthelred was the most pious of the lot and just had the bad luck to live a long life (he's the third longest-reigning medieval king of England, and the seventh longest-reigning monarch of England) rather than a short or cloistered one. A full life as medieval monarch was hardly condusive to creating a pious image (Louis IX excepted).
I took Gurri's argument to not just be about the impact of increased visibility and criticism on the public mood, but also that the complexity of the administrative state was such that no ordinary citizen, and maybe not many elites, could understand how it functioned or how to change things, further contributing to the vagueness of protests.
You hint towards this in the review but a distinction should be made between actions and outcomes. Democracies can be incredibly fickle where masses demand an outcome that may not be realistic, but there are two other cases:
1. Demanding an outcome that corresponds to rather well known and obvious policy options none of which are politically acceptable (e.g. lowering housing costs) -- usually the minority that actually benefits from the opposite of the outcome (home prices and rents rising forever) is more motivated and better informed on how and what keeps the effect going the way they want it to.
Other example of this might be
2. Explicitly demanding an action that is also not politically acceptable (border enforcement and the political content of public education are examples. But perfectly actionable (Ample evidence that it is done successfully elsewhere and/or in the past)
For example... 'liberal rot in schools' If populist protestors were demanding that public school children be made *more patriotic*, that's demanding an effect to which no practical action might realistically generate. Demanding a particular topic be purged from the curriculum (CRT specifically or racial struggle sessions in general if you believe CRT isn't a real thing) is an action, even if it's a bad action. Acting like conscious decisions made by public officials are the result of passive and inevitable forces of history or progress like some caricature of a libertarian is silly [though often effective]
In general it does make sense for voters to generally demand effects rather than actions because you'll get more consensus on effects. But you do get cases where a specific and perfectly realistic action is demanded and you notice:
1. It's political poison for an elected official to take up the action as a platform
2. If the voters do manage to breach the "Containment election" none of the permanent employees of the government are willing or able to work with the representatives to make the action happen.
3. Some higher governmental body (A supreme court, house of lords) with formal or de-facto veto power comes around and strikes down any attempts at putting the action into place.
There are some modern parallels to this but the one that also comes to my mind is late republican Rome and land reform. The optimates employed every dirty trick to keep it from happening and they kept crying "Tyrant" until they actually got one.
But again, even getting to stage 1 is uncommon since voters *are* generally pretty fickle.
I would question your description of BLM as not fitting this pattern. First, it is a deliberately-leaderless movement. Second, while "defund the police" may be a specific demand, it's one with very low public support and sort of fits the "miracle" scheme because there's no real explanation of what happens next.
Also, various demands have been but forth by BLM-adjacent groups, and they turned into the same universal-issue-grab-bags that characterized Occupy Wall Street, such as from the Movement for Black Lives (https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/) which includes:
- Abolishing all prisons
- Reparations
- Restoring Glass-Steagall
- Ending the Trans-Pacific Partnership
- Progressive tax reform
- "A right to restored land, clean air, clean water and housing and an end to the exploitative privatization of natural resources"
- Labor-organization rights (unspecified, and also not explained as to how they don't already have this)
- Universal healthcare
Also, just in case you weren't sure if this was liberal, all of this is peppered with repeated references to LGBTQ+ people, indigenous people, etc.
I will admit many of these are indeed specific demands but they basically sum to "fix every problem ever" and while some of them might reasonably be accomplished, others are basically fantasies.
The 1/6 example is interesting because clearly that single event had an aspirational goal, but was connected with various groups that are closer to nonsense protest movements - the Proud Boys, various anti-government militias, and ESPECIALLY QAnon (which technically has a leader, albeit one who seems to have vanished and nobody can identify), which has to be the apex version of the "the elites could just press the Miracle button" idea, insofar as it claims they are both not doing that and also secretly molesting and/or murdering children, and its main goal is "arrest basically everybody and try them for their [imagined] crimes".
Notwithstanding these diverse demands, there was in fact a lot of legislative response to BLM. Colorado ended qualified immunity, Virginia banned no-knock warrants, lots of cities banned chokeholds etc. I guess the January 6 version is "election integrity" laws and "audits" in red states.
This is definitely a fair point, although I would think you could say the same thing about some of the other examples given - the Yellow Vests (cited in the comments, not the article) saw a repeal of the gas tax increase in France, for example. Not sure what happened to it, but Netanyahu announced a plan for housing after the protests started in Israel.
I think any large-enough movement, even an incoherent one, will probably spawn some legislation if only because people want to take advantage of it to advance their political careers, or, more charitably, because people want to represent the wishes of their constituents to the degree they can follow them.
Bingo. The difference is that BLM is a movement supported by the entirety of the establishment.
Could you be a bit more concrete as to what you mean by this? It strikes me as a strong overstatement in its current form. For example, lots of "the establishment" do not agree with the "defund the police" slogan.
I think this is a key point: "There haven't been many big viral protests lately except Black Lives Matter and the 1/6 insurrection, and both seemed to have a perfectly serviceable set of specific demands (defunding the police, decertifying the elections)."
But I think maybe they are "specific demands" clear to * you * at a high level, but I guarantee you the actual people involved in both are nowhere near that specific, consistent or even agreed upon, and even more to Gurri's point, they are "incoherent" because you can't actually do them.
A million kid march to demand free unicorns for all, even if they elect a single monolithic Dictator of Unicorns who has the strict political discipline to require every kid to sign the Free Unicorn Petition and then you, a relatively well politically informed person, see and understand that demand - is still a Gurri-style protest. Because neither the explicit top-level goal that the public agrees "yes, that's their goal" (or the subconscious-level goal of "y'all should be nicer to us kids who want unicorns") can be done, meaning that same cycle of "we demand X, the Man doesn't provide it, therefore the Man is bad and we should continue having a Revolt of the Public" continues.
yes I recognize physically we could actually defund all the police or decertify the election but A) it won't work to achieve what the people in those protests want, and B) would still be considered a evil failure of The Man and requiring further Protests when they didn't work - I am bundling "... according to the standards of the protestors" into my definition of "will this demand work?"
Idleness is the devil's workshop. Freetime has expanded and we have filled it with garbage entertainment.
Btw, connecting this to your previous post : In 2014, when Modi won in India, essentially defeating a member of a dynasty that had held control for 70 years, it was obvious that this was possible due to social media.
There was no way, before social media, to make jokes about the Gandhis, mock them. But social media allowed that and the dam burst.
Didn't Vajpayee do the same thing just a few years earlier though?
Do what? Beat the Gandhi? Yes, but it was obviously a weak victory. The coalition did not hold.
Remember there was no real alternative to the Gandhi for 70 years, because they owned all the media and never got interviewed...a bit like royalty. I remember Rajiv Gandhi saying, shortly before I moved to the U.S, "Indians are not ready for independent news media. They need to show responsibility."
I am amazed no one on this page brings up Sonia Gandhi's National Advisory Council, where she ran the country using Manmohan Singh as a puppet, without any accountability herself.
Not one media person has asked her that. Why?!
Not one person, even the pro-BJP asked Rahul Gandhi, in the one interview Rahul submitted to, about his disproportionate assets.
Modi has been called a mass murderer without evidence, by every media outlet, ever since Sonia perceived him, a new CM, as a political threat, but HE is the fascist!
That is Scott Alexander's big error.
Nick Kristoff of the nytimes said that he sees Rahul Gandhi as the prince who ought to win, because hey, he's like a prince. I wonder if he'd be so callous about trusting his own govt, with say Jenna Bush or Chelsea Clinton, because they're like princesses! This was a 2014 Kristoff article endorsing Rahul Gandhi.
If it wasn't for social media, this is the sort of nonsense that would have been out there. And all the 12 years of "What about 2002?".
During the anti Sikh pogrom of 1984, when random Sikhs were targeted and brutally killed (led by Congress party politicians), Rajiv Gandhi declared, "When the earth shakes, some trees will fall.". He was referring to his mother Indira Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh body guards. He was justifying the pogrom against random innocent Sikhs (the "trees" that fell!) by his party.
Does this fall nowhere on the radar of people discussing fascism in India?!
(Rajiv went on to become the next PM, riding on the sympathy wave of his mother's assassination, continuing the dynasty. Was he a fascist PM?)
This is in reference to the previous post on this blog though, and only marginally this post.
His family clearly even now has friendly "agents" in important newspapers like the nytimes, and around the world. How they become agents, I don't know. But they seem so bogus in how they cover India. And so disinterested in India itself except that they'd like to see a Gandhi in power.
"In Spain, the previous forty years had seen the fall of a military dictatorship, its replacement with a liberal democracy, and a quintupling of GDP per capita from $6000 to $32000 a year - "in 2012, four years into the crisis there were more cell phones and cars per person in Spain than in the US". The indignado protesters in Spain had lived through the most peaceful period in Europe's history, an almost unprecedented economic boom, and had technologies and luxuries that previous generations could barely dream of. They had cradle-to-grave free health care, university educations, and they were near the top of their society's class pyramids."
But, that is completely normal, which has been recognized for decades, if not centuries . See https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/sociology-and-social-reform/sociology-general-terms-and-concepts/relative-deprivation (Discussing "the counterintuitive but persistent finding that typically such revolts are launched by groups that enjoy rising, not falling, socioeconomic conditions.")
Whatever the other merits of the book, I am skeptical that the new factor he identifies (reaction to the failure of high modernity) can explain a phenomenon that predates it.
I finished "The Revolt Of The Public" about a month ago and thought it was one of the most interesting and stimulating books I've read in a while. The criticism that its descriptions and conclusions are obvious depends, perhaps, on how much time one spends thinking about such things. At least in my own case, I found its distillation of trends and motivations that underlie a lot of contemporary phenomena non-obvious enough to be impressed. It reminded me a lot of evolution (i.e. evolution by natural selection) -- very obvious in retrospect, not at all obvious at the time of its discovery, and great at providing a framework in which a lot of things make sense. For example, being at a university, I've been annoyed / upset by a lot of vague, half-baked pseudo-protests, whose character makes a lot more sense as reflections of what Gurri describes as generally leaderless, aim-less, and deliberately unconstructive "movements" -- "The public opposes, but does not propose" leading to - "... a perpetual feedback loop of failure and negation." [p. 271]
I think the better criticism of the book is in the solutions it puts forth, which seem like wishful thinking. Good solutions are a lot to ask for, though...
Reading the review, I realize I have a slightly different take. Transitioning out of high modernism and into an age of information abundance, people are now attempting to make up their own minds on topics. It turns out figuring things out from first principles is quite hard, and most people are also quite bad at it. So you get things like QAnon adherents parroting "do your own research" but being taken in by often quite silly conspiracy theories. I can't even figure out whether my toddler really needs X ounces of milk a day like the guidelines say, and I'm probably in the top 5% of the population in terms of education and intelligence. Every decision we make is in the fog of war now that we no longer blindly trust some authoritative source to tell us what to do, and it's even worse when you get to big, complex problems like obesity or homelessness or the quality of education. I think all the apparent nihilism and "throw the bums out" protests are a symptom of being unable to come up with better ideas and throwing up your hands and telling other people they should have figured it out for you.
I'd like to think the silver lining is that society as a whole will get better at debating and synthesizing different points of view. I have to admit that I don't see a lot of actual progress, but I assume it's a multi-decade process. I just tend to think that whenever society expends a lot of energy on something, we eventually tend to understand it better. We're still grappling with the new information landscape of Google, Twitter, and whatever else, and we're pretty bad at it so far. In terms of both technology and critical thinking, I'm cautiously optimistic that we'll get better at it, and the result will appear less nihilistic.
How dare you take a long-term perspective. (I think you make a lot of sense, and the throes of transition are not very pretty. Then again, neither were many of the throes of industrialization.)
This is the most important comment in the entire thread. As a species, we tend to suck at dealing with a new thing until we don’t. And once we’ve figured it out, then it becomes a solved problem.
We’re struggling with these new mediums but we struggled with TV and radio too.
This too shall pass.
> Or stopping illegal immigration - many countries manage this just fine, America could do it if it wanted to.
Citation needed.
There's an easy way to stop illegal immigration, which is to be surrounded by a bunch of countries with equally high living standards as yourself, or that lock their citizens in. I think this is what most European and Asian countries do, to the extent that they do manage to stop illegal immigration.
I mean... Both you and Scott are making a lot of implicit assumptions here. I'd tell you that you're implying immigration is a solved problem in European countries, but I don't think you'd agree with that framing.
But in any case, "the extent that they do manage to stop illegal immigration" is "virtually not at all". It's especially a problem in the EU because countries have open borders between then, but no common immigration policy, which creates toxic incentives.
(This is always something that annoys me when discussing European politics with American audiences. They often conflate "I haven't heard of the problems there" with "They're probably doing fine".)
Yeah... definitely. The American left-wing, especially, seems even more oblivious of European politics than the right-wing, though of course, both are rather uninformed, and use it to their own narratives...(e.g. right-wingers with the "refugees in Sweden crisis", and left-wingers with "free universal healthcare", which isn't quite how it works in Europe...).
> but the biggest and most mainstream of mainstream news organizations, like the New York Times are becoming more trusted and certainly more profitable.
This is really interesting. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post increased their legitimacy with both Trump and Clinton voters*, while Huffington Post decreased with both. CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and Breitbart all polarized to various degrees, where the group that trusted trusted more and the group that distrusted distrusted more. No outlet saw the opposite effect. (Though the delta at e.g. WSJ decreased because R trust increased more than D.)
HuffPo's failures aside, there appears to be a clear pattern that the outlets that saw a general increase in trust are paywalled while the ones that offer a free product polarized. There's quite a lot of speculation that could follow from that, but my first thought is that despite the differences in outcome they're each following their incentives pretty competently.
*Samples compared are 2016 and 2018.
Interesting point about Huffington Post - now that it's mentioned, I realize that I've heard about it a lot less in recent years. Did Vox take up the place in the market that they used to occupy?
That sounds right at first glance, but hard to verify given the shifting foundations of the wider market. HuffPo has been in a steep decline since at least 2016, but Vox isn't exactly picking up all the readers the former has been losing; IIRC it's losing readership as well, but nowhere as quickly.
This book is more relevant than ever in 2021 and still a must-read. Your dismissiveness is baffling.
In June 2020 a lot of people thought the revolution had come. The two lawyers who tossed a Molotov into a cop car and are now facing decades in jail. The politicians who ran to an "abolish the police" platform. Ross Douthat who tweeted, a month after "The Decadent Society" came out, that this may be a quick end to decadence. And I was like, "Do you even Gurri, bro? This revolt of nihilism will blow over by the fall."
That's also why you can't build left/right institutions simply based on hating the right/left. That's just nihilism again. Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence, and owning the libs/cons isn't the same as building trust or governing. The polarization is a symptom of failing institutions, not a way to fix them.
Speaking of, are you sure you know how to build institutions for the decentralized information age? Should we appoint Zvi to head the CDC, or is the entire centralized structure of the CDC as it exists within the sprawling government hopelessly flawed and the entire thing should be burned down? Do you know where people are actually getting their COVID information from? Where are you getting your information about where people are getting COVID information from, and can you trust it? Those are real questions in 2021, and the answers to them depend on understanding deeply the themes of the book on public trust, information, and nihilism. Anyone who is sure they know what's going is almost certainly wrong, and they could do worse than rereading "The Revolt of the Public Again".
Good post.
All of the Stripe Press books are gorgeous physical objects. I wonder why? Maybe the operation is run at break-even or even a loss and that allows them to invest more in the printing?
Same reason the small family owned Italian place run by two brothers makes better food than Olive Garden. Same reason the small jewish deli makes better sandwiches than subway. Some people are decidated to aesthetics, and some run large corporations, but few people do both.
I've not read the book, but it sounds to me as though Gurri's ideas hold up better than you give him credit for. Your statement that there haven't been any big protests lately besides the whole Georg Floyd unpleasantness and the storming of the capital seems like a Jupiter sized caveat from my perspective.
Secondly, consider that neither of these protest movements really had leaders, either. Who was leading the Black Lives Matter movement? Nobody. Who organized the 1/6 riot? Beats me. Add to that: the 1/6 rioters, when they stormed into the senate chamber, what did they do? Took selfies, stole a few items, vandalized some stuff, then left. They didn't have any sort of plan, like say, preventing Congress from meeting until they met demands for a recount or something. It was really just an expression of anger and indignation, and a completely over the top one, at that. Seems pretty reminiscent of the earlier protest movements you discussed above.
Additionally, consider that the demand to defund the police is so potentially catastrophic and corrosive that it could only come from people whose relationship to modern society is, to put it mildly, a bit fraught. This strikes me as the reverse of the magic button that solves problems; it's the idea that we can eliminate basic government services like law enforcement and not only will this not create law and order problems, but it will eliminate existing problems with police accountability. This chain of reasoning--police act bad, eliminate the police--makes Greta Thunberg look like Otto Von Bismarck. It may not be nihilistic, exactly, but it is so deranged and sophomoric as to be indistinguishable from nihilism. The protests themselves, with the rioting, looting, burning, beatings, property destruction, etc., were a fairly absurd over-reaction to a handful of admittedly ugly viral videos of police misconduct that have trickled out into public view over the past few years, when you consider that dying at the hands of police under any circumstances is fairly rare in this country.
On the flipside of the ledger, we're laboring through a pandemic which has killed ~5 million people worldwide and made an order of magnitude more very unpleasantly sick, and when public health officials encourage people to do some very simple, common sense things like wear a cloth mask over your nose and mouth in public places and go and get a free vaccine when its available, you get a certain strand of people who are unwilling to do either, because they mistrust this nebulous group they call 'elites' so much, and instead they concoct weird conspiracies about Bill Gates and the deep state to explain what's happening, and more than a few wind up getting sick and dying because they wouldn't protect themselves. They're literally dying from their mistrust of people in positions of authority.
Wait until Greta seizes Alsace-Lorraine...
Yes they are. Though, I would say that particularly the right-wing is now susceptible to this type of nihilistic protest... I guess, BLM was a bit of an outlier, but even that movement seems to have clear goals...on the right, it's basically only a reaction to events....e.g. the storming of the US capitol, and the claim that elections were stolen...it seems to me that it's just a quick reaction to an event they dislike, but with no plan behind it... I guess that's why it's called "reactionary politics"...🤔😬
"poverty remained as troubling as ever"
oh come *on*, don't do that. especially not about the aptly-named Great Society programs
oh, you're retelling the book's narrative throughout? sorry, never mind then
Even with the conclusion, you're giving Gurri a bit too much credit here tbh. All of his predictions were wrong. His descriptions of the problem were tinged with a lot of partisan rhetoric that didn't quite fit the facts. The book got famous because people claimed it predicted Trump, but Gurri himself rejected this and his afterword is a really embarrassing pseudo defense of Trump. If the one thing he gets credits for isn't even right, there's basically no unique insight here.
Along the lines of Scott's point about the miracle button - I'm not so impressed with all this anger of the commoners against the elites. If any given group of commoners had their way and became the ruling class, their way would have its own problems, people would get mad at them, and they would start defending themselves and using lame discourse tricks to insulate themselves from criticism in the same way that the current elites do.
I don't think it's unusual for political protests to be dominated by the educated middle class. One of the Freakonomics books has a chapter saying that terrorists are also drawn from this class, and that similarly this class is more likely to vote than the poor in democracies. They are more politically aware and engaged and have ideologies and thus are more likely to be radical. The same was true of 19th century Europe, where Marx and his associates (university educated socialist theorists) were far more radical than the workers (low-income manual laborers) they claimed to be writing about or fighting for.
The wikipedia article on Bolsheviks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsheviks#2nd_Party_Congress) notes that "Lenin... wanted to limit membership to those who supported the party full-time and worked in complete obedience to the elected party leadership. Martov wanted to extend membership to anyone "who recognises the Party Programme and supports it by material means and by regular personal assistance under the direction of one of the party’s organisations."[7] Lenin believed his plan would develop a core group of professional revolutionaries who would devote their full-time and energy towards developing the party into an organization capable of leading a successful proletarian revolution..."
Who could work in politics full-time? Probably only someone with at least some amount of money already!
I think a recurring theme is that the really destitute are focused on immediate, obvious/material goals: a place to live, food, and safety. The middle class have the luxury of thinking about less tangible concerns, like expression and identity. They also learn how to abstract, think about idealized situations, and apply logic to those abstractions, which makes them think they have found some perfect and unassailable solution. Hence the radicalization.
> The "New Poor" are the most likely source of converts for mass movements, for they recall their former wealth with resentment and blame others for their current misfortune.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer
> Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. (...) The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim — for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives — is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. (...) From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_and_Practice_of_Oligarchical_Collectivism
And Lenin wrote in a letter to one of his brothers in arms while abroad, "There is no money, there is no money!! This is the main trouble!"
See pages 142-5 here:
https://archive.org/stream/EducationOfLevNavrozov/Navrozov%2C%20Lev%20-%20Education%20of%20Lev%20Navrozov_djvu.txt
"Maybe the occasional tendency of the US to switch party systems has captured the center-vs-border conflict and subsumed it into the broader left-right one."
I'd say we know this didn't happen. Bernie voters didn't become MAGAs. Many of the BLM protests were against the political establishment in Democrat-controlled cities, but that didn't turn them to the right.
What Scott describes as the High Modernist approach does get a lot of pushback from the left. One example area is climate change, with the obvious tension between innovating our way out of the problem and the consumption-limiting degrowth approach. I'd argue that people like Elon Musk and even the EA crowd are quite High Modernist in nature. They're just not the government.
And when most Americans mistrustfully think of 'power' they usually instinctively think of 'government power'. When the philosopher-bureaucrat-scientist-dictator-manager-kings are visionary CEOs, they're applauded, not hectored for their shortcomings. Super-efficient modernist structures are fine as long as they optimise for shareholder value and not, say, minimising obesity or homelessness.
On thing that might have some explanatory power is generational. Young people are great at seeing what is wrong with the status quo and naïve about how hard it is to create better institutions and outcomes. The last time of huge unrest was the 1960s and 1970s when the boomers were coming of age. The current discontent seems similar. Thunberg is a good example, in that she angrily demands something be done but doesn't know how.
No word regarding the question whether the "ClimateGate" was a non-event when not taken completely out of context? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy
In a similar vein, Greta Thunberg saying she is demanding solutions, not providing them, is very far from her demanding that the problem just "magically go away". There are lots of proposed solutions, but they come at a cost and thus require political will. Saying that by protesting, one shows that the will is there in the populace and thus wants to motivate politicians to act on the variety of existing solutions, without reducing the support on just one that may turn out to be less optimal, sound like a very logical approach to me.
By contrast, demanding a scientifically supported complete strategy from anyone protesting anything is just a different way of saying "unless you are a scientist/economist/sociologist/etc, you are not allowed to protest."
Sure, some modern protests seem a bit aimless, but that is not a new phenomenon, otherwise "burn the witches/kill the jews" would not have been a regular product of people protesting there being a plague/famine/crisis/foreigner.
I know you like to write ironically, and not being a native speaker, I may be bad at picking up on that. But in contrast to what you write in the beginning, the book seems to very much not say things that are obviously true now, quite the opposite. Almost all the Arab Spring protests failed, so Gurri's self-provided test simply failed. The various protests that are thrown together are very different in aim, support, coherence, making a grand theory of failing modernism extremely shaky. So I have trouble identifying ANY of the things he says that are patently true now, despite your entry into the text. And your own last paragraph also shows that you do not believe his points at all, easily finding points where is analysis is way off the mark, and then looking for possible answers.
So, what is he saying that makes his book worth reading? Or is the cover really the only good thing? As most, I usually really enjoy your book reviews (the 1001 nights one was awesome), but in this one, you seem to get lost in your own rabbithole so deep that your words do not make it back out to me.
"In a similar vein, Greta Thunberg saying she is demanding solutions, not providing them, is very far from her demanding that the problem just "magically go away". There are lots of proposed solutions, but they come at a cost and thus require political will. Saying that by protesting, one shows that the will is there in the populace"
But is the will there? In order to ameliorate the effects of climate change, if we believe the latest warnings, there will need to be a *huge* change in consumption habits and expectations. Not everyone can be offered a yacht to take them across the ocean, and while it may be symbolic it is not feasible in modern conditions - unless people are willing to go back to "the days of sail" and think for a moment about how that will affect global trade.
The public in general may think that recycling, biking to work, and buying food at farmer's markets will do the trick. In reality, things like thumping great increases in the price of fossil fuels are needed - and what would the American public do if their gas prices starting looking like European petrol prices?
There really is an expectation that there is a magic button and you just have to press it to get things done, and it will be easy and won't require us to give up our little luxuries. Fields of turbines for wind power generation? Solar? These are not simple questions with simple answers, and after a certain point you don't get to say "It's not my job to think about solutions" when you are making demands.
"In a similar vein, Greta Thunberg saying she is demanding solutions, not providing them, is very far from her demanding that the problem just "magically go away". There are lots of proposed solutions, but they come at a cost and thus require political will. "
True, but as near as I can tell the "will" that Thunberg et al feel is lacking is the will to stand up to the Greedy Fat Cats saying "stay away from the Miracle button" and offering nice juicy campaign contributions, on account of not wanting to have to pay more taxes and give up their jet-set lifestyles. Thunberg herself is at least willing to endure a bit of austerity, but I don't think her followers have any doubt that the solutions are known and materially certain to succeed and that the material cost will have low impact on anyone outside the upper classes.
"Miracle Button, but every time you press it the level of every Rich Person's money bin goes down ten centimeters", is still a miracle button for this purpose.
This is an interesting comment. I think it is arguable that the very rich and the economic sector of finance are in fact predatory on the real economy composed basically of natural resource use and manufacturing, in the way John Michael Greer argues from Schumacher-type principles in 'Wealth of Nature'. Recently I have been wondering if one of the biggest issues facing the nation where I live is whether it is possible in our democratic system to rein in 'the Big' -- whether it's Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Tech, I think none of those is actually the friend of either the ordinary people or the earth we live from. I guess at the moment I am asking questions about for inst whether it is actually possible to decrement the rich people's money bin. Is that out of our reach, because they have such a lot of practice at filling the troughs our politicians feed at? Is it possible for the money markets to *not* predate on the commercial enterprises which are able to provide for human needs without destroying the natural systems we depend on?
It is not possible to achieve dramatic results by decrementing rich people's money bins, because there's really not that much money in the bins. Most of what makes the super-rich what they are, is control over the flow of money between middle-class workers and middle-class consumers and the providers of raw materials that make up the goods that make for the generally high standard of living and of state capacity that we take for granted.
Naively sticking someone's greedy socialist paws into those greedy capitalist money flows, is going to break things. Sticking to the parts that we know are safe to tap (the money bins from which the megayachts are paid for) doesn't do all that much. Whether or not it might be possible to cleverly redirect the flow of wealth in more desirable directions is an open question, depending in part on whose desires. But it's not likely to happen as a result of simplistic "we demand solutions" or "arrest the banksters" activisim.
"Most of what makes the super-rich what they are, is control over the flow of money between middle-class workers and middle-class consumers and the providers of raw materials that make up the goods that make for the generally high standard of living and of state capacity that we take for granted. " I think this possibly supports Greer's hypothesis that the tertiary economy is parasitic? I don't think there's a way to argue that he is a socialist, by the way, he's more of a moderate conservative influenced by Burke. I think we already have problems with the tax revenue being wanted in several places at once.
Perhaps I misunderstood the point you were making in your final paragraph:
""Miracle Button, but every time you press it the level of every Rich Person's money bin goes down ten centimeters", is still a miracle button for this purpose."
I was guessing that you were making a point here that it would be possible to tap into the Rich Person's money bin to hit at least some of the High Modernist goals. I had previously been thinking that this is fairly difficult due to the amount of effort the rich generally go for in tax avoidance (with the exception of HM the Queen, because the Crown estates hand over about 85 % of their annual revenue to the public purse.) Because of what I thought was an assertion of yours about the possibility of it, I was speculating about whether it is actually possible to get anything much from that bin, even if there was a widespread agreement that we wanted to try to raid it.
I suppose any kind of 'tax the the rich' effort would attract a socialist label. I was seeing it more as a possible policy goal on conservative grounds, from evaluating whether the capitalists really are benefiting actual industry or merely rent-seeking. I could see that if China manages to rein in predatory capitalism and refocus on material skills, which seems to be a direction of their top level policy, will the rest of us be left with the capitalists (who may actually despite their own claims) depressing the ability of the economies to do useful work in a world of material resource decline, primarily the energy descent of course?
Control of the big money flows is not "parasitic", any more than e.g. your brain is a parasite for insisting on control of your respiratory system. If nobody controls the big money flows, then e.g. Ford Motor Company buys a million tons of cotton instead of a million tons of steel because cotton is something they can buy, cotton is cheap, and that's what the die roll said to do.
The belief that "oh, *that* sort of control, we can do that with just some clerks with spreadsheets", goes back far enough that the spreadsheets were dead-tree ledgers. But it has a very bad track record. There are lots of people who are certain that if you took the spreadsheets away from Greedy Rich People and gave them to properly-motivated clerks, said clerks would find all the places where money is being diverted to Greedy Rich People and redirect it to the Public Good without interfering with the bit where auto factories get their steel. I'm pretty sure they'd botch the job in a big way, if we were fool enough to give it to them.
I'm not against finance in general, but I'm looking for a way to evaluate whether the actions carried out in any way benefit the real world, defined as that one in which people gather natural resources and make them into things people need, and meet the needs of the inhabitants with them. Isn't it possible to make some distinctions about whether the activities of a finance firm are a net benefit or not? I know the finance system is useful for human activities, but I think it goes a long way beyond being useful.
As for your point about Ford, presumably they want to make cars, they are clearly not going to buy cotton just because it's cheap, I get the feeling I must have entirely missed your point here?
I'm saying not all of the finance world is helpful: I guess I am looking for people to help me design friendliness evaluation for finance. Here in the UK we have a lot of the economics and finance sector but the rest of the economy doesn't seem to benefit a lot. Perhaps it's just the shrinking pie effect from energy descent.
To be fair, demanding solutions instead of providing them is perfectly acceptable in other contexts. For example, if I go to McDonalds and the ice cream machine is broken for the 3rd week in a row, it could be reasonable of me to tell them, "I demand you fix your machine before I shop here again". Yes, it would be awesome if I could just go in and fix their machine, but that's not my job. There are professionals who do those sort of things, and, being a software engineer, if I tried fixing it myself I'd probably just make it explode or something.
Or, to use a more salient example, if I'm driving on the highway and see a forest fire, it's reasonable of me to call up 911 and yell, "OMG there's a forest fire you gotta help". They have fire trucks, helicopters, chainsaws, and absurdly strong people trained to use all that equipment. I've got a water bottle and a Kia Soul. I pay my taxes so that I don't [i]have[/i] to spend my days training to deadlift 200 lbs while wearing an asbestos suit.
Sure, as long as you understand that ultimately you're responsible for what happens in your life. To take another example: if your doctor is giving you instructions that aren't helping you, you have to find another doctor, until things work out for you. Many people will stay with their current doctor, and complain that their health isn't the best. But thinking that your doctor should care about your health more than you is a delusion.
But the protests were more as if you went into McDonalds, they asked for your order, and you huffed and puffed about "that's not *my* job, you should just *know* what my order is!" and then getting really angry when they didn't include an ice cream for you. You *wanted* ice cream! They should *know* that! *Everyone* likes ice cream, how can they not know that! In fact, McDonalds should be providing free ice cream for everyone!
Something that bothers me a lot in Scott's writing recently has been the blind pairing of Brexit with Trump, as if they were manifestations of the same broad process. This review perhaps gives us the tools to understand why this is wrong a bit better in the centre and border dichotomy.
From an interested outsider's perspective, I don't disagree that Trump was clearly the beneficiary of a movement against the centre, since he had to overthrow not one but two parties' establishments to get to the presidency, and did so by vague appeals to discontented and marginalised populations. Within a democratic framework that seems to be a clear border uprising, right down to the threats to said democratic framework.
Brexit though was more of a centre versus centre conflict. In 2014 the most powerful centre in the UK was not the Brussels government/bureaucracy/gravy train (I wasn't a fan...) but the national government and parliament in Westminster. And when the Brexit debate started it was a debate about control and sovereignty, not a rejection of elites. It was a question of which set of elites should control some aspects of our life, not an attempt to throw the lot out. Yes, most (but not all) of our governing classes were in favour of EU membership, but there were prominent Eurosceptic voices across the political and media spectra. The leave coalition was a very uneasy mix of nationalists, libertarians, old-style socialists, social democrats and members of the existing liberal-conservative consensus (see our current Prime Minister for example) who judged the EU to have less benefits than harms. What united them was arguably a very modernist view that powers should be centralised in our parliamentary government and not held at different levels with different methods of accountability. That is to say, the unifying vision of the leave party was not to attack the elites but to actually bolster the power of the strongest centre in the UK.
That this came to pass can be seen in the aftermath, when various factions and institutions tried to assert their claims to the stronger power available: the speaker asserting the power of parliament; the attempts of the courts to override government; the formation of the eventually (temporarily presumably) victorious alliance in the Conservative party of Brexiteers and remainers who accepted the result. This was not a fight with the borderers, but the elite trying to accommodate to a unicentral reality.
The media focuses too much on the workers in towns whose former coal mining or steel industries have gone, whilst failing to remember the role of many middle class women who voted for Tony Blair's government a decade earlier, or the millions of university graduates (easily enough to sway the vote) who did want to leave. This narrative, perhaps unconsciously, seeks to explain Brexit as the UK's own Trump moment. It's fun as far as it goes, but the support of the left-behind in former industrial towns is about as close as you get to a parallel between Brexit and Trump.
So, as an appeal to Scott: stop with the right-on conflation of Trump and Brexit. Whilst both perhaps drew on the support of angry communities, only on
...only one actually was a rejection of the centre. Brexit fused anger and centralisation into a campaign to "take back control", a phrase coined by a man who has a belief in the ability of central government to do better
Nicely put. I can see how easy it is to lump Trump and Brexit together. Sometimes it just suits Scott's rhetorical purposes. But I agree that probably.... enough is enough!
Martin Gurri is explicitly saying this. Its not some adventure of logic by the OP. "The 2016 Brexit referendum and election of Donald Trump — both of which were based primarily on the angry repudiation of the status quo — provided further compelling evidence of this public sentiment [of nihilism]"
https://theintercept.com/2019/03/03/revolt-of-the-public-martin-gurri/
Yes, but Scott has paired the two in other posts.
And I would accept Brexit as a repudiation of the status quo, but not an angry one. It was pretty low key without any violence or really many rallies. Whilst there were angry people involved (on both sides) they were not typical. The leave campaign was optimistic not nihilistic as well. That Gurri makes the same error of classification suggests the media lense on Brexit was rather tuned into Trump rather than what actually happened. To be fair the hardcore minority of remainers who wanted another vote or something to overturn the decision (many of whom were involved in the media) were rather interested in portraying leaving the EU as Trump-style populism, so the media narrative had a source. It's just people accept it too easily.
Well, there certainly was violence with the labour politician being shot... though, I agree that overall Brexit was less nihilistic than the Trump movement... like I wrote above, people like Bozza Johnson or Michael Gove know what their values are at least, while Donnie T seems to be driven by only his (and his supporters) passions...
>The leave coalition was a very uneasy mix of nationalists, libertarians, old-style socialists, social democrats
That tells you Leave is Border. Look at how the UKs officially centrist party the Liberal Democrats are 100% remain. The moderates in the other parties are remainers, too. Remain is centre.
Note that Border is not a synonym for Populist, and Centre is not a synonym for Elite. Prominent leaver Jacob Rees-Mogg is as Elite as they get, but also Border, because he has weird views, for instance.
So any popular revolt against a right- or left-wing dictatorship is likely to be centre attacking the border? Because that appears to be the logic of your view.
Ignoring the classification of the currently woke by UK standards and wanting to raise taxes Liberal Democrats as central (they look to be left of the Labour leadership at least), the centre/border is just a way of expressing centre and periphery, so those who have power and those that don't. It's nothing to do with populism as you say, although by definition most elites will be linked to the centre. It's certainly nothing to do with positioning on the right-left scale. Indeed, the Liberal Democrats, despite actually being in government shortly before as the junior part of a coalition, are pretty well excluded from power so despite being politically of the centre, they are arguably borderers attacking the centre (their strongly pro-Europe position and desire for PR are a definite minority position in the UK).
Also, if you're going to quote me please don't cut off the quote at the point where I flag the contribution of the centre to the leave campaign. Yes, the leave campaign involved a lot of borderers, as did the remain campaign comes to that, but it was led and directed by people from the centre who believed in the centre. Selectively quoting me doesn't change that, just makes your point slightly invalid.
"So any popular revolt against a right- or left-wing dictatorship is likely to be centre attacking the border? Because that appears to be the logic of your view."
What? I never said anything of the kind.
"Yes, the leave campaign involved a lot of borderers, as did the remain campaign "
Only the rank and file of the leave campaign involved more , and more bordery. They had some establishment from figures on board, but that's not what swung it. It's kind of true that some of the establishment was on board with leave, buy it doesn't mask off the fact that populist revolt was really important too.
The liberal democrats might be centrist, but they are definitely not mainstream in the UK...so not necessarily "elites"... similar to how Macron in France represented himself when first running for president in 2017...so you could argue that the "centre" isn't necessarily always the "centre". Of course, there are countries where this is indeed the case, e.g. Canada or the Netherlands...
Good point. I also never understood why so many people tend to group Bozza Johnson with Trump... I think there are very different politicians, despite having similar hairstyles and being populists... Bozza to me seems like a traditional liberal-consevative, who has more or less clear values, even if he changes them if it's opportunistic to do so (e.g. climate change). Donny T, on the other hand, seems like someone who really is driven by his passions, without thinking it through...so, if you will, and if I were to stereotype, Bozza is very British (similar types are Jezza Clarkson and Piers Morgan), while Donny T is very much a yank, similar types like him include Ted Nugent, Graham (the evangelical bloke) and maybe Ice cube (the rapper/actor, especially in 21 jump Street...).
...🤔
"Gurri isn't shy about his contempt for this. Not only were these some of the most privileged people in their respective countries, but (despite the legitimately-sucky 2008 recession), they were living during a time of unprecedented plenty. [...] The indignado protesters in Spain had lived through the most peaceful period in Europe's history, an almost unprecedented economic boom, and had technologies and luxuries that previous generations could barely dream of."
"In Gurri's telling, High Modernism had always been a failure, but the government-media-academia elite axis had been strong enough to conceal it from the public."
How does Gurri reconcile these two opinions? Wasn't it High Modernism that brought us to this time of unprecedented plenty, with technologies and luxuries that previous generations could barely dream of?
I believe Gurri argues that the rate of improvement has decreased as a result of High Modernism's failures, as well as HM failing to solve particular problems. So prosperity is better, though not as good as it could be, peace is only kind of a result of HM policies (the first half of the 20th century wasn't good for it, and the latter half was good largely in the sense it wasn't in Europe's living room) but things like poverty, homelessness, everyone who goes to college having immediately a high status, high paid and fulfilling job, etc. those things haven't been fulfilled either. Governments promise more and more and deliver less and less, but before that was sort of swept under the rug.
You're probably right that this is what Gurri believes, but it makes him sound...entitled? To use Scott's analogy, High Modernism has already pressed multiple miracle buttons and delivered multiple miracles: antibiotics, vaccines, foods from all over the world, humanity's knowledge at everyone's fingertips, the banishment of famine and war from developed countries, near zero infant mortality, plummeting crime rates...yet Gurri criticizes HM for not delivering miracles even faster?
It was, of course. But modernism's successes become taken for granted, while its failures are constantly talked about. As such, you have postmodernism, neoliberalism, and more generally the retreat from centralized planning to improve anything from the 1970s onward. (And, I'd argue as a direct effect of that, the slowing-down of actual progress - and the Great Stagnation then fuels more of the decentralized protests being described.) Like, it's absolutely true that the traditional media did and does cover up governmental failure, and social media has revealed a lot of incompetence that was already there. But what traditional media has absorbed from social media is not its freedom (it can't, that's not how the business model works by definition) but its hostility - outrage, with sprinklings of fear and/or despair for flavor.
It's something that I've thought of as Internet negativity, but it might just be the nature of intellectual discussion, to emphasize negative emotions (and with social media we're spending much more of our time discussing politics and philosophy). Sometimes a good thing - not settling for minor improvements if there's better possible - but also causing major problems. Building is hard, criticizing is easy. Combine with the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, and you get, well, this.
Maybe more specifically, the points where traditional media fails is in demonstrating authorities (not just the government, of course, but a lot of the time the line between gov't, corporations, and high-class social circles is very blurry, and needless to say mass media itself is a part of the authority structure) being incompetent and/or evil (and sometimes it *is* malice rather than incompetence). So social media has an advantage (whose extent depends on censorship, but the advantage remains so long as it's equally or less censored compared to traditional media, which is probably part of why journalists are lobbying so much for social media censorship - they want journalistic freedom to remain their estate privilege alone) in negative stories. Traditional media then ended up, for whatever reason, trying to compete on the negativity front, maybe as a reaction to when they themselves wound up being targeted. Or maybe it really is just a matter of business models.
But it's a difficult balance. Because on the one hand you need privacy and idealism to make plans, but on the other hand you need the ability for whistleblowers to reveal if the plans are evil, or naysmiths to point out when it'd lead to disaster. At the moment we don't seem to be doing great on either, but then again I'm probably romanticizing the past to a substantial extent, rather than things actually getting worse. The DSA does not suffer from the nihilistic vagueness Occupy had.
If Scott thinks everything in here is obvious, could because Gurri was fairly well-received and influential in the tech/rationalist/libertarian circles Scott is adjacent to? In other words, do these ideas seems obvious now because Gurri is in the water?
I am not convinced that the various protest movements in / since 2011 are more closely related to each other than they are to earlier revolutionary waves. If social media has been massively influential for protests, then we should expect that protests since 2005 have certain things in common that the Vietnam War protests did not - or the revolutions of 1848 - or the peasants' war of 1525.
The most common distinguisher given for social media movements is a lack leaders and institutions. I am skeptical, both that previous protests always had leaders and institutions, and that modern protests usually lack both. Just looking at recent US history, Occupy is no-leaders & no-institutions, the Tea Party is no-leaders & yes-institutions, Democratic Socialism is yes-leaders & yes-institutions, and Trumpism is yes-leader & no-institutions. All of these are given as examples of social media driven protests.
"the cover image - of some sort of classical-goddess-looking person (possibly Democracy? I expect if I were more cultured I would know this) holding a cell phone"
Not necessarily needing to be more cultured; because my mind Works That Way, I identified that as "not a Classical image, it's Victorian early to mid-century idea of Ye Olden Tymes and not pre-Raphaelite, so it's meant to be a queen or noblewoman sometime in the Middle Ages".
Some Googling enabled me to finally track it down, it's an image that's been used for several other purposes but Getty Images have it as "Vintage engraving from 1851 showing Princess Elfrida (Ælfthryth) of Wessex (died June 7, 929), the last child of Alfred the Great, the Saxon King of England and his wife Ealhswith" (unfortunately they don't identify who the original artist was).
https://www.gettyimages.ie/detail/illustration/princess-elfrida-royalty-free-illustration/169979753
Elfrida/Aelfthryth was the third child of Alfred the Great, she married Baldwin, Count of Flanders. Her elder brother was King of Wessex after their father died and her elder sister ruled Mercia (the allied kingdom) as Lady of Mercia. She married Baldwin II, Count of Flanders. One of their descendants, Matilda of Flanders, would go on to marry William the Conqueror, therefore starting the Anglo-Norman line of Kings of England. Through her descendant, Henry I of England, she is also a direct ancestor of the current monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Elizabeth II.
I think the cover artist just picked this at random as "example of old elite plus has hand out that can have something inserted into it" with no deeper meaning. I doubt they even know particularly that it's a 9th century Anglo-Saxon princess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86lfthryth,_Countess_of_Flanders
I should correct myself, she was *Saxon*, not *Anglo-Saxon*.
You've been beaten to the punch unforunately: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-revolt-of-the-public/comments#comment-2902485:
Bubba HoTep
6 hr ago
The cover is an illustration of Princess Elfrida, daughter of Alfred the Great, by Edward Henry Corbould from an 1850 collection of Victorian poems, "The Keepsake" https://dvpp.uvic.ca/poems/keepsake/1850/pom_5687_elfrida.html
Also, someone has already provided the full explanation of the symbolic significance of the cover: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-revolt-of-the-public/comments#comment-2910390:
notation
1 hr ago
In at least that poetic version of events, the noblewoman Elfrida revolts by asserting her beauty before the king instead of hiding it, perhaps from pride and perhaps from spite. Her husband the Earl dies so the king can marry her, and she spends the rest of her life unable to smile in gladness.
The Keepsake is the story of a very privileged woman asserting her power to destroy the existing order in which she lived without care for the consequences, which prove regretful.
Reading the poem, they have identified the wrong Elfrida! The Saxon princess, daughter of Alfred the Great, is not the same as the Elfrida who married King Edgar the Peaceful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_the_Peaceful
In 963, Edgar allegedly killed Earl Æthelwald, his rival in love, near present-day Longparish, Hampshire. The event was commemorated by the Dead Man's Plack, erected in 1825. In 1875, Edward Augustus Freeman debunked the story as a "tissue of romance" in his book, Historic Essays; however, his arguments were rebutted by naturalist William Henry Hudson in his 1920 book Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn.
Edgar was crowned at Bath and along with his wife Ælfthryth was anointed, setting a precedent for a coronation of a queen in England itself.
...About 964/965 Edgar married again, his third relationship, to Ælfthryth, widow of Æthelwald, Ealdorman of East Anglia, Edgar's adopted brother. Ælfthryth was the daughter of Ealdorman Ordgar and his wife, a member of the royal family of Wessex. Legend has it that Edgar heard of Ælfthryth's great beauty and sent Æthelwald to arrange marriage for him (Edgar) but Æthelwald instead married her himself. In retaliation Æthelwald was killed 'in a hunting accident' and Edgar married her as he had wanted. It is not known if this is true or simply romantic fiction."
*This* Elfrida is 10th century noblewoman, and after King Edgar's death, allegedly she was involved in the murder of his first son, Edward the Martyr, so her son - Athelred the Unready - could inherit the throne:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86lfthryth_(wife_of_Edgar)
"According to William [of Malmesbury], the beauty of Ordgar's daughter Ælfthryth was reported to King Edgar. Edgar, looking for a Queen, sent Æthelwald to see Ælfthryth, ordering him "to offer her marriage [to Edgar] if her beauty were really equal to report." When she turned out to be just as beautiful as was said, Æthelwald married her himself and reported back to Edgar that she was quite unsuitable. Edgar was eventually told of this, and decided to repay Æthelwald's betrayal in like manner. He said that he would visit the poor woman, which alarmed Æthelwald. He asked Ælfthryth to make herself as unattractive as possible for the king's visit, but she did the opposite. Edgar, quite besotted with her, killed Æthelwald during a hunt.
Edgar had two children before he married Ælfthryth, both of uncertain legitimacy. Edward was probably the son of Æthelflæd, and Eadgifu, later known as Saint Edith of Wilton, was the daughter of Wulfthryth.
Edgar married Ælfthryth in either 964 or 965. ...(I)n 968 Ælfthryth had given birth to a second son who was called Æthelred.
Edgar died in 975 leaving two young sons, Edward and Æthelred. Edward was almost an adult, and his successful claim for the throne was supported by many key figures including Archbishops Dunstan and Oswald and the brother of Ælfthryth's first husband, Æthelwine, Ealdorman of East Anglia. Supporting the unsuccessful claim of Æthelred were Ælfthryth herself (now the Queen dowager) Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester, and Ælfhere, Ealdorman of Mercia.
According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, King Edward was killed at Corfe Castle on 18 March 978, while visiting Ælfthryth. He was apparently killed by servants of the queen, leaving the way clear for her son Æthelred to be installed as king. As the king developed into a cult figure and martyr, a body of literature grew up around his murder, at first implying Ælfthryth's guilt and later accusing her outright. The 12th century monastic chronicle the Liber Eliensis went so far as to accuse her of being a witch, claiming that she had murdered not only the king, but also Abbot Brihtnoth of Ely."
Getty Images WRONG! How can we possibly trust any authorities after this? 😁
Yeah, that's Queen Elfrida, not Countess Dowager Elfrida.
Oh, excellent! I'm glad to find out who the original artist was. Thanks!
The 'revolt' of the masses against the elite has been a constant concern as to how democracy will indeed devolve from rule by the demos into rule by the mob:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_rule
Much of historical writings against democracy were not intended to be opposition to giving everyone a voice (the demos, after all, is the people and the people should be interested in how their society works) but was opposed to the idea of "whoever shouts the loudest makes the rules".
And as Scott points out, it wasn't really the masses revolting, it was a lot of college-educated young people in a generally flourishing society who were expecting jam on it. A mix of idealism and unreality. The statement quoted from OWS reminds me so much of the hyped 2006 book/movie/probably fuzzy slippers and pyjama set as well "The Secret", which basically was "you can have anything you want just by asking and the Universe will provide it".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_(Byrne_book)
And it was in the air in the early 2000s, in 2006 the newly-elected Primate of The Episcopal Church pinned her hopes on the Millennium Development Goals (that extreme poverty would be eradicated by 2015; she was too educated and progressive to believe that stuff about "The poor you will have with you always"):
https://stanfordmag.org/contents/grace-under-pressure
https://www.episcopalrelief.org/what-we-do/integrated-approach/global-goals/millennium-development-goals-2/
"She is eager to get on with that work, which means focusing on the Episcopal Church’s commitment to the eight Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations, including eradicating extreme poverty, halving hunger and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS, providing universal primary education and ensuring environmental sustainability. “About 40 years ago, some economists got together and said, ‘What would it take to solve abject poverty?’ And they began to do some calculations and said, ‘Well, if the developed nations of the world gave seven-tenths of one percent of their annual incomes, we could do it in a finite length of time.’ If we work on this, it’s possible to achieve these goals by the year 2015. It’s a huge bill, but it’s doable. For the first time in human history, it’s possible to end the worst kind of poverty.”
And then two years down the road came the big economic crash...
Scott's description of High Modernism is the Golden Age SF dream of the glorious future when the technocrats would rule and Science! would provide the answer to every problem, including "psychiatry will make it possible to change people's minds and brains so everyone will function at their best and we'll do away with crime and mental illness". A lot of this kind of forecasting is precisely why I am cool on topics like AI, because we've been there before and sure, *maybe* this time it really will shake out as forecasted, but *maybe* not?
Because of the very fact of progress, enrichment, and government in collaboration with Science! and Industry! solving a lot of the low-hanging fruit problems, the expectations of these protests was indeed "there is a magic button that can solve everything and it's only because of capitalist greed and entrenched sexism and racism and homophobia and all the rest of the -isms and -phobias that the old people in charge are not pressing the button!" After all, Big Government Programmes of the past such as nationalised health services and so on had solved a lot of problems, so the evidence was there that it could be done.
And here we are today. I don't think it's much easier/simpler to break it down into Left versus Right rather than Masses versus Elites; there is that element to it, but it really is a much deeper distrust of authority and authorities. People trusted Cronkite because he looked and sounded like the dependable, trustworthy, authority figure that in the post-war years poured out the benefits from the cornucopia. He was a journalist, when that term was not one of contempt. He was a liberal, when that wasn't damned as being a wicked centrist. This was the benevolent face of authority whom people could trust. And now that has all gone away, whether you're on the right or on the left.
Nicely put.
In the 70s we used to have dozens of variants on the "If we can put a man on the Moon*, we can surely solve [insert random social problem here]." Always amazed me, and it seems an endlessly recurrent delusional faith: that all mechanisms are equivalent, and if we have had great success in building a better actual machine why, clearly, it follows we must be in a better position to build a metaphorical machine -- some social construct, protocol, methodology, which we can all follow blindly to Utopia as blindly as we press the button on the iPhone and *shazam* it turns on and (via a P2C2E**) shows us the latest text from Aunt Petunia at home in Des Moines as well as Cousin Fearless on her JYA in Thailand. Amazing! Now why can't we similarly press the button on the iPublicThingy and *shazam* a similar P2C2E shows us God's truth about the progress of COVID, the best way to a prosperous future in which the weather is good and all the children above average.
The best I can imagine is that it stems from the normal wild egoism of H. sapiens: we think we have learned to build iPhones because *we've gotten a lot smarter* than they were in 1870, fiddling about with their primitive wires hung from poles and telegraph keys. Since we're smarter, we *ought* to be able to solve problems they couldn't, right? Stands to reason.
Of course, this is nonsense. We can solve problems like "how to build a smartphone" because to do that we must dance with a brutal, but brutally efficient partner, which is Nature herself. You step on her toes, she smacks you good and hard right away, and you learn not to do it very quickly. You build the machine wrong, you turn it on, it doesn't work, or explodes and kills everyone in the room, and you don't do that any more.
But there is no equivalent for any *other* probem, the building of any metaphorical social machine. If you build a school system, or set of laws, or tax and spending regime, or monetary policy wrong, and turn it on -- certainly bad things happen, but how do you know? There is nothing that reads out on meters, there are no explosions or red-hot smoking wiring. You would indeed have to rely on our collective ability to be honest with ourselves about whether our social institutions are working, and if there is one characteristic of our species that stands out as much as our egoism, it is our ability and tendency to bullshit ourselves.
---------
* My favorite being the sarcastic "fish needs a bicycle" version: "If they can put a man on the Moon, why not all of them?"
** (c) Salman Rushdie.
> * My favorite being the sarcastic "fish needs a bicycle" version: "If they can put a man on the Moon, why not all of them?"
Reminds me of an old joke. A Ukrainian farmer runs up to his neighbor. "Danylo, Danylo, the Russians have gone to the moon!"
Danylo is shocked! "All of them?"
"No, no, just one." His neighbor says.
"Why do you bother me with this?" Danylo says, bitterly disappointed.
I like it! Did you hear the one about the man who ran across Red Square shouting that the Premier is a moron? He was given 12 years: 2 for insulting the Premier, and 10 for revealing state secrets.
Holmes and Watson are camping. Watson wakes up and sees Holmes is in his bedroll staring at the sky. "What do you think this means Watson?"
Watson thinks a moment. "Well Holmes, when I look up at the stars I think about our insignificance in the universe. How small the earth is and how small we are on the earth. All the billions of years that came before us and will come after. And yet our lives are still important. We still live and love and die. For all our insignificance our lives still have meaning."
"Watson you idiot" Holmes says. "It means someone stole our tent!"
Good one 😃
Also nicely put. I think this summarizes well the problem with High Modernism: it works for some very specific things (machine type things with good feedback) and works very, very badly for other things (organic complex adaptive system type things without good feedback), but HM's successes in the first field encourage one to expect success in the latter fields. Since humans don't like to admit failure without Nature giving them a clear smack on the nose, those latter types of failures just get those failing to argue endlessly and bloodily that they didn't fail.
You know, there's been a lot of debate about whether what happened on January 6th was a riot or an insurrection, but I'm all for calling it the 1/6 Insurrection, since, after all, if it wasn't exactly an insurrection we can at least agree it was 1/6th of one.
Maybe Greer would get more traction if he wrapped these observations in a Planet-of-Cops-style diatribe. Call it Planet of Karens. What do we want? To talk to the manager!
""in 2012, four years into the crisis there were more cell phones and cars per person in Spain than in the US ..."
Spain had a youth unemployment rate of 50% in 2012.
Seriously, this argument is so FUCKING STUPID that it invalidates the whole line of reasoning that is built upon it. Gurri is a flaming moron who should not be taken seriously.
I don't know when this halcyon stable past with every soul trusting the confident High Modernist Establishment is supposed to be. Certainly hasn't been within the past half century, by personal recollection. Was it in the 80s? Hmm...President Teflon is telling me the government is not the solution, it's the problem, Nuclear Freeze marches, nope. Was it in the 70s? Hmmm....The Pentagon Papers, We Shall Overcome, marches against Tricky Dick's war, nope. Was it in the 50s, maybe, Ward 'n' June Cleaver? Oh dear, we have railroad strikes, "I have here in my hand a list...," the government is lying to me about communist spying (either way), so nope. Maybe in the 30s, the great awesome New Deal in which we all believed? Except you'd have to be deeply ignorant of history to think any such thing.
I think this review basically took Gurri's thesis and applied the American experience of the last 5 years and said: it doesn't match up perfectly. Thats understandable because Scott is American. This falls a bit into a "USA=World" fallacy that disproportionately affects Americans. You guys are like 5% of the planet's population, and you are not representative at all. In Latin America for instance, moderate politicians are the center, while left and right wing authoritarians are fanning the flames of revolt. The Middle East is also a good example, as often they don't match up to the right-left debates. I recently read "The toxoplasma of rage", and I really think that there are some elements of that in here. The incentives are to be in the border! AOC is even trying to be border by wearing that dress IMO
"Mostly young, mostly university-educated, mostly part of their countries' most privileged ethnic groups. Not the kind of people you usually see taking to the streets or building tent cities."
Well, in America these are the people I always associated with protesting. The tent-building was new, perhaps it was due to improvements in camping equipment?
"in 2012, four years into the crisis there were more cell phones and cars per person in Spain than in the US"
I strongly doubt the "more cars" thing.
"They had cradle-to-grave free health care, university educations, and they were near the top of their society's class pyramids."
When the government taxes you 1$ and gives you a coupon for something worth 1$, you might feel like you got back a lot less than 1$. This can be the case for healthcare and especially for education. Some people find education a ticket to a high-paying career, others just see themselves with the same job at age 23 as their Dad got when he was 19 and didn't need a degree. That doesn't feel like "progress."
I read it, thought it was a pretty quick and easy read given the number of pages (it's generously typeset), and also thought there was some valuable advice for people who, whether they admit it or not, are part of the "elite" class (be humble and don't try to BS people for their own good).
But I took issue with a couple of things. First, Gurri made a big deal out of the ability of protests like the Arab spring to overthrow entrenched dictators, and really tried to argue that this was a unique phenomenon enabled by the information "tsunami". But people have been overthrowing entrenched dictators for at least a couple centuries! Russ Roberts briefly brought this up when he interviewed Gurri on EconTalk, and Gurri just kind of dismissed it by saying that those uprisings were different. But were they? I don't know enough detailed history to say, but I felt like he needed to address that in way more detail than he did.
My second critique is that Gurri claims that technocratic elites pretty much always failed to deliver on their promises but since they controlled the flow of information, the bulk of people never realized it. I think that's pretty condescending. The people in power might be able to cover up failures happening half a world away with the help of a sympathetic media, but if middle-class life sucked throughout the middle third of the 20th century, not even an army of Walter Cronkites would be able to hide that fact. Gurri cites a lot of the usual examples of technocratic failure to bolster his case (and believe me, I'm temperamentally sympathetic to that perspective), but I kept thinking of this ACS post
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-weyl-on-technocracy
I suspect that American and Western institutions more broadly have actually become less competent and effective. The democratization and rapid spread of information might exacerbate it, but that's not the root cause.
People have been overthrowing dictators for centuries, but the contagion effect of the Arab Spring seemed different. The "look how easy it is to topple a dictator" seemed like a new thing. And powers like North Korea and China are very focused on controlling social media, and I assume this is because it is believed to be potentially destabilizing. Even in Tunisia they quickly passed laws against criticizing politicians and they have jailed bloggers. The nice effect of democratic leaders there have been that even though the economic situation in Tunisia is worse than before the revolution, there is no dictator to topple. Overthrowing you democratically elected government is less satisfying. But of course people were overwhelmingly supportive at first when the president dissolved parliament.
1848 was also contagious. And 1989.
Gurri calls our current government a kind of "zombie democracy". The institutions of the 20th century - legislatures, universities, newspapers - continue to exist. But they are hollow shells, stripped of all legitimacy. Nobody likes or trusts them. They lurch forward, mimicking the motions they took in life, but no longer able to change or make plans or accomplish new things.
This sounds to me like the institutional equivalent of tech debt. Decisions were made; perhaps they were made for expedience, or perhaps they were intended to be robust… but now the outcomes of those decisions has ossified and the institutions are stuck, unable to change or make things better.
"In Spain, the previous forty years had seen the fall of a military dictatorship, its replacement with a liberal democracy, and a quintupling of GDP per capita from $6000 to $32000 a year - "in 2012, four years into the crisis there were more cell phones and cars per person in Spain than in the US". The indignado protesters in Spain had lived through the most peaceful period in Europe's history, an almost unprecedented economic boom, and had technologies and luxuries that previous generations could barely dream of."
An extremely similar dynamic went on in Chile during 2019 (which I guess was too late to be included in the book). During October 2019, there were massive/violent protests all over the country involving widespread destruction of private and public property (most notably, 20 metro stations were pretty much burned to the ground in one night).
Given the scale of the protests you’d think that the this was a country with a long track record of poor economic outcomes. You’d be mistaken, though. Over the preceding 30 years per-capita GDP increased three fold, poverty went down from 45% to 10%, schooling increased, access to university increased, there was a peaceful transition from a dictatorship to a democratic government, and a large etc.
Over the past decade, public discourse has turned against the “old order,” blaming all societal ills on the "rampant neoliberalism" that has dominated Chilean economic policy over the past 30-40 years. All the accomplishments have been swept aside, often by the very politicians involved who lead the country during these decades.
Now Chile is in a very worrisome course to changing its constitution (something that has a very poor track record in Latin America) and throw out the window all the institutions that have made rapid economic progress possible. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
How could something like this happen in Latin America’s most successful nation? There are aspects of the problem that are particular to Chile, no doubt, but I think a large part of the phenomenon is connected to the rise of social media, very much in line with Gurri’s argument.
From what I could observe in Chile, I’ve developed a two-component pet pet theory. First, before social media, politicians would get very constant feedback from their peers (who were relatively sane) and infrequent feedback from voters. Since the political equilibrium was one friendly to a pro-market economic policy, and since economic numbers were strong, everyone on either side of the isle was forced to choose between holding reasonably market-friendly views, or risk being excommunicated. Twitter obliterated this equilibrium. With it, politicians started to get realtime feedback from the median voter and figured that they would do better by catering to their demands. The problem, however, is that the median voter is a paranoid, innumerate, ignoramus (see The Myth of The Rational Voter), so it’s no wonder that the output of the new political equilibrium is a bunch of insane policies.
Second, since social media rewards populist pandering, not only does it force incumbent politicians into a race to the bottom in terms of the quality of public debate, it also forces the system to select the relatively unscrupulous. That the quality of public debate has gone down over the past decade, in Chile and elsewhere, I think is widely agreed. To my mind, this is partly because with social media, democracy became worst at selecting decent politicians.
Anyway. I don’t mean to rant. I just really enjoyed the post and feel like the recent developments in Chile lend credence to Gurri’s theory.
> There haven't been many big viral protests lately except Black Lives Matter and the 1/6 insurrection, and both seemed to have a perfectly serviceable set of specific demands (defunding the police, decertifying the elections).
...this is sarcasm, right? Right?
Minneapolis currently has a ballot initiative to make "defund the police" happen. The actual law it would enact has specific provisions, empowering the city council to do some things and requiring it to do others. The *description* that's actually on the ballot-- written by the city council-- is so vague about what the measure actually does that there were lawsuits and a court ruling to throw it out.
And 1/6-- look, I don't mind calling it an "insurrection", but *there was no plan* and no realistic scenario where it led to Trump remaining in office.
Gurri's title and analysis would seem to owe something to Ortega's "The Revolt of the Masses," a brilliant analysis of the situation before WWII. The major trends we see now bearing fruit were mostly predicted by Sr. Ortega about a century ago.
I don't know why this riled me, but... "boffins"? Really? That's almost exclusively a British usage and it's distracting in this context. "Technocrat" and "nerd" (thanks a lot, Taleb) are near-synonyms that are much more widely understood and still reasonably neutral.
Maybe cause British words sound cooler than merican ones? I mean, just compare "bloke and dude" or "mate and buddy"...or "bruv and bro" ... there's definitely something about these British, innit?...🤔😎
> It's like that thing where someone who warned about the coronavirus on March 1 2020 was a bold visionary, but someone who warned about it on March 20 was a conformist bandwagoner
Surely this is a typo for January or February? The Wuhan lockdown was international news on January 23, and my university (not in China) sent its first mass-email about covid on January 24. I was warning everyone I could to prepare for the pandemic in early February. "The World Health Organization on [March 11] declared the rapidly spreading coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, acknowledging what has seemed clear for some time" https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/11/who-declares-the-coronavirus-outbreak-a-pandemic/
On George Washington, see "Henderson and Gochenour on "Presidential Greatness" - Econlib" https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/03/henderson_and_g.html
Basically, Washington was a big landowner, and the British policies of not expanding West limited the value of his holdings. The American insurrection was rather profitable for him.
I think part of what's happened is the internationalisation of the left/right tribes. Now that everyone everywhere is connected by the internet, leftists in the US feel more connected with leftists everywhere else in the world than they do with rightists in their own country. And the same with rightists. Even if they're losing elections or their demands are not being heard in their home country, there are other countries - other parts of the leftist/rightist online communities - where they are succeeding. And this motivates them and spurs them on.
In the early days of social media, these tribes had not yet solidified and worked their way through the internet. People were confused and unified enough to just revolt against the great something-or-other. Now we've reverted back to good old fashioned tribalism, albeit in a more internationalist way.
A possible complication to the "things are different now" narrative: you say
> When Martin Luther King marched on Washington, he built an alliance of various civil rights groups, unions, churches, and other large organizations who could turn out their members. He planned the agenda, got funding, ran through an official program of speakers, met with politicians, told them the legislation they wanted, then went home. The protests of 2011 were nothing like that. They were just a bunch of people who read about protests on Twitter and decided to show up.
I don't know enough history to confirm, but in Malcom X's autobiography he disagrees with that, he says the mercy on Washington was originally decentralized and just a lot of people being collectively angry, and that MLK et al took it over/coopted it to make it more palatable. I think he makes it sound like the powers that be basically inserted the ultimate "leaders" to temper the protests.
I guess "a protest can be taken over by a charismatic leader" might still not be viable today, but it feels pretty different then the protest being created by that person.
I'd also argue there's an optimistic side to Gurri's argument that Modernism's failures used to be covered up, because it means that government and society aren't necessarily failing or even doing worse than they have in the past. Our information environment has just changed.
I think an examination of history at least provides some evidence of that being true. Despite the fears around Trump and 01/06, FDR and LBJ, for example, both discussed ballot fraud as if it was commonplace enough to be a nuisance and still accomplished incredible things in a time of general faith in politics and government
Echoing some other comments, I'm surprised you think the revolt of the public is totally over and in America subsumed into the party system. I think the revolt of the public is alive and well, but that elites have become much more adept at coordinated messaging since 2014.
1) the CDC and FDA are given middling trust by rationalist types, privileged, educated, with high expectations, and noticing every institutional failure and mistake. The less educated still have highly varying degrees of mistrust in these institutions, but the ability of that mistrustice spread has been corralled over the course of the pandemic.
2) media companies have reduced the "Rho" of anti-establishment "nihilism" through better coordinated efforts and censorship. This development pushes quite hard against Gurri's thesis. This doesn't mean however that the epistemological anarchy is over, but simply that some forms of it have been temporarily reigned in.
3) the next fight is more likely to be between incumbent institutions and novel institutions, made possible through self-selection into novel institutions.
The problem with mocking a "press Miracle Button" scenario is that sometimes there -is- a miracle button.
I mean, while universal health care is not a perfect solution - see the grumbles that the UK and Canada have with theirs - the US -could- have it too if it would just enact it. It's the blocks built into our political system which have prevented that, and this has been going on for over 70 years now on this particular issue.
Also, homelessness. I keep seeing articles about how the most cost-effective way of dealing with homelessness is to just give them small apartments, and that this is working in a few places trying it (was it Reno?). Maybe this is rebuttable, but I've never seen it either rebutted or widely enacted. Is this a miracle button? I don't know, but I'd like to see the question raised.
New York City spent 3.2 billion on homelessness.[1] Estimates of the homeless population vary widely, using a high estimate from one group of 80,000[2], that divides to 40,000$ per homeless person.
1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-citys-spending-on-homeless-hits-3-2-billion-this-year-11558562997
2. https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/#:~:text=people%20are%20homeless%3F-,In%20a%20city%20of%20more%20than%208.3%20million%20people%2C%20nearly,or%20in%20other%20public%20spaces.
Well, speaking as one of the "blocks" -- I would cheerfully shoot anyone who proposed nationalized universal health care in the US -- I'm pretty happy we exist.
Who needs democracy when you have murder?
You're going to need to stock up on bullets.
Reading the review, it seems that this book is classic punditry:
1: The thesis predicts some things correctly, but then other things fail the test
2: Treats some modern events as if they are novel and driven by a "new normal" when in fact they have occurred many times before in the past in ways similar and different (see British Civil war, 1848, 1968, Iran Revolution etc... A few revolts during Roman Republic times come to mind as well)
3: Treats the changing optics and visibility (rants of bloggers reaching thousands vs rants in a local bar reaching two drunk guys) as a change in the actual underlying factors (for example, social unrest occurred when the main form of public communication was stone tablets)
4: The new distrust of "High Modernism" seems a bit paradoxical. The solutions that are often requested are also versions of High Modernism. Much like ancient revolts occurred because natural disasters were considered proof that the king was impious, the illegitimacy of the elite does not mean illegitimacy of the system.
5: Assuming ACX correctly conveyed the analysis of the Arab Spring, then not only was the analysis lacking, it also seems very much distorted by a western frame of mind.
It seems to me that the social mechanisms that might alleviate or fix some of these societal ills are broken because of the large tech monopolies.
If you turn your communications infrastructure into slot machines, silly behaviour is rewarded. Rage clicks are a draw. If it pays to be stupid, some people will be very stupid. Grifters will proliferate.
If we were to shut down or properly these companies that refuse to act ethically, we would solve many of our problems.
>>It's like that thing where someone who warned about the coronavirus on March 1 2020 was a bold visionary,<<
Coronavirus Will Kill 20 Million Or More
March 3, 2020
https://link.medium.com/sdPS6OvYHjb
Does this make me an "almost bold" visionary?
BTW, 4.7 million persons have died from Covid-19 and this pandemic is certainly not over.
Democracies get the leaders the people deserve. I really don’t think it’s much more complicated than that.
I am 73. I have lived through many of the past prophesied events from: I like Ike..,featuring only blue collar, white people, political cartoon commercials...; to the dogs and water hoses of white southern justice..; to ‘why the fuck are we in Viet Naam, man?’..; the Black Panthers.., Chicago 7.., or 8.., or 9...but still no power.
I’ve lived through the breakin’ of Nixon..; to the movie actor calling out the national guard on college campuses; and his wife eventually running the country. Lived through ‘I cannot keep my dick in my pants’ Kennedy..; through ‘I cannot keep my dick in my pants’ Clinton..; to ‘Why are we invading Iraq?’..; to ‘Ok, now we still do not know why we are invading Iraq’.., again..; through ‘now we are calling Jordanians Palestinians”, why?
The only question: Can the Republic a.k.a., the Union of States survive?
The answer is No.
The Union will not survive.
The reason is simple:
The BDS movement is an advanced militarized invasion of the U.S. by those who desire the second rise of The Ottoman Empire.
I don't think you give Gurri enough credit for popularizing the theory that mainstream / traditional institutions have had their sense of legitimacy greatly reduced, and that this is a result of the Internet (which is also leading to the popularization of fringe narratives, and in general totally reshaping our epistemic commons).
Even if he got some details or implications wrong, these are super important trends which are still not appreciated well enough. People do worry about the effect of social media on society but the focus is often on the 'big evil corporations manipulating us' angle without enough appreciation for effects that flow from the structure of the Internet.
Well that's a bummer. I requested this book and was looking forward to reading it.