On Ideas that Matter

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Ronald Coase was 50 years old the year that he published “The Problem of Social Cost.” The paper’s basic intuitions were already well-formed when he wrote “The Nature of the Firm” nearly 25 years earlier. That “Social Cost” came to be written at all was only happenstance, more or less the product of being required, as a precondition of an invitation to present his work at Chicago, to make more explicit some of the basic premises that had informed his paper on the Federal Communications Commission the prior year. And the invitation was only extended in the first place because Chicago-school economists believed so strongly that those premises were wrong.

It is worth remembering, too, that, according to Coase’s own lamentations in the late 1980s, the vast majority of the economics profession had misunderstood and misapplied his key point in “Social Cost,” with the tragic consequence that the idea George Stigler dubbed “the Coase Theorem” lent credibility to Chicago-school law and economics, which in turn nourished the project to radically reconstruct the state and the global economy starting in the late 1970s. Coase did not believe the Coase theorem applied to the world in practice. As for Stigler’s idealized version, Coase thought it was not only wrong, but nonsense.

Since 1990, Coase’s original agenda, to get policy makers to base their decisions on serious, careful thinking about the comparative cost consequences of various institutional arrangements, has steadily gained ground in both domestic and international policy making, albeit not always in the form he imagined. “Governance” is sometimes used as no more than a weasel word for regulation, but it has often been used to gather together projects to assign rights and decision-making powers so as to make the best use of  local constellations of interests, knowledge and capacities, rather than trying to solve problems by creating comprehensive laws. Whatever one may think of that agenda as a matter of democratic legitimacy or pragmatic policy-making, it is preferable to the naive market boosterism of Stigler’s neoliberalism 1.0. And as much as we can say that the latter project was helped along politically by misreadings of Coase’s original intent, we should also admit that without Coase’s framing of the problem there is no Williamson, and without Williamson no “governance.”

Let me say all this again: Coase developed a world-changing idea in 1937, simply by trying to think through gaps between the idealizations of economic theory and the realities of business practice; he did not publish an articulation of that idea that ‘took’ until he was 50 years old; the articulation that brought his ideas to fame was only published because a group of well-resourced academics were so convinced he was wrong; for another 30 years, his ideas were put to uses almost completely contrary to those he had intended. It is only now, 15 years after his death, over 50 years since Social Cost, and 80 years after he first developed his original insight, that we can fairly say that his ideas are being put to use in earnest.

So, let us remember in our infinite humility how little we can know about whether our ideas are good ones, what it might take for those ideas to take hold, what uses they might be applied to if they are taken up, and how those uses may ultimately shape the world. As for the idea of transaction costs: is it good news, or is it bad news? It is still too soon to say. As for our own ideas, it is unfortunately too soon to even ask.

Persistent Error

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Jelly-beans-p-value

One of the thing that I now worry about more than I used to, given the news, is that everything that goes on in the world is within an order of magnitude the result of people spinning the wheel on a random process that allows folly to linger as orthodoxy just long enough to be embarrassing to our descendants—like bellbottoms or crocs. I mean, we got to the moon, and iPods exist, so it can’t be performative error-echos all the way down, right? Still, sometimes when it comes to efforts to order our lives together, it feels like every field of knowledge—law, economics, psychology, sociology—works this way.

This premise puts in serious question the lengths that I will go to be rigorous in my work, to be fair to my sources, to feel satisfied that my claims are backed up by relevant, substantial evidence. If winning ideas are drawn from a pot without any bias toward nuanced claims or good ideas or rigorous evidence, why do we bother doing what we do? It’s not just that maybe I could have been smoking this whole time if it doesn’t actually cause cancer, it’s more broadly a sense of “the worst are full of passionate intensity and the best/lack all conviction.”

Why be so fastidious about reading the bus schedule correctly, when all it means in practice is that, some person having convinced the bus driver that the schedule was wrong, we are sat in certainty that we got the time right, in a town the bus isn’t actually coming back to until after the Christmas holidays?

Salty

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Car_tire_floating_in_the_Baltic_Jurata

At the New York Review of books, Masha Gessen writes about Trump and the language of the autocrat. It’s a great essay about an important issue, but it seems to go astray in its diagnosis of the issue.

Trump also has a talent for using words in ways that make them mean nothing. Everyone is great and everything is tremendous. Any word can be given or taken away. NATO can be “obsolete” and then “no longer obsolete”—this challenges not only any shared understanding of the word “obsolete” but our shared experience of linear time.

And then there is Trump’s ability to take words and throw them into a pile that means nothing.

Here is an excerpt, chosen from many similar ones, from his interview with the AP about his first hundred days in office:
Number one, there’s great responsibility. When it came time to, as an example, send out the fifty-nine missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria. I’m saying to myself, “You know, this is more than just like, seventy-nine [sic] missiles. This is death that’s involved,” because people could have been killed. This is risk that’s involved, because if the missile goes off and goes in a city or goes in a civilian area—you know, the boats were hundreds of miles away—and if this missile goes off and lands in the middle of a town or a hamlet …. every decision is much harder than you’d normally make. [unintelligible] … This is involving death and life and so many things. … So it’s far more responsibility. [unintelligible] ….The financial cost of everything is so massive, every agency. This is thousands of times bigger, the United States, than the biggest company in the world.
Here is a partial list of words that lose their meaning in this passage: “responsibility,” the number “fifty-nine” and the number “seventy-nine,” “death,” “people,” “risk,” “city,” “civilian,” “hamlet,” “decision,” “hard,” “normal,” “life,” the “United States.” Even the word “unintelligible,” inserted by the journalist, means nothing here, because how can something be unintelligible when uttered during a face-to-face interview?

This seems wrong to me. The words when used in these ways are not drained of meaning. They are not rendered meaningless. Words, when used these ways, are doing things, and those doings are part of the meaning. A bird that lands on a wire does not stop having wings. Someone who is pointing his fingers in opposite directions is still pointing. Catch a tire on your fish hook. You are still fishing, and you’ve still caught something. Ask yourself: why is Trump using these words, not others? ‘Responsibility’ is in the quote because it is supposed to be, and if Trump gets away with having it enter and exit sidewise, it is because people do not listen the way that we think: they hear buzz words connected by a frayed filament of grammar, and are thereby mollified, appeased, pacified. They fill in the blanks. The blanks do not work the way we think either. Yes, no, there is no propositional sense, no report. But a great deal is being communicated, and deliberately so, through connotation, association, subject-verb-object and Trump being the speaker.

We do not like it. But no one wants to eat a tire, either. And that does not make it correct to say that pappy caught nothing fishing, so we’re eating nothing for dinner. As Austin taught us, when we ask, mouth full of rubber, “is there any salt?” we expect more than just an account of what’s in the kitchen cupboard.

Tyrants

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Whats Water.Andrew Sullivan is well known as the Catholic Republican who, because of his personal experiences, took on causes that were unpopular with other conservatives and thereby made himself somewhat of a cause celebre among American progressives. He deserves praise for the courage of standing against his tribe on principle, and he’s also a great writer. Nonetheless, I am always wary of his arguments, as they often derive from old-school, small-c conservative commitments to fundamental human fallibility, the resulting necessity of centralized authority and hierarchy, and a suspicion of anything too new. I think in his recent and widely-shared piece on the meaning of Donald Trump, this conservative reading of his sources has gotten the better of him.

The picture of America Sullivan draws has little to do with democracy as we know it (and reads selectively from Plato, to boot). At best, it describes the cultural commitments of an increasingly narrow slice of liberal middle class America; at worst, only the nightmarish fantasies of its opponents. What is America actually suffering from? The bottom half of earners are doing worse now than in the mid 1970. Black people are worse off than they were back then, too, and are incarcerated at 4-5 times more than they used to be. Wages are stagnant, the distribution of wealth is unthinkably uneven and those who were responsible for the financial calamity that led to dispossession and despair were never held to account–“no banker went to jail” as they say.

If their diagnoses differ, it is clear that Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, along with the supporters of both Bernie and Trump, have been inspired by a deep sense of injustice about the distribution of power and wealth in American society. And in that sense of injustice, they are right.

To describe America’s problem as a surfeit of democracy is thus to bend the meaning of the word to its breaking point. The influence of money on American politics, both before and after Citizens United, has corrupted the ideal (and here I steal from Larry Lessig) of a republic for, by and of the people. The centrality of wealth to the American political system, given the massive inequality of wealth, renders the system a loose oligarchy. The problem is not, per Sullivan, the democratic licentiousness of the populace. The problem is in the democratic deficit of the political sphere.

You might say that money doesn’t matter, because the candidates who win aren’t the ones who get the most money. This ignores the question of what the field of candidates would look like, and what sorts of policies they would be promoting, if the whole process wasn’t awash in cash. Congress spends 2/3 of its time fundraising. Water doesn’t determine which fish will win in a race, but it’s still pretty important to the outcome.

Sullivan’s version of America’s problem requires him to recount a just-so-story about the rise of Trump that is neither credible in structure nor a good fit to the actual history. If his reading of Plato is right, then after the elites have been toppled, his story goes, a dictator arises by exploiting antipathy and distrust of the elites. But if the elites have been toppled, where is the political benefit in challenging them? Is it not a more believable hypothesis, given the evidence, that Americans are raging against elite corruption because there has in fact been a centralization of power, and a disproportionate allocation of benefits, to a narrow few? Beyond whether his parable makes sense on its face, there is the problem that he can fit Plato’s narrative about the slide from democracy to tyranny to the American case only by imagining that political systems somehow develop according to some evolutionary logic of ideal types. And that means letting the actual political actors off the hook.

As many have argued, Trump’s ascendance is hardly without precursors in the American political discourse. Trump is the harvest of what the Republican party has sowed: exploitation of racial difference for political gain? a disdain for any principle that stands in the way of electoral advantage? a willingness to sacrifice substance for rhetorical splash? Has Sullivan not heard of Karl Rove? But the Democractic party doesn’t get off scot-free, either. As well-documented by this excellent historical review in nplusone, Bill Clinton’s victory in the 1990s was rooted in his party’s turn away from labour, the middle class and the poor, expressed most clearly in the party’s simultaneous deification of free trade and its denial of trade’s distributive costs. Economists like to make great hay of the overall gains that can be made from open trade, and depending on where you are standing, the big numbers do go up slightly. But the size of those numbers don’t do much for Flint, Michigan. For the last twenty-five years, the Democratic party as much as the Republican has been perfectly willing to embrace a policy that enriches the country at the expense of the working class, while blaming the working class for their resulting unemployment and penury, and actually making life harder for those who find themselves out of work.

Trump is certainly wrong to place the blame for any of this on China, Mexico, the Muslims. And in his diagnosis of America’s ills, in his prescriptions to overcome them and in his campaign methods, he’s not only wrong, but dangerous. But his popularity lies not only in the novelty of his scapegoating, but in being one of two candidates in this election who has refused to look at the struggle of America’s popular classes, and place the blame back on them.

America’s problem isn’t that there is too much democracy, but that there is too little. And the rise of Bernie Sanders, Occupy–even the Tea Party–suggests that Americans may be ready to re-balance the ledger. We don’t need Plato’s cynicism to see that clearly.

Brats

culture, education, , , , ,

Foucault sweater polo

Rod Macdonald was a brilliant mind, a warm, often generous mentor, and a charming man. One of the things he taught me is that, when you are smart, well-educated, charming in your own way—and, I suppose, if we are to be honest with our typology, when you are a man—avoiding hagiography, and by the same lights, preventing admiration from turning into discipleship, required finding ways to keep people at a distance, ways to compensate for the charm.

It seems to me that Foucault’s strategy was the same as Rod’s: if you want to ensure that the enfant terrible is not appointed under protest as leader of a movement, one can simply be childish. If you want people to take your seriously, but not too seriously, act like a brat. Viz (translation in hover text):

Je voudrais que mes livres soient une sorte de tool-box dans lequel les autres puissent aller fouiller pour y trouver un outil avec lequel ils pourraient faire ce que bon leur semble, dans leur domaine. L’ Histoire de la folie, je l’ai écrite un peu à l’aveuglette, dans une sorte de lyrisme dû à des expériences personnelles. Je suis attaché à ce livre, bien sûr, parce que je l’ai écrit, mais aussi parce qu’il a servi de tool-box à des personnes différentes les unes des autres, comme les psychiatres de l’antipsychiatrie britannique, comme Szasz aux États-Unis, comme les sociologues en France : ils l’ont fouillé, ont trouvé un chapitre, une forme d’analyse, quelque chose qui leur a servi ultérieurement.

Les Mots et les Choses, au fond, est un livre qui est beaucoup lu, mais peu compris. Il s’adressait aux historiens des sciences et aux scientifiques, c’était un livre pour deux mille personnes. Il a été lu par beaucoup plus de gens, tant pis. Mais, à certains scientifiques, comme Jacob, le biologiste prix Nobel, il a servi. Jacob a écrit La Logique du vivant; il y avait des chapitres sur l ‘histoire de la biologie, sur le fonctionnement du discours biologique, sur la pratique biologique, et il m’a dit qu’il s’est servi de mon livre. Le petit volume que je voudrais écrire sur les systèmes disciplinaires, j’aimerais qu’il puisse servir à un éducateur, à un gardien, à un magistrat, à un objecteur de conscience. Je n’écris pas pour un public, j’écris pour des utilisateurs, non pas pour des lecteurs.

This short quotation, of course, provides a delicious example of his strategy (“Il a été lu par beaucoup plus de gens, tant pis”–what an asshole! what a brat!), while demonstrating, if one takes its key thrust about how he hoped his work on discipline and governance might be put to use and holds it up to the light of most the literature that subsequently drew on his work, just how unsuccessful that strategy was.

Rule Thyself

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Just Do It

One of the unexplored concepts for a themed blog or tumblr or twitter account or…—anyway, a concept which lays fallow for reasons that will quickly be made clear—would have a title something like “read together.”

To explain: the upsides of being in my location in a global division of labour that nominally assigns me the task of reading books and articles, and writing down my thoughts about what I have said cannot be overstated. Among the downsides is living in a professional community that is continually, constantly training me in the habit of using the passive voice; another is that the same voracious curiosity which undergirds the satisfaction I draw from my work is also a constant source of frustration insofar as I am forced, in trying to make my way from the reading to the writing, to leave interesting thoughts by the way side. And nothing is more frustrating than having to abandon an apparent parallel, a subtle link, between two sources. Part of the recipe of being a successful academic, apparently, lies in cultivating a boundless curiosity while curating a strict discipline over the paths we allow it to take us down. A capacity for caprice, certainly, but also the prudence to almost never exercise it.

The tone of “read together” would thus be imperative: it would offer two excerpts from my reading online, in a tone of invitation, and with an implied plea for the reader to do something with materials that I am sure could produce insight if only their relation to one another were fully explored. So, for example, from a masterful review of the issues raised by the trial of Oscar Pistorius, South Africa’s famed “blade runner,” for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp:

The full citation from Corinthians tattooed on Pistorius’s upper back reads:

I do not run like a man running aimlessly;
I do not fight like a man beating the air;
I execute each stride with intent;
I beat my body and make it my slave
I bring it under my complete subjection
To keep myself from being disqualified
After having called others to the contest.

The line about making my body my slave is not in most translations from Corinthians, nor is subjection described as ‘complete’. Pistorius was raising the stakes. He was also punishing, or even indicting, himself.

And, from a shorter piece on the causes of the recent rise in injuries in the NFL:

Advertisements are now composed entirely of jump cuts between rippling bodies yelling, barking, testifying to some endless purgatory of reps, sets, and routines. Menacing homilies about commitment linger on screen to be joined by this model of shoe or that style of gear. “Every single day,” we hear Tom Brady chant stoically, “every single day,” as his image, multiplied a thousandfold by technology, drills relentlessly with itself, perfectly in sync, in a macabre echo of authoritarian spectacle.”You are the sum of all your training,” Under Armour threatens us, before urging, finally, at the end, “Rule Yourself.” In its unalloyed praise for the eternal necessity of discipline, the sports commercial is a worthy heir to Puritan austerity. Excess physique is grace rewarded. Lean muscle is proof that God loves us and wants us to be strong.

See? There is something there. There is also, at a stretch, a cute echo back to the molding of the self in the academic life, in that “Rule Thyself.” But I tell myself I have other places that I must direct my energies, so let me just quote from Horkheimer and Adorno:

It is not merely that domination is paid for by the alienation of men from the objects’ dominated: with the objectification of spirit, the very relations of men—even those of the individual to himself—were bewitched.

No doubt somebone, somewhere, is already putting these pieces together. After all, somebody is always one step ahead, better prepared, more disciplined. That’s why we have to keep training, right?