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Tyler Cowen had Dan Wang (author of Breakneck, originator of the 'China is run by engineers, US is run by lawyers' meme) on his podcast last week. IMO, Tyler's podcast is at it's best when he's debating rather than interviewing, part of why his year-end reviews are some of his best episodes. It's particularly interesting watching someone intelligent actually defend America and moreover champion causes that inevitably would code as lower-status to the intellectual class.
tl;dr, Tyler's views —
Massive quotes incoming. Skip ahead if you don't want to read Tyler's arguments:
And honestly, this seems to me to be the revealed preferences of most people. Europeans and Chinese who move to the US largely move to the burbs and buy the big car even while (at least the former) tut-tutting about how barbaric it all is. People, at least once they hit a certain age, want the SFH and the big yard with the fence and the space to raise their children.
On the pandemic and vaccines:
And yet. And yet! At one point we have this brief exchange:
I can buy some of Tyler's takes, and as I mentioned it's refreshing to see an actual contrarian take about the competence of America. But at some point, it just transcends a contrarian take into cope territory. Why are we complacently accepting that China is going to be the global center for auto manufacturing on top of drones and everything else? Life might be good now, but if China is just 1950s America, and 1950s America was just 19th century Britain, aren't we headed for the same stagnation and broad irrelevance of the UK today?
Maybe some of the catastrophizing about China is overwrought and some of America's apparent weaknesses are just the invisible hand of the market moving in mysterious ways, while the gleaming bridges and HSR to nowhere are albatross projects and a drag on growth. Maybe our apparent decadence and vice are really just the product of a system optimized for giving it's people a good life, while Chinese grind 996 work weeks for shit wages to stroke Xi Jinping's ego. But man, I don't want to get hit with the rare earth metals stick whenever the POTUS doesn't kowtow to the emperor. I'm still torn between whether the economists should be running the show or whether we should keep them as far away from the levers of power as possible.
Make some actual tariffs that bite and laws that promote onshoring; and if consumers don't even notice an increase in prices it ain't working. If your argument is that we can't match the Chinese in whatever way, deregulate or bring Chinese companies here so we can learn from them or do whatever it takes to compete. Instead, we just decided to sell them H200s and erode one of our few remaining advantages (maybe someone more plugged in can comment on how significant this is?).
Bizarre question by Cowen
Cowen retroactively defines an attractive suburb as a sprawling American suburb. No wonder Wang is confused.
American suburbs are the result of uniquely American circumstances from the mid/late 20th century: white flight, stranger danger, infinite money, fertile population, car lobbies & cheap gas. China has little to do with these circumstances and therefore, little to do with the American suburb.
Agreed. The whole "suburb" thing as defined here in uniquely American. Here in the UK we also have homes with a yard and a dog and a car (though some of the most expensive properties in central London won't have an exclusive yard and potentially not even off street parking given that they literally share walls with their neighboring super expensive properties (they are terraced, not detached). They are amazing places to live (hence the prices) but Cowen's phrasing would put them as not "attractive".
Plus the whole controlling your school district is a very American thing as well, it just seems quaint and weird in the UK: schooling should be run by professionals, not the whims of a bunch of parents who don't know shit about pedagogy. As we move to a more and more multi polar world US citizens need to realize that the rest of the world doesn't think like them and while in the past they had the luxury of being able to ignore what we said without much consequence this is fast dissipating and they will now need to learn some cultural sensitivity like the rest of us.
In a better world yes. Unfortunately some of our professionals like to ban teaching phonics and think Gender Queer is good content for 8 year olds. I like having a democratic veto over these people. If the school board goes looney enough then they can be voted out. As a taxpaying voter I get a say.
You're referring to American schools here, so clearly Tyler's whole "we control the schools thing" isn't going so well lol
There are a number of options here, assuming that government schools exist. ("Every school a charter school" type approaches are clearly possible, but they don't have a particularly good record in practice) In order of desirability I would put them as:
In the UK, (1) got us acceptable outcomes under Blair's rotation of education secretaries, and very good outcomes under Gove, (2) got us okay outcomes for most kids but some schools decided not to teach the kids to read, (3) got us "The perfect Ofsted lesson - how to impress school inspectors by never, ever teaching the kids anything" and (4) is outside the Overton window.
I suspect most Motteposters would disagree with me and rate (4) above (3). They may be right in a US context.
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hmm? school boards across the country were deposed and much of this stuff was stopped in localities across the country, including my locality
the "professional experts" were booted over their political insanity and covid insanity and now not a single one has a seat anymore and the explicit progressive politics has ended with teachers being sanctioned and punished for attempting to push it
what are you talking about?
I'm trying to imagine this scenario except instead "the whims of a bunch of parents who don't know shit about pedagogy" have no power and their only option is a march through institutions to retake the professional expert class (sacrificing a few generations in the meantime) or just move away to some other place?
unless you're claiming the progressive politics rearing its face in gender politics and racial politics in education generally or of children is some uniquely American thing, which is hard to swallow, I'm trying to craft a decent point out of this
even if it's true, like every one else who swims in the American empire's culture, when it's happening here you can look forward to it happening in your county as well (BLM protests coming to a town near you!) and then you can tell us your surefire effective way to depose an entrenched professional class
I know it's easy for euros to feel they know quite a bit about America, American politics, and Americans, because they're steeped in our culture and read discussion of our politics on the American internet, but it's important to remember their understanding and knowledge is quite limited and heinously manipulated. Being American and not blue-tribe, living in Western Europe and watching the media the Europeans consume there is quite eye opening. The whole continent's (or at least the Western part of it) accurate understanding of America is a casualty of American media's attack on typical Americans.
Mostly just being snarky.
My point was that this ideal of the best way to run schools "parents in the suburbs control it" has resulted in (edit) mediocre educational outcomes in the western world, and generally a system full of absolute fucking insanity like gender and racial politics. Maybe having technocrats would be even worse, but the status quo is extremely far from "good".
I'm Canadian, it's too late for us, we went full retard a while ago. I'm not actually sure what the most effective way to depose an entrenched professional class is, maybe american suburban parents are the dominant strategy. Given their efficacy however, we might be fucked if they are.
adjusting for demographics, the US school system is one of the best in the world as measured by proxies like PISA, with the school systems with the most involved parents, i.e., suburbs, scoring near the top
homeschoolers do even better than that
to be fair, I think this is despite the school systems and not because of them; what made you think US primary schools were "some of the worst educational outcomes in the western world"?
racial and gender politics were imposed from above and through institutional capture; it was never imposed because parents wanted it or through parental control
parental control was the check and moderation on each of the "professional educators" newest idiocy from abandoning phonics to gender politics to common-core
I was being too snarky, I amended to "mediocre"
Middle of the pack in achievement
Pretty expensive but again, with middling outcomes.
I would posit that having massive demographic achievement gaps is a failure state.
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Now imagine how poorly American pedagogists would behave if they could run wild and never answer to voters or parents. Which is my response to BurdensomeCount rather than Tyler.
I'm deeply skeptical of would-be technocrats. Self appointed "experts" aspiring to shape society free from petty concerns like consent from the governed so consistently go against my preferences. This happens to be a good example of the "experts" not clearly aligning with broader societal preferences, expectations or goals. Maybe American school administrators are especially unaligned with any positive societal outcomes and BurdensomeCount is fairly pointing out how British schooling is well managed by competent professionals. That's certainly not a point in America's favor given how school administrators seemingly run rampant. But that is especially not an argument for why they should be freed from the last bit of voter influence over them.
Fair point!
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Government should be run by the people it governs, as close as possible to reality and as decentralized as possible. That goes double for public schooling.
Oh believe me, I know. We're a thousand years into a project that other races simply can't accomplish, and wouldn't try anyway.
Should an asylum be run by its inmates?
As so many Boomer Republicans (still) like to say, "we don't live in a 'democracy,' we live in a representative republic." (Setting aside the quibble about how they here define "democracy…) Well, what does it mean to be a good "representative"?
How does a parent or guardian properly "represent" a small child?
How does someone with power of attorney "represent" a senile elder?
How does a relative "represent" a hospitalized schizophrenia patient who keeps trying to cut himself open to remove the chip the CIA implanted to control him?
Why not? There's nothing pejorative about an asylum institution, unless you're trying to smuggle in the connotation of an insane asylum in particular. But if you have to have insane inmates as analogous to the citizenry of a country for that analogy to hold as a pejorative, it can be trivially dismissed as a false analogy, or just as trivially inverted to say that the government officials are the incompetent crazy people who really shouldn't be in charge of things.
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Hobbes talks about this, and it's one of the basic foundations of Enlightenment republican thought, that no man knows the business of another so well that he can reliably claim the right of rule over him just by superior knowledge. It was only in the 20th Century that intellectuals became so detached and naïve that they thought, for instance, that they knew farming better than farmers, and, to be fair, only a few million had to die before experts settled on "let's give them better technology, educate them on techniques, and let them make the decisions on how to implement it." But the generations rotate, the lessons of common sense are forgotten, and now the experts are sure that they know best again.
I accept the point against democracy in general, but, if we are to have a democracy, better the ordinary people than the official class that democracy creates.
Where does Rousseau, and his distinction between the "general will" and the "popular will" fit into "Enlightenment republican thought"? Because I generally see people class him as a major figure of the "Enlightenment" alongside Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu; and because I've read an argument about how that concept means that real democracy is when a self-selected vanguard party of intellectual elites take uncontested charge of the state, and that giving the voters what they vote for is instead "populism," which is the greatest threat to Our Democracy.
So, I never liked the Social Contract, I think it's largely motivated by Rousseau coping about getting kicked out of Geneva, but the "General Will" was wildly misinterpreted by his revolutionary followers. The General Will can only legislate general laws, based on the idea that the population as a whole will come to the best solutions if it isn't tempted by faction, but is forced to consider full collective self-interest. In that respect, the General Will is entirely compatible with the American idea that the Constitution and Constitutional procedure is the essence of legitimate governance, in that, even with full popular sovereignty, whatever is done under the Constitution must be done according to general laws (e.g. the Amendments clause). The General Will is not a blank check for elites, but something closer to Kant's Categorical Imperative, that one should "act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law".
More generally, scholars of both the left and right radically overstate how much Rousseau broke with previous traditions. The Emile is an extraordinarily Classicizing, even reactionary text; he says that man in the state of nature is little different from an ape; amour-propre is a prototype of the Anglo concept of enlightened self-interest. Both leftist and conservative modern readings of Rousseau are understandable, given the abuse of Rousseau in the Revolution, but about as accurate as talking about Nietzsche endorsing the Aryan Race.
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Or else what, exactly?
Or else you continued to get laughed at and have power moved away from you because the rest of the (western at least) world stops accepting you as the primus inter pares and then lose the exorbitant privilege of running 6% yearly deficits because you have the world's reserve currency and can freely export away your inflation. If the UK tried the level of profligacy which has become standard in the US we'd end up under an IMF programme in 2 years.
The levels of contempt I am hearing against the US and Americans in my personal circle are basically the highest they have ever been. This isn't just a me thing, there was a recent piece in the FT how the appropriate response for the EU now given the US reducing its support for Ukraine is to hit back hard on US tech with tariffs rather than the "roll over and take it" with the 15% tariffs they accepted earlier this year. It's now becoming fairly standard that when I meet someone new from the US they'll volunteer by themselves unprompted within the first few minutes that they "are one of the good ones"...
While I am 80% with BurdensomeCount on this point, the cultural sensitivity is a furphy. The Americans don't do cultural sensitivity, they have been powerful enough not to need to since the 1920's, and the rest of the pro-American world is used to dealing with that.
The point is that the American-led system used to be (by design) win-win for the countries participating in it - very much including the US. The EU and first-world Asia don't pay directly for US military protection, but the willingness to trade goods and services for portraits of Benjamin Franklin is part of the package deal. This would all be clearer if the BEP put Nuclear Gandhi* on the forthcoming $200 bill instead of Donald Trump.
Trump doesn't like win-win arrangements (and nor do his dumber supporters in the country), and wants to replace the status quo with a setup where the US wins and the EU and first-world Asia lose. The danger is that he blows up a system which (and I am pulling numbers out of my ass here) generates 6% of GDP in net benefits in order to extract 1.5% of GDP in tribute.
There is a separate issue that including Red China in the system has turned out to probably be a mistake, because the CCP was talking about win-win outcomes while seeking win-lose ones quietly. But Trump isn't trying to kick the Chinese out - China gets a better deal than traditional US allies do.
Looking at dysfunction in domestic politics, America is less governable than any other large democracy except France - even with a trifecta, neither party can pass a deficit-reducing budget. The cost is eaten by UST holders accepting a lousy return. You could try to replace that with actual extractive imperialism, but @BurdensomeCount and I come from a culture that had some idea how to do that right (and how and why it ceased to be profitable in the first half of the twentieth century), and you don't. The skill level issues America experiences when it tries to do imperialism are well-known.
* The adoptive child of Sid Meier, born at Microprose HQ, and therefore American under the 14th amendment. Dead in later versions of Civ, and therefore eligible to be on a banknote.
I think you are modelling Trump wrong. I think he's fine with win-win between equals. To me his actions make most sense if you model him as viscerally attracted to strength and repelled by weakness.
From this perspective China is strong, it builds stuff, it's worthy of respect; maybe you've got to tariff them a bit to stop them leeching off you and to remind them that, hey, you're no slouch yourself, but generally they're cool people. Likewise, Russia is pretty impressive. Not nice, and failing to take Ukraine was a bit lame, but they stuck two fingers up at everyone and they've mostly backed it up.
Britain and the EU on the other hand are very lame. Lots of puffing themselves up, lots of trying to look down their noses at the real players like a little man wearing platform soles, but then they break and beg for help. They have some influence (EU regulation for example) but it's a pathetic, crawling, sneaking sort of power. It's not just that the NATO countries are expensive to defend, they're sad and they make America sad by association. Likewise Palestine, the Middle East, Africa.
Ukraine and Israel are in this weird halfway place where they're quite strong and defended themselves pretty impressively, but (Ukraine especially) can only do it if they're on America's apron strings. They're not bad guys but they do have to sit down and listen when Daddy talks and they don't come to the White House and posture like America's doing them a favour.
The way my model of Trump thinks about dealmaking is that if the weaker party walks away smiling, the stronger party has screwed up.
This is a phenomenological model based on looking at his behaviour across four careers - I don't have a strong theory about what psychological traits make him think this way, so I doubt we have a real difference of opinion here. I see "Trump is viscerally attracted to strength and repelled by weakness" as a (probably correct) mechanistic explanation for why he behaves in the way predicted by my phenomenological model, not a rival model.
Fred Trump's money and connections meant that Donald has always had the option of refusing to play if he isn't the biggest dick in the game. Negotiations with China are the first time he has had no choice but to enter a negotiation where pointing his finger and saying "You're Fired" isn't an option, and he got a lousy deal in his first term and appears to be surrendering like a Frenchman in his second term.
What about, say, that famous meeting with North Korea? Where Trump got a lot of flack b/c Kim Jong Un looked entirely too smiling and chummy with him. Same with Putin.
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Oh no, the United States has earned the contempt of David Aaronovitch, Anatole Kaletsky, Caitlin Moran, your friends, maybe even Zanny or Xanny or whatever her name is. The Brit chattering classes are talking tough because their pride, what's left of it, has been deeply wounded, but more in the manner of a scrawny kid who just got wedgied/swirlied/etc. by the jock twice his size. Oh he's gonna kick his ass someday, he's gonna go all out, he did karate lessons! The reality is, there is no pares going on. There's a financial sector that could always evaporate overnight, hooked up to an economy about as dynamic as East Germany, with an ever-shrinking military who, by the way, are starting to despise the London types. The French have a claim to freedom of action, Germany had one until recently, but the only way the UK can stay relevant is clinging to America. Hence the equivocation between "Brits are malding" and "the EU should do something".
If you are in the UK, and want to do something that matters to thumb your nose at the US, volunteer for Democrats Abroad or donate to some outlet like the Guardian that Democratic voters read. Seething from the cuck chair of history isn't going to get you anywhere.
You're not wrong, but neither is he
The UK does seethe in the cuck chair of history (LMAO), but a world in which the USA loses the mandate of free market heaven is a world that's much shittier for the USA.
And the way the USA loses said mandate is by doing exactly what is happening, generally being an irrational and chaotic actor who insists on shooting itself in the foot a lot, and then making fun of the people going "hey maybe stop doing that?".
Nothing crazy has happened yet, and maybe nothing will. But the tiny dominos are starting to shift, and they could get bigger. A non exhaustive list:
Some Saudi oil and natgas trades are now settled in RMB.
Some Russian bonds are now denominated in RMB.
SWIFT is absolutely garbage technologically but the USA laughs at anyone who points this out and China is grinding hard to set up an alternative.
BRICS is looking into using a basket of currencies to settle trades. You may say "hah who the fuck cares about BRICS" which is fair. But if BRICS is looking to get away from you, and then you also alienate the EU (and make no mistake, regardless of the cuck chair, the vibes are shifting) you have actually lost your dominant position over the vast majority of humanity
As someone who greatly benefits from Pax Americana, please wake the fuck up and avoid this obvious fail state
It doesn't matter which currency is used to conduct/settle trades: totally economically meaningless, because currencies are freely swappable for any of the buyers & sellers (before and after the settlement). So the only thing that slightly matters in this realm is what currency anyone chooses to save in.
So in this regard (of the US getting some free benefit from being the big dog), the 'dominos starting to fall' would look like the US trade deficit shrinking, as past savers start trying to spend down their USD reserves instead of amassing them. But we're currently in an environment where trump and some of his people are trying their damnedest to intentionally reduce the US trade deficit... So it's muddy, with various winners & losers there, and probably better to look at more solid economic indicators entirely (for any story of the world getting shittier for the US).
As for the prior comment about "the exorbitant privilege of running 6% yearly deficits", it simultaneously seems like a pretty big burden (requiring correct macroeconomic management). Because decade-after-decade, century-after-century, new people continually come along with an incorrect gut-notion understanding of money, freak out about government deficits and debt, and try to wreck the economy in their misunderstanding. So if foreign & domestic people/firms/governments stopped having such a desire to increase their USD savings, and the US government no longer needed to run as large of a deficit to supply those desired savings, quite a lot of people would be even happier & content with that state of affairs (even if it meant taxes were relatively a bit higher compared to spending).
I gesture to those as indicators of shifting sentiment and soft power. You're right, but the journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step, and those are steps. They might stall, I hope they do, but dismissing everything outright is how you eventually get clapped.
I agree with the entirety of the middle of your comment. I was recently exposed to the idea that the CCP would start increasing the strength of the RMB to promote domestic consumption, which I thought was interesting. I think it would both lower the US trade defect and increase desire to save in RMB, especially if it was telegraphed as a long term trend. That being said, the CCP is so locked in on export dominance I'm not sure if they want to (or can). But an interesting thought.
Lol, lmao even. There is nothing people love more than gibs, and nothing they'll irrationally oppose more than taxes. There is no world in which that is politically tenable or happiness increasing.
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I agree. But note that nothing you have said has anything to do with UK elites (who all hate and fear the free market except insofar as it brings foreign capital into London).
I guess my point was they're a canary in the proverbial coal mine, sure maybe they're idiots to laugh at, but eventually once you've bucketed the majority of human beings and economic activity into the "idiots to laugh at" bucket, you might actually be the idiot being laughed at
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Europe is the proverbial toxic parent who can not accept that their children are grown, that they've moved out, they've gotten married, and they have bills and kids of their own to deal with. They keep trying to play the "So long as you're living under our roof you need to shut up and listen" card, but that's just the thing. We haven't lived under your roof in years.
If Europe wants to laugh at us and and hold us in contempt, I say let them. Call me when they put a man on the Moon.
If Europe wants to align itself with Asia and the Subcontinent that's fine. They're adults and it's their choice. However by the same token they won't have any grounds to complain when their kids decline to visit, or refuse to pay for thier nursing home.
Take your troops home like Soviets did, close down your bases, rebuild Nordstream or pay for it, everyone is going to be happy.
It's really simple!
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Aw jeez, and you're saying this won't happen if we show some cultural sensitivity? Liberal Europe can be as indignant as it wants while it finishes crawling into the grave, but why should anyone really care? No soothing they find acceptable would matter to the people they're busy handing their countries off to anyway.
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