Conspiracy Theory

I did want to talk to people about responsible conspiracy theorizing. That is, in the minds of many, people believe that conspiracy theorists are people like Alex Jones, people who are spouting all sorts of crazy ideas-some of which might have some grain of truth in them, but in general it feels like an exercise in talking to the tin foil hat crowd.

Now, I don’t know much about Alex Jones; perhaps he’s better than I think he is, but what I want to talk about is a different kind of conspiracy theorizing....

So the first thing I want is to be relatively clear: I’m somebody who believes that there is a fair amount of organization behind the scenes-usually of a relatively low level of organization-that is unknown to the people who are watching TV or listening to, let’s say, NPR on the radio. And at various times I’ve dug more deeply into various stories, and so I want you to have some idea of my history in the space.

In the 1980s and 1990s, I became very active in believing that the so called STEM shortage of scientists and engineers that was claimed by the policy research and analysis division of the National Science Foundation, was in fact a conspiracy in order to make life easier for employers who would be facing American scientists with an ability to bargain, and make higher wage demands; and that the National Academy of Sciences and National Science Foundation interceded on the behalf of employers, which was tampering in the labor market in an absolutely vital sector-resulting in the Immigration Act of 1990, or IMACT90, as it was called.

At that point, I also became aware of what I have termed the Borjas Rectangle Theory: that is that employers generally, in free market economies, when they’re complaining about labor shortages, are actually trying to transfer wealth from labor to capital-complaining instead that there is a small inefficiency that needs to be rectified, which we might [in turn] call the Harberger Triangle. So that is, employers claim that there’s a small inefficiency, but in [point of] fact they’re seeking large transfer payments from the vulnerable to the well-heeled. I also believe that NAFTA and the Free Trade Agreement from the 1990s, was a kind of conspiracy supported by the economics establishment of the United States; that they knew that in fact free trade was not a freebie. It was not in fact a rising tide that lifted all boats, but was in fact, again, a transfer, which was claimed to be a pure good for everyone. This is the difference between something called the Kaldor-Hicks objective function and the Pareto objective function.

I also believed that String Theory was largely a desperation measure in physics that was sold to the world to buy time, when in fact the field of theoretical physics was failing. I also claimed that the Boskin Commission, formed by Packwood and Moynihan in the mid-1990s, was a kind of conspiracy to transfer-actually-a trillion dollars, by using the fact that Social Security payments are indexed to inflation, as well as tax brackets being indexed to inflation; so that if you could show that the CPI was overstated and you could reduce the CPI, you could transfer millions without having to touch the so called “third rail” of American politics.

This brings us to the two trading fortunes in New York City that, during the first decade of the new millennium, made no sense to me. And those were Bernie Madoff, then referred to as the “Jewish T-Bill”, and Jeffrey Epstein. In the case of Madoff, I made a wrong guess. I believed that Bernie Madoff was frontrunning a traditional business that he held using actual orders that he knew were being placed, and in his hedge fund [he] was effectively cheating-based on the inside information he had from a legitimate business, in an illegitimate business. I goofed, and I was wrong. In fact, he was operating a pyramid scheme. It didn’t occur to me.

Eric Weinstein on The Portal Ep #25

See Also

• The Portal Ep. 25
• Responsible Conspiracy Theorizing