Standard rule: anyone who describes themselves as “brave” is usually
full of shit. I’ve known people who’ve been on active duty, whose entire
job involved getting shot at while trying to do other shit, who don’t
talk about themselves that way. This kind of nonsense is a huge
narcissism red flag.
You can write huge articles saying 'being brave' is both [good](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/) and [bad,](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) so who can really tell, and become a well funded substack poster.
I'm too much of a city creature to really like the idea of doing the tiny stone hut on a windswept rocky isle thing indefinitely. But it's on the list of "yeah, I'd do that for long enough to finish writing a book" fantasies.
I would add, a thought occurred to me yesterday on seeing another of
Hanson’s obviously dishonest attempts to say something provocative and
get a reaction.
Hanson’s work as an economist is predicated on, essentially, trying
to use stats and game theory to work out what people really
believe, rather than what they say they believe - hence all the guff
about signalling and so on.
But his public persona routinely treats this project as assuming that
whatever people say they mean the opposite, i.e. that every
utterance of any kind is a social signal so that if you say anything you
must mean the opposite, regardless of whether he’s checked
whether you might actually mean it.
It’s an interesting kind of contrarianism.
There’s a whole line of history you can trace with this right back to
Carl Menger and then through the worst excesses of Public Choice
economics, where anybody attempting to something in the public good is a
potential fraud only out for themselves.
> trying to use stats and game theory to work out what people really believe
"Let me explain to you the deepest inner workings of society using this 2 by 2 payoff matrix."
>There’s a whole line of history you can trace with this right back to Carl Menger and then through the worst excesses of Public Choice economics,
Could you expand on this a little? I'm not terribly familiar with Menger but I do know a bit about Virginia School public choice stuff.
Carl Menger was the ultimate architect of what is now known as the Subjective Theory of Value (‘STV’, I forget whether he himself coined the term, and if he did it would have been in German). He argued that foregoing theories of economic value from Adam Smith to Ricardo to Marx and many others had mistaken economic value as a function of labour, whereas in his conception economic value could only be understood as an expression of individual preferences, at least within a market system. Moving from this premise Menger further argued that consequently the proper way to analyse an economy was through the lens of ranked preferences in order to determine what is valuable in that economy and why - this is in contrast to competing theories (most notoriously the “Labour Theory of Value”) which for example might measure value in an economy, roughly, as a ratio of labour input to productive output and therefore the price of any service or good.
Where Public Choice comes in to the story is that this STV germ seeded a a particular version of modern economic theory which treats economic agents as at least theoretically self-interested atoms in a gyre of other atoms whose preferences are first and foremost the predictors of their behaviour. This opens the door for Public Choice in that Public Choice theorists such as James Buchanan discovered a way to model *political* behaviour according to an underlying assumption that regardless of any collective interest, agential decision-making in politics could be divined by working out what the agent would consider to be in their own best interest. It’s worth pointing out here that the likes of Kenneth Arrow approached this from a very different direction and were much more concerned with how to maximise mutual collective action than was Buchanan, but the point about subjectivity and individualism stands.
When it comes to Robin Hanson, we’re looking at somebody who’s mother’s milk is the Buchanan flavour. By contesting the honesty of somebody’s stated preferences by looking at their (alleged) “revealed” preferences, as written in their social behaviour, he takes the stance that the most objective account of what people do is how they behave rather than what they say they believe in. Public Choice theory notably was kind of a wash, and even Brad DeLong has written that Buchanan was more than a bit dishonest in how he pursued it empirically: it’s a clever idea but it doesn’t necessarily hold up when you try to apply it the way Hanson or fellow travellers do.
Also I only just noticed that it’s you Hero, [word up?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZjAantupsA).
As an aside, if you’re interested in classic British political sit-coms *Yes, Minister* and it’s follow-up *Yes, Prime Minister* were inspired by Public Choice theory, with the premise being that the civil servants would always be behaving in their own, rather than the public, interest.
Thanks, I really appreciate the well written response. Im pretty well read in classical economics and the early marginalists so I was already aware of most of that and Ive seen the Adam Curtis doc so I'm also aware of the sitcom connection. Menger however is the only one of the original three marginal revolutionists that I'm completely unfamiliar with. So I guess if I could reword my question I guess I should have asked whether or not it would be anachronistic to read mid/late 20th century developments in Austrian(ish) Econ onto its founders, considering how diverse the politics of the early Austrians actually were. But again Im asking you, I have no idea. And yeah its nice to talk to you again too, I still like keeping up with your blog. Also its worth saying, Buchanan... very racist.
EDIT: grammar/phrasing
When it comes to Menger especially I tend to draw the line between early/mid-20th Austrian economists roughly around the influence of Ludwig von Mises. Menger was concerned with a close analysis of theory which admitted of empirical analysis and was generally a bit shy about drawing overly bold conclusions from *a priori* speculations as you’d find in e.g. praxeology. If anything the Marginal Revolution was opposed to what would become the ideas of really hardcore Austrians like von Mises and later his protege Murray Rothbard in America, initially out of the Red Vienna period and later the Cold War.
I have no respect whatsoever for Ludwig von Mises or Murray Rothbard, but I retain a lot of intellectual respect for the seriousness with which Menger et al. took their work, even if they weren’t always 100% right. Hell, even Pareto deserves credit in spit of his ties to the fascist movement.
How it seems to me is that in the chaos of post-WW1 Europe, and later the deliberate gaming of economic institutions by powerful interests - such as those that promoted Hayek way beyond his abilities - Austrian and to some extent libertarian economics calcified into something that I doubt its founders would have recognised at all.
But seeking out questions that are so removed from sanity that
they’re important to no-one, and working to answer those, is so much
more fun! (Though we usually market it to others under the name “pure
mathematics”.)
RH: Those seem not so fun to me.
Ah, so he readily admits he doesn’t “stumble” into loaded topics out
of some naive thirst for knowledge whose path obliviously led him to
weirdness; he actively seeks to be edgy.
It's not the aspiration we are sneering at, it's the enormous and frankly embarrassing self-regard. And the extremely narrow view of humanity and human thought it implies.
Being a Koch-funded tenured academic economist with a blog doesn't mean you *aren't* brave – although it isn't exactly clear what you are putting at risk – but to claim it makes you much braver (or aspirationally braver, not really that much difference) than everybody else...that is quite sneerworthy.
Standard rule: anyone who describes themselves as “brave” is usually full of shit. I’ve known people who’ve been on active duty, whose entire job involved getting shot at while trying to do other shit, who don’t talk about themselves that way. This kind of nonsense is a huge narcissism red flag.
‘I’m amazed that nobody apart from me is trying to answer the deepest and most important questions’ is kind of an incredible take
[deleted]
I would add, a thought occurred to me yesterday on seeing another of Hanson’s obviously dishonest attempts to say something provocative and get a reaction.
Hanson’s work as an economist is predicated on, essentially, trying to use stats and game theory to work out what people really believe, rather than what they say they believe - hence all the guff about signalling and so on.
But his public persona routinely treats this project as assuming that whatever people say they mean the opposite, i.e. that every utterance of any kind is a social signal so that if you say anything you must mean the opposite, regardless of whether he’s checked whether you might actually mean it.
It’s an interesting kind of contrarianism.
There’s a whole line of history you can trace with this right back to Carl Menger and then through the worst excesses of Public Choice economics, where anybody attempting to something in the public good is a potential fraud only out for themselves.
(slaps forehead in astonishment) Wait, we were supposed to be working to answer the important questions? This changes everything!
He’s lost it.
deepest most important questions like (cw) “>!what if it was a gentle silent rape!<”
Ah, so he readily admits he doesn’t “stumble” into loaded topics out of some naive thirst for knowledge whose path obliviously led him to weirdness; he actively seeks to be edgy.
Windbag Release: Brave No Jutsu
E U P H O R I C
once again he’s just saying out loud what all his fans are thinking
I wonder what he’s trying to signal with this?
hey he noticed us
Society if everyone were as brave and capable and unafraid of truth as Robin Hanson