I mostly liked this. It’s making a few points, maybe roughly:
GDP and ‘growth’
GDP measures asset selloff and production of new durable means (capital) as the same; they aren’t
asset selloff without converting that into new durable means implies (longrun) stasis at best, and more likely atrophy
(so GDP ‘growth’ masks the actually longrun meaningful determinants, and can be misleading)
institutions as determinants of trajectory
‘good’ institutions adhere to constituents’ interests, and convert windfalls into durable productive means
‘bad’ ones just extract windfalls, and maybe even hasten atrophy if they can make a buck doing so
(this tends to determine whether the GDP ‘growth’ turns out to have been illusory)
There’s also some helpful and opinionated elucidation of some terms of art like ‘Dutch disease’, ‘resource curse’, and ‘comprador’. I’d have thoroughly appreciated that essay. (I might have also liked to hear some prescriptions for alternative types of measurement and instrumentation that would reliably distinguish cases.)
Then there are the psychological threads:
Lacan and his unhinged menagerie
‘Perverts’ know what’s up but use distracting ontologies to mask it while making a killing e.g. comprador-style
‘Hysterics’ notice something’s up but misdiagnose and are deceiving themselves and others in some sort of self-aggrandising (?) dance?
Am I to understand these as something like controlled opposition? The perverts are erecting and nourishing these guys without them knowing?
Or somehow structurally selected and amplified by a larger malign multi-actor agent-agnostic process?
‘Neurotics’ fully buy the masking ontology and are selected to administer and enforce it
An unspoken conspiracy
Ultimately these structures perpetuate themselves
This includes by attacking activities which operate outside of their ontologies (which would otherwise provide demonstration of the ontologies’ inappropriateness, like the Wickard v Filburn case)
(I got the vibe that these are supposed to be everywhere, but I’m not sure if that’s explicitly stated)
These parts felt maybe ‘fun’ and ‘poetic’ but on the whole a bit of a reach and harder to take seriously, while making the essay maybe twice as long as otherwise (or more). (I suspect this may be a taste thing and other readers may have loved that!)
Maybe I feel a bit that these were expressed with more confidence or generality than I currently feel able to justify on the presented context (I do of course buy that these character types and dynamics can and do happen). I’m interested to know if my light summary above is on the right track, and whether there are core resources (I’d guess not Lacan himself) which would give justification to more of that, or would help diagnose when these things are more or less in operation. Similarly to the above bits, I also hungered for something like a tentative prescription or case studies of successful anti-menagerie-conspiracy outcomes.
I think the Lacanian triad is an emergent attractor when the basis of legitimacy for certain sorts of power imbalances decays enough. “Controlled opposition” is true in the sense that it points to a cause of the arrangement’s stability, but possibly false insofar as it implies deliberate, premeditated arrangement.
Guilt, Shame, and Depravity models the basic psychic mechanism underlying this sort of thing. The Debtors’ Revolt (also linked in the OP) proposes a historical mechanism for the overthrowing of the pronormative Dutch Capitalist order; you might consider it a companion piece to the Calvinism case study I mentioned. Statisticism works through an example of the sort of pattern of unseeing I’m associating with Lacan’s obsessional neurotic. Also relevant is Excerpts from a larger discussion about simulacra.
I unfortunately cannot point you to clear and concise canonical sources discussing an empirical basis for Lacanian theory in detail; the fact that it’s a popular theory among some kinds of elites, with no clear counternarrative[1], should be sufficient to establish its relevance, even if it doesn’t establish its truth; and it counts for some sort of evidence that a bunch of elites are kinda-sorta confessing to thinking that way. (If you do want to engage with Lacan directly, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a decent entry, and Zizek’s film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology is a fairly accessible handwavy intro to Lacanian interpretation of media.)
“Everywhere” is a strong term, but the existence of Lesswrong as a sort of refugee community for intellectuals, and after its heyday, Slate Star Codex (and now Astral Codex Ten) as the last unironic semicanonical news magazine, implies that these patterns or other patterns of coordinated unseeing are pretty pervasive among elites, in ways that block other people interested in thinking about the problem from recognizing and being recognized by each other. So I suppose it’s “everywhere” in roughly the sense that the Roman Catholic Church was “everywhere” in medieval western Europe (see again my Calvinism piece for details).
Bourdieu and Foucault cover some of the same ground but don’t actually disagree with Lacan. Public choice economics explains some of what’s going on at the incentive level, but as far as I can tell, public choice people have no idea Lacanians exist. You’d think the people who study why institutions fail to self-correct would have noticed the people who study why individuals fail to self-correct, and vice versa. That the former seem genuinely unaware of the latter, while the latter have the ear of European institutional elites and Americanelite undergraduates, and publish papers trying to subsume the former into their framework and position themselves as its legitimate interpreters, is itself a pretty good example of the asymmetric compartmentalization I’m describing.
I enjoyed the GDP post! (And in fact subscribed off the back of it.)
“Controlled opposition” is true in the sense that it points to a cause of the arrangement’s stability, but possibly false insofar as it implies deliberate, premeditated arrangement.
That’s helpful, thanks.
it’s a popular theory among some kinds of elites, with no clear counternarrative
!
This all strikes me as much postmodernist awfulness… which is nevertheless meaningful and informative. I currently have poor access to that kind of thing, feels slippery. Thank you also for those other links, and for your scholarship in general.
I mostly liked this. It’s making a few points, maybe roughly:
GDP and ‘growth’
GDP measures asset selloff and production of new durable means (capital) as the same; they aren’t
asset selloff without converting that into new durable means implies (longrun) stasis at best, and more likely atrophy
(so GDP ‘growth’ masks the actually longrun meaningful determinants, and can be misleading)
institutions as determinants of trajectory
‘good’ institutions adhere to constituents’ interests, and convert windfalls into durable productive means
‘bad’ ones just extract windfalls, and maybe even hasten atrophy if they can make a buck doing so
(this tends to determine whether the GDP ‘growth’ turns out to have been illusory)
There’s also some helpful and opinionated elucidation of some terms of art like ‘Dutch disease’, ‘resource curse’, and ‘comprador’. I’d have thoroughly appreciated that essay. (I might have also liked to hear some prescriptions for alternative types of measurement and instrumentation that would reliably distinguish cases.)
Then there are the psychological threads:
Lacan and his unhinged menagerie
‘Perverts’ know what’s up but use distracting ontologies to mask it while making a killing e.g. comprador-style
‘Hysterics’ notice something’s up but misdiagnose and are deceiving themselves and others in some sort of self-aggrandising (?) dance?
Am I to understand these as something like controlled opposition? The perverts are erecting and nourishing these guys without them knowing?
Or somehow structurally selected and amplified by a larger malign multi-actor agent-agnostic process?
‘Neurotics’ fully buy the masking ontology and are selected to administer and enforce it
An unspoken conspiracy
Ultimately these structures perpetuate themselves
This includes by attacking activities which operate outside of their ontologies (which would otherwise provide demonstration of the ontologies’ inappropriateness, like the Wickard v Filburn case)
(I got the vibe that these are supposed to be everywhere, but I’m not sure if that’s explicitly stated)
These parts felt maybe ‘fun’ and ‘poetic’ but on the whole a bit of a reach and harder to take seriously, while making the essay maybe twice as long as otherwise (or more). (I suspect this may be a taste thing and other readers may have loved that!)
Maybe I feel a bit that these were expressed with more confidence or generality than I currently feel able to justify on the presented context (I do of course buy that these character types and dynamics can and do happen). I’m interested to know if my light summary above is on the right track, and whether there are core resources (I’d guess not Lacan himself) which would give justification to more of that, or would help diagnose when these things are more or less in operation. Similarly to the above bits, I also hungered for something like a tentative prescription or case studies of successful anti-menagerie-conspiracy outcomes.
I went into more detail on the GDP story in Is GDP a Kind of Factory?, linked at the top. There you will also find some discussion of relatively pragmatic cases where nations have outperformed the trend for a few decades, in the section titled Resource extraction and the question of feedback. For a more radical case study, see Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency, which discusses the bare minimum cultural kernel that was needed to initiate a three centuries long golden age.
The closest thing I have to a call to action here is Levels of Republicanism.
I think the Lacanian triad is an emergent attractor when the basis of legitimacy for certain sorts of power imbalances decays enough. “Controlled opposition” is true in the sense that it points to a cause of the arrangement’s stability, but possibly false insofar as it implies deliberate, premeditated arrangement.
Guilt, Shame, and Depravity models the basic psychic mechanism underlying this sort of thing. The Debtors’ Revolt (also linked in the OP) proposes a historical mechanism for the overthrowing of the pronormative Dutch Capitalist order; you might consider it a companion piece to the Calvinism case study I mentioned. Statisticism works through an example of the sort of pattern of unseeing I’m associating with Lacan’s obsessional neurotic. Also relevant is Excerpts from a larger discussion about simulacra.
I unfortunately cannot point you to clear and concise canonical sources discussing an empirical basis for Lacanian theory in detail; the fact that it’s a popular theory among some kinds of elites, with no clear counternarrative [1] , should be sufficient to establish its relevance, even if it doesn’t establish its truth; and it counts for some sort of evidence that a bunch of elites are kinda-sorta confessing to thinking that way. (If you do want to engage with Lacan directly, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a decent entry, and Zizek’s film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology is a fairly accessible handwavy intro to Lacanian interpretation of media.)
“Everywhere” is a strong term, but the existence of Lesswrong as a sort of refugee community for intellectuals, and after its heyday, Slate Star Codex (and now Astral Codex Ten) as the last unironic semicanonical news magazine, implies that these patterns or other patterns of coordinated unseeing are pretty pervasive among elites, in ways that block other people interested in thinking about the problem from recognizing and being recognized by each other. So I suppose it’s “everywhere” in roughly the sense that the Roman Catholic Church was “everywhere” in medieval western Europe (see again my Calvinism piece for details).
Bourdieu and Foucault cover some of the same ground but don’t actually disagree with Lacan. Public choice economics explains some of what’s going on at the incentive level, but as far as I can tell, public choice people have no idea Lacanians exist. You’d think the people who study why institutions fail to self-correct would have noticed the people who study why individuals fail to self-correct, and vice versa. That the former seem genuinely unaware of the latter, while the latter have the ear of European institutional elites and American elite undergraduates, and publish papers trying to subsume the former into their framework and position themselves as its legitimate interpreters, is itself a pretty good example of the asymmetric compartmentalization I’m describing.
I enjoyed the GDP post! (And in fact subscribed off the back of it.)
That’s helpful, thanks.
!
This all strikes me as much postmodernist awfulness… which is nevertheless meaningful and informative. I currently have poor access to that kind of thing, feels slippery. Thank you also for those other links, and for your scholarship in general.