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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.
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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