Err... first there is a severe intellectual confusion between state ownership in the economy and central planning. They are different subjects really - certainly correlated but not necessarily synonymous at all (in either direction). This confusion makes the conversation on Hayek ... mmm well, I suppose it's a popular conversation.
Is there any chance we could get more articles instead of this jump in the # of podcasts? Maybe I’m in the minority here but I’d prefer a written piece making concrete claims rather than an hour long conversation. The video conversation format makes individual ideas harder to pin down and revisit, at least to me.
Matt publishes articles in Slow Boring 5x a week. Perhaps you can encourage Jerusalem to publish more articles, but some of us love podcasts and are always happy to have more, so you'll have to put up with their proliferation.
I respect your opinion but unfortunately it’s driving the shift of our culture from literary to oral, making you literally Donald Trump for disagreeing with me.
Well I assume you were being a bit tongue-in-cheek, literary culture was killed by TV and radio a long time ago. People still read, but it's roughly the same niche audience who preferred to read over watch TV. I personally like being able to listen to something while I do chores; I've just switched from listening to NPR like I did as a kid to listening to a wider variety of podcasts now. The people who watch video podcasts, I'll never understand.
I take Hayek's points about central planning seriously, but I also think y'all didn't give a fair shake to critiques of how market competition can lead to equilibria that disempower customers, or forces them into tradeoffs nobody would think is reasonable, even if they are technically free to opt out.
Youth sports are a good example, where my understanding is it has basically been taken over by profit-seeking travel leagues that are extremely demanding and competitive, and try to extract as much profit from parents as possible. These have largely replaced the community little leagues of old. So parents are forced to choose between no sports for their kids or joining these expensive and intense travel leagues. Yes, in theory somebody could found a company to compete with the travel leagues, but in practice this seems to be the natural equilibrium. That is very restrictive in a way, and also isn't an equilibrium anyone would have agreed is good in advance if you had proposed it 30 years ago.
I don't see why we wouldn't have government step in and regulate these travel leagues to make them match the preferences of the majority of parents. This kind of regulation isn't going to harm GDP growth.
People could naturally just fight this by banding together and deciding to send all their kids to the rec league. The reason this isn't happening is because of successful marketing by the profit-seeking travel teams persuading the most influential parents that the extra money is worthwhile. As usual, the issue is a problem of society's values and effort being put into the problem rather than anything that would benefit from central planning. If you tried to remedy this situation with government intervention, you'd get a bunch of people who are bought into the sports-industrial complex screaming about the limits to their freedom to put their kids in fancier teams.
I think this is exactly the sort of griping that has turned from bar chat to "there oughta be a law" that Matt was wisely counseling against in favor of a presumption of free enterprise, in a land of varying preferences and incentives, in the conversation (which I thought was a really fantastic part of the discussion).
"But just as important is the question of what types of state interventions enable people and firms to exercise true freedom. Universal healthcare and other social welfare programs enable people to move, start new businesses, try to write the next great American novel, or do anything else they might find important."
I'm not against any of these policies, but the phrase "true freedom" builds your preferred trade-offs into the definition of freedom. An arrangement that decouples employment, marriage, and access to healthcare expands your freedom along those particular dimensions, but doesn't establish that the resulting arrangement increases your freedom overall. Suppose it required higher taxes, produced longer waits, or limited your choice of providers or treatments. Perhaps all of those things could be true and *you* specifically would still experience this as an expansion of your freedom, but that won't be true for everyone.
I think this illustrates the value and limits of Sen's capabilities approach. It shows why formal liberties can badly overstate someone's actual opportunities. But capability and negative liberty measure different things, and calling both ‘freedom’ can obscure the trade-offs between them rather than resolve those trade-offs.
He was a genius ahead of his time but, as ever with libertarian leaning critiques of central planning (I) arguments that it doesn’t work very well and ends up making people worse off, because of fundamental economic, political, and informational realities are very, very strong and (ii) arguments that public provision of the enables of positive freedom (healthcare, income assistance, education, housing etc.) are IN PRINCIPLE an intolerable affront to liberty, are pretty bad.
You can actually bring in outside food into Yankees Stadium. While Jerusalem quickly shifted to giving the proponents the benefit of the doubt by talking about hot dog prices and hypothetical competition from grocery stores (at least private ones, still waiting for the public groceries in NYC to open to compete with Yankees Stadium food vendors), the original NYC proposal from Lina Khan specifically used beer prices at Yankees Stadium as its illustrative example of price gouging. You can bring in unopened containers of non-alcoholic drinks, so really the prohibition in the stadium from external competition really comes down to beer.
i plugged my phone into the car at the start of school drop off run to put on k pop demon hunters but couldn’t play it in time before we got the snippet of Matt calling private equity firms that limit video taping in hockey arenas “motherfuckers”. Lesson learned!
We should always be careful about saying something will happen ALL the time.
I think a stronger statement that socialism will necessarily entail restrictions on liberty, and those restrictions should have a default presumption of being bad and inefficient.
I also think it's helpful not to compare socialism to capitalism, but to free markets (which are the same thing) but I think the term free markets better describes to the average person the differences in choices.
Will you be free to buy and sell with whom you want, or will government decide.
But I also agree that while this broad framing is helpful and correct, that economics is complicated and there will be times when other situations will arise.
For example, I broadly favor free trade. But I don't think we can have it with China because China isn't playing by the rules. China is using state capacity distort markets that have strategic value so they can dominate key industries that have national security implications.
In that case, tariffs and maybe even direct subsidies to industry will be necessary even if they are economically inefficient.
I'm confused why Demas conceives most parts of life/politics/jobs as "cohersion"? Sure, your job makes you wear clothes to work, so they of cohersing you to wear clothes. But you still have the freedom to not work there. Same with Yankee stadium. You have the freedom to not buy a ticket, you could not buy a beer or hotdogs. This is not cohesion. Of course, you can complain about the high prices, but no one is forcing you to attend. At the end of the day, we all have the freedom to choose to do or not do something. The seems to be a confusion of wants and needs here. Isn't that what Hayek means by economic freedom?
This was an exceptional analysis of a tough and recurring debate. Jerusalem did a super job here in her exploration in the opening round. For me, there is a simple answer to one straight forward question here: Hayek was wrong about much of the central and crucial elements of his world view. When you read him--which is a task in itself--you should always watch for the mental gymnastics and tortured lifting he does to get one to agree that the free market alone will somehow rationally guide a social and economic system.
I love all The Argument podcast episodes, but I love the book club ones the best. It really is helpful to bring a lens to our contemporary problems of what is brand new to our time and what is actually the same old story.
The main thing I took away from this discussion is that in general, government should be making rules and programs that apply to everyone and that everyone could get behind. A lot of what the CFPB was doing under Democrats was in this category- cracking down on payday lenders and business practices that are basically scams. We should have programs to help the unemployed, to help people fold up businesses that don't work anymore, and other such things as a general category, but we shouldn't be letting any particular industry get themselves a good deal through the government unless there's a clear benefit to the general public.
I think the next book should be either Amusing Ourselves to Death or Understanding Media. I want to get your read on the great TV haters.
In the generic Conservative/Liberal split I can accept using liberal as "concern for the disadvantaged." A vague, "the abundance in society makes the struggle of the vulnerable an infringement on their human rights." Sure, whatever.
Trump gave the government 10% of Intel. To make money for the government. I would call that Conservative here.
Err... first there is a severe intellectual confusion between state ownership in the economy and central planning. They are different subjects really - certainly correlated but not necessarily synonymous at all (in either direction). This confusion makes the conversation on Hayek ... mmm well, I suppose it's a popular conversation.
Is there any chance we could get more articles instead of this jump in the # of podcasts? Maybe I’m in the minority here but I’d prefer a written piece making concrete claims rather than an hour long conversation. The video conversation format makes individual ideas harder to pin down and revisit, at least to me.
Matt publishes articles in Slow Boring 5x a week. Perhaps you can encourage Jerusalem to publish more articles, but some of us love podcasts and are always happy to have more, so you'll have to put up with their proliferation.
I respect your opinion but unfortunately it’s driving the shift of our culture from literary to oral, making you literally Donald Trump for disagreeing with me.
Well I assume you were being a bit tongue-in-cheek, literary culture was killed by TV and radio a long time ago. People still read, but it's roughly the same niche audience who preferred to read over watch TV. I personally like being able to listen to something while I do chores; I've just switched from listening to NPR like I did as a kid to listening to a wider variety of podcasts now. The people who watch video podcasts, I'll never understand.
I take Hayek's points about central planning seriously, but I also think y'all didn't give a fair shake to critiques of how market competition can lead to equilibria that disempower customers, or forces them into tradeoffs nobody would think is reasonable, even if they are technically free to opt out.
Youth sports are a good example, where my understanding is it has basically been taken over by profit-seeking travel leagues that are extremely demanding and competitive, and try to extract as much profit from parents as possible. These have largely replaced the community little leagues of old. So parents are forced to choose between no sports for their kids or joining these expensive and intense travel leagues. Yes, in theory somebody could found a company to compete with the travel leagues, but in practice this seems to be the natural equilibrium. That is very restrictive in a way, and also isn't an equilibrium anyone would have agreed is good in advance if you had proposed it 30 years ago.
I don't see why we wouldn't have government step in and regulate these travel leagues to make them match the preferences of the majority of parents. This kind of regulation isn't going to harm GDP growth.
People could naturally just fight this by banding together and deciding to send all their kids to the rec league. The reason this isn't happening is because of successful marketing by the profit-seeking travel teams persuading the most influential parents that the extra money is worthwhile. As usual, the issue is a problem of society's values and effort being put into the problem rather than anything that would benefit from central planning. If you tried to remedy this situation with government intervention, you'd get a bunch of people who are bought into the sports-industrial complex screaming about the limits to their freedom to put their kids in fancier teams.
I think this is exactly the sort of griping that has turned from bar chat to "there oughta be a law" that Matt was wisely counseling against in favor of a presumption of free enterprise, in a land of varying preferences and incentives, in the conversation (which I thought was a really fantastic part of the discussion).
"But just as important is the question of what types of state interventions enable people and firms to exercise true freedom. Universal healthcare and other social welfare programs enable people to move, start new businesses, try to write the next great American novel, or do anything else they might find important."
I'm not against any of these policies, but the phrase "true freedom" builds your preferred trade-offs into the definition of freedom. An arrangement that decouples employment, marriage, and access to healthcare expands your freedom along those particular dimensions, but doesn't establish that the resulting arrangement increases your freedom overall. Suppose it required higher taxes, produced longer waits, or limited your choice of providers or treatments. Perhaps all of those things could be true and *you* specifically would still experience this as an expansion of your freedom, but that won't be true for everyone.
I think this illustrates the value and limits of Sen's capabilities approach. It shows why formal liberties can badly overstate someone's actual opportunities. But capability and negative liberty measure different things, and calling both ‘freedom’ can obscure the trade-offs between them rather than resolve those trade-offs.
He was a genius ahead of his time but, as ever with libertarian leaning critiques of central planning (I) arguments that it doesn’t work very well and ends up making people worse off, because of fundamental economic, political, and informational realities are very, very strong and (ii) arguments that public provision of the enables of positive freedom (healthcare, income assistance, education, housing etc.) are IN PRINCIPLE an intolerable affront to liberty, are pretty bad.
You can actually bring in outside food into Yankees Stadium. While Jerusalem quickly shifted to giving the proponents the benefit of the doubt by talking about hot dog prices and hypothetical competition from grocery stores (at least private ones, still waiting for the public groceries in NYC to open to compete with Yankees Stadium food vendors), the original NYC proposal from Lina Khan specifically used beer prices at Yankees Stadium as its illustrative example of price gouging. You can bring in unopened containers of non-alcoholic drinks, so really the prohibition in the stadium from external competition really comes down to beer.
i plugged my phone into the car at the start of school drop off run to put on k pop demon hunters but couldn’t play it in time before we got the snippet of Matt calling private equity firms that limit video taping in hockey arenas “motherfuckers”. Lesson learned!
We should always be careful about saying something will happen ALL the time.
I think a stronger statement that socialism will necessarily entail restrictions on liberty, and those restrictions should have a default presumption of being bad and inefficient.
I also think it's helpful not to compare socialism to capitalism, but to free markets (which are the same thing) but I think the term free markets better describes to the average person the differences in choices.
Will you be free to buy and sell with whom you want, or will government decide.
But I also agree that while this broad framing is helpful and correct, that economics is complicated and there will be times when other situations will arise.
For example, I broadly favor free trade. But I don't think we can have it with China because China isn't playing by the rules. China is using state capacity distort markets that have strategic value so they can dominate key industries that have national security implications.
In that case, tariffs and maybe even direct subsidies to industry will be necessary even if they are economically inefficient.
“Around 21:15, Matt names one of Hayek’s chapters “Freedom and Security,” which reverses the actual name “Security and Freedom.””
Gonna need a full apology from Matt for this “slip up.”
I hope somebody got fired for THAT blunder
I'm confused why Demas conceives most parts of life/politics/jobs as "cohersion"? Sure, your job makes you wear clothes to work, so they of cohersing you to wear clothes. But you still have the freedom to not work there. Same with Yankee stadium. You have the freedom to not buy a ticket, you could not buy a beer or hotdogs. This is not cohesion. Of course, you can complain about the high prices, but no one is forcing you to attend. At the end of the day, we all have the freedom to choose to do or not do something. The seems to be a confusion of wants and needs here. Isn't that what Hayek means by economic freedom?
This was an exceptional analysis of a tough and recurring debate. Jerusalem did a super job here in her exploration in the opening round. For me, there is a simple answer to one straight forward question here: Hayek was wrong about much of the central and crucial elements of his world view. When you read him--which is a task in itself--you should always watch for the mental gymnastics and tortured lifting he does to get one to agree that the free market alone will somehow rationally guide a social and economic system.
I want to hear about the arguments in Paul Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicine
I love all The Argument podcast episodes, but I love the book club ones the best. It really is helpful to bring a lens to our contemporary problems of what is brand new to our time and what is actually the same old story.
The main thing I took away from this discussion is that in general, government should be making rules and programs that apply to everyone and that everyone could get behind. A lot of what the CFPB was doing under Democrats was in this category- cracking down on payday lenders and business practices that are basically scams. We should have programs to help the unemployed, to help people fold up businesses that don't work anymore, and other such things as a general category, but we shouldn't be letting any particular industry get themselves a good deal through the government unless there's a clear benefit to the general public.
I think the next book should be either Amusing Ourselves to Death or Understanding Media. I want to get your read on the great TV haters.
“underplayed by liberals”
All nuance evaporated. Under what paradigm is additional government control liberal? You’re allowed to say socialist.
I believe the term liberal here really means the left not classical liberal
Right/left would fit better but only because left means socialist in that context. Which circles back around to my point.
In America the left is also frequently labeled liberal even though they tend not to be classically liberal in many aspects
In the generic Conservative/Liberal split I can accept using liberal as "concern for the disadvantaged." A vague, "the abundance in society makes the struggle of the vulnerable an infringement on their human rights." Sure, whatever.
Trump gave the government 10% of Intel. To make money for the government. I would call that Conservative here.