The populist style is highly combative, very confrontational, hostile to elites and institutions, typically anti-intellectual, abrasive, often transgressive of established norms and ideas, and often with a revolutionary affect.
…I believe the populist style, in particular, is going to be fading soon, along with the populist movement.
I have adopted, from Alana Newhouse, the term “brokenist.” Renn argues that populism succeeded in exploding the establishment consensus on immigration, trade with China, and women as an oppressed group. But he thinks that going forward populism must give way to what he calls “the new constructivism,” and what I call “institutionalism.”
it is not just about trying to revive Reaganism or the Obama moment or the proverbial “dead consensus.” It’s about how we address today’s problems, whether that be through old ideas, updated ideas, or completely new ones.
Robin Hanson, posing an interesting question to Claude Fable, writes,
As you can see, advocates [for world government] started out with reasons of war, trade, morality, and inevitability, but have drifted over time toward big weapons, inequality, and the environment. ~72% of the world now supports more world govt.
The only advocate of world government that I can think of is Robert Wright. So I don’t know any advocate of world government whose views I trust.
the human mind has a complicated, dynamic structure and is capable of generating and believing many contradictory beliefs at different levels of representation. Being trained or predisposed to care about consistency, philosophers may find this obnoxious, but it is not pathological. In fact, I’d wager that all of us have some contradictory beliefs. Because of this, we are often insulated from the epistemological effects of holding erroneous high-level beliefs. We may sincerely believe that God intervenes in the world, while also believing that emergencies require action, not patience while we wait for divine aid.
This means that the costs and benefits of high-level beliefs are predominantly social. Such beliefs are used to signal loyalty to tribes (and perhaps sophistication and social capital).
Of course, those of you have read TLP (or read the condensed version) already knew most of this. Winegard points out that the mechanism by which people hold contradictory beliefs is compartmentalization. That is how a socialist can justify living in a mansion or a “family values” politician can engage in sexual misconduct.
Interviewed by Yascha Mounk, Daron Acemoglu says,
I know of no society in history that has been able to create shared prosperity for a sustained period of time that is not based on wage growth and employment.
…with digital automation—meaning that using digital technologies with advanced tools, software systems, robotics, and now AI—we are substituting machines and algorithms for tasks previously performed by humans. That severs the link between business growth, innovation, and profits and wages, because now we can expand production tremendously without employing many workers.
…inflation-adjusted wages of workers with a high school degree or less than a high school degree, especially men with a high school degree, fell consistently almost every year from 1980 to 2014.
Acemoglu describes the need for liberals to deal with heterogeneity at the group level, not just the individual level.
It is very important that we at the same time enshrine basic individual freedoms—freedom of thought, freedom of religion, association, speech—at the same time as we recognize community-level pluralism.
Recall my three-layer model: individuals, groups, and the larger society. Deviant individuals threaten groups. Deviant groups threaten the larger society. Liberals tend to want to crack down on deviant groups. Acemoglu is arguing that this must change. But he makes it sound like the solution is to tolerate deviant groups, and I don’t think he explains how to make that work.
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