Martin Gurri (and Garett Jones) watch

Theodore Dalrymple writes,

I do not, however, think that so large a proportion of the French public supports the strikers because it is unaware of the underlying realities of the situation. I think they support the strikers because of a general dissatisfaction with life, when anything that discomfits those in authority is welcomed, even if it is even more inconvenient for themselves.

The elite view, which Dalrymple shares, is that French pensions are filled with special-interest provisions that impose inordinate cost to the general public, and reform is clearly needed. But the general public is so anxious to express dissatisfaction with elites that it is supporting the status quo.

Garett Jones’ forthcoming book is 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less.

19 thoughts on “Martin Gurri (and Garett Jones) watch

  1. The USA had a similar problem with entitlements and needed a meeting for the elders to fix social security in 1983. But we defaulted first in 1972, and it took ten years for prices to stabilize.

    We can improve that. Do a rational default, one that use modern financial math, then adjust entitlements a few years later. Defaults work when they are expected, not an overnight surprise.. But in the end, a nation cannot adjust entitlements until pricing works. The French are stuck, doing it backwards.

  2. The French are just an unhappy group of people. Any analysis of the French mood Soros adjust for this general ennui.

    The Spectator Index just published a ranking of 22 countries whose citizens believe they live in the best place in the world. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the United States comes first at 37 per cent. More of a surprise, Saudi Arabia comes a close second. India, Thailand, Australia, China follow. And the French? Next to last at 6 per cent.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/12/17/french-hate-much-ever-elect-someone-like-boris/

    • This analysis reminds me of Kuru disease

      Initially, the Fore people believed the causes of kuru to be sorcery or witchcraft, while patrol officers believed that kuru might be psychosomatic, or caused by mental factors.

      The Australian patrolman’s prognosis of social psychosis is technically more advanced than the Fore tribesman’s sorcery prognosis but no closer to the truth.

  3. Dalrymple also says

    many people find it difficult to engage in even elementary thinking

    Hopefully I’m not in danger of being physically or socially attacked by a mob of Gurri’s revolters, but I’m going to agree with this statement, perhaps like a self-interested elite technocrat would/should.

    Benefit defined pensions (vs contribution defined) are unsustainable in a mature economy with modest population/economic growth. Fixing such unsustainable but pareto efficient systems is non-trivial. Explaining those two sentences to the public is prerequisite to a solution.

  4. The Jones hypothesis that highly indoctrinated voters are best for maintaining the status quo in quasi-democratic 2-party states like the USA seems hardly surprising, yet one wonders how he can reach the conclusion that maintaining the status quo is in ordinary people’s interest. In a less-indoctrinated (18% tertiary degrees vs 44% in the USA) pluralist, multi-party authentic democracy like Brazil the ordinary people have achieved a government whose deficit spending is on pace to be eliminated next year and has a fine national health system that spends in total about a fifth per capita as the USA federal health programs spend per capita. And, unlike in the USA, Brazilian doctors have more classroom time on the gastrointestinal system than global warming. I’ll give his book a try but somehow passive indoctrination and submission hardly seem like a solution to the crisis of the authoritarian class in the USA.

  5. There is likely an unhappiness and disappointment there about progress. Most people would have liked to get a similar sweetheart deal for themselves. If they see now the existing sweetheart deals dismantled and ended, it shows even more than broken election promises that there will be no similar deal for themselves or their children.

    So rather fight this to keep the illusion alive that these plans are the next logical step after the 35 hour work week.

    Of course those retirement plans are completely unsustainable if you’d extend them to a large portion of the population, but most people don’t think too hard about that. They’ve worked hard for 30 years haven’t they? So how come they don’t deserve this? There are rich people walking around with lots of money, so why not take it from them?

  6. The Dalrymple article does not touch on Macron’s original proposal to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64. This was dropped, apparently after Dalrymple went to press, yet one could see why it might have stirred widespread opposition. The primary opponents to the pension reform bill now are the unions, themselves something of an elite class. At any rate, the reform bill is going forward. For some context note federal employees in the USA can retire with full pensions at age 55. Most articles on the French pension reform bill state that the government did a poor job of explaining it to the public. Some useful context from the LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-01-24/new-strikes-protests-as-france-unveils-retirement-bill
    https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-01-24/new-strikes-protests-as-france-unveils-retirement-bill%3f_amp=true

    And note the Fiscal Times article describing the protests as a traditional French process. Considering the total inability of the USA to achieve any measure of federal spending reform, I think that a more accurate response would be to find that the French protests illustrate how the USA needs more democracy, not less.

  7. I think the US would be better off with fewer elected offices, and many fewer veto points. I think that you need those things if elections are to provide any semblance of accountability. So no more divided government, no more local control of every little thing, and no more supermajorities necessary to pass legislation.

    • All those checks and balances and “veto points” are there to protect those of us who didn’t win the last election. So I don’t like your idea…

      • I should have added — And I don’t know why you would, either, unless you actually believe you can win every election.

  8. One aspect that is forgotten about the ‘Economic Elite’ (whom Jones wants running everything) is they agreed to pension and benefits for working class people in the post WW2 era. So I suspect the population has a bit of ‘Pension Envy’ here.

    Wages for working classes have stagnated since 1974 so why should the average worker trust our economic elite today?

  9. Speaking as the official spokesman for the general masses world wide (including the french) I want to make clear that this has little to do with discomfiting the a-holes

    that is just a side benefit

    Our problem is that each and every one of us has complete confidence that any and all policies enacted by the current state apparatus will only benefit members and cronies at the expense of us
    while not actually doing anything to resolve or even ameliorate the supposed issue

    no action is better than bad action

    we know we can’t really stop them from buggering us (for our own good of course) but maybe we can delay them a little and maybe make them feel a bit

    • So… if no action is better than any action, and this applies to the action of overturning policy X, then was no action better than any action when policy X was implemented? Or were elites altruistic back then? Since we’re talking about retirement age, clearly, all retirement age cutoffs are not equal, and the best policy changes as people age. And since the policy change is pretty straightforward, we don’t really need to speculate about ‘elite’ motives. Whatever their motives are, either the previous policy was too generous (which is inconsistent with this supposed elite sociopathic class self-interest) or the policy changes actually is good.

      In any case, it’s obvious that elite interests and ‘common people’s’ interests often coincide. French elites and non-elites both would like France not to be nuked into oblivion, for example. Both have some selfish interest in having a sane budget. It’s one thing to be wary that if where the interests of the ruler and the rules diverge, but the attitude of ‘whatever the elites want, I want the opposite’ is just that of a child having a temper tantrum and destroying everything in the room, to the detriment of everyone, including himself.

      • YES

        millions of middle class and middle age+ people are just throwing a childish temper tantrum

        brilliant analysis

        If you disagree with my informed assertion that the french public reaction is based on distrust of the elites then what is YOUR explanation?

        hopefully one that doesn’t boil down to “the peasants are dumb”
        Much as we all dislike the french lets assume they are NOT stupid

        as an aside note your reaction is a rhetorical abomination

        you turn my “no action is better than bad action” into “no action is better than any action”

        you take the rule of thumb “don’t trust elite solutions” and try to show that if we turn it into a Kant style general principle it would produce a model of elites that you find inadequate. how is that relevant to understanding current french public attitude?

        you give ONE (1) far fetched example (avoiding nuclear war) and use it to assert that something like it is often true. that’s not how examples work

        please don’t bother to respond to my rhetorical objections
        they are very much besides the point

        • No, they are not throwing a childish temper tantrum. They are acting like the wisest man I ever knew would have predicted.

          “I know how to make my children hate me,” he said, “I promise them this (holding his hand at head height) and give them this (bringing the hand down to his waist).”

  10. The biggest problem is that far too many elites were socialistically indoctrinated by elite college professors who have long be secretly discriminating against low-tax, high responsibility individualists. Instead, too many are proud socialists, despite Venezuela.

    The elite are mostly college educated. They are a large minority.
    They do pretty well in any reasonably free economic system.

    It’s not clear that “maximum total” GDP, where >50% goes to the top 10% is as good as maximizing the growth rate of the median worker. A number which is too seldom measured, and thus not managed towards.
    Top 1% incomes grew by 31.4% while bottom 99% incomes grew only by 0.4% from 2009 to 2012. Hence, the top 1% captured 95% of the income gains in the first three years of the recovery…

    https://20somethingfinance.com/the-top-1-percent-and-income-inequality-united-states/

    If the median income is growing less quickly than the top 1% income, it’s likely the “rules” are rigged too much in favor of the rich. Too many elite want to be in the economic top 10%, if not 1% — therefore, to trust them with making the economic rules, or even making the measure (gross GDP, for instance, rather than median after tax income), seems foolhardy. I’m expecting G. Jones’ book to confirm his own elite desires to trust him.

    The Swiss, with among the most “democratic” processes and many referendums, are among the richest in Europe. I’d trust their system more, and the EU and US systems less. Referendums for tax increases, for instance.

  11. The voters that Garrett likes are “informed.” At least that’s the word he uses, sometimes.

    If he stuck to that word and made it a constraint on the power of the merely credentialled, then he’d be getting somewhere. Instead he keeps slipping back into a much looser definition of this informed voter, no better than what we have now. In other words, not informed at all.

    This is the voter who counts himself an expert in everything because he went to a good school. It doesn’t matter that his degree was in grievance studies, and his information comes from Twitter. The informed voter, loosely defined, merely has the right attitudes and nothing to back them up. And doesn’t try to back them up because in this class it’s not necessary to make arguments using evidence or proof.

    Who would this graduate seek to convince? Someone outside his class? Someone who doesn’t already agree with him and with people like us? But all of those other people are irrelevant. They’re primitive. We’re progressive. They’re native. We’re civilized.

    All of the discussion is within the chattering class. If you don’t utter the shibboleths you’re beyond the pale. But if you know the shibboleths, you are “informed.”

    Vernon Bogdanor talks about the exam-passing classes. And Yuval Levin explains the problem with that: “We have implicitly mistaken an idea of merit meant to broaden the entry criteria into elite educational institutions for an idea of merit that could justify and legitimate authority throughout society. But authority is not legitimated merely by the ways it is obtained. Often more important are the ways it is deployed.”

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