Cato Institute ‘prosperity expert’ Marian Tupy joins the Remnant for a much-needed dose of economic optimism, enumerating the ways in which we are indisputably better off materially nowadays. He and Jonah also attempt to figure out why a sort of social malaise persists in the world despite this.

Shownotes

The Dispatch

OTATrade.com/DINGO

Marian Tupy of the Cato Institute 

HumanProgress.com

The Rational Optimist – Matt Ridley

Max Roser – Our World In Data

Hans Rosling (RIP) 

The Simon Project

The Good News Is The Bad Is Wrong – Ben Wattenberg 

On the price elasticity of population

Andrew McAfee on Econtalk

“Stuck” – Ron Bailey

Cato Institute conference on socialism and evolutionary psychology 

Lawrence Summers vs. Emmanuel Saez 

“No-no to Reno and Beto” – G-File on Rusty Reno

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There are 14 comments.

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  1. Joe D. Inactive
    Joe D.
    @JosephDornisch

    When I was 15, way back in 1991 I spent a few months mostly in Poland. At one point we went on a trip to what was then Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Austria. We were going to go to what was then Yugoslavia – but events made my parents decide against that. Anyhow, our first stop was Zilena, Slovakia – where some people we met told us how bad and lazy the Czechs were. When we got to Prague, they told us how bad and lazy the Slovaks were.

    • #1
  2. TerryS Inactive
    TerryS
    @TerryS

    Once again Jonah interviews  a person he agrees with. As you would expect, this results in a lot of straw men erected and knocked down. Why not interview or debate Rusty Reno (or one of his surrogates) rather than mock Reno’s ideas?

    In a segment where Jonah brings up the idea that liberal capitalism cannot provide meaning outside of economics, Tupy says that less successful people need to move (e.g. break c bonds of community) and find life meaning through work.

    The old Jonah Goldberg would have argued that people find meaning through family and community, and that a system that requires breaking family and community bonds to achieve economic goals is not conservative.

    • #2
  3. dicentra Inactive
    dicentra
    @dicentra

    The idea is not that you can run in and take all of Bezos’s money, thus depriving him of his outsized influence, it’s that no one would be allowed to get as rich as Bezos un the first place. That’s the system they’re advocating for.

    I am against centrally planned economies. I also share the concern that some people have way too much power because of their wealth. I don’t know what you can do about it without wrecking everyone else’s prosperity, but we can at least acknowledge that concentrations of power are a problem, even when they arise from our favored economic system.

    • #3
  4. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    One reason the left ignores inequality of intellect, etc (aside from issue of race and other factors) is that government is – and hopefully always will be – incapable of taking intellect from people who have “too much” and transferring it to people who have “too little.”  And especially without keeping some of it for itself/the bureaucracy!

    • #4
  5. FredGoodhue Coolidge
    FredGoodhue
    @FredGoodhue

    Interesting about the proposal to limit rich people’s charitable activities because it affects sovereignty.  Bernie Sanders has said something similar. He’s against charity because the government should directing social welfare activities.

    I had thought that one should use the word “federalism” because “state’s rights” was tied to slavery and segregation.  Now that I’ve learned that “federalism” has been tied to those bad things, I need to come up with a different term. How about “vertical separation of powers”, not that is rolls of the tongue very well.

    America was settled by people who left their homes for better opportunities.  If you go back far enough, even the Indians did so. Leaving the ancestral home is an American tradition.  I live in a more prosperous area, and I know lots of people who moved here for opportunity.

    I personally know a lot of political conservatives who are not lifestyle conservative in the sense of the supposed 1950s ideal of family and professional life.  I see the American dream as the right to pursue your own goals. Your goals are often not the same as other people’s goals. Some goals can be very eccentric. Your goals may not include material prosperity, but you do not have a right to have other people supply that material prosperity while you pursue some personal goal.

    Like Malthus, many futurists have done so by making a straight line projection   This usually makes for failed predictions. Yes, Malthus can be excused because he did not have a history of failed predictions to look back on.  Modern futurists can see all the past expectations of civilizational failure. What is different is that many doom and gloom predictors are now advocating policies that would bring about their predictions.  They are trying to implement global warming “solutions”, which will wreck modern economies, and prevent developing economies from prospering. I don’t think, for the most part, they are doing this consciously, but they are doing it nonetheless.

    • #5
  6. Richard Fulmer Inactive
    Richard Fulmer
    @RichardFulmer

    FredGoodhue (View Comment):
    I had thought that one should use the word “federalism” because “state’s rights” was tied to slavery and segregation.

    The South’s belief in states rights was a very self-serving, one way affair.  They cared nothing for the northern states’ rights when they jammed the Fugitive Slave Acts down their throats.  As you’ll recall, the Acts required people to join in hunts for runaway slaves or face fines and/or prison. 

    People cannot credibly claim to believe in any right that they refuse to grant others.

    • #6
  7. Richard Fulmer Inactive
    Richard Fulmer
    @RichardFulmer

    TerryS (View Comment):
    The old Jonah Goldberg would have argued that people find meaning through family and community, and that a system that requires breaking family and community bonds to achieve economic goals is not conservative.

    Capitalism didn’t break family and community bonds, government did.  Check out the book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, by Marvin Olasky.  The author documents the tens of thousands of charitable and self-help organizations that existed across the United States throughout the 19th and early 20th Centuries.  These organizations helped people pull themselves out of poverty and, not incidentally, helped knit communities together.  

    Much of that came to a grinding halt with LBJ’s Great Society programs.  The poverty level, which had plummeted to 14% when the programs kicked in, has flatlined ever since.  

    • #7
  8. Richard Fulmer Inactive
    Richard Fulmer
    @RichardFulmer

    TerryS (View Comment):
    Once again Jonah interviews a person he agrees with. As you would expect, this results in a lot of straw men erected and knocked down.

    What arguments did they make that you consider straw men and why?

    • #8
  9. Richard Fulmer Inactive
    Richard Fulmer
    @RichardFulmer

    Sometimes sound effects can be fun, but I thought that, in a couple of cases, they detracted from an interesting point that had been, or was being, made.

    • #9
  10. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Richard Fulmer (View Comment):

    TerryS (View Comment):
    The old Jonah Goldberg would have argued that people find meaning through family and community, and that a system that requires breaking family and community bonds to achieve economic goals is not conservative.

    Capitalism didn’t break family and community bonds, government did. Check out the book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, by Marvin Olasky. The author documents the tens of thousands of charitable and self-help organizations that existed across the United States throughout the 19th and early 20th Centuries. These organizations helped people pull themselves out of poverty and, not incidentally, helped knit communities together.

    Much of that came to a grinding halt with LBJ’s Great Society programs. The poverty level, which had plummeted to 14% when the programs kicked in, has flatlined ever since.

    And Sanders, for sure, wants a lot more “government compassion” and less or no private charity.

    • #10
  11. Unwoke Caveman Lawyer Inactive
    Unwoke Caveman Lawyer
    @UnwokeCavemanLawyer

    Look, I’m mostly on the side of the “liberals” and against the “post-liberals” in these waves of debates we have these days—French vs. Ahmari, Goldberg vs. Reno, &c., &c.—but it does seem to me that the post-liberals also have a point, and even some of the best and smartest of the liberals (Goldberg, French, Charles Cooke) seem to be great at missing that point, so that both sides in these debates end up talking past each other.

    In this podcast, at 44:12, Mr. Tupy says (and Goldberg laughs and agrees with him), “. . . it is always easier, or it should be easier, to search for meaning on a full stomach, and not crying over the grave of a six-months-old daughter or a son.  So modernity allows you to search for meaning in ways that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, who may have been forced to repeat phrases in a church they didn’t like, for a religion that they didn’t believe in, and so on and so forth.  So I think that on balance it is much better to be prosperous, even if you may be facing some crisis of meaning.”

    That’s absolutely incorrect, and seems to evince a thumbless grasp of what we’re even talking about when we say that people want “meaning” in life.  First, a life scarred by tragedy and sorrow is by no means an inherently less meaningful (or less likely to feel meaningful) life than a life of ease in the prosperous modern and postmodern West.  Second, what on earth does that have to do with people going to a church they don’t believe in?  Does Mr. Tupy believe that a particular society’s cultural expectations of religious conformity were created by poverty or infant mortality? or maybe I’m being unfair and he’s more right than I first thought about the relationship between the two, but if he’s saying we get to choose between a society in which we know our place in the world and how to do a good job of fulfilling our role and relating to the people around us, and a society in which we have modern medicine and more money but are basically on our own to figure out some kind of meaning in life (and how to relate to people), it’s not obvious to me that the latter is the better choice.

    If we had to choose between meaning in life and mere material wealth (which is the choice Mr. Tupy sets up in that last sentence), obviously we should choose meaning.  (It profiteth a man nothing to lose his soul for the whole world—but “to be prosperous”?)

    • #11
  12. Richard Fulmer Inactive
    Richard Fulmer
    @RichardFulmer

    Unwoke Caveman Lawyer (View Comment):
    … if he’s saying we get to choose between a society in which we know our place in the world and how to do a good job of fulfilling our role and relating to the people around us, and a society in which we have modern medicine and more money but are basically on our own to figure out some kind of meaning in life (and how to relate to people), it’s not obvious to me that the latter is the better choice.

    In the past, people knew their place in the world because they were given their place.  Either they were born into it or it was dictated to them.  Is that better than having to figure out your own place in the world and your own life’s meaning?

    Unwoke Caveman Lawyer (View Comment):
    If we had to choose between meaning in life and mere material wealth (which is the choice Mr. Tupy sets up in that last sentence), obviously we should choose meaning.

    Again, would you choose a dictated life’s meaning or freely chosen meaning?  Freedom’s tough; you have to take responsibility for your own life.  But the alternative is slavery.

    • #12
  13. Unwoke Caveman Lawyer Inactive
    Unwoke Caveman Lawyer
    @UnwokeCavemanLawyer

    Richard Fulmer (View Comment):

    Unwoke Caveman Lawyer (View Comment):
    … if he’s saying we get to choose between a society in which we know our place in the world and how to do a good job of fulfilling our role and relating to the people around us, and a society in which we have modern medicine and more money but are basically on our own to figure out some kind of meaning in life (and how to relate to people), it’s not obvious to me that the latter is the better choice.

    In the past, people knew their place in the world because they were given their place. Either they were born into it or it was dictated to them. Is that better than having to figure out your own place in the world and your own life’s meaning?

    Unwoke Caveman Lawyer (View Comment):
    If we had to choose between meaning in life and mere material wealth (which is the choice Mr. Tupy sets up in that last sentence), obviously we should choose meaning.

    Again, would you choose a dictated life’s meaning or freely chosen meaning? Freedom’s tough; you have to take responsibility for your own life. But the alternative is slavery.

    Then perhaps all three of us are talking past each other to such an extent that it’s difficult to see how we can get on the same page enough even to rise to the level of disagreement.  Among other things, if meaning has to be generated entirely internally, in a vacuum, that is by definition not meaning.

    • #13
  14. Richard Fulmer Inactive
    Richard Fulmer
    @RichardFulmer

    Unwoke Caveman Lawyer (View Comment):
    Among other things, if meaning has to be generated entirely internally, in a vacuum, that is by definition not meaning.

    Wow, that’s taking things to quite an extreme.  The idea that we must either have our lives’ meanings forced upon us or we must choose them as atomistic, detached individuals is a false choice.  Family, friends, society all influence meaning.  In fact, it’s hard to imagine what a person’s life could mean in a vacuum – that is, in the absence of other people.  

    One of the points that Jonah repeatedly makes is that it is the organizations to which we belong that provide much of the meaning in our lives.  Families, churches, service organizations, chess clubs, bowling leagues  all add meaning to our lives.  As government eliminates or replaces such organizations, much of that meaning disappears.  

     

    • #14
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