Intellectuals and Society, Revisited

Well, Arthur Schlesinger, is part of a long, and, one might say distinguished line of people who have been absolutely wrong, for, for decades and cent- and actually for centuries. So this is just one of many, statements that you could quote. It's not even the only time that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was wrong by miles. He was wrong in attributing the, recovery from the Great Depression to Franklin D. Roosevelt. he was wrong in arguing that, the tax cuts were gonna make, by, under Andrew Mellon, were gonna make it, harder to, balance the budget. they not only balanced the budgets, they had a surplus and, paid down the national debt.

Well, no, Andrew Mellon was ear- was earlier Oh... but in writing, but in writing retrospectively about it, he s- he said that, Mellon was very inconsistent in saying he wanted to reduce the national debt while cutting the tax rate.

Well, he cut the tax rate, but the tax revenues increased.

Yes.

Well, you, the more lik- But I would say there's something to that because the more likely you are to spout off about things you don't know anything about. The pro- the problem is that all of us have a narrow range within which we may be great. But a few steps outside that range, and we're totally lost. you know, Bobby Fischer d- didn't go around commenting, you know, on, on theories of evolution and stuff like that. he w- he was- Right... happy to play chess. and, but intellectuals, someone like who's a linguist like Noam Chomsky, he does, he didn't stick to linguistics. If he stuck to linguistics, we would nev- most people would never have heard of him.

not only the diploma... waffle on? It's all, it's all just the general reputation of being an intellectual. and you don't have to go that far away. I mean, you know, a couple of years ago, there was a mountain lion killed here in Palo Alto, and all kinds of insane things were said by people at Stanford and whatnot about how terrible it was to kill this mountain lion. he was up in a tree near- It was-... where the school, where the school was about to-

school was about to let out.

people who may have been, you know, they may have been the world's authorities on existentialism or Mayan culture or whatever, they know nothing about mountain lions, and the, a- and the cops ha- have had to deal with this before, and they do know something about mountain lions.

Well, the people with the vision of the anointed, as I call it, believe there are solutions and that intellectuals have the inside track in providing those solutions. Those with the opposite vision does- understand there are no solutions. There are trade-offs. And, you know, you can make this a little bit better by making something a little bit worse, or you can make it a little bit better by making something a lot worse. And, r- right now, for example, this mania for high-speed rail, there's no question if you're willing to pour enough money down the rathole, we can have high-speed rail.

They have it in Spain. one of the economics professors in Spain said, you know, "Not only are they not covering the operating costs, there's not been $1 collected towards the infrastructure." I mean, like, the rails and the trains, they haven't gotten $1 to pay for that. They're not even covering the cost of running the trains on a daily basis, you know, the conductors and the electricity.

They have more knowledge than other people

It g- it gives them a much bigger role in the world. I mean, if you believe in free markets, what about all these people who wanna have social justice? People just go out there, they make whatever deals they w- can with each other, work things out, and go on their way. And, here is all this unused brilliance standing on the sideline, watching with impotent rage.

Roughly.

Oh, absolutely.

Well, and that's, sufficient for many people.

Well, for one thing, for most of history, you had autocratic governments. You had kings, you had emperors, and so on. And, the, and the wa- and what the people thought didn't matter an awful lot. On a, in a democracy, what the people think matters a lot. And so, and also, in, in later times, you have a more prosperous society where we can afford, from a financial point of view, to send more and more people through colleges and universities and to, and support books and things like that, much more so than in the past. And now you have people out there who fundamentally don't really know much beyond what their specialty might be, creating a certain, vision of life in the electorate, which the people with the holders of power have to take into account.

Yes, and, well, classic example was the era between the two world wars, where the intellectuals were all in favor of disarmament. Even while Hitler was arming Germany and when Japan was arming and so forth, they were saying we should disband the RAF, the British, some, the British intellectuals and so on. - And, a- and, and it was not that they convinced the holders of power. The holders of power understood that Germany was rearming secretly even before Hitler took power.

Oh, yeah. The British and French intelligence services both knew this. The public didn't know this, and Baldwin was not about to tell the British public that the Ge- Germany was rearming because the c- clear implication was that Britain must re- rearm. And the, intellectuals had made rearmament, you know, poison politically.

Oh g- oh, my gosh, that, the Tet Offensive was, hailed by the, intellectuals as a, as a, as a huge defeat for the American military forces. A- after the communists took over, won the war, took o- took over South Vietnam-

Yeah. the communist leaders themselves said they were devastated by the Tet Offensive. They never won a military battle ag- against American forces the whole time the Vietnam War went on. But in the newspapers, the, the Tet Offensive was, depicted as a great defeat for the United States.

the communists w- knew

Everybody.

They dominated the climate of opinion, and if, in a democracy, if the people believe the war is unwinnable, then it's unwinnable.

Because there are many talents. They have a huge ego stake in, in a given set of conclusions. See, in other words, it's very asymmetrical. I mean, if you believe in free markets and, you know, traditional values and so forth, there is no exaltation that comes with that. You're just somebody who believes in free markets and traditional values.

Yes.

Yes.

But, but if, but if you believe in social justice and saving the environment, you know, I mean, you're really something. And so they, the people with that viewpoint have a huge ego stake. The... And empirical evidence is, like, gambling all of that on, on a roll of the dice.

Yes.

That's right.

Well, you've been told all your life, and many of these people have, from an early age, they were in the class for bright, gifted children. They were the ones who got into the good high schools. They were the ones who were accepted in colleges that accept, less than 10% of the applicants. they've heard this all through their lives. And after a while, they must, in all due modesty, believe it.

Yes.

That there is a reason why things have declined the way they have. That people of that sort have a track record. I remember years a- ago encountering a fellow who had been a teaching, s- a fellow at Harvard when I was an undergraduate, and I said to him, " I've been noticing that whenever there's a great disaster, there always seems to be a Harvard man in the middle of it." He, he said, "Ha- have you noticed that, too?" You know, I mean, think of McNamara and the Whiz Kids and the Vietnam War. You know, think of the Ford Foundation. W- who was the Harvard man in charge of that? I think it was Bundy.

Yeah. you know, he m- he launched this whole notion of subsidizing community activists as the answer to the racial problems. Of course, they have every... Community activists have every incentive to exacerbate the problem to, to the fullest.

I mean, calm would be the end of their job.

Oh, no question.

Well, first of all, these people did not make their living as intellectuals.

They did not make their living even as politicians, most of them. Right. Most of them had, they had day jobs, and when, the, the rebellion against Britain started, they put that aside for the, for the time being to go into politics and to try to d- write up a constitution and all those kinds of things. But they were not intellectuals in the sense in which I define it as people who earn their living, by producing a final product, which is simply ideas.

Yes.

They ex- intellectuals have a great tendency to see poverty as a great moral problem to which they have the solution. Now, the human race began in poverty, so there's no mysterious explanation as to why some people are poor. The question is, why have some people gotten prosperous, and in particular, why have some gotten prosperous to a greater degree than others? But everybody started poor, so poverty is not a mystery to be solved by intellectuals. More than that, I think, one of, one of the things I wish I'd put more emphasis on in the book is that intellectuals have no interest in h- in what creates wealth and what inhibits the creation of wealth. They are very concerned about the distribution of it, but they act as if wealth just exists somehow. So- And it's only a question, it's like manna from heaven. It's only a question of how we split it up.

Cause it would destroy the whole vision that they have. If you-

Well, it, it- Is that-... it, it would, it, it would say- There are enormous numbers of reasons why people acquire the ability to create wealth, and they vary all over the world. And so if you find, for example, that in centuries past, Germans living in Eastern Europe, had much higher standards of living than the indigenous peoples of Eastern Europe, intellectuals will say, "Well, the Germans have somehow oppressed the people of Eastern Europe."

Or the ones who are in- into genetic determinism will say, "The Germans were born, biologically superior to the people of Eastern Europe." But anyone with a knowledge of history would know that there are all kinds of reasons why Western Europe as a whole has far greater wealth ca- producing capacity than Eastern Europe. But of course, that would then cut out the role of intellectuals. They would then have to do what David Hume did, which is what he told... He urged his fellow 18th century Scots to learn the English language, because that would open up a whole world to them, that they would not have otherwise.

I mean that the same things which allow some other people to prosper can allow them to prosper if they take advantage of those same things. The Scots were a classic example. They were one of the poorest and most ignorant people on the fringes of European civilization in centuries past. But once they, for whatever reason, began to educate themselves, and especially to learn the English language, which became a passion. I mean, people all over Scotland, including Hume himself, were taking lessons in the English language.

I don't know if it was Gaelic. It was what- whatever

yeah. - Didn't know that... and, and with- and fr- from about the middle of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th century, the leading intellectuals in Britain were Scots.

I mean, you had Adam Smith- Adam Smith... in economics, Humes in human philosophy, Black in chemistry. you go through the whole list. And so they could do that, but that was an extremely rare thing for an intellectual to say. Most intellectuals in most countries around the world see the issue as how those who are more prosperous should be brought down, rather than how,... And moreover, the people who are lagging should cling to their culture. I don't know how you're gonna keep on doing what you've always done and get results that are different from what you've always gotten.

And in 1930 as well.

it, it shows among other... Well, the minimum wage law is one huge, factor. 1930 was also the last year, when there was no federal minimum wage law. If you look at the unemployment rate of Black teenagers in 1948, 1949, it is a fraction of what it has been at any, recent decade. and 1949 was a recession year, so the Black teenage unemployment rate in 1949 was a fraction of what it was in even the most prosperous years of the 1990s.

Yes.

Yes. And

And people move up very quickly. I mean, M- McDonald's has over 100% turnover a year. People say, "He's out, you know, he's out flipping hamburgers." Yes, he's flipping hamburgers in January. Does not mean he's gonna be flipping hamburgers in December. somewhere- He's

right... deal with coworkers... and he's, and he's not gonna be, but he's gonna start up the ladder.

but the, what was different about the late 1940s was the minimum, the federal minimum, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 specified what the minimum wage would be. The runaway inflation of the 1940s made that number meaningless. I see. So for all practical purposes, inflation had repealed the minimum wage law.

Thank God I w- I was a teenager in those years. and, you know, when I started out my first full-time job as a Western Union messenger, my starting pay was 50% above the federal minimum wage because inflation had made the federal minimum wage meaningless. And so under those conditions, in 1948, s- Black 16 and 17-year-olds had an unemployment rate under 10% and slightly less than that of white teenagers the same age. Now, as you come in and the liberals say, "No, we, we've gotta catch up with inflation," starting in 1950, they escalated the minimum wage regularly, and then you began to see these horrendous rates of unemployment among Black teenagers.

Yes.

It's, it's just definitional. Intellectuals have many skills which will e- enable them to evade the testing of what they believe And that negates the fact, the fact that they are capable of testing it doesn't mean that they're going to test it.

hmm.

Yes. I still get emails from students, you know, who say that, you know, when they raise any issues, that go against the professor's ideology, they just get ridiculed

Oh, before then, but of course I was working during the day and going to school at night, which is not the ideal conditions for, for, you know, intellectual, results. So I really didn't have the results.

Yes.

I'm not sure that reading the Yankee scores made you an intellectual. Oh,

But, but can you imagine anybody in Harlem doing that today?

a, as a, as a small, old white man had a little newsstand in Harlem. And I would... And he obviously had enough people doing this to make, to m- to make it worth his while to be open at midnight. And I would walk, it was a long block. I'd walk down this long block, get my newspapers and come on back home and read them.

A different world.

Well, I, I, I had been taken by the Marxist philosophy, and therefore I'd done a lot of studying. I'm one of the few people, I guess, who's read all three volumes of Capital and indexed them as I went. And from this I wrote a, a, - And this,

I started, but at Harvard I got, I read- You went to Harvard. Harvard... I went through, went through The Capital. And, that then provided me with a, an undergraduate honors thesis, and it's the honors thesis that got the magna cum laude. The grade point average was just enough to make me eligible.

Not quite. I have, I have never gone to a class reunion at Harvard, even when I was teaching at Brandeis, which is about a 20-minute drive from Harvard. eh, there were... What I saw there that got, that bothered me is what is, what bothered me ever since, there was the sense that we don't really need to test for evidence. -hmm. If all we bright, good fellows all believe this, it must be true.

You have

Yes, and then, and then the same thing as you, that you mentioned from the, from the book, that there is this sense that you don't really have to go for evidence, that, you know, the- these are things that we all know.

Yes.

Well, in Chicago, you had to make your arguments. As, some e- some economist once said, you know, at, at Chicago, economics is a full contact sport. Hmm. And I don't know if you're aware of the, of the, back and forth that goes on. It's fierce. But the fact of the matter is that everyone recognized you have to have facts, you have to have logic. You can't say that, "We believe this 'cause everybody knows this." No, you got, you gotta show how and why.

Hmm.

Well, in the preface to the book, I explain that I don't go into that. That I'm not trying- I'm trying to get a little

I, I did not try to explain every sparrow's fall. I'm trying to find what are the general patterns that we can see looking at intellectuals over the past two centuries, and I specifically say Milton Friedman's a classic example of someone who did not do it that way. Although, I will... M- Milton himself somewhere pointed out that at a very early period in his life, he was a Keynesian. He was certainly a liberal.

if- So, but he, but he moved beyond that, and a lot of people do. I would say most of the conservative intellectuals were at some point in their lives on the left. I mean, Hayek was a socialist. I, you go, you go, you can just go through the whole list of them. I mean, there are a few, like William F. Buckley, who was a conservative from day one, but he was the exception, not the rule.

Yes.

Well, it was not taking Milton Friedman's... I was a Marxist when I went into Milton Friedman's course. I was a Marxist when I came out.

I went to work for the government as an, as a, as a, as a, as a summer intern in economics, and seeing the thinking or lack of thinking that was going on in the government, I realized that government is not where it's at.

It was truly unthinking. It was also something else, that the Labor Department had its own institutional interests. I was interested, for example, in whether the minimum wage law caused unemployment. a- and I, as I tried to f- come up with ways of testing that, I realized that the people in the Labor Department saw that as a threat. I mean, they were appalled as I, as I s- gave some ways we might try to test this, because they had no desire to test the minimum wage law, which provided one-third of the funding for the US Department of Labor. and so you r- once you say the government agencies have their own institutional interests, so don't look for them to serve the interests of other... I mean, to me, the question is, are, are all these, teenage kids gonna go without jobs and end up on the street and in crime and all the rest of it? That was not their top priority, and I realized it was ne- it w- other people's wellbeing would never be the priority of politicians and bureaucrats.

Well, l- like others, I did not, successfully resist them at first. But, as time went on and more and more evidence accumulated, I wasn't as prepared as some others were to just keep, explaining away, all the evidence.

Yes.

Oh, y- you might say the road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees.

I love the way, the use of the word opportunity. you know, I had as much opportunity to become an NBA star as Michael Jordan had. It just happens that there was some difference in skill. And so the same thing with education. There is no point trying to run people through institutions that they have very little interest in, a- and that they may not be suited for. in fact, I would argue that one of the problems of American education is you have a lot of people in college who have no interest in what a college is supposed to be, nor is there any reason why they should.

So you water down- Yeah... the education of the people who are there to get an education because of the people who are not there for that purpose, and who are, a- and, and they're, and who you're trying to appease in some way.

It's to win votes, frankly.

This is pre, this is pre-Solyndra, of course.

Y- you know, this notion of picking out something and calling it a good thing, like education or affordable housing or whatever it might be, everything is a matter of trade-off. God, what did the man say there?

It's amazing that here is a man talking about five different industries and none of which he has the slightest experience. You know, but because he has these degrees from the places you mentioned, he thinks, a- and people have told him how clever he is, he now thinks that he can, can do this.

No human being on this planet can do this...

Oh, it shows them again in the role they relish. They're the, they're the wise and noble forcing the re- forcing the rest of us poor dummies, to do what's right, you know, e- even though we don't want to.

Yes. All right.

Yes.

I love it When people keep their own money, that's called subsidizing them. I love it. You know, that's the brilliance of intellectuals, that they, they can use words in such a malleable way, that they can s- I mean, the, Obama has an absolute talent for saying things that make no sense, but not only sound plausible, but inspiring. You know, sub- the, we're subsidizing the oil companies when they deduct the cost of doing business, you know, in order to arrive at the figure of how much net income they have. Everybody does that.

It is straightforward, but it's also straightforward nonsense.

people don't, b- m- They often speak of people who are rich as people who happen to have money.

Extremely few people happen to have money.

Y- Well, but Rockefeller didn't happen to have money.

Heirs, the heirs happened to have money. Right. So you're doing this... Go ahead But Roc- but Ro- Rocke- Rockefeller, he, Rockefeller reduced the coils, cost of oil to a fraction of what it had been before him. Right. Benefiting millions of people across the country. Therefore, they bought their oil from Rockefeller rather than from people who had more expensive ways of producing oil, with that one of them being the, use of, tank cars on the railroads. The progressives were livid that Rockefeller, could ship his oil at a cheaper price than the other producers. It never occurred to them that oil, Rockefeller shipped his oil in tank cars, which are a hell of a lot cheaper to transport than in barrels. Right. I mean, we still measure oil in barrels today, but we ship it in tankers.

And, that's how he m- ha- became a multibillionaire.

George W. Bush.

The, that's the question of the hour. You have people who, don't stop and think. You've had dumbed-down education. You've had propagandistic education. And people, he's, what he's saying connects with all those, with all those kinds of things.

in fact, this, it goes the other way, too. I was just doing some research on Detroit and its decline, and they kept raising the city income tax, and every time they raised the tax rate, the tax revenues went down. in ni- in 2008, Charles Gibson re- put this to Obama when he was a candidate. He said, "Why are you for raising the tax rate on the rich? Because, you often get more revenue at lower tax rates than at the higher tax rates." And he said, "Well, it's a question of social justice." In other words, he doesn't really care about whether the government raises more revenues. If he can get people mad at the rich and they vote for him, then the po- then it's a success. Just as, Coleman, Young's policies in Detroit were a great political success for him.

It ruined Detroit, but it didn't-

Yes.

Thank heaven I'm sitting down.

I may, I may take a sleeping pill so I can forget it. -hmm. The, this man has diddled with Iran to the point where we're the military people are saying, "You know, even if we decide to go in and bomb that place, they are so dispersed, so far underground, it's by no means clear that we can do it." The time when he was going through all this wonderful diplomacy he talks about was precisely the time when those things were put underground and dispersed. It's like, it's like when Hitler was ar- arming. You know, the, as Churchill said, at one point, a memorandum could have stopped Hitler.

You know, because the power was so lopsidedly on the side of the Western democracies. it's like they could say, "Stop rearming or else."

intellectually- We can't do that with the, with, with the, with... We, they diddled the, they diddled with Iran to the point where now we don't know.

why do they shrink from- Oh, because, because, oh, because they believe that, again, that their intellect is the, is the unique factor that is gonna save us. And to say that they're a bunch of military people are gonna be more effective than doing all these terribly clever things that Obama's doing, - I see... undermines their whole position.

Oh, absolutely. But in terms of education, then you have to be very careful in which, college you choose, and you can't go according to big names. You go according to, matching what you want with what the college offers. And especially, you don't wanna go to a college where the professors think that, the students are there to provide them with an audience for indoctrination.

I, I don't know if it can be cultivated, but, it's, it's hard to find for one thing. b- but I, but I think that, they shouldn't go someplace where there is a party line and where anyone who says anything different is just slapped down, and that's unfortunately the case in too many universities.

Yes.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

I would think that the odds of their being swept out are no better than 50/50.

there are none of them. Th- there's none of the candidates, of either party that would cause me to dance in the streets.

If I thought that the voters had some sense of realism, and if they were concerned with the lo- with the larger questions rather than whose ex-wife said what, and so on, or, you know, what, what, Governor Romney did or did not do when he was head of Bain Capital that I would have, if they had some sense of the loss of freedom, which is infinitely more important than any of the specific issues that follow by themselves. That is, Obamacare really is a huge step towards the loss of freedom. I mean, and it happens in small ways that, but constantly. I mean, we can't have our own, the light bulb that we want in our own home. We can't flush the toilet with the kind of toilet we want. We can't take a shower with the kind of shower head we want. we can't put our garbage out except, and broken down by the way that some little, gauleiters have decided, oh, we o- we o- we, we oughta do it. I mean, that, they, it's, it's just the accretion of these things, many of which are too small to be sig- significant in themselves. But in the aggregate, you can s- aggregate, you can see the tendency of this. The people who think they know better, and they ought to be telling us what to do, those people are the danger, and if you don't see that, then I'm not sure what the, what the future's gonna be like.

Thank you.