My intellectual influences, part 1: My father

Merle Kling was a professor of political science at Washington University. Our personalities were such that our relationship was a bit more like professor-student than father-son.

1. “Sometimes it’s this way, and sometimes it’s that way.”

The most important idea that Merle Kling gave me was one he never wrote down. He called it the First Iron Law of social science.

Sometimes it’s this way and sometimes it’s that way.

Natural scientists assume universality. Chemists and physicists look for theories that can be applied without exception. But for social scientists, Merle Kling’s admonition was that you have to live with exceptions, with ambiguity, with uncertainty.

One implication of the First Iron Law is that mathematics does not have as much power in social science as it does in natural science. My MIT professors acted as if they expected math to work the way that it did in physics. If your theories were inadequate today you would need to use deeper math tomorrow. Nope.

Austrian economists are equally guilty of claiming the mantle of science. I find Austrian rhetoric off-putting.

Samuelson-style economic texts leave you with the impression that it is impossible for government intervention ever to fail to achieve its objectives. Austrian economists leave you with the impression that it is impossible for government intervention ever to succeed in its objectives. I say “Sometimes it’s this way, and sometimes it’s that way.”

2. Identifying nonsense. My father and his colleagues had a game that they would play when encountering high-sounding phrases (think of a self-help book or a speech at a political convention. Or think of a business book filled with buzzwords like “empowerment” and “synergy.”) Take all of the fancy words out of a paragraph and put them back in a completely different order. If changing the order of the fancy words does not change the meaning, then the paragraph in fact does not have any meaning. It is just using words in order to make listeners or readers feel like they are getting some profound insight.

3. “In league with the future”

The publication which gave him the greatest pride was The Intellectual: Will He With Away?

the intellectual is isolated from the main currents of social change, and that he is incapable of comprehending or interpreting present directions of change. His predictions in the past were not always right, but they were plausible. Today, thanks to the wholly unprecedented transformations wrought by science and technology, he lacks the most elementary and indispensable prerequisites for making “league with the future.”

He was a literary intellectual himself, even devising a political science course called “Politics and the novel.” But he didn’t want me to grow up to be a literary intellectual. He would have preferred that I pursue science, although he was satisfied when computer programming caught my interest. Being able to work with computers put me in league with the future.

One way to describe my career path is as a computer whiz who was briefly diverted by economics. My first white-collar paychecks came from computer programming. I then took a detour into graduate school at MIT, and then I extended the detour with my first job at the Fed. In 1987, my career got back on track when I started working on option pricing models at Freddie Mac. I took other people’s financial modeling ideas and implemented them on personal computers that only recently had become powerful enough to run them. At Freddie Mac, I was typically more interested in information systems problems than in economic problems. I battled with the people in charge of information systems, which was my rather obnoxious way of discovering what I didn’t know.

With the dawn of the World Wide Web, I was in my element. I left Freddie to start a commercial web site. I was very naive about business, but my computer-related instincts were sound. The site became profitable when I acquired partners with business experience who handled executive decisions and marketing, while I became the “chief scientist,” trying to match the software development to our business ambitions. I found myself saying, “My karma is that I spent so much time at Freddie Mac berating the information technology bureaucrats that I came back as one.”

Soon after my partners and I sold the business, I retired to a life of high-school teaching and writing. Although I often flaunt my economics Ph.D in my biography, I am probably closer to an amateur economics gadfly. And a literary intellectual.

I used to regularly tell my high school students, “You need technical skills and communication skills. The person with only technical skills ends up like Dilbert, with an idiot for a boss. The person with only communication skills ends up being the idiot.” I was merely repeating what my father taught me about how to be in league with the future.

4. “Man has two arms, two legs, and a propensity to engage in conflict.”

My father did not think that you could take conflict out of human affairs. This is a tough lesson to internalize. You will find that if you work in an organization, you will come into conflict with other people, both inside and outside the organization. On the inside, I call this “corporate soap opera.”

It is natural to get caught up in this soap opera, even though the mature thing to do is detach from it. Try to obtain the status you think you deserve, and try to bring people around to your ideas. But when you lose conflicts, try to take those losses in stride.

5. “The more violent the revolution, the more dramatic the change that follows.”

My father noticed that revolutions in Latin America were often short, relatively peaceful, and not of lasting significance. A coup would replace one military junta with another. In contrast, the violence of the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution produced significant historical breaks.

If you are a conservative, you should place a high value on peace.

6. “We’ll have to pay people to play corkball.”

My father intuited very early the challenge that scientific progress posed for humans needing employment. He gave a number of talks in which he used as an illustration the game of corkball, an adaptation of baseball for teams of two or three players that was popular in St. Louis. He would say that as workers became superfluous, society would have to take those with obsolete skills and pay them to play corkball.

Mainstream economics would deride the corkball theory. Humans have unlimited wants, so there is always work to be done. Workers will respond to new production methods by retraining and migrating into new occupations. Past warning about perpetual mass unemployment have proven false.

Even though this unlimited-wants argument still attracts support among most economists, my father’s corkball theory has not died. Even some mainstream economists think that with artificial intelligence improving, this time is different.

I never really embraced the corkball theory. Yes, I favor a UBI, but not to allow people to loaf. If you replace existing welfare programs with a UBI, that would increase the incentive to work.

17 thoughts on “My intellectual influences, part 1: My father

  1. Your father sounds like a great guy Arnold. It’s easier to see, after reading this, how he produced a son who writes such an interesting and eclectic blog.

    I am surprised these influences didn’t cause you to be more skeptical about a UBI though. Even if you could begin with taxes and safety net programs the way you want them, (in reality a complete nonstarter) the next day the left would start advocating for more programs to benefit the poor and the right would start advocating for tax cuts for the wealthy. I see no reason to think it would be even a remotely stable equilibrium.

    Even so, it is exactly this kind of unpredictability and openness to unconventional ideas that keeps your work interesting. In a world where political tribalism makes clusters of logically unrelated positions easy to predict in most people, it is refreshing to read someone who doesn’t really easily find a home in any political tribe. Thanks for this post and thanks for the blog.

  2. Re “corporate soap opera”:
    Practically speaking, the best that those members not devoted to advancement by any means can do, while working for success on the projects assigned and avoiding catastrophe in the interest of the common good, is to defend themselves when their integrity requires it.
    Historian David McCullough has cited a statement by John Adams that speaks to these divergent attitudes (Landon Lecture, Kansas State University, February 2002):
    “In a letter to his wife, Abigail, written by Adams at Philadelphia in what seemed one of the darkest moments of the whole story (the American Revolution), and he knew how worried she was, how frightened she was of what the outcome of all this might be. And he said to her, ‘We can’t guarantee success, but we can deserve it.’
    “And when I read that I thought how different that is from our time, when all that matters is success, being number one, being at the top, irrespective of how you got there, what devices, what elbows and knees and the rest you used to get there. They’re saying something exactly the reverse. And when I read that sentence I thought what a mind he had and what a moral lesson that is.”

  3. Arnold, I’m glad that earlier in your life you got the idea “Sometimes it’s this way, and sometimes it’s that way.” It took me much longer to realize its importance but I never blamed my professors (my father was too busy with three jobs to support our large family; albeit not a professor, he always told me to do what I wanted but be sure to have the money to do it). I left home penniless 60 years ago to go to Buenos Aires and I have always lived within my budget constraint (I have given away all inherited wealth, including a large one accumulated by my eldest daughter). I was lucky because soon I related to a group of natural scientists (involved in the work of B. Houssay and L. F. Leloir, winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Chemistry) from whom I learned their view of science as well as to a group of young economists from whom I learned why Economics was a different type of science.

    My view of “Sometimes it’s this way, and sometimes it’s that way”, however, differs from yours. Early in my career, I learned the importance of identifying similarities and differences in all sorts of experiences, in particular, those dominated by human behavior and interactions. We don’t live in labs –we just spend time in labs trying to understand our experiences. I think this is true also for natural scientists: they don’t assume universality, they just assume that “their laws” hold under well-defined, precise conditions, but when applying “the laws” they need to take into account human interference. Unfortunately, in Economics and other social sciences, human interference is essential to what we want to understand by building and applying theories.

    In Buenos Aires, I was lucky to have an old econ professor that had been a disciple of Stackelberg in Germany and enjoyed explaining the essential similarities in human behavior and interactions that were the base of the marginal analysis of benefits and costs. Maybe I was lucky that he didn’t use a bad translation of Samuelson’s textbook (he knew the errors in the translation of German texts). Also, he warned us that the application of that analysis was largely conditioned by differences (one of my first jobs was to apply it to the preliminary valuation of infrastructure projects that the Argentinian government presented to the World Bank in early 1963 –two large ones were executed and are still operating).

    I still work on the basis that to analyze an experience (for example, the current pandemic) I have to find first the similarities that scientists have found in previous experiences and then the differences. I used to review a lot of theoretical work during my Econ Ph.D. at UMinn (thanks to Leo Hurwicz and other neoclassical professors) but my focus was always on the small difference which each work identified as critical to expand or correct the theory. Simultaneously, I used to review a lot of applied work on which the focus was the specific differences that make a case exceptional or a problem hard to solve (thanks to Vernon Ruttan and his colleagues at the Applied Econ Department).

    • Arnold, regarding your point #2 on identifying nonsense, I learned about it when I was very young and I had to deal with other boys who thought they were smarter than I. In my city, we used to play football (soccer) in the streets because after WWII there were very few cars and we liked to cheat in every way possible. It was the best school to identify and fight nonsense. It marked us for the rest of our lives (for example, we only trusted any women but not arrogant men). For most of my first 50 years, I played and worked in environments with a majority of men.

      Take the case of macroeconomics. In Buenos Aires, as an undergraduate, I took a few courses but they didn’t pay much attention to the sort of Argentina’s macro-instability, in particular to high inflation and large devaluations (Díaz-Alejandro, a Ph.D. MIT wrote the best analysis in the late 1950s and early 60s). When I moved to UMinn for my Ph.D., the teaching was largely along the line of Ackley’s textbook and papers complementing it. For my dissertation, a professor suggested explaining the failure of Argentina’s central bank to control the money supply. I knew that the analysis he was expecting was nonsense because it was framed in what had become the standard monetary analysis of income (a la Friedman). So I cheated: I limited myself to show that the central bank could somehow control an M0 but I never included the analysis of why the demand for M0 couldn’t be stable (this stability was Milton’s second requirement for his theory to be true). Decades later I argued with Scott Sumner that he had never been able to meet the two conditions for Milton’s theory to be true (control of the Mx supply and stability of Mx demand).

      In the business of economic advising, nonsense is common. To be competitive, you need to identify and fight nonsense. Today, I’m struggling with the nonsense that everyday bloggers write about the pandemic.

    • Arnold, to comment on your points 3, 4, and 6, I have first to comment on #5. Indeed, we cannot compare our LA revolutions with what happened in France, Russia, and especially in China. I was in LA during a few revolutions as well after some other revolutions, but never in Cuba. I was in South Africa just before the release of Mandela and in some African countries just after the independence revolutions were over or there was a promise of a negotiated peace. I was in China after the Tiananmen Square revolt had been totally controlled, and Deng Xiao Ping accepted growth to prevent new revolts (Shanghai, late 1992). Those violent conflicts were to a large extent inevitable –they were preceded by thousands of years of wars.

      More importantly, all those violent conflicts need to be understood in the world’s context in which they took place because each one was very important at least for the nationals. Take the case of Perón in Argentina. He grabbed power thanks to the high tension that WWII imposed on Argentina’s politics but also to the huge cost that the UK imposed on the Argentinian economy in the 1930s. The first revolts against Perón took place in 1951 when he became a candidate for re-election and more importantly when the ec0nomy entered into its first fiscal crisis post-WWII (the reserves accumulated during the war had been exhausted). It took, however, 4 years to get rid of him (in September 1955, when I was at the Navy’s High School and we had to fight the battle of Río Santiago). Argentina’s conservatives wanted peace but they realized they were no longer a relative majority; on the contrary, they had become a thin minority as shown by the election of early 1958 in which they got less than 2% of the votes (in the 1963 election they got over 10% because the candidate was General Aramburu, but since then they have never presented a candidate). Since Perón, Argentina has been divided between “Peronistas” and “Others”, two coalitions in which nobody claims to be conservative. The division triggered the great “revolution” of March 1976 in which the military took power to get rid of the leftists that had taken over the “Peronistas”, but in December 1983, “democracy was established” and since then the tension of that division has been quite high (as high as it’s today at the end of 2020). Argentina had been an important player in the world order before 1930, it was an orphan of the world (dis)order of 1930-1955, then a party to the cold-war order (1966-1990), and since then a very marginal country of the new (dis)order.

    • Arnold, I have read your father’s article you refer to in point #3. His definition of intellectuals makes clear that he has in mind “the humanities”, one of Snow’s two cultures. I assume, however, if your father were writing today, he would say that he had in mind two of the three cultures that Jerome Kagan mentions in his revision of Snow. He would include both humanities and social sciences (he refers to social scientists in his article). And for both of them, I’d bet that your father would argue that they lack the most elementary and indispensable prerequisites for making “league for the future”.

      In your comment on your father’s point, you limit yourself to the meaning and benefit of specialization (my word, you don’t use it). Although we can discuss the meaning and benefit of specialization, in the article your father seems to point to the high tension of being an intellectual a la Tyler Cowen —pretending to know a little of a lot of things but nothing in detail. Sooner or later such intellectual understands the high tension in his communication and dealings with others: he cannot expect to be updated in all his things and to be taken seriously when he gives an opinion (I assume your father wouldn’t be surprised that so many of these intellectuals write columns and books based on their columns). To do a detailed, serious analysis of an issue requires too much work with a few other people (your team if you are the captain) and away from the mass. An intellectual in your father’s sense risks to become an idiot, a foolish, because of his high propensity to give an opinion on matters he knows nothing about or well enough to add value to an exchange of ideas.

      One of the most important cultural changes in the past 50 years is the rise of the experts. Many of them are simply your father’s intellectuals. Unfortunately, these experts appear to have been valuable to politicians and the mass media so we cannot ignore there is a demand for their services. They have proved to be good at escalating political conflicts.

    • Arnold, with respect to #4, I fully agree with your father: you cannot take conflict out of human behavior and interactions. I was lucky enough to spend a year at Blacksburg, with Jim Buchanan and Gordon Tullock at their best time, almost 20 years after they had written The Calculus of Consent. By then, they were following different lines of research –Jim preferred to focus on voluntary interactions and cooperation to meet people’s demands for goods, while Gordon on conflict and coercion in different legal and political settings. Simultaneously but independently, in the 1970s, Hayek, Hirschleifer, Boulding, and others were struggling to make sense of cooperation and conflict.

      Since then, I have been searching for a way to combine both. Today I think that the analysis of individual behavior and social interactions has to assume they depend on some containment of our dark side as a prerequisite to facilitate and take advantage of our bright side. This applies to all our behavior and interactions, not just to organizations as you do in your comment. It’d be a terrible mistake to think that is limited to formal organizations because we spend most of our lives outside them. Btw, when I talk about our dark side, I have in mind both our malice and our idiocy (the main source of stupidity as defined and analyzed by Carlo Cipolla), and any comparative and historical analysis of legal systems should take into account how rules to contain both have been evolving.

    • Arnold, in relation to #6, I’m surprised that you confuse your father’s concern for relief with your concern for mitigating poverty. Today we have a clear case in which politicians are asked for relief regardless of their position about any UBI scheme. All governments have been providing relief for damages caused by a great variety of misfortunes, including now the governments’ responses to the pandemic (David Moss’ When All Else Fails is about the many times and ways in which the U.S. government provided relief). It has become so pervasive that now radical-left factions with the support of rotten and corrupt democrats are demanding reparation for damages caused long ago. Indeed, this has nothing to do with mitigating poverty and strengthening incentives to work.

      If anything, the pervasiveness of government relief confirms how much we are ignoring the transformation of government into a phony insurance company. In his book, Moss argued for government to become insurer of last resort, but for a long time I have been arguing that it was a mistake to think of central banks as lenders of last resort because politicians want them to be lenders of discretionary resort. The ongoing experience with the new U.S. law on relief —delayed for months by the rotten and corrupt democrats— deserves a detailed analysis.

      I expect the demand for government relief to increase sharply in the next four years. Despite Larry Summers’ grotesque column in Bloomberg —the one celebrated by Tyler Cowen in a post earlier today— I expect both Larry and Tyler to push for relief after January 20. Btw, they ignored Greg Mankiw’s proposal for relief presented last March, a reasonable one.

  4. You were lucky to experience, in your formative years, a constant, articulate example of worldly good sense; and you generously ‘carry it forward’ to your readers everyday with fresh insights or wise reminders.

    Scattered personal echoes (my peculiar path to some of Merle Kling’s maxims):

    a) Re: 1. “Sometimes it’s this way, sometimes it’s that way.”

    Since I didn’t grow up around intellectuals, I got a handle on this insight by reading (and then teaching, in a western civ course) the great French moralists of the early modern period: Michel de Montaigne, Blaise Pascal, Francois de La Rochefoucauld. These pre-Newtonian authors delight in identifying myriad, precise psychological mechanisms (rather than laws).

    Then acquaintance with great literature (esp. Giacomo Leopardi, Leo Tolstoy, Kazuo Ishiguro) deepened my appreciation of this way of thinking.

    Finally, I discovered a loose group of scholars who extend this way of thinking to modern interdisciplinary social science: Thomas C. Schelling, Jon Elster, Diego Gambetta, Timur Kuran.

    b) 2. “Identifying nonsense.”

    First, an admiration for Leopardi’s poetry, and an interest in independent ideas on the Left, led me to Sebastiano Timpanaro’s idiosyncratic, incisive books, one of which, The Freudian Slip, introduced me to lucid, fair-minded ‘nonsense identification.’

    I grew up around commercial artists (advertising illustration, editorial illustration), who revered the Old Masters. Naturally, I devoured Roger Kimball’s lampoon of bullshit academic art history, The Rape of the Masters.

    Finally, Jon Elster’s mature essay, “Hard and Soft Obscurantism,” helped me find my sea legs amid the rising tide of nonsense in the humanities and social sciences:
    https://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/politicaleconomy/study/ug/political-economy/Elster,-obscurantism-in-the-social-sciences,-Diogenes-58.1-2-(2011).pdf

    c) 3. “In league with the future.”

    A librarian, George Graf, got me onto everything Thomas Sowell, whose book, Intellectuals and Society, explains why it often occurs that people become intellectuals from opaque, self-centered motives, and why the chattering classes usually get things wrong.

    Eventually, I came across EconTalk. Russ Roberts does his level best to cultivate intellectual humility, by personal example, and through probing conversations with a wide range of authors, about hubris in the social sciences.

    Merle Kling predicted (1957) that intellectuals will become well-fed and irrelevant. What would he say about the impact of woke academics?

  5. I have zero professional training in corkball theory…but I’m thinking that UBI will be a total loser for the average taxpayer. UBI will always and everywhere be a supplement to, and not a replacement for, traditional welfare programs. Prepare to open your wallet and watch it get emptied.

    Why the libertarians continue to insist on this UBI nonsense is completely lost on me.

  6. My father noticed that revolutions in Latin America were often short, relatively peaceful, and not of lasting significance. A coup would replace one military junta with another. In contrast, the violence of the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution produced significant historical breaks.

    If you are a conservative, you should place a high value on peace.

    Given your examples, a high value on eradicating leftists, rather.

    • If you are genuinely trying to conserve what you’ve presently got, or at least trying to stop things from getting even worse, it’s better to place a high value on *suppressing leftism* rather than eradicating leftists, which is the extreme and risky measure of a pound of cure when you failed to apply the ounce of prevention.

      Also, the really bad news, is that if you are a traditionalist, you will really need not just to freeze things but to radically adjust the present course. The unfortunate converse of, “The more violent the revolution, the more dramatic the change that follows,” is that if you need dramatic change … well … it won’t be easy and tidy.

  7. Re: 6. “We’ll have to pay people to play corkball.”

    If the design of extant means-tested welfare programs discourages work by imposing high marginal tax rates on earned income, then a targeted remedy would be to change the design of means-tested programs accordingly. (Compare the EITC.) By contrast, UBI is scattershot.

    According to Maitreesh Ghatak & François Maniquet, the budget trade-off in UBI entails tax policy that discourages work by low-wage individuals:

    “As the basic income becomes larger, the amount of tax that needs to be collected increases. That requires an increase in the average tax rates. In order not to deter high-wage individuals from working hard, this increase in the average tax rates should be accompanied as much as possible by low marginal tax rates on large incomes. This is accomplished by having large marginal tax rates on low incomes, thereby increasing the average tax rates on the whole income distribution. This has the drawback that it discourages low-wage individuals from working, but given the lower marginal tax rates on larger incomes, the very productive individuals continue to work, and a sufficiently large amount of tax is collected.”—“Universal Basic Income: Some Theoretical Aspects,” Annual Review of Economics (2019) [gated].

    However, UBI presumably would mitigate a different, crucial flaw in extant means-tested welfare programs: scant take-up among the poorest individuals (bottom decile of income after tax and transfer). It seems that many of the neediest fall through the cracks. See Figure 5 in Hilary Hoynes and Jesse Rothstein, “Universal Basic Income in the United States and Advanced Countries,” Annual Review of Economics (2019) [gated]. Maybe the NBER version of the paper is ungated?: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25538/w25538.pdf

    What if “this time is different” for mass unemployment because of an automation revolution? Might there be alternatives to paying people to play corkball? Insurance against automation risk is a new idea. Robin Hanson explores the issue in a fascinating video interview (“Robin Hanson on Nerds for Yang”, 23 December 2019) at the link below (at cue times 00:13:53-00:18:07 and passim):
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44ecyp0kJa0

  8. The biggest problem is not that you couldn’t find jobs for all workers, but that the richest and most bourgeois groups will find no reason to share a state or nation with those they don’t like. Japan and Singapore are at the head of this. They’ve structured their nation so that they get first world comforts but put a high priority on only accepting immigrants on their terms. This may change, but I suspect the negative effects of identity politics will lead to increased sorting both by class and by ethnic group. At some point the gated suburb becomes the starting point for a new model of governance, especially if low end jobs can be replaced by robotics or trade or software. The more this is true, the more richer groups will choose to be selective about who shares citizenship and sovereignty with them. The current mania for open immigration is purely about class warfare. Open immigration undermines middle class Americans with unwoke traditional views, but it is only acceptable as long as elites find it easy to live far from the madding crowds. This probably won’t go on ad infinitum and I can see changes ahead. But the dream of the uber elite is a world where they can exclude both the lower and middle classes unless they pay obeisance to the elites’ values du jour.

  9. So non-ideological, skeptical of intellectuals, and pro-pragmatic progress. Sounds like a populist to me.

  10. Point five clearly applies domestically, and indeed conservatives appear to value low crime rates and limited social upheaval from riots (or even large protests which may tip into riots). Did you intend this to apply to foreign conflict as well? It is less clear that conservatives value peace more than other ideologies in this realm, or that they should. If barbarians are at the gates, perhaps war is needed to turn them away.

  11. Arnold Kling:

    I’ve waited a while, in hopes that someone else would point out a typo in section 3 of this post. You’ve written “The Intellectual: Will He With Away?”. Can you please change “With” to “Wither”?

    I feel silly for letting this bother me, but it’s the title of an article written by your father, so maybe it’s worth getting right.

    Thanks.

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