Category: Philosophy
My excellent Conversation with John Amaechi
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. As I said on Twitter, John has the best “podcast voice” of any CWT guest to date. Here is the episode summary:
John Amaechi is a former NBA forward/center who became a chartered scientist, professor of leadership at Exeter Business School, and New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, It’s Not Magic: The Ordinary Skills of Exceptional Leaders, argues that leadership isn’t bestowed or innate, it’s earned through deliberate skill development.
Tyler and John discuss whether business culture is defined by the worst behavior tolerated, what rituals leadership requires, the quality of leadership in universities and consulting, why Doc Rivers started some practices at midnight, his childhood identification with the Hunchback of Notre Dame and retreat into science fiction, whether Yoda was actually a terrible leader, why he turned down $17 million from the Lakers, how mental blocks destroyed his shooting and how he overcame them, what he learned from Jerry Sloan’s cruelty versus Karl Malone’s commitment, what percentage of NBA players truly love the game, the experience of being gay in the NBA and why so few male athletes come out, when London peaked, why he loved Scottsdale but had to leave, the physical toll of professional play, the career prospects for 2nd tier players, what distinguishes him from other psychologists, why personality testing is “absolute bollocks,” what he plans to do next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Of NBA players as a whole, what percentage do you think truly love the game?
AMAECHI: It’s a hard question to answer. Well, let me give a number first, otherwise, it’s just frustrating. 40%. And a further 30% like the game, and 20% of them are really good at the game and they have other things they want to do with the opportunities that playing well in the NBA grants them.
But make no mistake, even that 30% that likes the game and the 40% that love the game, they also know that they like what the game can give them and the opportunities that can grow for them, their families and generation, they can make a generational change in their family’s life and opportunities. It’s not just about love. Love doesn’t make you good at something. And this is a mistake that people make all the time. Loving something doesn’t make you better, it just makes the hard stuff easier.
COWEN: Are there any of the true greats who did not love playing?
AMAECHI: Yeah. So I know all former players are called legends, whether you are crap like me or brilliant like Hakeem Olajuwon, right? And so I’m part of this group of legends and I’m an NBA Ambassador as well. So I go around all the time with real proper legends. And a number of them I know, and so I’m not going to throw them under the bus, but it’s the way we talk candidly in the van going between events. It’s like, “Yeah, this is a job now and it was a job then, and it was a job that wrecked our knees, destroyed our backs, made it so it’s hard for us to pick up our children.”
And so it’s a job. And we were commodities for teams who often, at least back in those days, treated you like commodities. So yeah, there’s a lot of superstars, really, really excellent players. But that’s the problem, don’t conflate not loving the game. And also, don’t be fooled. In Britain there’s this habit of athletes kissing the badge. In football, they’ve got the badge on their shirt and they go, “Mwah, yeah.” If that fools you into thinking that this person loves the game, if them jumping into the stands and hugging you fools you into thinking that they love the game, more fool you.
COWEN: Michael Cage, he loved the game. Right?
But do note that most of the Conversation is not about the NBA.
My excellent Conversation with Steven Pinker
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Steven probe these dimensions of common knowledge—Schelling points, differential knowledge, benign hypocrisies like a whisky bottle in a paper bag—before testing whether rational people can actually agree (spoiler: they can’t converge on Hitchcock rankings despite Aumann’s theorem), whether liberal enlightenment will reignite and why, what stirring liberal thinkers exist under the age 55, why only a quarter of Harvard students deserve A’s, how large language models implicitly use linguistic insights while ignoring linguistic theory, his favorite track on Rubber Soul, what he’ll do next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Surely there’s a difference between coordination and common knowledge. I think of common knowledge as an extremely recursive model that typically has an infinite number of loops. Most of the coordination that goes on in the real world is not like that. If I approach a traffic circle in Northern Virginia, I look at the other person, we trade glances. There’s a slight amount of recursion, but I doubt if it’s ever three loops. Maybe it’s one or two.
We also have to slow down our speeds precisely because there are not an infinite number of loops. We coordinate. What percentage of the coordination in the real world is like the traffic circle example or other examples, and what percentage of it is due to actual common knowledge?
PINKER: Common knowledge, in the technical sense, does involve this infinite number of arbitrarily embedded beliefs about beliefs about beliefs. Thank you for introducing the title with the three dots, dot, dot, dot, because that’s what signals that common knowledge is not just when everyone knows that everyone knows, but when everyone knows that everyone knows that and so on. The answer to your puzzle — and I devote a chapter in the book to what common knowledge — could actually consist of, and I’m a psychologist, I’m not an economist, a mathematician, a game theorist, so foremost in my mind is what’s going on in someone’s head when they have common knowledge.
You’re right. We couldn’t think through an infinite number of “I know that he knows” thoughts, and our mind starts to spin when we do three or four. Instead, common knowledge can be generated by something that is self-evident, that is conspicuous, that’s salient, that you can witness at the same time that you witness other people witnessing it and witnessing you witnessing it. That can grant common knowledge in a stroke. Now, it’s implicit common knowledge.
One way of putting it is you have reason to believe that he knows that I know that he knows that I know that he knows, et cetera, even if you don’t literally believe it in the sense that that thought is consciously running through your mind. I think there’s a lot of interplay in human life between this recursive mentalizing, that is, thinking about other people thinking about other people, and the intuitive sense that something is out there, and therefore people do know that other people know it, even if you don’t have to consciously work that through.
You gave the example of norms and laws, like who yields at an intersection. The eye contact, though, is crucial because I suggest that eye contact is an instant common knowledge generator. You’re looking at the part of the person looking at the part of you, looking at the part of them. You’ve got instant granting of common knowledge by the mere fact of making eye contact, which is why it’s so potent in human interaction and often in other species as well, where eye contact can be a potent signal.
There are even species that can coordinate without literally having common knowledge. I give the example of the lowly coral, which presumably not only has no beliefs, but doesn’t even have a brain with which to have beliefs. Coral have a coordination problem. They’re stuck to the ocean floor. Their sperm have to meet another coral’s eggs and vice versa. They can’t spew eggs and sperm into the water 24/7. It would just be too metabolically expensive. What they do is they coordinate on the full moon.
On the full moon or, depending on the species, a fixed number of days after the full moon, that’s the day where they all release their gametes into the water, which can then find each other. Of course, they don’t have common knowledge in knowing that the other will know. It’s implicit in the logic of their solution to a coordination problem, namely, the public signal of the full moon, which, over evolutionary time, it’s guaranteed that each of them can sense it at the same time.
Indeed, in the case of humans, we might do things that are like coral. That is, there’s some signal that just leads us to coordinate without thinking it through. The thing about humans is that because we do have or can have recursive mentalizing, it’s not just one signal, one response, full moon, shoot your wad. There’s no limit to the number of things that we can coordinate creatively in evolutionarily novel ways by setting up new conventions that allow us to coordinate.
COWEN: I’m not doubting that we coordinate. My worry is that common knowledge models have too many knife-edge properties. Whether or not there are timing frictions, whether or not there are differential interpretations of what’s going on, whether or not there’s an infinite number of messages or just an arbitrarily large number of messages, all those can matter a lot in the model. Yet actual coordination isn’t that fragile. Isn’t the common knowledge model a bad way to figure out how coordination comes about?
And this part might please Scott Sumner:
COWEN: I don’t like most ballet, but I admit I ought to. I just don’t have the time to learn enough to appreciate it. Take Alfred Hitchcock. I would say North by Northwest, while a fine film, is really considerably below Rear Window and Vertigo. Will you agree with me on that?
PINKER: I don’t agree with you on that.
COWEN: Or you think I’m not your epistemic peer on Hitchcock films?
PINKER: Your preferences are presumably different from beliefs.
COWEN: No. Quality relative to constructed standards of the canon…
COWEN: You’re going to budge now, and you’re going to agree that I’m right. We’re not doing too well on this Aumann thing, are we?
PINKER: We aren’t.
COWEN: Because I’m going to insist North by Northwest, again, while a very good movie is clearly below the other two.
PINKER: You’re going to insist, yes.
COWEN: I’m going to insist, and I thought that you might not agree with this, but I’m still convinced that if we had enough time, I could convince you. Hearing that from me, you should accede to the judgment.
I was very pleased to have read Steven’s new book
What should I ask Alison Gopnik?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is Wikipedia:
Alison Gopnik (born June 16, 1955) is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the areas of cognitive and language development, specializing in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning. Her writing on psychology and cognitive science has appeared in Science, Scientific American, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, Slate and others. Her body of work also includes four books and over 100 journal articles…
Gopnik has carried out extensive work in applying Bayesian networks to human learning and has published and presented numerous papers on the topic…Gopnik was one of the first psychologists to note that the mathematical models also resemble how children learn.
Gopnik is known for advocating the “theory theory” which postulates that the same mechanisms used by scientists to develop scientific theories are used by children to develop causal models of their environment.
Here is her home page. So what should I ask her?
The new Derek Parfit volume
He also talked about more personal matters such as his severe problems with insomnia during the recent book-writing process, saying that he was sometimes awake for thirty-six hours at a time and felt that if he had had a gun to hand he might have shot himself — not because he wanted to die, but because he was desperate to lose consciousness. He had eventually been recommended to try a sleep regime and calming drugs that had solved the problem, and when I commented that I also had problems with sleep, he immediately suggested I should try his methods too. I discovered later that whenever he came across some technique he regarded as providing a major life improvement, he would proselytize it far and wide.
That is from Janet Radcliffe Richard, the widow of Derek Parfit. Her fascinating spousal memoir is from the new and fascinating edited collection Derek Parfit: His Life and Thought, edited by Jeff McMahan. Worth the triple digit price. Derek would exercise on a stationery bike only, because that was the only form of exercise compatible with reading. And he was a big fan of Uchida playing Mozart, as all people should be.
And there is this segment, near the close of the essay:
…in the eyes of some people who were aware of it, my philosophical standing was if anything diminished, because in Derek’s circle I was merely his partner, and barely known otherwise. He did not open up new opportunities for me; on the contrary, I rather dropped out of public view when we lived togehter. He did not widen my social circle, because he did not have one; in practice (not deliberately), he severely contracted it. He was of little use for anything recreational, because we did together only what he wanted to do, and soon after I met him most possibilities of that kind were perpetually over the horizon. He did not in any way advance my career: he was neither my teacher nor my referee, and I had started to establish my terrain — very different from his — before I knew him. I learned an enormous amount from him, of course; but I did not often find it helpful to discuss my work with him. Even my eventual return to Oxford had nothing to do with him.
Recommended. Larry Temkin tells us that Parfit could not calculate a fifteen percent tip, and there is an essay by Derek’s brother as well. I have never seen a volume where the contributors evince so much fierce loyalty and attachment to their subject.
Celebrate Vishvakarma: A Holiday for Machines, Robots, and AI
Most holidays celebrate people, gods or military victories. Today is India’s Vishvakarma Puja, a celebration of machines. In India on this day, workers clean and honor their equipment and engineers pay tribute to Vishvakarma, the god of architecture, engineering and manufacturing.
Call it a celebration of Solow and a reminder that capital, not just labor, drives growth.
Capital today isn’t just looms and tractors—it’s robots, software, and AI. These are the new force multipliers, the machines that extend not only our muscles but our minds. To celebrate Vishvakarma is to celebrate tools, tool makers and the capital that makes us productive.
We have Labor Day for workers and Earth Day for nature. Viskvakarma Day is for the machines. So today don’t thank Mother Earth, thank the machines, reflect on their power and productivity and be grateful for all that they make possible. Capital is the true source of abundance.
Vishvakarma Day should be our national holiday for abundance and progress.
Hat tip: Nimai Mehta.
What should I ask Cass Sunstein?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him soon. Most of all (but not exclusively) about his three recent books Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom, Manipulation: What It Is, Why It Is Bad, What To Do About It, and Imperfect Oracle: What AI Can and Cannot Do.
So what should I ask him? Here is my previous CWT with Cass.
My Hope Axis podcast with Anna Gát
Here is the YouTube, here is transcript access, here is their episode summary:
The brilliant @tylercowen joins @TheAnnaGat for a lively, wide-ranging conversation exploring hope from the perspective of insiders and outsiders, the obsessed and the competitive, immigrants and hard workers. They talk about talent and luck, what makes America unique, whether the dream of Internet Utopia has ended, and how Gen-Z might rebel. Along the way: Jack Nicholson, John Stuart Mill, road trips through Eastern Europe, the Enlightenment of AI, and why courage shapes the future.
Excerpt:
Tyler Cowen: But the top players I’ve met, like Anand or Magnus Carlsen or Kasparov, they truly hate losing with every bone in their body. They do not approach it philosophically. They can become very miserable as a result. And that’s very far from my attitudes. It shaped my life in a significant way.
Anna Gát: I was so surprised. I was like, what? But actually, what? In Maggie Smith-high RP—what? This never occurred to me that losing can be approached philosophically.
Tyler Cowen: And I think always keeping my equanimity has been good for me, getting these compound returns over long periods of time. But if you’re doing a thing like chess or math or sports that really favors the young, you don’t have all those decades of compound returns. You’ve got to motivate yourself to the maximum extent right now. And then hating losing is super useful. But that’s just—those are not the things I’ve done. The people who hate losing should do things that are youth-weighted, and the people who have equanimity should do things that are maturity and age-weighted with compounding returns.
Excellent discussion, lots of fresh material. Here is the Hope Axis podcast more generally. Here is Anna’s Interintellect project, worthy of media attention. Most of all it is intellectual discourse, but it also seems to be the most successful “dating service” I am aware of.
The politics of depression in young adults
From a recent paper by Catherine Gimbrone, et.al.:
From 2005 to 2018, 19.8% of students identified as liberal and 18.1% identified as conservative, with little change over time. Depressive affect (DA) scores increased for all adolescents after 2010, but increases were most pronounced for female liberal adolescents (b for interaction = 0.17, 95% CI: 0.01, 0.32), and scores were highest overall for female liberal adolescents with low parental education (Mean DA 2010: 2.02, SD 0.81/2018: 2.75, SD 0.92). Findings were consistent across multiple internalizing symptoms outcomes. Trends in adolescent internalizing symptoms diverged by political beliefs, sex, and parental education over time, with female liberal adolescents experiencing the largest increases in depressive symptoms, especially in the context of demographic risk factors including parental education.
Here is the link. This is further evidence for what is by now a well-known proposition.
Patrick Collison on the Irish Enlightenment
Most of all, the Irish Enlightenment seems to me an instance of small group theory. I’m fond of the thought that between great man and structuralist theories of history there lies an intermediate position: the small group, a colocated cauldron for iconoclastic thinking, can as a collective pioneer a novel direction. The romantics in Jena, the founders of Silicon Valley, the musicians behind punk. Unsurprisingly, the early Irish thinkers are closely connected. Swift and Berkeley attended the same school and were good friends. Hutcheson and Berkeley debated publicly, while Burke’s work is clearly downstream of Hutcheson’s.
And this:
How should we view the movement as a whole? Well, the timing is important: Cantillon published his Essai in 1755, Swift Drapier’s Letters in 1724, and Berkeley The Querist in 1735. It seems to me that, before 1750, the Irish thinkers have a strong claim to leading the world in the field of economics and to having collectively sketched out much of the core of the field in broadly correct terms. In Petty you have economic statistics; in Cantillon you have risk, market pricing, and much else; in Berkeley, you have a theory of national banking plus development economics; in Swift you have proto-monetarism. The claim is not that they figured everything out or were right on all points, but which other school or group could you rank ahead of them? Smith published Wealth of Nations in 1776 and The French physiocrats, who were very important, came later: Quesnay’s first piece wasn’t published until 1756.
Do read the whole short essay.
Three accounts of modern liberalism
I have a review essay on that topic in the latest TLS. Excerpt, on Philip Pilkington:
Pilkington’s sense of numbers, history and magnitude is sometimes off. He writes that “liberalism is forming broken, atomized people who are unable to pass on their genes to a future generation”, apparently oblivious to the fact that fertility rates are falling in many non- liberal countries as well – in Russia, for example – where they are lower than in the US. In China, fertility is lower still. Is the liberal goal really to “replac[e] the family with the state”? That sounds more like the non-liberal visions we find in western thought, running from Plato to the more extreme forms of communism in which children are encouraged to report on the supposed crimes of their parents.
We are told that “deindustrialization eviscerated American industry”, yet US manufacturing output is now barely below its pre-financial crisis peak, and service sector jobs tend to pay more on average today than do manufacturing jobs. Pilkington also promotes strange theories of trade imbalances, as presented by the non-economists Oren Cass and Michael Pettis but rejected by virtually all serious researchers in the area. Their view is that a huge economic restructuring is needed because China and Germany keep running trade surpluses while the US is in perpetual trade deficit. But in reality this arrangement seems as stable as any other macroeconomic state of affairs could be. It is Pilkington’s prerogative to disagree with the consensus, but we are never told why everyone else might be wrong. Overall, there is too much sloppiness here in service of the agenda of carping about liberal societies.
And on Robert Kagan:
An alternative and less neat vision of American history shows how liberalism has often relied on illiberalism, and not just accidentally. Lincoln was a significant abuser of civil rights, including on habeas corpus. The North’s campaigns in the Civil War killed many thousands of innocent civilians, not all of them in the service of legitimate military ends. You can argue that this may have been necessary, but liberal it was not. As for FDR, he tried to pack the Supreme Court and sought a significant expansion of executive power, making his administrations a methodological precursor of Trump. He did fight the Second World War on the side of liberalism, but he did not always use liberal means (eg the firebombing of Tokyo), and indeed a full respect for the laws of warfare might not have secured victory.
Once we see American history as a union of liberal and illiberal forces, we can relax a little about the current situation. Certainly, we are returning to some bad and illiberal behaviours of the past, and it is right to be concerned. Yet this seems to be more a feature of the ebb and flow of American politics than a decisive turn away from liberalism. Illiberalism has been prominent in the mix most of the time, and that is both the good news and the bad.
Interesting throughout, recommended, I believe it is the Sept.1 issue.
*Take a Girl Like You*, by Kingsley Amis
This excellent and neglected novel deserves a new look in our time. As Christian Lorentzen points out in his useful introduction, if you are interested in (non-Submission) Houellebecq, this is the next place to go. How exactly did we get on the Houellebecq sexual emptiness path to begin with? This novel was published in 1960, and it shows the first steps toward the sexual revolution and the rise of more open sexual competition, with a nod in the direction of what the final results are going to be.
In the novel the old sexual world is still there, and largely in control. There is a distinction between “good girls” and “bad girls,” for instance, or if you are traveling with an opposite sex companion there needs to be talk of “separate bedrooms.” But the characters discuss birth control, and one asks the other why don’t they just…do it? The novel shows how the older world started to break down and morph into what was to come later.
I will not spoil the ending for you.
Interesting and insigthful passages abound. For instance:
“He’s got a sensual face. But he doesn’t know much about women, I think. He talks all the time, and this isn’t necessary, as we women soon learn.”
Or:
He kissed her very thoroughly, without trying to do anything else, and indeed without any of the toiling and moiling, let alone the moaning and groaning, gone in for by the too-serious ones, and/or the ones who put up a show of being serious.
pp.169-171 have the best analysis of “lookism” I have seen.
Amis understands the slippery slope phenomenon very well. He even suggests that greater promiscuity is bound to lead to regularly bisexual women.
Recommended, an easy and fun read, and if it helps you norm my evaluation I did not love Lucky Jim by him.
Philosophy of freedom podcast with philosopher Rebecca Lowe
Here is the audio and transcript. Here is one excerpt:
Tyler: I think there are many notions of freedom, more than just three, but positive and negative are by far the most important. And they’re the ones you can at least try to build into political systems. A greater number of people understand what you’re talking about. And if you can manage to take care of those two in a reasonably satisfactory manner, odds are you’ve just succeeded. And I wouldn’t be too fussy about the others.
But I bet if you sat down, you could come up with 57 different kinds of freedom that are relevant. Look at Amartya Sen’s Paretian liberal paradox. Well, what would you choose if the choice affected only you? For him, that’s a significant part of liberty. I think it’s an insignificant part, but if he insists on putting it on his list, okay, it can go on the list.
And:
Rebecca: So when you talk about positive freedom, I think maybe what you’re talking about is something like an agent-focused framing of freedom. So I think one of the problems with the kind of negative framings generally, so if we think about the classic, particularly on the kind of liberal/libertarian side, people might want to say something like freedom is non-interference, freedom is non-coercion. The republicans might say it’s non-domination.
One risk with these things is I think it avoids centring the person who it is who’s doing the free thing, the person who has freedom, the agent. Is that fair?
Lots of lengthy threads and back and forth, so not so easy to excerpt. This podcast was almost entirely fresh material, and of course it is recommended.
We also decided to leave in the post-podcast discussion of the podcast itself. A good practice which should spread more widely, here is part of that:
TYLER
Let me give you a sense of where I think we’ve arrived at, and tell me if you agree. See if this is some kind of constructive progress. You want to defend societies based on freedom with some kind of metaphysics and you want to build up that metaphysics. I want to defend societies based on freedom, which are roughly the same societies as you want to defend, with a minimum of metaphysics. I’m always trying to push the metaphysics out the door. So a lot of this conversation has been Rebecca drags in the metaphysics…
REBECCA
This is my life! You know this!
TYLER
… and then Tyler… the baseball is thrown at him, he sort of quickly has it in his hands, and then tosses it to the other side of the room. Metaphysics, get away! And then Rebecca is frustrated because the metaphysics are gone and she throws more metaphysics at him. And that’s what we’ve been doing. Is that a fair characterisation of, you know, the show so far, as they call it?
Here is Rebecca’s Substack and podcast more generally, the emphasis is on people doing philosophy.
What should I ask John Amaechi?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is Wikipedia on John:
John Uzoma Ekwugha Amaechi // ⓘ, OBE (/əˈmeɪtʃi/; born 26 November 1970) is an English psychologist, consultant and former professional basketball player. He played college basketball for the Vanderbilt Commodores and Penn State Nittany Lions, and professional basketball in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Amaechi also played in France, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Since retiring from basketball, Amaechi has worked as a psychologist and consultant, establishing his company Amaechi Performance Systems.
In February 2007, Amaechi became the first former NBA player to publicly come out as gay after doing so in his memoir Man in the Middle.
John has a new book coming out, namely It’s Not Magic: The Ordinary Skills of Exceptional Leaders. So what should I ask him?
Is it Possible to Raise National Happiness?
That is a new paper by Alberto Prati and Claudia Senik, here is the abstract:
We revisit the famous Easterlin paradox by considering that life evaluation scales refer to a changing context, hence they are regularly reinterpreted. We propose a simple model of rescaling based on both retrospective and current life evaluations, and apply it to unexploited archival data from the USA. When correcting for rescaling, we find that the well-being of Americans has substantially increased, on par with GDP, health, education, and liberal democracy, from the 1950s to the early 2000s. Using several datasets, we shed light on other happiness puzzles, including the apparent stability of life evaluations during COVID-19, why Ukrainians report similar levels of life satisfaction today as before the war, and the absence of parental happiness.
To give some intuition, the authors provide evidence that people are more likely engaging in rescaling than being stuck on a hedonic treadmill. I think they are mostly right.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Cass Sunstein on classical liberalism
Here’s what I want to emphasize. I like Hayek a lot less ambivalently than I once did, and von Mises, who once seemed to me a crude and irascible precursor of Hayek, now seems to me to be (mostly) a shining star (and sometimes fun, not least because of his crudeness and irascibility). The reason is simple: They were apostles of freedom. They believed in freedom from fear.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, I did not see that clearly enough, because they seemed to me to be writing against a background that was sharp and visible to them, but that seemed murky and not so relevant to me — the background set by the 1930s and 1940s, for which Hitler and Stalin were defining. (After all, Hayek helped found the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947.)
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, socialist planning certainly did not seem like a good idea, not at all, but liberalism, as I saw it, had other and newer fish to fry. People like Rawls, Charles Larmore, Edna Ullmann-Margalit (in The Emergence of Norms), Jurgen Habermas (a past and present hero), Amartya Sen (also a past and present hero), Jon Elster (in Sour Grapes and Ulysses and the Sirens), and Susan Okin seemed (to me) to point the way.
I liked their forms of liberalism. Hayek and the Mont Pelerins (and Posner and Epstein) seemed to be fighting old battles, and in important ways to be wrong. With respect to authoritarianism and tyranny, and the power of the state, of course they were right; but still, those battles seemed old.
But those battles never were old. In important ways, Hayek and the Mont Pelerins (and Posner and Epstein, and Becker and Stigler) were right. Liberalism is a big tent. It’s much more than good to see them under it. It’s an honor to be there with them.
Here is the whole Substack, recommended. I am very much in accord with his sentiments here, running in both directions, namely both classical and “more modern” liberalism.