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

'''Eric Weinstein''': Okay, Private Truths, Public Lies, which brought an entirely new perspective in the field of economics, which is that of preference falsification. I wondered if you would just give us a brief introduction to this theory. And then perhaps I’ll say a little bit more about why it’s so powerful and also so incredibly dangerous to the field.

'''Eric Weinstein''': So, I mean, there’s so much that’s juicy to dig into. I think that you may be undervaluing some of the aspects of silence where somebody will say, “Well, look, I’m not a very political person,” somebody else might make an admonition, “Keep your head down,” “stick to your knitting,” “stay in your lane.” There are all of these ways in which we do favor silence, but those of us who have to speak in a professional capacity, we’re expected to form opinions on these things. We really don’t have the luxury usually of staying silent.

'''Eric Weinstein''': I talked about sometimes dining à la carte intellectually, where I can’t get my needs met in a low-resolution world anyplace and so I sort of pick and choose which bits of things I need. And I sort of think of this as political flatland, that people are trapped in pro-life versus pro-choice. And my real position is a plague on both your houses. I’m not pro-choice to the extent that I’m willing to call a child four minutes before its birth fetal tissue, nor am I pro-life to the extent that I’m going to call a blastosphere a baby. Both of those seem patently insane to me. And nowhere do I get to discuss Carnegie stages and embryonic development, which would be sort of a more scientific approach to what quality of life is it that we’re trying to preserve. And yet I caucus, if you will, with the pro-choice community, not because I hold the idea that it’s simply a woman’s right to choose, because obviously there’s something else that’s going on inside of the woman, there’s the whole miracle of gestation and reproduction. But if people see that I caucus pro-choice, then they say, “Okay, you’re willing to sit with somebody who’s willing to terminate a third trimester pregnancy frivolously because they’re ideologically committed to it. Ergo, you’re evil. Ergo, we can no longer be friends.” And my key point is, “Look, I’ll drop these people in a heartbeat if you give me some nuanced room in which to maneuver, let’s talk about the neural tube formation. Let’s talk about what we think of as life, is it the emotional connection to seeing something one recognizes as human? Is it the quality of the brain? Is it something mystical, ineffable? Are you coming from a religious tradition?” The key point is to make it impossible to have a discussion. And, you know, I remember being beaten up on a picket line, in a picket line where there was a group that was picketing an abortion clinic, and I was demonstrating for the right to keep it open. And I got beat up in Rhode Island on camera. And after this incident, I think I had a chance to talk to the person I thought had hit me with the picket sign. And it turned out that we could come to, we couldn’t get all the way there, but there was at least a partial rapprochement where we could say, “Well, I see where you’re coming from, I see where you’re coming from. Maybe we can understand that you’re both motivated by the best interests as we perceive them.” That has gone away in large measure, because what we’ve taken, or at least this is my understanding, is our institutional media and our sense-making apparatus and they have become complicit in making the center, that is the sensible and analytic center, absolutely uninhabitable.

'''Eric Weinstein''': —pointed me to it saying, you know, this idea that we don’t actually even have preferences is something I always thought was important. He saw it as the lack of integrability of tangent planes to create indifferent surfaces, for those of you geeks following at home. And all of these theories about what’s wrong with our preferences, George Soros has one about beliefs with reflexivity, have been really effectively kept out of the mainstream of economic theory. And I find it, I view economic theory a little bit like it’s not quite as totalitarian as North Korea, but it’s very similar to certain places in Eastern Europe where there’s that what you can explore freely and what you can’t talk about, or at least it was this way until recently. Now, I look at the moment where I think you had your kind of Saddam Hussein moment about what we can and can’t discuss. And I trace it in part, it’s funny to even think of it in these terms, to Becker and Stigler’s paper called De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum. And in it, they hardened the theory of fixed preferences to a dogma by comparing preferences to the Rocky Mountains, and they said, on our interpretation, there’s an alternate view of why we can’t discuss tastes. And that’s because, like the Rocky Mountains, they are unchanging over time and the same to all men. And you know, my jaw dropped as an outsider because I hadn’t been indoctrinated when I read this. And I thought that is the single, craziest, idiotic thing that could be said about human beings and their beliefs and preferences. And yet, somehow it became a famous paper as opposed to being laughed out of the field.

'''Eric Weinstein''': And we’re watching a lot of prominent economists sort of change their position without announcing that they used to be, in effect, working for a nonsensical theory, or at least quieting themselves. I was astounded by Paul Krugman’s column, or maybe it was a blog post, called A Protectionist Moment where he starts talking about the scam of the elites’ forever freer trade, where I associated that with sort of the intellectual force of Jagdish Bhagwati. And some of these theorists who clearly were pursuing a political position where, you know, in the case of free trade, there’re two separate phenomena. You can say that something would Pareto-improve the society if everyone is made either as well off as they are today or better off. And then there’s this other kind of more technical version of this called Kaldor-Hicks improvement, which is that if we were to tax winners to pay losers, then everyone would be Pareto-improved. And I’ve noticed this very interesting thing about economists, where they have two voices. They have the voice that they have to use in the seminar room, because there’s nowhere to hide from the fact that a lot of these public pronouncements are absolute nonsense. And then the claim is that, oh, well, when we’re in our seminar voice, and maybe this was Danny Rodrik’s phraseology, I can’t remember whose it was, but then when we speak publicly, we’re allowed to say something that is actually different. It’s not the same thing in two different voices. It’s an idea that there’s an exoteric and an esoteric way of expression, which is a sort of Straussian theory, and the esoteric is reserved for one’s colleagues. But we’re actually allowed to lie to the public to help the fortunes of the politicians we favor when we’re speaking publicly. What the hell is going on?