@gilmore606 comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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gilmore606 6hr ago

iirc Big Yud had an essay on this, called something like "Am I Smarter Than The Bank Of Japan?"

Context

erwgv3g34 gilmore606 1hr ago

From chapter 1 of Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck, "Inadequacy and Modesty":

I once wrote a report, “Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics,” that called for an estimate of the economic growth rate in a fully developed country—that is, a country that is no longer able to improve productivity just by importing well-tested innovations. A footnote of the paper remarked that even though Japan was the country with the most advanced technology—e.g., their cellphones and virtual reality technology were five years ahead of the rest of the world’s—I wasn’t going to use Japan as my estimator for developed economic growth, because, as I saw it, Japan’s monetary policy was utterly deranged.

Roughly, Japan’s central bank wasn’t creating enough money. I won’t go into details here.

A friend of mine, and one of the most careful thinkers I know—let’s call him “John”—made a comment on my draft to this effect:

How do you claim to know this? I can think of plenty of other reasons why Japan could be in a slump: the country’s shrinking and aging population, its low female workplace participation, its high levels of product market regulation, etc. It looks like you’re venturing outside of your area of expertise to no good end.

“How do you claim to know this?” is a very reasonable question here. As John later elaborated, macroeconomics is an area where data sets tend to be thin and predictive performance tends to be poor. And John had previously observed me making contrarian claims where I’d turned out to be badly wrong, like endorsing Gary Taubes’ theories about the causes of the obesity epidemic. More recently, John won money off of me by betting that AI performance on certain metrics would improve faster than I expected; John has a good track record when it comes to spotting my mistakes.

It’s also easy to imagine reasons an observer might have been skeptical. I wasn’t making up my critique of Japan myself; I was reading other economists and deciding that I trusted the ones who were saying that the Bank of Japan was doing it wrong… … Yet one would expect the governing board of the Bank of Japan to be composed of experienced economists with specialized monetary expertise. How likely is it that any outsider would be able to spot an obvious flaw in their policy? How likely is it that someone who isn’t a professional economist (e.g., me) would be able to judge which economic critiques of the Bank of Japan were correct, or which critics were wise?

How likely is it that an entire country—one of the world’s most advanced countries—would forego trillions of dollars of real economic growth because their monetary controllers—not politicians, but appointees from the professional elite—were doing something so wrong that even a non-professional could tell? How likely is it that a non-professional could not just suspect that the Bank of Japan was doing something badly wrong, but be confident in that assessment?

Surely it would be more realistic to search for possible reasons why the Bank of Japan might not be as stupid as it seemed, as stupid as some econbloggers were claiming. Possibly Japan’s aging population made growth impossible. Possibly Japan’s massive outstanding government debt made even the slightest inflation too dangerous. Possibly we just aren’t thinking of the complicated reasoning going into the Bank of Japan’s decision.

Surely some humility is appropriate when criticizing the elite decision-makers governing the Bank of Japan. What if it’s you, and not the professional economists making these decisions, who have failed to grasp the relevant economic considerations?

I’ll refer to this genre of arguments as “modest epistemology.”

...

I once heard an Oxford effective altruism proponent crisply summarize what I take to be the central argument for this perspective: “You see that someone says X, which seems wrong, so you conclude their epistemic standards are bad. But they could just see that you say Y, which sounds wrong to them, and conclude your epistemic standards are bad.” On this line of thinking, you don’t get any information about who has better epistemic standards merely by observing that someone disagrees with you. After all, the other side observes just the same fact of disagreement.

Applying this argument form to the Bank of Japan example: I receive little or no evidence just from observing that the Bank of Japan says “X” when I believe “not X.” I also can’t be getting strong evidence from any object-level impression I might have that I am unusually competent. So did my priors imply that I and I alone ought to have been born with awesome powers of discernment? (Modest people have posed this exact question to me on more than one occasion.)

It should go without saying that this isn’t how I would explain my own reasoning. But if I reject arguments of the form, “We disagree, therefore I’m right and you’re wrong,” how can I claim to be correct on an economic question where I disagree with an institution as reputable as the Bank of Japan?

...

The converse side of the efficient-markets perspective would have said this about the Bank of Japan:

CONVENTIONAL CYNICAL ECONOMIST: So, Eliezer, you think you know better than the Bank of Japan and many other central banks around the world, do you?

ELIEZER: Yep. Or rather, by reading econblogs, I believe myself to have identified which econbloggers know better, like Scott Sumner.

C.C.E.: Even though literally trillions of dollars of real value are at stake?

ELIEZER: Yep.

C.C.E.: How do you make money off this special knowledge of yours?

ELIEZER: I can’t. The market also collectively knows that the Bank of Japan is pursuing a bad monetary policy and has priced Japanese equities accordingly. So even though I know the Bank of Japan’s policy will make Japanese equities perform badly, that fact is already priced in; I can’t expect to make money by short-selling Japanese equities.

C.C.E.: I see. So exactly who is it, on this theory of yours, that is being stupid and passing up a predictable payout?

ELIEZER: Nobody, of course! Only the Bank of Japan is allowed to control the trend line of the Japanese money supply, and the Bank of Japan’s governors are not paid any bonuses when the Japanese economy does better. They don’t get a million dollars in personal bonuses if the Japanese economy grows by a trillion dollars.

C.C.E.: So you can’t make any money off knowing better individually, and nobody who has the actual power and authority to fix the problem would gain a personal financial benefit from fixing it? Then we’re done! No anomalies here; this sounds like a perfectly normal state of affairs.

...

But the Bank of Japan is just one committee, and it’s not possible for anyone else to step up and make a billion dollars in the course of correcting their error. Even if you think you know exactly what the Bank of Japan is doing wrong, you can’t make a profit on that. At least some hedge-fund managers also know what the Bank of Japan is doing wrong, and the expected consequences are already priced into the market. Nor does this price movement fix the Bank of Japan’s mistaken behavior. So to the extent the Bank of Japan has poor incentives or some other systematic dysfunction, their mistake can persist. As a consequence, when I read some econbloggers who I’d seen being right about empirical predictions before saying that Japan was being grotesquely silly, and the economic logic seemed to me to check out, as best I could follow it, I wasn’t particularly reluctant to believe them. Standard economic theory, generalized beyond the markets to other facets of society, did not seem to me to predict that the Bank of Japan must act wisely for the good of Japan. It would be no surprise if they were competent, but also not much of a surprise if they were incompetent. And knowing this didn’t help me either—I couldn’t exploit the knowledge to make an excess profit myself—and this too wasn’t a coincidence.

This kind of thinking can get quite a bit more complicated than the foregoing paragraphs might suggest. We have to ask why the government of Japan didn’t put pressure on the Bank of Japan (answer: they did, but the Bank of Japan refused), and many other questions. You would need to consider a much larger model of the world, and bring in a lot more background theory, to be confident that you understood the overall situation with the Bank of Japan.

But even without that detailed analysis, in the epistemological background we have a completely different picture from the modest one. We have a picture of the world where it is perfectly plausible for an econblogger to write up a good analysis of what the Bank of Japan is doing wrong, and for a sophisticated reader to reasonably agree that the analysis seems decisive, without a deep agonizing episode of Dunning-Kruger-inspired self-doubt playing any important role in the analysis.

When we critique a government, we don’t usually get to see what would actually happen if the government took our advice. But in this one case, less than a month after my exchange with John, the Bank of Japan—under the new leadership of Haruhiko Kuroda, and under unprecedented pressure from recently elected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who included monetary policy in his campaign platform—embarked on an attempt to print huge amounts of money, with a stated goal of doubling the Japanese money supply.

Immediately after, Japan experienced real GDP growth of 2.3%, where the previous trend was for falling RGDP. Their economy was operating that far under capacity due to lack of money.

Now, on the modest view, this was the unfairest test imaginable. Out of all the times that I’ve ever suggested that a government’s policy is suboptimal, the rare time a government tries my preferred alternative will select the most mainstream, highest-conventional-prestige policies I happen to advocate, and those are the very policy proposals that modesty is least likely to disapprove of.

Indeed, if John had looked further into the issue, he would have found (as I found while writing this) that Nobel laureates had also criticized Japan’s monetary policy. He would have found that previous Japanese governments had also hinted to the Bank of Japan that they should print more money. The view from modesty looks at this state of affairs and says, “Hold up! You aren’t so specially blessed as your priors would have you believe; other academics already know what you know! Civilization isn’t so inadequate after all! This is how reasonable dissent from established institutions and experts operates in the real world: via opposition by other mainstream experts and institutions, not via the heroic effort of a lone economics blogger.”

However helpful or unhelpful such remarks may be for guarding against inflated pride, however, they don’t seem to refute (or even address) the central thesis of civilizational inadequacy, as I will define that term later. Roughly, the civilizational inadequacy thesis states that in situations where the central bank of a major developed democracy is carrying out a policy, and a number of highly regarded economists like Ben Bernanke have written papers about what that central bank is doing wrong, and there are widely accepted macroeconomic theories for understanding what that central bank is doing wrong, and the government of the country has tried to put pressure on the central bank to stop doing it wrong, and literally trillions of dollars in real wealth are at stake, then the overall competence of human civilization is such that we shouldn’t be surprised to find the professional economists at the Bank of Japan doing it wrong.

We shouldn’t even be surprised to find that a decision theorist without all that much background in economics can identify which econbloggers have correctly stated what the Bank of Japan is doing wrong, or which simple improvements to their current policies would improve the situation.

Skibboleth It's never 4D Chess gilmore606 5hr ago

The BoJ isn't staffed by populist outsiders who actively tout their lack of qualifications. If it was, the answer very well might be 'yes'.

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