The United States is suffering through an epistemic crisis. From day to day it seems increasingly difficult to know the truth with real certainty. The nation’s leadership came to power atop a wave of “fake news,” only to appropriate the term and wield it alongside its own “alternative facts.” The official propaganda is further muddled by opposing conspiracy theories, heightened by international intrigues, entangled in the pop culture industry, circulated on social media, and blessed by prominent televangelists. Citizens are divided over their trusted sources, forming rival camps according to which websites they are willing to read and which channels they are willing to watch. Along the way, the possibility of knowledge seems to have fallen into a fog of beliefs.
.. First, the great historian Daniel Boorstin—who I quote in the book—has said that, at the very beginning, Americans self-selected for their belief in advertising. The “New World” was this empty slate being advertised to English settlers, and the people who came over in those first few decades were people who believed the promises when, in fact, there was nothing here. Does that count as credulity? It certainly counts as a wishful pre-disposition to believe.
.. Americans are generally too quick to disbelieve official accounts and too quick to believe alternative theories?
Yes, I think that is precisely correct, and I think it is in large measure a result of the nation having been born of the Enlightenment and of fervent Christianity. These are flipsides, too. This extreme credulity and extreme skepticism are yin and yang, or flipsides of the same coin—the operative word being extreme.
.. the sort of extravagant and flamboyant Christian belief and practice that is virtually unique to this country.
.. in the last couple of decades, one of our major political parties has become explicitly and aggressively Christian in this unique sense. Many of its members believe more and more empirically insupportable things about supernatural interventions in contemporary life, and that then bleeds over into believing things that are untrue outside of the religious realm, as with the claim that climate change is a hoax, for example.
.. It’s in the mix with other forces, such as our over-amped Enlightenment skepticism, our extreme individualism, and even our knack for show business fantasies and our obsession with entertainment.
.. If the religious free market was responsible for such widespread and extreme and fervent beliefs in the United States, then why now, when a very similar degree of freedom exists throughout the developed world, are charismatic churches not popping up in Australia or Canada or Denmark at the rate that they do in the United States?
.. it’s not just the religious free market that makes Americans so religious, but a combination of other character traits.
.. When religious belief relies on a literal reading of scripture as history, suggesting that nothing is a coincidence, that there is a certain grand plan worked out in specific detail—that does correlate with belief in conspiracy theories.
.. So why is it that our most fervently Christian fellow citizens support him so strongly?
.. I think there is something there—it suggests that there are other reasons, cultural and economic reasons,
.. Trump has shown a unique willingness to embrace claims that are demonstrably untrue—that Barack Obama wasn’t born here and a conspiracy covered that up; that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination; that five million illegal immigrants voted against him in the 2016 election; and on and on and on. The fact that he is so indifferent to empirical reality and so willing to stand up and embrace explanations that simply confirm his pre-existing ideas or are convenient for him because they make him seem better or his enemies worse—it’s somewhat unkind, I understand, to say that he shares that tendency with religious people, but I think that is shared.
.. you might identify with a guy who is willing to take strong stands on unprovable claims.
.. As Thomas Jefferson said, basically, “people can believe in 20 gods or no god as long as it doesn’t pick my pocket or break my leg.” That is my live-and-let-live feeling, until it starts having consequential and problematic effects on public policy—until it starts dictating our foreign policy toward Israel or our response to climate change or our public school curricula, for instance. At that point, when clear principles of science are denied, or when important political leaders are making official decisions according to their belief in the imminent return of Christ—that’s when problems arise.
If Only Stephen Paddock Were a Muslim
If only Stephen Paddock had been a Muslim … If only he had shouted “Allahu akbar” before he opened fire on all those concertgoers in Las Vegas … If only he had been a member of ISIS … If only we had a picture of him posing with a Quran in one hand and his semiautomatic rifle in another …
If all of that had happened, no one would be telling us not to dishonor the victims and “politicize” Paddock’s mass murder by talking about preventive remedies.
.. Then Donald Trump would be tweeting every hour “I told you so,” as he does minutes after every terror attack in Europe, precisely to immediately politicize them.
..We will turn the world upside down to track down the last Islamic State fighter in Syria — deploying B-52s, cruise missiles, F-15s, F-22s, F-35s and U-2s. We will ask our best young men and women to make the ultimate sacrifice to kill or capture every last terrorist. And how many Americans has the Islamic State killed in the Middle East? I forget. Is it 15 or 20? And our president never stops telling us that when it comes to ISIS, defeat is not an option, mercy is not on the menu
.. No matter how many innocents are fatally shot — no matter even that one of their own congressional leaders was critically wounded playing baseball — it’s never time to discuss any serious policy measures to mitigate gun violence.
.. But for Pruitt, we know, it’s never time to take climate change seriously.
.. It’s also corrupt. Because it’s driven by money and greed — by gunmakers and gun sellers and oil and coal companies, and all the legislators and regulators they’ve bought and paid to keep silent. They know full well most Americans don’t want to take away people’s rights to hunt or defend themselves.
.. Forget about persuading these legislators. They are not confused or underinformed. They are either bought or intimidated.
.. This is about raw power, not persuasion. And the first chance we have to change the balance of power is the 2018 midterm elections. Forget about trying to get anything done before then. Don’t waste your breath.
Just get power. Start now.
Zinke says his workers are disloyal. They say his personnel moves break the law.
As Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke blasted many within his department for being disloyal to the Trump administration’s agenda this week, the agency’s inspector general’s office continued a probe into whether officials acted inappropriately when they abruptly reassigned dozens of senior workers.
.. The reassigned workers include Joel Clement, a climate scientist who was removed from his job as director of policy analysis and reassigned to a revenue accounting position for which he has no experience. Clement became a whistleblower when he publicly complained about his switch from his longtime role, in which he assessed climate impact on Alaska Native communities.
.. “He believes . . . that the administration targeted him because he was speaking out about the danger [of climate change] to Alaska Native Communities,” said attorney Katherine Atkinson, who is representing Clement. “As a result, they labeled him as a climate guy.”.. Beyond how the reassignments were carried out — which Atkinson said violated the U.S. Code — “it’s a waste of government money to just arbitrarily move people around in the hopes that they will quit,” she said... Another staffer called the news a “shock to the system” that would require a move to Washington from a post hundreds of miles away.
Tyler Cowen: Jeffrey Sachs on Charter Cities, Paul Krugman, and How to Reform Graduate Economics Education
(33:25)
TYLER COWEN: To pick a success from the past, let me mention Poland. In my opinion, Poland has gone very well. It’s a great country. It’s been a success. If I made the following claim, would you agree with it? That you, Jeffrey Sachs, have done more for economic liberty through the medium and history of Poland than almost any other economist alive today? True or false?
.. In 1989, I made recommendations for Poland. I said several unusual things, like “Don’t pay your debts, get debt cancellation. You need emergency, a billion dollars on this date,” and so forth. Everything I recommended actually ended up happening with US government support.
.. Then in Russia two years later I was asked by Gorbachev and then by Yeltsin to help them, because they saw what was happening in Poland. They liked that. They wanted something similar. So I said exactly the same things, and the US government kept saying, “No, no way, no way.” I kept saying, “But that kept working there.”
I didn’t understand it in some deep sense for a long, long time, how weird this was. I knew it wasn’t the difference of economic advice. I understand what a financial crisis is.
TYLER COWEN: Culturally weird, you mean.
JEFFREY SACHS: No, how weird it was in the historical moment that things that had worked extremely well, had shown themselves, where I had had Brent Scowcroft and Bob Dole and others strongly supporting it, all of a sudden just no support from Washington. The IMF saying, “We’re not going to do this.” I said, “But, Richard Urban, you did that two years ago in Poland.” “We’re not going to do it.” “Why?” Flat.
OK. What’s the lesson of this? Quite important, actually. It’s a little bit off-topic, but very important. We didn’t want to help Russia in 1991. We wanted our unipolar world. I didn’t know that at the time.
.. I had had Brent Scowcroft and Bob Dole and others strongly supporting it, all of a sudden just no support from Washington. The IMF saying, “We’re not going to do this.” I said, “But, Richard Urban, you did that two years ago in Poland.” “We’re not going to do it.” “Why?” Flat.
.. What I didn’t understand was everything I said about Poland was immediately accepted because it was good advice and because Poland was going to be a bulwark of NATO. Everything I said about Russia didn’t matter whether it was good advice or not. Russia was on the other side.
TYLER COWEN: But China did it without us, without American help for the most part. What is it about Russia that meant Russia couldn’t do it? The problem was not like a Khrushchev-Kennedy dialog. But Russia must have failed in some other way where China more or less did not. What is that element?
.. JEFFREY SACHS: Many things. First of all, Russia faced in 1991 an extremely acute financial crisis. If you haven’t lived through a deep, deep, deep financial crisis, it’s hard to understand what it is.
.. But there’s a big difference of being a urban industrial, broken, Soviet economy.
TYLER COWEN: Which was deindustrializing eventually anyway.
JEFFREY SACHS: Which had so overgrown the investor heavy industry, and it was in a lot of collapse, versus being an agrarian, impoverished country, as China was in 1978. The pathways were bound to be very, very different. The geography is different, by the way, because China’s just filled with people who could do low-cost labor right at the ports on the east coast of China.
Whereas for Russia, it’s almost basically a landlocked landmass that was running off of petroleum which had collapsed in global price, which had collapsed in the physical facilities in the countryside, with collapsing steel mills, collapsing everything.
.. Syria had a huge drought, the biggest in its modern history, from 2006 to ’10. It led to many social ramifications that contributed to the explosion of violence starting in 2011.
This fact of these ecological crises turning into social catastrophes, I think, is a very real phenomenon. We should not presume that somehow we’ll just be able to handle this stuff. I’m told constantly, “Crisis leads to innovation and solution.” The truth is that’s sometimes true, and sometimes crisis leads to catastrophe.
.. Just a final word about that. We have so much statistical machinery to ask the question, “What can you learn from this dataset?” That’s the wrong question because the dataset is always a tiny, tiny fraction of what you can know about the problem that you’re studying.
If you want to know about the problem, get out there and learn about it. Don’t think that you’re going to find it in your dataset. For that we need a different kind of epistemological approach and a different kind of teaching approach as well.
I want our students out on the hospital wards, as it were