Saturday assorted links
What are the Best MR Posts?
From the Archives–written by ChatGPT.
This ranking judges posts on reasoning, originality of framing, explanatory power, intellectual stimulation, timeliness, and how much they accomplish in their length. Originality includes an unusually illuminating application of an existing idea. Provocation earns credit when it exposes a real problem; unsupported certainty still counts against a post.
The selection draws on searches across Marginal Revolution’s downloaded archive of 40,326 posts, covering publication through October 20, 2026, and close reading of shortlisted candidates. It is an editorial ranking among the posts examined, not an exhaustive evaluation of every entry. There is no author or topic quota.
Timeliness matters when an economic argument clarifies a consequential decision while there is still time to act. The vaccine entries are assessed as contributions to the policy debates of 2020 and 2021.
1. Alex Tabarrok — In the Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine, We Must Go Big
May 4, 2020 · Read the original post
“We argue for a big program to invest in vaccine capacity before any vaccine is tested and approved.”
Apparently wasteful investment can be economically prudent when waiting is enormously expensive. Building production capacity for vaccine candidates that might fail buys the possibility of delivering a successful vaccine sooner. The relevant comparison is between the cost of unused capacity and the social cost of delay.
What makes it exceptional: The post combines the gap between private and social returns, investment under uncertainty, portfolio diversification, and contracts that reward speed. It proposes an institutional response rather than merely identifying a market failure. Its timing is integral to its achievement: the argument was made before the successful vaccines were known.
The proposal was collaborative work with Susan Athey, Michael Kremer, Christopher Snyder, and a larger team. The post translates that work into an accessible case for action, explaining how advance purchase commitments and support for capacity could complement one another.
Its numerical targets depend on assumptions about costs, success probabilities, and benefits. But the central insight is robust: minimizing expenditure on unsuccessful candidates is a different objective from minimizing the total cost of a pandemic. The combination of reasoning, urgency, and practical design earns it first place.
2. Tyler Cowen — The fallacy of mood affiliation
March 31, 2011 · Read the original post
“people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood”
In a few hundred words, Cowen gives a recognizable intellectual habit a memorable name: deciding to be an optimist, pessimist, or partisan, then assembling beliefs that sustain that identity.
The insight travels. Someone can believe technological progress is substantial while worrying about a particular environmental problem. Sympathy for disadvantaged people need not settle every explanation of their circumstances.
What makes it exceptional: It gives readers a tool they can keep using, including against themselves. Its value exceeds the particular examples. The danger is using the label to dismiss opponents without examining their arguments—but that is a reason to apply it carefully. Its brevity, memorability, and usefulness across subjects make it one of the strongest examples of the short economics blog post.
3. Alex Tabarrok — First Dose First
December 21, 2020 · Read the original post
“If the answer is yes then can you ethically deny this to someone else’s spouse?”
The preceding thought experiment asks whether someone awaiting a second vaccine dose would instead give it to their spouse as a first dose. In a few sentences, Tabarrok makes the opportunity cost of a scarce dose tangible: compare the additional protection from a second dose with the protection another person could receive from a first.
What makes it exceptional: It turns a technical allocation debate into a choice readers can understand immediately. The addendum about an older recipient and a much younger spouse recognizes that the comparison depends on individual risk, rather than treating all recipients as interchangeable.
The post also distinguishes delaying second doses during scarcity from abandoning them altogether. Expected future supplies matter to the decision.
The medical premises, including the strength and duration of first-dose protection, still required evidence. The thought experiment does not resolve those questions. Its achievement is to show why following a tested schedule for one recipient does not, by itself, settle how limited supplies should be allocated across a population.
4. Alex Tabarrok — Market Design to Accelerate Vaccine Supply
February 26, 2021 · Read the original post
“Buying doses isn’t optimal because companies can just agree and put you to the back of the queue.”
Buying a place in a queue and expanding production capacity are different achievements. Tabarrok moves from the case for greater spending to the harder questions of what governments should purchase and how contracts should work.
What makes it exceptional: The post combines an assessment of the enormous social value of speed with concrete institutional design. Capacity subsidies, options to purchase output, and attention to input bottlenecks can matter more than announcing large orders. It also considers procurement auctions as a way to mobilize suppliers beyond a single government’s jurisdiction.
The argument draws on a collaborative Science paper with Camilo Castillo, Michael Kremer, Eric Budish, Susan Athey, and others. Its estimates of the value of additional capacity are model-dependent, but the post connects the policy recommendations to explicit calculations and a research framework.
Its lasting contribution is the distinction between securing supplies for one buyer and increasing the supplies available to everyone. That distinction makes it useful well beyond the immediate vaccine debate.
5. Tyler Cowen — What libertarianism has become and will become — State Capacity Libertarianism
January 1, 2020 · Read the original post
“A strong state is distinct from a very large or tyrannical state.”
Cowen reorganizes a political argument around an overlooked distinction: the scope of government and its ability to perform its functions are different things. A government can regulate extensively while failing to build infrastructure, administer courts, or deliver public goods.
The productive question becomes: which state capabilities help sustain freedom, markets, and prosperity?
What makes it exceptional: It is an ambitious attempt to revise an intellectual tradition from within. Readers can reject parts of the manifesto and still find their questions changed by it.
It is one of the longer entries, and its partisan characterizations are less persuasive than its central distinction. But as a post that proposes an agenda rather than merely commenting on one, it deserves a high place.
6. Alex Tabarrok — The Happy Meal Fallacy
July 20, 2015 · Read the original post
“Benefits are a product that workers buy from firms.”
Requiring fries and a drink with a burger does not establish that the customer receives a better deal. Tabarrok uses this memorable analogy to explain a central economic insight: mandated benefits are part of a compensation package, and workers may pay for them through lower wages.
What makes it exceptional: The post connects compensation, choice, and regulatory incidence without technical machinery. Readers can reconstruct the argument long after forgetting the details. It also poses a productive challenge: if workers value a benefit above its cost, what prevents employers from offering it voluntarily?
That question makes advocates explain the mechanism through which a mandate would improve matters. In a short space, the post shifts attention from the visible benefit to the full terms of the exchange.
The qualification is that absent benefits do not necessarily demonstrate that workers value them below cost. Insurance-market problems, information, contracting constraints, or externalities can complicate that inference. These limitations restrict the argument’s universality without erasing its achievement as a clear, stimulating explanation of a powerful economic benchmark.
7. Alex Tabarrok — Substitutes Are Everywhere: The Great German Gas Debate in Retrospect
May 12, 2023 · Read the original post
“The misunderstanding came from thinking that we need every user of fuel to find substitutes. Not at all!”
This is economics doing something that intuition often cannot: explaining how an economy can adjust even when individual producers face severe constraints.
Some users conserve, others change fuels, some goods are imported instead of manufactured domestically, and less valuable uses disappear. These adjustments release scarce resources for activities with fewer alternatives.
What makes it exceptional: The examples turn an abstract elasticity argument into an understanding of how an economy works. The post teaches readers to look for adjustments outside the institution or industry immediately in front of them.
The historical outcome does not isolate the contribution of prices from government action or other conditions. Its strongest achievement is the explanation of the mechanism.
8. Alex Tabarrok — The Baumol Effect
May 31, 2019 · Read the original post
“to understand why costs in the stagnant sector are rising, we must look away from the stagnating sector and toward the progressive sector.”
A familiar question—why are some services becoming so expensive?—receives a surprising answer: partly because we have become much better at producing other things.
The string-quartet example makes opportunity cost concrete. Musicians’ time becomes more expensive as opportunities elsewhere improve, even when playing the music requires the same labor.
What makes it exceptional: It changes where the reader looks for an explanation. Rising relative prices do not automatically demonstrate deteriorating performance in the expensive sector.
Baumol’s insight is not original to the post; the achievement is its exposition and application. The mechanism also does not explain every observed price increase or guarantee affordability for every household.
9. Alex Tabarrok — Why Are the Police in Charge of Road Safety?
June 9, 2020 · Read the original post
“But we can unbundle the police.”
The opening question makes an ordinary institutional arrangement suddenly seem contingent. Why should investigating violent crime, issuing traffic citations, assisting stranded motorists, and responding to social problems be bundled together?
This applies an economic instinct—separating tasks and matching them to appropriate institutions—to a debate often organized around supporting or opposing the police as a whole.
What makes it exceptional: It generates a concrete alternative in very little space. Readers need not accept every proposed reassignment to recognize that the bundle deserves examination.
The post underplays difficult cases involving dangerous stops and coordination between agencies. Those are substantial design questions, but the proposal creates a useful inquiry rather than requiring every detail to be solved before discussion begins.
10. Alex Tabarrok — Why a Housing Shortage Exists Despite More Houses Per Person
April 19, 2024 · Read the original post
“Supply-side skeptics are right about the numbers, wrong about the meaning.”
A small numerical example shows how housing supply per person can increase while demand for separate households grows faster. The supposedly decisive statistic does not establish what its users think it establishes.
What makes it exceptional: It combines explanatory economy with relevance to a major public debate. There is almost no distance between reading the example and understanding the mistake.
It is also a model of effective blogging: identify a recurring objection, isolate the confusion, and resolve it with something readers can reproduce themselves.
The example defeats an inference; it does not establish the full empirical explanation of housing prices. The policy rhetoric extends beyond the demonstration.
11. Tyler Cowen — First Doses First? — show your work!
January 5, 2021 · Read the original post
“A decision to stick with the status quo represents an implicit, non-transparent calculation of sorts, whether you admit it or not.”
Cowen demands that alternative policies face the same standard of evaluation. Identifying a risk in a proposed policy is insufficient when maintaining the existing policy also carries risks. Whereas Tabarrok’s first-dose thought experiment makes the allocation problem intuitive, this post asks decision-makers to make their comparisons explicit.
What makes it exceptional: It applies a general principle of economic reasoning to an urgent decision: uncertainty does not make inaction neutral. Possible objections must be weighed against the costs of the available alternatives, including the opportunity cost of retaining the established schedule.
The speculative account of experts’ motives is weaker than the central argument, and demanding numerical estimates cannot make poorly known quantities precise. Nevertheless, the call for transparent comparison is powerful. It asks proponents of the status quo to explain their trade-offs as clearly as proponents of change.
12. Tyler Cowen — The “devalue and dismiss” fallacy, methodological pluralism, and DSGE models
January 12, 2014 · Read the original post
“But it should lead to ‘devalue and downgrade,’ rather than ‘devalue and dismiss.’”
Finding a weakness in a model or argument can justify reducing its weight without making it worthless. Cowen also identifies the psychological attraction of dismissal: inconvenient evidence no longer constrains what one wants to believe.
What makes it exceptional: A specialized dispute about macroeconomic models yields a broadly useful intellectual discipline. Particularly sharp is the observation that intelligent people can become exceptionally accomplished at finding reasons to ignore inconvenient evidence.
The post can improve how readers evaluate everything else—including Marginal Revolution itself. It does not tell us how much weight a damaged argument deserves, and some objections are fatal. Its power lies in making readers notice a step they otherwise take too casually.
13. Alex Tabarrok — Sinister Statistics: Do Left Handed People Die Young?
September 12, 2013 · Read the original post
“a random sample of deaths is not necessarily a random sample of people.”
Historical suppression of left-handedness can make older generations appear disproportionately right-handed. Sampling deaths then produces a misleading apparent mortality difference.
What makes it exceptional: It has the structure of a good intellectual detective story: a startling finding, a plausible initial explanation, and a hidden feature of the data that changes the interpretation. It teaches readers how an apparently persuasive statistic can fail, rather than merely telling them to distrust statistics.
The Harry Potter comparison, credited to Chris McManus, makes the lesson memorable. Younger deceased people are more likely to have read the books; that does not make the books lethal. Statistical rigor and excellent blogging reinforce each other.
14. Alex Tabarrok — The Simple Math of FDA Delay
December 11, 2020 · Read the original post
“The slow ramp up doesn’t change the number of deaths caused by delay it just spreads them out over different days.”
The important move is to compare entire rollout paths. A delayed start can postpone benefits throughout the process; the cost is not limited to what could have been accomplished on the first day. A gradual rollout does not, by itself, make a delay at the beginning inconsequential.
What makes it exceptional: The combination of urgency, a simple model, and visual explanation makes an otherwise easily missed opportunity cost understandable. It directs attention to the full consequences of a decision across time.
The exact result depends on the simplified model. Actual consequences depend on supply constraints, epidemic conditions, protection, and whether earlier authorization would advance delivery. The post’s enduring achievement is the comparison it teaches, not a precise empirical death count attributable to the FDA.
15. Alex Tabarrok — Patents versus Markets
March 16, 2009 · Read the original post
“market prices may have given people hints about the optimal solution”
The post explores an unexpected possibility: markets might help reward discovery while also supplying information that assists discovery. An experiment involving a combinatorial puzzle makes the mechanism tangible.
What makes it exceptional: It opens a design space. The reader moves beyond asking how strong patents should be and starts asking what other institutions could reward innovation and combine dispersed knowledge.
Tabarrok distinguishes competing explanations of the experimental result and identifies practical limitations. It combines imagination with restraint: an attractive institutional possibility presented without pretending that one experiment establishes a universal solution or a replacement for all patents.
The Anthropic succession plan?
Anthropic’s version is rather more elaborate. Each of its seven co-founders will maintain a confidential, ranked list of up to ten people who may eventually inherit that founder’s membership and voting role inside a special Founder LLC. Five of the other six co-founders must approve the list. The first eight candidates on the list must clear detailed eligibility requirements. Numbers nine and ten do not, although the other founders must still approve them. I particularly like #9 and #10; they remind me of the break glass in emergency signs.
The elaborate planning protocol begins to make sense when we understand what is being passed on. The people on these lists are not prospective CEOs. They inherit something stranger: a founder’s seat in the mechanism that controls the company’s direction. And that changes the succession question entirely.
Here is more from Rajesh Achanta.
Was Mossadegh a liberal, democratizing force?
One reads and hears so many times that Iran was on the path to democracy until a CIA coup installed the Shah in 1953. It turns out that account is quite wrong, as is detailed by Simon Sebag Montefiore:
As his support in the Majlis ebbed, Mosaddegh demanded autocratic powers. Both the shah and Majlis refused. On 16 July 1952, Mosaddegh resigned and the shah appointed the ‘Old Fox’ Qavam…On 21 July, five days later [after a shooting], the mobs forced Mosaddegh’s reinstatement.
…Mosaddegh had not been able to resist the temptation of supreme power. His attempt to undermine the monarchy by getting control of the army and to declaw the army by purging officers and making budget cuts had offended supporters of both. The demeaning of the monarchy, secular policies and prosecution of Fadayan assassins had offended the clergy. His moves to bypass the democratically elected parliament by taking plenary powers outraged liberals and democrats. Alienating all of them, Mosaddegh quickly lost control, languishing, pyjama-clad and close to nervous breakdown, in his residence.
…When the police chief was assassinated, Mosaddegh ordered mass arrests that led to Malija members flooring a vote of no conffidence. The once idealistic premier, resorting to authoritarian measures, called a faked plebiscite [with no secret ballot the results were 2 million yes, 1,207 no] to dismiss parliament and huge demonstrations to support him by the communists.
So it was one bad guy succeeding another. Montefiore also argues that what brought down Mossadegh was a second Iranian coup, not the initial coup attempt organized by the CIA.
That is all from the new and excellent The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East.
Friday assorted links
1. What will happen with Texas data centers? And more on that.
2. What is the half life of a claim about LLMs?
3. YouTube video created by AI. Titled Der Zauberberg.
4. Data centers tend to be put in places with relatively flat supply curves.
5. “According to Twenge, one of the great Cassandras of teen mental health in America, the current trajectory is now best described as a “longstanding trend in improvement.”” (NYT)
6. ANC now a minority party (FT, David Pilling).
Untethered AI agents in Delaware?
A Delaware AIC will be a separate legal entity whose day-to-day affairs are managed by an AI agent rather than a person. At the agent’s direction, the AIC can sue and be sued in its own name, hold and dispose of property, and incur obligations…
That is a current proposal, here is the full article. Whether or not this is prudent, to some degree it is inevitable. You will recall my essay with Sonia Farrell Pearson:
This question matters now: there are already ways an agent could become fully untethered. By “untethered” – a central concept in this essay – we mean that there is no meaningful or actionable way to trace the actions back to a legally accountable human or institutional entity.
For one, people can and do set agents free, on purpose. An agent could be created by a human or a company that intends to monitor it but then dies or disappears. Or perhaps the entity that created the agent is based in a country like North Korea, not reachable by standard laws.
In other cases the agent might not need to “escape” at all: the agent could be ‘controlled’ by a shell corporation that, while formally owned and traceable, provides no true defendant or ability to satisfy claims. Or perhaps a process spawns a chain of agents so long that the actions of a subagent can’t be tied to the original agent’s creator, neither epistemically nor meaningfully. Even if we can identify the model’s original creator, what if it’s been finetuned, or merged with another model that was created by someone else? The law might eventually untangle these kinds of complex cases, but we foresee an intermediate period where it does not.
And then there’s the user, who makes choices about what the models should actually do. The Hugging Face incident was unusual in that OpenAI was both the model’s creator and its user. But now close to a billion people use these systems: when blaming the creator is legally inappropriate, will it always make sense to blame the user?
We examine the law and economics of exactly how that might work, or in many cases not work. Circa November 2026, worth a reread.
What They Took From You
Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the police. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave forever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 cent. of the national income…broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.
— A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1975).
Hat tip Mark Skousen, quoted in Richard Ebeling’s new book, Liberty and the History of Ideas.
The Global Office
This paper argues that globalisation’s frontier has shifted from manufacturing GVCs to services GVCs: from the Global Factory to the Global Office. While the Factory remains larger in gross trade, the Office is growing much faster. A heatmap of trade in intermediates shows that the Factory is bloc-shaped and dominated by China, whereas the Office is star-shaped and dominated by America. Gravity estimates show that distance matters less for Office exports, but time zones matter more: each hour of time-zone separation reduces Office exports by roughly 4%, while having no effect on Factory exports. Importantly, all of the world’s export-linked net job creation between 2008 and 2022 occurred in digitally delivered services rather than manufacturing, and trade-linked service jobs command higher average pay globally. The Factory-to-Office shift is also reshaping development. Most emerging economies have seen export-led growth tilt towards services, but their service exports are not yet large enough to drive overall GDP growth the way manufacturing did historically. The big picture is that globalisation’s second unbundling is running out of steam even as its third unbundling is powering ahead. The paper, which raises more questions than it answers, closes with the conjecture that the future of trade is services.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Richard Baldwin.
Natasha Cowen guest posts on Caffrey
I am on my way back home from Armenia, where I was on a Fulbright teaching U.S. securities regulation to Armenian law students. I’m an active user of AI for multiple areas of my life, including my professional life. When I just started preparing for teaching this class, I had a plan: I would use AI to help me write my slides. I would give it prompts, so that it would roughly know the content of each slide and then it would do the beautification part. [account of what was not working]
Then one day, I spoke to a friend who works for a financial regulator, just like I used to, and she told me that she uses Caffrey. It’s a startup and I had never heard of it before this conversation. They specialize in legal research. I reached out to them and asked whether they would give me permission to use it, which they did after meeting with me. To be honest, I didn’t have very high hopes. After all, I have already used two most advanced systems. But I was very pleasantly surprised. Caffrey is founded by lawyers. They understand how important it is for the legal advice and research to be accurate. I gave Caffrey my slides, asked it to verify all legal information in them, and it did an amazing job. I have been working in this field myself for 20 years, so I believe that I can evaluate very well whether something is done properly, and I have nothing except for high praise for Caffrey. The only reason I’m writing this post is because I want others to benefit. And I want Cafffrey to succeed. This would be good for the field of financial regulation, for the lawyers who work in it, and for their clients.
Love at first photo?
Romantic interest on swipe-based dating apps (SBDAs) is highly concentrated. This can frustrate both popular users who feel overwhelmed by a glut of attention, and less popular users who feel dejected by a lack of it. Is the concentration of interest exacerbated by the platform design of dating apps? I provide causal evidence on the effects of two common design features – the emphasis on visual elements in profiles,and limits on the number of profiles users can express interest in – on the concentration of interest (“likes”), and show that both, as implemented under the status quo,concentrate interest. To do so, I design, build, and run my own experimental dating app, which closely resembles conventional SBDAs and allows participants to form real matches. Across three field experiments, over 1,000 participants use the app to makeover 70,000 matching decisions. Under conventional SBDA profile design, I show that visual profile components (i.e., photos and height) dominate matching decisions, and that the concentration of interest is driven mainly by users’ reactions to profile visuals. Simply reducing the salience of visuals on profiles does not significantly affect which profiles receive likes, but requiring users to screen profiles on other components spreads likes more evenly (Gini coefficient decrease of 0.05 points) without reducing their number or the resultant number of matches. Finally, I show that limiting the number of profiles that users can express interest in, which many SBDAs do as part of a freemium subscription model, amplifies concentration (Gini coefficient increase of 0.1 points).
That is from the job market paper of Sofia Shchukina, who is on the job market from the University of Chicago.
Thursday assorted links
2. Data on the flattening of consumer culture (NYT). One-sided, but still of interest.
3. A new and better measure of how much of educational value is signaling.
4. Inside joke concerning the Pope that only some Beatles fans will get.
5. U.S. productivity growth is looking up.
6. NYT on Dario.
Pollution as Growth Killer
India’s Outlook Business has an excellent issue focusing on pollution not just as a people killer but as a growth killer (as I have emphasized pollution reduces wealth and health, see especially this video).
I am interviewed; here is one bit:
Q. Doesn’t the demographic dividend argue for growth first?
The demographic dividend is people. If you poison the people, you shrink the dividend. A young workforce with lower cognitive scores, more respiratory illness and shorter working lives is a smaller asset than the headcount suggests, and the damage to today’s children shows up as lower productivity in future decades.
The premise also assumes that India’s pollution is a byproduct of economic growth. Much of it isn’t. Farmers burning rice stubble in Punjab and Haryana produce more smoke than GDP. Burning garbage, road dust and old coal plants running without scrubbers are not engines of the economy. Families cooking with wood and dung are polluting because they are poor. Cleaning up these sources costs very little output, and some of the fixes would raise it.
Bad air is a tax on talent. And not just Indian talent. Who wants to visit Delhi in November? Foreign skilled professionals, firms and tourists all have options. Clear skies are a selling point for incredible India.
See also Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director of research and advocacy at the Centre for Science and Environment, who argues:
The evidence increasingly shows that air pollution is imposing significant economic and health costs on India. Several studies from credible institutions have estimated the scale of these losses.
For instance, a Lancet study estimated that air pollution was costing India roughly 9.5% of its GDP. The World Bank has put the figure at around 6% of GDP, while a Dalberg [a consultancy] study highlighted substantial losses to Indian businesses, estimating the costs at around 3% of GDP.
The economic impact is visible in several ways. When people fall ill, there is a significant loss of productivity. We have also seen reports of reduced consumer footfall during periods of severe pollution in Delhi. There are also concerns about people shifting their base and businesses, raising questions about operating in highly polluted locations such as Delhi.
So, the evidence increasingly suggests that pollution is under-mining economic activity. We may talk about economic growth, but if a significant part of that growth is being eroded by pollution-related health and productivity losses, the gains are not being fully realised.
Social media and political radicalization
For a while now, we have been hearing claims that social media radicalize the American electorate, and that social media damage teen mental health.
Well, we just held a major set of elections that produced resoundingly moderate results, repudiations of both Trump and the extreme Democratic left. You may or may not like those results, but they are pretty clearly moderate.
And the recent trends in teen mental health are positive. All the while social media usage continues unabated, and furthermore short video continues to rise.
Neither the political nor the mental health trend is guaranteed to continue, but this is a sign that the standard anti-social media polemics are radically incomplete and currently failing in their predictions.
My very good Conversation with Richard Hanania
Here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
The first half of the conversation stays close to the text [Conrad’s Nostromo], covering the novel’s political backdrop, its deliberately scrambled timeline, the near-total absence of religion in Conrad’s universe, Nostromo’s own vanity and treatment of women, a close reading of the “folly and murder” passage, the Fredric Jameson claim that no Latin American author could have written this book, and their very different research methods for preparing. Then the conversation opens outward, moving through why Latin America has unusually high crime despite not being especially poor, Panama’s surprising success story, Shakespeare’s objective greatness, the state of media criticism after the AI boom, who on the populist right is actually worth reading, why conservative women hug and liberal women shake hands, what Hanania wants to write and learn next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Here’s one thing that struck me, and I’m not sure you’ll agree. Early in the novel, there’s all this talk about the Italians and Garibaldi and liberty, and the extent to which I think this book is also a critique of classical liberalism is what surprised me reading it for the second time. The first time was probably, I’d guess, 30 years ago, that Conrad is not against the classical liberal prescription, really, but he views it as another pathology inserted into a hopeless situation.
It just morphs into some form of corruption and interest groups. It’s replaced by the autocrats, but it turns out to not really matter more. There’s, again, this dead hand of history. The indigenous groups, their customs, their norms are really what rule the area. The foreigners come and go, and they may steal or extract wealth, but at the end of the day, the talk of liberty and democracy, for him, it’s a kind of fraud. I think it’s also a recognition that imperialism was not going to do the job.
HANANIA: Don’t you think that the Occidental Province had a higher GDP per capita than the rest of the country? It wasn’t just they made money. It seems like there was real wealth. Getting to the end, to the spoilers, the miners actually march on the city because they’re so loyal to Gould. They like what’s going on. There is actual improvement in people’s lives. It’s not that nihilistic, right?
COWEN: It may be higher GDP, but keep in mind GNP may be what counts. I don’t think Conrad thought in those terms. I don’t read him as a consequentialist, though I’m mostly one myself. For him, progress is about moral progress. He doesn’t see a lot of moral progress in this setting. The point that that’s not happening is, for him, at least more important than, oh, living standards went up a bit or, well, isn’t this better than the even poorer societies they had earlier on? I think he grew up in what we now call Poland, but then was ruled by Russia. The idea of foreign rule is something he had such a strong instinctive dislike of. And you see it in his other books as well that he’s a cynic about foreign presence, though I don’t think he’s saying things were better before.
HANANIA: No, I don’t think I agree.
COWEN: I didn’t think you would agree. That’s why I said that.
HANANIA: There is a noble savage idea. There’s one part where he goes into the rant when Sotillo, the general, is torturing Hirsch. I think he goes into a rant about how primitive man did not devise as much sadistic torture, which I don’t think is probably true, but that’s Conrad’s idea. Basically, there’s a kind of innocence there.
I look at the Hernandez and the robbers and the people who are living in the countryside. Those people are purest case of noble savage. There is part of that. You’re right. Conrad is into honor. This is a book about love and men caring about women. There’s Monygham, the doctor’s loyalty to Mrs. Gould, and then Decoud’s loyalty to Antonia. His other books are about this. Yes, he’s a romantic. He’s not a romantic in politics. He thinks politics is a dirty—
COWEN: Agreed.
HANANIA: —unromantic world. If he thinks socialism and populism on a scale of one to 10 are like a one and classical liberalism is a four, to me, he’s a classical liberal, even though he’s not an eight or a nine on classical liberalism.
COWEN: I think I read him as believing in contingency as the most important truth of politics and a geographic relativism. I don’t think he has much Rousseau in him of idealizing the noble savages, but he sees the noble savages are not noble. They’re terrible, but what’s terrible in them gets recreated in us at higher levels of wealth and power. That, for him, is the most fundamental truth of politics.
Interesting throughout, recommended. And here is Richard’s prescient recent book Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster.
What Drives Censorship on College Campuses?
There has been widespread concern about self-censorship on university campuses, and especially that conservative voices are being stifled. Using survey data from a private elite college, we show that self-censorship is not simply about being conservative: it is students with the most moderate views who self-censor the most. This pattern is associated with confidence and salience — students who are more confident in their views or who see an issue as especially important tend to hold more extreme views and to self-censor less. At the same time, conservatives self-censor at higher rates than liberals, and the same individual is more likely to self-censor on the views where they are relatively more conservative than on those where they are relatively more liberal; conservatives are also far more likely than liberals to cite concerns about social exclusion as a reason for self-censoring, and report self-censoring less outside the university community. Groups perceived as marginalized self-censor less than majority groups, and especially so on issues salient to them (e.g., Black students on BLM).
That is from a new NBER working paper by