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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31256 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Classical liberalism vs. The New Right

Tyler Cowen responds to the ‘New Right’-

There is also a self-validating structure to New Right arguments over time. You can’t easily persuade New Right advocates by pointing to mainstream media reports that contradict their main narrative. Mainstream media is one of the least trusted sources. Academic research also has fallen under increasing mistrust, as the academy predominantly hires individuals who support the Democratic Party.

Most classical liberals are uncomfortable with the New Right approaches, and seek to disavow them. I share those concerns, and yet I also recognize that hard and fast lines are not so easy to draw. The New Right is in essence accepting the original classical liberal critique of the state and pushing it a few steps further, adding further skepticism of elites, a greater emphasis on culture, and a belief in elite collusion rather than checks and balances. You may or may not agree with those intellectual moves, but many common premises still are shared between the classical liberals and the New Right, even if neither side is fully comfortable admitting this.

The New Right also tends to see the classical liberals as naïve about power (the same charge classical liberals fling at the establishment), and as standing on the losing side of history. Those aren’t the easiest arguments to refute. Furthermore, the last twenty years have seen 9/11, a failed Iraq War, a major financial crisis and recession, and a major pandemic, mishandled in some critical regards. It doesn’t seem that wrong to become additionally skeptical about American elites, and the New Right wields these points effectively.

The major thing he misses, or perhaps only elides to, is that the individualist framework that libertarianism was built on has been utterly obliterated by technological, political, and demographic shifts. The future is now, old man, and it’s all about groups, and Kaldor-Hicks efficiencies. Given our degenerate institutions there is no way any particular set of losers can actually expect compensation for their damages, and so all one can hope for is that our particular sect wins out in the scrum of sectarian squabbling.

Yet, listening to a recent interview of his, I was struck by his (likely correct) bone-deep cynicism towards grand reform. His marginal revolution is lower variance than a monarchy or integralist state, and so intrinsically less ambitious. X-risks seem to demand a serious response, but Cowen just shrugs and hopes we have a nice few centuries before we destroy ourselves.

It has become increasingly clear that the political Right in America is not what it used to be. In particular, my own preferred slant of classical liberalism is being replaced. In its stead are rising alternatives that don’t yet have a common name. Some are called “national conservatism,” and some (by no means all) strands are pro-Trump, but I will refer to the New Right. My use of the term covers a broad range of sources, from Curtis Yarvin to J.D. Vance to Adrian Vermeule to Sohrab Ahmari to Rod Dreher to Tucker Carlson, and also a lot of anonymous internet discourse. Most of all I am thinking of the smart young people I meet who in the 1980s might have become libertarians, but these days absorb some mix of these other influences.

These people have been around for at least a decade. There is nothing new about them, nor are they part of the political right or that right wing.

I don’t like the status quo either, but I also see a world where the most left-wing majors – humanities majors – are losing enrollments and influence. Furthermore, the internet is gaining in intellectual influence, relative to university professors.

It's more like the intellectuals, such as university professors, are gaining influence online, not that the internet is replacing intellectuals. Tyler's article got 350 comments, which is nuts. That's comparable to influencers on on YouTube. University professors are not losing influence at all.

The New Right also overrates the collusive nature of mainstream elites. Many New Right adherents see a world ever more dominated by “The Woke.” In contrast, I see an America where Virginia elected a Republican governor, Louis C.K. won a 2022 Grammy award on a secret ballot and some trans issues are falling in popularity. Wokism likely has peaked.

This is not evidence of it having peaked. DEI is still a big deal.

Similarly, the New Right places great stress on corruption and groupthink in American universities.

This has been the basic conservative view for decades. It's not a new thing.

The New Right also seems bad at coalition building, most of all because it is so polarizing about the elites on the other side.

That's because it's not so much as a political movement as it's an online or pundit movement. People like Tucker or Yarvin do not aspire to public office.

The pandemic response, such as shutdowns, quarantines, and mask mandates (which were of at best dubious efficacy) was a major blow to the status quo. This was their own doing. Then the inflation surge, which none of the experts saw coming. These events made the public lose faith in experts.

Then the inflation surge, which none of the experts saw coming

Lawrence Summers, who is about as mainstream an expert you can think of, was predicting high inflation as early as Feb of 2021.

hmm here he is in Dec. 2020 advocating for inflationary policy https://www.marketwatch.com/story/larry-summers-says-deficit-reduction-would-be-catastrophic-argues-for-new-government-debt-yardstick-11606863495

An all-star panel of economists implored Congress to pass a major new coronavirus stimulus package, with former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers making the argument that Washington politicians should become much more comfortable with large deficits and a growing national debt.

During a virtual event staged Tuesday afternoon by the Brookings Institution to advise the incoming Biden administration and Congress on fiscal policy, Summers attacked the conventional wisdom behind the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles fiscal responsibility commission created by former President Barack Obama 10 years ago, when both Democrats and Republicans largely agreed that deficit reduction was urgently needed.

and again here https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/summers-u-s-government-should-spend-whatever-it-takes-to-control-virus

"Summers: U.S. government should spend ‘whatever it takes’ to control virus"

but then 5 months later he does a 180:

http://larrysummers.com/2021/05/24/the-inflation-risk-is-real/

This was after inflation already spiked.

So it's hard to say if he was right or not. Inflation already began to spike when he made his warning, but the problem was, it was too late. Maybe interest rates should have gone up sooner.

I don't think we yet have an adequate explanation for why inflation spiked so much. Stimulus played some role but so did possibly other factors.

Summer's argument is that the output gap at the beginning of the Biden administration was much smaller than the scale of the stimulus bill the administration was attempting to pass. It's possible to say, "We need some stimulus, but not that much, which will be inflationary".

Your second link is March 2020.

And Summers was warning about the scale of the stimulus package in February, 2021.

I don't think anyone expected this to be different.

The point is that he did. They have like, models that let them distinguish between situations.

I don't think the stimulus is main the cause though, because the inflation has persisted long after the stimulus was spent, and a good chunk of the money was saved/invested anyway.

So, this is getting a bit into the weeds on the question, but the way to think of the relationship between fiscal stimulus and inflation is by thinking of the stimulus as just the same as anyone with a sufficiently large credit card. The path of monetary policy that achieved low, steady inflation prior to the over-sized stimulus at the beginning of the Biden administration probably looked something like slow rate hikes over the course of late 2021 and 2022 that eventually brought rates up to some point lower than they are going to end up being in our current timeline. The monetary stimulus of 2020 had been enough to prevent the lockdowns from causing serious, deep, long-lasting depression and opening up would have brought total spending back into line with the non-pandemic growth path of 2019 without the Fed having to slam on the breaks.

Then a huge amount of additional spending happened. The Fed suddenly had to change stances to a tighter policy sooner in order to stave off inflation but, importantly, they didn't. Inflation started to spike long before the Fed even started talking about tightening. Then they took most of a year before they started actually tightening.

So, it's still monetary policy causing the inflation (as only monetary policy can cause sustained inflation), but it's the stance of monetary policy being suddenly far too loose as a result of a change in the environment, rather than a change in the policy instrument. If the Fed had followed a policy path similar to its path in real life in a hypothetical world where the 2021 stimulus didn't happen or was much smaller, there probably wouldn't have been any inflation or it would have been much milder. If the Fed had appropriately offset the 2021 stimulus by moving forward and scaling tightening plans from the second half of the year or the next year to the first half of 2021, there probably wouldn't have been any inflation or it would have been much milder.

The Fed suddenly had to change stances to a tighter policy sooner in order to stave off inflation but, importantly, they didn't. Inflation started to spike long before the Fed even started talking about tightening. Then they took most of a year before they started actually tightening.

That is what I said, which for some reason people disagreed with, and my post was downvoted a bunch of times so i deleted it .

here is what I wrote:

With perfect hindsight, interest rates should have started going up after the stock market made new highs, which was in late 2020 instead of waiting until q2 of 2022. But this would have caused a market crash anyway.

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