Category: Philosophy

From the beginning, “neoliberalism” was an obnoxious term

by  Tyler Cowen in

It was meant as an insult, implying that Mises – a marginalist – was trying to salvage 19th century liberal economics from the collectivist attacks of the Marxist left and the Nazi right, hence the “neo” moniker being attached.

One of the main promoters of this use was Othmar Spann, a rival of Mises on the University of Vienna faculty. Spann was a prominent proto-Nazi intellectual. In 1924 he added a disparaging chapter on “neoliberalism” to the new edition of his economics textbook.

By the time Mises arrived in Paris in 1938 for the CWL gathering, he had endured a decade and a half of simultaneous disparagement as a “neoliberal” by Nazis and Marxists. It should be no surprise that he was not keen to adopt the label himself.

Here is the full Phil Magness tweet storm.

What happened in 17th century England (a lot)

by  Tyler Cowen in

East India Company founded — 1600

Shakespeare – Hamlet published 1603

England starting to settle America – 1607 in Virginia, assorted, you could add Harvard here as well

King James Bible – 1611

The beginnings of steady economic growth – 1620 (Greg Clark, JPE)

Rule of law ideas, common law ideas, Sir Edward Coke – 1628-1648, Institutes of the Laws of England, four volumes

Beginnings of libertarian thought – Levellers 1640s

Printing becomes much cheaper, and the rise of pamphlet culture

John Milton, Aeropagitica, defense of free speech, 1644

King Charles I executed – 1649 (leads to a period of “Britain without a King,” ending 1660)

Birth of economic reasoning – second half of 17th century

Royal African Company and a larger slave trade – 1660

General growth of the joint stock corporation

Final subjugation of Ireland, beginnings of British colonialism and empire (throughout, mostly second half of the century)

Discovery of the calculus, Isaac Newton 1665-1666

Great Plague of London, 1665-1666, killed ¼ of city?

Great Fire of London, 1666

John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667

Social contract theories – John Locke 1689

Bill of Rights (rights of Parliament) — 1689

Birth of modern physics – Newton’s Principia 1687

Bank of England — 1694

Scientific Revolution – throughout the 17th century, places empiricism and measurement at the core of science

The establishment of Protestantism as the religion of Britain, both formal and otherwise, throughout the century, culminating in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

London – becomes the largest city in Europe by 1700 at around 585,000 people.

England moves from being a weak nation to perhaps the strongest in Europe and with the strongest navy.

Addendum: Adam Ozimek adds:

…first bank to print banknotes in Europe, 1661

Discovery of the telescope 1608

First patent for a modern steam engine 1602

What should I ask Marilynne Robinson?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her.  Here is from Wikipedia:

Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.

Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of faith and rural life. The subjects of her essays span numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.

Her next book is Reading Genesis, on the Book of Genesis.  So what should I ask her?

Social improvements that don’t create countervailing negative forces

by  Tyler Cowen in

Let us say you favor policy X, and take steps to see that policy X comes about.

Under many conditions, people who favor non-X will take additional countervailing steps to oppose X.  And in that case your actions in favor of X, on average, will lead to nothing.  In the meantime, you and also your opponents will have wasted material resources fighting over X.

This argument is hardly new, but most people do not like to consider it much.  They instead prefer to mood affiliate in favor of X, or perhaps against X.  They prefer to be “fighting for the right things.”

Perhaps visible political organizing is most likely to set this dynamic in motion.  Everyone can see what you are doing, and perhaps they can use their actions to fundraise for their own side.

That is one reason why I am not so thrilled with much of that organizing, even if I agree with it.  Of course there are other scenarios here.  Your involvement on behalf of X might just be flat-out decisive.  Or perhaps the group against X is too resource-constrained to respond to your greater advocacy.  That said, those descriptors (and others) might apply as well to either side of the dispute, your side included.  Scaling up the fight over X might cause you to be the one who simply flat out loses the struggle.

It is worth thinking which kinds of “small steps toward a much better world” do not produce such countervailing effects.

How about “being positive and constructive”?  Does it generate an equal and offsetting amount of negativity?

How about “trying to get people to be more reasonable, yet without offering a substantive political commitment bundled with that”?  Does that in turn motivate the crazies to work harder at making everyone go insane?  I am not sure.

What else might be effective, once these strategies are considered?

Does “refuting people” fit into this category?  Yes or no?

Which activities should you be abandoning altogether?  Or perhaps trying to do in secret, rather than publicly?

Settembrini and the continuing relevance of classical liberalism

by  Tyler Cowen in

Adrian Wooldridge has an excellent Bloomberg column on this topic, promoting the relevance of Thomas Mann, and here is one excerpt:

In the book [Magic Mountain], Castorp falls in with two intellectuals who live in the village of Davos below his sanitorium: an Italian humanist called Lodovico Settembrini and a Jewish-born cosmopolitan called Leo Naphta who is drawn to the Communist revolution and traditional Catholicism. The two men carry on a bitter argument about the relative merits of liberalism and illiberalism that touches on every question that mattered in prewar Europe: nationalism, individualism, fairness, tradition, war, peace, terrorism and so on.

Settembrini mechanically repeats the central tenets of liberalism but doesn’t seem to realize that the world is a very different place from what it was in 1850…Settembrini is like the bulk of today’s liberals — well-meaning but incapable of recognizing that the world of their youth has changed beyond recognition.

My reading of the world, however, is slightly different.  I think the Settembrini example, from 1924, shows classical liberalism is still relevant.  In 1924, classical liberalism seemed out of touch because the rest of the world was too fascistic, too communist, and too negative, among other problems.  Yet at the time the classical liberals were essentially correct, even though Settembrini sounds out of touch.

Because classical liberals continued to carry the torch, we later had another highly successful classical liberal period, something like 1980-2000, though of course you can argue the exact dates.

Perhaps the underlying model is this: classical liberals often seem out of touch, because the world is too negative to respond to their concerns.  Most of the time classical liberals are shouting into the well, so to speak.  But they need to keep at it.  Every now and then a window for liberal change opens, and then the classical liberals have to be ready, which in turn entails many years in the intellectual and ideological wilderness.

When the chaos surrounds, the liberals are no less relevant.  The Settembrini character, from 1924, illustrates exactly that.  Because he did eventually have his day, though many years later.

Tyler Cowen on Undertone podcast

by  Tyler Cowen in

Dan Schulz is a very good interviewer.

Are chatbots better than we are?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Maybe so:

We administer a Turing Test to AI Chatbots. We examine how Chatbots behave in a suite of classic behavioral games that are designed to elicit characteristics such as trust, fairness, risk-aversion, cooperation, \textit{etc.}, as well as how they respond to a traditional Big-5 psychological survey that measures personality traits. ChatGPT-4 exhibits behavioral and personality traits that are statistically indistinguishable from a random human from tens of thousands of human subjects from more than 50 countries. Chatbots also modify their behavior based on previous experience and contexts “as if” they were learning from the interactions, and change their behavior in response to different framings of the same strategic situation. Their behaviors are often distinct from average and modal human behaviors, in which case they tend to behave on the more altruistic and cooperative end of the distribution. We estimate that they act as if they are maximizing an average of their own and partner’s payoffs.

That is from a recent paper by Qiaozhu Mei, Yutong Xie, Walter Yuan, and Matthew O. Jackson.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

*Molly*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new book by Blake Butler, a memoir.  It is no spoiler to tell you that his wife Molly takes her own life at a young age.  I don’t know of any better argument for social conservatism than this book.  And perhaps suicide should be regarded as a sin, not something to get sentimental about on Twitter.  There is so much depravity in this book, at so many different levels.  There is the decline of a whole civilization in this book.  Here is a good New Yorker review by Alexandra Schwarz.

2023 CWT retrospective episode

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the link, here is the episode summary:

On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year in the show and more, including the most popular and underrated episodes, the origins of the show as an occasional event series, the most difficult guests to prep for, the story behind EconGOAT.AI, Tyler’s favorite podcast appearance of the year, and his evolving LLM-powered production function. They also answer listener questions and conclude with an assessment of Tyler’s top pop culture recommendations from 2013 across movies, music, and books.

And one excerpt:

COWEN: That’s a unique experience. You have a chance to do Chomsky. Maybe you don’t even want to do it, but you feel, “If I don’t do it, I’ll regret not having done it.” Just like we didn’t get to chat with Charlie Munger in time, though he’s far more, I would say, closer to truth than Chomsky is.

I thought half of Chomsky was quite good, and the other half was beyond terrible, but that’s okay. People, I think, wanted to gawk at it in some manner. They had this picture — what’s it like, Tyler talking with Chomsky? Then they get to see it and maybe recoil, but that’s what they came for, like a horror movie.

HOLMES: The engagement on the Chomsky episode was very good. Some people on MR were saying, “I turned it off. I couldn’t listen to it.” But actually, most people listened to it. It did, actually, probably better than average in terms of engagement, in terms of how much of the episode, on average, people listen to.

COWEN: How can you turn it off? What does that say about you? Were you surprised? You thought that Chomsky had become George Stigler or something? No.

Fun and interesting throughout.  If you are wondering, the most popular episode of the year, by far, was with Paul Graham.

John Stuart Mill on empirical economics and causal inference

by  Tyler Cowen in

Written by me, here is a passage from GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of All Time, and Why Should We Care?

A System of Logic covers many different topics, but for our purposes the most important discussion is Mill’s treatment “Of the Four Methods of Experimental Inquiry,” sometimes called “Mill’s Methods” and indeed receiving their own Wikipedia page. Mill outlines different manners in which causes and effects might be correlated, or not, and what we can infer from such patterns, and how difficult it can be to sort out actual cause and effect from the data. He refers to the “direct method of agreement,” the “method of difference,” “joint method of agreement difference,” the “method of residue,” and the “method of concomitant variations,” all as ways of trying to make correct or at least better inferences from the data.

I’ll spare you the details on the full argument, but in essence Mill was trying to figure out how to do causal inference econometrics, but with words only. That enterprise was doomed to fail, but it gives us insight into what Mill thought was by far the most important question in social science, namely causal inference when faced with complex underlying chains of cause and effect. For Mill, everything is what we would now call “an identification problem,” and this understanding is clearest in Mill’s chapters “Fallacies of Generalization” and “Fallacies of Ratiocination.” Mill also serves up a remarkably on-target discussion of how the different nature of social science problems, and their possibly greater complexity, can lead to identification problems that are not necessarily present in the natural sciences – see his chapter “Of the Chemical, or Experimental, Method in the Social Science.” That entire approach is remarkably 2020s in orientation, and you won’t find earlier history of thought books giving Mill much if any credit for this.

In a funny way, Mill was ahead of Milton Friedman in his understanding here. Friedman knew much more statistics, but in his economics he often presented causal inference as fairly straightforward. In his Monetary History of the United States, co-authored with Anna Schwartz, the reader does get the impression that the historical correlations, and ordinary least squares techniques, do in fact show that the money supply is a central driver of nominal income, given the relative stability of money demand. Later, the real business cycle theorists were to challenge that inference, and suggest that often it was income that was causing the money supply. That is a kind of complex challenge Mill seemed quite comfortable with in A System of Logic, whereas Friedman and Schwartz assigned higher power to common sense approaches to cause and effect.

Mill remains in my eyes one of the most underrated thinkers.

Weird anecdotes about philosophers connected to Oxford

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is one:

McTaggart wore his eccentricities with pride.  He rode a tricycle.  He walked “with a curious shuffle, back to the wall, as if expecting a sudden kick from behind,” a fact that may or may not be explained by his having been bullied at boarding school.  He saluted every cat he met.  His dissertation for a fellowship at Trinity, later published as Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic; had elicited from that older Apostle, Henry Sidgwick, the remark; “I can see that this is nonsense, but what I want to know is whether it is the right kind of nonsense.”  Apparently, it was.

That is from Nikhil Krishnan, A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford 1900-1960.  Another recent book dealing with both philosophy and war at Oxford is M.W. Rowe’s very thorough J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer.  Here is that book’s best weird philosopher anecdote:

Robert Paul Wolff noted Quine’s frequent lack of small talk, and his tactics for brushing off unwanted questioners, but his deeper doubts were crystallized by an incident some years later:

“Quine obviously had a sensual side to his nature to complement his intellect, as his attractive second wife and his love of food and jazz attested.  But I always thought there was some element of humanity missing from his makeup that gave him a rather cold aura.  Quine had just returned from a trip to Germany — this was not fifteen years after the war remember — and he was describing a tour he had taken of SS torture chambers.  He exhibited an eerie fascination with the technical efficiency of the facility that struck me as devoid of any real human appreciation of its demonic purpose.”

But at Oxford, Quine was perfectly charming, and his erudition and accomplishments — besides logic and jazz, he was an expert on maps, widely travelled, and said to speak eight languages — ensured considerable social success…

As for the broader book, I had not known the extent to which Austin was a significant and highly successful intelligence officer.  It is a very good book if you are interested in hundreds of pages on this topic.

Blaise Pascal is underrated

by  Tyler Cowen in

Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher, is often credited with establishing one of the earliest public transport systems in Paris, known as the “carrosses à cinq sols” (five-sou carriages).

Historical accounts note that in 1662, Pascal received royal permission to establish a system of carriages that would operate on fixed routes within Paris. These horse-drawn carriages had designated stops where passengers could board or disembark, much like modern bus services. The fixed price for a trip was five sous, which made it affordable for a wider segment of the population, unlike private carriages which were reserved for the wealthy.

Pascal’s involvement in this venture was primarily as an investor and organizer; he collaborated with the Duke of Roannez and other associates to get the project off the ground. Though the service initially enjoyed royal patronage and was somewhat successful, it eventually declined and was abandoned a few years later, partly due to the socio-political context of the time and the competition from other modes of transport that were less regulated and could operate more flexibly.

While it did not last long, Pascal’s carriage system is often seen as a forerunner to modern public transport services due to its structured, route-based approach to moving people around a major city. It reflects an early understanding of the need for regular, accessible transportation for the urban populace.

That is from GPT-4.