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This week on The Big Show, we attempt to return to some sense of normalcy (while of course maintaining social distancing by at least 1,000 miles). Yes, we talk about that thing we’re all doing and what our new lives are like now. But then, we shift gears to visit with our good friend Ross Douthat, NYT columnist and podcaster (The Argument, which Ross co-hosts is one of our favorites) on the occasion of his new book., The Decadent Society. It’s a meditation on what happens when a rich and powerful society stops advancing and how the combination of wealth, technology, economic stagnation, political stalemates, and demographic decline (among other things) creates a “sustainable decadence” that could stick around for a long time. Needless to say, it’s a provocative conversation that we’d like to get your take on in the comments. Finally, we do round of What Are You Watching, and do a deep dive on toilet paper, courtesy of the Lileks Post of The Week.
Music from this week’s show: I.G.Y by Donald Fagen
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Hey, all I needed to know to know that I wouldn’t buy it, is that it’s a “meditation.” Ick.
A question for the readers.
Does the NY Times select only pompous asses to be columnists, or is it the experience of being a NY Times columnist that makes one a pompous ass?
Inquiring minds want to know.
I daresay, if the Feds regulated computer programming, you would be required to write all your programs in structured COBOL to run on a mainframe.
Which would have made sense, at the time the regulations were written.
Ah, there he is…Ricochet’s very own White Knight…defender of terrible pundits far and wide…
I am nearly done with the book. I’d pass if I were you. Though I must say, he is spot on about how tired our silly movie industry is.
Not defending any pundits, I’m defending my own prose.
Fair enough
Did you never hear of Ada?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)
The Times did hire Douthat as their conservative columnist (aside from Mr. Tea Party, David Brooks, of course), when they decided not to renew their contract with Bill Kristol. Just think about what those conservative musings would have sounded like in the pages of the Times over the past four years…..
Does that mean that, between Kristol and Douthat, Douthat is the lesser of two evils?
Kristol would be doing tag-team columns with Paul Krugman if he were still at the Times right now.
Somebody tell @peterrobinson that the current season of Better Call Saul is not the last. There will be a thirteen-episode Season 6 next year (unless the pandemic delays it, which I suppose it could). https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/better-call-saul-ending-season-6-amc-1267357
Interesting podcast where a bunch of people who have few children (does Robinson have 4? Ross I don’t know…) speculate on why no one has kids. Ask yourselves and your wives? Outside of intense religiosity feminism means your wife works and the kids go to daycare and there isn’t much left for kids beyond 1-3. Whites in the US are below replacement rate and almost at European levels. Religiosity is falling like a brick. These are connected as the rise of feminism even among the religious, and celebrated by conservatives who want their daughter to be a doctor not a mother, results in people being too concerned with this world and not the future and their children.
Which gets me to the real point – the collapse of Christianity as a serous guiding principle is why society is in decay. Its a complicated issue, but at the heart of it wicked people are decadent and we are a wicked godless nation.
This assumes there are no other mechanisms for distributing the risk of some people being mavericks or crazy drivers. There are and they have tradeoffs many of which are far better than the current set up.
Why would insurance have anything to do with certification. You are conflating two different ways of mitigating risk. A better question to ask about these regulations is did the rate of bad outcomes go up or down in industries that started to require certification. Did barriers to entry increase and stifle competition – which is generally the goal. People inside the field want the regulations to limit new entrants. You can look up the data on the risks – it mostly makes no difference. People doing your nails have a strong incentive to do a good safe job that has nothing to do with certification.
I believe Peter Robinson has 5, Ross Douthat has 3.9, James Lileks has 1, and Rob Long has none.
Most, if not all, of those mechanisms are after the fact. Most people would prefer not to be hit by a drunk driver to start with, rather than sue for being seriously injured or killed and perhaps not be able to collect anything in the end because the driver had insufficient insurance or none at all. that’s one reason for having police on the roads, rather than insurance agents.
That after-the-fact aspect is interesting. I think a big difference between people who are enthusiastic about regulation (and based on his/her comments, I’d put kedavis in that category), and those who are more lukewarm about it has to do with the degree to which one believes that harm prevention rather than harm mitigation should be employed.
Regulation is a harm prevention strategy: it imposes an actual cost based on the possibility of a potential harm.
Mitigation (e.g., via tort action) imposes a presumably greater cost when actual harm occurs, but essentially no cost until actual harm occurs.
Obviously both strategies have their place. However, there is usually no absolute way of determining whether the regulatory approach or the mitigation approach will achieve the best results in any particular case. People who favor regulation will tend to favor an increased regulatory burden, while others will tend to see mitigation in exceptional situations as preferable.
I am wary of the regulatory impulse, since I believe that human nature tends to drive regulators toward ever-increasing regulation, until the burden they impose is substantially greater than would be the cost of mitigation in the absence of regulation. I think that’s simply the nature of the regulatory bureaucracy. If I had my druthers, all regulation would contain sunset provisions requiring that it be explicitly re-authorized every few years, and such reauthorization would require cost-benefit analysis as detailed and demanding as, say, the environmental impact statements required by that wonderful model of regulatory self-restrain, the EPA.
There’s really no way to know or to prove that after-the-fact mitigation would be more effective against drunk drivers, for example, than having police out looking for them with stiff penalties if caught. Considering the incidence before drunk-driving laws got a lot more harsh, it seems the opposite to me. And drunk people aren’t the most likely to evaluate the possible future cost of their action if they injure or kill someone. They get that calculation wrong even now.
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And if you decide that it’s better to let people work that out for themselves without regulation, do you then regulate how much insurance they must have in case they cause such damage? If not, then what? Do you go back to having Debtor’s Prisons if someone injures someone else beyond their ability to pay for it? What about indentured servitude as a means of payment?
A lot of this sounds very pie-in-the-sky Libertarian compared to the real world. Laissez-Faire sounds pretty cool in certain dorm rooms, but if you’re the guy whose family becomes destitute because a drunk driver kills YOU and there’s no or insufficient restitution, it sounds different. And that’s even assuming your family would be okay with a pile of money rather than YOU.
Most Regulation suppresses innovation. They tend to be written to say “you must use this technique”, rather than “you must accomplish this goal, using whatever technique you wish to”.
Drunk driving isn’t a good example. I think most people would argue that regulation AND mitigation are both appropriate in that case.
As I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, the question really isn’t “do you believe in regulation?”, because every sensible person believes in some regulation. The question is, do you want a lot of regulation, or do you want a little regulation? A useful proxy for that would be: do you want, on balance, more regulation than we have now, or less?
I want vastly less regulation than we have now. The impetus for this discussion, as I recall, was the contention that Rob seems to believe that conservatives and progressives are similar in their desire for regulation. I think that’s wrong, and that conservatives generally want less, while progressives generally want more.
In many situations, a desire for less regulation is in conflict with other aspects of current society. Arguably many of the conflicts should be undone as well, but if we can see that won’t happen, then it doesn’t really make sense to just undo the other side of it.
An example I tend to use is drug legalization. It’s somewhat similar to the idea that it’s bad to have open borders and a welfare state at the same time.
Legalizing drugs, while at the same time having a “safety net” which means people could do whatever they like with drugs and be taken care of the rest of their life at taxpayer expense, is a conflict that I don’t see being at all balanced. But the chances are slim of undoing the safety net even for people who have in essence immolated themselves. So I think it makes sense to continue restrictions on drug use, until such time as those who ruin themselves with it, also suffer the consequences themselves. And having a Skid Row can be an effective deterrent against abuse.
Of course.
And, equally, in many situations a desire for less regulations is not in conflict, but rather supportive of, other aspects of current society (whatever that means).
I’m trying to draw a simple distinction here between those who see regulation as a useful tool to be applied liberally, and those who see regulation as a necessary evil to be used sparingly. We can always find examples to support a pro-regulation or anti-regulation position in a particular context. I’m talking about a more general inclination here, about a philosophical perspective on the value of regulation.
I see regulation as having an inherently, existentially negative quality to it. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have it, but rather that we should do our best to use it sparingly, cautiously, and as narrowly as practical. I think that’s the perspective most consistent with a desire for limited government and a free people.
Yes, but my point – or one of my points, anyway – is you can’t just do that in a vacuum, as it were. As the saying goes – I don’t remember who may have come up with it first – if you find a wall in a forest or whatever, you don’t just take it down without finding out why it was put there in the first place. And so much of what is now regulated I would say, is not just because some people “like” regulation. It’s actually more of a response to something else. So just removing the regulation, without otherwise addressing the reason it was done in the first place, is probably more foolish than wise. And I suspect a lot of people who say they want less regulation, are more like the people Jonah Goldberg sometimes talks about who say “free expression should be unlimited!” until you ask them about porn on Saturday morning TV. They mostly want to eliminate regulation THEY dislike.
You don’t share my general skepticism of regulation. I think we’ve established that. (I think we established it a week or two ago, actually, but it’s fun to keep talking about it.) You’re probably closer to what Rob was thinking about when he talked about conservatives liking regulation as much as progressives. (I’m assuming you’d identify yourself as conservative; if not, excuse the error.) I think I’m probably closer to a “normal” conservative, one who reflexively distrusts regulation and thinks we have too much of it. I’m the kind of conservative that I think Rob doesn’t really understand, and may not believe exists in great number. But I think I’m probably in the conservative majority in this regard.
The reference you’re looking for is from G.K. Chesterton. It’s from his book The Thing, and is in this telling a gate or fence crossing the road. He uses that as an example of something that shouldn’t be casually removed.
If you think of every regulation as a removal of something, as a reduction in the choices available to people — and that’s certainly the case — then we could invoke Chesterton’s metaphor as an argument against casually creating new regulation. I’d be good with that: if I could have a promise that new regulations would be created only rarely, and only after great soul-searching and lengthy deliberation and justification, I’d probably be happy to keep the ones we already have in exchange for protection from endless new ones.
Then, since we’d be following Chesterton’s wise advice, you and I would both be happy, right? ;)
Well, the thing is, I think Jonah’s point is like Rob’s point, which might be better stated as “conservatives don’t like regulation except for regulations they like.” Such as, no porn on Saturday morning TV. Which some might say is just “common sense.” But maybe a lot more is too, especially given other forces at work, like I mentioned before.
Maybe “regulating” a drunk riding a horse is leftist claptrap. But a drunk in control of a multi-ton motorized vehicle can do a lot more damage than a drunk in control of a horse. Why should it be treated the same as a horse just because regulation isn’t “conservative?”
Someone else could probably write these points better than me.
I also don’t read either Rob or Jonah as cheerleading for regulations, just being cynical about human nature, even among our ranks. Let’s face it, pre (and even alas, post) 2016 saw a lot of GOP acquiescence in regulations that favored big business over startups. We managed to keep a reputation for being relatively helpful to new businesses and new ideas anyway, solely due to the incompetence of the other side. It’s not traitorous in any way to point out that it’s not like we have clean hands either.
It’s natural, if not exactly admirable, to tilt the books a little for people who are like us in some respect, especially in some disrespected respect. I’m not immune to that; I’ll cut some extra slack for Dinesh D’Souza or Drew Carey if they ever got in a jam, and I’m sure that like me you could name dozens of others who get some benefit of the doubt.
The government has to stop force and fraud.
Hard drugs are very complicated. Don’t ask me how to Google this, but when you hear a libertarian explanation of the fiscal dynamics of enforcing hard drug laws, it’s absolutely jaw-dropping. You are wasting money while you empower organized crime and the Mexican cartels etc.