4: Timur Kuran - The Economics of Revolution and Mass Deception: Difference between revisions

'''Eric Weinstein''': —I think there’s some contradictions that we legitimately, even lies, I talk about load-bearing fictions.

'''Eric Weinstein''': We have to have some number of load-bearing fictions in any society because you can’t actually just do everything in broad daylight and hope that everything that we want can be harmonized. Some people are gonna have to accept that there are trade-offs who can’t intellectually accept that there are trade-offs, and they will require load-bearing fictions. For example, we do convict innocent people using our system of justice. And there’s nothing magical about 12 people on a jury being able to decide what actually happened. But if we don’t have some kind of mysticism around the wisdom of a jury of our peers, we won’t be able to mete out almost any justice at all. So I don’t think that we can hope for a sort of child’s vision of an honest society. But what I find really impressive is the rent-seeking aspect of keeping it so expensive to investigate something that it’s impossible. So you talked about a system of selective pressures where if you raise certain questions, you won’t be employed and therefore through directed survivor bias, there’s nobody at the top of a profession who will speak about something openly and in public. One of the things I’ve been curious about, my wife has a concept that she’s talked about called economics squared, the economics of economists. So economists are famous for training their lens on everyone else except for themselves. They’ll talk about what are the economics of a physician in trying to figure out how to allocate scarce organs, very upsetting things. And the culture of economics, for those who don’t know, is that economists don’t blink when they talk about things that are incredibly upsetting. They’re part of a technocratic class who considers emotions to be beneath them. The one place that I can find where they cannot actually have an honest conversation in general is if you say, “Let’s talk about the economics of being a macroeconomist. You know, if you’re so good at understanding the economy, you should be able to trade in the market, which is relatively complete because there are instruments of every kind to place any bet. Why are you asking for a grant? Because obviously, if you’re any good, you should be rich—not because ‘if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich’ works in general, but you happen to be concerned about the one thing where that would be the proof of concept.” Can economics squared be born?