Good work interviewing Robinson before he got the Nobel-Bank prize in Econ. I really enjoyed this as an economist long frustrated with my field’s narrowness.
Robinson’s message is important for the Persuasion Community, but it lacks a key factor that should be part of his framework. He’s got the Institutions and the People which need to balance in a narrow corridor. For dynamics: technical and intellectual (political?) innovations, which are subject to “historical contingency.” That’s all good.
But these intellectual processes develop by the somewhat rational spread of ideas, despite the random contingencies. The missing factor is completely non-rational the same way evolution is.
The missing factor is ideology. That’s huge and it’s mainly what the good fight is fighting. Woke/CRT/Identity politics is pure ideology. Those evolve exactly like religions just as religions do.
Intellectual innovations and ideologies develop and defend themselves in completely different ways. Ideologies gain their power through an evolutionary process not through intellectual/technical processes. Communism, Nazism, fascism pretend to be intellectual, but in practice they just evolve by trial, error and the “naturally” selection of dogmas that capture minds quickly and thoroughly.
Frighteningly, ID politics is pushing us toward the likes of Robinson’s “68 different ethnic groups on the Jos Plateau,” in order to destroy the capitalist-racist-heteronormative state. And as the state is weakened, as Robinson notes, “the absence of the state is often [replaced by] the “cage of norms,” [which] puts enormous constraints on liberty.
So Yascha, could you write an essay on how you would modify Robinson’s analysis to make it more applicable to our Community fighting the good fight against the Woke/CRT identity trap and perhaps right-wing populism as well?
Here's a related piece I wrote on my own Substack site:
And now I’ve seen it all after watching the University of Chicago’s current crop of dismal scientists giddily standing together there last Monday morning on the shoulders of giant menaces to society like the U of C’s storied Nobel laureates Milton Friedman and George Stigler as the running and the flashing cameras captured the spectacle of their gathering to congratulate their colleague James Robinson for his good fortune in bagging himself a Nobel Prize for his work on inequality of all things and to pat him on the back for a job well done in thereby redounding to the Nobel-loaded glory of that midwestern ground zero where the disease of neoliberalism was turned loose with a lethal dose of always growing inequality on our poor species.
It was so instructive to watch Mr. Robinson stand up there at the podium on the shoulders of those already-mentioned giants and begin his remarks by singing the praises of that ivy-covered font of awful zombie ideas about how we human beings should relate to one another while he was in the middle of taking the morning off from the usual worrying of himself into a fit of textbook economics inquiry over the inequality between the so-called prospering societies of the world and the ones that can’t get their postcolonial act together enough to read and religiously follow the dismal and social sciences textbooks written by the “prospering” societies’ soulless neoliberal social engineers in dismal and social scientists’ lab coats who’s ongoing mission it is to keep the world and all the markets in it free from any impediments to everybody’s taking prosperity to mean what a lucky society gets when the greedy free agents that make it up have at last freed themselves from the tethers of the human solidarity keeping them from becoming the best and most prospering Homo economicus they can be.
And now I’ve also heard it all after having listened to all 50 minutes of Yascha Mounk’s 2019 interview with James Robinson without ever hearing a single hint that either of the two parties was hearing how weird it was for a perfectly well-educated and genuinely well-meaning sounding eventual Nobel prize winner to sit somewhere out there in the middle of the unfolding global neoliberal shit show that a certain exhibit A in the case to be made against worshipping unfettered self-interest named The Donald was then the ringleader of and wonder what on earth was wrong with the dumb countries without the good sense to follow the lead of the Shining City on a Hill for instance where a mere 100,000 or so and a mere 50,000 or so of its consumer-citizens annually undergo deaths of despair and deaths owing to health insurancelessness, respectively and where everybody has pitched in to pull off the miracle of preserving the preposterous pretense that democratic processes have anything to do with what goes on up there at the top of this obvious corporatocracy and where the already-mentioned consumer-citizens are doing a fantastic job of carrying on under the thanatotic burden of the anomie spread everywhere thanks to corporate America’s money-corrupting of the social and economic and political and governmental and academic and financial and religious and other institutions that used to hold us fellow human beings together and where all the growing inequality-hardened consumer-citizens are also doing a darn good job of carrying on in the patting of ourselves on the back no matter how badly we’re being morally injured by the 25 cents we consumer-citizens (as opposed to the corporate person-citizens) chip in on every tax dollar to the corporatocratic cause of imperialistically turning our military loose on a lot of the failed states James Robinson is so worried about and where we consumer-citizens are also having no trouble whatsoever troubling ourselves not much at all over the so oversized part we’re playing in the climate change that’s having such an oversized effect on the kinds of failing states James Robinson is so worried about.
So now five years down the road on this unfolding neoliberal shit show The Donald could very well become the ringmaster of again, it’s hard not to feel sick about how little the chances are that the committee in charge of picking the big winner of next year’s Nobel Prize for the dismal science will come up with someone looking with due courage and urgency for a means of shrinking the neoliberal monster till its small enough to be drowned in the proverbial bathtub.
Excellent interview. I am particularly interested in the argument about the financial rewards of slavery. All evidence is that the agricultural caste system (which includes both slavery and Jim Crow) impoverished all but 8-13% of the southern population. The denial of education to African Americans deprived the southern economy of the skilled labor necessary to develop a modern economy. Segregation created useless and costly redundancies in physical structures and education-related personnel. During World War II, the forced ignorance of Jim Crow thoroughly hobbled Florida’s ability to capitalize on the unprecedented federal dollars lavished on the state during the war. The handful of military bases that survived the end of the war were exclusively due to the Cold-War necessity to rethink defense and the need to catch up with rocketry and missile technology.
The United States would have been far richer without the agricultural caste system in all of its forms.
Good work interviewing Robinson before he got the Nobel-Bank prize in Econ. I really enjoyed this as an economist long frustrated with my field’s narrowness.
Robinson’s message is important for the Persuasion Community, but it lacks a key factor that should be part of his framework. He’s got the Institutions and the People which need to balance in a narrow corridor. For dynamics: technical and intellectual (political?) innovations, which are subject to “historical contingency.” That’s all good.
But these intellectual processes develop by the somewhat rational spread of ideas, despite the random contingencies. The missing factor is completely non-rational the same way evolution is.
The missing factor is ideology. That’s huge and it’s mainly what the good fight is fighting. Woke/CRT/Identity politics is pure ideology. Those evolve exactly like religions just as religions do.
Intellectual innovations and ideologies develop and defend themselves in completely different ways. Ideologies gain their power through an evolutionary process not through intellectual/technical processes. Communism, Nazism, fascism pretend to be intellectual, but in practice they just evolve by trial, error and the “naturally” selection of dogmas that capture minds quickly and thoroughly.
Frighteningly, ID politics is pushing us toward the likes of Robinson’s “68 different ethnic groups on the Jos Plateau,” in order to destroy the capitalist-racist-heteronormative state. And as the state is weakened, as Robinson notes, “the absence of the state is often [replaced by] the “cage of norms,” [which] puts enormous constraints on liberty.
So Yascha, could you write an essay on how you would modify Robinson’s analysis to make it more applicable to our Community fighting the good fight against the Woke/CRT identity trap and perhaps right-wing populism as well?
Here's a related piece I wrote on my own Substack site:
And now I’ve seen it all after watching the University of Chicago’s current crop of dismal scientists giddily standing together there last Monday morning on the shoulders of giant menaces to society like the U of C’s storied Nobel laureates Milton Friedman and George Stigler as the running and the flashing cameras captured the spectacle of their gathering to congratulate their colleague James Robinson for his good fortune in bagging himself a Nobel Prize for his work on inequality of all things and to pat him on the back for a job well done in thereby redounding to the Nobel-loaded glory of that midwestern ground zero where the disease of neoliberalism was turned loose with a lethal dose of always growing inequality on our poor species.
It was so instructive to watch Mr. Robinson stand up there at the podium on the shoulders of those already-mentioned giants and begin his remarks by singing the praises of that ivy-covered font of awful zombie ideas about how we human beings should relate to one another while he was in the middle of taking the morning off from the usual worrying of himself into a fit of textbook economics inquiry over the inequality between the so-called prospering societies of the world and the ones that can’t get their postcolonial act together enough to read and religiously follow the dismal and social sciences textbooks written by the “prospering” societies’ soulless neoliberal social engineers in dismal and social scientists’ lab coats who’s ongoing mission it is to keep the world and all the markets in it free from any impediments to everybody’s taking prosperity to mean what a lucky society gets when the greedy free agents that make it up have at last freed themselves from the tethers of the human solidarity keeping them from becoming the best and most prospering Homo economicus they can be.
And now I’ve also heard it all after having listened to all 50 minutes of Yascha Mounk’s 2019 interview with James Robinson without ever hearing a single hint that either of the two parties was hearing how weird it was for a perfectly well-educated and genuinely well-meaning sounding eventual Nobel prize winner to sit somewhere out there in the middle of the unfolding global neoliberal shit show that a certain exhibit A in the case to be made against worshipping unfettered self-interest named The Donald was then the ringleader of and wonder what on earth was wrong with the dumb countries without the good sense to follow the lead of the Shining City on a Hill for instance where a mere 100,000 or so and a mere 50,000 or so of its consumer-citizens annually undergo deaths of despair and deaths owing to health insurancelessness, respectively and where everybody has pitched in to pull off the miracle of preserving the preposterous pretense that democratic processes have anything to do with what goes on up there at the top of this obvious corporatocracy and where the already-mentioned consumer-citizens are doing a fantastic job of carrying on under the thanatotic burden of the anomie spread everywhere thanks to corporate America’s money-corrupting of the social and economic and political and governmental and academic and financial and religious and other institutions that used to hold us fellow human beings together and where all the growing inequality-hardened consumer-citizens are also doing a darn good job of carrying on in the patting of ourselves on the back no matter how badly we’re being morally injured by the 25 cents we consumer-citizens (as opposed to the corporate person-citizens) chip in on every tax dollar to the corporatocratic cause of imperialistically turning our military loose on a lot of the failed states James Robinson is so worried about and where we consumer-citizens are also having no trouble whatsoever troubling ourselves not much at all over the so oversized part we’re playing in the climate change that’s having such an oversized effect on the kinds of failing states James Robinson is so worried about.
So now five years down the road on this unfolding neoliberal shit show The Donald could very well become the ringmaster of again, it’s hard not to feel sick about how little the chances are that the committee in charge of picking the big winner of next year’s Nobel Prize for the dismal science will come up with someone looking with due courage and urgency for a means of shrinking the neoliberal monster till its small enough to be drowned in the proverbial bathtub.
Excellent interview. I am particularly interested in the argument about the financial rewards of slavery. All evidence is that the agricultural caste system (which includes both slavery and Jim Crow) impoverished all but 8-13% of the southern population. The denial of education to African Americans deprived the southern economy of the skilled labor necessary to develop a modern economy. Segregation created useless and costly redundancies in physical structures and education-related personnel. During World War II, the forced ignorance of Jim Crow thoroughly hobbled Florida’s ability to capitalize on the unprecedented federal dollars lavished on the state during the war. The handful of military bases that survived the end of the war were exclusively due to the Cold-War necessity to rethink defense and the need to catch up with rocketry and missile technology.
The United States would have been far richer without the agricultural caste system in all of its forms.