Richard Rorty in 1998
This comment from 1998 sounds strangely familiar:
[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. . . .
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words [slur for an African-American that begins with “n”] and [slur for a Jewish person that begins with “k”] will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
Now you can certainly argue that this is much more extreme than what we’ve seen (and I’d agree), but can anyone deny he captures the mood of the moment?
The article where I found this has a few other remarks about Rorty’s book:
He also then argues, however, that this sadism will not solely be the result of “economic inequality and insecurity,” and that such explanations would be “too simplistic.” Nor would the strongman who comes to power do anything but worsen economic conditions. He writes next, “after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make his peace with the international superrich.”
I’m actually hoping the last part is true, I like neoliberalism much more than Rorty does. And again, I give him credit for that prediction, as I think it’s quite possible that Trump adopts the economic policies he describes.
PS. I also like this article comparing Trump’s win to the OJ verdict.
HT: Lorne Smith
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18. November 2016 at 18:43
Interesting post.
It is curious that it is the policy of the federal government, through the Fed, to keep at least one in 20 employees unemployed and looking or work.
Meanwhile, “labor shortages” are looked on with horror. You might think there is no such thing as a “labor shortage” only where the supply and demand curves cross. But no, we can have labor shortages.
Why do we need an open border with Mexico, no fence, and free unmonitored passage?
“The labor situation,” said Ronald Reagan, in 1980. Unemployment then was 7%, would hit 9% in his first term. Bush Sr. agreed. That was the GOP establishment. And you think the rank-and-file turned against them? The only question is, why did it take 36 years?
No one seems to rant against property zoning much, but the minimum wage must die, and the borders should be open.
It is sad that Americans are so misfed information that they turn to the likes of a Don Trump.
But given the GOP and Donk establishments, it is understandable.
Some Filipinos said they voted for Duterte knowing he was a lulu, but could not stand to again vote for permanent corruption and inadvertent or planned class warfare against the middle and working classes.
Remember we are for free trade—but not in U.S. cities. If you want to sell goods in a U.S. city, you must do so on land zoned retail. The “right” to sell retail is closely controlled.
No push-cart or truck-vending. Which might lead to “labor shortages” too, btw.
Funny how some topics make into the conversation, and others do not…
18. November 2016 at 19:39
It’s kind of a shame you’re such a fan of Richard Rorty, Scott, he was a nonsense philosopher with a nonsense philosophy. You can like some things he wrote all you want, just don’t take him too seriously.
18. November 2016 at 20:04
OT but not in a way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sirXAfpIrao
That’s a presentation by Larry Summers and Lord Adair Turner.
They both raise fascinating prospects that deficient demand is structural (not cyclical, or a debt overhang etc), and requires permanent (or at least long-term) responses. Summers says, “The lack of demand creates its own lack of supply.”
Turner talks about helicopter drops, and Summers about fiscal responses, and both about what is debt when interest rates hit zero (or negative rates as in Japan and Switzerland).
Market Monetarists have been timid on this score, in general saying there should be NGDPLT, and the lower interest rates and talk should get us there.
Maybe.
We might need to go to permanent helicopter drops, or QE, which seem much the same thing.
The nice thing is we can slay the debt bogeyman and at the same time we kill the recession. QE or helicopter drops.
Or, we can do what we are doing, and encourage the next election of a Bernie Sanders or a Don Trump.
18. November 2016 at 20:41
Michael, He was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Calling him a nonsense philosopher merely tells me that his ideas are over your head. There’s no shame in that (his ideas on truth are very subtle and nuanced), but I don’t know if I’d want to broadcast your confusion it to the entire blogosphere.
Ben, When have MMs said “lower interest rates should get us there?” Are you saying that low rates are easy money?
18. November 2016 at 21:02
Scott,
You’re coming across as very arrogant in your reply about Rorty. Like many who try to be scientific, I’ve long thought philosophy in general has no value. Many of the world’s leading scientists agree, which doesn’t make us right, but it suggests one is not necessarily ill-informed to dismiss a philosopher.
18. November 2016 at 21:12
The more I hear from Steve Bannon, the more I’m convinced he’s a really smart guy. Much smarter than his critics (who don’t have a clue what he’s all about, and that’s apparently fine with him. It’s his advantage);
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/steve-bannon-trump-tower-interview-trumps-strategist-plots-new-political-movement-948747
‘He absolutely — mockingly — rejects the idea that this is a racial line. “I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” he tells me. “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver” — by “we” he means the Trump White House — “we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed. They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”‘
18. November 2016 at 21:35
How about you tell us about his subtle and nuanced ideas on truth, since they’re so manifestly over my head, then, Scott?
18. November 2016 at 21:38
Since we are doing all this Trump blogging, what about the opening of Cuba? Any word on if that will go away? Seems like opening trade with Cuba was a great idea. Just look at Vietnam and China. Open trade enriched both nations and caused two repressive Communist nations to become more liberal. Wasn’t it nice that Obama didn’t pander to the Florida Cuban vote? Wouldn’t it be nice if Trump followed suit?
18. November 2016 at 22:01
You’re wasting your time Michael.
Contrary to Sumner’s jealousy, your assessment of Rorty is warranted. He did indeed write literal nonsense.
His ideas are not above my head. I studied his and other hermeneutical philosophers’ works. What Sumner calls “subtle and nuanced” ideas on truth are upon actual critical assessment blatantly self-contradictory.
If you asked for Sumner to explain Rorty’s philosophy, you would get glazed over eyes.
Richard Rorty was at root an attacker of philosophy. He effectively regurgitated the ancient mantras of skepticism and nihilism, of epistemological and ethical relativism which has reared its ever changing head.
In his book “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”, Rationalism, writes Rorty:
…”is a desire for constraint—a desire to find “foundations” to which one might cling, frameworks beyond which one must not stray, objects which impose themselves, representations, which cannot be gainsaid…” (p. 315)
“The dominating notion of epistemology is that to be rational, to be fully human, to do what we ought, we need to be able to find agreement with other human beings. To construct an epistemology is to find the maximum amount of common ground with others. The assumption that an epistemology can be constructed is the assumption that such common ground exists…” (p. 326)
However, Rorty claims that no such common ground exists. Therefore, Rationalism must fall and the relativist position of Hermeneutics must become a replacement.
Rorty continues:
“Hermeneutics sees the relations between various discourses as those of strands in a possible conversation, a conversation which presupposes no disciplinary matrix which unites the speakers, but where the hope of agreement is never lost so long as the conversation lasts. This hope is not a hope for the discovery of antecedently existing common ground, but simply hope for agreement, or, at least, exciting and fruitful disagreement. Epistemology sees the hope of agreement as a token of the existence of common ground which, perhaps unbeknown to the speakers, unites them in common rationality. For hermeneutics, to be rational is to be willing to refrain from epistemology—from thinking that there is a special set of terms in which all contributions to the conversation should be put—and to be willing to pick up the jargon of the interlocutor rather than translating it into one’s own. For epistemology, to be rational is to find the proper set of terms into which all contributions should be translated if agree- ment is to become possible. For epistemology, conversation is implicit inquiry. For hermeneutics, inquiry is routine conversation.” (p. 318)
After reading this, would it not seem appropriate to ask “What, then, about his own pronouncements?”
If there is nothing like truth based on common, objective ground, then all of Rorty’s talk can surely not claim to say anything true. It would be self-defeating to do what he seems to be doing: denying that an objective case can be made for any statement, while at the same time claiming this to be the case for his own views. In so doing, one would falsify the content of one’s own statement.
In order to understand Rorty correctly, one must first realize that he cannot truly be saying what he seems to be saying. Nor can I or anyone else here say anything claiming to be objectively so and true. Including Sumner’s dismissal of your post. No, Rorty’s talk and Sumner’s talk can merely be understood as only contributing to their and our facile entertainment.
But why should they or I or anyone else listen and be entertained? If there is no such thing as truth and, accordingly, no objective distinction between truth-claiming propositions and any other propositions, then we are left with nothing but pervasive intellectual permissiveness.
With every statement and claim as just another contribution to the conversation of mankind, anything at all that is said is just as good a potential candidate for my entertainment as anything else. But why bother listening to such permissive, everything-goes talk? Rorty might reply, “It is because your talk or my talk or someone else’s talk is persuasive.”
But according to his doctrine, the categories “persuasive” and “unpersuasive” are not simply other names for “true” and “false.” The whole point would be lost if they were. No, Rorty believed that a statement is persuasive because it has in fact persuaded; because it has resulted in agreement. To go beyond this and ask, “Ok, but has one been persuaded of something true?” would be an inappropriate query.
So are we entertained by what Rorty wrote? Even that is an inappropriate query. For how else could we find out whether someone was in fact enter- tained by something, or that he was persuaded by it, that he understood or misunderstood what it was that had been said to entertain and persuade, and even further, whether there was something that meant anything at all and so could be understood, rather than merely being meaningless gibberish.
Obviously we could not claim to know any of this unless we had a common language with commonly understood concepts such as “persuaded” and “entertained”. In fact, we could not meaningfully claim to deny this without presupposing another set of commonly understood concepts. This common ground that must be presupposed if we want to say anything meaningful.
Language, therefore, is not some ephemeral phenomena disconnected from reality. It is a form of action.
Language is an offshoot of practical cooperation and as such, via action, is inseparably connected with an objective world. Talk, fact or fiction, is a form of cooperation and thus presupposes a common ground of objectively defined and applied terms. Not necessarily in the sense that one would always have to agree on the content of what was said or that one would even have to understand everything said. But rather, in the sense that as long as one claimed to express anything meaningful at all, one would have to assume the existence of some common standards, if only to be able to agree on whether or not and in what respect one was in fact in agreement with others, and whether or not and to what extent one in fact understood what had been said.
These common standards would have to be understood as objective in that they would involve the application of terms within reality. To say, then, that no common ground exists is a rank contradiction. The very fact that this statement can claim to convey meaning implies that there definitely exists such common ground.
Rorty, then, was indeed a purveyor of philosophical nonsense. The main reason he became prominent was because we are living in an age of an attack on Reason, and because philosophers tend to pat themselves on the back and imagine themselves as more enlightened than the rest of the saps, and who are vain in believing they can understand the “subtle and nuanced truths” in badly organized, fallacy filled theories. It is a main reason why Hegel, Marx and Keynes became so influential. Books filled with inconsistencies are like manna to busybody academics who believe that being confused is always a sign of being in the presence of genius.
Hence Sumner’s propagandizing of Rorty on this blog. That and the juicy and exploitable one liners of Rorty like “truth is what you can get away with”, and other provocative claims that pique the interest of the morally questionable.
18. November 2016 at 22:19
In terms of ethics, the general line of Rorty’s argument is that since language is social (no one can have his or her own language, per Wittgenstein) and since human life is intricately bound up with language, human life cannot be characterized as primarily individualist.
Accordingly, since at the epistemic level individualism is inadequate, it cannot be sustained as an adequate ethical, social, or political outlook either. This, in turn, gives further support to the idea that the human individual is an invention. Karl Marx was the most influential proponent of this idea, but it is also present in the thought of conservatives such as proto-fascist Edmund Burke.
It is impossible to advance libertarianism and to think like a libertarian when Rortyism is your philosophical basis.
Some people just live their entire lives in a state of inner conflict and self-alienation.
18. November 2016 at 22:19
Trump polled a smaller percentage of the electorate than did either Romney or McCain. No evidence of any new movement rising on the right in that.
(And he polled less than them against an unliked, scandal-plagued candidate — while Romney ran against a strong incumbent and McCain had to both run in the shadow of an unpopular incumbent and against the worst economy in 70 years. Not so impressive, that.)
Trump didn’t win this election, Hillary lost it. Millions of people who voted for Obama stayed home rather than vote for her.
OTOH, the Republican Party up-and-down, from Senate through governorships to local governments and legislatures, is in its strongest position in 80 years….
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/11/17/republican_party_the_strongest_its_been_in_80_years.html
This is the culmination of a long process that long pre-dates Trump — he rode on top of it to pull the votes he did. (And also has been pushed along by a lot of Democratic losing moves.)
This could deliver eight years of Trump no matter how the Democrats, intellectuals and libertarians weep and wail. But we shall see about that.
18. November 2016 at 22:24
Isn’t this what you went to school for MF?
18. November 2016 at 22:36
Scott: You are right that some MM’ers point out nominally or historically low rates not not low functionally (including you!).
But it is rare to read an MM’er who embraces helicopter drops on perma-QE.
Summers and Turner are there.
18. November 2016 at 23:15
I still am not convinced that Trump is about race and sex. He’s certainly not about gays. I think his win is a broader reaction to the decline of hope and of the culture that sustained people who would never escape poverty, regardless of regime. Is it a coincidence that the “surprise” states were the coal diggers and burners and that Clinton went out of her way to trash those people? It’s that Clinton lost, not that Trump won. I acknowledge that I’m reading the lovely but incredibly depressing Hillbilly Elegy right after finishing the even more depressing Coming Apart….
19. November 2016 at 04:16
Jim Glass: Everything you say is true–and yet before Trump prevailed in the Electoral College (he lost the popular vote by one million and counting) he flattened the GOP establishment. Crushed them—after telling Fox News to shove it! In fact the last man to dare face Trump was himself a outsider of sorts, Cruz.
Jeb Bush barely got into the ring before being knocked into the seats. If Bush was the face of the of GOP establishment, and I think he was, they have a reduced role left on the national stage.
The Bushes will be absent at the inauguration! Symbolic but telling!
Remember Eric Kantor?
It remains to be seen if Trump has the vision, intellect and persistence, or his buddy Bannon, to re-mold the party into their own making. Something tells me this is not going to jell. Maybe Ivana can save the day.
But I doubt we will see a globalist, free-trade, immigrationist Presidential candidate any time soon from the GOP. Romney was the last of line.
The only wonder is that we did not see a Trumpian GOP figure 20 years ago. I guess the “O” stood for Grand Ossifying Party.
19. November 2016 at 05:15
Prof. Sumner,
here is more Rorty, taken from the same book “Achieving our Country”, especially his economic views. I think he is wrong. Rorty was no libertarian, but since his moral philosophy was a kind of utilitarianism and your libertarianism is too based on utilitarianism, i would like to know where you think Rorty goes wrong.
“Nevertheless, there is a dark side to the success story I have been telling about the post-Sixties cultural Left. During the same period in which socially accepted sadism has steadily diminished, economic inequality and economic insecurity steadily increased. It is as if the American Left could not have handle more than one initiative at a time as if it either had to ignore stigma in order to concentrate on money, or vice versa.
One symptom of this inability to do two things at once is that it has been left to scurrilous demagogues like Patrick Buchanan to take political advantage of the widening gap between rich and poor. While the Left’s back was turned, the bourgeoisification of the white proletariat which began in World War II and continued up through the Vietnam War has been halted, and the process has gone into reverse. America is now proletarianizing its bourgeoisie, and this process is likely to culminate in a bottom-up populist revolt, of the sort Buchanan hopes to foment.
Since 1973, the assumption that all hardworking American married couples can afford a home, and that the wife could then, if she chose, stay home and raise kids, has begun to seem absurd. The question now is whether the average married couple, both working full time, will ever be able to take home more than $30,000 a year. If husband and wife each work 2,000 hours a year for the current average wage of production and nonsupervisory workers ($7.50 per hour), they will make that much. But $30,000 a year will not permit homeownership or buy decent daycare. In a country that believes neither in public transportation nor in national health insurance, this income permits a family of four only a humiliating, hand-to-mouth existence. Such a family, trying to get by on this income, will be constantly tormented by fears of wage rollbacks and downsizing, and of the disastrous consequences of even a brief illness.
Seventy-two percent of Americans now think that “layoffs and loss of jobs in this country will continue indefinitely.„ They have good reason to think this. Unless something very unexpected happens, economic insecurity will continue to grow in America. Indeed, it is easy to imagine things getting much worse much faster. This is because a good deal of the insecurity is due to the globalization of the labor market a trend which can reasonably be expected to accelerate indefinitely.
What industrialization was to America at the end of the nineteenth century, globalization is at the end of the twentieth. The problem which Dewey and Croly faced – how to prevent wage-slavery from destroying the hope of equality – was partly solved by the leftist initiatives of 1910-1965. But a problem Dewey and Croly never envisaged has taken its place, and measures which might cope with this new problem have hardly even been sketched. The problem is that the wage levels, and the social benefits enjoyed by workers in Europe, Japan, and North America no longer bear any relation to the newly fluid global labor market.
Globalization is producing a world economy in which an attempt by any one country to prevent the immiseration of its workers may result only in depriving them of employment. This world economy will soon be owned by a cosmopolitan upper class which has no more sense of community with any workers anywhere than the great American capitalists of the year 1900 had with the immigrants who manned their enterprises. The increasing dependence of American universities on gifts from abroad, of American political parties on bribes from abroad, and of the American economy on foreign sales of Treasury bonds are examples of the tendencies which are at work.
19. November 2016 at 05:16
This frightening economic cosmopolitanism has, as a byproduct, an agreeable cultural cosmopolitanism. Platoons of vital young entrepreneurs fill the front cabins of transoceanic jets, while the back cabins are weighted down with paunchy professors like myself, zipping off to interdisciplinary conferences held in pleasant places. But this newly-acquired cultural cosmopolitanism is limited to the richest twenty-five percent of Americans. The new economic cosmopolitanism presages a future in which the other 75 percent of Americans will find their standard of living steadily shrinking. We are likely to wind up with an America divided into hereditary social castes. This America will be run by what Michael Lind (in The Next American Nation) has called the “overclass,” the highly educated and expensively groomed top 25 percent. One of the scariest social trends is illustrated by the fact that in 1979 kids from the top socioeconomic quarter of American families were four times more likely to get a college degree than those from the bottom quarter; now they are ten times more likely.
It is as if, sometime around 1980, the children of the people who made it through the Great Depression and into the suburbs had decided to pull up the drawbridge behind them. They decided that although social mobility had been appropriate for their parents, it was not to be allowed to the next generation. These suburbanites seem to see nothing wrong with belonging to a hereditary caste, and have initiated what Robert Reich (in his book „The work of Nations“) calls “the secession of the successful.”
Sometime in the seventies, American middle-class idealism went into a stall. Under Presidents Carter and Clinton, the Democratic Party has survived by distancing itself from the unions and from any mention of redistribution, and moving into a sterile vacuum called the “center.” The party no longer has a visible, noisy left wing – a wing with which the intellectuals can identify and on which the unions can rely for support. It is as if the distribution of income and wealth had become too scary a topic for any American politician much less any sitting president ever to mention. Politicians fear that mentioning it would lose them votes among the only Americans who can be relied on to go to the polls: the suburbanites. So the choice between the two major parties has come down to a choice between cynical lies and terrified silence.
If the formation of hereditary castes continues unimpeded, and if the pressures of globalization create such castes not only in the United States but in all the old democracies, we shall end up in an orwellian world. In such a world, there may be no supernational analogue of Big Brother, or any official creed analogous to Ingsoc. But there will be an analogue of the Inner Party- namely, the international, cosmopolitan super-rich. They will make all the important decisions. The analogue of Orwell’s outer Party will be educated, comfortably off, cosmopolitan professionals – Lind’s „overclass,“ the people like you and me.
The job of people like us will be to make sure that the decisions made by the Inner Party are carried out smoothly and efficiently. It will be in the interest of the international super rich to keep our class relatively prosperous and happy. For they need people who can pretend to be the political class of each of the individual nation-states. For the sake of keeping the proles quiet, the super-rich will have to keep up the pretense that national politics might someday make a difference Since economic decisions are their prerogative, it will en courage politicians, of both the Left and the Right, to specialize in cultural issues. The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhere – to keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans and the bottom 95 percent of the world’s population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores. If the proles can be distracted from their own despair by media-created pseudo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear.
19. November 2016 at 05:19
Contemplation of this possible world invites two responses from the Left. The first is to insist that the inequalities between nations need to be mitigated – and, in particular, at the Northern Hemisphere must share wealth with the its Southern. The second is to insist that the primary responsibility of each democratic nation-state is to its own least advantaged citizens. These two responses obviously conflict with each other. In particular, the first response suggests that the old democracies should open their borders, whereas the second suggests that they should close them.
The first response comes naturally to academic leftists, who have always been comes naturally to minded. The second response the marginally employed members of trade unions, and to people who can most easily be recruited into right-wing populist movements. Union members in the United States have watched factory after factory close, only to reopen in Slovenia, Thailand, or Mexico. It is no wonder that they see the result of international free trade as prosperity for managers and stockholders, a better standard of living for workers in developing countries, and a very much worse standard of living for American workers. It would be no wonder if the saw the American leftist intelligentsia as on the side of the managers and stockholders – as sharing the same class interests. For we intellectuals, who mostly academics, are ourselves quite well insulated, at least in the short run, from the effects of globalization. To make things worse, we often seem more interested in the workers of the developing world than in the fate of our fellow citizens.
Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book „The Endangered American Dream“ is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers -themselves desperately afraid of being downsized – are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for any one else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel „It Can’t Happen Here“ may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past for years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
But such a renewal of sadism will not alter the effects of selfishness. For after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make his peace with the international super-rich, just as Hitler made his with the German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf war to provoke military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the American Left? Why was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of globalization? Why could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed?
It is often said that we Americans, at the end of the twentieth century, no longer have a Left. Since nobody denies the existence of what I have called the cultural Left, this amounts to an admission that that Left is unable to engage in national politics. It is not the sort of Left which can be asked to deal with the consequences of globalization. To get the country to deal with those consequences, the present cultural Left would have to transform itself by opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions. It would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma.”
19. November 2016 at 05:39
The interesting thing about the Rotry quote, excerpted the way it is, is that it seems to be a very clear admission from a deep thinker on the left that the left (or at least the establishment left as it existed in 1998) has nothing to offer “labor unions and organized unskilled labor” to reverse their economic decline. Further, the prediction that empowerment of a strongman elected by “labor unions and organized unskilled labor” will lead to a return to open bigotry is an admission from the left that they have utterly failed to integrate black, brown and female Americans into the organized workforce that the left regards as part of its base. It’s also an admission that no racial attitudes have changed since 1960. It’s only that their open expression has been suppressed.
So, it seems the left’s claim to legitimacy rests simply on redistribution and perpetual enforcement of political correctness. Isn’t that exactly the platform Clinton ran on? The big irony here is that all those misogynistic, homophobic, racist members of “labor unions and organized unskilled labor” were inside the Democrat’s tent so long. How did all those morally upright members of the left stand being next to them? If these racists switched sides and finally elected strong man Trump, doesn’t that mean that they also elected Obama? And W. J. Clinton?
19. November 2016 at 05:42
Scott. You said:
“You’re coming across as very arrogant in your reply about Rorty.”
Let’s see. Some troll comes on here and tells me my favorite philosopher is doing nothing but spouting nonsense, and you call me arrogant when I point out that maybe this guy is in over his head?
I don’t ban people for acting like jerks, but if you don’t like being criticized then don’t come on here and insult me or the people I like.
Michael, OK, There is no meaningful distinction between the statement “X is true” and “I believe X is true”. Or “there is no single methodology for determining what is true” (These are my made up quotes, I don’t recall exactly what he said.) Much of his work can be seen a a critique of epistemology, which does increasingly look like a field that’s led nowhere.
Benny, We never should have had the trade embargo in the first place. Who knows what Trump will do.
Liberaer, Obviously I totally disagree with Rorty on economics. He doesn’t even get the facts right. Living standards in the third world are soaring, and even in the US median real wages have not fallen. So husbands are just as able to support stay at home moms as in 1973. If it doesn’t seem that way it’s because people are greedier today. They no longer want to live in three bedroom one bath ranch houses in older suburbs. Those are being taken over by Hispanic immigrants.
19. November 2016 at 07:46
Scott,
I don’t generally comment on philosophers, because I don’t care about the subject at all, and while I’ve heard of Rorty, I know nothing about his philosophy. But, if someone could persuade me to comment on him at all, I’d just say I see no use in philosophy. Meaningless would be a good enough word to me to describe any or all philosophy. I don’t think the scientific method and body of science leaves any room for philosophy to make any contributions to human thought, or at least any thought that has any value.
I was being critical, but I hope you don’t take this as an attack. I would be amazed at the persistence of philosplophy to matter to many if not for the numerous other examples of completely wasteful thought people engage in. Of course, we’re all guilty of this at times, in various ways.
19. November 2016 at 08:02
I think it’s quite imprudent to think a philosopher will have something perspicacious to say on a sociological topic. He may. Then again, so might your tax accountant. The accountant is likely to be less loquacious. (It’s pretty dopey to say philosophy is nonsense per se, or to fancy that science can replace philosophy; a scientific endeavour will have implicit philosophical underpinnings).
No clue why Rorty would be the moderator’s ‘favorite’, bar that he has the same cast of mind contemplating philosophical works as he does contemplating visual art.
19. November 2016 at 08:07
Some troll comes on here and tells me my favorite philosopher is doing nothing but spouting nonsense, and you call me arrogant when I point out that maybe this guy is in over his head?
The problem is that philosophy, literary criticism, art and architecture criticism, theology, the theoretical wing of sociology, and law are disciplines that are vulnerable to tarted up nonsense and to rhetorical gamesmanship undertaken as parries to people who point out the nonsense. (My favorite example is the law professor who argued in Law & Contemporary Problems that the courts should ban hunting by the judicial ukase).
19. November 2016 at 08:10
It’s also an admission that no racial attitudes have changed since 1960. It’s only that their open expression has been suppressed.
That attitude is bog standard in higher education. What’s interesting about professors is how much they despise their clientele, which they look at with funhouse mirrors.
19. November 2016 at 08:24
Is it a coincidence that the “surprise” states were the coal diggers and burners and that Clinton went out of her way to trash those people? It’s that Clinton lost, not that Trump won.
BO more than Clinton. Mavens within the Democratic Party will refer to the ‘wine track’ and the ‘beer track’. Both BO and Clinton have very bourgeois backgrounds, interests, and impulses, but BO’s appeal was noticeably more ‘wine track’ than hers, for whatever reason. Curiously, Gary Hart grew up in an impecunious small-town wage-earner family but was the echt wine track candidate.
19. November 2016 at 10:19
Scott Freelander:
If you find value in the scientific method you have a use for epistemological philosophy.
19. November 2016 at 11:37
Scott, that Rorty quote is good. Great, maybe, even. I’m not Rorty’s biggest fan, but now I understand what you like about him.
19. November 2016 at 11:43
“Wasn’t it nice that Obama didn’t pander to the Florida Cuban vote?”
-Except he totally did (against Romney/Ryan in 2012):
https://www.wola.org/analysis/rep-paul-ryans-surprising-voting-record-on-cuba/
Trump also pandered to the Cuban vote, which is probably why he won Florida. The Clintons were always popular on the Floridian Gold Coast, but Obama made such large gains relative to Bush there, it was hard for the Clintons to overperform Obama by much. Meanwhile, Trump made large gains relative to Romney in the Florida panhandle, which also helped win him the state.
19. November 2016 at 12:26
‘How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?’
‘THAT’S NOT FUNNY!’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_vDke_nQvU
19. November 2016 at 12:26
“There is no meaningful distinction between the statement “X is true” and “I believe X is true”. Or “there is no single methodology for determining what is true” (These are my made up quotes, I don’t recall exactly what he said.) Much of his work can be seen a a critique of epistemology, which does increasingly look like a field that’s led nowhere.”
Great, one liners…/s
Led to nowhere…within the assumed framework of communitarianism and statism amiright?
Epistemology always buries its undertakers.
Attacks on epistemology are by implication themselves studies in epistemology. This is a characteristic feature of epistemology. For epistemology is the study of how we think and how we come to know anything. Critiquing the field of epistemology is critiquing the very thing necessary to even critique it.
The argument that there is no meaningful distinction between the statement ‘x is true’ and ‘I believe x is true’ is an argument that refutes itself. For it is an argument that is presented as not merely as a belief, but as something objectively true about the nature of beliefs themselves. It is supposed to say something true about beliefs as such, namely, that whatever anyone believes, cannot also be known as anything else, for example whether such beliefs are in fidelity with objective reality or not. Yet to claim that a belief cannot be known as being in accordance with objective reality or otherwise, is itself a claim referring to the objective reality of our own mental abilities, our own minds, in other words it is a claim about the truth of the objective reality of the human mind. It is effectively saying “Don’t trust your reason to find what is true, instead trust my claims as true.”
Rorty was one one a long line of philosophical shysters who attacked everyone as deluded for being human, but conveniently leaving an escape hatch for his own self.
To think this is to chase, and eat, one’s own tail.
The argument that “there’s no single methodology for determining what’s true” is not in fact Rorty’s thesis. That was Paul Feyerabend’s thesis. See his book “Against Method”. No worries though, because it is not like what Sumner said can be considered true. His own words, per Rorty, is just him letting us know who he believes. But…is he going to let Michael “get away with it”?
19. November 2016 at 12:31
I know whom I hope Trump chooses as his press spokesman;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmkyDnXiXsI
19. November 2016 at 14:28
More of what Steve Bannon believes, from Bannon himself (via Kimberly Strassel;
http://www.wsj.com/articles/steve-bannon-on-politics-as-war-1479513161
————–quote—————
[Strassel writes] Here are a few things you’ve likely read about Steve Bannon this week: He’s a white supremacist, a bigot and anti-Semite. He’s a self-described Leninist who wants to “destroy the state.” He’s associated with the “alt-right,” a movement that, according to the New York Times, delights in “harassing Jews, Muslims and other vulnerable groups by spewing shocking insults on social media.”
…. Mr. Bannon is an aggressive political scrapper, unabashed in his views, but he says those views bear no relation to the media’s description. Over 70 minutes, he describes himself as a “conservative,” a “populist” and an “economic nationalist.”….
Anti-Semitic? “Breitbart is the most pro-Israel site in the United States of America. I have Breitbart Jerusalem, which I have Aaron Klein run with about 10 reporters there. We’ve been leaders in stopping this BDS movement”—meaning boycott, divestment and sanctions—“in the United States; we’re a leader in the reporting of young Jewish students being harassed on American campuses; we’ve been a leader on reporting on the terrible plight of the Jews in Europe.” He adds that given his many Jewish partners and writers, “guys like Joel Pollak, these claims of anti-Semitism just aren’t serious. It’s a joke.”
He blames the attacks on a lazy media, noting for instance that the “renegade Jew” line wasn’t Breitbart’s. Conservative activist David Horowitz (also Jewish) has taken responsibility for writing the headline himself, in a piece about Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.
The Lenin anecdote came from an article in the Daily Beast by a writer who claimed to have spoken with Mr. Bannon in 2013: “So a guy I’ve never heard of in my life claims he met me at a party, and then claims I said something about Lenin, and this is taken as gospel truth, with nobody checking it.”
What about the charge of white supremacism? “I’m an economic nationalist. I am an America first guy. And I have admired nationalist movements throughout the world, have said repeatedly strong nations make great neighbors. I’ve also said repeatedly that the ethno-nationalist movement, prominent in Europe, will change over time. I’ve never been a supporter of ethno-nationalism.”
Mr. Bannon says the accusations miss that “the black working and middle class and the Hispanic working and middle class, just like whites, have been severely hurt by the policies of globalism.” He adds that he urged candidate Trump to reach out in his campaigning. “I was the one who said we are going to Flint, Michigan, we are going to black churches in Cleveland, because the thrust of this movement is that we are going to bring capitalism to the inner cities.”
….
He acknowledges that the [Breitbart] site is “edgy” but insists it is “vibrant.” He offers his own definition of the alt-right movement and explains how he sees it fitting into Breitbart. “Our definition of the alt-right is younger people who are anti-globalists, very nationalist, terribly anti-establishment.”
But he says Breitbart is also a platform for “libertarians,” Zionists, “the conservative gay community,” “proponents of restrictions on gay marriage,” “economic nationalism” and “populism” and “the anti-establishment.” In other words, the site hosts many views. “We provide an outlet for 10 or 12 or 15 lines of thought—we set it up that way” and the alt-right is “a tiny part of that.” Yes, he concedes, the alt-right has “some racial and anti-Semitic overtones.” He makes clear he has zero tolerance for such views.
….
As for Mr. Bannon, don’t expect to see him on cable. “People say get out there. But I see no purpose in trying to convince a bunch of media elites who only ever talk to themselves. I never went on TV one time during the campaign. Not once. You know why? Because politics is war. General Sherman would never have gone on TV to tell everyone his plans. I’d never tip my hand to the other side. And right now we’ve got work to do.”
————–endquote—————
19. November 2016 at 16:08
Feyerabend’s dictum of “there’s no single methodology for determining what’s true”, is by the way also self-contradictory when applied to practical activity.
Feyerabend’s thesis ultimately misconceives scientific theories as nothing but systems and frameworks of verbal propositions, and he ignored the foundation of these, or of any, propositions in a reality of action and social interaction.
Sure, on the level of abstract verbal propositioning, of statements conceived as distinct from activity, where theories are seemingly arbitrary rules of manipulating and organizing seemingly arbitrary ideas, ANY theory becomes immunizable, and ANY two rival theories whose terms cannot be reduced to and defined in terms of each other must appear as incommensurable, and thus no rational choice is possible..
If theories really were nothing but verbal expressions, what possible reason could any one statement give way to another? Any one statement can stand alongside any other statement without ever being challenged, unless of course we arbitrarily decide to do so for some arbitrary reason, such as “agreement”. This is what Feyerabend showed.
Yet all of the above does not affect the refutability of a theory and the commensurability of rival theories on the entirely different level of applying these theories in the reality of individual human action. On this level, it is impossible for two rival theories to be incommensurable. Indeed, one could not even state that any single theory was irrefutable or any two theories were incommensurable and in what way unless one were to presuppose a common categorical framework to serve as a basis for such a statement.
And this practical grounding is ironically the sole reason why scientific progress is possible! The historical fact that scientific progress has been made is testament to the existence of a common, objective standard in reality within which the concept of progress (as well as retrogression) is given a reality.
19. November 2016 at 16:17
In the youtube I mention above, Summers also mentions BoJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s pledge to buy Japanese government bonds, 10 year, at 0%.
This is a fascinating policy tool, forgotten in the U.S but used through WWII to 1951.
19. November 2016 at 16:44
Scott,
I think you and others err in continuing to interpret the election in ad hominem or emotional terms. This is certainly the interpretation the progressive media and politicians would like us to believe, but in fact the correct way to interpret the election is a widespread rejection of the liberal agenda.
19. November 2016 at 16:55
dtoh,
It’s interesting you say the election suggests a widespread rejection of the liberal agenda, especially considering that Trump didn’t even win the popular vote. Also, Obama is somewhat popular, so most people don’t seem to hold his relatively liberal agenda against him.
By the way, which liberal agenda are you talking about? Trump has presented himself as an economic liberal in many respects, wanting a trillion dollars in deficit spending for infrastructure, for example, and favoring protectionist policies that unions have long liked. Also, Trump has repeatedly promised no cuts to Social Security or Medicare. He’s about as big government as one gets in the US.
What the election says to me is that traditional American conservatism has been rejected. There is now no party for the George Wills, Mitt Romneys, or Bushes of the world.
Bernie Sanders polled better than Hillary against Trump, consistently during the primaries among general election voters polled, and obviously outperformed in the primaries for a 73 year-old self-admitted socialist with no charisma.
I think many conservatives live in a dream world, but many have started to wake up to the nightmare they unwittingly helped create.
19. November 2016 at 17:25
What the election says to me is that traditional American conservatism has been rejected. There is now no party for the George Wills, Mitt Romneys, or Bushes of the world.
Romney and Bush the Elder are capable men with certain virtues. They’re also opportunists for whom issues are fungible. They call him ‘windsock Romney’ for a reason. As for Bush the Younger, he’s a very competitive man (“If his father owned the biggest junkyard in town, he’d want to own the biggest junkyard in two towns”). He has commitments, not convictions. (He ran for president pushing for an unfunded expansion of Medicare and his signature legislation his first year in office was yet another federal initiative in primary and secondary schooling – co-sponsored by … Ted Kennedy).
As for what has and has not been rejected, get back to us when the Democratic Party controls something in excess of 4 state governments.
19. November 2016 at 17:48
Scott Freelander:
“It’s interesting you say the election suggests a widespread rejection of the liberal agenda, especially considering that Trump didn’t even win the popular vote.”
It is less interesting that you don’t seem to understand that Clinton received millions of invalid, but nevertheless counted, votes from dead people and illegal immigrants.
It is also less interesting that you don’t seem to realize that Clinton lost the overwhelming number of counties across the country.
Finally, it is less interesting that Clinton’s popular vote was numerically equivalent to one small county in California where she won by 1 million votes.
In the overall, legal voter based, country-wide turnout, the political establishment, which was liberal, was resoundingly rejected.
The founders instituted the electoral college to prevent a few populous cities from determining who governs the entire nation.
Disclaimer: The above is not an endorsement or a sanction. Democracy is just a watered down Communism.
What, did you believe that the tiny minority of wealthy elites, who control almost the entire media, who are Clinton supporters, represent the entire country?
19. November 2016 at 18:35
@Scott Freelander
Valid points, I would just say.
1. First, 90 to 95% of the electorate voted in the same way they always do so most of the change is at the margin.
2. There is no such thing as “winning” the popular vote anymore than there is winning the “runs” game in baseball. There is no such game. If there were, people would play the game differently.
3. The fact that a candidate as defective Trump (albeit against a defective opponent) did so well is perhaps indicative of very strong policy preferences held by the electorate.
4. Not sure infrastructure spending is a good litmus test for the conservative/liberal spectrum.
5. Not cutting Medicare/Social Security is no indicator for political views. It might be a proxy for intelligence….only a moron would campaign on platform of cutting Medicare or Social Security.
5. Seems to me if you boil it down to one issue, it’s the size of government, and a candidate’s position on taxes is a pretty darn clear indicator or where they stand.
That said, I do agree that there was a very clear rejection of the policies favoring the rentier class, but IMHO those policies were always a perversion of conservatism (and something traditionally pursued by both parties).
19. November 2016 at 19:54
Way OT but…
“The 1951 Accord, also known simply as the Accord, was an agreement between the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve that restored independence to the Fed.
During World War II, the Federal Reserve pledged to keep the interest rate on Treasury bills fixed at 0.375 percent. It continued to support government borrowing after the war ended, despite the fact that the Consumer Price Index rose 14% in 1947 and 8% in 1948, and the economy was in recession. President Harry S. Truman in 1948 replaced the then-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Marriner Eccles with Thomas B. McCabe for opposing this policy, although Eccles’s term on the board continued for three more years. The reluctance of the Federal Reserve to continue monetizing the deficit became so great that, in 1951, President Truman invited the entire Federal Open Market Committee to the White House to resolve their differences. William McChesney Martin, then Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, was the principal mediator. Three weeks later, he was named Chairman of the Federal Reserve, replacing McCabe.
—30—-
How do you like that? Truman “replaced” Eccles despite him having three more years on his term. This to keep the Fed monetizing the debt, when inflation was running at 8%.
This tells you how ossified and small-c conservative monetary policy has become in the U.S. The Fed has bulked up, created a hoary aura on virtuous independence, converted the field of monetarism into something Milton Friedman would not recognize, with some sort of Austrian-infected sclerosis.
Today Haruhiko Kuroda is holding interest rates on 10-year Japanese government bonds at zero.
Lord Adair Turner says all those tales you read about Japan being so in debt? The government of Japan will own the debt of Japan by 2020, through the central bank and through pension funds.
There are valuable avenues here for Market Monetarists to explore.
19. November 2016 at 20:23
Scott, I’m not a troll. I’ve been a faithful reader of this blog for years and years. Notice I’m not here to challenge you on your economics, your area of expertise. I, for the most part, like your economics. You know more about the field than I do and I see no solid grounds to challenge you on any thing. I see no thing I would really want to deeply challenge you there.
But having a favorite philosopher when you are not yourself an educated philosopher is kind of like having a favorite economist when you are not yourself an economist. You’re not necessarily going to even understand what’s being said. Rorty challenges the foundational possibility of truth, of knowledge itself. If that isn’t nonsense, I don’t know what is. Whatever you feel about Major_Freedom, he’s actually doing good work here. Relativists in general are deeply vulnerable to the argument MF makes in his last post (If all truth is relative to some factor, how does this statement justify itself outside that relativity?), and Rorty never did make an attempt to address it.
Finally, saying epistemology as a field has led no where is nothing but a cliche. The modern world is built on it. The question of justification is how you get from Aristotle’s discomfort with empiricism to modern science. As a practitioner of what is supposed to be a science yourself, you should not like anyone who takes a blaise attitude towards justification. It’s the root of what you do.
Philosophers aren’t rock stars. Logic means something and its application to various fields is how you get epistemology in the first place (how do we distinguish between ‘A’ and ‘Not A’? We find grounds on which to judge the statements, which is an epistemological question). It’s not a fruitless field, it’s the single richest fruit human kind has ever picked.
19. November 2016 at 21:24
“We find grounds on which to judge the statements, which is an epistemological question). It’s not a fruitless field, it’s the single richest fruit human kind has ever picked.”
Precisely. Exploration of the deepest seas, the highest mountains on Earth, and the furthest stretches of outer space, for all the wonder that lies out there, will for us humans be intellectually stimulating and beneficial to us primarily if not exclusively by way of enhancing our knowledge of who we are and our place in the universe.
The undiscovered country is and always will be consciousness.
19. November 2016 at 23:50
MF – you seem like a pretty sharp guy but then you make claims like there are millions of invalid votes. Do you have any justification for this claim?
20. November 2016 at 00:11
Scott Freelander – philosophy is meaningless? Trying to grasp what you mean here… Politics is philosophy right? Ethics is philosophy? These things are meaningless?
20. November 2016 at 04:09
Commenters hating both on Rorty and philosophy should at least make up their mind. Rorty was one of the big anti-philosophers in the tradition of Wittgenstein. Even an attitude like not to be bothered with philosophy at all, Rorty would have liked. The whole point of “Achieving our Country” is to talk the left out of philosophy. Sure, anti-philosophy is still philosophy, in the sense that you do it by writing books or essays not by experiments in the laboratory. It’s more like software engineering.
Prof. Sumner,
it’s interesting that starting with the same utilitarian intuitions you can end up a libertarian or a nationalist. In your case the important step seems to me that you insert the strong empirical claim that people are mostly selfish. Although utilitarianism would allow (demand) draconian forms of redistribution, you think, it just can’t be done. You allow for progressive taxation and low wage subsidies but that’s basically it.
Rorty on the other hand thinks that economic policy based on libertarianism creates too much inequality (He doesn’t buy into Milton Friedmans slogan “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”) Further Rorty thinks, that people are not only selfish, but also deep into group identities. They want to be proud of something which is bigger than they themselves and their families.
Based on these two assumptions more redistribution policies are necessary and possible. The mistake of the left is to think the beneficiary of such a policy could be the whole human race. People are not proud to be humans, they are proud to be Japanese, German, Irish, British or American.
So basically Rorty is telling the left, the only way to get more redistribution is by becoming a national left. Any form of international utilitarianism (be it libertarianism or marxism) just can’t be done. Not doing anything, will give you right wing nationalism, because people will not accept that all or most of the growth goes to their own cosmopolitan elites and developing countries. Since right wing nationalism can only be fought by left wing nationalism, you end up with Trump vs Bernie.
I don’t agree with Rorty at all, but I think your assumption that people are mostly selfish is too optimistic 🙂
20. November 2016 at 05:18
Scott J.,
Philiosphy is useless. It doesn’t matter that the scientific method evolved from philosophy. I could teach a child to use the scientific method without introducing any philosophy at all, and that child could then do science, which is the sole method for discovering anything like definitive truth.
I think philosphy is mental masturbation. Philosphers address questions that can only be answered scientifically, or the answers to which come down to subjective preferencem The latter applies to ethics, for example.
And no, politics is not philosophy. Politics simply involves the resolution of conflicting interests. Just because political science curricula include political philosophy doesn’t mean it is useful, or relevant in any respect, other than historically.
20. November 2016 at 05:37
dtoh,
You’re giving voters much too much credit. Personality often looms larger than issues, at least with swing/occassional voters. How else can you reconcile the fact that Obama is more popular than not, if you believe the polls, and was leading Trump by 12 in a hypothetical race, but Clinton barely wins the popular vote? Of course, Clinton’s scandals hurt too, but at root, she just wasn’t a likeable candidate. She didn’t mind running as largely trying to continue to push the Obama agenda on most issues.
Also, polls consistently show respondents generally favor Democratic policies, but Democrats are too timid in pursuing what they argue is in the interests of the American people.
And regarding Trump, big infrastructure projects paid for entirely with deficit spending, in conjunction with huge tax cuts isn’t fiscally conservative by any definition. Not even the best Keynesian argument could justify it. And this will occur, if you believe Trump, without significant offsetting cuts elsewhere.
Also, once again, protectionist policies were long liberal policies, being very pro-union, and every extremist liberal state I can think of had protectionist policies.
I think that to the degree Trumpism lasts, it represents political realignment. This is the adoption of more European-style far right nationalist ideology, to the degree that there’s any ideology at all. It’s just stupid, contradictory rah rah cheering for one’s own team, stupidly believing that macroeconomics involves zero-sum games.
20. November 2016 at 07:48
Jim. You’ve entrusted your party to a crazy man, who is picking crazy advisers. That usually does no end well.
Scott, I don’t understand opera, so I don’t comment on it. I certainly don’t say “I think opera is stupid, because I don’t understand it.”
Dtoh, The why did Hillary get almost 2 million more votes that Trump? Why not interpret the election as “rigged to thwart the will of the voter” by the electoral college? I am not saying that’s my interpretation, but it would seem just as sensible as yours, given that 95% of voters voted for candidates that want truly MASSIVE increases in government spending. I thought that was “liberal” or am I just being “emotional”. And the winner is a guy who
s top strategist sees FDR’s New Deal as the model. Is that what you mean by conservative? Or are you referring to the protectionism and immigrant bashing?
Your mistake is to assume that elections are public opinion polls. They are not. If they were, then there would be no Electoral College. Elections are about power, not public opinion.
Michael, Your reply just makes me more certain that you don’t understand Rorty. He’s not saying there is no such thing as truth. Truth is a label we attach to ideas that are accepted. He’s operating well within the philosophical tradition of pragmatism. When he criticizes epistemology he is criticizing the search for the one true method of establishing truth. It does not exist, and instead we have a vast number of methods, of greater or lesser persuasive power. He understands that science is a social activity, which unavoidably utilizes many methods of persuasion.
I have read criticism of Rorty by other philosophers, and I find their arguments to be less persuasive that Rorty’s. My approach to economics is based on Rorty’s ideas about methodology.
20. November 2016 at 08:18
OK, let’s try a different tack, then:
What criteria do you use to decide that Rorty’s arguments are more persuasive than those of other philosophers?
20. November 2016 at 08:29
Michael, Your reply just makes me more certain that you don’t understand Rorty.
You tried this gambit when people chuckled at your affection for contemporary art.
20. November 2016 at 09:26
Scott,
My point about philosophy is that there’s no room for it, because we do have the scientific method and it is the best/only way to establish the truth. Short of being able to conduct clean, controlled experiments, we do have the science of making guesses, with probability theory and statistics. If you want to say mathematics and statistics are within philosophy, fine, but that is just semantics and such semantics don’t requirw the existence of philosophy departments. Likewise with pragmatism. Label any approaches to finding truth and conveying it “pragmatism” and call it philosophy. The conclusion doesn’t change. I would be willing to bet most people who put this “pragmatism” into action, be it Rorty’s or what have you, are not philosophers.
I will close by saying I don’t think mathematics is philosophy. Mathmatics is formal apriori application representations of empirical facts. At root is simple arithmetic, which was presumably developed for basic accounting purposes, and for the purpose of the development of calendars to help aid farmers. Theoretical physics and computer science seem to be continuing a gradual convergence with pure mathematics, which I think may reflect the fact that mathematics, most of which is abstracted from simple arithemetic, may in fact share all permutations of its possible development with those of physics, and in that sense may in fact be in reality a single subject of study. There are certain areas of set theory I’d personally exclude, but there seems to be much truth in this.
But, even short of math essentially very much being inseperable from reality itself, mathematics is, at root, an empirical endeavor, with some areas of development being useful, versus others.
So, to be explicit, my perspective is that there is no difference between the mathematics I accept, and scientific empiricism.
20. November 2016 at 10:47
Like MichaelM says, R. Rorty was a minor rated philosopher who apparently, like most of his 20th century colleagues, rejected the idea of an objective truth (the Platonic Ideal) in favor of relativism (see the Wikipedia link to his name) yet complains that Trump-liking supporters will be a step backwards. If there’s no evil, as Rorty would claim, no such thing as objectively bad, why would a world where n****r and k**e is common, and women are groped and leered at, be so bad?
20. November 2016 at 11:05
‘Jim. You’ve entrusted your party to a crazy man…’
Where did you get that idea, Scott. Unless Jim has recently registered as a Republican, he’s an Independent and has been since I first encountered him nearly 20 years ago.
You need to reevaluate your assumptions.
20. November 2016 at 14:46
Michael, Coherence.
Art, I have no affection for contemporary art, at least as the term is usually applied (painting, sculpture, etc.)
Scott and Ray, Life’s too short to try to explain philosophy to those that seem to lack any knowledge of the field.
Patrick, If Jim doesn’t like the GOP, then let him say so.
20. November 2016 at 15:11
Steve J:
For the millions of invalid votes, you can research what Greg Phillips of the VoteFraud.org organization found. His research shows approximately 3 million votes for Clinton were from either dead people or illegals or some other fraudulent source.
20. November 2016 at 15:24
Sumner wrote:
“Michael, Your reply just makes me more certain that you don’t understand Rorty. He’s not saying there is no such thing as truth. Truth is a label we attach to ideas that are accepted.”
Not quite. Rorty argued that objective truth cannot be known, that the only truth people can know, is what is generally accepted.
You ought to actually critique Rorty’s arguments for self-referential consistency.
If objective truth according to Rorty cannot known, that all claims to truth are at best what is generally accepted, then what about THAT argument? If Rorty is right, then he cannot claim to know the reality of what others are thinking, or whether or not they are indeed thinking of some objective truths. That his claim can only be true by way of being contingent on general acceptance. But when he first wrote his thesis, he was the sole person to have that thought, which means by his own standard, what he thought was not even true. Yet he continued to push for it with the intention of it becoming generally accepted. But why would he push for any theory that at the time was false by his own standard?
The fact is that Rorty’s thesis contradicts itself. He cannot even claim to know what people are thinking of when they think they are thinking objective truth, because that itself would be an objective truth claim about what actual people are actually thinking totally apart from what they may happen to believe.
20. November 2016 at 15:41
Sumner, given how the overwhelming majority of people reject or do not believe in NGPLT, please explain how, given your agreement with Rorty’s thesis on knowable truths of reality, that the Fed’s failure to practice NGDPLT is responsible for anything, good or bad,in the history of the world.
It’s like fish in a barrel on this blog.
20. November 2016 at 15:48
Scott,
I didn’t ask you to explain philosophy. However, I will now ask you to demonstrate the utility of philosophy. Why doesn’t the private sector hire many philosophers if they have much to say that is of unique value? As an economist, can you demonstrate the value of philosophy using what you consider to be relatively efficient markets?
And don’t just mention books sales and similar media sales. Some psychics sell millions of books too.
20. November 2016 at 16:03
Scott, you said,
“Your mistake is to assume that elections are public opinion polls. They are not. If they were, then there would be no Electoral College. Elections are about power, not public opinion.”
I agree completely. Perhaps I should have said,
“the election is a widespread rejection of the liberal agenda by those with the power to impact the election.”
I assumed that was obvious and implied.
20. November 2016 at 16:59
‘Patrick, If Jim doesn’t like the GOP, then let him say so.’
Jim said nothing one way or the other about ‘liking’ the Republican Party. Nor have I. We’re simply pointing out facts that are real, whether anyone likes them or not.
20. November 2016 at 18:11
Scott Freelander:
“Philiosphy is useless. It doesn’t matter that the scientific method evolved from philosophy. I could teach a child to use the scientific method without introducing any philosophy at all, and that child could then do science, which is the sole method for discovering anything like definitive truth.”
With comments like this, Freelander, it is especially true that philosophy can help with fixing your feelings of being lost and afraid.
Sole method? Are you sure? How? Any method, however successful, cannot prove itself. Have you ever read Godel?
It matters very much that the modern scientific method derives from and is fully grounded on philosophical reflection.
The modern scientific method was formalized only recently, during the early 20th century. If people thought like you did, then it would never have arisen in the first place, since it was a philosophically motivated revolution in the history of science. In other words, it was precisely philosophical investigation that is responsible for you to sit there and claim that philosophical investigation is useless.
“I think philosphy is mental masturbation. Philosphers address questions that can only be answered scientifically….”
Better to mentally masturbate than to force a life of intellectual celibacy and stagnation.
Philosophers do not only address questions that can be addressed via the modern scientific method. For example, one question that the method cannot answer, is the justification and foundation of the method itself.
Another phenomena the method has not, and logically cannot, and never will address, is the nature of individual action. How do I know this? I know this by the structure of and presumptions inherent in the modern scientific method. Certain truths about our minds can only known by masturbating it, to use your phrasing.
The claim that the the modern scientific method is the *sole* method for discovering definitive truths, is itself a philosophical, not scientific claim. For the modern scientific method does not contain any such presumption or necessity. The modern scientific method rests on skepticism, of theories that must in principle be falsifiable or else they are not scientific claims and not capable of being true knowledge.
The claim that the modern scientific method is the sole method for establishing truths, then, is a claim that is beyond the very standard your claim is the sole method.
Perhaps you should give your mind a wank every know and then to keep it active and capable of performing?
“…or the answers to which come down to subjective preference. The latter applies to ethics, for example.”
A common mistake made by those who do not think philosophically. There is in fact an objective ethics that only philosophical reflection can elucidate.
“And no, politics is not philosophy. Politics simply involves the resolution of conflicting interests.”
That is also a philosohical argument. There is also the argument that politics is something other than simply “conflict resolution”. Politics can also be regarded as the study of how all humans ought to cooperate with other to reach preferred outcomes. This does not require any assumption of inherent comflict between people. You are relying on philosophical ideas created in the past by claiming politics is what you claim it is.
The modern scientific method has not shown that politics is what you say it is. So no, your claim is philosophical and very much subject to critical scrutiny. It is not immune. It actually rests on shaky assumptions.
Politics is not philosophy per se, no, but all politics today rests entirely on philosophical ideas created in the past for you to use today. And no doubt politics will change in the future in part because of new or regurgitated philosophical ideas.
“Just because political science curricula include political philosophy doesn’t mean it is useful, or relevant in any respect, other than historically.”
The claim that all political inquiry is only relevant or useful in the historical sense is also itself a philosophical claim. And ironically, philosophy can show that historicism refutes itself.
Freelander you are someone who I think needs to study philosophy and not be intimidated by it. Your intellectual bigotry is holding you back.
20. November 2016 at 18:59
Major.Freedom,
I think the fundamental laws of nature are all that’s important. I think everything else is derived from those fundamental laws, which I don’t necessarily think are unchanging, and have no reason to believe will ever be known to us in entirety, if that’s even a relevant way to look at things.
I accept uncertainty and am completely comfortable with it. You should really stick to philosophy, because your amateur psychology-based assumptions are just that.
This is the primary reason we disagree on economics. Because you seem to like to be philosophy-heavy and disavow empiricism in economics, you find some value in organizations such as the Mises Institute. I think it is about as useful as the Psychic Friends Network, though less entertaining.
20. November 2016 at 20:09
Scott, there are many coherent theories, how do you distinguish between multiple different, internally coherent theories which are mutually exclusive?
20. November 2016 at 21:19
Scott Freelander:
“I think the fundamental laws of nature are all that’s important. I think everything else is derived from those fundamental laws, which I don’t necessarily think are unchanging, and have no reason to believe will ever be known to us in entirety, if that’s even a relevant way to look at things.”
This statement is rather incoherent. The meaning of fundamental, natural laws are, among other things, that they are necessarily unchanging. If they are changing then they are not fundamental laws. Moreover, if it were indeed the case that there were no such thing as unchanging laws, then the scientific method would not only not be “the sole method” for discovering truths, but it would itself become incoherent because the very concepts of “falsification” and “confirmation” require and presume unchanging laws. In other words, of the “laws” of the universe were not unchanging, if they were changing, then it would be meaningless to say that a theory proposed yesterday was today “falsified” or “confirmed”. All you could say or think was that yesterday B followed A, but today B did not follow A, or perhaps today B followed again, but nothing else would follow. There would be no “falsification” or “confirmation” of any theories.
“I accept uncertainty and am completely comfortable with it. You should really stick to philosophy, because your amateur psychology-based assumptions are just that.”
How cute. You accept uncertainty? I don’t think so. The way you described philosophy above, and the modern scientific method, no sir, you were quite certain in how you think. You are certain that philosophy is useless. You are certain that the modern scientific method is the sole method to discover truths of reality.
Certainly wrong yes, but nevertheless certain are you.
“This is the primary reason we disagree on economics.”
Precisely! You disrepect and look down on the fundamental philosophical principles of knowledge, and of logic. Have you ever spent a day subjecting your own ideas to the standards they presume and profess?
That is where your ideas go astray. I see it all the time. You have all these certainties and convictions, bigoted nonetheless, where instead of understanding, you hold your nose and with arrogance and hubris you pretend to be above what is in fact crucial to any knowledge.
“Because you seem to like to be philosophy-heavy and disavow empiricism in economics, you find some value in organizations such as the Mises Institute. I think it is about as useful as the Psychic Friends Network, though less entertaining.”
See, your problem is that you have confused me with someone who would be hoodwinked into believing that churlish comments can substitute for substantive argument, debate, and idea sharing/testing.
I am wiping the floor with your claims here and yet you double down and pretend you don’t need anything better than what you have. Again, this is just you limiting yourself unjustifiably.
21. November 2016 at 10:40
Michael, I find his theories to be more coherent. I think they best describe how real world groups of intellectuals (Including scientists) argue with each other, and try to persuade. And it also matches to the sorts of methodology that I find most persuasive. It you take my recent book on the Great Depression, I think I utilize a Rortian approach in trying to establish the truth.
21. November 2016 at 11:06
Scott,
While your progress in clearly arguing for a return to basic fundamentals in economics is admirable and should be applauded, I think advancing the football for market monetarism in terms of formal theory would be more useful. Formalized models that fit the data have a way of ultimately conquering all.
21. November 2016 at 19:33
“Formalized models that fit the data have a way of ultimately conquering all.”
Does it make a difference that this has never happened in economics? Every model that appeared for a time to “fit the data” has always without exception proved to be incapable of continuing to fit the data in the future. Nobody has discovered any “economic constants” the way physicists, chemists, and engineers have found them via the modern scientific method.
Actual economic science teaches us that no such constants exist, for the process of finding constants presupposes non-constancy in the PEOPLE doing the researching, i.e. learning and changing in unpredictsble ways with respect to the outcomes of the research, and it is the people who are the very subject matter of economics.
22. November 2016 at 03:16
Major.Freedom,
You’re correct to say it hasn’t happened in economics enough. There is a shocking lack of consensus among some even on matters such as sticky wages. Too often, it seems, economists can’t even agree on what the facts are.
I’ve only taken undergraduate courses in econ, so I can’t comment much on advanced econ education, but there seems to be no effort to test holistic understanding of macroeconomics at the undergrad level, nor any effort to comprehensibly test a list of facts. At least that seemed true 20 years ago. There was no promotion of a deep understandning at all. Also, the approach to teaching the subject made little sense to me.
That said, there are commenters on this blog working to mathematically codify market monetarism in some interesting ways.
22. November 2016 at 06:49
Does it make a difference that this has never happened in economics? Every model that appeared for a time to “fit the data” has always without exception proved to be incapable of continuing to fit the data in the future.
Reading the two of you is a bit like contemplating the Iran-Iraq War, but funnier.
22. November 2016 at 11:09
Scott, You said:
“Formalized models”
That’s the problem. What does that mean?
22. November 2016 at 12:46
Scott,
You have some occasional commenters working on some things. One, antischiff isn’t an economist, but he’s doing some very interesting things in the form of software. He’s basically building a very explicit form of market monetarism into a portfolio stress tester that will also make implicit market NGDP forecasts explicit.
I’m starting to add some ideas to this approach, because he’s literally starting almost from scratch. Very simple, even stupid things like expressing NGDP in terms of (Sm/Dm)RGDP, where Sm = supply of money and Dm = demand for money, helps to keep thinking clear and allow for some insight.
As antischiff says, Einstein helped remake physics with what is relatively very simple math. It was a lot of simple algebraic and calculus manipulation to get to the basic insights.
Also, Jason Smith, who also isn’t an economist, is doing very interesting things by reformulating economics in terms of information transfer. I have no idea if he’s right, but his formulation offers ready explanations for how a market of irrational actors can make rational decisions, for example. His model’s predictions actually probably fit New Keynesianism best.
While many from outside the field have tried and failed to make significant contributions to economics, there are advantages to lacking the shortcomings of the way economics seems to be taught. I’m increasingly convinced that by starting over in some ways, better models can be built that avoid the dead-end mistake in formulation made by past theorists. It appears that economics could possibly be a much more precise science.
22. November 2016 at 12:49
By the way, I know you may laugh, and perhaps everyone will. And maybe none of us will succeed. It’s much too early for me to tell. However, I have a feeling we already have something very important to say formally.
23. November 2016 at 08:19
Scott, Good luck.
26. November 2016 at 20:59
ssumner wrote:
Jim. You’ve entrusted your party to a crazy man…
My party? Shirley, you jest!
Patrick, If Jim doesn’t like the GOP, then let him say so.
Why? Has a declaration of tribal loyalty been added as a requirement to comment here?
Patrick is right, I’ve been an independent all my life, never eligible to vote in a single primary ever. At first it was just a temperamental thing, being naturally reluctant to join large groups.
But in recent years I’ve followed the psychological and brain research on partisanship, and it really is alarming. Yes, the 30-points-of-IQ-loss, and all the derangement syndromes, and automatic assumptions that life-long independents who link to objective empirical data are members of the evil enemy tribe, are all bad enough.
But really *disturbing* is the brain science research that says when political partisans see politicians telling lies they get an endorphin rush, not from attacking the other side’s lies but from believing their own. Yes, partisans in a real sense actually get addicted to believing their own lies, it makes them feel sooooo good. This is where honesty dies and wars come from.
And there is no cure for it, this being hard-wired into us all. I can’t tell how many times I’ve pointed this out in conversation and had the other people there say, “Yes, it’s so true, that’s exactly how **the other side** is!!”
I’ve never yet heard anyone say, “Hey, that’s how I am!”
There being no cure, the sole effective remedy is to admit, “Yes, that’s how I am when I’m partisan about anything”, and not wanting that, willfully choosing to be ideologically non-ideological, partisanly non-partisan.
Which is actually fun, once one gets there. One misses the tribal drug rush now and then, but gaining the freedom to look at the US political system with a clear eye like it was maybe a 17th Century Italian one, can be both intellectually rewarding and very amusing. And watching political arguments becomes much more fun.
So here is my declaration of tribal loyalty, as may be required: Ideologically and partisanly non-partisan. For the record.