How Much Does the Elite Know?

The great presumption of the twentieth century was that an educated elite capable of “rational, factual, socialist argument” was much better way at running the country than the higgling and the chaos of the market.

So it wrong to suggest, Thomas Sowell writes, that either economic interests rule (Marx) or that ideas rule (Keynes).   

My own view is that differences in bedrock assumptions underlying ideas play a major role in determining how people differ in what policies, principles or ideologies they favor.

But suppose that the bedrock assumption of our age, that the best government is government by a rational elite of experts, is wrong? 

No big deal.  It just explains most of the famines and economic disasters of the twentieth century, from the Ukrainian famine to the Great Leap Forward famine, to the extended Great Depression and the stagflation of the 1970s.

Opposed to this conventional wisdom that an educated elite knows best is the insurgent view of people like Thomas Sowell.

If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on Earth does not have even 1 percent of the total knowledge on Earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.
If no one has even 1 percent of the knowledge available, not counting the vast amount yet to be discovered, imposing from the top of the notions favored by elites convinced of their own superior knowledge and virtue is a formula for disaster.

What Sowell is doing here is dumbing down the central insight of two experts, Lugwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek. 

Mises said that the socialist commonwealth would fail because it could not compute prices (i.e., would lack the knowledge to know what to produce and what not to produce). 

Hayek said that the brilliant man in Whitehall or Washington could not outperform the millions of economic actors with their intimate knowledge of economic facts on the ground.

Today we have a report from Peter Ferrara that the Democrats in Congress are ramping up taxes and spending in their budget resolutions.

That is another way of saying that we, the committee of 535 best people assisted by government experts, know what is best for America.  We know how to spend Americans’ money better than they do.

Our Democratic friends are liable to wake up pretty soon with a bad cold.

Who Needs School Anyway?

Pity poor Marilee Jones, formerly Dean of Admissions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  She figured she needed a bushel of degrees to work at MIT so she faked ’em, according to James Taranto.  Fortunately, Taranto only works for The Wall Street Journal edit page.  So he doesn’t need all those sheepskins. 

I feel her pain, for school never agreed with me. I repeatedly found myself in conflict with teachers and professors. I left high school after my sophomore year; and although I spent several years in college, I never bothered to graduate.

Actually, it’s probably true that school disagrees with most boys.  Especially now that school is so feminized and gun-free.  As Ruth Dudley Edwards puts it:

The feminisation of education and the ensuing triumph of political correctness have turned generations of boys off reading, not least by urging them to get in touch with their feelings and despise that part of themselves that wants to see heroes biffing villains.

You mean the way that Brigadier Ritchie Hook used to go on about “biffing” in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour series?

Perhaps they could read The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden and

swot up on the solar system, learn about famous battles and read inspiring stories of incredible courage and bravery. Teach your old dog new tricks. Make a pinhole camera

and so on.  But it’s not just school that boys don’t like.  It’s classes in general.

Women are always going to classes to learn something, even if it is “tennis, wine-tasting, sailing.”  Then they complain because they don’t meet any men there, writes Ann Althouse.  It’s the old story.

Because, after all, you know that if you’re going to explain gender difference, you’ve got to assume that whatever the women are doing is good, and it’s the men who have the problem. So: You know those men. They think they’re so smart. You can’t tell them anything. They won’t ask for directions.

Let’s look at the male side of this, shall we?  Althouse continues.

Men prefer to look at something they have decided to do and figure it out on their own. They like to observe, analyze, and discover. They accept the risks and enjoy the excitement of trial and error. They don’t like sitting around having someone tell them what to do, and they aren’t intrigued by the prospect of meeting women who spend so much time doing something they loathe.

OK, she admits.  She made that up.

Then there’s this from Althouse’s comment section.

My daughter, just yesterday, looks at me as we were watching television and says, "What’s with this stupid female superiority thing?"
She elaborated a little bit... no matter what[,] the girls on TV were always right. Smarter, wiser, etc.

Out of the mouths of babes...

Dems Can't Break the Habit

Despite their promise of moderation and transparency last November the Democrats can’t break the habit of taxing and spending, reports Senate Minority Leader John Boehner writes that the Democrats recently tried to change the House rules to allow them to vote for raising taxes without leaving their fingerprints on the vote.  That’s not what Democrats promised last year.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Ca.) said in December, “[W]e promised the American people that we would have the most honest and most open government and we will.”

It’s sad but true that political parties do not get into office on the strength of their programs.  They get into power because the voters can’t stand the other party for another minute.

Iraq: After the Americans Leave

Conservatives think that when the United States leaves Iraq that all hell will break loose, and maybe it will.

But this article from StrategyPage shows that behind all the bombs and explosions there is a slow motion civil war and sorting out process going on.

Several years of having a Shia majority running the country has instilled a confidence in the Shia community that has not been felt in generations.

Of course there’s the question of Iranian influence.  But the Iraqi Shias  are beginning to think "we can do this."  Maybe they can survive without Iran.

Another interesting thought is what “counter-insurgency” will look like after the Americans leave.  Think Hamat in Syria.

But with U.S. troops gone, the Iraqi security forces will be inclined to wage war the traditional way. That means massive use of firepower against civilians in any neighborhood where the Sunni Arab terrorists show up, or are found. In Syria, the 1982 uprising by Islamic radicals was put down, in part, by the destruction of the town of Hamat, and the massacre of over 10,000 civilians there. That was meant as a message to the rebels.

It’s a message that everyone in the Middle East remembers, and a tradition that everyone understands.  And once the Americans leave, “that will no longer be a problem.”

Who Defeated the Soviet Union?

In hindsight, everyone knew that the Soviet Union was bound to collapse.  Conservatives knew that it was the firmness of Ronald Reagan.  Liberals suddenly discovered that the Soviet Union was bound to collapse anyway—although they had cleverly avoided telling anyone before 1991.

But  Yegor Gaidar in his book, The Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, has a different take.  It all started when the Bolsheviks were deciding how to develop the Soviet Union in 1928-29.  Should they allow peasant argiculture and the market system while still hanging onto political power?  Or should they choose another way?

The solution preferred by Joseph Stalin was the expropriation of peasants’ property, forced collectivization, and extraction of grain. Judging from the available documents, the essence of this decision was relatively simple. Bukharin and Rykov essentially told Stalin: "In a peasant country, it is impossible to extract grain by force. There will be civil war." Stalin answered, "I will do it nonetheless."

The problem was that the forced expropriation of grain to feed the industrialization of the cities (the strategy also used by Mao) resulted in widespread famine in the countryside.

That might be fine, temporarily, while the industrial sector got up to speed, but unfortunately, it never did.  The industrial output of the Soviet Union never came up to world-class standards. As Nikolai Ryzhkov, chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, put it

 "No one will take our machinery production. That is why we are exporting mainly raw materials."

And nobody has ever argued that the Soviets had a clue when it came to consumer products.

Fortunately, the Soviets got a lucky break in the 1970s.  The oil price explosion and oil discoveries in western Siberia enabled them to pay for grain imports by exporting oil. Then came the fateful day in 1985.

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.

It cost the Soviet Union $20 billion a year that it needed by buy grain from abroad.  For a few years the Soviets were able to stay afloat by borrowing money from the West.  Then came the crunch.  The banks refused to continue lending.

Anatoly Cherniayev described the situation in Moscow in March 1991:

If [the grain] cannot be obtained somewhere, famine may come by June. . . . Moscow has probably never seen anything like that throughout its history—even in its hungriest years.

And that was the end of the Soviet Union.

So maybe now we can understand why the United States has had such a chummy relationship with the Saudis.  They threw the switch that ended the Soviet Union.

Now if only they would throw the switch on their Wahabi mosques and their poisonous imams.

Jerry Falwell and Enthusiastic Christianity

What are we to say about Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist Christian pastor who founded the Moral Majority?  Was he a moral hero, pushing back against a culture of immorality?  Or was he a hate-filled bigot?  For a lot of heat, but not much light, you can read the comments section after a recollection of Falwell by R. Albert Mohler Jr. here.

The facts of Falwell’s life, as reported by Kristen Gelineau, are these.

Falwell, who started a fundamentalist church in an abandoned bottling plant in Lynchburg in 1956 with just 35 members, built it into a religious empire that included the 24,000-member Thomas Road Baptist Church, the "Old Time Gospel Hour" carried on TV stations around the country, and 9,600-student Liberty University, which he founded in 1971 as Lynchburg Baptist College.

But what did it all mean?  The best place I have found is James M. Ault, Jr’s Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church—as experienced, we should say, by a liberal sociologist at the very apogee of the Moral Majority in 1983-84.

The pastor of the Shawmut River Baptist Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, was Frank Valenti, who started out as an Italian Catholic.  He’d barely learned to read in school and was badly wounded in Vietnam.  It was when lying wounded that he got religion, and ended up studying to be a pastor at Falwell’s Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg.

The curriculum at the college was heavy on hands-on education and light on academics, but “its modest reading assignments proved too much for Frank.”  But still, he graduated and founded his own Baptist church in Worcester.

Like Frank, the people drawn to fundamentalist Christianity are people on the cusp of literacy.  They are people making the transition from the culture of the spoken word to the culture of the written word.  And Bible study is the center of the experience, for it is through reading and discussing the Bible that fundamentalist Christians negotiate the transition from the world of the spoken word (tradition means passing on knowledge with the spoken word) to the world of the written word.

And reading is a challenge for them. “Wow, I skipped a whole bunch of words there,” says one man at Bible study.

Reading itself proved a challenge for others around the table, too, especially the men, whose time and attention at school had often been more limited than the women’s.

But the combination of reading and discussion creates a new culture. Here is one of the church members, Phil Strong.

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us answers.  He would open up God’s word and say, “OK, here’s what God has for you.’”

It is important to appreciate the radical nature of what has happened to a person who says that.  They are living right at the intersection of the traditional world of the spoken word and the newly experience world of the written word.  It is an experience that we, who cannot imagine an illiterate world, can barely grasp.

But of course to many the culture of the fundamentalist church is something to be stamped out.  As one Newsweek commenter wrote:

Jerry Falwell was a parasite who fed on fear, ignorance, and bigotry.

Well, yes—if you believe that exploration and creativity and tolerance are the most important, maybe the only values.  But fundamentalist Christianity is not for people in that kind of mind space. 

Fundamentalist or enthusiastic Christianity for people experiencing the “leap in being” from the world of power and powerlessness to the world of rules.  That is why it flourishes in the favelas of South America and the slums of southern Africa.

And for millions of people, it is the Bible and the desire to read it and understand it that brings them to literacy.

Entrepreneurs and Media Dinosaurs

Talk-show host Hugh Hewitt is proabably as good and energetic an interviewer as you’ll get to hear.  He can disembowel a pompous MSMer as quick as a Mexican immigrant can dress a chicken in a meat-packing plant.

But he’s also good at interviewing to bring his interviewee out, as in this radio interview with Michael S. Malone, author of Bill and Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company.  The way Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard did it came to be called the HP Way:

It’s called the HP way, and it’s several things. One of it is it’s a culture built on trust, all the way from the two partners trusting each other completely, down through the entire organization, where you trust people to make their own decisions, and you put the employees first, and innovation right behind, and you drive your way forward by empowering your people to do the right thing. It’s a powerful culture. It’s unbelievable at its peak.

Above all, Bill and Dave had no nostaglia for buildings or for products.

If a product stopped being profitable, they got rid of it. They got rid of buildings, they changed locations. The only continuity in their management career, and the reason they ended up on top, and are as famous as they are, is because they put their employees first.

This has become a commonplace today.  We all say that a company is only as good as its people.  But back in the heyday of the high industrial age, people thought that capital, resources, and labor went together to make prosperity.  Now we know that resources and capital are second-tier.  It is human capital that is everything.

So then we come to the newspaper industry.  Says Malone:

A couple of years ago, I got into a lot of trouble, because I was maybe the first guy to actually come out and say newspapers are all going to die. And luckily, Rupert Murdoch came along two weeks later, and took all the flak from me with his speech. But what set me off was I realized I hadn’t read a newspaper in six months.

In the newspaper they are hanging onto their product, the physical newspaper, and the printing plant out back like grim death.

And what I noticed reading this story about Lileks and the Star Tribune was, and I’m an old newspaper man, 30 years writing for newspapers now, it’s that they’re still attached to the printing plant out back, to the trucks that deliver the newspapers, to the linoleum in the newsroom.

And what are they doing?  They are giving their senior talent golden parachutes and sending them out the door. (Of course, they probably have no option, since newspapers are union shops.)  They are hanging onto the legacy hardware and sending the talent away.

Malone went over to the business school at Oxford University and he gave them a speech.

I gave a big speech on entrepreneurship, and the power of entrepreneurship, and how I thought it was the single most important phenomenon of modern times, and that entrepreneurship needed to be cultivated. It was the source of all the new jobs in the world, the source of almost all the innovation, and yet entrepreneurs had no constituents.

It’s the great issue of our times.  The entrepreneurial model is changing the face of the workplace, but government is still doing the command-and-control thing.

Sooner or later, something’s got to give.