The Amphitheatre next door
Arles, 2024
Quote of the Day
”S&P Global is paying Accenture to train all 35k staff in ‘generative AI’. I used to joke that if you say ‘Digital Transformation’ three times, an Accenture partner will appear in a puff of smoke and offer you a contract – now the same happens for ‘AI’. Welcome to enterprise IT.”
- Benedict Evans
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
You Raise Me Up | Life in 3D
I got this from Quentin who discovered these three musical siblings while browsing. Their names are Devon, Daylon and Daura, hence the ‘3D’!
Long Read of the Day
Seeing Like a Matt
Fascinating essay by Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) on the intellectual blind spots of anti-anti-neoliberalism. Sounds arcane, I know, but if you’re interested in the ideology that got us into this mess (and I, for one, am), then it’s great read. It’s basically a response to a recent blog post by Matt Yglesias in his series on “Neoliberalism and Its Enemies.”
This is how it opens:
In brief (lots more below), Matt’s diagnosis of the state of affairs seems to me to be as follows. Once, and not so long ago, Democrats like Obama had a technocratic approach to policy which was dubbed neoliberalism by its enemies, but was actually pretty good! This approach involved letting markets do their thing so as to produce lots of delicious economic growth, and redistributing the proceeds to make people happy. Good policy making required careful thinking about the concrete costs and benefits of proposed measures – you calculated the tradeoffs and made the appropriate policy choices, ignoring the complaints of lefties. With notably rare exceptions, such as trade with China, this worked out pretty well. Sadly, in the last few years, many Democrats have fallen off the path of righteousness, seduced by the brazen idols of political economy. They have lost any understanding of tradeoffs, or of proper policy analysis, and are wandering the mazes of their own confused rhetoric in a condition of utter bewilderment. There is a cure. We Must All Return to the One True Path of Technocratic Neoliberalism, Though We Don’t Have To Call It That If It Makes You Feel Sad!
My own take (or, more precisely, my crude riff on other, more intelligent people’s ideas) is unsurprisingly very different. As I see it, there is no realistic prospect of going back to the technocratic shake-and-bake of letting markets rip and divvying up the benefits. It had its virtues, but we live in a different world, in part thanks to its equally substantial flaws.
Do read it. Henry is a fine writer and very erudite, and he’s intellectually combative but never rude. This essay is a model of how to disagree productively.
Books, etc.
Screenshot
The historian Richard J. Evans, my distinguished former colleague, has a new book out, which is on my list. I’ve just seen the NYT review and look forward to reading it. Years ago, Richard, David Runciman and I ran a big, Leverhulme-funded research project on ‘Conspiracy and Democracy’. We started in late 2012 and for the first three and a half years our academic colleagues — who subscribed to the conventional wisdom that conspiracy theories had very little significance for democracy — wondered about our sanity. And then Brexit happened and Trump was elected and our colleagues were no longer incredulous!
My commonplace booklet
Trump’s ‘Affirmative Action Program’: the media
The inability of mainstream media in the US to dispassionately report on Trump is shocking. One sees it everywhere, but it was particularly egregious in the imbalance between the incessant focus on Joe Biden’s frailties and the apparent inability of leading newspapers and broadcast outlets to report truthfully on Trump’s manifestly obvious cognitive disintegration.
So it was refreshing to read John Stoehr, editor of ‘The Editorial Board’ newsletter, on the subject:
Every single person in Washington knows Trump is weak, but he rarely comes off that way to the American public, and that’s thanks to the press corps. In a sense, the press corps is Trump’s “affirmative action program” (if we accept the illiberal definition of affirmative action). It doesn’t matter how much he fails. It doesn’t matter how weak he is. The press corps can be trusted to inject something – anything – he says into any story, even ones where he does not belong, and as a consequence, he will come off as stronger than he is. Case in point: “Biden, Trump exchange jabs as Russia prisoner swap turns political.”
(Trump’s “affirmative action program” was on display this week after he humiliated himself during a televised interview at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. The audience laughed at him when he doubted Kamala Harris’ Blackness. That was funny! But the press corps bailed him out, again, by framing the story as if Harris were responsible for his buffoonery, not him.)
And because Trump comes off as stronger than he is, Biden comes off as weaker than he is. Remember: Biden really did get those prisoners out.
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