Intellectuals and Society

Well, talking to experts does make a difference. many of the great disasters of our time have been, co- committed by, experts. You may remember, FDR's brain trust, which according to later studies, prolonged the Depression by several years. the whiz kids in the Pentagon under McNamara, who managed to mess up the Vietnam War. you can run through an impressive list of things, of disasters brought about by people with very high IQs.

I mean people whose end products are ideas. there are other peop- people with great, intelligence whose end products are things like the Salk vaccine. there are

right. He-

That's right, because the engineer is judged by, the end product, whi- which is not simply ideas. If he builds a building that collapses, it doesn't matter how brilliant, hi- his idea was, he's ruined. conversely, if an intellectual who's brilliant has an, has an idea to, for rearranging society and that ends in disaster, he pays no price at all.

hmm.

absurdity. The same could be said of, Bertrand Russell and his, and his, landmark works on mathematics and other people in other fields. but they step outside their field. And, when you step outside your level of, specialty, sometimes that's like s- stepping off a cliff.

Because a tr- a chess grandmaster can be world-famous for doing absolutely nothing more than winning chess tournaments and making displays, as many of them do, of playing, five chess games, simultaneously while blindfolded. -

That's right. That's right.

Well, a- and we would- They

obscurity no matter how- But, well, the whole question of, when is someone well-known or not, came up w- during a visit of Jim Flynn from s- New Zealand here a few years ago. He's one of the world's authorities on IQ tests.

people, you know, in India know about Jim Flynn, people in England. He's go- he made a world tour. but I doubt if the people in the next block from where he lives knows who he, know who he is.

Yes.

Because they believe that since knowledge is concentrated in people like themselves, what needs to be done is, as, in the quote from, President Obama, is to put more power in the hands of the experts.

That's right.

Yes.

One, they don't know everything. They don't have, they don't know one-tenth of everything. in fact, I, I will argue that they probably don't know 1% of the consequential knowledge in a society.

knowledge whose presence or absence has consequences, serious consequences. I mean, I was once in a plane that was coming down for a landing in the Ithaca airport. and suddenly the pilot gunned the motor and went up again because someone in the control tower had t- to- told, had reminded him that he hadn't low- lowered his landing gear. so that was consequential knowledge. Consequential knowledge, right? Yes. I'm just delighted that person had, w- had his eyes open and his, mind on his work.

Oh, absolutely. in fact, one of the, one of the things that has happened all around the world in the 20th century was that n- a- all sorts of countries have tried central planning. Now, the guys who run the central planning, they usually have advanced degrees from, prestigious institutions. They have mountains of statistics, sitting there, and they have all the experts in the country at their beck and call. And yet, when you take the power out of their hands and return it to the market, then all the hundreds of millions of people who don't have any of those things usually end up with a higher rate of growth and a more rapidly, rapid decline in poverty.

Yes. All right.

That's a, that's a tough one to encapsulate, but the basic confusion is between statistical categories and flesh and blood people. It's true that if you look at, the percentage of the income that went to the top 20%, in some year A, and then later on, a decade later, you'll find that percentage has gone up. And you say, "Well, that shows the disparity between the people." But if- The rich are getting richer...

the rich are getting richer.

but when you, when you follow, statistics generated by the Internal Revenue Service, which can follow particular individuals over time, you find the people who are in the bottom 20% of taxpayers in the first year, their income has nearly doubled by the, by this, la- later period, while the income of the people who were initially at the top is increased by less. If you get down to the very top, it's actually gone down. So that people are simply moving between these brackets from year to year. and the number of people who were in the bottom 20%, let's say in 1975, who are still there in 1991, is 5% of them.

29% of them have already gotten all the way to the top. absolute majority are in the top half. And so you're, you're, you're comparing what happens to these abstract categories rather than what's happening to actual flesh and blood people.

Well, he's happy with the data that he got. Why would he examine some- Why would he go further? He looks at the numbers. The numbers say what he, what he thinks it should say. Hey, that's it. Right. QED, and he moves on to the next great, crusade.

Income is not distributed. and, I mean, not... Newspapers are dis- are distributed, Social Security checks are distributed, and one time milk was distributed. Income is not distributed. People earn it directly mo- fro- from those to whom they provide some good and s- good or service. and the argument made by many people, you see, is that, it's a question of capital and labor co- have conflicting, interests in, in dividing up the income.

No. there is no income to divide up before they first reconcile their conflicting interests and decide on what terms they're gonna produce that income. there is no preexis- there's no manna from heaven for them to fight over.

Yes.

Well, one way of examining it would be to just look at, look at the time period. -hmm. the stock market crash occurred in October 1929. Now, there's data on unemployment month by month. Two months after the stock market crash, unemployment peaked at 9%. It then began to decline irregularly, till about 6.3% by June of 1930.

yes... on its own.

In June 1930, the government stepped in with its first massive intervention, with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, passed despite a public appeal by more than 1,000 economists from the leading universities saying, "Don't do it." They did it anyway. It shows how much influence economists have. within six months after that, unemployment hit double digits for the first time, and it never came down for the remainder of the decade for, even for one month. And it, so the stock market crash brought you up to 9%, and that was starting to fizzle out. The government steps in to help, and that hit, that hits double digits, and e- eventually, it got up to a peak of 25%, and it didn't fizzle out until the end of the decade.

Well, first of all, they didn't handle it. The politicians handled it.

And so, even if you were to say that these guys really could've done a great job had they had the unbridled power and so forth, they don't have the unbridled power. One of the problems with experts is that experts are hired by other people, and so you never know what the expert would have done. In fact, there was an article in The Wall Street Journal some time back that, what, the policies that are being followed in Washington are the direct opposite of the policies that Summers advocated when he published before he got to Washington.

So the, we should never assume that experts are just people s- they are supplying information to politicians who are trying to do good.

Oh, yes.

Yes.

That, intellectuals should, influence, if not control, the kinds of decisions that are made in society. And more especially, that, they should promote the transfer of decisions from the masses to those who have, quote, more intellect. And wh- what, and what, and given how I conceive of knowledge being, its distribution, that would mean transferring, decisions from where there's 99% of the knowledge to where there's 1% of the knowledge. And against that background, it's not at all surprising that things like, central planning simply don't produce as good results as allowing all the millions of people to react in the marketplace.

Well, am- among the many reasons, most academic intellectuals have no experience, no serious experience, outside the academy. I mean, I mean, I remember I once, I was once an economist for AT&T when it was the world's largest corporation, and when I returned to the academic world, they welcomed me as the prodigal son who's returned from the evils of corporate America to the true nirvana of academia. so... And, not only do they have no experience, they have every incentive to believe that they are brighter than other people, and know more than other people, because they've been told that all their lives. -hmm. I mean, you, you become a top intellectual, because you've passed through all these successive filters. You've gotten into the best colleges. You've gotten into the best, graduate schools.

yes. All right. - And so you have all of that in your background.

Yes.

Yes.

Don't forget, human beings have an enormous power of rationalization. think of all the absurd things that have been, believed throughout all of history. and well, I guess the one common denominator is that those absurd things typically were very flattering to those who believed them. Right. They had the one true fa- faith. They were the vanguard of the proletariat. You know, you just run through the whole list of the things.

hmm.

Well, what are you reading?

Oh, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a magnificent,... if you want a model for propaganda, it is, it is, it is the masterpiece of that.

No. There's no need for that, as many people are showing. You can become President of the United States with no contact with, economic reality.

Yes.

Yes.

I... People who say things like this act as if they're saying something new. this is what was being said back in the 1790s and ever since then. You know, that, there, there's nothing older than the idea that this is new. and it, it's

There you are.

But in point of fact, there's n- there's, there... Again, this is one of those totally unquestioned and unsubstantiated statements. w- John Dewey was saying, you know, that the, made the same thing, some 60 years ago, that, those of us who are for change have to fight against those who are for the status quo. Now, the people he was talking about, people like Adam Smith, Adam Smith was not for the status quo.

as I mentioned in the book, why would Adam Smith spend a whole decade writing a 900-page book to say how contented he was with the way things were? I mean, w- when you spend a decade writing a 900-page book, something is bugging you. You know? I mean. All

and anyone who ever bothered to read Adam Smith would see that he is pretty ticked off about a lot of things.

Well, there's the fallacy. n- no, it's, the word right, i- it's amazing. I, and in one sense, I can n- I can't, just simply cannot explain it. - People say we have a right to affordable housing, decent healthcare, we have a right to all kinds of stuff. And the question is, where did this right come from? It's- By

There you are.

Yes. Well, but it's, that's no more arbitrary than all the other things that are called rights. I mean, right now we're gonna have this, trial of these terrorists, in a court of law, which is absolutely, unprecedented and absolutely absurd. And the question is, where did that right come from? Well, it's not in the Constitution. It is certainly not in the Geneva Convention. it's just that by loose thinking, people say, "Well, prisoners of war get treated that way." Yes, they're not prisoners of war. The Geneva Convention said what prisoners of war were. People who a- adhere to the Geneva Convention get the protections of it. But during the Second World War, when some German soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge put on American uni- uniforms, infiltrated the US line, and they were captured, they were simply lined up against the wall and shot and killed right there. And, it was not something secret. The Army filmed it, and I've seen the films on the History Channel. Really? It wa- there was no question. If you don't play by the rules, you don't get the protection of the rules. It's that simple.

I guess they weren't thinking, they were reacting. They were reacting to the horrors of the First World War, which most of those intellectuals had supported, by the way.. and now, and now they decide, "No, that was so awful, we just have to re- we have to renounce war." There's no thought that, yes, you can renounce war. That does not stop your neighbor from building up the biggest army in the world and coming in and killing you. It's, it's mu- much like the, it's much like the thinking about gun control, you know, that you say, "Well, listen, I don't think people should have guns." Hey, I wish people didn't have guns, but the fact is that passing a law does not stop them from having guns. It just makes you defenseless.

o- one of the things I think I mentioned in there in passing is that, in Britain, the burglary rate is far higher than in the United States, and moreover, British burglars do not case the place before they go in. Now, if you're in the United States and you're gonna bust into someone's house in the middle of the night, you may be met by a hail of bullets. Right. In Britain, they have made, they have made burglary a safe occupation. It's like, it's like OSHA for burglars.

Yes. in fact, the communists themselves in later years admitted that there was no way they could've defeated the United States on the battlefield, that in fact, that the Tet Offensive, which was the turning point, that the communist guerrilla movement was virtually wiped out in the south. but the intellectuals saw that as a, as a victory for the communists, and the war was unwinnable. And once a democratic country decides that a war is unwinnable, it becomes unwinnable.

Hmm.

Yes.

What- But, but it's also true that, true that Nixon was, and it's not- Well, that's true. That's true because here, here's the thing. Machiavelli thought of intellectuals as influencing events by influencing the rulers and changing their minds. That, no, that isn't the role, as Vietnam clearly showed. Nixon di- didn't care a damn for the intellectuals.

But they created a climate of opinion in which if he continued that war, he would pay too high a political price, so he threw South Vietnam to the wolves, signed a negotiated agreement. They love a ne- negotiated agreements. It doesn't matter what it says. So long as you sign it and you win the Nobel Prize, who cares if a few million people get killed in the aftermath?

Oh, there are many. Oh, yeah. Right, yeah. Many transmission belts. I mean, the schools, all from the elementary school right o- up through the, the graduate schools, the media, now increasingly, the churches. Right. even churches that we think of as, conservative are out there pushing, the liberal agenda.

That, but this, this goes way back at, to at least the '20s, the idea that an arms race is wrong, and not only wrong, but is dangerous, that will lead to war. and of course, the, the, the counter-evidence, again, like, like so many things that intellectuals believe, it is not subjected to any kind of empirical test.

Because when, the, between the two world wars, you had all these arms agreements and, renunciations of war, and all of that just encouraged the Axis powers to feel that they could win this war, because the West was too gullible to arm themselves or defend themselves.

Yes.

It may well be, because, the, they didn't have to fight off all the nonsense that they would've been taught at these very prestigious institutions.

Yes.

Yeah.

oh, trying to explain other people is very tough. I mean, in, in s- in some senses, I mean, I'm often baffled. Why did Larry Summers, you know, try to hang on at Harvard? The man has millions. he coulda, he coulda stood up and t- and said what he thought. the whole notion of people being independently wealthy is very shaky for me because there are people out there with multi-millions who are afraid to speak their mind.

And there are other people who can barely make the rent who will say, you know, just what they're thinking.

Yes.

Well, the, one thing is by, a l- making alarming predictions, offering, solutions to our problems. and if they didn't do that... I- if Noam Chomsky had just kept on staying in linguistics, neither of us probably would have ever heard of Noam Chomsky. He would've been just as famous around the world among linguists, but w- nobody else would have heard of him.

I think it's a classic example of the, need for crusades. Now, people are, many people are shocked by these emails. I'm not at all shocked by them. I read, I read the original UN study years ago, and I was just curious as to how they were gonna deal with the question that the, temperatures went up first and then there was the increase in carbon dio- carbon dioxide.

Because you can't say that A causes B, if B happened first. And so I read this, and I could see they were, they were tiptoeing through the tulips in the way they phrased things and so forth. They couldn't confront that. And now we're finding out, that they knew darn well they couldn't deal with all the evidence.

Yes.

But again, you have to ta- take account of the ability of human beings to rationalize. I'm sure there are scientists out there, who, who believe s- some or all or mu- much of what they're saying, and there are other scien- scientists who believe the opposite. But they, but the ones who are pushing global warming are doing their damnedest to make sure that those who believe the opposite don't get heard in the public.

There's no payoff to that.

imagine yourself as an assistant professor in some department where the c- or where your c- senior colleagues who are gonna vote on your pay, among other things, have millions of dollars in grants handed out to promote global warming, and you say just what you've just now said, and they all say, "This guy is incorrigible."

Oh.

That's for another book for somebody else to write. In the end, the preface, I mentioned that I, that I will have very little to say about Milton Friedman. For, not because he's, he's not one of the most important people of the 20th century, but because he is such an exception to the general pattern that I'm trying to explain. Okay. I will leave it to someone else to figure out the exceptions.

Oh my gosh. You re- I mean, this, this is like trying to account for every sparrow's fall. I mean, you c- we, we are, we're not-

Well, he is at least. But, no, you can't. it's, it's, it's, hard enough to account for general patterns. When you get down to the individual, you would have to know so much more than any of us ever, has ever known, or will probably know for the next thousand years at least.

I hadn't thought of that. It would be... It's, it's, it's, it's a chilling thought Because we're becoming a nation of people who are propagandized from elementary school right on through to the graduate school in a certain vision of the world. And only the ones who, for one reason or another, either experience or insight or whatever leads them to say, "Wait a minute," on- only those are the ones that we have to depend on.

Yeah.

Actually, I would say only one word: goodbye. Because I know there's no point to ta- talking to them. It's like, it's like asking me how, what would I say to the head of the mafia, to get him to give up crime? There wouldn't be a thing I could say to him. He would say, "Give up crime? I make a thousand times what you do. Why should I give up crime?"

Thank you, and Happy New Year to you.