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

'''Eric Weinstein''': well,

'''Timur Kuran''': because they would lose, they would lose jobs. You would get cheaper labor from

'''Eric Weinstein''': Doesn't anybody know any immigrants? Does anybody know any brown people, but the idea that it's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. It's like some white person's crazy idea of what restrictionism is about, it has to do with pushing out labor supply curves. It's it's,

'''Timur Kuran''': this is

'''Eric Weinstein''': or diluting the vote,

'''Timur Kuran''': this should be part of the discussion part of an intelligent discussion that we can have. And reasonable people could can agree can disagree on what the optimal trade off is,

'''Eric Weinstein''': right

'''Timur Kuran''': And ultimately, reasonable people who disagree can come to a compromise. You're not going to get 100% of what you're looking for. You're not going to get 100% of what you're going to come somewhere in the middle, we're going to have a national policy. And that's a national policy that can have some dynamism to it every four years. We can talk about it again, we can move the needle a little bit depending on where we really this is the way we can do it. But we have massive massive preference falsification on this simply because people are afraid of being called xenophobes. That's, that's

'''Eric Weinstein''': you want to know how crazy

'''Timur Kuran''': and we have massive knowledge falsification which goes along with this. People cannot because you're afraid of being of being put in the wrong box in terms of your preferences of whether you're a xenophile or a xenophobe, you don't. You don't say things that should be obvious to everybody that there are going to be major effects on the labor market that are not going to be distributed evenly. There are going to be some there are going to be perhaps a major owners of big factories are going to gain a lot from the falling wage rates and a lot of people living in the inner cities are going to be hurt by by this, this is something you cannot say because you'll be labeled

'''Eric Weinstein''': I've already realized something

'''Eric Weinstein''': You want to know how crazy this is? I use the phrase doesn't anybody know any brown people? Doesn't anybody know any foreigners? I'm going to be excoriated for that because I didn't say don't any white people know. It's like, even when I'm speaking glibly,

'''Timur Kuran''': yes.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Like the cost of any stupid aspect of phraseology is this ridiculous drumming up by the people who want us not to talk about this which I think is for economic reasons, I think people are, who are in control are terrified that they will come. They will encounter the idea that in general, Americans are pro-immigration and want it at lower levels. We're open to foreigners, we think it's a vibrant part of our society. But we're not stupid. We understand that if you have free health care for all free education for all, you know, nearly limitless opportunity to cross borders. You cannot do all of these things. We don't want our votes diluted. There's no ability to have the conversation. And so a lot of what ''The Portal'' is about is we've got to break out of this enforced conversation of morons, to some place where we can actually potentially get enough resolution to say, oh, here's what I'm really at about, I don't think we should be blocked to the, you know, the most dynamic people coming from overseas. We need some ability to admit refugees look at the people who've been, you know, at death's door and we've saved it's an important part of revitalizing the country, we have to be able to talk with specificity. And what I see is a media that doesn't have any interest in this long form kind of interaction, simply because it's trying to enforce low resolution speech.

'''Timur Kuran''': And that low resolution speech involves to put it in concrete terms. If you want restrictions on immigration you're for cages. Well, most Americans are not for caging children either. They they're appalled by that. They would like more orderly forms of restrictions, more humane form of forms of restrictions. But we cannot get to that point. If we cannot have if reasonable people cannot have conversations, which are going to involve some disagreement if they cannot have conversations that are probed by the media, so that the underlying assumptions are identified

'''Eric Weinstein''': without the gotchas

'''Timur Kuran''': without the gotchas the underlying assumptions are underlying they are identified. The trade offs are brought out, the knowledge on on which people's preferences are based. Those are scrutinized. There are many myths about what the composition of immigration is. So that we actually are we can we can we can get rid of some of our myths and start talking about these issues on the basis of facts. Some facts,

'''Eric Weinstein''': so what is it

'''Timur Kuran''': We cannot we cannot do this, if we can't speak freely

'''Eric Weinstein''': Well, so, and the thing that I don't understand is the universities. So you're, you're sitting there, Duke, you're part of this archipelago of higher education as a major node on it. What the heck happened that our universities became places where you can't explore ideas as opposed to the citadels in which one can? Or am I wrong about that?

'''Timur Kuran''': This is this is has been a slow process and I think it has to do with Well, meaning it started with well meaning policies to help integrate groups that had been excluded

'''Eric Weinstein''': they'd been insular

'''Timur Kuran''': the the universities had been insular, the universities had had explicitly excluded certain certain groups, for example, African Americans. And when you bring in groups that have been excluded from the university system, you bring them in there are going to be some adjustment problems. And I think it was I think there were some well meaning people who wanted to help them, help them adjust and started special special programs that and these involved were called third world in the university that I went to college that I went to was called the Third World center or there were African American centers or something. So these centerss these were again, created to give these these groups in this case African Americans a place where they could share their their grievances where they could where they could talk to each other to talk to each other. They were not meant to be closed to others who wanted to communicate with them who wanted to help them them integrate. Gradually they turned into activist centers, they and they started pushing universities in the direction of making special efforts hiring African American professors bringing African Americans minorities into the administration and so on. All this was also initially motivated by, driven by well meaning people that there were that you had administration's and departments that were in fact genuinely racist that had histories of racism that had over that had overlooked very talented African Americans. But it got to but eventually starting from from from there it started taking on unrealistic dimensions and when I'll give you an example I'm right now a professor at Duke. Duke was one of one of the first universities If not, if not the first university to the to have a plan put in its long term plan or a 10 year plan that every department in the university would have at least one African American Professor on its its faculty this was a policy put in place well before I got there in the 1980s. It was not feasible because in some professions there were very few African American professors who could teach at, at a research universities and the competition for them because what was happening at Duke was happening at other universities as well. The competition for them was very fierce. So given the numbers, some places no matter how hard they tried, some places were not going to make their make their targets. Well, this was then interpreted as not as a consequence of low numbers and the over-ambitiousness of the the initial plan, that's something that could be accomplished in in over a longer time period couldn't be accomplished say in in 10 years, instead of being interpreted in that manner. It was attributed to racism. And it got to the point where the the policies that were being proposed to to reduce the imbalances, the racial imbalance in the faculty in the student body or the policies that were being being proposed at opposing them started putting you in danger.

'''Timur Kuran''': and that you could be, you could be attacked as racist that shut down conversation. Now this is one thing that I've given you one example. Because it's it's the one that I've that I've studied the struggle in universities over affirmative action, but it has happened in other areas as well. Other groups have used the same strategy to shut down discourse on cultural issues and to to to have universities build all sorts of new units designed to help particular identity constituencies,

'''Eric Weinstein''': right. But so I'm actually quite quite interested in divided in my own mind about this. What I don't understand is why it is that we can't frame these problems in ways that contain both explanations about human bigger bigotry, unfairness and misogyny, racism, let's have that as a component and then let's have non-oppression based explanations. And let's try to figure out what percentage of things are due to both. And what everyone seems to do is that they either want to exclude one or the other from consideration, so that we can't figure out the mixture now I, I, you know, became a mathematician. I went through Penn, Harvard, MIT in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I think it's the case that at the time I was in each of those departments. There was not a single female full professor on the faculty. Now, I have no idea what that is. It's, there's so many fine female mathematicians in the world. And I could, I could, you know, certainly reel off five or 10 that everyone would agree, or first rate mathematicians off the top of my head, but there is a wild imbalance in the field. And I am convinced that there's a component of this that has to do with men have erected mathematics in the way that men are most comfortable with, because there have been so few women in the field. And I'm also reasonably convinced that there's some asymmetry, maybe not an intellectual ability, but certainly in interest in spending one's life negotiating a world mostly of symbols. So I have no idea how to call it but I don't think that either component of that vector in two dimensions which is oppression based explanations and non-oppression based explanations, I don't think either component would be zero.

'''Timur Kuran''': It's ultimately an empirical issue.

'''Eric Weinstein''': One would imagine

'''Timur Kuran''': and the way with with these with as with every empirical issue, we need to collect data, and we need to approach the issues. The way scientists

'''Eric Weinstein''': but we're not allowed to set up the problem.

'''Timur Kuran''': We're not allowed to set up the problem. We're not allowed to pose the question. And this is, this is the big, big danger. This is where we become where the situation we find ourselves in is analogous to the situation of the Soviet bloc.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Yeah,

'''Timur Kuran''': where you could not ask the question of why. East German Ladas were so so inferior to West German Mercedes and various other West German cars VW s for instance

'''Eric Weinstein''': right

'''Timur Kuran''': You could not ask this question. You could not even after you started, you could start, you could pick up television stations in West Germany and see how incredibly different the lifestyles of workers there were that in the so called worker's paradise where the proletariat was in power in that society in East Germany, workers at a much lower standard of living than in West Germany. The Turks who had to had been brought into West Germany were living much better than the East German workers. You could not for one thing you could not point that out. But secondly, you could not ask the question. Why? What does it Where did we go wrong? It wasn't that the will wasn't there Marx and Engels and the other theoreticians and Lenin had had certain ideas and a certain sense of how the society worked. And I believe that they, they sincerely passionately believed that, in fact, they could create the utopia they had in mind. They were, there were certain very critical elements of human nature that they didn't appreciate. But if the East Germans have been allowed to ask these questions, and put these issues, to empirical tests, and so on, they would have come up with the answers and they could have actually made the transition without a revolution.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Timur, I could talk to you forever. So I think what we're going to do is we've been at this for a little while, and with a question that's been much on my mind having to do with, in my case, wanting potentially to retake the White House and for the democrats in an honorable way, which I don't think will happen. I'm not particularly close to the Democratic Party. In fact, it's been driving me crazy, but it is where I grew up. And then I would love to invite you back at anytime you'd like to continue the discussion, but the theory that really has captivated me is how to figure out the appeal of Trump and I have, in part come up with this idea of the checksum theory of politics. Now, checksum has to do with you're receiving a binary, let's say, as a computer program, and you want to know whether it's been corrupted. And so there's some very quick check without having to be able to see the program to know whether or not the program has been has been corrupted on its way to you. The three things that I've settled on which allow me to know that the Democratic Party and its media organs are lying, have to do with a belief that immigration is more or less a pure positive and that anybody who wants it restricted can only do so out of xenophobia, a belief that trade and globalization is a simply positive force that should be expected to lift all boats and the belief that there is zero connection between terror and Islam, no matter how many people cry Allahu Akbar at the end of a killing spree. Now, that is not to say that there's no aspect of white terrorism, as it's not to say that there's no aspect of trade that is positive. Surely it is. And that's not to say that immigration doesn't carry positive benefits. I think we've extolled several of them in the course of our conversation, but it's the simplicity and the violent ferocity with which these things are defended, which have caused large numbers of Americans to say I don't know what this is, but it's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. No one could possibly believe anything is simplistic, stupid, and as threatening as what you've created and it's driving people in droves to embrace anyone who will say otherwise. Am I wrong?

'''Timur Kuran''': No, I think there's the there's a lot that makes a tremendous amount of sense. And I want to really say what you said in a different way and explain the reasons that I think Trump came to power. vast numbers of people, including diehard Trump supporters, think that he's not the type of person they'd like to have over for dinner. There's not the like, they're they not theirs he's not the type of person they would like to go into business with. He's not a trustworthy person. He's not a moral person. He's not for the millions of evangelicals who voted for him, not the not somebody who gets close to representing Christian values. But there's one thing that distinguishes Trump among all

'''Eric Weinstein''': said the Muslim to the Jew

'''Timur Kuran''': politicians. What's that?

'''Eric Weinstein''': Said the Muslim to the Jew

'''Timur Kuran''': there's one thing that that Trump demonstrated that no politician, Democratic or Republican, who came close to being a candidate. It's a characteristic that he had. And that is the the ability to take on the sacred cows of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. And it's important and it's important.

'''Timur Kuran''': And it's something that he he demonstrated as a Soon as he announced his candidacy, he started insulting various groups of society's. Or some of them are groups that do not have like Muslims, like Hispanics we call de called all of them rapists all 11 million Hispanic immigrants, he said they're all rapists. And

'''Eric Weinstein''': did he

'''Timur Kuran''': I thought that was

'''Eric Weinstein''': well,

'''Timur Kuran''': early on, early on,

'''Eric Weinstein''': I worry i don't think that he did he played around with a lot of things that could be parsed one way or the other. But

'''Timur Kuran''': so

'''Eric Weinstein''': continue on

'''Timur Kuran''': anyway, anyway, he said some very awful things about the about immigrants. Maybe I've

'''Eric Weinstein''': he was playing with fire,

'''Timur Kuran''': he was playing with fire. He certainly said awful things about Muslims. Now they're voting power energy. Those were the initial groups that he targeted. could say me, well, maybe this is something that a smart politician a populist politician might do. They don't have much voting power. But then he started taking on groups insulting groups and accusing groups of certain groups of doing horrible things, groups that had significant voting power. Some of them were primarily democratic voting groups. So you could say, well, that makes sense because that's going to energize the Republican base. There are people in the Republican Party don't like these other other groups. That makes sense. But then he started insulting and demeaning and humiliating groups in the Republican Party, major groups in the Republican Party, and that included the one that sticks in my mind is the veterans. He insulted John Mccain, who was somebody was an icon not even for Republicans, including Republicans who didn't vote for him and when he ran for president in the primary, but just also somebody highly respected by Democrats, and he accused McCain of being a failure because he had been it gotten arrested and he preferred soldiers who didn't get arrested and so on, this is something that insulted so many, so many veterans. Now, after this happened, his poll numbers went up after he said this, generally, but also among Republicans, and even among veterans, and this was just absolutely stunning to me. And it to me, it said, people are looking for a game changer. And what they're looking for is somebody who can take on the vested interests in Washington, and somebody who is who can be so open in criticizing criticizing groups that are so important to the republican coalition will be fearless against anyone and if there's anyone who's going to shake up the system, it's going to be Trump. And I think that is one source of his, his strength. And I think that going forwards whether he's going to succeed in the next election is going to depend on whether people believe that he is in fact that that attitude has generated something for them, whether he's actually he's actually taken measures against immigrants, that that for for the people who voted for Trump For this reason, because he would shake up the system whether this proves that he will stay on that path, and this is what the country needs. What the country needs more of to move forward.

'''Eric Weinstein''': You know, just listening to this reminds me that the phrase out of control has two separate meanings. The Democrats see him as out of control in the sense of a destructive force that threatens every everything around around him. The Republicans who who support him and maybe even some Democrats who support him. Or let's say this Trump supporters and Trump detractors, Trump detractors see him as out of control in the sense that he's a danger to everything. Trump supporters see him as outside of control. And therefore, he can weirdly be trusted because clearly nothing is holding him back. He's not he has no paymaster somewhere because nobody could act like this if they were part of the institutional makeup of the country and I wonder if that's really what divides us.

'''Timur Kuran''': And this is I think what is dividing us strike now and the people who feel that he's just destroying so many things that are valuable to them are willing to intensely hate him. And that hatred is now driving them toward politicians who are willing to suspend various civil liberties that are central to the American system or have been central to the American system, because getting rid of Trump is more important than anything else. And and Trump insofar as Trump is is not that the the, the sort of trumpism will not be gone after Trump is no longer president insofar as these People who hate the establishment and hate the various vested interests insofar as they're there, they're going to continue to pose a problem politically, they're going to continue to be a political force somehow. And the Trump well the group that you label the Trump detractors, we might call them the Trump Trump haters. Many of them would like to suspend various liberties, various checks and balances to get rid of this clear and present danger. That is one way we can get to a dictatorship. Another way is, of course, allowing Trump to pursue some of his agenda. That's another way to

'''Eric Weinstein''': twin paths to dictatorship.

'''Timur Kuran''': And again, we get back to To this issue of the tremendous need that the society has for the people who are falsifying preferences in one way or another, who see the complexity of the issues, to come out of the closet and to find a leader of their own, who is going to have the charisma.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Yeah,

'''Timur Kuran''': that is going to out Trump Trump and out a AOC AOC this what we’re lacking

'''Eric Weinstein''': Well, maybe maybe we find such a person inshallah,

'''Timur Kuran''': I hope so inshallah.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Okay, well, you've been through ''The Portal'' with Dr. Timur Kuran of Duke University. Thanks for listening or watching and we'll see you next time.