Congratulations, Bryan! I find it genuinely moving that you’ve been inspired by your reading to engage in the business of democracy. Not always exciting, but we desperately need people doing this work, especially youngs promoting fresh ideas. Totally unironically, thank you for your service!
Am I a bad person for imagining Bryan bowing before a hooded and cloaked figure and saying, "Yes, Lord Yglesias... Everything is proceeding as you have foreseen..."
Congratulations, Bryan! If I were in your situation, in addition to upzoning and eliminating parking requirements, I'd try to make more car-free and car-lite places in my city.
If you're in an old city with an existing downtown—Midwest, upstate New York, something like that—you have a downtown, and you can open up some downtown streets for people and close them for cars. Even in newer cities, try to find places where cars can be eliminated. Make places for people to be, without cars.
Also, bike lanes. Make it safe for kids to ride their bikes to school, and make it safe to ride from areas where people live to areas where people shop. This means safe bike routes from the start to the finish. It's no good having a bike lane to school with one dangerous intersection. Parents, wisely, aren't going to let their children ride through an intersection where they might be killed. Similarly, women are much more risk-averse than men on average. If you want women to take their e-bikes to the grocery store and the farmer's market, you have to make the whole trip safe. If there's one scary part where a woman has to mix with 40 mph traffic, she's probably going to take the car.
Like, here's the freeway, and here's the little section with the rickety bridge that's two inches wider than your car, with no railings, over a moat full of crocodiles. If that's the route, a lot of people aren't going to take it. The whole route is bad because of the one part with the crocodiles, no matter how great the rest of it is. You can't just say, it's fine except for that little part; the whole route is bad.
In terms of Informed Citizenness I really appreciate my subscription to The Economist. They have an editorial slant that's sometimes wrong but they still give a fair hearing to other points of view, but when they cover something I know a lot about I've always found their coverage pretty reasonable and better than any other general purpose publication I can think of.
I read the Economist as well, and I think their Science and Technology coverage is very good. There are two areas I see in the Economist that have heavy editorial slant: Britain (especially Northern Ireland) and Latin America. On Northern Ireland, they are strongly, unapologetically unionist, hate Sinn Fein, and make excuses for loyalist paramilitaries and government collusion with them. For Latin America, they always support right-wing governments and "reform" and make excuses for right wing economic mismanagement, corruption, and violence, while dreading any left-wing governments. It's like they assign the Northern Ireland beat to out-of-touch right-wing unionists and the Latin American beat to bitter rich right-wing Venezuelan emigres.
Well, if you want left wing, in-touch Unionists, the Progressive Unionist Party is your choice. They are also the political arm of the Ulster Volunteer Force and Red Hand Commando, so caveat emptor.
I'm not sure that would be an improvement. I think, especially for Americans, that reading Northern Ireland coverage by the Economist is like being in Bizarro world. Very few Americans are instinctively Unionist and invested in the British Empire in Ireland.
I'm sure it would not be an improvement. However, now that you mention it, it may be a point in favor of the Economist's approach that American readers get a viewpoint that they are not usually exposed to, or may even be unaware that it is a view that is supported by a substantial portion of the population in Northern Ireland itself.
I don't read the Economist for opinion. That's my core problem. It's not like I want articles on Northern Ireland written by Irish expats living in Boston who have the Clancy brothers on indefinite repeat either. I would rather have more facts and less shading.
I think I stopped reading the economist around 2018 when they were simultaneously cheering on Bolsonaro and calling for urgent action on climate change.
There's a surprising amount of daily news. I seldom hear anything on the NPR that is newss of the day that isn't also covered by The Economist within 24 hrs or so
Yeah they are weekly and global and will have a lot of gaps if you are interested in any particular issue. Read the United States section, and it will be missing a hell of a lot of the major things that happened in the United States that week. I think in the realm of us all discussing clickbait and Instagram and Facebook this last week, economist does a good job of not being clickbaity, I think even better than the NYT. I only read 2 or 3 of their articles a week but I think the thing they do best is inform without preaching.
I used to love the Economist too but I really lost it over their Afghanistan coverage. They just went so heavy on the “this is the end of American power” angle and “Biden will never recover from this show of weakness” that I just couldn’t take it. What made it weirder was how they were one of the publications that actually focused on how ineffectual the operation was to begin with. Oh well. When they eventually publish their “we were wrong” article like they with Iraq I’ll probably be back...
In 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky published Worlds in Collision. It claimed--drawing on mythology, history, and other sources--that Venus was ejected by Jupiter and flew close to the earth, causing catastrophies before finding its current orbit. It was a long-running best seller.
A major reason that its popularity lasted as long as it did was the credulity of scientists outside their fields. Astronomers said "the astronomy is all bunk, but the history is interesting," while historians said the opposite.
I often think this applies to everything and that anything I find interesting outside my fields of expertise is complete bunk.
The few times I’ve tried reading that, the comments have been excessively anti-immigrant right wingers, which isn’t even good economics. Didn’t inspire me to read more.
The comments are the inevitable result of a very hands off moderation policy, alas. I just don’t read the comments, and the posts themselves are great.
Check out my comments elsewhere in this thread, in my exchanges with Evil Socrates and sbuserid, both of whom also had some good thoughts on this subject.
I really like Tyler, love listening to him, and would jump at the chance to have a beer with him (although he doesn't drink, so I guess it would just be me drinking the beer). He's a really smart guy.
That said, the move you describe is one of the tics that finally turned me off to him. If you want to understand someone's thinking, setting up a trick to get them to express a logical fault and then pouncing is not a way to do that. It puts the speaker on the defensive, which means that they close down, rather than opening up, and back into making ever smaller claims, because those are easier to defend, rather than exploring. It "proves" how "smart" Tyler is at the expense of reducing the quality of the actual exchange, because it narrows the terrain for discussion down to some little point that Tyler has previously prepared to make.
And if you listen when he interviews a really super-smart person, they will call him out on this in various ways. Those can become really contentious interviews, because he back-foots onto trying to find his way back into that little point he wanted to make. Which gets you to your latter point: how can he become similarly smart to them on their topic of expertise? It's so impressive! And he does it twice a month!
Well, unless he's not doing that. If it's a game--if he's carefully finding a little point where he can pick his spot and run an ambush--then he's executing a great strategy to perform expertise rather than developing actual expertise. My very strong suspicion is that Tyler conflates the two, and I say that as someone who has crossed a couple of boundary disciplines in his life and did that myself. It's a super easy trap to fall into.
When I gradually moved from history into public health, it was very easy for me to pretend to certain kinds of statistical understanding that are useful in epidemiology. I read a lot of stats-adjacent stuff (politics, sports, etc.), have a good college education, did a stats-adjacent job early in my career (payroll and HR), and understand the basics. Plus I know a lot about the spread of disease in populations from a historical standpoint, having read that literature. I could sound very "smart" in a conversation with an epidemiologist.
But eventually I realized that I was hitting a wall, because when I talked to actual epidemiologists, I was so interested in demonstrating that I belonged in the club--I know this stuff, too!--that I was effectively snowing them, particularly if we were talking about a subject that interested me and where I had opinions. So I was not actually taking advantage of the conversation to develop new ideas or explore things that I did not properly understand or might not know, even though I AM NOT TRAINED AS AN EPIDEMIOLOGIST.
If you think someone is wrong about something, and you want to have a genuine discussion, the thing you do is to say, "I think you are wrong about something, and I want to argue about it, so let me explain my position, and then you can respond." Even better / more generous would be to say, "I think you are wrong about something, but I am also not in your field and assume that I feel this way because there is stuff I don't know, and I was hoping you could explain X to me."
And the underlying truth of the world is that it's incredibly complicated, and outside of some elements of hard science--emphasis on the some--there really are not "correct" answers to almost anything involving human behavior. It's hand-waving all the way down. So when you pick out some little inconsistency in someone's conception of the world, you are demanding that they think and behave with a level of rigor that is totally inconsistent with actual lived reality, and then penalizing them for not behaving like a normal person. It's kind of a ridiculous thing to do, and not actually a good way to expand your own horizons.
In Tyler's defense, I think he is not a neurotypical thinker, so I don't think he is being intentionally deceptive or whatever. But I think he has reached a certain level of self-confidence with Tyler Cowan, Public Intellectual that has caused him to longer need to keep working on his fastball, and it shows.
(A thing, honesty, which is basically destined to happen to all of us.)
I have been reading MR almost since it started and have a fairly similar view. One thing that irritates me is the title of Tyler’s podcast. They are *not* conversations! They are lists of questions, some of which seem designed to serve the purposes described above. I wish there were more give-and-take.
Interesting comment and I would like to hear more. To whit:
1. Do you have some examples in mind of interviews you describe as below (I'd like to listen to them)?
"And if you listen when he interviews a really super-smart person, they will call him out on this in various ways. Those can become really contentious interviews, because he back-foots onto trying to find his way back into that little point he wanted to make."
2. What about the MR pandemic coverage turned you off? I found the coverage pretty enlightening (or at least I though so, maybe it was filling me with nonsense!). Though much of that was Tabarrok I suppose.
1) The very last podcast I listened to of his was his interview of Amia Srinivasan, which precipitated much sturm and drang on these here internets--so much so that Tyler felt compelled to write a comment about it on MR that intended to be generous but couldn't help being a little backhanded, DESPITE THE FACT THAT HE WRITES A WARNING ABOUT BEING BACKHANDED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE COMMENT. It was like Max Tyler, in all that is good AND ill in his approach:
At any rate, Srinivasan is pretty relentless in specifically recognizing where he wants to go small and have a little nit-picky debate and refusing not just to play, but to give ground about it. She wants to have a big, expansive conversation about big ideas and the world, and she understands that getting into some detail is often a strategy to foreclose possibilities and box in your conversational partner or demonstrate your own "smartness." And it really pissed people off who wanted to hear how Tyler was going to "get" her, because she gave zero Fs about being "gotten" and treated such moves as exasperating and childish.
2) MR had so much nonsense that was, as sbuserid wrote above, the equivalent of "one weird trick," in this case for solving the pandemic. Some of those tricks were things that I have no problem with but view as having been way, way overhyped, i.e. Fast Grants. Like, if you only understood the impact of Fast Grants from MR, you would be like, "Holy shit! This stuff changed the world!" And, my friend, they did not change the world. They did some nice stuff! But lots of people doing lots of things did lots of nice stuff during the pandemic. The hype machine was off the chain (and if you check through the comments on MR, you will find my grouchy posts on some of those blog posts, before I quit reading it).
Other stuff on MR was just straight up from Silly-ville, like the discussion around super-spreaders at the beginning of the pandemic. That discussion was straight-up, 100% garbage, for reasons that were patently obvious to anyone with insight on how infectious disease moves through a population. And it was so obviously garbage that reading those posts made me feel like I was being gaslit, like, "Is it really not obvious to Tyler and Alex that this is silly? The evidence you need is RIGHT THERE IN THE STORY" (I'm thinking here of a line of commentary that was focused on Covid outbreaks in South Korea as evidence for the super-spreader hypothesis).
And reading that stuff made me think, "Huh. When they offer one weird trick to use economic thinking to address a pandemic, it is obvious to me that there is a lot of nonsense here. So what does that mean about all the stuff they write about where I am not an expert?" And that's when I quit reading MR so much.
I should say here, and again sbuserid is right on, that this is a problem more generally in global health. There is this simultaneously hilarious and dispiriting cycle in global public health where each new generation of rock-star economists eventually cycles around to being interested in global health problems, in part because of the role of the World Bank and IMF in being connected to these issues (long story).
And what happens each time is that the econ folks come in and say, "man, global health is a big problem in terms of economics of developing countries, and these global health programs are a bunch of nonsense, but now we're going to solve it with Economic Thinking (TM)! Y'all are so luck to have us!" And sometimes they make some marginal gains, and sometimes they don't, and I, for one, am always extremely happy to see some new money come into the field, but if you judge by the stated program goals or claims of the economists, they always fail. Always.
For examples of this, see malaria, de-worming, and HIV. And I wouldn't even necessarily describe those as failures--a lot has been accomplished in all three areas. But you would not know that if you went back and read the econ papers on the subject and then looked at the outcomes ten years later.
It's not just global health, either. Microfinance has some really good applications. It is not going to save the world. It just isn't. The roots of poverty and inequity are deep and multi-causal and complicated and econ think just isn't very good at that kind of problem.
The "margin" in Marginal Revolution is sometimes way too thin to move the world. A long enough lever made of cooked pasta will not, in fact, allow you to lift the whole world.
"Tyler's an economist, and everyone already knows they are prolifically wrong. Further, he's chairing a media contest between smart people."
I have not read your whole comment, yet, because when I read this line I had to stop and reply that this made me laugh out loud so hard that simply mashing the Like button was not sufficient to communicate my appreciation for it.
Honestly, for all my griping, I pretty much hold the same opinions as you. If I wasn't busy with other stuff, such as writing overly long comments on Slow Boring, it's entirely possible that MR would still be in my info diet. Tyler will always be welcome in my home. It's just an affection that involves considerably more eye-rolling.
Here’s how Tyler describes himself in his latest book(with Daniel Gross): “Tyler attributes a lot of his own success to his hyperlexia—his ability from a very young age to read much faster than other people and to absorb that information very readily. Hyperlexia is often connected to autism and its information gathering proclivities, although Tyler does not think of himself as having low social intelligence or disabilities in communication skills, the latter being part of the formal clinical definition of autism.”
I actually think it's bad for mainstream news publications to cover heterodox views on topic in news coverage. In macroeconomics, for instance, I remember one article they had about MMT becoming more popular. But they don't mention the MMT viewpoint in their normal monetary policy news articles and I think they'd be unreasonably long if they covered the MMT, Austiran, Marxist, etc perspectives. Better to just stick to mainstream understandings even when I think they're wrong. Also, I'm curious about what sort of media outlet goes into greater depth than The Economist. The Atlantic can but they write fewer, longer articles. And you have specialist publications that go into greater depth by having to spend less of the article given background that they assume their readers already understand.
I think that sometimes the way he describes violence is, I dunno, a little too much for me?
The way he lays out historical scenes of violence borders on pornographic, in my experience and opinion. For me he goes beyond describing what happened and how bad it was, he seems to kind of get off on painting the most vivid possible image of misery possible, and it's that last part that really puts me off him.
There is a real value in having historians' accounts of exactly what happened during the worst parts of history, but I guess I subscribe to the Boy Scout Camping Trip Chaperone theory of describing violent history; e.g. you kind of want to avoid the people overeager to do the job in favor of the guy who would almost literally rather be doing something else. In both cases I don't want the first dude who enthusiastically raises his hand to do the job to be the one to do it.
Former journalist here. Here's a few good reasons for quoting experts:
1. Many experts don't write in lay terms but are capable of speaking normal English in conversation.
2. What the expert wrote is what they thought as of the publication date. A journalist might want to know what they think today, particularly in response to some current controversy.
3. Many journalists are just plain out of their depth on some of the topics they have to cover.
With all of that said, journalists often include expert quotes for non-good reasons, such is to smuggle their own opinions into the piece.
(1) and (3) are real problems. But (2) misunderstands the nature of experthood, I think. Most experts are experts not because they're quicker to understand phenomena, but because they've already spent a lot more time studying them. Put them on a new phenomenon, and their initial guesses aren't much better than a layperson.
I mean things like, "is it normal to have empty classified document folders lying around?" That's the kind of thing that experienced people would know offhand or have an informed reaction to that they haven't previously laid out in a journal article.
Isn't it also is more credible for a journalist to quote an expert rather than cite them? If I have no idea who a journalist is, why would I trust them to do a fair literature review? Whereas, a reader can take an expert quote more at face value.
On history, Devereaux easily got the better of that argument. But it's understandable that historians are touchy these days. One of my college majors was history and I love history, but I have to admit none of the main justifications for history as a profession or field are especially flattering to the egos of historians. The most common, popular reason for history -- which many professional historians claim to disavow -- is to create identities for current living people. Telling each other stories about a real or imagined past to construct an identity we can share with other living people -- but that use of history isn't really about the past at all, the past is just a convenient grab-bag of mythmaking material for use in the present. And accuracy is totally beside the point -- a straight-up myth will serve the purpose just as well as meticulous research if present-day people buy it.
A second purpose of history, perhaps the truest from a practitioner's perspective -- is history as antiquarianism/hobbyism. It's fun to geek out about studying some obscure, strange foreign society in the past, for the same reason that's fun to imagine alternative worlds in fiction, etc., Here, accuracy in some objective sense matters a lot, from a nerd perspective. But it's not very important to people who aren't into it as a hobby.
A third purpose of history, which I suspect some academic historians have fallen into as a way to justify their funding, is essentially history as extended-anthropology, or extended-political science, extended economics, etc. Simply using past societies to expand the pool of human experience to which modern social science techniques can be applied. But why? The evidence in the past is so much thinner, and there are so many more unknown variables that it's hard to see what the value is of doing this.
Did you actually read his piece ? He argues that there is a big chunk of social science that wouldn't exist (or would be crap) without the work of professional historians. He also alludes to, but perhaps is not quite as explicit about , the other crucial contribution of professional historian - illuminating the *possibilties* for human society. It’s one of the best antidotes we have for parochial, presentist (ahem) bias. Living in a foreign country really opens your eyes to so many things you took for granted and were transparent to you. History takes that to a whole new level.
I think that our society's insistence on everything being 'scientific', and the higher social cachet of 'scientific' fields*, is resulting in history's territory basically being devoured by the-things-that-end-in-ology.
History is going to produce 'scientific' output.
It can provide inputs for other 'scientific' fields, though. And is valuable for other reasons.
*I keep using 'scientific' because I don't consider social sciences real science. =)
Yes, I read it, and as I said Devereaux easily got the better of the argument (i.e., Smith got shredded). But it wasn't really addressing my point above; I wouldn't have spent the time studying history or still love it if I didn't think it was valuable, for similar reasons as I think other humanities are valueable. But other than as hobbyism for nerds, history's value and function in the larger society is present-day culture production, like other forms of literature and creative work, and I think it's a mistake for historians to be so unwilling to embrace that.
I agree with you that studying history opens up possibilities, but think you're getting the directionality wrong. It's not as if historians report back from the archives about some obscure past cultural practice and then present-day people say, that's a good idea, let's be more like that old society. That just doesn't happen (or the extent it does it's almost uniformly reactionary and harmful).
Rather, it's people living today who are chafing or pushing for some change in some aspect in our current society, against conservatives who say, that's foolish, this is the way things are, whether it be current gender or ethnic identities/categories or some other contested feature of our current society. And then historians who are living in the present and sympathetic to those wanting change go back and find evidence of how that supposedly immutable thing came into existence, and show that it is not immutable but instead contingent and could have been or could be made some other way. That's then rhetorical grist and support for the current people to use in their arguments and efforts for changing current and future society. In words, history and the past is being mined for fodder for constructing current identities and culture. So I don't think what you said is inconsistent with what i wrote -- it pretty much all falls into the first, and to some extent second, major functions that I identified.
That's a caricature. Yes, current concerns shape the questions we ask, but the answer we get actually shape our views in turn, they are not, in fact, pre-determined. Part of the problem however, is that much (though not all) of the fruits of professional historians gets slowly churned through a lot of mediators (e.g. social scientists) before it actually gets to the public, so the importance is often opaque. But the main point stands. It reminds me of something that may have been mentioned in SB a long time ago: some GOP populist was hampering on about closing down some government department in charge of meteorological data because private companies are providing the forecasts so much more nicely and clearly, and in fact we've never actually seen results from them anyway. He failed to mention that 100% of those private providers are entirely relying on that government service for their data, without which they are useless. For the public, however, it looks as though it's all private actors. Same thing with Social scientists and historians (unless you think Social Science is also a waste of time, but then you're debating at a different level).
Second, I'd argue that knowledge for its own sake is worth having too. I.e. there is value in truth per se. Not just in imagining that the moon is cheese but knowing what it's actually made of. Not for any practical reason, but just for its own sake. By the same token, knowing what actually happened in our past, rather than just relying on oral traditions and stories. It's valuable to have stuff in a museum and have the explanation not be just something someone made out of pure guess work, but rather be highly reliable. However, I stress that this is a secondary point. Even if you reject this (or reject this merits funding), the first point stands.
The activities and processes you're describing fit within the functions I described. I don't think what you're saying is inconsistent with what I'm saying.
I read Smith and Devereaux (well, not entirely because I got tired of his long-winded disquisition). It seems they're arguing past each other. Smith wants rigorous, extremely time- and resource-consuming empirical studies of historical events to be done before one can say anything relating to the present. Devereaux is saying that historians aren't making predictive claims when they kinda actually are.
The first isn't going to happen as Smith wants because historians aren't in the business of devoting vast resources to answer the question of current relevance which is at most a small sidebar to their real work. Devereaux is wrong because apparently historians (like him) like to spout off about current events.
The happy meeting ground is that when historians speak about what history says about possible futures, they're right to the extent that they're offering more of a somewhat-grounded hypothesis than an established truth. That is, they may indeed be right, but the listener must be aware that there are large error bars surrounding their prediction. And that's fine with me.
"On history, Devereaux easily got the better of that argument."
I don't think you and I read the same essays, because I thought Smith got the better of the argument.
Smith argues that historians need to distinguish between their work as historians and their work as pundits, because the two have different different evidentiary standards. Devereaux then whines that, yes, editors of articles for the general public do tend to strip out lots of necessary caveats in a way that tends to destroy the ways in which historians add nuance, but it's all OK, really, because the truth is out there in the academic literature.
You might ask why do planetary science rather than just earth science? The evidence on other planets is just so much thinner. I think that does in fact explain why planetary science is a part of one academic discipline (astronomy) while earth science is multiple disciplines (geology, oceanography, atmospheric science, etc). But it’s worthwhile for all these fields to exist and be in conversation with each other. Same with economic history, anthropological history, political history, etc.
“But why? The evidence in the past is so much thinner, and there are so many more unknown variables that it's hard to see what the value is of doing this”
It’s useful to dissuade modern man from putting on airs.
1) As put, this is wrong, but tryin to understand why we got to here instead of there is worthwhile.
2) There is a market for it, so what's wrong?
3) Exactly right. The amount of data on Roman or Greek slavery is thin, but the distance from Atlantic trade slavery makes it worthwhile. Barbarian invasions of the Roman West as bungled immigration policy.
Given how much richer California is than Mexico, I think one could make a moral argument that the US should have tried to take even more land from them.
Sort of a change of subject, but my friend from Tijuana says rents have doubled or more over the last year. I hadn't realized that our housing issues have spilled over the border, or perhaps it's more accurate to say the housing shortage is being driven by global factors more than domestic ones.
Unfortunately, many of the people in favor of annexing Mexican land don't believe that people of Mexican heritage can't be "true Americans". They wanted the land but not the people.
"On the Media" had a good 3-part series showing several times where the US flinched at expansions that would add large non-white populations to the country. An odd tension between between imperialist instincts and racist instincts, I'm sad to say.
That probably inflates the racial aspect a bit, although I'm just guessing and not studying original sources. I can think of 4 other reasons they could have preferred to only annex non-dense areas, and I imagine all 4 + racism played a role in the debate:
1 Adding tens of millions Spanish speakers all at once would have been very difficult
2 Adding tens of millions of Catholics would have made some Protestants very uncomfortable
3 As it says in the wikipedia: "Idealistic advocates of Manifest Destiny, such as John L. O'Sullivan, had always maintained that the laws of the United States should not be imposed onto people against their will." True these same folks probably rejected annexing NW Mexico, but more people would have been worse.
4 It's certainly easier to annex relatively unoccupied land unless the preexisitng inhabitants really want to be annexed. Most of what became the US SW had few occupants at the time.
Although it’s a little odd that they put the border precisely where they did. Had it been uniformly 50 miles north, or uniformly 50 miles south (maybe not exactly 50) it would have gone through relatively unpopulated deserts, rather than hitting the Rio Grande cities, San Diego, and Yuma. (I don’t know if Nogales already existed or formed because of the border.)
Oh right, it's part of that! That purchase was made to get the flattest bit of land in that area, so that the Southern Pacific could make a transcontinental railroad (even though no transcontinental track had yet been built) so that slaveholders wouldn't be shut out of the market to the west coast. I rode Amtrak's "Sunset Limited" once, that uses that track, and also learned about El Paso being "the pass" that is the farthest north pass for crossing east-west that usually stays snow-free all winter.
And if that is correct reasoning (morally or otherwise), would you claim by analogy that, given the differences in richness between west Africa and the US, more slaves should have been brought over?
Of course not, just as the US should obviously not invade Mexico right now.
I'm just saying the descendents of Californians benefitted from the annexation as they're enjoying much higher living standards than they would in the counterfactual world where they're still a part of Mexico.
You wrote it right there at the beginning: "grossly simplified observation."
That observation was telling you something, and the something it was telling you was, "the comment I'm about to make is going to sound very smart and actually have about eighteen different problems that make it sound really silly to someone who actually knows the material.
I think the "computer communication" point is right on. I have a theory that written communication, in general, feels really "correct" to us--i.e. all the greatest philosophers write books!--and is actually really broken, in various ways, because it ignores huge swathes of how we are actually evolved to communicate, i.e. with our facial expressions.
And then here comes the internet and texting and electronic communication in general, encouraging us all to double down on written communication.
OTOH, it's hard to imagine what we're really supposed to do about it. I guess maybe TikTok and YouTube, but then I hate TikTok and YouTube, because I can read so much faster than I can watch a video. It feels imprisoning or time-wasting.
What made the land belong to Mexico other than inherited claims from another imperial power? I've never had much sympathy for "we took it from the Mexicans" since it was the indigenous Californians, Comanche et al. who were the ones with the genuine prior claim.
That game can be played further , you know… what makes that claim “genuine”? Murder, genocide etc are absolute wrongs. Lying and cheating on treaties are questionable at best. But Realestate claims? How does that work exactly, absent a common framework? Do we just decide that the indigenous Americans collectively “owned” the entire continent pre-1492? Why?
Oh, sure, at some point you get into do the English get reparations for the Norman Conquest, do the Welsh get reparations from the English for the Saxon invasion, does Italy owe damages to the descendants of Boudicca. But saying "the land was stolen from Mexico" when Mexico's claim was founded on the same European right of conquest approach is taking the piss.
Ultimately we're all children of the earth. The first homo sapiens in Mexico or Siberia or Brooklyn didn't have a stronger "right" to those places than the creatures already living there.
Property rights are a human construct. They're a necessary evil our species has invented because otherwise the economy would suck and we'd all be a lot poorer.
EDIT: That comes across as a little crazy. What I meant by "property rights" (and should've written) is: private ownership of land."
I was gonna say, the Rio Grande Valley's Hispanic heritage ain't "immigrant", they've been there wayyyy longer than the Anglo Texans. Let alone you newcomers!
And just as an example, here's the discussion of the Rancho San Vicente y Santa Monica, owned by Francisco Sepulveda, whose heirs later profited from developments that bear these historic names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancho_San_Vicente_y_Santa_Monica
There were cases being adjudicated for decades and decades—well into the 20th century—involving land claims (using a process naturally set up by the conquering Anglos after the defeat of Mexico).
If Instagram is making u unhappy you should step away too but apparently the critique of Instagram/fb is just way greater. Twitter is much more of a mess than this substack would have one believe.
Somehow the reparations bargain with Native Americans seems to have been "well how about we let you open casinos?"
I'm half-kidding, but there's some substance there. I watched with amusement as the rural whites where I grew up freaked out as the local tribal government became far more wealthy than the decaying little midwestern town...
Casino money has lead to some ugly disputes over eligibility for tribal membership. Once membership has money attached to it, tribes had an interest in tightening eligibility, and because "blood quantum" is an element of the criteria, you get the unseemly situation of tribes sounding like Nazis or segregationists splitting hairs about who does or doesn't have enough of the right kind of "blood" to qualify.
Yep, that's one of the major factors that I think *should* give (but seemingly doesn't at all) even hard-core Kendian-style "anti-racists" pause about reparations: any sort of race-based reparations plan would put the US government in the position of arbitrating who really qualifies as "black" or "black enough," which seems like a very ill-advised thing if you also simultaneously believe the majority of the US population both controls the military and law enforcement establishment and is literally seething with barely contained genocidal hatred toward non-whites....
I don't know that genocide is the next-step risk, but it's a nice call out of the contradictions inherent in the most extreme "race explains everything" style progressive thought.
I think it would set race relations back quite a bit, though. Which is a shame because, at least judging by my favorite race-relations stat, interracial marriage and births, relations are improving dramatically every year just by doing "nothing" as is.
Well, *I* don't think it's a next step risk! But you can find plenty of people who would claim unironically that there's even already an officially sanctioned genocide of black Americans in progress (Google "genocide police shootings") and I suspect on a Venn diagram the circle of people believing that almost entirely falls within the circle of people who think a federal government-administered race-based reparations program would be an excellent idea.
Folks often complain about the percentage of citizens that vote, well, let someone in office/seeking election propose and promote a concrete reparations plan and I think voter turnout would be the highest ever (on both sides).
I'd like Matt to weigh in more on Bret's actual response, because I don't think Noah Smith's argument comes across as made in good faith, and Bret seems to take the time to respond, while Matt's just handwaving it as "See, Bret had to type up all of his feelings like a thin-skinned academic!" It's feels too close to old trolling on the blogosphere of "Well I must be right because you got so upset about what I said you posted a long response!"
I thought Devereaux’s response seems to come down to giving specific meanings to words like “empirical” and “theory” that Smith isn’t using. Unfortunately, both of them seem to have gotten too much into personal conflict to see that I think the main points they both assert are compatible. (I might also be mildly triggered by Devereaux’s one offhand remark about philosophy, because I, as a Hume-sympathetic epistemologist, actually think that everything Devereax is talking about in historical work counts as “empiricism” - hearing testimony, reading documents, trying to interpret what the people might have been saying and not saying, etc.)
Whenever a historian makes a claim that something happened “because of” something, or “led to” something, or even that something is “possible”, they are proposing some kind of hypothetical or theoretical idea that goes beyond Hume’s worry that maybe there is no “because” or “could” and all there is is just one damn thing after another. I think Devereaux is right that historians usually try to be careful about this, and this care makes them allergic to anything that looks like a grand narrative or broad theory, but they still need to do bits of it on the small scale to understand their documents. I think Smithis also right that inevitably, most people make some mistakes even with the things that they take care to avoid, especially when they are writing for a broader public.
Bluntly, MY doesn’t strike me as someone who’d have anything particularly interesting to contribute on this if he tried to do so in earnest. He’s incredibly effective in a pretty broad yet finite set of fields (as everyone), and I sense that this debate won’t be one of them. Perhaps one of his strengths is largely knowing not to venture too much into places where he doesn’t have much to add?
I don't want to strawman Matt, so I'll try to do a good faith effort at explaining what I believe he's trying to say. As indicated previously here (See some of Matt's posts before on things like World War I and Austria-Hungary, or Kerry in 2004), Matt seems to be more open to counterfactual speculation as a way of kicking the tires on understanding what's actually driving events/history. Historians seem to be very hesitant to engage in counterfactuals. A number of economists have at times tried to model counterfactuals, I recall Fogel doing something about estimating the impact of railroads vs. canals, and so that's an intrusion of economists into the territory of historians.
But I do think historians have a solid footing of defending the point that things have happened for a reason, and you get bogged down when you're trying to say what if something else happened (example, it's pretty hard to imagine Nazi Germany successfully invading Britain). And since history is an N of one, it's also really hard to speculate what happens if something were changed.
Historians don't like counterfactuals because, unless they're extremely narrow, technical and concrete, tend to be entertainment, not actual serious analysis. It's not very different from science fiction. It's nice, but has little to offer to what most scientists do most of the time. Personally I never bother to seriously read those occasional pieces by MY. They strike me as a waste of time. MY isn't a historian. His takes on history are of limited interest, except when he talks about the stuff he knows really well (history of housing in the us etc.), and his takes of counterfactual history is basically reading his fanfic. Not why I personally subscribe, but to each their own.
I don't think it's Noah's best article--the insight in it just isn't enough to justify its length in my view. That said, his central thesis seems fairly unassailable and is worth observing: historians constantly draw analogies between past events and current events and these are predictions, the strength of which has never really been rigorously tested.
As far as I can tell, Bret's response was a very grouchy version of "nuh uh, when I saw something that happened in the past can help explain the present and anticipate the future I am not actually making predictions or telling a causal story, I am, um something something something epistemology something Noah's a dumb idiot something" and was super unconvincing. The very first example (Greek democracies) he tries to refute still very ably illustrates Noah's point! The caveats he complains about being elided all amount to "of course what I am about to say could be completely wrong and of no value, but I am going to say it anyway". Weird defense!
I think this is over-reading what Devereaux is saying. I think that, once we translate the difference in vocabularies (which Deveraux's talk of epistemology helps me understand, but didn't allow either him or Smith to just come out and say it), what Devereaux is saying is "predictions are really hard; we don't have direct observation of the past, or of possibility; but if we use empirical methods in the much broader sense (while historians restrict the word "empirical" to a narrower sense) then the historian is in fact doing empirical work to discover some basic facts about possibility, though we should be careful about being *too* confident about *anything*". I don't think the two of them really disagree, except perhaps about how much work historians are doing (because there's lots of work to be done at lots of points in the argument, and historians focus on one side of the work, while econometricians focus on the other side).
Bret's response struck me as essentially making the claim that the study of history is without practical value, lol.
Not brilliant ground to situate oneself on, IMO.
If we can't use it to try to understand the present and near-future, and can't use it to craft the story that is our communal identity, what bloody use is the whole discipline?
This is very strange. You’re the second person to write this and it’s as if we read two entirely different pieces. He mentions two practical values, one explicit (providing the data necessary for social science) one implicit (understanding the possibilities for human societies). That’s exactly the opposite of showing it’s impractical. Also what “vast resources” are we talking about. The discipline of history is one of the cheapest there are. To conduct most subfields at the highest levels all you need is tenure lines, good libraries, and at best modest research grants for occasional travel and the odd research assistant (optional). It’s laughably cheaper than most other fields.
"Vast" and "Vastly less" mean completely different things. Obviously there are not "vast" resources being consumed in the study of history, though that's in part due to the fact that the discipline is collapsing around us, in case you hadn't noticed. The undergraduate students caught onto the fact that there're no tenured positions waiting for them at the end of the yellow brick road.
But it's still perfectly possible to say that we should use vastly less, proportionally, if it really is as valueless as the piece we both read implies to me.
Now, as for the two values he mentioned, he caveats the hell out of the first in ways that make it borderline-useless, as Harrison's "80% confidence interval" example below suggests.
For the second, ok, but that's pretty damned vague and again borderline-useless unless one is prepared to analogize them to the present.
The thing is, I didn't disagree with the gist of the article: a scientific/statistical/data-driven epistemology is the wrong one to apply to the study of history.
But his dismissal of counterfactuals and parallels and theories of history as valid tools for understanding the past and present means that there's nothing of value left. That's the part I disagree with.
I think you misunderstood him. I don't think he is saying that the data histoirans provide social scientists is useless, only that it needs to be used with care, care that can only realistically be provided by the continued collaboration between the fields.
as for analogies, *of course* analogies to the present are useful, and done all the time. What he was trying to say is that the way they are useful is in showing us possibilities rather than predictions. That' still very valuable. To be able to rule out that assumption "this can't happen" , or to become conscious to the fact that you were unknowingly assuming that b follows from a where in fact that's not necessarily the case, is very important.
Forgive my frankness, but I think you're taking the article, which is shot through with bog-standard academia ass-covering, and interpreting it how you're used to, because you're used to it.
Meanwhile, I'm reading the words at face value and thinking, "probably shouldn't say this stuff out loud, yo."
That seems to account for the majority of the difference in the way we understand this piece.
If he *means* what you say, which is entirely possible, he's shying away from *saying* it directly in favor of an endless series of sheet anchors thrown out to windward.
I guess that's necessary, as any perceived overpromise will be jumped on by his fellows as a misstep.
But my sympathy is limited at best, because that entire section of the piece was a choice on his part. Better not to wander so far afield and simply confine himself to criticizing Noah's original premise, which is indeed bullshit.
Yeah, interesting. I thought he is speaking at face value, but it is entirely possible that since he is speaking about my field I am reading into it (or perhaps rather i'm interpreting his intentions correctly, but he didn't do a good enough job to convey them to his *intended* audience) . I'd just point out that from my perspective I don't recall seeing any ass covering. He just made a bit of a rhetorical point about being careful and nuanced to show the difference between him and Smith, so yes, there was some malice or snark there, but I didn't feel like he wrote out of any kind of fear. I think that might be a misunderstanding on your part, actually.
Maybe we did! Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I think the issue isn't that historical research isn't cheap, but that at a certain point something may just remain unknowable. No matter the times you go to a good library, look for primary evidence, sort through the historical record, you're trying to piece together a puzzle without all of the puzzle pieces. Works are lost. Some people didn't journal. Gaps remain.
In theory, yes, but not in practice. That's a common misconception. Even in ancient history we are actually discovery new primary sources (e.g. inscriptions) at significant rates, AND havne't actually even *looked* at the majority of e.g. the half a million papyri unearthed in Egypt in the late 19th century.* Besides that, archaeology is constantly advancing and changing the picture. For later periods it's more dramatic, whole archives that haven't even been explored by anyone. Sure, the evidence is theoretically finite but we haven't gotten close.
More importantly, you'd be surprised how much genuine insights a fresh look and a fresh approach to existing material can sometimes yield.
Finally, yes, some fields are less productive than others and are (or for a time seem) more "spent". that's true in every branch of knowledge. People notice that and naturally gravitate to other subject matters. But there is no single period of history that is even close to being "done" in that sense.
P.S.
half a million papyri is actually a severe under count. That figure is an estimate for the oxyrynchus papyri, one of the most famous finds. Only about 5000 fragments published thus far, of an estimated 500,000....
Hm, I see it as a little different, in that the study of history has to be very careful about the conclusions it's making, because you don't have the same ability to approach things through experimentation that you do in the sciences.
I would draw an analogy to the work of Nate Silver and others to analyzing polling data and trying to build models, but still having a high degree of uncertainty in the forecasts. 538 gives the GOP a 75% chance of winning the House, but there's still an 80% confidence interval of Republicans winning between 248 and 209 seats.
If you tried to translate that into a historian making conclusion you might get something like "With an 80% confidence interval we can say that Archduke Ferdinand not being assassinated results in anywhere between Austria-Hungary being the world's superpower to a Communist Russia still developing but triggering a nuclear war in the mid-1950s."
Which may be and probably is true, but if you decline on that basis to discuss parallels, their potential applicability to modern circumstances, and the historical events and historiography that led us to those circumstances, then the study of history is entirely without value and we can toss the whole enterprise overboard.
My whole point is precisely that history's non-scientific, qualitative judgements are important and useful anyway.
Basically, the only utility of history as an academic discipline is in providing us insight into the present, either we came to be here or how the past has parallels which can inform our actions today.
Other than that the only thing it's good for is as a hobby for nerds like myself, which is functionally an art rather than a practical discipline of any kind.
Which would be fine, but in that case we should devote vastly less resources to its study, lol. Hence my point that it's not an argument I'd want to make as someone employed in the field. I, personally, believe the point is wrong, but that's irrelevant.
On a more specific note, the hatred historians hold for counterfactuals is wildly overblown, IMO.
There are plenty of events around which we can construct firm counterfactuals in more recent times. I'll take the example of the atomic bombings that closed out WWII in the Pacific. In their absence we can effectively be 100% certain that vastly more people would have died in every combatant nation, because there were only two alternative plans to bring an end to the war:
1. The Allied plans to invade Japan were virtually guaranteed to kill 1-2 million IJA and IJN personnel, 300,000-800,000 Japanese civilians, and a 200,000-500,000 Allied soldiers, and even assuming the success of Operation Coronet and a fairly prompt surrender thereafter, the IJA would have continued massacring 100-200,000 Mainland Asian civilians a month until at least May, 1946.
2. The USN plan to blockade Japan and starve it into surrender would have resulted in the deaths of between 6 and 15 million Japanese civilians by Fall, 1946. In addition, it's death throes would almost certainly have provoked the IJA in mainland Asia to reach a new crescendo of mass murder.
I fail to see how marginal uncertainty and range of possible outcomes inherent in these scenarios make us unable to draw conclusions and thus value from such a counterfactual.
I agree with your analysis but I think many people who argue against the need for the atomic bombing to end the war argue that Japan was seriously considering some form of surrender before Hiroshima/Nagasaki or that the war could reasonably be concluded under acceptable terms that would obviate the need for an invasion, and that the demand for unconditional surrender was itself a major reason for the actual and anticipated number of deaths.
I'm not saying that's my view, but I have read it among critics of the atomic bombing.
At which point, the goal of the study of history is to provide textual and recorded evidence as to which side is correct on those two points.
The historiography I'm familiar with says both are horseshit. The Japanese position prior to the bombings was the retention of territory outside the Home Islands, no change in the form or personnel of government, no war crimes prosecutions, and full retention of their military apparatus, and the available documentation and correspondence indicates this was regarded as a minimal negotiating position within the highest reaches of the government, not a maximal one.
The only argument for which I have any respect is the one that claims the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Sakhalin was sufficient on its own to put the "surrender" faction of the Japanese cabinet over the top. I think it's wrong, but it's a nearer-run thing than "they were ready to surrender on reasonable terms anyway", and generally speaking its adherents also understand that it is a grave form of presentism to have expected Allied policymakers to act on that assumption while Japan was killing thousands of people a day.
I pretty much agree. Those who thought Japan was edging toward some kind of negotiated peace at this time clearly had forgotten about the battle of Okinawa, by far the bloodiest of the Pacific war, which ended shortly before Hiroshima/Nagasaki.
It would indeed have done that, by killing half its industrial workforce due to starvation.
The Allies had to provide something like 600 Kcal/day/capita to Japan for 6 months to get it through the winter and spring of 1946, and that was with the remaining key landside transport links intact and its coastal shipping network flowing freely to move food from agricultural regions to population centers.
With all due respect, your response to David's last question about media consumption wasn't good or helpful. A lot of us have the same question and we'd appreciate a fuller response. For example, I subscribe to Slow Boring, NYT and The Dispatch and I feel better informed these days about different perspectives. But, if I didn't subscribe to The Dispatch, I'd most definitely be missing a lot of good, intelligent and thought-provoking center right points of view. Honestly, it was only after The Dispatch quoted a couple takes by you and presented them as "a center left perspective to take seriously" that I discovered Slow Boring and subscribed. I'm glad I did!
+1 for the Dispatch. Between this sub and them, I think a person could be very well-informed with having plenty to read. (Especially if they're getting into the comments.)
I concur with the folks disappointed by the NYT recommendation. It's true that there's occasionally good reporting, and their newsletters are quite good (RIP, Jay Caspian Kang), but I feel like the paper has succumbed to the worst sort of click-bait style headlines and misleading paragraph organization (Apoorva Mandavilli's COVID reporting, for example). I often get to the end of an article and realize that it has argued the opposite of the headline. And these complaints are all before considering the rigidly orthodox Democratic (party) perspective underwriting the topic selection among news articles or the deeply provincial point-of-view on cultural matters that take Manhattan as normative and authoritative (relative to the globe, not just "flyover country").
I'm fundamentally looking for news on matters of significance that can surprise me, at the level of story selection or detail (or both). It's demoralizing to read coverage that feels like it was written by a third-generation AI.
Then there are the comments, wow: a nightmare of repetitive, predictable in-group boundary-policing. Any opinion piece that tries to push the audience the tiniest bit triggers an onslaught of detailed comments accusing the author of "bothsiderism" followed by a tedious rehash of the crimes of Donald Trump and his accomplices in the Republican party. I get it, I hate him too, but there's more to the world, my friends.
Maybe Matt felt he couldn't recommend Bloomberg, due to a conflict of interest? I think both Bloomberg's and the Wall Street Journal's news sections are more limited, but significantly better than the NYT. Al Jazeera is often better, too. I used to like the British papers, but the Guardian just feels like feels like an NYT clone now.
I wish editors let journalists and columnists write the titles for their articles. At The Atlantic, article titles change throughout the day based on the whims of editors, which seems really click-baity to me for what are supposed to be "prestige" publications.
Just read the Bret Devereaux piece. Can’t recommend it highly enough! A really good exposition to some of the ways historians think and work and their unique contributions, often precisely because History doesn’t work like mainstream Social Sciences. Also, that Noah Smith guy comes across as an ignorant jerk, but maybe it’s just Twitter being a bad influence ?
Admittedly I did not. I did however read his tweet “Great to see history majors being abandoned. Maybe now all the historians will have time to go read a book.” This makes him supremely qualified for the title “ignorant jerk” in my book.
I am also Team Chip - tortilla and potato - but you all are wrong: great chips should not have artificial flavors sprinkled on them. Thank you for listening.
The response to Bret's post is a bit facile. You tweeted that it was confusing why historians resist explicit reasoning about counterfactuals and in his post he expressly responded to your point:
"We tend to refuse to engage in counterfactual analysis because we look at the evidence and conclude that it cannot support the level of confidence we’d need to have. This is not a mindless, Luddite resistance but a considered position on the epistemic limits of knowing the past or predicting the future."
Your response to this was: "For myself, this has mostly served as a reminder of how thin-skinned academics are!"
Bret's response (to you at least) is not in the least defensive, he's addressing your position. It's dismissive to essentially reply 'Y U Mad Bro'. It seems you should either respond to his point or say something along the lines 'Thanks for addressing my question, I still like counterfactuals though - might substack about it later but I'm not going to do a detailed response.'
Don't feel bad about abandoning R, Matt. As a coder, I can tell it's not for everyone, and it’s why I always hated the “learn to code” slam on journalists—especially since almost all of those assholes don't know how to code themselves.
Congratulations, Bryan! I find it genuinely moving that you’ve been inspired by your reading to engage in the business of democracy. Not always exciting, but we desperately need people doing this work, especially youngs promoting fresh ideas. Totally unironically, thank you for your service!
I would love to see more Bryan content here going forward. Have Matt and the SB community crowdsource your policy stances! Or not.
We could end up being the shadow rulers of some middle American city. I like where this is headed.
Am I a bad person for imagining Bryan bowing before a hooded and cloaked figure and saying, "Yes, Lord Yglesias... Everything is proceeding as you have foreseen..."
Yes please!
Congratulations, Bryan! If I were in your situation, in addition to upzoning and eliminating parking requirements, I'd try to make more car-free and car-lite places in my city.
If you're in an old city with an existing downtown—Midwest, upstate New York, something like that—you have a downtown, and you can open up some downtown streets for people and close them for cars. Even in newer cities, try to find places where cars can be eliminated. Make places for people to be, without cars.
Also, bike lanes. Make it safe for kids to ride their bikes to school, and make it safe to ride from areas where people live to areas where people shop. This means safe bike routes from the start to the finish. It's no good having a bike lane to school with one dangerous intersection. Parents, wisely, aren't going to let their children ride through an intersection where they might be killed. Similarly, women are much more risk-averse than men on average. If you want women to take their e-bikes to the grocery store and the farmer's market, you have to make the whole trip safe. If there's one scary part where a woman has to mix with 40 mph traffic, she's probably going to take the car.
Like, here's the freeway, and here's the little section with the rickety bridge that's two inches wider than your car, with no railings, over a moat full of crocodiles. If that's the route, a lot of people aren't going to take it. The whole route is bad because of the one part with the crocodiles, no matter how great the rest of it is. You can't just say, it's fine except for that little part; the whole route is bad.
In terms of Informed Citizenness I really appreciate my subscription to The Economist. They have an editorial slant that's sometimes wrong but they still give a fair hearing to other points of view, but when they cover something I know a lot about I've always found their coverage pretty reasonable and better than any other general purpose publication I can think of.
I read the Economist as well, and I think their Science and Technology coverage is very good. There are two areas I see in the Economist that have heavy editorial slant: Britain (especially Northern Ireland) and Latin America. On Northern Ireland, they are strongly, unapologetically unionist, hate Sinn Fein, and make excuses for loyalist paramilitaries and government collusion with them. For Latin America, they always support right-wing governments and "reform" and make excuses for right wing economic mismanagement, corruption, and violence, while dreading any left-wing governments. It's like they assign the Northern Ireland beat to out-of-touch right-wing unionists and the Latin American beat to bitter rich right-wing Venezuelan emigres.
Well, if you want left wing, in-touch Unionists, the Progressive Unionist Party is your choice. They are also the political arm of the Ulster Volunteer Force and Red Hand Commando, so caveat emptor.
I'm not sure that would be an improvement. I think, especially for Americans, that reading Northern Ireland coverage by the Economist is like being in Bizarro world. Very few Americans are instinctively Unionist and invested in the British Empire in Ireland.
I'm sure it would not be an improvement. However, now that you mention it, it may be a point in favor of the Economist's approach that American readers get a viewpoint that they are not usually exposed to, or may even be unaware that it is a view that is supported by a substantial portion of the population in Northern Ireland itself.
I don't read the Economist for opinion. That's my core problem. It's not like I want articles on Northern Ireland written by Irish expats living in Boston who have the Clancy brothers on indefinite repeat either. I would rather have more facts and less shading.
I think I stopped reading the economist around 2018 when they were simultaneously cheering on Bolsonaro and calling for urgent action on climate change.
How much are they giving “daily news” and how much is it more “weekly magazine”? There’s a difference in the type of content.
There's a surprising amount of daily news. I seldom hear anything on the NPR that is newss of the day that isn't also covered by The Economist within 24 hrs or so
Yeah they are weekly and global and will have a lot of gaps if you are interested in any particular issue. Read the United States section, and it will be missing a hell of a lot of the major things that happened in the United States that week. I think in the realm of us all discussing clickbait and Instagram and Facebook this last week, economist does a good job of not being clickbaity, I think even better than the NYT. I only read 2 or 3 of their articles a week but I think the thing they do best is inform without preaching.
Plus they don't try to construct a story out of expert quotes in the way Matt talks about here.
I used to love the Economist too but I really lost it over their Afghanistan coverage. They just went so heavy on the “this is the end of American power” angle and “Biden will never recover from this show of weakness” that I just couldn’t take it. What made it weirder was how they were one of the publications that actually focused on how ineffectual the operation was to begin with. Oh well. When they eventually publish their “we were wrong” article like they with Iraq I’ll probably be back...
In 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky published Worlds in Collision. It claimed--drawing on mythology, history, and other sources--that Venus was ejected by Jupiter and flew close to the earth, causing catastrophies before finding its current orbit. It was a long-running best seller.
A major reason that its popularity lasted as long as it did was the credulity of scientists outside their fields. Astronomers said "the astronomy is all bunk, but the history is interesting," while historians said the opposite.
I often think this applies to everything and that anything I find interesting outside my fields of expertise is complete bunk.
Quanta Magazine articles have always seemed accurate in my field.
Which makes me wonder, who are they writing for? Does anyone actually need accurate pop science articles about quantum physics?
I mean, I highly appreciate them. I don’t get enough exposure to hard science writings otherwise.
I suppose we should add this for historical record: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/1991/10/-quot-the-economics-of-the-colonial-cringe-quot-about-the-economist-magazine-washington-post-1991/7415/
Your comment just struck a chord with my memory of reading that article a long time ago.
I had this exact same experience during the pandemic with Marginal Revolution, which I used to love.
The few times I’ve tried reading that, the comments have been excessively anti-immigrant right wingers, which isn’t even good economics. Didn’t inspire me to read more.
The comments are the inevitable result of a very hands off moderation policy, alas. I just don’t read the comments, and the posts themselves are great.
How so? Was it the criticism of pandemic policy?
Check out my comments elsewhere in this thread, in my exchanges with Evil Socrates and sbuserid, both of whom also had some good thoughts on this subject.
I really like Tyler, love listening to him, and would jump at the chance to have a beer with him (although he doesn't drink, so I guess it would just be me drinking the beer). He's a really smart guy.
That said, the move you describe is one of the tics that finally turned me off to him. If you want to understand someone's thinking, setting up a trick to get them to express a logical fault and then pouncing is not a way to do that. It puts the speaker on the defensive, which means that they close down, rather than opening up, and back into making ever smaller claims, because those are easier to defend, rather than exploring. It "proves" how "smart" Tyler is at the expense of reducing the quality of the actual exchange, because it narrows the terrain for discussion down to some little point that Tyler has previously prepared to make.
And if you listen when he interviews a really super-smart person, they will call him out on this in various ways. Those can become really contentious interviews, because he back-foots onto trying to find his way back into that little point he wanted to make. Which gets you to your latter point: how can he become similarly smart to them on their topic of expertise? It's so impressive! And he does it twice a month!
Well, unless he's not doing that. If it's a game--if he's carefully finding a little point where he can pick his spot and run an ambush--then he's executing a great strategy to perform expertise rather than developing actual expertise. My very strong suspicion is that Tyler conflates the two, and I say that as someone who has crossed a couple of boundary disciplines in his life and did that myself. It's a super easy trap to fall into.
When I gradually moved from history into public health, it was very easy for me to pretend to certain kinds of statistical understanding that are useful in epidemiology. I read a lot of stats-adjacent stuff (politics, sports, etc.), have a good college education, did a stats-adjacent job early in my career (payroll and HR), and understand the basics. Plus I know a lot about the spread of disease in populations from a historical standpoint, having read that literature. I could sound very "smart" in a conversation with an epidemiologist.
But eventually I realized that I was hitting a wall, because when I talked to actual epidemiologists, I was so interested in demonstrating that I belonged in the club--I know this stuff, too!--that I was effectively snowing them, particularly if we were talking about a subject that interested me and where I had opinions. So I was not actually taking advantage of the conversation to develop new ideas or explore things that I did not properly understand or might not know, even though I AM NOT TRAINED AS AN EPIDEMIOLOGIST.
If you think someone is wrong about something, and you want to have a genuine discussion, the thing you do is to say, "I think you are wrong about something, and I want to argue about it, so let me explain my position, and then you can respond." Even better / more generous would be to say, "I think you are wrong about something, but I am also not in your field and assume that I feel this way because there is stuff I don't know, and I was hoping you could explain X to me."
And the underlying truth of the world is that it's incredibly complicated, and outside of some elements of hard science--emphasis on the some--there really are not "correct" answers to almost anything involving human behavior. It's hand-waving all the way down. So when you pick out some little inconsistency in someone's conception of the world, you are demanding that they think and behave with a level of rigor that is totally inconsistent with actual lived reality, and then penalizing them for not behaving like a normal person. It's kind of a ridiculous thing to do, and not actually a good way to expand your own horizons.
In Tyler's defense, I think he is not a neurotypical thinker, so I don't think he is being intentionally deceptive or whatever. But I think he has reached a certain level of self-confidence with Tyler Cowan, Public Intellectual that has caused him to longer need to keep working on his fastball, and it shows.
(A thing, honesty, which is basically destined to happen to all of us.)
I have been reading MR almost since it started and have a fairly similar view. One thing that irritates me is the title of Tyler’s podcast. They are *not* conversations! They are lists of questions, some of which seem designed to serve the purposes described above. I wish there were more give-and-take.
Interesting comment and I would like to hear more. To whit:
1. Do you have some examples in mind of interviews you describe as below (I'd like to listen to them)?
"And if you listen when he interviews a really super-smart person, they will call him out on this in various ways. Those can become really contentious interviews, because he back-foots onto trying to find his way back into that little point he wanted to make."
2. What about the MR pandemic coverage turned you off? I found the coverage pretty enlightening (or at least I though so, maybe it was filling me with nonsense!). Though much of that was Tabarrok I suppose.
1) The very last podcast I listened to of his was his interview of Amia Srinivasan, which precipitated much sturm and drang on these here internets--so much so that Tyler felt compelled to write a comment about it on MR that intended to be generous but couldn't help being a little backhanded, DESPITE THE FACT THAT HE WRITES A WARNING ABOUT BEING BACKHANDED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE COMMENT. It was like Max Tyler, in all that is good AND ill in his approach:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/09/a-few-observations-on-my-latest-podcast-with-amia-srinivasan.html
At any rate, Srinivasan is pretty relentless in specifically recognizing where he wants to go small and have a little nit-picky debate and refusing not just to play, but to give ground about it. She wants to have a big, expansive conversation about big ideas and the world, and she understands that getting into some detail is often a strategy to foreclose possibilities and box in your conversational partner or demonstrate your own "smartness." And it really pissed people off who wanted to hear how Tyler was going to "get" her, because she gave zero Fs about being "gotten" and treated such moves as exasperating and childish.
2) MR had so much nonsense that was, as sbuserid wrote above, the equivalent of "one weird trick," in this case for solving the pandemic. Some of those tricks were things that I have no problem with but view as having been way, way overhyped, i.e. Fast Grants. Like, if you only understood the impact of Fast Grants from MR, you would be like, "Holy shit! This stuff changed the world!" And, my friend, they did not change the world. They did some nice stuff! But lots of people doing lots of things did lots of nice stuff during the pandemic. The hype machine was off the chain (and if you check through the comments on MR, you will find my grouchy posts on some of those blog posts, before I quit reading it).
Other stuff on MR was just straight up from Silly-ville, like the discussion around super-spreaders at the beginning of the pandemic. That discussion was straight-up, 100% garbage, for reasons that were patently obvious to anyone with insight on how infectious disease moves through a population. And it was so obviously garbage that reading those posts made me feel like I was being gaslit, like, "Is it really not obvious to Tyler and Alex that this is silly? The evidence you need is RIGHT THERE IN THE STORY" (I'm thinking here of a line of commentary that was focused on Covid outbreaks in South Korea as evidence for the super-spreader hypothesis).
And reading that stuff made me think, "Huh. When they offer one weird trick to use economic thinking to address a pandemic, it is obvious to me that there is a lot of nonsense here. So what does that mean about all the stuff they write about where I am not an expert?" And that's when I quit reading MR so much.
I should say here, and again sbuserid is right on, that this is a problem more generally in global health. There is this simultaneously hilarious and dispiriting cycle in global public health where each new generation of rock-star economists eventually cycles around to being interested in global health problems, in part because of the role of the World Bank and IMF in being connected to these issues (long story).
And what happens each time is that the econ folks come in and say, "man, global health is a big problem in terms of economics of developing countries, and these global health programs are a bunch of nonsense, but now we're going to solve it with Economic Thinking (TM)! Y'all are so luck to have us!" And sometimes they make some marginal gains, and sometimes they don't, and I, for one, am always extremely happy to see some new money come into the field, but if you judge by the stated program goals or claims of the economists, they always fail. Always.
For examples of this, see malaria, de-worming, and HIV. And I wouldn't even necessarily describe those as failures--a lot has been accomplished in all three areas. But you would not know that if you went back and read the econ papers on the subject and then looked at the outcomes ten years later.
It's not just global health, either. Microfinance has some really good applications. It is not going to save the world. It just isn't. The roots of poverty and inequity are deep and multi-causal and complicated and econ think just isn't very good at that kind of problem.
The "margin" in Marginal Revolution is sometimes way too thin to move the world. A long enough lever made of cooked pasta will not, in fact, allow you to lift the whole world.
"Tyler's an economist, and everyone already knows they are prolifically wrong. Further, he's chairing a media contest between smart people."
I have not read your whole comment, yet, because when I read this line I had to stop and reply that this made me laugh out loud so hard that simply mashing the Like button was not sufficient to communicate my appreciation for it.
Honestly, for all my griping, I pretty much hold the same opinions as you. If I wasn't busy with other stuff, such as writing overly long comments on Slow Boring, it's entirely possible that MR would still be in my info diet. Tyler will always be welcome in my home. It's just an affection that involves considerably more eye-rolling.
Here’s how Tyler describes himself in his latest book(with Daniel Gross): “Tyler attributes a lot of his own success to his hyperlexia—his ability from a very young age to read much faster than other people and to absorb that information very readily. Hyperlexia is often connected to autism and its information gathering proclivities, although Tyler does not think of himself as having low social intelligence or disabilities in communication skills, the latter being part of the formal clinical definition of autism.”
Both of you might also find this interesting: https://danfrank.ca/my-favourite-tyler-cowen-posts-and-ideas/
Thanks for this very interesting discussion!
I actually think it's bad for mainstream news publications to cover heterodox views on topic in news coverage. In macroeconomics, for instance, I remember one article they had about MMT becoming more popular. But they don't mention the MMT viewpoint in their normal monetary policy news articles and I think they'd be unreasonably long if they covered the MMT, Austiran, Marxist, etc perspectives. Better to just stick to mainstream understandings even when I think they're wrong. Also, I'm curious about what sort of media outlet goes into greater depth than The Economist. The Atlantic can but they write fewer, longer articles. And you have specialist publications that go into greater depth by having to spend less of the article given background that they assume their readers already understand.
Whew, Cannot do MartyrMade. Heard Daryl Cooper on a few other things and he is not my cup of tea.
Often good podcast, some out-there beliefs otherwise. I think his famed Twitter thread about Trump voters really was insightful, though.
I think that sometimes the way he describes violence is, I dunno, a little too much for me?
The way he lays out historical scenes of violence borders on pornographic, in my experience and opinion. For me he goes beyond describing what happened and how bad it was, he seems to kind of get off on painting the most vivid possible image of misery possible, and it's that last part that really puts me off him.
There is a real value in having historians' accounts of exactly what happened during the worst parts of history, but I guess I subscribe to the Boy Scout Camping Trip Chaperone theory of describing violent history; e.g. you kind of want to avoid the people overeager to do the job in favor of the guy who would almost literally rather be doing something else. In both cases I don't want the first dude who enthusiastically raises his hand to do the job to be the one to do it.
Former journalist here. Here's a few good reasons for quoting experts:
1. Many experts don't write in lay terms but are capable of speaking normal English in conversation.
2. What the expert wrote is what they thought as of the publication date. A journalist might want to know what they think today, particularly in response to some current controversy.
3. Many journalists are just plain out of their depth on some of the topics they have to cover.
With all of that said, journalists often include expert quotes for non-good reasons, such is to smuggle their own opinions into the piece.
(1) and (3) are real problems. But (2) misunderstands the nature of experthood, I think. Most experts are experts not because they're quicker to understand phenomena, but because they've already spent a lot more time studying them. Put them on a new phenomenon, and their initial guesses aren't much better than a layperson.
I mean things like, "is it normal to have empty classified document folders lying around?" That's the kind of thing that experienced people would know offhand or have an informed reaction to that they haven't previously laid out in a journal article.
Isn't it also is more credible for a journalist to quote an expert rather than cite them? If I have no idea who a journalist is, why would I trust them to do a fair literature review? Whereas, a reader can take an expert quote more at face value.
On history, Devereaux easily got the better of that argument. But it's understandable that historians are touchy these days. One of my college majors was history and I love history, but I have to admit none of the main justifications for history as a profession or field are especially flattering to the egos of historians. The most common, popular reason for history -- which many professional historians claim to disavow -- is to create identities for current living people. Telling each other stories about a real or imagined past to construct an identity we can share with other living people -- but that use of history isn't really about the past at all, the past is just a convenient grab-bag of mythmaking material for use in the present. And accuracy is totally beside the point -- a straight-up myth will serve the purpose just as well as meticulous research if present-day people buy it.
A second purpose of history, perhaps the truest from a practitioner's perspective -- is history as antiquarianism/hobbyism. It's fun to geek out about studying some obscure, strange foreign society in the past, for the same reason that's fun to imagine alternative worlds in fiction, etc., Here, accuracy in some objective sense matters a lot, from a nerd perspective. But it's not very important to people who aren't into it as a hobby.
A third purpose of history, which I suspect some academic historians have fallen into as a way to justify their funding, is essentially history as extended-anthropology, or extended-political science, extended economics, etc. Simply using past societies to expand the pool of human experience to which modern social science techniques can be applied. But why? The evidence in the past is so much thinner, and there are so many more unknown variables that it's hard to see what the value is of doing this.
Did you actually read his piece ? He argues that there is a big chunk of social science that wouldn't exist (or would be crap) without the work of professional historians. He also alludes to, but perhaps is not quite as explicit about , the other crucial contribution of professional historian - illuminating the *possibilties* for human society. It’s one of the best antidotes we have for parochial, presentist (ahem) bias. Living in a foreign country really opens your eyes to so many things you took for granted and were transparent to you. History takes that to a whole new level.
I think that our society's insistence on everything being 'scientific', and the higher social cachet of 'scientific' fields*, is resulting in history's territory basically being devoured by the-things-that-end-in-ology.
History is going to produce 'scientific' output.
It can provide inputs for other 'scientific' fields, though. And is valuable for other reasons.
*I keep using 'scientific' because I don't consider social sciences real science. =)
“The past is a foreign country.”
Yes, I read it, and as I said Devereaux easily got the better of the argument (i.e., Smith got shredded). But it wasn't really addressing my point above; I wouldn't have spent the time studying history or still love it if I didn't think it was valuable, for similar reasons as I think other humanities are valueable. But other than as hobbyism for nerds, history's value and function in the larger society is present-day culture production, like other forms of literature and creative work, and I think it's a mistake for historians to be so unwilling to embrace that.
I agree with you that studying history opens up possibilities, but think you're getting the directionality wrong. It's not as if historians report back from the archives about some obscure past cultural practice and then present-day people say, that's a good idea, let's be more like that old society. That just doesn't happen (or the extent it does it's almost uniformly reactionary and harmful).
Rather, it's people living today who are chafing or pushing for some change in some aspect in our current society, against conservatives who say, that's foolish, this is the way things are, whether it be current gender or ethnic identities/categories or some other contested feature of our current society. And then historians who are living in the present and sympathetic to those wanting change go back and find evidence of how that supposedly immutable thing came into existence, and show that it is not immutable but instead contingent and could have been or could be made some other way. That's then rhetorical grist and support for the current people to use in their arguments and efforts for changing current and future society. In words, history and the past is being mined for fodder for constructing current identities and culture. So I don't think what you said is inconsistent with what i wrote -- it pretty much all falls into the first, and to some extent second, major functions that I identified.
That's a caricature. Yes, current concerns shape the questions we ask, but the answer we get actually shape our views in turn, they are not, in fact, pre-determined. Part of the problem however, is that much (though not all) of the fruits of professional historians gets slowly churned through a lot of mediators (e.g. social scientists) before it actually gets to the public, so the importance is often opaque. But the main point stands. It reminds me of something that may have been mentioned in SB a long time ago: some GOP populist was hampering on about closing down some government department in charge of meteorological data because private companies are providing the forecasts so much more nicely and clearly, and in fact we've never actually seen results from them anyway. He failed to mention that 100% of those private providers are entirely relying on that government service for their data, without which they are useless. For the public, however, it looks as though it's all private actors. Same thing with Social scientists and historians (unless you think Social Science is also a waste of time, but then you're debating at a different level).
Second, I'd argue that knowledge for its own sake is worth having too. I.e. there is value in truth per se. Not just in imagining that the moon is cheese but knowing what it's actually made of. Not for any practical reason, but just for its own sake. By the same token, knowing what actually happened in our past, rather than just relying on oral traditions and stories. It's valuable to have stuff in a museum and have the explanation not be just something someone made out of pure guess work, but rather be highly reliable. However, I stress that this is a secondary point. Even if you reject this (or reject this merits funding), the first point stands.
The activities and processes you're describing fit within the functions I described. I don't think what you're saying is inconsistent with what I'm saying.
I read Smith and Devereaux (well, not entirely because I got tired of his long-winded disquisition). It seems they're arguing past each other. Smith wants rigorous, extremely time- and resource-consuming empirical studies of historical events to be done before one can say anything relating to the present. Devereaux is saying that historians aren't making predictive claims when they kinda actually are.
The first isn't going to happen as Smith wants because historians aren't in the business of devoting vast resources to answer the question of current relevance which is at most a small sidebar to their real work. Devereaux is wrong because apparently historians (like him) like to spout off about current events.
The happy meeting ground is that when historians speak about what history says about possible futures, they're right to the extent that they're offering more of a somewhat-grounded hypothesis than an established truth. That is, they may indeed be right, but the listener must be aware that there are large error bars surrounding their prediction. And that's fine with me.
"On history, Devereaux easily got the better of that argument."
I don't think you and I read the same essays, because I thought Smith got the better of the argument.
Smith argues that historians need to distinguish between their work as historians and their work as pundits, because the two have different different evidentiary standards. Devereaux then whines that, yes, editors of articles for the general public do tend to strip out lots of necessary caveats in a way that tends to destroy the ways in which historians add nuance, but it's all OK, really, because the truth is out there in the academic literature.
Do you disagree?
You might ask why do planetary science rather than just earth science? The evidence on other planets is just so much thinner. I think that does in fact explain why planetary science is a part of one academic discipline (astronomy) while earth science is multiple disciplines (geology, oceanography, atmospheric science, etc). But it’s worthwhile for all these fields to exist and be in conversation with each other. Same with economic history, anthropological history, political history, etc.
“But why? The evidence in the past is so much thinner, and there are so many more unknown variables that it's hard to see what the value is of doing this”
It’s useful to dissuade modern man from putting on airs.
Stop knocking down Chesterton's fence, you fools!
To do terrible job of paraphrasing Rorschach...
History isn't extended-anthropology, anthropology is extended-history!
1) As put, this is wrong, but tryin to understand why we got to here instead of there is worthwhile.
2) There is a market for it, so what's wrong?
3) Exactly right. The amount of data on Roman or Greek slavery is thin, but the distance from Atlantic trade slavery makes it worthwhile. Barbarian invasions of the Roman West as bungled immigration policy.
Given how much richer California is than Mexico, I think one could make a moral argument that the US should have tried to take even more land from them.
>>Given how much richer California is than Mexico,
Maybe pal, but you can get a nice two bedroom in Oaxaca for 600 bucks a month. Try that in Santa Monica. California Shmalifornia.
Sure, but people in Oaxaca and California have been voting with their feet for decades, and California is winning in a landslide
Too bad that's out of reach for a lot of Oaxacans
Sort of a change of subject, but my friend from Tijuana says rents have doubled or more over the last year. I hadn't realized that our housing issues have spilled over the border, or perhaps it's more accurate to say the housing shortage is being driven by global factors more than domestic ones.
heh, they thought about it, but ummm, they were afraid that would bring too many Mexicans into the US. Really.
So they drew the line where they wouldn't get so many dense non-white populations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_of_Mexico_Movement
in that case we should've annexed all of Mexico so there wouldn't be any Mexicans, there would just be a lot more Americans.
That gets us over 450 million. Did Matt put you two up to this?
Unfortunately, many of the people in favor of annexing Mexican land don't believe that people of Mexican heritage can't be "true Americans". They wanted the land but not the people.
"On the Media" had a good 3-part series showing several times where the US flinched at expansions that would add large non-white populations to the country. An odd tension between between imperialist instincts and racist instincts, I'm sad to say.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-empire-state-mind
That probably inflates the racial aspect a bit, although I'm just guessing and not studying original sources. I can think of 4 other reasons they could have preferred to only annex non-dense areas, and I imagine all 4 + racism played a role in the debate:
1 Adding tens of millions Spanish speakers all at once would have been very difficult
2 Adding tens of millions of Catholics would have made some Protestants very uncomfortable
3 As it says in the wikipedia: "Idealistic advocates of Manifest Destiny, such as John L. O'Sullivan, had always maintained that the laws of the United States should not be imposed onto people against their will." True these same folks probably rejected annexing NW Mexico, but more people would have been worse.
4 It's certainly easier to annex relatively unoccupied land unless the preexisitng inhabitants really want to be annexed. Most of what became the US SW had few occupants at the time.
Although it’s a little odd that they put the border precisely where they did. Had it been uniformly 50 miles north, or uniformly 50 miles south (maybe not exactly 50) it would have gone through relatively unpopulated deserts, rather than hitting the Rio Grande cities, San Diego, and Yuma. (I don’t know if Nogales already existed or formed because of the border.)
We purchased Yuma from Mexico. Look up the "Gadsden Purchase."
Oh right, it's part of that! That purchase was made to get the flattest bit of land in that area, so that the Southern Pacific could make a transcontinental railroad (even though no transcontinental track had yet been built) so that slaveholders wouldn't be shut out of the market to the west coast. I rode Amtrak's "Sunset Limited" once, that uses that track, and also learned about El Paso being "the pass" that is the farthest north pass for crossing east-west that usually stays snow-free all winter.
What's moral about that?
And if that is correct reasoning (morally or otherwise), would you claim by analogy that, given the differences in richness between west Africa and the US, more slaves should have been brought over?
I mean, at least the dangly bit below CA! It’s always been weird to me that Baja California is not part of the United States.
Of course not, just as the US should obviously not invade Mexico right now.
I'm just saying the descendents of Californians benefitted from the annexation as they're enjoying much higher living standards than they would in the counterfactual world where they're still a part of Mexico.
Too Cold / Just Right / Too Hot
You wrote it right there at the beginning: "grossly simplified observation."
That observation was telling you something, and the something it was telling you was, "the comment I'm about to make is going to sound very smart and actually have about eighteen different problems that make it sound really silly to someone who actually knows the material.
Meh. It's an internet comment board, and we aren't writing dissertations.
You can make a 'close enough' gut-feeling comment and it can communicate something valuable.
It's all about the vibes!
I think the "computer communication" point is right on. I have a theory that written communication, in general, feels really "correct" to us--i.e. all the greatest philosophers write books!--and is actually really broken, in various ways, because it ignores huge swathes of how we are actually evolved to communicate, i.e. with our facial expressions.
And then here comes the internet and texting and electronic communication in general, encouraging us all to double down on written communication.
OTOH, it's hard to imagine what we're really supposed to do about it. I guess maybe TikTok and YouTube, but then I hate TikTok and YouTube, because I can read so much faster than I can watch a video. It feels imprisoning or time-wasting.
I guess I'm saying that I'm part of the problem.
What made the land belong to Mexico other than inherited claims from another imperial power? I've never had much sympathy for "we took it from the Mexicans" since it was the indigenous Californians, Comanche et al. who were the ones with the genuine prior claim.
That game can be played further , you know… what makes that claim “genuine”? Murder, genocide etc are absolute wrongs. Lying and cheating on treaties are questionable at best. But Realestate claims? How does that work exactly, absent a common framework? Do we just decide that the indigenous Americans collectively “owned” the entire continent pre-1492? Why?
Oh, sure, at some point you get into do the English get reparations for the Norman Conquest, do the Welsh get reparations from the English for the Saxon invasion, does Italy owe damages to the descendants of Boudicca. But saying "the land was stolen from Mexico" when Mexico's claim was founded on the same European right of conquest approach is taking the piss.
Ultimately we're all children of the earth. The first homo sapiens in Mexico or Siberia or Brooklyn didn't have a stronger "right" to those places than the creatures already living there.
Property rights are a human construct. They're a necessary evil our species has invented because otherwise the economy would suck and we'd all be a lot poorer.
EDIT: That comes across as a little crazy. What I meant by "property rights" (and should've written) is: private ownership of land."
Nope. Still struggling with the whole indigenous peoples thing I see.
I thought most of the Califórnios managed to keep their land. Several of the major subdivisions of Los Angeles were from Spanish ranches.
I was gonna say, the Rio Grande Valley's Hispanic heritage ain't "immigrant", they've been there wayyyy longer than the Anglo Texans. Let alone you newcomers!
And just as an example, here's the discussion of the Rancho San Vicente y Santa Monica, owned by Francisco Sepulveda, whose heirs later profited from developments that bear these historic names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancho_San_Vicente_y_Santa_Monica
There were cases being adjudicated for decades and decades—well into the 20th century—involving land claims (using a process naturally set up by the conquering Anglos after the defeat of Mexico).
“But for me, personally, I would say I get a lot of joy from Twitter. If Twitter is making you unhappy, I think you should try stepping away.”
I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.
If Instagram is making u unhappy you should step away too but apparently the critique of Instagram/fb is just way greater. Twitter is much more of a mess than this substack would have one believe.
I feel like the negative effects of Twitter fall on the people who have to rely upon the classes that are captive to it.
Somehow the reparations bargain with Native Americans seems to have been "well how about we let you open casinos?"
I'm half-kidding, but there's some substance there. I watched with amusement as the rural whites where I grew up freaked out as the local tribal government became far more wealthy than the decaying little midwestern town...
Casino money has lead to some ugly disputes over eligibility for tribal membership. Once membership has money attached to it, tribes had an interest in tightening eligibility, and because "blood quantum" is an element of the criteria, you get the unseemly situation of tribes sounding like Nazis or segregationists splitting hairs about who does or doesn't have enough of the right kind of "blood" to qualify.
This is a big potential issue with reparations in general.
Yep, that's one of the major factors that I think *should* give (but seemingly doesn't at all) even hard-core Kendian-style "anti-racists" pause about reparations: any sort of race-based reparations plan would put the US government in the position of arbitrating who really qualifies as "black" or "black enough," which seems like a very ill-advised thing if you also simultaneously believe the majority of the US population both controls the military and law enforcement establishment and is literally seething with barely contained genocidal hatred toward non-whites....
I don't know that genocide is the next-step risk, but it's a nice call out of the contradictions inherent in the most extreme "race explains everything" style progressive thought.
I think it would set race relations back quite a bit, though. Which is a shame because, at least judging by my favorite race-relations stat, interracial marriage and births, relations are improving dramatically every year just by doing "nothing" as is.
Well, *I* don't think it's a next step risk! But you can find plenty of people who would claim unironically that there's even already an officially sanctioned genocide of black Americans in progress (Google "genocide police shootings") and I suspect on a Venn diagram the circle of people believing that almost entirely falls within the circle of people who think a federal government-administered race-based reparations program would be an excellent idea.
Folks often complain about the percentage of citizens that vote, well, let someone in office/seeking election propose and promote a concrete reparations plan and I think voter turnout would be the highest ever (on both sides).
Except, of course , that those “those” aren’t actually the same people.
The end of this mailbag is a really sick burn at the expense of Bret Stephens
I'd like Matt to weigh in more on Bret's actual response, because I don't think Noah Smith's argument comes across as made in good faith, and Bret seems to take the time to respond, while Matt's just handwaving it as "See, Bret had to type up all of his feelings like a thin-skinned academic!" It's feels too close to old trolling on the blogosphere of "Well I must be right because you got so upset about what I said you posted a long response!"
I thought Devereaux’s response seems to come down to giving specific meanings to words like “empirical” and “theory” that Smith isn’t using. Unfortunately, both of them seem to have gotten too much into personal conflict to see that I think the main points they both assert are compatible. (I might also be mildly triggered by Devereaux’s one offhand remark about philosophy, because I, as a Hume-sympathetic epistemologist, actually think that everything Devereax is talking about in historical work counts as “empiricism” - hearing testimony, reading documents, trying to interpret what the people might have been saying and not saying, etc.)
Whenever a historian makes a claim that something happened “because of” something, or “led to” something, or even that something is “possible”, they are proposing some kind of hypothetical or theoretical idea that goes beyond Hume’s worry that maybe there is no “because” or “could” and all there is is just one damn thing after another. I think Devereaux is right that historians usually try to be careful about this, and this care makes them allergic to anything that looks like a grand narrative or broad theory, but they still need to do bits of it on the small scale to understand their documents. I think Smithis also right that inevitably, most people make some mistakes even with the things that they take care to avoid, especially when they are writing for a broader public.
Bluntly, MY doesn’t strike me as someone who’d have anything particularly interesting to contribute on this if he tried to do so in earnest. He’s incredibly effective in a pretty broad yet finite set of fields (as everyone), and I sense that this debate won’t be one of them. Perhaps one of his strengths is largely knowing not to venture too much into places where he doesn’t have much to add?
I don't want to strawman Matt, so I'll try to do a good faith effort at explaining what I believe he's trying to say. As indicated previously here (See some of Matt's posts before on things like World War I and Austria-Hungary, or Kerry in 2004), Matt seems to be more open to counterfactual speculation as a way of kicking the tires on understanding what's actually driving events/history. Historians seem to be very hesitant to engage in counterfactuals. A number of economists have at times tried to model counterfactuals, I recall Fogel doing something about estimating the impact of railroads vs. canals, and so that's an intrusion of economists into the territory of historians.
But I do think historians have a solid footing of defending the point that things have happened for a reason, and you get bogged down when you're trying to say what if something else happened (example, it's pretty hard to imagine Nazi Germany successfully invading Britain). And since history is an N of one, it's also really hard to speculate what happens if something were changed.
Historians don't like counterfactuals because, unless they're extremely narrow, technical and concrete, tend to be entertainment, not actual serious analysis. It's not very different from science fiction. It's nice, but has little to offer to what most scientists do most of the time. Personally I never bother to seriously read those occasional pieces by MY. They strike me as a waste of time. MY isn't a historian. His takes on history are of limited interest, except when he talks about the stuff he knows really well (history of housing in the us etc.), and his takes of counterfactual history is basically reading his fanfic. Not why I personally subscribe, but to each their own.
I don't think it's Noah's best article--the insight in it just isn't enough to justify its length in my view. That said, his central thesis seems fairly unassailable and is worth observing: historians constantly draw analogies between past events and current events and these are predictions, the strength of which has never really been rigorously tested.
As far as I can tell, Bret's response was a very grouchy version of "nuh uh, when I saw something that happened in the past can help explain the present and anticipate the future I am not actually making predictions or telling a causal story, I am, um something something something epistemology something Noah's a dumb idiot something" and was super unconvincing. The very first example (Greek democracies) he tries to refute still very ably illustrates Noah's point! The caveats he complains about being elided all amount to "of course what I am about to say could be completely wrong and of no value, but I am going to say it anyway". Weird defense!
I think this is over-reading what Devereaux is saying. I think that, once we translate the difference in vocabularies (which Deveraux's talk of epistemology helps me understand, but didn't allow either him or Smith to just come out and say it), what Devereaux is saying is "predictions are really hard; we don't have direct observation of the past, or of possibility; but if we use empirical methods in the much broader sense (while historians restrict the word "empirical" to a narrower sense) then the historian is in fact doing empirical work to discover some basic facts about possibility, though we should be careful about being *too* confident about *anything*". I don't think the two of them really disagree, except perhaps about how much work historians are doing (because there's lots of work to be done at lots of points in the argument, and historians focus on one side of the work, while econometricians focus on the other side).
Bret's response struck me as essentially making the claim that the study of history is without practical value, lol.
Not brilliant ground to situate oneself on, IMO.
If we can't use it to try to understand the present and near-future, and can't use it to craft the story that is our communal identity, what bloody use is the whole discipline?
This is very strange. You’re the second person to write this and it’s as if we read two entirely different pieces. He mentions two practical values, one explicit (providing the data necessary for social science) one implicit (understanding the possibilities for human societies). That’s exactly the opposite of showing it’s impractical. Also what “vast resources” are we talking about. The discipline of history is one of the cheapest there are. To conduct most subfields at the highest levels all you need is tenure lines, good libraries, and at best modest research grants for occasional travel and the odd research assistant (optional). It’s laughably cheaper than most other fields.
First, I feel the need to point out:
"Vast" and "Vastly less" mean completely different things. Obviously there are not "vast" resources being consumed in the study of history, though that's in part due to the fact that the discipline is collapsing around us, in case you hadn't noticed. The undergraduate students caught onto the fact that there're no tenured positions waiting for them at the end of the yellow brick road.
But it's still perfectly possible to say that we should use vastly less, proportionally, if it really is as valueless as the piece we both read implies to me.
Now, as for the two values he mentioned, he caveats the hell out of the first in ways that make it borderline-useless, as Harrison's "80% confidence interval" example below suggests.
For the second, ok, but that's pretty damned vague and again borderline-useless unless one is prepared to analogize them to the present.
The thing is, I didn't disagree with the gist of the article: a scientific/statistical/data-driven epistemology is the wrong one to apply to the study of history.
But his dismissal of counterfactuals and parallels and theories of history as valid tools for understanding the past and present means that there's nothing of value left. That's the part I disagree with.
I think you misunderstood him. I don't think he is saying that the data histoirans provide social scientists is useless, only that it needs to be used with care, care that can only realistically be provided by the continued collaboration between the fields.
as for analogies, *of course* analogies to the present are useful, and done all the time. What he was trying to say is that the way they are useful is in showing us possibilities rather than predictions. That' still very valuable. To be able to rule out that assumption "this can't happen" , or to become conscious to the fact that you were unknowingly assuming that b follows from a where in fact that's not necessarily the case, is very important.
Forgive my frankness, but I think you're taking the article, which is shot through with bog-standard academia ass-covering, and interpreting it how you're used to, because you're used to it.
Meanwhile, I'm reading the words at face value and thinking, "probably shouldn't say this stuff out loud, yo."
That seems to account for the majority of the difference in the way we understand this piece.
If he *means* what you say, which is entirely possible, he's shying away from *saying* it directly in favor of an endless series of sheet anchors thrown out to windward.
I guess that's necessary, as any perceived overpromise will be jumped on by his fellows as a misstep.
But my sympathy is limited at best, because that entire section of the piece was a choice on his part. Better not to wander so far afield and simply confine himself to criticizing Noah's original premise, which is indeed bullshit.
Yeah, interesting. I thought he is speaking at face value, but it is entirely possible that since he is speaking about my field I am reading into it (or perhaps rather i'm interpreting his intentions correctly, but he didn't do a good enough job to convey them to his *intended* audience) . I'd just point out that from my perspective I don't recall seeing any ass covering. He just made a bit of a rhetorical point about being careful and nuanced to show the difference between him and Smith, so yes, there was some malice or snark there, but I didn't feel like he wrote out of any kind of fear. I think that might be a misunderstanding on your part, actually.
Maybe we did! Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I think the issue isn't that historical research isn't cheap, but that at a certain point something may just remain unknowable. No matter the times you go to a good library, look for primary evidence, sort through the historical record, you're trying to piece together a puzzle without all of the puzzle pieces. Works are lost. Some people didn't journal. Gaps remain.
In theory, yes, but not in practice. That's a common misconception. Even in ancient history we are actually discovery new primary sources (e.g. inscriptions) at significant rates, AND havne't actually even *looked* at the majority of e.g. the half a million papyri unearthed in Egypt in the late 19th century.* Besides that, archaeology is constantly advancing and changing the picture. For later periods it's more dramatic, whole archives that haven't even been explored by anyone. Sure, the evidence is theoretically finite but we haven't gotten close.
More importantly, you'd be surprised how much genuine insights a fresh look and a fresh approach to existing material can sometimes yield.
Finally, yes, some fields are less productive than others and are (or for a time seem) more "spent". that's true in every branch of knowledge. People notice that and naturally gravitate to other subject matters. But there is no single period of history that is even close to being "done" in that sense.
P.S.
half a million papyri is actually a severe under count. That figure is an estimate for the oxyrynchus papyri, one of the most famous finds. Only about 5000 fragments published thus far, of an estimated 500,000....
Hm, I see it as a little different, in that the study of history has to be very careful about the conclusions it's making, because you don't have the same ability to approach things through experimentation that you do in the sciences.
I would draw an analogy to the work of Nate Silver and others to analyzing polling data and trying to build models, but still having a high degree of uncertainty in the forecasts. 538 gives the GOP a 75% chance of winning the House, but there's still an 80% confidence interval of Republicans winning between 248 and 209 seats.
If you tried to translate that into a historian making conclusion you might get something like "With an 80% confidence interval we can say that Archduke Ferdinand not being assassinated results in anywhere between Austria-Hungary being the world's superpower to a Communist Russia still developing but triggering a nuclear war in the mid-1950s."
Which may be and probably is true, but if you decline on that basis to discuss parallels, their potential applicability to modern circumstances, and the historical events and historiography that led us to those circumstances, then the study of history is entirely without value and we can toss the whole enterprise overboard.
My whole point is precisely that history's non-scientific, qualitative judgements are important and useful anyway.
Basically, the only utility of history as an academic discipline is in providing us insight into the present, either we came to be here or how the past has parallels which can inform our actions today.
Other than that the only thing it's good for is as a hobby for nerds like myself, which is functionally an art rather than a practical discipline of any kind.
Which would be fine, but in that case we should devote vastly less resources to its study, lol. Hence my point that it's not an argument I'd want to make as someone employed in the field. I, personally, believe the point is wrong, but that's irrelevant.
On a more specific note, the hatred historians hold for counterfactuals is wildly overblown, IMO.
There are plenty of events around which we can construct firm counterfactuals in more recent times. I'll take the example of the atomic bombings that closed out WWII in the Pacific. In their absence we can effectively be 100% certain that vastly more people would have died in every combatant nation, because there were only two alternative plans to bring an end to the war:
1. The Allied plans to invade Japan were virtually guaranteed to kill 1-2 million IJA and IJN personnel, 300,000-800,000 Japanese civilians, and a 200,000-500,000 Allied soldiers, and even assuming the success of Operation Coronet and a fairly prompt surrender thereafter, the IJA would have continued massacring 100-200,000 Mainland Asian civilians a month until at least May, 1946.
2. The USN plan to blockade Japan and starve it into surrender would have resulted in the deaths of between 6 and 15 million Japanese civilians by Fall, 1946. In addition, it's death throes would almost certainly have provoked the IJA in mainland Asia to reach a new crescendo of mass murder.
I fail to see how marginal uncertainty and range of possible outcomes inherent in these scenarios make us unable to draw conclusions and thus value from such a counterfactual.
I agree with your analysis but I think many people who argue against the need for the atomic bombing to end the war argue that Japan was seriously considering some form of surrender before Hiroshima/Nagasaki or that the war could reasonably be concluded under acceptable terms that would obviate the need for an invasion, and that the demand for unconditional surrender was itself a major reason for the actual and anticipated number of deaths.
I'm not saying that's my view, but I have read it among critics of the atomic bombing.
At which point, the goal of the study of history is to provide textual and recorded evidence as to which side is correct on those two points.
The historiography I'm familiar with says both are horseshit. The Japanese position prior to the bombings was the retention of territory outside the Home Islands, no change in the form or personnel of government, no war crimes prosecutions, and full retention of their military apparatus, and the available documentation and correspondence indicates this was regarded as a minimal negotiating position within the highest reaches of the government, not a maximal one.
The only argument for which I have any respect is the one that claims the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Sakhalin was sufficient on its own to put the "surrender" faction of the Japanese cabinet over the top. I think it's wrong, but it's a nearer-run thing than "they were ready to surrender on reasonable terms anyway", and generally speaking its adherents also understand that it is a grave form of presentism to have expected Allied policymakers to act on that assumption while Japan was killing thousands of people a day.
I pretty much agree. Those who thought Japan was edging toward some kind of negotiated peace at this time clearly had forgotten about the battle of Okinawa, by far the bloodiest of the Pacific war, which ended shortly before Hiroshima/Nagasaki.
I wounded why a prolonged blockade would not have ended Japan's war-making capacity with neither invasion nor the atomic bomb.
It would indeed have done that, by killing half its industrial workforce due to starvation.
The Allies had to provide something like 600 Kcal/day/capita to Japan for 6 months to get it through the winter and spring of 1946, and that was with the remaining key landside transport links intact and its coastal shipping network flowing freely to move food from agricultural regions to population centers.
But then at least the blockade would have to have been the alternative to the bomb rather than invasion.
To me, R was more frustrating than it ended up being worth.
I can do a lot of the same stuff with Python, and it's so much more pleasant to code in.
If you're doing data engineering, sure. But it's hard to beat R + ggplot for charts.
Uh, 90% of `ggplot` is available in Python via `matplotlib`.
I have one word for you: tidyverse
I raise you MATLAB, but it is really expensive.
I see your MATLAB and raise you Octave.
With all due respect, your response to David's last question about media consumption wasn't good or helpful. A lot of us have the same question and we'd appreciate a fuller response. For example, I subscribe to Slow Boring, NYT and The Dispatch and I feel better informed these days about different perspectives. But, if I didn't subscribe to The Dispatch, I'd most definitely be missing a lot of good, intelligent and thought-provoking center right points of view. Honestly, it was only after The Dispatch quoted a couple takes by you and presented them as "a center left perspective to take seriously" that I discovered Slow Boring and subscribed. I'm glad I did!
+1 for the Dispatch. Between this sub and them, I think a person could be very well-informed with having plenty to read. (Especially if they're getting into the comments.)
I concur with the folks disappointed by the NYT recommendation. It's true that there's occasionally good reporting, and their newsletters are quite good (RIP, Jay Caspian Kang), but I feel like the paper has succumbed to the worst sort of click-bait style headlines and misleading paragraph organization (Apoorva Mandavilli's COVID reporting, for example). I often get to the end of an article and realize that it has argued the opposite of the headline. And these complaints are all before considering the rigidly orthodox Democratic (party) perspective underwriting the topic selection among news articles or the deeply provincial point-of-view on cultural matters that take Manhattan as normative and authoritative (relative to the globe, not just "flyover country").
I'm fundamentally looking for news on matters of significance that can surprise me, at the level of story selection or detail (or both). It's demoralizing to read coverage that feels like it was written by a third-generation AI.
Then there are the comments, wow: a nightmare of repetitive, predictable in-group boundary-policing. Any opinion piece that tries to push the audience the tiniest bit triggers an onslaught of detailed comments accusing the author of "bothsiderism" followed by a tedious rehash of the crimes of Donald Trump and his accomplices in the Republican party. I get it, I hate him too, but there's more to the world, my friends.
Maybe Matt felt he couldn't recommend Bloomberg, due to a conflict of interest? I think both Bloomberg's and the Wall Street Journal's news sections are more limited, but significantly better than the NYT. Al Jazeera is often better, too. I used to like the British papers, but the Guardian just feels like feels like an NYT clone now.
I wish editors let journalists and columnists write the titles for their articles. At The Atlantic, article titles change throughout the day based on the whims of editors, which seems really click-baity to me for what are supposed to be "prestige" publications.
Just read the Bret Devereaux piece. Can’t recommend it highly enough! A really good exposition to some of the ways historians think and work and their unique contributions, often precisely because History doesn’t work like mainstream Social Sciences. Also, that Noah Smith guy comes across as an ignorant jerk, but maybe it’s just Twitter being a bad influence ?
P.S.
Link to the post:
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/29/new-acquisitions-on-the-wisdom-of-noah-smith/
Have you read Noah's piece? It doesn't come off as jerky at all — Devereaux's piece only paints him that way.
Admittedly I did not. I did however read his tweet “Great to see history majors being abandoned. Maybe now all the historians will have time to go read a book.” This makes him supremely qualified for the title “ignorant jerk” in my book.
I am also Team Chip - tortilla and potato - but you all are wrong: great chips should not have artificial flavors sprinkled on them. Thank you for listening.
“…great chips should not have artificial flavors sprinkled on them”
De gustibus non est disputandum.
The response to Bret's post is a bit facile. You tweeted that it was confusing why historians resist explicit reasoning about counterfactuals and in his post he expressly responded to your point:
"We tend to refuse to engage in counterfactual analysis because we look at the evidence and conclude that it cannot support the level of confidence we’d need to have. This is not a mindless, Luddite resistance but a considered position on the epistemic limits of knowing the past or predicting the future."
Your response to this was: "For myself, this has mostly served as a reminder of how thin-skinned academics are!"
Bret's response (to you at least) is not in the least defensive, he's addressing your position. It's dismissive to essentially reply 'Y U Mad Bro'. It seems you should either respond to his point or say something along the lines 'Thanks for addressing my question, I still like counterfactuals though - might substack about it later but I'm not going to do a detailed response.'
Don't feel bad about abandoning R, Matt. As a coder, I can tell it's not for everyone, and it’s why I always hated the “learn to code” slam on journalists—especially since almost all of those assholes don't know how to code themselves.