Yuval is one of the greatest minds we have working today. He brings a particular mixture of sanity, seriousness, gravitas, level-headedness, and dare-I-call-it normalcy to political discussions. His explanation of what the Constitution does (and, importantly, doesn’t do) threads right into the idea of comfort with contradiction:
Would the system empower the small states or the large ones? It would empower both and leave them...
One of the most important things we can teach our children as they’re coming of age is to cultivate a comfort with contradiction. Sometimes good things come at the expense of other good things. You can’t always get your way. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
As we grow up, we discover the contradictions of everyday life: one benefit requires giving up another.
In fact, we do teach these things as parents trying to raise well-adjusted kids: Share and help others. Tell the truth, even when...
I have two major worries. First, if Milei approaches fiscal success, the opposing parties will think long and hard about whether they wish to enable further success. Or will they instead prefer to see the Milei reforms crash and burn for fiscal reasons? I don’t think they know themselves, but the history of politics in Argentina does not give special reason to be super-optimistic here. You don’t have to believe the opposition will deliberately flush their country down the toilet, they just not might be convinced that further fiscal consolidation...
Read any news that intersects with politics, culture, technology, or economics, and you’d believe we’ve come to the end of the road. You find the occasional optimist pointing out how things aren’t so bad, or that they’ve also been real bad in the past (definitely true!).
Brink Lindsey paints his own bleak picture of our current set of crises — of dynamism, inclusion, and politics – but acknowledges a fear of overblowing the threats presented by these issues. In this piece he offers some hope here with confidence that we can muddle through with solutions as we...
Authoritarian regimes are often very, very strong. But like marble they’re brittle. They can withstand enormous pressures, from within and without, but there’s no flexibility.
I’d say it’s like Aesop’s Oak and the Reed, except I think that’s a bit inapt as well. America ain’t no stinking reed. But to at least get some use out of the metaphor, authoritarian societies are like stands of oaks. They can withstand all the wind in the world so long as the wind isn’t...
In his book Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama has a section on corruption in political systems and how it impacts economic development:
There are many reasons why corruption impedes economic development. In the first place, it distorts economic incentives by channeling resources not into their most productive uses but rather into the pockets of officials with the political power to extract bribes. Second, corruption acts as a highly regressive tax: while petty corruption on the part of minor, poorly paid officials exists in many countries, the vast bulk of misappropriated funds...
Of this year’s reads so far, Martin Gurri still holds the crown on my favorite with his 2014 book The Revolt of the Public.
That book has the best diagnosis of the current state of politics, the culture war, polarization, and the media’s inability to make sense of all of it (while contributing themselves to the chaos).
This is a wide-ranging interview on public trust, social media, and the state of our institutions:
I would not say that our institutions are mired in a period of secular incompetence and decline. That is actually...
I think I probably read three different pieces this week alone that reference James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. It presents an argument about the desire for “legibility” that overthrows and reorders bottom-up, emergent systems that develop naturally.
In this piece, Venkatesh Rao dives into what legibility means and what happens when the pursuit of order and “governability” ignores locally-discovered motivations that could be at work informing why a system works the way that it does.
On private emotions being thrown into the public sphere:
People escape the Dunbar world for obvious reasons: life there appears prosaic and uninspiring. They find a digital interface and, like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, enter a new realm that glitters with infinite possibilities. Suddenly, you can flicker like a spark between the digital and the real. The exhilarating sensation is that you have been taken to a high place and shown all the kingdoms of the world: “These can be yours, if. . . .” If your video goes viral. If...
Martin Gurri is one of the best minds we have for the current moment. Make sure to subscribe to his essays on the Mercatus Center’s “The Bridge.”
The American people appear to be caught in the grip of a psychotic episode. Most of us are still sheltering in place, obsessed with the risk of viral infection, primly waiting for someone to give us permission to shake hands with our friends again. Meanwhile, online and on...
Adam Elkus with a great essay on the current moment:
“Is this as bad as 1968?” is an utterly meaningless question precisely for this underlying reason. People do not invoke 1968 because of the objective similarities between 2020 and 1968. They do so because we have crossed a threshold at which basic foundations of social organization we take for granted now seem up for grabs. This is an inherently subjective determination, based on the circumstances of our present much as people in 1968 similarly judged...
The collapse of trust in our leading institutions has exiled the 21st century to the Siberia of post-truth. I want to be clear about what this means. Reality has not changed. It’s still unyielding. Facts today are partial and contradictory—but that’s always been the case. Post-truth, as I define it, signifies a moment of sharply divergent perspectives on every subject or event, without a trusted authority in the room to settle the matter. A telling symptom is that we no...
I’ve been following Gurri’s work closely since I read The Revolt of a Public a couple months back. I think he’s one of the sharpest minds we have right now thinking and writing about what’s going on in politics, media, and public opinion.
He was on this week’s EconTalk talking to Russ Roberts about his book. The show notes for the episode provide excellent additional material on his core ideas.
Martin Gurri on the growing similarities between west and east coast elites:
The effect, I suspect, will be the exact opposite of the reactionary dream. In wild and seedy digital gathering-places, far from any pretense of idealism, political discussion will inevitably grow more unfettered, more divisive, more violent. The attempt to impose Victorian standards of propriety on the information sphere will end by converting it into a vicious and unending saloon brawl. No matter how revolting the web appears at present – it can always get...
Author Martin Gurri posted this quick 10 minute summary of his book The Revolt of the Public. It was one of my favorite recent reads, and in this video he does an excellent job summarizing his key diagnosis of what’s behind the degradation of authority from institutions and dissolution of public trust in them.
His insights connect information dissemination, institutions, and authority — the public expects unrealistic levels of service and expertise from institutions, while institutions also promise far more than they’re capable of delivering....
Martin Gurri in response to Marc Andreessen’s “It’s Time to Build” essay:
So how do we get from here to build? To demand that our current institutions make that leap would be like asking the Great Pyramid to win the Indianapolis 500. It won’t happen. As a precursor to Andreessen’s building spree, our institutions—certainly government at every level, including the regulatory and scientific agencies—must crack open their industrial-age cocoons and join the rest of us in the digital dispensation. At a minimum, they must be able to move as fast as information does today....
I recently finished Arnold Kling’s excellent Three Languages of Politics, which attempts to build a model to describe why different political viewpoints are so often not disagreeing as much as they are talking about different things entirely.
At one point Kling references this thought experiment proposed by economist Bryan Caplan — a Turing test for probing a person’s true ideology:
We don’t have to idly speculate about how well adherents of various ideologies understand each other. We can measure the performance of anyone inclined to boast about his superior insight.
A nice comprehensive list of SaaS products for the workplace, across a ton of different categories. Great work by Pietro Invernizzi putting this database together.
This is the best piece I’ve seen on the swirling controversy around the coronavirus pandemic response: on experts, the WHO, government response. The problem is not that experts don’t always have the answer (which they clearly don’t), it’s that the mechanics of many institutions, but also individual reasoning methods, are incompatible with responding to data-poor situations.
People were presented with a new idea: a global pandemic might arise and change everything. They waited for proof. The proof didn’t arise, at least at first. I remember hearing people say things like “there’s no reason for panic, there are currently only...
In the current media landscape, amplified by the massive expansion of networks and social media, everyone is talking past one another. Not even speaking the same language.
To quote Kling from the interview:
People are not trying to change the minds of the other side, or trying to open the minds of their own side. They’re trying to...
I ran across this interview with physicist David Deutsch, with his thoughts on Brexit. A lot of great stuff here on resilience, error correction, individualism vs. collectivism, Karl Popper, and Britain’s first-past-the-post system.
This was a fascinating interview with Dr. Michele Gelfand from Jonah Goldberg’s The Remnant podcast. It mostly covers the subject of her book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, on the differences between “tight” vs. “loose” cultures — think Singapore or China vs. Spain or Italy. It’s a timely subject in this time of global response to a pandemic, seeing how different cultures respond to the crisis.
A discussion between economist Arnold Kling and author Martin Gurri about the erosion of institutions and what that means for polarization and cultural instability.
Martin Gurri doesn’t like to make predictions. But if you were lucky enough to read his groundbreaking 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public, when it was first published, you’d have an excellent guide for understanding much of what subsequently happened in the United States and around the world. Gurri’s thesis—that information technology, particularly social media, has helped to dramatically widen the distance between ordinary people and elites—has proven invaluable in explaining not only the...
This 2013 piece from Dexter Filkins gives an excellent background on Qasem Soleimani, an important figure now well known after his killing a couple of weeks ago, but prior to that hardly known by anyone other than experts, even with his massive influence in the region.
I’m always intrigued by complicated simulation games. I remember a few of these “real-time” MMO games being popular in the early days of online gaming. Glad to see the genre still kicking in an era of low-attention-span gaming...
Wesley Yang on the potential staying power of Andrew Yang.
The campaign that Yang is running and the response so far to his candidacy is pleasantly surprising. In a political scene where everything is dire, negative, and “us-versus-them,” he brings a levity and sanity to the discourse. Even though I disagree with a lot of his proposed solution, I don’t disagree on the diagnosis. It’s a relief to see someone in mainstream politics making a dent on a platform of rationalism and open-mindedness.
Turns out cultures from warmer climates evolved a taste for spicy foods to combat the presence of more diverse bacteria:
Alas, nothing in nature turns out to be that simple. Researchers now suggest that a taste for spices served a vital evolutionary purpose: keeping our ancestors alive. Spices, it turns out, can kill poisonous bacteria and fungi that may contaminate our food. In other words, developing a taste for these spices could be good for our health. And since food spoils more quickly in hotter weather, it’s only natural that warmer climates...
I’ve been reading some of Hayek’s famous articles this week. This one is all about what he probably considered one of the most important concepts, since these basic ideas form a central thesis for most of his works. His argument was for bottoms-up, decentralized systems of decision-making instead of centralized, top-down systems:
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in...
Honest postmortems are insightful to get the inside backstory on what happened behind the scenes with a company. In this one, Jason Crawford goes into what went wrong with Fieldbook before they shut it down and were acquired by Flexport a couple years ago:
Now, with a year to digest, I think this is true and was a core mistake. I vastly underestimated the resources it was going to take—in time, effort and money—to build a launchable product...
Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind was one of my favorite recent nonfiction books I’ve read in the last few years. It’s one of the most objective, deep analyses of a question that’s interested me for years: why do people have such fundamental and deep disagreements on how the world works or should work? Why are political left and right seemingly so far apart from one another on such fundamental levels? Haidt’s perspective as an expert in moral psychology provides insights into the foundations of how we’re different and how we’re the same.
This is an old announcement, but new to me. CloudFlare now hosts privacy-centric DNS at 1.1.1.1, available to all:
We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. They thought it was a laudable goal. We offered Cloudflare’s network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.
I’m making my way through The Federalist, which has been on my reading list forever, and for which I had my interest rekindled last year reading Alexander Hamilton.
For those that don’t know, it’s a collection of essays written by the trio of Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to convince the populace of the need to ratify the then-draft US Constitution.
Up to Federalist No. 25, the focus is on a) the utility and importance of the “union of states” as a concept worth pursuing and cementing and b) the insufficiency of the Articles of...
Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order was one of the most interesting books I’ve read in the last 5 years. It traces the history of human social hierarchy and government from antiquity to the French Revolution. This talk is a great high-level overview of the ground covered in the book. Think of it as a preview and convincing teaser to the full work.
Voting is something most Americans take for granted. In our work we cross paths with a lot of folks in other countries where this luxury is rare, corrupt, or non-existent. Humanitarian projects and security work allow us to see firsthand how much less individual freedom and respect citizens have in so many places around the world.
Each year when I walk over to the polls to vote and see all the other people out to cast theirs, I think about how cool it is to get to contribute. Our system is definitely...
