The relationship between wealth and power is essentially the relationship between potential and actual

Tuesday, February 8th, 2022

The relationship between wealth and power, Carroll Quigley argues in Weapons Systems and Political Stability, is essentially the relationship between potential and actual:

Wealth is not power, although, given time enough, it may be possible to turn it into power. Economic power can determine the relationships between states only by operating within a framework of military power itself. That is, potential power has to become actual power in order to determine the factual relationship between power units such as states. Thus the relationship is not determined by manpower, but by trained men; it is not established by steel output, but by weapons; it is not settled by energy production, but by explosives; not by scientists, but by technicians.

When economics was called “political economy” up to about 1840, it was recognized that the rules of economic life had to operate within a framework of a power structure. This was indicated at the time by the emphasis on the need for “domestic tranquility” and for international security as essentials of economic life. But when these political conditions became established and came to be taken for granted, political economy changed its name to “economics,” and everyone, in areas where these things were established, became confused about the true relationships. Only now, when disorder in our cities and threats from external foes are once again making life precarious, as it was before the 1830s, do we once again recognize national security and domestic tranquility as essential factors in economic life.

In the past century we have tended to assume that the richest states would be the most powerful ones, but it would be nearer the truth to say that the most secure and most powerful states will become the rich ones. We assumed, as late as 1941, that a rich state would win a war. This has never been true. Wealth as potential power becomes effective in power relationships, such as war, only to the degree that it becomes actual power, that is, military force. Merely as economic power it helps to win a war only potentially and actually hampers progress toward victory. We could almost say that wealth makes on less able to fight and more likely to be attacked. Throughout history poor nations have beaten rich ones again and again. Poor Assyria beat rich Babylonia; poor Rome beat rich Carthage; poor Macedonia beat rich Greece, after poor Sparta had beaten rich Athens; poor Prussia beat richer Austria and then beat richer France several times. Rich states throughout history have been able to defend their positions only if they saw the relationship between wealth and power and kept prepared or, if they were able when attacked to drag out the war so that they had time to turn their wealth into actual military power. That is wheat happened in the two World Wars. In each case the victims of German aggression were able to win in the long run only because there was a long run. If the Germans had been able to overcome the English Channel, their victims would not have had time to build up their military power.

Thus we see that wealth in itself is not of great importance in international affairs. It must be turned into military power to be effective, but then it ceases to be wealth. Wealth turned into guns no longer is wealth. But guns can protect wealth.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 10 Comments »

The Gnomes of Zürich are at work again

Sunday, February 6th, 2022

I was introduced to the term “Gnomes of Zürich“ by Steve Jackson’s humorous conspiracy-themed game, Illuminati, where the secretive Swiss bankers were one of the factions vying for global domination. I never hunted down the origin of the term though:

Although Swiss bankers had been criticised in Britain since the 1950s, the term “gnome of Zürich” originated in a crisis meeting of the Labour politicians in November 1964. The politicians blamed Swiss bankers for raising speculation against the pound. During the meeting, politician George Brown criticised the Swiss bankers and said, “The gnomes of Zürich are at work again.” The term “Gnomes of Zürich” was then used by many other politicians of the time. Then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson vowed to resist the gnomes’ sinister power.

Posted in Policy | 4 Comments »

A method of measuring relative power so that they can live together in peace

Saturday, February 5th, 2022

Peace and stability are only secure, Carroll Quigley argues in Weapons Systems and Political Stability, as long as power relationships are clear to all concerned:

Conflict arises when there is no longer a consensus regarding the real power situation, and the two parties, by acting on different subjective pictures of the objective situation, come into collision.

The purpose of such a conflict, arising from different pictures of the facts, is to demonstrate to both parties what the real power relationship is in order to reestablish a consensus on it.

[...]

Unfortunately this kind of fighting between young boys now occurs much more rarely than it did before (say a century ago) with the result that boys of today grow up to manhood and go off to fight, or to run the State Department, without any conception of the real nature of power and its relationships. This lack is, at the same time, one of the causes of juvenile delinquency and of adults’ mistaken belief that the role of war is the total destruction, or the unconditional surrender, of one’s opponent, instead of being what war really is, a method of measuring relative power so that they can live together in peace.

The role of any conflict, including war, is to measure a power relationship so that a consensus, that is a legal relationship, may be established. War cannot be abolished either by renouncing it or by disarming, unless some other method of measuring power relationships in a fashion convincing to all concerned is set up. And this surely cannot be done by putting more than a hundred factually unequal states into a world assembly where they are legally equal. This kind of nonsense could be accepted only by people who have been personally so remote from real power situations all their pampered, well-protected lives that they do not even recognize the existence of the power structures in which they have lived and which, by protecting them, have prevented them from being exposed to conflict sufficiently to come to know the nature of real power.

Posted in Policy, War | 5 Comments »

The cognitive stratification of American society was not a problem 100 years ago

Friday, February 4th, 2022

Back in 1961, the SAT helped get Charles Murray into Harvard from a small Iowa town by giving him a way to show that he could compete with applicants from Exeter and Andover:

Ever since, I have seen the SAT as the friend of the little guy, just as James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, said it would be when he urged the SAT upon the nation in the 1940s.

Conant’s cause was as unambiguously liberal in the 1940s as income redistribution is today. Then, America’s elite colleges drew most of their students from a small set of elite secondary schools, concentrated in the northeastern United States, to which America’s wealthy sent their children. The mission of the SAT was to identify intellectual talent regardless of race, color, creed, money, or geography, and give that talent a chance to blossom.

[…]

It makes no difference, however, that the charges about coaching are wrong, just as it makes no difference that the whole idea that rich parents can buy their children high SAT scores is wrong. One part of the indictment is true, and that one part overrides everything else: the children of the affluent and well educated really do get most of the top scores. For example, who gets the coveted scores of 700 and higher, putting them in the top half-dozen percentiles of SAT test-takers? Extrapolating from the 2006 data on means and standard deviations reported by the College Board, about half of the 700+ scores went to students from families making more than $100,000 per year. But the truly consequential statistics are these: Approximately 90 percent of the students with 700+ scores had at least one parent with a college degree. Over half had a parent with a graduate degree.

In that glaring relationship of high test scores to advanced parental education, which in turn means high parental IQ, lies the reason that the College Board, politically correct even unto self-destruction, cannot bring itself to declare the truth: the test isn’t the problem. The children of the well educated and affluent get most of the top scores because they constitute most of the smartest kids. They are smart because their parents are smart. The parents have passed their smartness along through parenting practices that are largely independent of education and affluence, and through genes that are completely independent of them.

The cognitive stratification of American society — for that’s what we’re talking about — was not a problem 100 years ago. Many affluent people were smart in 1907, but there were not enough jobs in which high intellectual ability brought high incomes or status to affect more than a fraction of really smart people, and most of the really smart people were prevented from getting those jobs anyway by economic and social circumstances (consider that in 1907 roughly half the adults with high intelligence were housewives).

From 1907 to 2007, the correlation between intellectual ability and socioeconomic status (SES) increased dramatically. The socioeconomic elite and the cognitive elite are increasingly one. If you want the details about how this process worked and how it is transforming America’s class structure, I refer you to The Bell Curve (1994), the book I wrote with the late Richard Herrnstein. For now, here’s the point: Imagine that, miraculously, every child in the country were to receive education of equal quality. Imagine that a completely fair and accurate measure of intellectual ability were to be developed. In that utopia, a fair admissions process based on intellectual ability would fill the incoming classes of the elite colleges predominantly with children of upper-middle-class parents.

In other words, such a perfect system would produce an outcome very much like the one we see now. Harvard offers an easy way to summarize the revolution that accelerated after World War II. As late as 1952, the mean SAT Verbal score of the incoming freshman class was just 583. By 1960, the mean had jumped to 678. In eight years, Harvard transformed itself from a college with a moderately talented student body to a place where the average freshman was intellectually in the top fraction of 1 percent of the national population. But this change did not mean that Harvard became more socioeconomically diverse. On the contrary, it became more homogeneous. In the old days, Harvard had admitted a substantial number of Boston students from modest backgrounds who commuted to classes, and also a substantial number of rich students with average intelligence. In the new era, when Harvard’s students were much more rigorously screened for intellectual ability, the numbers of students from the very top and bottom of the socioeconomic ladder were reduced, and the proportion coming from upper-middle-class backgrounds increased.

Posted in Education, Policy | 39 Comments »

Power can become a question of morale

Thursday, February 3rd, 2022

Power, Carroll Quigley notes in Weapons Systems and Political Stability, can become a question of morale:

It means that the actor himself is convinced of the correctness and inevitability of his actions to the degree that his conviction serves both to help him to act more successfully and to persuade the opposition that his (the actor’s) actions are in accordance with the way thins should be. Strangely enough, this factor of morale, which we might like to reserve for men because of its spiritual or subjective quality, also operates among animals. A small bird will often be observed in summer successfully driving a crow or even a hawk away from its nest, and a dog who would not ordinarily fight at all will attack, often successfully, a much larger beast who intrudes onto his front steps or yard. This element of subjective conviction which we call morale is the most significant aspect of the ideological element in power relationships and shows the intimate relationship between the various elements of power from the way in which it strengthens both force and persuasion.

It also shows something else which contemporary thinkers are very reluctant to accept. That is the operation of natural law. For the fact that animals recognize the prescriptive rights to property, as shown in the fact that a much stronger beast will yield to a much weaker one on the latter’s home area, or that a hawk will allow a flycatcher to chase it from the area of the flycatcher’s nest, shows a recognition of property rights which implies a system of law among beasts. In fact, the singing of a bird (which is not for the edification of man or to attract a mate, but is a proclamation of a residence area to other birds of the same habits) is another example of the recognition of rights and thus of law among non-human life.

Posted in Policy, War | 28 Comments »

It does not consist of an effort to get someone else to adopt our point of view

Tuesday, February 1st, 2022

Persuasion is misunderstood, Carroll Quigley argues in Weapons Systems and Political Stability:

It does not consist of an effort to get someone else to adopt our point of view or to believe something they had not previously believed, but rather consists of showing them that their existing beliefs require that they should do what we want. This is a point which has been consistently missed by the propaganda agencies of the United States government and is why such agencies have been so woefully unsuccessful despite expenditures of billions of dollars. Of course it requires arguing from the opponent’s point of view, something Americans can rarely get themselves to do because they will rarely bother to discover what the opponent’s point of view is.

Posted in Policy | 3 Comments »

What can a divided America learn from Switzerland?

Monday, January 31st, 2022

Switzerland largely avoids the divisions that characterize U.S. politics:

Americans typically try to explain this by saying, “Well, it’s so homogeneous.” But Switzerland is much more diverse than one might think.… It has four national languages; it’s been shaped by historical differences between the Catholic and Protestant regions; and there’s a wide urban-rural divergence, with only 10% of the population living in the 60% of the country covered by the Alps. Adding to the diversity is the huge number of immigrants: 30% of the population is foreign-born, about the highest percentage in the world.

Over the centuries Switzerland has developed an electoral system and a culture that defuses political tensions and delivers peace and prosperity. A polarized U.S. looking for lessons from Switzerland can study the country’s special recipe: vivid democracy, a strong aversion to centralizing power, and the deep sense of responsibility that citizens feel toward their country.

Switzerland is often described as a direct democracy, but that’s somewhat of a misnomer because citizens are not directly involved in every legislative decision and don’t even elect the president and other members of the executive branch. However, the Swiss people hold a unique political power, thanks to the two main tools of direct democracy: the initiative and the referendum.

The initiative allows any group of Swiss citizens to gather signatures and put a proposal for amending the constitution on the ballot. As a result, the Swiss people are summoned to polling stations usually four times a year and get to vote on a variety of questions—nothing is off the table. Such a system may seem to invite instability, but the opposite is true. Initiatives routinely fail to pass. The constitution may eventually get changed only after multiple attempts.

The referendum allows citizens to call for a vote on a law passed or a treaty negotiated by the federal government. For example, last week citizens voted to allow the government to require proof of vaccination against COVID-19 for gaining access to most public indoor places, and take a variety of other COVID measures. Concerns that the government was granting itself too many powers drove the campaign against the law, but only 38% of voters agreed.

[…]

Underscoring the autonomy of the local jurisdictions, the cantons and municipalities collect more in tax revenue than does the federal government. In the U.S., by comparison, the states and other local authorities collect only 36% of the country’s total tax revenue.

Federalism also works as a counterbalance to the majoritarian tendencies of democracies. As seen in the U.S. and elsewhere, illiberal decisions and increasing centralization are inherent in democratic systems that don’t contain enough federalist checks on power. Increasing the authority of a central government, as those on the left in many countries advocate, can increase polarization because it leads to high-stakes, winner-take-all elections. Requiring the majority of cantons to agree on constitutional changes balances the power of the majority of voters, which in any country can cancel the rights of dissenting voices, jeopardize freedom and lead to tyranny.

One important dividend of federalism is that it helps keep taxes and regulations in check because of the competition it creates among cantons or states. If people don’t like their canton’s or municipality’s tax system, they can easily vote with their feet. U.S. taxpayers seeking to escape high state taxes and overregulation can do this too, but states are much larger geographically than cantons so this might mean moving far away from jobs, friends and relatives.

Posted in Policy | 15 Comments »

The purpose of their conflict will be to destroy the organization but leave the people and artifacts remaining

Sunday, January 30th, 2022

A community consists of people + artifacts + organization, Carroll Quigly argues in Weapons Systems and Political Stability, and when two communities are in conflict, each trying to impose its will on the other, this can be achieved by destroying the organization of the other:

That means that the purpose of their conflict will be to destroy the organization but leave the people and artifacts remaining, except to the degree that these are destroyed incidentally in the process of disrupting their organization in order to reduce their capacity to resist. In European history, with its industrialized cities, complex division of labor, and dense population, the efforts to disrupt organization have led to weapons systems of mass destruction of people and artifacts, which could, in fact, so disrupt European industrial society, that the will to resist is eventually destroyed.

But these same weapons, applied to a different geographical and social context, such as the jungles of southeast Asia, may not disrupt their patterns sufficiently to lower their wills to resist to the point where the people are willing to submit their wills to those of Wester communities; rather they may be forced to abandon forms of organization which are susceptible to disruption by Western weapons for quite different and dispersed forms of organization on which Western weapons are relatively ineffective.

Posted in Policy, War | 3 Comments »

It is important only when we do not have it

Friday, January 28th, 2022

The need for security is a constant need, Carroll Quigley notes in Weapons Systems and Political Stability, but it is important only when we do not have it:

That is why the United States, in the 1920s and 1930s, could have such mistaken ideas about the relative significance of security and prosperity. Because we had the former, with little or no effort or expense to ourselves, from about 1817 to at least 1917, we continued to regard this almost essential feature of human life as of less significance than prosperity and rising standards of living from 1920 till late in the 1930s or even to 1941. Accordingly, we ignored the problem of security and concentrated on the pursuit of wealth and other things we did not have. This was a perfectly legitimate attitude toward life, for ourselves, but it did not entitle us to insist that other countries, so much closer to the dangers of normal human life than we were, must accept our erroneous belief that economics was more fundamental than politics and security.

Many years ago, when I talked of this matter to my students, all in uniform and preparing to go off to fight Hitler, one of them, who already had a doctorate degree in economics, challenged my view that politics is more fundamental than economics. The problem arose from a discussion of the Nazi slogan “Guns or butter?”

I asked him, “If you and I were together in a locked room with a sub-machine gun on one side and a million dollars on the other side, and you were given first choice, which of these objects would you choose?”

He answered, “I would take the million dollars.”

When I asked, “Why?,” he replied, “Because anyone would sell the gun for a lot less than a million dollars.”

“You don’t know me,” I retorted, “because if I got the gun, I’d leave the room with the money as well!”

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 6 Comments »

There was little point in discussing the Third World when they knew so little about how their own society worked

Sunday, January 23rd, 2022

In his final weeks at Georgetown, Carroll Quigly told the students in his “The World Since 1914″ class that there was little point in discussing the Third World when they knew so little about how their own society worked:

So I told them about the USA — really very hair-raising when it is all laid out in sequence:

  1. cosmic hierarchy;
  2. energy;
  3. agriculture;
  4. food;
  5. health and medical services;
  6. education;
  7. income flows and the worship of growth;
  8. inflation;

showing how we are violating every aspect of life by turning everything into a ripoff, because we…have adopted the view that insatiable individualistic greed must run the world.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 2 Comments »

Weapons systems have been decisive in shaping human social, economic, and political decisions

Saturday, January 22nd, 2022

Throughout history, society’s decisions regarding its weapons systems have been decisive in shaping human social, economic, and political decisions, as Harry J. Hogan explains in his foreword to Carroll Quigley’s Weapons Systems and Political Stability:

Dates Weapons Politics
970–1200 knight and castle feudalism
1200–1520 mercenary men-at-arms and bowmen feudal monarchy
1520–1800 mercenary muskets, pikes, artillery dynastic monarchy
1800–1935 mass army of citizen soldiers democracy
1935– army of specialists managerial bureaucracy

Posted in Policy, Technology, War, Weapons | 6 Comments »

The traditional yeomanry is losing out

Tuesday, January 18th, 2022

The working class may have suffered the most in the past decades, but the angriest class in America may be the small business and property-owning class, Joel Kotkin says:

National chains and online services are replacing many traditional Main Street businesses — the insurance and travel agencies, the local banks, the High Street retailers and restauranteurs. To make matters worse, local smallholders increasingly find themselves dependent on what analyst Mike Lind calls “toll booth” companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, tech megaliths which are able to coerce small businesses to give up their data. Amidst the supply chain crisis, firms like Amazon and the big box stores use their bargaining power to minimize delays in deliveries in ways not available to smaller businesses.

The traditional yeomanry — like the “kulaks” or wealthy peasants in Stalin’s day — is losing out. As executive compensation reached the stratosphere at the big tech and finance firms, small businesses faced what Harvard Business Review described as “an existential threat.” Experts are warning that one-third of small businesses, which comprise the majority of U.S. companies and employ nearly 50 percent of all workers, could ultimately shut down for good.

Perhaps, Arnold Kling suggests, we are now living in the New Servants economy:

Tyler Cowen has a series called “those new service-sector jobs.” My favorites include Coffin Whisperer and Wedding Hashtag Composer. The demand for such services can only come from people with excess wealth, and the supply comes from people who realize that their best source of income is to cater to those with excess wealth. This is very different from the age of mass consumption, when Henry Ford tried to manufacture cars that his workers could afford.

Actually, I think that the biggest engine of the trickle-down economy is the nonprofit sector. I don’t have data on this, but I suspect that if you ask the next 10 young professionals you meet where they work, at least 3 of them will reply that they work for nonprofits.

[...]

I would much rather see billionaires invest in businesses in minority communities than fund nonprofits that donate to BLM.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Economics, Policy | 14 Comments »

There is little excuse for young people to live in Hong Kong

Sunday, January 16th, 2022

Dan Wang has by now lived in each of China’s main megaregions:

Everything that can go wrong in urban design has gone wrong in Beijing. The climate is arid and prone to northerly sandstorms. Its streets are unwalkable, but a stroll would reveal that its imperial heritage, made up of alley houses called hutongs, is slowly being taken over by its socialist heritage, made up of gray Soviet blocks that tower over all. Beijing is therefore a desert steppe city with Stalinist characteristics. A decade ago, the city was a lively place. One can find no shortage of people reminiscing about visiting art shows and fun bars in hutongs, then grabbing roadside barbecue just outside. Today, it is a concrete no-fun zone and the most restrictive city in the country. But Beijing is redeemed by its intellectual life. It is the center not just of state power, but also universities and the biggest-dreaming startups. For those who can work up the courage to confront the mess of its urban city, a sparkling dinner awaits.

A hundred years ago, Shanghai (where I currently reside) was the city in Asia where the ambitious could live comfortably while making a great deal of money. A rough few decades later, that fact is true once more. Shanghai is by far the most westernized city in China, attracting perhaps the majority of foreign nationals as well as Chinese who have spent time abroad. One can live in the tree-lined former French Concession, which today hosts the greatest concentration of coffee shops in the world, and work in office settings little different from those in Singapore and Hong Kong. It’s easy to make day trips to the canal cities of east China that enchanted poets and emperors alike. Shanghai today is culturally on par with Beijing, offering no fewer selections of visual and performance art. A more valid contrast is that Shanghaiers are more concerned with practical affairs. Its people are focused on producing the sorts of food and fashion businesses that make the city still more livable.

The Greater Bay Area is a bit more of a mystery to me, given that I lived in the failing part—Hong Kong—rather than the growing part: Shenzhen. At the start of reform and opening, Shenzhen absorbed the shock troops of Chinese entrepreneurialism. The southeastern region has long focused more on commerce than culture, having produced relatively fewer objects of historical resonance. When the British seized Hong Kong, the port was a mostly-barren rock, while Shenzhen was barely a settlement at all. Even Guangzhou, a major mercantile hub, has never quite been a center of culture, only cuisine. The southeast is pursuing a strategy similar to Shanghai’s: the development of service sectors around a vibrant manufacturing base. But it is doing so with less taste. Although Shenzhen is less fun than Shanghai, its region is probably the most dynamic and forward-looking part of the country today.

[…]

The north is economically dysfunctional.… Beijing however has bucked the region and seen strong growth. It is the political center of the country and reaps every economic advantage from that status. That means retaining the bulk of the state sector as well as the industries most dependent on political rents. Thus it’s not so different from Washington, DC, with its mix of embassies, think tanks, and industries that need lobbying.

[…]

Shanghai is more commercially oriented. Around a thousand years ago, the region of east China started to transform into the fiscal center of the country, as people moved from the millet-growing north into the more productive rice-growing east. The area received another boost with the influx of New World silver, propelling Nanjing, Suzhou, and Hangzhou into the first cities in the world that made luxury goods for global markets. Dotted around these metropolises were market towns producing rice, ceramics, silk, and other goods. Shanghai came into its own through the slow collapse of the Qing. By the turn of the 20th century, it attracted the most dynamic Chinese entrepreneurs and became the center of the country’s industrial works. At the same time, Shanghai was the gambling and brothel capital of the world, the center of the country’s opium trafficking, and the extraterritorial playground for British, French, and American businessmen.

[…]

The fact I appreciate best is that Shanghai is highly livable. Among cities in Asia, Tokyo is a singular miracle, but I think that Shanghai is not lesser than Singapore, Hong Kong, or Seoul. Business executive types tell me that New York is the only city that rivals its dynamism. I agree that both cities have a special energy: both are on major waterways, invest a great deal in greenery, and have a thriving business environment to support excellent leisure activities. A huge number of people moved from Beijing to Shanghai after the start of the pandemic, including me. Whereas Beijing is hit hard by every domestic outbreak, Shanghai hasn’t had many cases while being the least restrictive city in the country. It’s hard for us fresh arrivals not to smirk at our friends in the north each time we read about new restrictions in Beijing.

The Shenzhen region is harder to write about given its patchwork nature. Shenzhen surpassed Hong Kong to be the region’s richest city in 2018. But it hasn’t been able to wrest leadership away from Guangzhou, which jealously guards its political power. Dongguan, Zhuhai, and Huizhou each pursue their own strategies, while Macau fits into the constellation as well (although it is less interesting given that it’s a single-industry town). Hong Kong, meanwhile, is a world unto itself. Since the political problems there over the last three years, the central government has made it obvious that it can think of the city only with exasperation. Rather than expect it to lead, Beijing is treating Hong Kong as something like an ulcer: a problem to manage away with hopefully not much more pain.

I left Hong Kong in 2018, before its protests and the ensuing political crackdown. I had hastened to leave then because I already felt the keen disappointment of living in a city in structural decline. I acknowledge that Hong Kong is an urban paradise: a tropical island with a splendid geographic setting, featuring a ring of skyscrapers that hug thickly-forested mountains. There the amenities of the tropics are easy to find: beaches, forests, wild birds and animals galore, all accessible by excellent systems of public transit. Manhattan meets Maui, in other words, at the mouth of the Pearl River. And there is still an interesting cast of characters, many of whom have adventured on the mainland or the rest of Asia, to enliven the city.

But Hong Kong was also the most bureaucratic city I’ve ever lived in. Its business landscape has remained static for decades: the preserve of property developers that has created no noteworthy companies in the last three decades. That is a heritage of British colonial rule, in which administrators controlled economic elites by allocating land—the city’s most scarce resource—to the more docile. Hong Kong bureaucrats enforce the pettiest rules, I felt, out of a sense of pride. On the mainland, enforcers deal often enough with senseless rules that they are sometimes able to look the other way. Thus a stagnant spirit hangs over the city. I’ve written before that Philip K. Dick is useful not for thinking about Hong Kong’s skyline, but its tycoon-dominated polity: “governed by a competent but fundamentally pessimistic elite, which administers a population bent on consumption. Instead of being hooked on drugs and television like in PKD’s novels, people in Hong Kong are addicted to the extraordinary flow of liquidity from the mainland, which raises their asset values and dulls their senses.”

Therefore I think there is little excuse for young people to live in Hong Kong. They should hop over to Shenzhen, which is an hour away by subway and decades younger by spirit. Shenzhen and Guangzhou are still attracting entrepreneurial types, producing an even more commercially-oriented culture than Shanghai. But while Shenzhen is pleasant, it is also a boring city with minimal culture. A friend relates an anecdote from a gallery artist, who said that clients in Shenzhen rarely comment on the art that they plan to buy. Instead they ask only its expected price in five years.

Posted in Policy, Urbanism | 4 Comments »

A higher variance for weirdness probably encourages creativity

Friday, January 14th, 2022

Noah Smith suggests that “we’re sort of in a replay of the 1970s” — “a period of exhaustion after several years of intense social unrest, where people are looking around for new cultural and economic paradigms to replace the ones we just smashed” — and Tyler Cowen responds:

I view the 1970s as a materialistic time, sexually highly charged, and America running into some significant real resource constraints, at least initially stemming from high oil prices. Mainstream culture was often fairly crass — just look at disco, or the ascendancy of mainstream network television. The current time I see as quite different. Sexually, we are withdrawing. Society is more feminized. America has far more immigrants. And we are obsessed with the virtual and with make-believe, to a degree the 1970s could not have imagined.

[...]

I think today the variance of weirdness is increasing. Conformists can conform like never before, due, say, to social media and the Girardian desire to mimic others. But unusual people can connect with other unusual people, and make each other much weirder and more “niche.” For instance, every possible variant of political views seems to be “out there” these days, and perhaps that is not entirely reassuring. A higher variance for weirdness probably encourages creativity. But is it a positive development on net? We are going to find out.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

What we needed instead was scientific socialism

Thursday, January 13th, 2022

The “Utopian” socialists were wrong, Bryan Caplan notes, but Marx was worse, as this excerpt from a piece by Joshua Muravchik explains:

He [“Utopian socialist” Robert Owen] was no obscure crank. When he arrived in the United States in 1824, he was received by a joint session of Congress that met over two separate days with outgoing President Monroe and incoming President John Quincy Adams, among the many luminaries who came to hear him out.

Owen then bought an already developed settlement on the banks of the Wabash River from a religious sect. The members of this group had developed it, and it included not only homes but vast fertile farmlands and more than twenty highly productive workshops that produced goods sold all across the country. Yet within a year after taking it over, Owen and his thousand followers had turned this little Switzerland into an Albania. All the other collective settlements, except for some that were first and foremost religious communities, had similar histories of failure.

But along came Marx and Engels, who wiped this record of failure away with one of the great intellectual conjuring tricks of all time. Owen and his ilk, said Marx and Engels, were utopians. What we needed instead was scientific socialism, which they then outfitted with great pseudo-scholarly paraphernalia: means and modes of production, historical forces, class struggle, and all the rest.

What I mean by conjuring trick is this: Owen and the other so-called utopians had an idea. What did they do? Owen and the other communitarians actually created experiments to test their ideas. Experimentation is the very essence of science. They were the real scientific socialists. Marx and Engels dismissed all experimental evidence, replaced it with an idea that was sheer prophecy, and claimed thereby to have progressed from utopia to science.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 1 Comment »

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