Some highlights of my weekly reading. Most Palestinians Don’t Want Hamas Rule, Poll Shows by Matthew Petti, Reason, June 13, 2024. Excerpt: The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) released its latest poll data from the West Bank and Gaza on Wednesday. It turns out that Palestinians are unhappy with all of the current options—including the Biden administration’s plan for international governance of Gaza. The last Palestinian election was held in 2006. Although no party won a majority, Hamas had the largest bloc in parliament, with 44 percent of the votes. The Bush administration encouraged Palestinian security officers to launch a coup d’etat against Hamas, which led to a Palestinian civil war. Since then, Hamas has ruled Gaza and Fatah has ruled the West Bank, both as one-party states. If parliamentary elections were held today, most Palestinians wouldn’t vote for either option. Hamas would get 32 percent of the vote, Fatah would get 17 percent of the vote, and a full 50 percent would either sit out of the election or vote for a third party. The survey showed similarly abysmal turnout rates in a presidential election—with one twist. If the former guerrilla leader Marwan Barghouti were allowed to run, he would handily defeat both the Hamas and Fatah candidates. Barghouti has been imprisoned by Israel since 2002 for his role in several attacks on Israelis, which he denies ordering. Since then, he has said that he accepts the pre-1967 borders of Israel and called for “peaceful popular resistance.” But: That said, when PCPSR asked Palestinians what the best path to independence was, 54 percent said “armed struggle,” as opposed to 16 percent who supported peaceful resistance and 25 percent who supported negotiations. It was a drop from December 2023, when 63 percent chose armed struggle.   Documenting Communism (Part I) by Charles Palm, Defining Ideas, June 12, 2024. So many excerpts that it’s hard to choose. Read the whole thing. Documenting Communism (Part II) by Charles Palm, Defining Ideas, June 12, 2024. Excerpt: Eighteen million people, out of a population of a hundred million adults, in those fifty or so years, passed through the Gulag, and millions perished. It was a pervasive part of Soviet life, and seeing how it was managed would provide insights into how Soviet communism itself worked. We got the full range of documentation: secret police records, policy memoranda and minutes of meetings, laws, decrees, judicial rulings, regulations on camp administration and operations, lists of prisoners, budgets, reports of the vast industrial enterprises operated by the Gulag administration, data of hunger strikes and mass rebellions, and documents on camp culture, education and health. We got records documenting every aspect of the Gulag: three million pages.   The Tragedy and Triumph of The Killing Fields by Bradley J. Birzer, Law & Liberty, June 14, 2024. As far as we know (and historians are still trying to document these things), there was no more intense genocide in the twentieth century than that committed by the Khmer Rouge. Though reported numbers vary, the Khmer Rouge murdered anywhere from 25% to 47% of the seven million-strong Cambodian population in the three years it ruled. As the Khmer Rouge openly stated: “All we need to build our country is a million good revolutionaries. No more than that. And we would rather kill ten friends than allow one enemy to live.” The U.S. Cricket Team’s Guide to Winning at Everything by Robert Tracinski, Discourse, June 14, 2024. The joke that immediately made the rounds after the surprise U.S. win in Dallas is that Pakistan didn’t lose to “India-B” (one of the Indian national cricket teams), they lost to “India H-1B.” India vs. Pakistan is the most intense rivalry in cricket, fueled by the geopolitical rivalry between the two countries. It’s a bit like the Yankees vs. the Red Sox, but with nuclear weapons. The U.S. cricket team is dominated by Indian immigrants who are here on H-1B visas, awarded to skilled workers, particularly in the tech industry.   (0 COMMENTS)

Western countries frequently complain that Chinese firms do not innovate, rather they copy western ideas and technology.  So how does the West respond when Chinese firms actually do innovate? Nicholas Welch and Kevin Zhang have an interesting article on the US response to innovation in the Chinese electric vehicle industry: Since Chinese EV manufacturers “poach” Western designers, many people might assume that only the Chinese are stealing product ideas and intellectual property. But in the world of EVs, we’re actually starting to see the Chinese innovate (out of competitive necessity) and Western EV manufacturers starting to “borrow” stale Chinese designs. . . . I think the real rationale for the tariffs is that the US EV industry — and the Japanese and Korean automakers that have US manufacturing operations — just doesn’t have very competitive offerings on the market. Therefore, the US has made the strategic decision to prioritize building a competitive EV industry at the expense of the American consumer in the short-term. Adam Tooze has an excellent article explaining that the world has seen an unexpectedly rapid growth in green energy over the past few years, almost all due to China: China’s huge surge in renewable energy, above all in solar power, actually puts us on track for the first time to meet these objectives. As Ember reports it has taken experts around the world by surprise: Each year the IEA has upgraded predictions: from 2021 to 2022 to 2023 the IEA’s accelerated case scenario predicted that 2023 annual additions would be 218 GW, 257 GW, and 406 GW, respectively. With recent updates from China, the actual additions for 2023 are 444 GW according to BNEF. To put the scale of additions in 2023 into context, annual additions of solar capacity had not broken 200 GW per year until 2022, which itself was a record year. Having shattered all previous experience of renewable power rollout, China’s huge surge in solar now actually puts us within striking distance of achieving a net zero path, driven by green electric power. . . . What we are witnessing is the most rapid take-up of a significant energy technology in history. Was China praised for this innovation?  Just the opposite: The response of Western politicians? Protectionism. Of course there are complex motives. They need to build coalitions to sustain the energy transition. They are worried about the CCP regime in China. They want to escape extreme dependence on imported sources of energy (though of course in the renewable space it is capital equipment not energy they are importing). But the more basic question is simply this. Are Western government and societies willing to prioritize the energy transition if it is not their drama, not their success story? Or, if the PV panels and the electric vehicles are from China, do other interests take priority? One of the most impressive examples of Chinese innovation is the social media site TikTok.  How did the US government respond?  By banning the app.  We are also doing all we can to stop innovation in China’s computer chip industry. I see a certain ambivalence in Western attitudes toward China.  We don’t want China to be a highly successful technology superpower, because that supposedly threatens our national security.  We don’t want China to be a non-innovative middle income country that merely borrows technology from the West, because that supposedly threatens jobs in our less dynamic industries. We seemed happiest with China when it was a highly inefficient low income country with its people living on the edge of starvation, cut off from the rest of the world.  North Korea with a billion people.  China’s not likely to accommodate our wishes, nor should it. There is also a reluctance to acknowledge Chinese achievements in science, despite the fact that by some highly respected measures they are among the world leaders in scientific achievements.  Nationalism distorts our view of the world. PS.  Reason magazine has an excellent article on Chinese innovation.  They point out that estimates of Chinese intellectual theft are essentially worthless (although it undoubtedly occurs quite often.)  There’s also this: The final piece in the “we wuz robbed” argument is the claim that Chinese companies “steal” the I.P. of their American partners in joint ventures. China’s prowess at the negotiation table is undeniable, and it wields its bargaining power aggressively to trade access to Chinese markets for learning. Yet the American companies that claim to be victims enter into these agreements freely and rarely come out net losers. These U.S. businesses have raked in trillions in sales and pocketed hefty profits—a testament to their ability to navigate the competitive landscape. The hawks vastly overestimate the value of any I.P. that can actually be stolen. Clueless about the technologies that most concern them, the hawks fixate on the blueprints without appreciating the craftsmanship required to bring them to life. After all, the secrets of technological innovation aren’t hidden. The recipes for making microchips have been available in university libraries for almost 70 years, but building them takes far more than just following instructions. (0 COMMENTS)

It is strange that there should be a Flag Day, which is today June 14. That’s in the United States. I don’t know of another country in the (more or less) free world where such a day exists, although governments have many other ways to inspire national pride and obedience. A flag can represent a group or an abstract ideal. If it identifies a private group, like an association or a company, it is innocuous. It is different when it represents a public group of which some members are forced to belong. Except for the rulers of the group and their favorites, the flag then represents a forced identity and some service obligations. Nazi flags at official events or official flags in the old American South were examples. An individualist would despise this sort of flag. Flag Day was proclaimed by the progressive Woodrow Wilson in 1916, a bit like the Pledge of Allegiance was invented in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a socialist who preached that Jesus was too. Schoolchildren were long obliged to salute the flag and recite the pledge of allegiance: American exceptionalism, at least in the Western world. A few decades after Woodrow Wilson’s proclamation, the Supreme Court fortunately ruled that the First Amendment prohibited American governments from imposing such professions of faith. A flag attached to a territory, typically a national flag, can also symbolize an ideal. Many Americans look at their flag that way. Woodrow Wilson believed that the Stars and Stripes represented “liberty and justice.” His conception of liberty of justice was obviously not shared by everybody, including the victims of eugenics, which was first legislated under his governorship in New Jersey. The only way an official flag can be truly representative of everybody in a territory is to represent a common ideal, shared by everybody. A common ideal necessarily excludes victims of public discrimination or exploitation. From a libertarian or classical liberal perspective, a national or territorial flag can be respectable only if it symbolizes an ideal of equal liberty. We should not expect people exploited or discriminated against by their government to sheepishly worship the latter’s flag. But many do, which points to what Bertrand de Jouvenel called “the mystery of civil obedience” (see his On Power). A number of hypotheses have been proposed to solve this mystery, from a habit of a species (probably genetically wired) to government propaganda and resistance as a problem of collective action. The ideal of equal liberty for everyone is not easy to achieve. In his Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative, James Buchanan presents this ideal as a hope and a faith, even if we know since Adam Smith that an autoregulated social order of equally free individuals is possible and conducive to general prosperity. One danger is nationalism, which is what most territorial flags try to fuel. At the other extreme, too much diversity can exclude the possibility of common values necessary for the maintenance of a liberal society. For example, imagine two religious sub-groups of individuals who worship respectively god A and god B, and believe that their god wants them to kill infidels. The set of common values would be the null set, and equal liberty impossible. There is in America and in many Western countries a memory of, or a hope for, the ideal of individual liberty (and property), which alone can efficiently prevent a continuing clash between individuals and their beliefs, preferences, and lifestyles. Finding a national or territorial flag that unambiguously conveys this ideal is not an easy quest. ****************************** (0 COMMENTS)

Here’s a thought experiment that recently occurred to me that I’d like to run by you, dear EconLog readers. I think the intuitive reactions one might have to this thought experiment might do a lot to clarify how one conceives of justice.  Suppose you live in a world where there is a military draft. In addition, let’s stipulate that a military draft is unjust. (If you’re in favor of a draft and find yourself resisting the thought experiment on those grounds, just substitute the draft for some other policy you would consider unjust.) However, not every citizen is eligible for the draft. Only half the population can be drafted. Let’s say the basis for who is eligible is something completely arbitrary – those who were born on even numbered days are eligible to be drafted, while those who are born on odd numbered days are exempt from the draft.  Let’s say that ending the draft is outside the Overton window – there is no realistic chance this policy can be revoked. However, you are in the unique position of being able to modify the draft with some kind of executive order. You can’t repeal it, but you can make it so those born on odd days become eligible for the draft. Assume nothing else would change if you did so – so for example, if you expand the draft, assume that twice as many citizens will actually get drafted, so nobody with an even numbered birthday sees their chances of being drafted lowered as a result.    So here’s the question – what is the right thing to do?  Should the draft be expanded, on the grounds that those born on even days have been treated unfairly by being subject to an unjust policy that other citizens don’t face? That is, should you pull the policy lever that increases the number of people who face injustice, in order to equalize the distribution of injustice?  Or should you decline to expand the draft, on the grounds that the policy is unjust and if injustice can’t be repealed, as few people as possible ought to be subject to it? That is, should you allow the policy to apply unequally to citizens, in order to minimize the number of people who are subjected to injustice?    What do you think? (0 COMMENTS)

A few years ago, I answered the question in this post’s title in the negative: It seems to me that human progress is very uneven:Technology: Very rapid progressScience: Rapid ProgressPublic morals: Slow progressSports: Slow progressHuman personalities: No progressArt: No progress Now, I wonder if this judgment was too hasty.  Perhaps I was thinking about the issue in the wrong way.  In this post, I’ll suggest that I was mixing up stocks and flows, and that this distorted my view of the relative progress in these two fields. To be clear, I understand the argument for why science seems much more progressive than art.  Science has advanced enormously over the past few centuries, whereas many of the best-regarded artists in music, painting, poetry and the theatre did their work hundreds of years ago. But now I wonder if this is a sort of “apples and oranges” comparison.  It seems to me that a field can be judged either by its stock of achievements, or its flow of creativity.  Thinking back on my earlier post, I believe I was comparing the stock of scientific knowledge to the flow of artistic creativity.  Let’s reverse those criteria, using physics as a stand in for science.  What’s happened to the stock of artistic achievement, and what’s happened to the flow of scientific creativity? During the first 30 years of the 20th century, physicists discovered the structure of the atom.  They developed the theory of quantum mechanics.  They developed special and general relativity.  Undoubtedly there were many more discoveries, but those are some of the most important.  Fields of applied physics such as astronomy also saw important discoveries, including the structure of stars, the existence of galaxies and the expansion of the universe. Unless I’m mistaken, the past 30 years have not seen discoveries of this importance, although progress continues to occur in many areas.  Nonetheless, from a “flow of creativity” perspective, you could argue that physics is in decline, and that the greatest achievements occurred many years in the past.  Who is the Einstein of today? Now let’s consider artistic knowledge from a “stock perspective”.  I would argue that the art world is significantly ahead of where it was 100 years ago, and vastly ahead of where it was 200 years ago.  This progress has taken several forms: 1. New artists continually appear on the scene, adding to our stock of artistic creations.  Painting such as Picasso’s Guernica did not exist 100 years ago.  If you go back 200 years, then entire styles such as Impressionism and Post-Impressionism did not exist. 2. Our understanding of the field of art has improved relative to where it was in past centuries.  In the mid-1800s, Vermeer’s paintings existed, and were not completely unknown to art connoisseurs.  And yet most art experts lacked the ability to appreciate his greatness.  Today, even people with just an undergraduate course in art history can appreciate Vermeer.  Many more examples could be cited, especially as you move up in time toward the present.  Thus by 1890, Vermeer had been “discovered” and yet Van Gogh remained undiscovered. Goethe was one of the supreme minds of the early 19th century.  In his book entitled Italian Journey, he shows what a superbly educated European might have been able to know about painting back in 1816.  And yet I suspect that I know even more about painting than Goethe did.  That’s not because I have a better mind, rather it’s because I’m standing on the shoulders of giants, looking out over a field of knowledge that has expanded dramatically in the past 200 years.  As an analogy, a college sophomore majoring in physics might well know more physics than did Isaac Newton. So why the perception that art is regressing while science advances?  I see several possible reasons: 1. Lots of abstract art and atonal music makes no sense to most people.  But it’s also true that quantum mechanics and relativity make no sense to most people.  Given enough time and progress, any field of human endeavor will advance beyond the comprehension of most people. 2. But people are willing to accept models such as quantum mechanics and relativity, when told that these models underlie the technology that leads to things like lasers or iPhones.  For this reason, science is more respected than art.  But the fact that people who don’t understand either field accept one of the two as a matter of faith is hardly a good argument for the claim that science is more progressive than art. 3. People apply a double standard.  They judge art on a flow basis—how does the flow of good new art compare to the flow of good new art in previous eras?  In science, they look at the accumulated stock of knowledge, which is generally increasing.  That’s a double standard, favoring science. In my view, most of the traditional fields of art and science are well past their “golden age.”  Rapid progress tends to occur when new techniques open up possibilities for creativity—the knowledge equivalent of the Oklahoma land grab, when people rushed in to take land that was suddenly available.  In science, techniques like deciphering the genome have recently allowed big gains in our understanding of how and where ancient peoples migrated.  Areas of science without new techniques tend to eventually stagnate.  In art, painting has stagnated and filmmaking has taken over as the most vibrant visual art over the past 100 years. In my own field (macroeconomics), things seem to have regressed in recent decades.  Fewer economists seem to understand that low interest rates don’t imply easy money.  Fewer economists seem to understand that fiscal stimulus is largely ineffective due to monetary offset.  Fewer economists seem to understand that the Fed determines the long run rate of inflation.  Fewer economists seem to understand that trade barriers don’t improve the economy.  Macro is declining in both a stock and a flow sense. (0 COMMENTS)

  The most famous passage in Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is this: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Just a few sentences prior to it, though, Smith writes: Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that. When an animal wants to obtain something either of a man or of another animal, it has no other means of persuasion but to gain the favour of those whose service it requires. I wonder if Smith understated the ability of animals or, at least, the ability of cats, to engage in exchange. Check out this heart-warming video. I found plausible the idea that the cat thought he was exchanging something that someone else thought to be valuable, a leaf, for something he valued, a piece of fish. HT to my lovely wife, who is always on the lookout for sweet animal stories. (0 COMMENTS)

What is a poem? What is it meant to do? Who is it meant for? Poet Dana Gioia and host Russ Roberts explore these questions and more as they talk about the meaning of poetry. The conversation touches on many personal topics: death, loss, family, and our common humanity. At the beginning of each episode, Roberts mentions EconTalk’s tagline: “Conversations for the Curious”.  This conversation certainly fits the bill, as the two explore what poetry in various forms has meant to them and their families. Dana Gioia’s career as a writer, poet and critic has spanned several genres, including as a librettist for opera and jazz artists. He has done public advocacy work within the arts as the Poet Laureate for the state of California and as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Here’s an excerpt from Gioia on his powers as a poet: You know, when I was a young, ambitious writer at Stanford and Harvard and imagining how I’d make my mark, I had this very English-department notion of what a poem is, and its relationship to the great tradition and the history of ideas. But, nowadays, I think of what a poem is, is this instrument of language that you create, that is one-half a game and one-half a kind of spiritual exploration. But, the highest thing that you can do is to be useful, is to have these words be useful to people in the dilemmas of their actual lives. If you’re lucky, they will find uses for your poem that you don’t even imagine. But, I had a very odd thing where I wrote a poem and I had people talk about it in a totally different context. And I read the poem, and I realized it applied to that context equally. In fact, I rather liked that as much as I liked my own. Because, poems are like children. Once they’re out of the house, they do things that you didn’t imagine and you may not approve of. But, what you’re trying to do is to make them able to lead independent lives. I know that sounds very odd, but once my poems are published, I’m simply one of the readers. I probably may be the best-informed reader, but if they belong anywhere at all, they belong in the language, into the readers of the language. Gioia and Roberts agree on the power that poetry has within ordinary lives, whether for a writer or economist, mother or child, opera lover or pop-song-enthusiast. Do you agree? Their discussion reminded me of scraps of poetry I memorized when I was younger, as a high school or college student, and how they occasionally resurface in my daily life. As an enthusiastic choral singer over the years, many of these poems are songs and have managed to engrave themselves into my brain, almost by accident, but somehow remain, through their words and rhythms, relevant to emotions and thoughts that I have years later. What did you take away from Gioia and Roberts’ discussion? You may want to consider some of the questions below:   1 – Much of Roberts’ and Gioia’s conversation centers around poetry’s power to connect us with past and future generations. Russ quotes from a few line from Septimus in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia: We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew? Sophocles, as a great tragic playwright, was certainly a kind of poet. Archimedes and ancient doctors, however, belong to what we would characterize as science. What about other human forms of expression and ideas? Do scientific or economic ideas also sometimes serve in this role of poems, connecting human to human?   2 – Gioia describes poetry as something that is “meant to be heard.”  Historically, he points out, poetry has always been connected to song and performance. Perhaps this is true to some extent of any knowledge expressed in human language, it is more than just the visual representation on the page. Can ideas exist independent of discussion? To what extent is poetry a conversation as well as a performance?   3 – In the opening part of the conversation, Gioia reads a poem that he wrote, Meet Me at the Lighthouse. This is dedicated to his cousin, who died at a young age. It begins a discussion about the poem itself, which contains allusions to jazz, Yeats, and classical mythological topics, as well as references to the poet’s memory of his cousin. How do these allusions work together within the unit of the poem to evoke meaning? What do they express about Gioia himself, or his cousin?    4 – Gioia mentions the Latin word for poem is the same as its word for song, carmen. Modern popular music often functions like poetry. Is there a particular poem that has stuck with you throughout life? What was it about that poem that was so meaningful and why do you remember it? If the poem has a musical setting, how does that enhance it? What is it about the music that is necessary to the poem, or is it necessary at all? Does this apply equally to different genres and eras of musical poetry: J.S. Bach, opera, ancient epic poems, Bob Dylan, Taylor Swift (of the Tortured Poets Department), Kendrick Lamar?   Related podcasts  Dana Gioia on Learning, Poetry, and Studying with Miss Bishop, EconTalk Dwayne Betts on Beauty, Prison, and Redaction, EconTalk Cheryl Miller on Hertog and the Humanities, The Great Antidote Zack Weinersmith on Beowulf and Bea Wolf EconTalk   More to explore Shannon Chamberlain on The Freedom of Poets: Thomas Wyatt as a Character in Wolf Hall at the Reading Room and, related, Garth Bond’s The Freedom of Poets 2: Thomas Wyatt and Petrarch Sarah Skwire’s The Opportunity Costs of J. Alfred Prufrock at EconLib Sarah Skwire on Milton’s Poetry and Prose: From the Liberty Fund Rare Book Room at the Online Library of Liberty Confucius’The Shi King, the Old “Poetry Classic” of the Chinese at the Online Library of Liberty The Bard and The Professor: Adam Smith’s Influence on the poet Robert Burns at AdamSmithWorks Adam Smith Also Teaches Good Teaching at AdamSmithWorks The Imitative Arts: Some Fun With Adam Smith’s Artistic Opinions at AdamSmithWorks Ancient Perspectives on the Value of Poetry at the Reading Room The Poet as Intellectual: How the Romantics Took on Thomas Malthus at the Reading Room   Nancy Vander Veer has a BA in Classics from Samford University. She taught high school Latin in the US and held programs and fundraising roles at Paideia. Based in Marburg, Germany, she is currently completing a masters in European Social and Economic History at the Philipps-Universität Marburg. (0 COMMENTS)

Later this month is the 50th anniversary of the South Royalton, Vermont conference on Austrian economics. Liberty Fund asked Richard Ebeling, one of the attendees to write the long essay, and then two people who attended (Mario Rizzo and I) and one person who didn’t (Geoffrey Lea) wrote responses. Here’s an excerpt from my response: Like Richard Ebeling, I was excited to attend the first Austrian Economics conference in South Royalton, Vermont. My motivation was different from Richard’s. I didn’t regard myself as an Austrian economist, but I did find Friedrich Hayek’s work on the socialist calculation debate, and Ludwig von Mises’ work more generally, profoundly insightful and important. I was also a big fan of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, the first thing by Hayek that I had read. I had read Hayek and Mises in the late 1960s when I was a young undergraduate mathematics major at the University of Winnipeg. I never took a course in Austrian economics: all of my reading was on my own. In the fall of 1971, when I applied for the Ph.D. program at UCLA, I knew a lot about UCLA’s strong free-market orientation and was looking forward to taking classes from Armen Alchian, Harold Demsetz, and Sam Peltzman, the three UCLA economists whose work I had read. While I knew that none of them was an Austrian economist, I hoped that some of them would be sympathetic. So I took a chance on my application letter, writing, “I would like to be in a graduate program where, if I refer to Mises, people don’t assume that I’m mispronouncing the name of a childhood disease.” It worked, if you judge by the outcome: I was offered full tuition plus a 2-year teaching assistant position paying $440 per month for a 9-month year. That was more than this kid from rural Manitoba had imagined he could get and, more relevant, more than I was offered at my second choice, the University of Chicago. The person who had motivated me to get into economics was Harold Demsetz, whom I had met in January 1970, when he gave 3 talks at the University of Winnipeg. I was hooked on economics. Although I almost always took Demsetz’s advice—he was my dissertation advisor and my mentor—in this case I went against his advice. I told him that I had received an offer to attend the South Royalton conference at someone else’s expense, and the program looked interesting. The three main speakers were Murray Rothbard, Israel Kirzner, and Ludwig Lachmann. I had read, and been impressed with, much of Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State. Demsetz’s friend and colleague Ben Klein had assigned Israel Kirzner’s Competition and Entrepreneurship in his industrial organization class earlier that year. While I don’t recall Klein saying why he liked the book, I think one reason was that Kirzner rejected the idea that perfect competition had anything to do with perfection. I do remember that Ben liked the idea of dynamic evolving competition that Kirzner, and the Austrians in general, refreshingly brought to the economic discussion. So I was surprised that Demsetz discouraged me from going to the South Royalton event. He told me that, now that my course work was done, I should be digging into my dissertation immediately. But I needed a break after two intense years, and this “busman’s holiday” seemed like what the doctor ordered. I probably batted a thousand on Demsetz’s advice: taking it on every other issue and rejecting it on this one. The conference was well worth it. Here’s a link to Richard Ebeling’s leading essay, Mario Rizzo’s response essay, and finally my responses essay. Geoffrey Lea’s response is yet to come. Don’t miss the part in my essay about Frances Hazlitt’s comment to Milton Friedman. The people in the photo are, from left to right, Harry Watson, Milton Friedman, Jerry O’Driscoll, Jack High, and Richard Ebeling. Personal note: I had a major medical test yesterday. The results were negative; I never like the word “negative” as much as I do when I hear it from doctors. I was sweating the test on Monday and Tuesday morning and having the test Tuesday afternoon. Thus the absence of blog posts Monday and Tuesday. (0 COMMENTS)

Megan McArdle once again joins EconTalk host Russ Roberts to discuss the dangers of the left-leaning bias of Google’s AI to speech and democracy, if such a thing as unbiased information can exist, and how answers without regard for social compliance create nuance and facilitate healthy debate and interaction. McArdle is a columnist for The Washington Post, and is the author of The Upside of Down: Why Failing Well is the Key to Success. Often times when the dangers of AI are discussed, apocalyptic scenarios of human subjugation  or extermination, such as Terminator, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and 2001: A Space Odyssey are thought of. More realistically, some are concerned about the potential of AI to destroy jobs and dilute the meaning of art or make plagiarism easier. AI chatbots and companions are becoming mainstream- for instance, the main topic of this podcast: Google’s Gemini. McArdle’s concern surrounds how the left-wing bias of the companies at the forefront of AI development has bled into their creations, and the tangential impact on American free speech and democracy. McArdle’s initial examples of this are the factual inaccuracies of Gemini in the name of affirming a socially respectable position. The first case discussed involves Gemini’s artistic portrayal of the founding fathers, and other ethnically European historical figures, as nonwhite, which she admits is trivial. However, Gemini’s responses to text queries about gender affirming care were far more notable to McArdle. So, I asked it about gender affirming care, and in short order, Gemini was telling me that mastectomies were partially reversible. When I said, my aunt had a mastectomy for breast cancer is that reversible? It said, no, and I said, well I don’t understand. It seemed to understand that these were the same surgery, but then it delivered a stirring lecture on the importance of affirming and respecting trans people. It had clearly internalized part of our social rules and how we talk about this subject, but not all of them. The errors leaned in one direction, it was not making errors telling people conservative things that aren’t true, and to be clear no activist wants Gemini to tell people that mastectomies are reversible. It was acting like the dumbest possible parody of a progressive activist. McArdle notes that there are reasons for this that don’t involve bias, such as training the chatbot on social media sites such as Reddit, whose moderation leans left. Additionally, the AI doesn’t have the ability to detect certain limits to logical positions, and social rules. But this is an issue for McArdle as well. She sees this as indicative of speech suppression, where only one side of the political spectrum is allowed to be praised, and the other is only allowed to be demonized. Her example of this Gemini’s refusal to giving praise to right-wing figures like Brian Kemp, while doing the opposite for more controversial left-wing figures like Ilhan Omar. The danger in this to McArdle is that AI will teach people not to think in a complex manner and will answer queries analytically to keep the questioner in their ideological bubble. We have these really subtle social rules, and we apply them differently in different situations, we code switch. If I’m with my liberal friends, there are some issues where I’m like, you know what let’s just not have a conversation about that. The AI can’t do that, it’s like a toddler. That can go in one of two directions. The good direction is that Google understands it cannot enforce the subtle social rules of the Harvard faculty lounge, which is effectively what it had done. Google can just say we’re going to be willing to say that Mao is also bad, but we’re just not going to say, Donald Trump who is elected by half of the population is too awful, and you’re only allowed to say awful things about him. That’s a more open equilibrium. It’s a place that allows people to be more confronted with queries and the complexity of the world. Gemini often does a good job with that. I have been dumping on it for an hour, but it actually often does a good job of outlining where the nuance is. My nightmare is that instead, Google teaches Gemini to code switch, to know the person who’s asking the query, what bubble they want to live in, and will give them an answer that will please them. That is a genuinely disturbing future. In response to this, Roberts asks a fantastic question. Since search engines, in order to be useful, are discriminatory or biased by their very definition, what could an unbiased Google, or Gemini possibly mean? This question prompts Roberts to proclaim his pessimism, as the problem is larger than AI chatbots, and is centered around the very ideal of an unbiased search engine. This teaches people to not to decipher truth from varying information, instead people rely on the results they’re given, particularly those which align with their biases. This has a further detrimental trickle-down effect to democracy. To summarize, since search engines are biased by their nature, Roberts’ solution comes from users of search engines behaving more carefully and attentively. This is a conversation about AI, at least nominally, but it’s really a much deeper set of issues related to how we think about our past. History has been taught as great men do great things and let’s learn about what they were. The modern historical trend is partly a reaction against that, and I have no problem with that. The problem I have is the whole idea of unbiased history. What the heck would that possibly be? You can’t create unbiased history; you cannot create an unbiased search engine. Almost by definition if it’s to be useful it’s discriminatory. It’s by definition the result of an algorithm that had to make decisions…the problem for me culturally is that we have this ideal of unbiased search engine. That can’t happen, so we should be teaching people how to read thoughtfully…you start to get people not knowing what the facts are… they assume most things are true if they agree with them. This infantilization of the modern mind is the road to hell, this is going to be difficult for democracy. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two candidates we have in the United States are not what most people would call the two most qualified people. It points to something more fundamental. McArdle proposes a similar solution: A proliferation of people focusing less on social appeasement when difficult social questions are being answered, and more on finding nuance. Understanding the complexity within addressing problems like racial inequality is the root to finding solutions. A great new concept I just learned is people who are high decoupling versus low decoupling. High decoupling people abstract all questions from context and low decouplers answers questions in the social context in which they occur. What you need is a high decoupling system instead of one attempting to produce a socially desirable answer. No one is a perfectly high decoupler, but it gives you as much nuance as possible. To contrast Roberts’ pessimism, McArdle gives reason for the best-case scenario. She believes that negatives are sure to come from AI, similarly to how social media led to cancel culture. But human decency will triumph over this challenge. McArdle’s point is one defending liberal society. She views the attempts to fundamentally shift the social order away from enlightenment principles as failures, and the new social order attempting to shift the window of acceptable views seen by Google’s left-wing bias will fail as well. The spirit of human connection and conversation is strong enough to maintain productive discourse. So, I think that the long-term reason to be optimistic: is that these technological challenges are going to create a bunch of bad stuff. I can’t even imagine all of it. You can’t either. If you would ask me in 2012 to predict cancel culture from Twitter, I definitely would not have. But we are also actually fundamentally decent to each other over and over and over again, and we look for ways to be decent to each other…I actually believe that enough people want the things that really matter–which are the people you love, and creating a better world and free inquiry and science and all of those amazing human values…And so, I think at the end of the day, that will probably win if the AI’s don’t turn us into paperclips. Although this was a fascinating conversation, I finished the podcast unconvinced by McArdle that AI bias was a meaningful issue. At multiple points throughout the podcast, she would discuss a response from Gemini that displayed clear left-wing bias, and then go on to state that Google fixed the issue very quickly, even the same day. For example, she mentioned that Gemini does not say mastectomies are partially reversible anymore. The AI that told me that mastectomies were reversible, now doesn’t say that. It’s actually interesting how fast Google is patching these holes. Drawing from this, it seems like Google has a set of values it wants their AI to embody, and they’re just working out the kinks. Furthermore, the leap McArdle takes from this is drastic to say the least, “We are now saying that you can’t have arguments about the most contentious and central issues that society is facing.” Social media bias against right-wing people has been shown to be an unfounded claim and is by far not the biggest threat to free speech. There is a far better argument for social media companies failing to adequately regulate disinformation and false claims about vaccines and the 2020 election or inability to take action against harassment or right-wing extremism coming from their platforms. Similarly, to cancel culture, this is an overblown concern. The better place to focus in the pursuit of preserving free speech and expression does not come from social media companies banning people for hate speech. It comes in state legislatures banning forms of LGBTQ+ expression, such as drag, and Project 2025’s totalitarian and Christian nationalist aims to restrict speech contrary to conservative principles. This is far more important than Gemini refusing to write a love poem for Brian Kemp. Freedom is under attack in America, but it predominately comes from the far right, not Silicon Valley. McArdle’s argument also begs the question of to what extent corporations are responsible to entities other than their shareholders. Are fossil fuel companies obligated to shift their energy production to green sources in order to slow climate change? What about corporations’ responsibility to pay their workers a living wage even if it’s above equilibrium? Are building developers, such as those of the Grenfell Tower, responsible for installing sprinkler systems or building with safer materials, even if it is more expensive? If Silicon Valley is socially responsible to uphold the public square and the spirit of free speech, even if it negatively impacts their shareholders, then this principle of social responsibility should be expanded to all areas of corporate activities.   Related EconTalk Episodes: Megan McArdle on Internet Shaming and Online Mobs Ian Leslie on Being Human in the Age of AI Can Artificial Intelligence be Moral? With Paul Bloom Zvi Mowshowitz on AI and the Dial of Progress Marc Andreesen on Why AI Will Save the World   Related Content: Megan McArdle on Catastrophes and the Pandemic, EconTalk Megan McArdle on the Oedipus Trap, EconTalk Megan McArdle on Belonging, Home, and National Identity, EconTalk Akshaya Kamalnath’s Social Movements, Diversity, and Corporate Short-termism, at Econlib Jonathan Rauch on Cancel Culture and Free Speech, The Great Antidote Podcast Lilla Nora Kiss’ Monitoring Social Media at Law & Liberty   (0 COMMENTS)

I find the debate over the existence of a god intrinsically interesting. Among the many arguments that exist, one argument in favor of a god’s existence I find fairly clever is Alvin Plantinga’s modal ontological argument. I’m not going to get too into the weeds over the finer details of that argument here, but in very simplified and condensed form, it can be described as follows. After offering a definition of “god,” the argument simply starts with the singular premise that the existence of such a being is at least possible. From there, it utilizes modal logic to go through a series of steps to reach the conclusion that the existence of such a being is necessarily true. The argument is logically valid, and everything follows deductively from the fairly modest premise that god’s existence is merely possible. This means that to deny the conclusion of the argument, it becomes incumbent on you to dispute that first and only premise, and offer a positive argument that god’s existence is impossible.  One of the biggest counters to the modal ontological argument is to point out that there is a symmetrical argument that can be constructed to reach the opposite conclusion. That is, you can also start with the fairly modest premise that it’s simply possible that no god exists, and using the same logically valid steps, reach the conclusion that the non-existence of a god is necessarily true. In order to resolve this issue, one would need to propose some kind of symmetry breaker between these two arguments, such that we have some non-arbitrary reason to prefer one over the other. Philosophers and theologians have proposed a number of different symmetry breakers over the years – you can see a compilation and evaluation of them in this recently released paper, if you’re interested. Why am I bringing all this up? Well, recently I posted about how I find libertarianism and classical liberalism to be more focused on reciprocity than other political philosophies. I argued that Thomas Christiano’s argument for the authority of democracy based on the obligation to show proper respect to the judgment of your fellow citizens fails because the obligation he cites (were it to exist, which is far from clear!) is reciprocal in nature. As I put it there: Even assuming that placing one’s judgment above the judgment of others is an impermissible wrong, the situation is still reciprocal. If my fellow citizens say I must do as they have decided because if I don’t, I’m treating my judgment as superior to theirs and treating them wrongly, I can equally say that by trying to compel me to do as they’ve decided, they’re placing their judgment above my own, placing me as an inferior and treating me wrongly. The situation is reciprocal. I also argued that Yoram Hazony’s concerns about free trade undercutting the mutual loyalty among the citizens of a nation fails to get off the ground because of the same issue: After all, what Hazony invokes so often is the idea of mutual loyalty – and the thing about mutual loyalty is that it’s mutual. The obligation goes in both directions. So why would we say I’m failing to show Walter proper loyalty by buying from Carl? Why not say Walter would be failing to show proper loyalty to me, by insisting I buy from him despite the huge additional financial burden it would impose on me? Simply saying “mutual loyalty” does nothing to resolve this Like the modal ontological argument, both of these situations require a symmetry breaker before they can reach the conclusions their proponents seek. And that’s what I think classical liberal and libertarian thought help bring to the table by focusing on the reciprocal nature of these situations. Invoking symmetry isn’t a semantic stopsign, designed to end conversations. It’s an invitation to carry a conversation forward by pointing out that there is a further factor requiring attention.  In the comment section to my previous post, commenter Dylan also brought up the issue of symmetry breakers regarding externalities. Dylan points out that in many cases, people’s moral intuitions about a situation serve as a symmetry breaker. I brought up Ronald Coase’s insight about the reciprocal nature of externalities in my post – and Dylan described how widely held beliefs about particular cases will, for many people, break the symmetrical nature of the situation. As he put it: Take the classic externality of the polluting factory, the idea that I should pay to stop the factory from polluting (or pay to mitigate my exposure) just feels wrong on a fundamental level, even if that solution would win on efficiency grounds. I think this accurately describes how the vast majority of people would react to this situation. To tell someone “Well, why don’t you just pay that factory to install scrubbers if you’re so upset about their smoke and soot falling in your yard” just feels wrong. Most people have a strong reaction along the lines of “They shouldn’t be blowing soot on my house in the first place – why should I have to pay them to make it stop?”  I think that in a lot of cases, moral considerations are a source of symmetry breakers. To use an easy example, my desire that my house not be burned down interferes with Pyro Pete’s desire to burn down houses. Technically, we are imposing on each other in a reciprocal, symmetrical way. But I don’t think it’s a great moral mystery to work out what a symmetry breaker is in this circumstance. Arson is wrong, therefore my imposition on Pyro Pete’s wishes is morally justified in a way that breaks the symmetry.  Sometimes in situations where the moral obligation isn’t clear (or isn’t applicable), other sources of symmetry breakers exist. Sometimes social conventions and norms can serve as symmetry breakers. Or in the court system, one standard that’s sometimes used is the principle of the “least-cost avoider.” In this standard, if two parties are equally imposing on each other (in a way that doesn’t clearly violate some existing law or moral imperative), the responsibility to ameliorate the situation is given to whichever party faces the lowest cost of doing so. If changing the situation is a major imposition on me but only a minor inconvenience for you, then that serves as the symmetry breaker in these cases.  The libertarian and classical liberal focus on reciprocity and symmetry isn’t born of some desire to argue that all laws or interventions are always unjustified on the grounds that every situation is symmetrical. If that was the case, libertarians would be arguing that a law preventing Pyro Pete from burying down my house is unjustified – but I’ve yet to come across a libertarian in favor of arson! But libertarians and classical liberals are correct to point out that the issue of reciprocity and symmetry exist and are important issues deserving examination. Symmetry isn’t an insurmountable obstacle – but ignoring the issue isn’t justified. To the extent that libertarians and classical liberals keep this issue raised, they are doing public discourse a service.  (0 COMMENTS)