In this week’s TGS, I’m joined once again by intellectual historian Daniel Bessner. Given Daniel’s area of scholarly expertise—US foreign relations—it should be no surprise that the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan colors our discussion. But we range much further than that. We debate Daniel’s conception of
I was hugely disappointed in Glen's defense of free markets throughout. As a few examples, living a frugal life and supporting capitalism are not mutually exclusive in the slightest. Capitalism is the freedom to trade and innovate without state coercion, nothing more. We could all freely choose to live like monks. The material progress to billions in Asia was also brushed aside in this podcast.
Next, the idea that the rich countries are rich solely at the expense of poorer countries is an incredibly Marxist ideological claim unsubstantiated by serious empirical evidence (and common sense). How about property rights, the rule of law, and human rights?
Conflating climate issues solely with free markets while ignoring the historical evidence of heavily polluting regimes in the Soviet Union with top-down political control is a serious error. Capitalism incentivizes humanity to use as little input as possible to provide for the needs of the masses. No discussion of harnessing capitalism with carbon taxes to direct resources in an environmentally friendly way is inexcusable.
To end the podcast, Glen made no pushback on the guest's claims that college has become unaffordable due to capitalism in higher education. Is the guest serious? The government has a monopoly on student lending, and the government has monopoly accreditation powers. There is no competition in higher education.
The guest puts up criticisms with no solutions. The classic conservative response is, "compared to what"? "What do you propose we do?"
I'm sorry I'm coming to this so late, and I haven't finished watching it yet, but Prof. Bessner comes across as little more than a glib ideologue. Smart, yes, but ideologues often are. He's very good at cherrypicking and shoehorning evidence to fit his narrative, but at the end of the day, it's a narrative, as artificial as any other. The Soviet Union ceased to be expansionist after Stalin's death in 1953? That would be comical if it weren't so tragically absurd. Ask the Berliners in 1961, or the Czechs in 1968, or the Afghans in 1980... or anyone who remembers the Soviets stationing nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962!
I know, I know, it was all a reaction to the US's imperialist aggression. The script writes itself.
Liberal Arts education- Glenn, you rightfully speak of the “great books” and power of a liberal arts education, but in reality that education has waned since the end of, or diminishment of, university core requirements in the 1970s. Hence, the degree may still be called “liberal arts” but it isn’t.
Indeed, there is no consistent definition of what means “liberal arts” and maybe you’re the guy to help the rest of the education industry define it and offer liberal arts knowledge through universities or less formal vehicles. Adding standardized exit exams might also be useful.
The “great books” were also once part of high school curriculum (where students have little choice over the curriculum), but that too has been severely dumbed down since the 70s. Classic liberal arts education does not directly lead to a job, but will make one a better citizen. A sustained representative republic benefits greatly from the knowledge embedded in the “great books”. Liberal arts education doesn’t need to compete with STEM and vocational as they are both important and essentially complimentary.
Daniel is correct that universities have become country club experiences for prolonging adolescence with less emphasis on education and none on rigor (outside of STEM). That adds to the costs, which is subsidized by taxpayers who don’t go to university. The European model is less residential, no country club and no sports. Emphasis is on subject matter only and usually within a single discipline (ostensibly the liberal arts education happens there before university).
Glenn, a while back you asked subscribers for topic suggestions, well mine is that you and your co hosts work on renovating all levels of education in America. I have full confidence that you and John and your other guests will be up to the task.
Well, Live Free of Die, you've done my work for me and then some. I'll just add a few basic points:
1) I don't agree with Daniel on much of anything as a matter of principle. I think he has a good knowledge of events at the level of a chronological table of contents, but his interpretation of virtually all those events is suffused with a suffocating sameness. He's looking through the standard Marxist lens, with some additional modern distortions added, courtesy of Chomsky and the "It's the end of the world unless we reverse direction." crowd.
2) Daniel is particularly articulate, but I've heard all of this delivered a distressing number of times over the past few years. Each such person seems convinced that they have their own original opinions. This is unnerving, because they don't. They are all dreaming up exactly the same "original" ideas and evaluations because they are all drawing from the same conceptual foundation, a foundation that was instilled when they were too young to think critically. They've all had the same influences. They've watched the same movies with the endless plots featuring evil business interests. They've all heard the same grievances, starting with the Saturday morning cartoons. But the largest force of sameness and indoctrination has been their education.
We've all heard of CRT, and some of us understand that while CRT as such is not explicitly taught from K12 on up, it is implicitly influencing the entire spectrum of education - all grades, all subjects. How? Because it is the lens through which all subjects are taught. Yes there is a lot of pushback because this has come to the publics attention as a result of parents auditing their kids' Zoom classes during the lockdowns.
What is less understood is that prior to teaching through the CRT lens, many educators and teachers were teaching through the Critical Theory lens. CRT is derived from CT. CT is essentially Marxist. Whereas with CRT you must find racism in everything, with CT you must find classism in everything. Class, oppression, struggle, false consciousness, all of it is generally accepted by educators and by many teachers and professors. At least two generations of Americans have been educated with all subjects passing through this CT lens. So if you wonder why so many younger people hate America and pine for something like socialism or communism, it's because they can't even remember a time when they thought otherwise. These anti-enlightenment anti-western ideas have been the backdrop to everything for them. They can no more think otherwise than a fish can fly. (Well yes, a very few fish can fly. But it is a rarety.)
So this is who Daniel is, an articulate representative of many millions of Americans who have been indoctrinated in this way. Sorry if this sounds uncharitable to Glenn's guest Daniel, but this is what has happened here in America.
The biggest mistake Americans made flew by under our radar. We should have been very concerned about what our children were being taught. Instead, we dropped them off at school, trusting to our system of education and thankful to have some time to ourselves each day. American parents never dreamed their kids were being mal-educated and turned into frustrated leftists rooting for the other side in every conflict and working earnestly against America with the full blind moral conviction of brainwashed zealots. But here we are. What a mess.
Although I agree with Daniel on many things in principle, and I admire that he's willing to debate his ideas (sort of), I find him very frustrating as a guest. I get the impression that he is an intelligent person who has never had any of his preconceptions seriously challenged in academia--and the thought that he is teaching these things to students, as he says them here, makes me shudder.
More than anything I loathe how he views the world through systems and epochs and institutions, rather than through people. He pretends to be a 'humanist' as his justification for overthrowing an economic system that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, appealing to some vague notions of exploitation that make no economic sense--by his same logic, the US was 'exploiting' Japan after WW2. He would look like a buffoon if he argued that now. Does he know why? Because our 'exploitation' turned Japan into one of the richest countries in the world. The examples go on--it's telling that he never addresses Glenn's point about how rich South Korea has become in any meaningful way, except vague references to forthcoming climate catastrophe.
It's interesting, isn't it, that Communists have found yet another problem that only they can solve--climate change--after they were wrong about everything else? How very convenient! (More on this later.)
Rather than searching through economic systems and regimes to find the humans, as one would think a humanist would do, he decries 'Capitalism' as if it were some sort of monolithic worldview created in the bedroom of one of the Medicis in the 15th Century. This is patently absurd. One can only support this line of thinking by appealing to a Marxian vision of historical epochs. But there is no such thing as 'Capitalism.' There is only the natural human inclination to truck and barter, in conjunction with naturally evolved and complex financial systems, and a relatively new global economic process. No one sat down to invent capital-C-apitalism. There is no comparison between it and Communism, which has a prophet (Marx/Engels) and a canon (The Communist Manifesto/Das Kapital/Lenin's writings, etc.). They could not be more different. One is a system retroactively quantified by writers, beginning with Smith; the other is a death cult stemming from a single man's vision.
It's a common neo-Marxist tactic to reframe the economic discussion, which they know they have thoroughly lost, through the context of climate change (see Patel and Moore, "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things," for one egregious example). The basic premise of the argument is that their hypothetical economic system, which is inevitably Stalinistic central planning where they'll get it right this time, will do a far better job managing resources and industry and subsequent pollution than 'Capitalism' currently does.
This seems to be the logic Daniel is appealing to. To his credit, he admits that a dramatic reduction in the quality of living will be required. Patel and Moore do not. I find this admission interesting in his case, because Daniel, as mentioned earlier, also says he's a humanist.
Is this not a contradiction in premises? How can one be a humanist, while supporting a reduction in lifespan and human quality of life? What's humanistic about that?
Like so many self-avowed Leftists he seems to, in actuality, place vague notions of ecological preservation or purity above definite human existence. That he can say this while also claiming that Capitalism is evil because people outside of the Northern Hemisphere are poorer than those within is laughably absurd. It's such a contradiction. If Daniel really were a humanist, he would be looking for ways to handle anthropogenic climate change WITHOUT reducing standard of living. Rather than stopping it altogether, he would look for ways to live with it. THAT is the the humanist approach to climate catastrophe--NOT overthrowing 'Capitalism.' This is the approach that serious intellectuals on the Left, such as those who often publish their writings via Spiked-Online, take--but they almost never do, and especially not in academia. What have we come to where Leftism is actually supporting a reduction in living standards for the global working class? What happened?
It's convenient for all of us, though, that no other economic 'system'--and Capitalism isn't an economic system, it's the manifestation of human nature on a global scale--could create the efficiency needed to support a clean, green, high-tech Earth aside from Capitalism. Marx and Engels themselves acknowledge, as do people like Patel and Moore, the immense efficiency market economics. In their minds this is why it ultimately leads to destruction--because it always must grow. But this is always contrasted with a completely nonsensical belief that a centrally planned economy, which they themselves admit would be less efficient, might actually pollute less. Aside from being an internal contradiction in premises, one can briefly examine the histories of the USSR and CCCP to see that this is so hilariously wrong. I would give evidence were it not for word constraints; I recommend Douglas Weiner, “The Predatory Tribute-Taking State: A Framework for Understanding Russian Environmental History,” in Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds., The Environment and World History.). All in all, the history of central planning demonstrates that it has contributed far more directly to material ecological crisis—such as the draining of the Caspian Sea—than vague notions of climate change could ever hope to. That is not to say that climate change isn't serious or worthy of consideration, but rather that the notion of capitalism being uniquely ecologically destructive is absurd. Capitalism’s immense efficiency, inherent in Marxian thought, makes it less destructive than any historical example of central planning.
But, of course, as Daniel would say, "This time, we'll do it right!" To bring it all full circle, back to his claim that he's a humanist, this is the sort of thinking that exemplifies the political Left--or, perhaps, more usefully, as Sowell would describe them, those with the Unconstrained vision. If you really, truly view history as being undertaken by systems and ideas rather than human beings, then it makes sense that Daniel can so disregard the USSR's immense failures as 'eh it's the workers fighting amongst themselves, we can do it better next time lol.' And he's right. There's no guarantee that next time the same things will go wrong.
But to hold this view is to completely ignore the human incentives, and the human failings, of the story of Communism. In "The Road to Serfdom," Hayek flawlessly predicts how and why centrally planned economies will fail. He was right about everything. This wasn't luck: these factors were obvious once the human was considered. But Daniel will never consider the human. He'll look at technology, and the social milieu, and he'll blame the workers for doing it wrong, and he'll completely ignore the fact that the real constraint on the USSR was its people. It was that the peasants in their communes didn't want Lenin. It was that no one actually did the work without being enslaved in labor camps. It was that no bureaucrat, no matter how well intentioned, could coordinate an economy by diktat. One will miss this fact if they only see history in Marxian epochs, or if they prefer to view systems as monolithic institutions, rather than corporate human activity. Could a worldview possibly be any less humanistic?
Such conversations with young people today make me sad and I can rarely sit through more than half what is usually posted. Such a myopic and prejudicial view of America is what is served on the menu of almost American colleges today. Daniel is a product of such Schooling and undoubtedly will have a long academic career indoctrinating the young minds that come to him looking for education.
The world was decimated by world war II and it was the Herculean effort by American industry, citizenry and military that saved it. America allowed asymmetrical economic treaties with the rest of the world as well as paying the capital in order to rebuild a world destroyed by war... That asymmetry persisted and gutted the industrial capabilities of the country and eventually moving those jobs to other countries for their enrichment and destroying the American middle class. Imperialism? That's just woke nonsense pumped into the head of impressionable students. The World is way more complicated and way more nuanced. I wish I had the time and patience to listen to the whole interview but I guess I'm just getting too old to listen to the same old well-rehearsed resuscitation of woke talking points about how evil America is. I will agree with Daniel that maybe it is time for us to go isolationist and let the world burn... But of course that will never happen because without America's military might and economic power the world falls apart and everybody with any sense knows it...
Glenn brought up the concern of potential oligarch control/misuse of the commons so to speak. My friends who have worked in ethnic art culture production since the 1970’s complain that decades ago in ethnicity X, politicized identity activists at the regional or national level took over local culture organizations. SF Bay Area displayed warning signs in 2012 - that I witnessed (identity Y). Some artist defected by abandoning their art and changing careers.
Today, I was trying to have a productive discussion about the problem of equity over-control at my friend’s place of work. I realized that even though I am not an economist, I am confident I can guess approximately some of the infrastructure pieces of Glenn’s field. I am referring to hierarchical structure and information movement up and down. But, equity is so mysterious and non-transparent, that I have no idea how topics and information are selected by leaders for an agenda that appears consistent nationwide.
Thank you for meeting with Bessner of The Nation, a weekly leftist news magazine that I used to subscribe to. I wish more media creators would follow suit and interview those who are unlike the host. Each of Bessner’s sentences has much background info that Bessner either has in his head or on his bookshelf. I’m curious about how Bessner would build an information/history foundation for each of his sentences. After that, there would be much unpacking to do - at least for me. That the USA was “never destined to be an empire” - so we should abandon any geopolitical advantage of pro-America influence by shrinking and retreating within our borders? For whatever reasons, some countries arrive in a superpower position (or empire), while others do not. That the USA is “misusing federal government infrastructure to commit crime/immorality abroad” - I am not convinced. To me it sounds like intellectual grievance against every USA action. I am temporarily stopped at minute 15 in the audio file (podcast). Very interesting discussion. Soon, I will return to podcast to complete my listening.
north korea had taken all but Busan before they were pushed back...is he suggesting that 3x the number of people living under the Kims for generations would have been a better outcome?
It is a great pleasure to listen to you two. I have a few comments. Bessner ultimately is anti democratic. He doesn’t like the choices people make with the resources they have. He asserts that global warming , to call it by it’s proper name , will cause the end of civilization. How? What exactly will happen to cause it ? The oceans rising to swamp all the homes of the Uber rich ?
I tune out any commentator on climate who does not mention Milancovitch cycles.
I had a similar experience with my undergraduate education. It was exciting to be in an environment where we were reading things like Aristotle and Descartes and Chaucer in the original Middle English. I'd been a kind of middling student in high school, but getting to college and being in that environment just flipped a switch for me. And it wasn't at a Brown or Columbia as Daniel suggests. It was in fact at a large state school, the University of Alabama.
But, I'll concede that things may have changed since I graduated in 2005. When I graduated, tuition was $3,200 a semester (and that's adjusted for inflation). Where I teach now it's over $25,000 a semester (just tuition, not room and board). I might be much more concerned about employment prospects as well under those conditions.
As for the "summer camp" comment, it's not summer camp. It's welfare.
For a good number of students, college is a means to an end, but the end isn't a credential and a job. College enrollment grants them access to loans which cover not just tuition, but also their living expenses. Being a full-time college student is the easiest path to getting your rent paid. We get students who know they have no business being in college who are just barely maintaining the credits and grades not because they want access to the summer camp, rock climbing, resort-style amenities, but because they need the loan money to keep flowing. Rather than being there so they can get a job, they're there to avoid getting a job.
Now that's obviously not all the students, not even the majority. Some are there for the credential and job. Some are there for the summer camp. Some are there for the *intellectual* summer camp that a liberal arts education should be. But, too many are taking out tens of thousands in student loans just to get access to tens of thousands more in food an housing aid.
Thank you for the interesting conversation. If I may make one observation: passion and conviction don't make for substance.
On one hand, it is nice that Bessner is authentic; on the other that does not add virtue or creditably to his arguments. He came across as thinking knowing history and understanding history are interchangeable. They are not.
I respect your acknowledgment of your limitations in historical scholarship - at the same time I wish you would have pushed back more on his narrative weakness (USA/Capitalism root of all evil) and unfounded assumptions he made by his dot connecting.
Dr. Loury, I don't know whether you're just being polite or enjoy watching people with bad arguments unravel, but as an economist, surely you could tell that Dr. Bessner did not have a precise definition of the bogeyman he kept referring to as "Capitalism". Perhaps it wouldn't be fair to demand a historian present you with the rigor you'd demand of the colleagues in your field, but in this conversation, he invoked a disparagement of "Capitalism" all too regularly as a critical link in his arguments. I don't think it would make your symposia all too awkward to ask your interlocutors to take a step back when you notice people seemingly referring to some core concept and politely insist they define better what they mean. Did Dr. Bessner not negotiate his salary at U of W? Did he ever buy or sell a piece of property at market rate? Does he trade stocks at all, or buy into a retirement fund that does?
Bessner makes some interesting points, but many of his comments involve very sloppy thinking. I will use his comments on the Covid-19 vaccines as an example. He questions the vaccines because of so-called breakthrough Covid-19 cases. Anyone familiar with vaccines knows that their efficacy is seldom 100%. We knew from studies used to test these vaccines that efficacy was likely to be in the 65% - 95% range, and we also knew that it was likely to be somewhat different for different strains of Covid-19. In other words, anyone with a basic understanding of statistics or of vaccines would expect to see breakthrough cases even though the vaccines are effective. Bessner said enough to make it clear that he doesn't understand vaccine efficacy, and then he went on with a long-winded and in some ways nonsensical explanation about whether universities or other schools should remain open.
It seems that Bessner has many scripted responses that he uses without making an effort to think through the issues. It really seems to me that many of Bessner's comments are theater (to paraphrase John McWhorter) rather than serious analysis.
Bessner's basic argument is, let's consider the worst behavior of the United States in the last fifty years, looked at in the worst light, and put it up against an ideal implementation of an imaginary social, economic, and political order, and see what comes out on top.
I was hugely disappointed in Glen's defense of free markets throughout. As a few examples, living a frugal life and supporting capitalism are not mutually exclusive in the slightest. Capitalism is the freedom to trade and innovate without state coercion, nothing more. We could all freely choose to live like monks. The material progress to billions in Asia was also brushed aside in this podcast.
Next, the idea that the rich countries are rich solely at the expense of poorer countries is an incredibly Marxist ideological claim unsubstantiated by serious empirical evidence (and common sense). How about property rights, the rule of law, and human rights?
Conflating climate issues solely with free markets while ignoring the historical evidence of heavily polluting regimes in the Soviet Union with top-down political control is a serious error. Capitalism incentivizes humanity to use as little input as possible to provide for the needs of the masses. No discussion of harnessing capitalism with carbon taxes to direct resources in an environmentally friendly way is inexcusable.
To end the podcast, Glen made no pushback on the guest's claims that college has become unaffordable due to capitalism in higher education. Is the guest serious? The government has a monopoly on student lending, and the government has monopoly accreditation powers. There is no competition in higher education.
The guest puts up criticisms with no solutions. The classic conservative response is, "compared to what"? "What do you propose we do?"
I'm sorry I'm coming to this so late, and I haven't finished watching it yet, but Prof. Bessner comes across as little more than a glib ideologue. Smart, yes, but ideologues often are. He's very good at cherrypicking and shoehorning evidence to fit his narrative, but at the end of the day, it's a narrative, as artificial as any other. The Soviet Union ceased to be expansionist after Stalin's death in 1953? That would be comical if it weren't so tragically absurd. Ask the Berliners in 1961, or the Czechs in 1968, or the Afghans in 1980... or anyone who remembers the Soviets stationing nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962!
I know, I know, it was all a reaction to the US's imperialist aggression. The script writes itself.
Liberal Arts education- Glenn, you rightfully speak of the “great books” and power of a liberal arts education, but in reality that education has waned since the end of, or diminishment of, university core requirements in the 1970s. Hence, the degree may still be called “liberal arts” but it isn’t.
Indeed, there is no consistent definition of what means “liberal arts” and maybe you’re the guy to help the rest of the education industry define it and offer liberal arts knowledge through universities or less formal vehicles. Adding standardized exit exams might also be useful.
The “great books” were also once part of high school curriculum (where students have little choice over the curriculum), but that too has been severely dumbed down since the 70s. Classic liberal arts education does not directly lead to a job, but will make one a better citizen. A sustained representative republic benefits greatly from the knowledge embedded in the “great books”. Liberal arts education doesn’t need to compete with STEM and vocational as they are both important and essentially complimentary.
Daniel is correct that universities have become country club experiences for prolonging adolescence with less emphasis on education and none on rigor (outside of STEM). That adds to the costs, which is subsidized by taxpayers who don’t go to university. The European model is less residential, no country club and no sports. Emphasis is on subject matter only and usually within a single discipline (ostensibly the liberal arts education happens there before university).
Glenn, a while back you asked subscribers for topic suggestions, well mine is that you and your co hosts work on renovating all levels of education in America. I have full confidence that you and John and your other guests will be up to the task.
Well, Live Free of Die, you've done my work for me and then some. I'll just add a few basic points:
1) I don't agree with Daniel on much of anything as a matter of principle. I think he has a good knowledge of events at the level of a chronological table of contents, but his interpretation of virtually all those events is suffused with a suffocating sameness. He's looking through the standard Marxist lens, with some additional modern distortions added, courtesy of Chomsky and the "It's the end of the world unless we reverse direction." crowd.
2) Daniel is particularly articulate, but I've heard all of this delivered a distressing number of times over the past few years. Each such person seems convinced that they have their own original opinions. This is unnerving, because they don't. They are all dreaming up exactly the same "original" ideas and evaluations because they are all drawing from the same conceptual foundation, a foundation that was instilled when they were too young to think critically. They've all had the same influences. They've watched the same movies with the endless plots featuring evil business interests. They've all heard the same grievances, starting with the Saturday morning cartoons. But the largest force of sameness and indoctrination has been their education.
We've all heard of CRT, and some of us understand that while CRT as such is not explicitly taught from K12 on up, it is implicitly influencing the entire spectrum of education - all grades, all subjects. How? Because it is the lens through which all subjects are taught. Yes there is a lot of pushback because this has come to the publics attention as a result of parents auditing their kids' Zoom classes during the lockdowns.
What is less understood is that prior to teaching through the CRT lens, many educators and teachers were teaching through the Critical Theory lens. CRT is derived from CT. CT is essentially Marxist. Whereas with CRT you must find racism in everything, with CT you must find classism in everything. Class, oppression, struggle, false consciousness, all of it is generally accepted by educators and by many teachers and professors. At least two generations of Americans have been educated with all subjects passing through this CT lens. So if you wonder why so many younger people hate America and pine for something like socialism or communism, it's because they can't even remember a time when they thought otherwise. These anti-enlightenment anti-western ideas have been the backdrop to everything for them. They can no more think otherwise than a fish can fly. (Well yes, a very few fish can fly. But it is a rarety.)
So this is who Daniel is, an articulate representative of many millions of Americans who have been indoctrinated in this way. Sorry if this sounds uncharitable to Glenn's guest Daniel, but this is what has happened here in America.
The biggest mistake Americans made flew by under our radar. We should have been very concerned about what our children were being taught. Instead, we dropped them off at school, trusting to our system of education and thankful to have some time to ourselves each day. American parents never dreamed their kids were being mal-educated and turned into frustrated leftists rooting for the other side in every conflict and working earnestly against America with the full blind moral conviction of brainwashed zealots. But here we are. What a mess.
Although I agree with Daniel on many things in principle, and I admire that he's willing to debate his ideas (sort of), I find him very frustrating as a guest. I get the impression that he is an intelligent person who has never had any of his preconceptions seriously challenged in academia--and the thought that he is teaching these things to students, as he says them here, makes me shudder.
More than anything I loathe how he views the world through systems and epochs and institutions, rather than through people. He pretends to be a 'humanist' as his justification for overthrowing an economic system that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, appealing to some vague notions of exploitation that make no economic sense--by his same logic, the US was 'exploiting' Japan after WW2. He would look like a buffoon if he argued that now. Does he know why? Because our 'exploitation' turned Japan into one of the richest countries in the world. The examples go on--it's telling that he never addresses Glenn's point about how rich South Korea has become in any meaningful way, except vague references to forthcoming climate catastrophe.
It's interesting, isn't it, that Communists have found yet another problem that only they can solve--climate change--after they were wrong about everything else? How very convenient! (More on this later.)
Rather than searching through economic systems and regimes to find the humans, as one would think a humanist would do, he decries 'Capitalism' as if it were some sort of monolithic worldview created in the bedroom of one of the Medicis in the 15th Century. This is patently absurd. One can only support this line of thinking by appealing to a Marxian vision of historical epochs. But there is no such thing as 'Capitalism.' There is only the natural human inclination to truck and barter, in conjunction with naturally evolved and complex financial systems, and a relatively new global economic process. No one sat down to invent capital-C-apitalism. There is no comparison between it and Communism, which has a prophet (Marx/Engels) and a canon (The Communist Manifesto/Das Kapital/Lenin's writings, etc.). They could not be more different. One is a system retroactively quantified by writers, beginning with Smith; the other is a death cult stemming from a single man's vision.
It's a common neo-Marxist tactic to reframe the economic discussion, which they know they have thoroughly lost, through the context of climate change (see Patel and Moore, "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things," for one egregious example). The basic premise of the argument is that their hypothetical economic system, which is inevitably Stalinistic central planning where they'll get it right this time, will do a far better job managing resources and industry and subsequent pollution than 'Capitalism' currently does.
This seems to be the logic Daniel is appealing to. To his credit, he admits that a dramatic reduction in the quality of living will be required. Patel and Moore do not. I find this admission interesting in his case, because Daniel, as mentioned earlier, also says he's a humanist.
Is this not a contradiction in premises? How can one be a humanist, while supporting a reduction in lifespan and human quality of life? What's humanistic about that?
Like so many self-avowed Leftists he seems to, in actuality, place vague notions of ecological preservation or purity above definite human existence. That he can say this while also claiming that Capitalism is evil because people outside of the Northern Hemisphere are poorer than those within is laughably absurd. It's such a contradiction. If Daniel really were a humanist, he would be looking for ways to handle anthropogenic climate change WITHOUT reducing standard of living. Rather than stopping it altogether, he would look for ways to live with it. THAT is the the humanist approach to climate catastrophe--NOT overthrowing 'Capitalism.' This is the approach that serious intellectuals on the Left, such as those who often publish their writings via Spiked-Online, take--but they almost never do, and especially not in academia. What have we come to where Leftism is actually supporting a reduction in living standards for the global working class? What happened?
It's convenient for all of us, though, that no other economic 'system'--and Capitalism isn't an economic system, it's the manifestation of human nature on a global scale--could create the efficiency needed to support a clean, green, high-tech Earth aside from Capitalism. Marx and Engels themselves acknowledge, as do people like Patel and Moore, the immense efficiency market economics. In their minds this is why it ultimately leads to destruction--because it always must grow. But this is always contrasted with a completely nonsensical belief that a centrally planned economy, which they themselves admit would be less efficient, might actually pollute less. Aside from being an internal contradiction in premises, one can briefly examine the histories of the USSR and CCCP to see that this is so hilariously wrong. I would give evidence were it not for word constraints; I recommend Douglas Weiner, “The Predatory Tribute-Taking State: A Framework for Understanding Russian Environmental History,” in Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds., The Environment and World History.). All in all, the history of central planning demonstrates that it has contributed far more directly to material ecological crisis—such as the draining of the Caspian Sea—than vague notions of climate change could ever hope to. That is not to say that climate change isn't serious or worthy of consideration, but rather that the notion of capitalism being uniquely ecologically destructive is absurd. Capitalism’s immense efficiency, inherent in Marxian thought, makes it less destructive than any historical example of central planning.
But, of course, as Daniel would say, "This time, we'll do it right!" To bring it all full circle, back to his claim that he's a humanist, this is the sort of thinking that exemplifies the political Left--or, perhaps, more usefully, as Sowell would describe them, those with the Unconstrained vision. If you really, truly view history as being undertaken by systems and ideas rather than human beings, then it makes sense that Daniel can so disregard the USSR's immense failures as 'eh it's the workers fighting amongst themselves, we can do it better next time lol.' And he's right. There's no guarantee that next time the same things will go wrong.
But to hold this view is to completely ignore the human incentives, and the human failings, of the story of Communism. In "The Road to Serfdom," Hayek flawlessly predicts how and why centrally planned economies will fail. He was right about everything. This wasn't luck: these factors were obvious once the human was considered. But Daniel will never consider the human. He'll look at technology, and the social milieu, and he'll blame the workers for doing it wrong, and he'll completely ignore the fact that the real constraint on the USSR was its people. It was that the peasants in their communes didn't want Lenin. It was that no one actually did the work without being enslaved in labor camps. It was that no bureaucrat, no matter how well intentioned, could coordinate an economy by diktat. One will miss this fact if they only see history in Marxian epochs, or if they prefer to view systems as monolithic institutions, rather than corporate human activity. Could a worldview possibly be any less humanistic?
Glenn, can i recommend you move your mic closer when you talk? Your audio is much quieter than Daniel's, which makes it more difficult to listen to.
Such conversations with young people today make me sad and I can rarely sit through more than half what is usually posted. Such a myopic and prejudicial view of America is what is served on the menu of almost American colleges today. Daniel is a product of such Schooling and undoubtedly will have a long academic career indoctrinating the young minds that come to him looking for education.
The world was decimated by world war II and it was the Herculean effort by American industry, citizenry and military that saved it. America allowed asymmetrical economic treaties with the rest of the world as well as paying the capital in order to rebuild a world destroyed by war... That asymmetry persisted and gutted the industrial capabilities of the country and eventually moving those jobs to other countries for their enrichment and destroying the American middle class. Imperialism? That's just woke nonsense pumped into the head of impressionable students. The World is way more complicated and way more nuanced. I wish I had the time and patience to listen to the whole interview but I guess I'm just getting too old to listen to the same old well-rehearsed resuscitation of woke talking points about how evil America is. I will agree with Daniel that maybe it is time for us to go isolationist and let the world burn... But of course that will never happen because without America's military might and economic power the world falls apart and everybody with any sense knows it...
Glenn brought up the concern of potential oligarch control/misuse of the commons so to speak. My friends who have worked in ethnic art culture production since the 1970’s complain that decades ago in ethnicity X, politicized identity activists at the regional or national level took over local culture organizations. SF Bay Area displayed warning signs in 2012 - that I witnessed (identity Y). Some artist defected by abandoning their art and changing careers.
Today, I was trying to have a productive discussion about the problem of equity over-control at my friend’s place of work. I realized that even though I am not an economist, I am confident I can guess approximately some of the infrastructure pieces of Glenn’s field. I am referring to hierarchical structure and information movement up and down. But, equity is so mysterious and non-transparent, that I have no idea how topics and information are selected by leaders for an agenda that appears consistent nationwide.
Thank you for meeting with Bessner of The Nation, a weekly leftist news magazine that I used to subscribe to. I wish more media creators would follow suit and interview those who are unlike the host. Each of Bessner’s sentences has much background info that Bessner either has in his head or on his bookshelf. I’m curious about how Bessner would build an information/history foundation for each of his sentences. After that, there would be much unpacking to do - at least for me. That the USA was “never destined to be an empire” - so we should abandon any geopolitical advantage of pro-America influence by shrinking and retreating within our borders? For whatever reasons, some countries arrive in a superpower position (or empire), while others do not. That the USA is “misusing federal government infrastructure to commit crime/immorality abroad” - I am not convinced. To me it sounds like intellectual grievance against every USA action. I am temporarily stopped at minute 15 in the audio file (podcast). Very interesting discussion. Soon, I will return to podcast to complete my listening.
north korea had taken all but Busan before they were pushed back...is he suggesting that 3x the number of people living under the Kims for generations would have been a better outcome?
It is a great pleasure to listen to you two. I have a few comments. Bessner ultimately is anti democratic. He doesn’t like the choices people make with the resources they have. He asserts that global warming , to call it by it’s proper name , will cause the end of civilization. How? What exactly will happen to cause it ? The oceans rising to swamp all the homes of the Uber rich ?
I tune out any commentator on climate who does not mention Milancovitch cycles.
Glenn,
I had a similar experience with my undergraduate education. It was exciting to be in an environment where we were reading things like Aristotle and Descartes and Chaucer in the original Middle English. I'd been a kind of middling student in high school, but getting to college and being in that environment just flipped a switch for me. And it wasn't at a Brown or Columbia as Daniel suggests. It was in fact at a large state school, the University of Alabama.
But, I'll concede that things may have changed since I graduated in 2005. When I graduated, tuition was $3,200 a semester (and that's adjusted for inflation). Where I teach now it's over $25,000 a semester (just tuition, not room and board). I might be much more concerned about employment prospects as well under those conditions.
As for the "summer camp" comment, it's not summer camp. It's welfare.
For a good number of students, college is a means to an end, but the end isn't a credential and a job. College enrollment grants them access to loans which cover not just tuition, but also their living expenses. Being a full-time college student is the easiest path to getting your rent paid. We get students who know they have no business being in college who are just barely maintaining the credits and grades not because they want access to the summer camp, rock climbing, resort-style amenities, but because they need the loan money to keep flowing. Rather than being there so they can get a job, they're there to avoid getting a job.
Now that's obviously not all the students, not even the majority. Some are there for the credential and job. Some are there for the summer camp. Some are there for the *intellectual* summer camp that a liberal arts education should be. But, too many are taking out tens of thousands in student loans just to get access to tens of thousands more in food an housing aid.
Dr. Loury,
Thank you for the interesting conversation. If I may make one observation: passion and conviction don't make for substance.
On one hand, it is nice that Bessner is authentic; on the other that does not add virtue or creditably to his arguments. He came across as thinking knowing history and understanding history are interchangeable. They are not.
I respect your acknowledgment of your limitations in historical scholarship - at the same time I wish you would have pushed back more on his narrative weakness (USA/Capitalism root of all evil) and unfounded assumptions he made by his dot connecting.
Dr. Loury, I don't know whether you're just being polite or enjoy watching people with bad arguments unravel, but as an economist, surely you could tell that Dr. Bessner did not have a precise definition of the bogeyman he kept referring to as "Capitalism". Perhaps it wouldn't be fair to demand a historian present you with the rigor you'd demand of the colleagues in your field, but in this conversation, he invoked a disparagement of "Capitalism" all too regularly as a critical link in his arguments. I don't think it would make your symposia all too awkward to ask your interlocutors to take a step back when you notice people seemingly referring to some core concept and politely insist they define better what they mean. Did Dr. Bessner not negotiate his salary at U of W? Did he ever buy or sell a piece of property at market rate? Does he trade stocks at all, or buy into a retirement fund that does?
Bessner makes some interesting points, but many of his comments involve very sloppy thinking. I will use his comments on the Covid-19 vaccines as an example. He questions the vaccines because of so-called breakthrough Covid-19 cases. Anyone familiar with vaccines knows that their efficacy is seldom 100%. We knew from studies used to test these vaccines that efficacy was likely to be in the 65% - 95% range, and we also knew that it was likely to be somewhat different for different strains of Covid-19. In other words, anyone with a basic understanding of statistics or of vaccines would expect to see breakthrough cases even though the vaccines are effective. Bessner said enough to make it clear that he doesn't understand vaccine efficacy, and then he went on with a long-winded and in some ways nonsensical explanation about whether universities or other schools should remain open.
It seems that Bessner has many scripted responses that he uses without making an effort to think through the issues. It really seems to me that many of Bessner's comments are theater (to paraphrase John McWhorter) rather than serious analysis.
Bessner's basic argument is, let's consider the worst behavior of the United States in the last fifty years, looked at in the worst light, and put it up against an ideal implementation of an imaginary social, economic, and political order, and see what comes out on top.