Here are my thoughts on the latest batch 0f Book Club comments.  Your words are in blockquotes; mine aren’t. Weir: If your ideology of unfreedom is open, uninfected by any vestige of tolerance, then you can’t pay lip service to some other ideology. If hierarchy is what you consciously aim at, then you can’t also delude yourself that you’re not a slave-driver. If equality is no longer an ideal to be striven after, then you openly call yourself the factory boss, and your nation a fortress. You abandon all pretence of Utopianism for hierarchy and regimentation. If the socialist dystopias hadn’t actually happened, I’d be inclined to agree with you.  Yet when we actually look at these regimes, especially their Marxist-Leninist version, Orwell’s story checks out.  Even today, the government of North Korea is officially ruled by the Workers’ Party of Korea, and energetically combines extreme hierarchy and regimentation with extreme utopianism.  Indeed, one of the strongest forms of regimentation is the demand that North Koreans loudly affirm utopianism in their dystopia. This is the implausible psychology of Orwell’s book, except that Orwell himself can’t maintain it from one sentence to the next. Straight away he slips back into the more believable and recognizable idea that these are “people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.” Not openly hierarchical. Glenn Greenwald: “No authoritarians believe they are authoritarians. No matter how repressive are the measures they support–censorship, monopoly power, no-fly lists for American citizens without due process–they tell themselves that those they are silencing and attacking are so evil, are terrorists, that anything done against them is noble and benevolent, not despotic and repressive.” Greenwald overstates.  Yes, many authoritarians mask their true aims.  Plenty of others, however, have been self-conscious and self-confessed.  Consider defenders of absolute monarchy like Sir Robert Filmer or the Catholic ultramontanists.  Franco called his regime “totalitarian” even though few historians agree: “A totalitarian state will harmonize in Spain the operation of all the capabilities and energy in the country, that inside the National Unity, the work esteemed as the most unavoidable must be the only exponent of the people’s will.”  And of course Lenin called for “Revolutionary-Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry.” Michael Barton: I recently read The Road to Wigan Pier, a book that was commissioned by a leftist book club. He was to travel to northern industrial England (mid 1930s) and report on the condition of the unemployed. The first part of the book is travelogue, a really gripping account of the people he encountered, employed and not. The second part contains his thoughts on the socialist project. Again, he says he is a socialist but has nothing but criticism for actual socialists and for their approach. It was so pronounced that the publishers inserted a Prologue in which they dispute the very book they commissioned. Quite right; I’ll be talking about Orwell’s strange socialist silence in a later post. John Alcorn: Was Gorbachev (the individual) a necessary cause of the end of the Soviet Union? If, say, Gorbachev had died in a car accident before he rose through the ranks, would “weak-kneed reform” have occurred anyway? Eventually, but it could have taken decades.  My understanding is that Gorbachev had already been passed over in favor of his short-lived predecessors.  If they survived a few years longer, Gorbachev could easily have been replaced by a youngish hard-liner (not Putin, presumably, but a Putin-esque figure). My non-expert understanding is that “standards of comparison” gradually became available to Soviet citizens — if only to “the Middle” — in the 70s and 80s, through more access to international travel, media, contraband. If this was the case, then the increase in exposure to western standards of comparison probably eroded Stalinist self-confidence and perhaps indirectly even made many of “The Low” aware that they were oppressed. As far as self-confidence goes, I’d say growing knowledge of the West was a minor factor compared to Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes and readmission of large numbers of former Gulag inmates back into the Party.  If you want to hold power, you keep the disillusioned as far from the levers of power as possible. (Moreover, cracks in the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe — for example, Solidarnosc in Poland — cast a shadow over long-term stability of the Soviet Union itself; perhaps especially in the Baltic republics.) There was little sign of resistance in the Baltics until Gorbachev let the Eastern European satellites go.  And ponder how Stalin would have handled Solidarity. Nicholas Decker: It always struck me that, if we accept the world’s conclusions about the fragility of kin ties and the effectiveness of propaganda as true, then the only thing that could end it would be a cataclysmic natural disaster – an asteroid impact, or a redux of the deccan traps. Thank heavens he wasn’t right about the pliancy of man’s minds. Even if this were right, I’d say that Orwell grossly underrated intra-Party factional conflict.  I’d expect that to destabilize most totalitarian regimes long before a civilization-disrupting asteroid strike. Dwarkesh: If I’ve inherited control of a traumatized dictatorship, and I want to turn it into a capitalist liberal democracy, how should I go about reforming things without causing things to fall apart like they did in the Soviet Union or Iraq? Amorally speaking, here’s my best guess.  Consider it a recipe, not an endorsement. Step 1: Purge known hard-liners en masse, without warning, Godfather style. Step 2: Swiftly liberalize the economy and civil society from this position of strength, while unequivocally affirming your monopoly on political power. Step 3: During the same period, open up your society to foreign business, tourism, media, NGOs, etc. Step 4: Once you’ve had 4-6 years of strong economic growth and rising international prestige, slowly relax your monopoly on power.  Always make it clear that you are acting out of the goodness of your own heart, not under pressure from the opposition. Step 5: After 15-20 years, you’re ready for your first competitive national election.  Put strong post-reform protection for your supporters into the constitution so they aren’t tempted to derail your plan. More Dwarkesh: I wonder how much of this [crimestop] is not about fear of thinking the wrong thing but just the failure of transfer learning which you write about elsewhere. Even in free societies, people are bad at grasping thoughts like, “If I believe X about A, I must also believe X about B to be consistent.” It would be interesting if our brains evolved to be bad at transfer to protect us from having heretical antisocial ideas in ancient hunter gatherer tribes. Very plausible.  In fact, I’d say failure of transfer is the main mechanism of thought control.  You only need crimestop to suppress the rare instances of socially disapproved transfer.  Thus, most Americans felt no need to use crimestop to suppress their knowledge of the contradiction between segregation and the Declaration of Independence, because few spontaneously noticed the contradiction.  You do need crimestop, though, to describe your society as a paradise of the workers and peasants while the peasants starve in plain sight, as they did under Stalin and Mao. More John Alcorn: Are Crimestop and cancellation simply distinct, local, emergent species of social desirability bias? I’d say they’re both outgrowths of Social Desirability Bias rather than “species” thereof.  Crimestop is a technique humans use to internally suppress their own socially undesirable thoughts.  Cancellation is a strategy activists use to punish other humans who express socially undesirable thoughts. If conformity is a relentless censorship mechanism, in the forum and even in the market, then can open societies endure? “Openness” is a matter of degree.  By world and historic standards, the West is still extremely open.  Indeed, I’d say openness is higher and conformity is weaker than when I grew up.  While political correctness was much milder in the eighties, religious and patriotic correctness were both stronger. What are effective countervailing mechanisms or institutions? Apathy and ADHD.  Most people barely care what other people think and say, and even the people who do care rarely care for long. How much bite does the institution of private property have as a bulwark against the dynamics of social desirability bias and social censorship? Enormous bite.  How many controversial websites could ever hope to receive government funding?  Private property is what allows diverse opinions to endure, using “diversity” in the non-Orwellian sense. (0 COMMENTS)

How to slow the recovery. The Biden plan should provide enough relief to carry the economy through the worst of the pandemic. One concrete example is the supplemental unemployment benefit, which Mr. Biden proposes to increase from $300 a week to $400. More important, the extra benefits will last at least through September, then phase out automatically as the labor market improves. Both changes are wise. (emphasis added) This is from Alan S. Blinder, “Biden’s Stimulus Hits All the Right Notes,” Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2021 (print edition.) The article is gated. With federal benefits of $400 per week, this translates into $10 an hour for a 40-hour week. That’s on top of state unemployment insurance benefits, which are typically somewhere between $250 and $500 per week. Take even the low end of $250 and that translates into $6.25 per hour for a 40-hour week. So that’s $16.25 an hour. Although unemployment benefits are subject to income taxation, they are not subject to payroll taxes. The employee’s share of payroll taxes is 7.65 percent. So to break even by taking a job, a worker getting $16.25 per hour for not working would have to get at least $16.25/(1 – 0.0765) = $17.60 for working. And if the worker wants to net at least, say, $3 an hour before tax (but after payroll tax) for working, he would have to be paid at least $20.84 for working. But that very fact means that a few million people, especially those making below $20 an hour, will take their time getting a job. That means that the labor market improvement that Blinder depends on, though it will happen, will be slower than otherwise precisely because of the extra $400 per week. Thus the title of this post. Blinder claims that this policy is wise; it is anything but. (0 COMMENTS)

By now, this idea is pretty widely accepted. But there’s somewhat more skepticism when dealing with shortages of important goods during an emergency. Consider these tweets: I’m not qualified to opine on the specifics of this issue.  But after all the missed opportunities of 2020, I’m skeptical of claims that society could not possibly be missing out on “no-brainers”. This long article discusses logistical problems in rapidly scaling up vaccine supplies: Take large original equipment manufacturers like 3M, for instance – they have as many as 5,000 direct suppliers, and each of those suppliers have their own suppliers. This results in quite large supply chain networks that extend all over the world – and it only takes one incident to disrupt these operations. Plus, many organizations don’t even know who is in their supply chain. This is what we saw earlier on with N95 masks, gowns and gloves. So what we have is a much more delicate or fragile supply chain for healthcare supplies, which really sets the stage for where we are now. Because the supply chain has become a much bigger factor, many of the components of the vaccine are subject to these same potential risks. These are genuine problems, but these are also exactly the sorts of problems that markets are good at addressing. Though Pfizer has already manufactured 20 million or so doses, Pfizer, Moderna and other vaccines are experiencing severe bottlenecks due to a lack of critical materials – including vials and rubber stoppers for the vials. How might China’s vast and highly flexible manufacturing sector respond to price signals for producing more of these supplies, say a 50-fold increases in vial and stopper prices?  Hint, here’s how they responded last spring to the mask shortage: Between March and May, China exported more than 50 billion face masks — a tenfold increase for total production last year, according to analysts Read that again.  In three months, China exported enough masks to give everyone in the world 6 masks, ten times their normal annual production. One mistake frequently made by non-economists, even non-economists that know far more about their own industry than economists do, is to underestimate all the margins by which supply can respond to market signals.  Almost nothing is “fixed” in quantity.  I won’t say it’s necessarily true that “where there’s a will there’s a way”, but when there’s obscene profits to be made then there’s almost always a way. (0 COMMENTS)

Here’s a third post from an anonymous professor here at the University of Texas, printed with his permission.  The proposal is intended in all seriousness. We are now unquestionably at a crisis point for free speech, academic freedom, and intellectual diversity in higher education.  Ritualistic denunciations of faculty who dissent from consensus, under the thin veneer of combating “misinformation,” are now practiced by prominent universities and broadly accepted within higher education.  Political tests requiring support for prioritizing racial balance over other considerations are increasingly applied for hiring and promotion.  Academic departments, universities, and administrators acting in their official capacity feel free to commit institutions to advocacy for particular policies.  Prominent people of the left are actively promoting blacklists to stop hiring of people who took a particular side in politics, and this practice that will no doubt quickly find its way into academia, or would if such people were not already effectively excluded.  These events are taking place at private universities that should be committed to open inquiry, but also at public universities that are legally committed to provide an environment where free speech and dissent are possible. Small groups of faculty have begun to push back in very mild ways, but such push back is entirely defensive and almost doomed to fail.  Once a dissenter is identified, there are many formal and informal institutions that can be brought to bear against such a person and anyone who supports him.  Title IX investigations are a classic approach, along with “inquiries” into research misconduct.  At my own school, our Dean sought a precedent to claim that using a classic example from a movie to illustrate Nash equilibrium (a clip praised as a pedagogical tool by the New York Times) counts as sexual harassment, apparently to punish the faculty member for an insufficiently contrite apology for the use of the example.    Whenever someone is attacked in this way, faculty who tend to support academic freedom act as if it is a victory when nothing is ultimately done to the faculty member.  This purely defensive stance is a recipe for failure; the process is the punishment, and the people who sought to limit free speech or impose political hiring criteria are free to keep trying until they succeed.  Knowing this, few faculty chose to fight back, and almost all attacks on academic freedom, free speech, and intellectual diversity succeed without the aggressors even having to truly fight. Existing institutions and norms are thus insufficient to address the problems of the current moment.  What is required is administrative reform, where attacks on academic freedom, free speech, and intellectual diversity are treated with at least the same degree of seriousness as other offenses at universities.  Specifically, every university should have an “Office of Free Speech” where faculty can lodge complaints when their academic freedom or free speech rights are violated, or when policies are put in place to limit the possibilities for intellectual diversity.  This office must have adequate funding to complete independent investigations of such allegations, and it should report directly to the highest authority governing the university, either the board of trustees or regents for most private universities or the regents or state legislature for public universities.  These investigations must have teeth; attacking academic freedom (not simply criticizing speech with speech) cannot be allowed to stand as acceptable behavior for administrators, faculty, or students.  The same sorts of consequences available for other offenses should be applied to those who use their position at the university to deprive others of their institutional or constitutional rights.  The office should not go as far as hounding people to suicide through punitive investigations and promotion of angry mobs, but those who weaponize university processes against innocent faculty should bear some costs for their actions. Crucially, this office must be independent of even the highest level administrators of the university, who are often responsible for the greatest threats to academic freedom.  For example, the top administration at my university publicly plays lip service to the importance of free inquiry while at the same time supporting policies that serve as a political test to prevent hiring of faculty who dissent from campus orthodoxy on “diversity and inclusion” matters.  And, faculty can certainly not be trusted with a role in the oversight of these issues; having served on certain faculty bodies designed to protect academic freedom, it is abundantly clear that most university faculty, even those who would go as far as to join such bodies, view academic freedom exclusively as a collective right of the faculty as a whole and not an individual right of faculty members.  That is, the consensus view of academic freedom is that the faculty as a whole should be free to decide what ideas should be allowed to be expressed on campus, and protecting academic freedom consists of preventing outside interference with this process, even when that outside interference is intended to protect the individual rights of faculty members. Notably, this arrogation of power is outside of any reasonable interpretation of the charter of a university; when faculty were granted academic freedom in running universities, this was done under the assumption that faculty were best able to judge work in their areas and that external influence would potentially corrupt academic inquiry.  Founders of universities undoubtedly did not anticipate that faculty would instead turn against the very idea of free inquiry and use the trust placed in them to shift the mission of institutions away from inquiry and toward pure advocacy.  Thus, having external, responsible parties ultimately judge the cases brought to the Office of Free Speech is entirely appropriate.  At some point, the answer to “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” cannot simply be that we trust faculty to protect the rights of those they despise, particularly in light of behavior observed recently.  Ultimately, universities, particularly those funded by taxpayers, must answer to a broader set of constituents than simply the faculty themselves; such accountability will certainly be treated as an attack on free inquiry, but in fact it is absolutely necessary to restore any semblance of such a concept at modern universities. (2 COMMENTS)

A friend on an email group I’m on asked my friend and co-author Charley Hooper the following question about the COVID-19 vaccines: Are you sure that the vaccine won’t mess with our genes? Charley allowed me to share his answer: No, I’m not 100% sure. But I’m one minus epsilon (a very small number) sure. Biological reason: I’m not an expert in this area. This is from my reading…RNA is a notoriously fragile molecule. Delivering mRNA successfully to the cells inside our bodies and ensuring that enzymes within our cells do not degrade it are key challenges in vaccine development. Chemical modifications during the manufacturing process can significantly improve the stability of mRNA vaccines. Encapsulating mRNA in lipid nanoparticles is one way to ensure that a vaccine can successfully enter cells and deliver the mRNA into the cytoplasm. mRNA does not linger in our cells for long. Once it has passed its instructions to the protein-making machinery in our cells, enzymes called ribonucleases (RNases) degrade the mRNA. mRNA dies a quick death once in human cells.It is not possible for mRNA to move into the nucleus of a cell as it lacks the signals that would allow it to enter this compartment. This means that RNA cannot integrate into the DNA of the vaccinated cell. There is no risk of long-term genetic changes with mRNA vaccines. Clinical reason: Moderna’s Phase 3 clinical trial of its COVID-19 vaccine enrolled 30,420. We haven’t seen any genetic damage to these participants. Ditto for Pfizer and BioNTech’s trial that enrolled 43,448 participants. How have we not seen any genetic damage in over 70,000 closely monitored individuals? Economic reason: Why would a company market a vaccine that could mess up the genetics of its customers? I shudder to think of the lawsuits. This goes against everything I’ve learned from spending the last three decades in the pharmaceutical industry. Genetic reason: If the vaccines do alter human DNA, what is the result? To make us healthier, stronger, smarter, more beautiful? That would be extremely difficult to accomplish. To make us mutants? If the vaccines do alter our DNA, I think it’s virtually certain that the alterations would be harmful and perhaps fatal. Who other than an extreme environmentalist or a mass murderer would want this? However, these vaccines were developed by drug companies, not mass murderers. There’s no group of people that I know of that had both a motive for such a crime and the ability to perpetrate it. Insider information reason: Have we heard of large numbers of employees at Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech avoiding the new vaccines? No.         (0 COMMENTS)

The TPOC Book Club continues its march through Chapter 1, “Ignorance Is Strength.” Please leave your thoughts and questions in the comments and I’ll do an omnibus reply later this week. After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, society regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. Coming from a socialist like Orwell, this is a major concession.  Why, you may ask, does collective ownership defuse complaints about wealth and privilege?  Social Desirability Bias, of course.  “This is mine” sounds bad; “This is ours” sounds good.  But aren’t corporations also joint property?  Indeed.  To cash in on the psychological appeal of collective ownership, you desperately need a clear-cut “non-profit” label.  Government, organized religion, and charity all get a pass, but rich people pooling their resources definitely does not. The so-called ‘abolition of private property’ which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit. Great!  I wish that economists who do international comparisons of inequality had the same insight. In the years following the Revolution it was able to step into this commanding position almost unopposed, because the whole process was represented as an act of collectivization. It had always been assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated, Socialism must follow: and unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport — everything had been taken away from them: and since these things were no longer private property, it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist programme; with the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent. If you read 1984 closely, it’s clear that measured economic inequality would be quite low.  What’s distinctive about Orwell’s dystopia is the immense inequality of power. But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper than this. There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself. Indeed.  I’ve long maintained that the Soviet Union would still be around today if Gorbachev had been a self-confident Stalinist instead of a weak-kneed reformer. After the middle of the present century, the first danger had in reality disappeared. Each of the three powers which now divide the world is in fact unconquerable, and could only become conquerable through slow demographic changes which a government with wide powers can easily avert. All-out nuclear war could probably do the trick.  Orwell elsewhere posits that a major nuclear war leads to a common realization of the necessity of avoiding further use of nuclear weapons.  But once countries start mutually nuking each other, it’s easy to see how things could spiral out of control. The second danger, also, is only a theoretical one. The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed. The recurrent economic crises of past times were totally unnecessary and are not now permitted to happen, but other and equally large dislocations can and do happen without having political results, because there is no way in which discontent can become articulate. Well-said.  Remember: The Soviet Union collapsed in the 1980s when conditions were, by Soviet standards, excellent.  During the 30s, millions of Soviet citizens starved, but the regime was never in danger of internal revolt. As for the problem of overproduction, which has been latent in our society since the development of machine technique, it is solved by the device of continuous warfare (see Chapter III), which is also useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch. Actually, this problem of “overproduction” was never anything more than a problem of sticky wages and bad monetary policy.  If you can’t profitably employ all of the resources that exist, you simply need to cut input prices.  If that’s off the table, you can just print more money.  This isn’t idle theory.  Since Orwell’s time, many First World countries have had low unemployment even though production continues to rise.  And some of them – like Japan – have virtually no military to speak of.  And look what happened to the U.S. when the Cold War ended.  Military spending as a share of GDP crashed – and the economy boomed. From the point of view of our present rulers, therefore, the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, under-employed, power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and scepticism in their own ranks. The problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way. Brilliant. Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know it already, the general structure of Oceanic society. At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful… His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Politics is the religion of modernity. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party, its numbers limited to six millions, or something less than 2 per cent of the population of Oceania. Below the Inner Party comes the Outer Party, which, if the Inner Party is described as the brain of the State, may be justly likened to the hands. Below that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as ‘the proles’, numbering perhaps 85 per cent of the population. Orwell neglects the possibility of a power struggle within the Inner Party.  If Oceania existed, this alone would create the instability necessary for regime change. In principle, membership of these three groups is not hereditary. The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen. Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of that area. This is one of the least plausible features of Orwell’s dystopia.  There is always demographic imbalance of power, and these imbalances are easy for power-hungry politicians to demagogue.  The kind of cultural homogeneity Orwell pictures would take centuries for even the most totalitarian regime to engineer.  Witness the breakup of the Soviet Union after seen decades of “We’re all Soviet citizens” propaganda.  It is true that our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on what at first sight appear to be hereditary lines. There is far less to-and-fro movement between the different groups than happened under capitalism or even in the pre-industrial age. Between the two branches of the Party there is a certain amount of interchange, but only so much as will ensure that weaklings are excluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious members of the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to rise. Very consistent with Clark’s The Son Also Rises.  Though strikingly, Orwell suggests no role for politically-powerful families to grow rich by corruption.  For Orwell, kin relations are strangely fragile; the government’s effort to turn children against their parents is almost totally successful.  In contrast, the Party continuously persecutes romance because it recognizes the power of the pair-bonding instinct.  In the real world, however, kin relations seem much more resilient than romantic bonds – and a much firmer basis for organized graft. Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most gifted among them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated. But this state of affairs is not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. A strange situation.  You’d expect the Party to constantly recruit from the proles, and eliminate only the talented proles who resist recruitment. In the crucial years, the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition. The older kind of Socialist, who had been trained to fight against something called ‘class privilege’ assumed that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. Again, brilliant. All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. This bleak picture is close to literally true.  Consider: Haiti appears to be the sole durably successful slave revolt in history.  Contra Orwell, slaves often feel the desire to rebel.  But that impulse rarely leads to a blueprint for social reform.  And even if it did, the coordination problem is crushing. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. Orwell seems to assume absurdly high Transfer of Learning.  Once a prole learns how to program a computer, he’ll soon figure out how to reform society.  In practice, however, learning is highly compartmentalized.  So Orwell’s dystopia is even more stable than it looks.  Even if the proles were trained for high-tech jobs, few would spontaneously grasp that the social order “could be other than it is.” What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated. If you’re getting a sense of deja vu, ask yourself: “How afraid are minimum wage workers of being ‘cancelled’ for their social media posts?” A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent… A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudes demanded of him are never plainly stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the contradictions inherent in Ingsoc. If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a goodthinker), he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion. Indeed. But in any case an elaborate mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the Newspeak words crimestop, blackwhite, and doublethink, makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever. A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts… This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. These words seem more relevant than ever, as I’ve been saying lately.  The big difference, of course, is that contemporary Western Thought Police are soft and disorganized.  A few crazies aside, what I call the “uniformity and exclusion movement” advocates no punishment harsher than blacklist from high-skilled employment and ostracism from high-status society.  Scary, but a far cry from jail, slave labor, or death.  And most of their wrath focuses on emotionally-charged incidents.  There’s no master plan, just a kaleidoscope of rage. (0 COMMENTS)

***** TAKE THE 2020 ECONTALK SURVEY: https://tinyurl.com/y6tzqvg6. VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE EPISODES OF THE YEAR! ***** Author Scott Newstok of Rhodes College talks about his book, How to Think Like Shakespeare, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Newstok draws on Shakespeare and other great writers and thinkers to explore the nature of education and the life […] The post Scott Newstok on How to Think Like Shakespeare appeared first on Econlib.

The mittens that Bernie Sanders wore at the inauguration of the new president have been a big hit in the media and in cyberspace. And we now know where the famous mittens came from, although most people miss the economic lessons of the story. The mittens were sown from recycled materials by a Vermont teacher called Jen Ellis, who moonshines in this artisanal hobby (Travis M. Andrews, “The Handwarming Story of How Bernie Sanders Got his Inauguration Mittens,” Washington Post, January 21, 2021). Remember Adam Smith’s pin factory. In the second part of the 18th-century, the division of labor allowed 10 men working together to each make the equivalent of 4,800 pins a day, while a single man working alone could only make 20 at most and perhaps not more than one pin (The Wealth of Nations, 1776). Now, apply that to mitten production. Ms. Ellis reportedly spent an hour making Mr. Sanders’s mittens. If she had spent that hour working in a clothing factory instead, she would have produced several pairs of mittens, perhaps dozens or hundreds of pairs. As Adam Smith saw for pins, the division of labor dramatically increases productivity—and even more dramatically with modern machines that did not yet exist in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. The numerous pairs of mittens produced by Ms. Ellis’s work in an hour could have been sold to Walmart or Dollar stores, keeping warm the hands of many poor. She chose instead to produce one pair for a wealthy Vermonter. (The 2016 purchase by Mr. Sanders and his wife of a house in a wealthy Lake Champlain neighborhood, documented by a local Vermont newspaper, has not been contradicted by Snopes.) Note that, except for the economic lessons, none of that is our business. Assume that Mr. Sanders’s income from taxpayers represents what has been necessary to incentivize him to give up private employment opportunities and be as productive or more productive for voters (and detrimental to none). Individual preferences (which guide individual actions) are subjective, and Ms. Ellis obviously preferred the recognition and gratefulness of Mr. Sanders to the contentment of several poor individuals.  She is, or should be, free to produce what she wants with the technology she prefers and sell or give her products to whom she wants. She is not, or should not be, obliged to bake a cake for the poor. On his side, Mr. Sanders is, or should be, free to wear the mittens he wants, however eccentric or ostentatious, just as people who want deodorant should be free to buy the sorts they want, despite what Bernie himself thinks; or just as people who want dolls for their daughters should be free to purchase them from Chinese producers or anywhere they find what they consider a good bargain, despite what Sanders’ co-politician Donald Trump proposed. What Mr. Sanders and Ms. Ellis have enjoyed is called economic freedom. It is the regime that, in general, best and most equally allows individuals to satisfy their preferences. (0 COMMENTS)

It’s generally recognized that our (American) response to the Covid-19 pandemic was disastrous. But I think far fewer appreciate the full scale of the disaster, or the most significant causal levers by which the worst effects could have been avoided. (Yes, Trump was bad.  But his public health disinformation and politicization of masking—while obviously bad—may prove relatively trivial compared to the mammoth failings of our public health institutions and medical establishment.) Much of the pandemic’s harm could have been mitigated had our institutions been properly guided by the most basic norms of cost-benefit analysis. This is the opening paragraph of Richard Yetter Chappell, “Lessons from the Pandemic,” DailyNous, January 19, 2021. The whole thing is excellent. Chappell is a philosopher but the piece reads like a well-written analysis by a policy economist. Another excerpt: In ordinary circumstances, the status quo is relatively safe and so untested medical innovations present asymmetric risks. That is, until they are proven safe and effective, it may be reasonable to assume that the potential risks of an untested product outweigh its potential benefits, and so block public access to such products until they pass stringent testing requirements. (There are arguments to be made that FDA regulations are excessively onerous even in ordinary circumstances, but I remain neutral on that question here. I take it that there is at least a reasonable case to be made in the FDA’s defense ordinarily. No such case for the FDA’s stringency seems possible in a pandemic.) A pandemic reverses the asymmetry of risk. Now it is the status quo that is immensely dangerous, and a typical sort of medical intervention (an experimental drug or vaccine, say) is comparatively less so. The potential benefits of innovation likely outweigh the potential risks for many individuals, and vastly so on a societal scale, where the value of information is immense. So the FDA’s usual regulations should have been streamlined or suspended for potential pandemic solutions (in the same way that any ethics barriers beyond the minimum baseline of informed consent should have been suspended for pandemic research). This should be the first thing the government does in the face of a new pandemic. By blocking access to experimental vaccines at the start of the pandemic, the FDA should be regarded as causally responsible for every Covid death that is occurring now (and many that occurred previously). This last sentence is almost correct and similar to what Charley Hooper and I argued last month in “The FDA’s Deadly Caution,” AIER, December 16, 2020. Surely there are some deaths that would be occurring now, even without FDA intervention, due to people not taking the vaccine or due to the vaccines’ not being 100% effective Yet another excerpt: Closely related to the above mistake is the implicit assumption that it’s somehow better to do (or allow) nothing than to do (or allow) something imperfect. Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good in a pandemic is disastrous. Blocking quick Covid tests for having lower accuracy than slow ones is an obvious example of this form of stupidity. Deciding in advance that a vaccine must prove at least 50% effective in trials to receive FDA approval is another. (Obviously a 40% effective vaccine would be better than nothing!  Fortunately it didn’t come to that in the end, but this policy introduced extra risk of disastrous outcomes for no gain whatsoever.) Compare Dr. Ladapo’s argument in the WSJ that “Doctors should follow the evidence for promising therapies. Instead they demand certainty.” (Steve Kirsch expands on the complaint.) Again, this is a very basic form of irrationality that we’re seeing from the medical establishment. Misguided perfectionism has also damaged the vaccine rollout due to prioritizing complex allocation schemes over ensuring that as many people are vaccinated as quickly as possible. (Some are letting doses spoil rather than “risk” vaccinating anyone “out of turn”!) More examples are discussed here. Do read the whole thing. HT2 Daniel Shapiro.       (0 COMMENTS)

In recent years, the reporting at The Economist has moved somewhat to the left. Here’s a recent example: But the assumption of rational self-interest constrains the welfare state significantly. Generous benefits, and the high taxes needed to fund them, will put rationally minded people off work, undermining economic growth and the government’s capacity to help people in need. In practice, though, Mr Saez explained, the world works differently. . . . Employment rates for prime-age men are remarkably similar across rich countries, Mr Saez pointed out, despite big differences in tax and welfare systems. Average tax rates in France are roughly 20 percentage points higher than those in America across the income distribution, yet about 80% of middle-aged men work in each country. (Americans do work more hours, but, as Mr Saez noted, this too reflects social choices, such as the shorter working week specified in French law.) There is strong social pressure for healthy men not to be seen as “freeloaders”, which pushes against the incentives created by higher taxes or bigger welfare cheques. Where social pressures to work are more ambiguous—as for the young or old or, in many places, women—generous benefits tend to have larger effects on employment decisions, Mr Saez noted. But this reinforces rather than undercuts the idea that social factors have important effects on economic decisions. This isn’t exactly wrong, but it seems a bit misleading.  The tone of the article is sort of dismissive of conservative arguments that the welfare state discourages work, but the actual empirical evidence suggests that it discourages work among the young, the old, women, and among men it leads to shorter work hours.  This is one reason why per capita GDP (PPP) is far lower in Europe than in America. It’s not true that “the world works differently”; it works exactly the way that classical economic theory predicts.  The European welfare state makes Europe a much poorer place.  That may be fine (perhaps people prefer the extra leisure time), but it’s foolish to minimize the effect. And to head off criticism, note that while some European welfare states have incomes well above the European average, so do some American states.  Lots of things affect income, not just welfare and taxes. Over the past quarter century, the center left has shifted a bit left on public policy issues: 1990s-style neoliberalism                                2021 post-liberalism 1. Singapore style forced saving                  Expanded social insurance programs 2. Private infrastructure projects.              Public infrastructure projects 3. Progressive consumption taxes              Progressive income/wealth taxes 4. Fiscal responsibility                                   Deficits don’t matter 5. Monetary stabilization policy                 Fiscal stabilization policy 6. Low wage subsidies                                   Higher minimum wages 7.  Privatization                                                More aggressive antitrust In 1996, Clinton ran for re-election on ideas such as “the era of big government is over” and “ending welfare as we know it.”  Fiscal stabilization policy was a complete non-starter.  We were moving toward budget surpluses, with an eye on the demographic time bomb created by lower birth rates and longer life expectancy. Why the recent move toward a slightly more socialist approach to policy?  (Yes, it’s far from outright socialism, but for the most part the list above is not a move toward the Nordic model, at least the post-1990 Nordic model.) Some might quote Keynes’s famous remark about how to respond to new information, but I’m not convinced that this can explain the shift.  I’m only an expert on one of the 7 areas above (stabilization policy), but in that one area I’ve seen a lots of bad arguments for the move toward fiscal policy, arguments that reflect a misunderstanding of macro theory and an ignorance of macroeconomic history.  So I have little confidence that the other 6 examples are any better justified.  Especially when I see dubious claims that a less effective policy (minimum wages) can be justified on the basis of being more politically acceptable than a more effective policy (low wage subsidies).  We have an EITC program!  And we have a new government where the Democrats have an easier time with new spending programs (requiring 50 senators) than regulatory changes (requiring 60 senators). So what explains the shift?  I suspect it’s a mix of various factors.  Monetary policy failures like the Great Depression and the Great Recession are almost always misdiagnosed as a failure of capitalism.  The move toward an information economy has made income less equal.  The zero lower bound makes monetary policy seem less effective than it is. More speculatively, the center right might feel increasingly comfortable viewing the center left as their “tribe”.  The days of P.J. O’Rourke’s “Republican Party Reptile” is long gone.  It’s no longer cool to be associated with an ideology that has become increasingly nationalistic and anti-intellectual.  Meanwhile, the demise of communism has removed some of the taint from the left.  Media outlets such as The Economist and the Financial Times, and think tanks like the Niskanen Center, seem increasingly at home in the center left. PS.  I used the term “post-liberal”, as its relationship to liberalism is analogous to the relationship of post-Keynesian to Keynesianism. Similarly, modernism was followed by postmodernism.  In any case, neoliberalism is already taken, and neo-neoliberalism just sounds stupid.   (0 COMMENTS)