Arnold Kling

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Articles

On the "elite overproduction" problem

Dec 10, 2024 | arnoldkling.substack.com | Arnold Kling

Yascha Mounk scrutinizes Peter Turchin’s idea “overproduction of elites.”Trying to make sense of Turchin’s writings makes you feel like you’ve been staring at an astrological chart for too long. His approach—which, in a reference to the muse of history, he dubs Cliodynamics—is full of grandiose pronouncements which are designed to look scientific but actually present the world in such broad generalities that they are simply unfalsifiable.
Seeking Truth versus Seeking Esteem

Dec 2, 2024 | econlib.org | Arnold Kling

So we have a way of telling which political activists actually care about society and which are merely trying to portray themselves as caring: The ones who actually care will exert significant effort to make sure that their beliefs are correct. —Michael Huemer, Progressive Myths, p. 212Michael Huemer believes that some important components of progressive ideology rest on flimsy empirical foundations.
If I Ran the DOGE

Nov 17, 2024 | arnoldkling.substack.com | Arnold Kling

Early in 2012, I wrote The Case for Executive Reorganization. Ten years later, I wrote Designing a Better Regulatory State. If I were offering advice to (“ran”) the Department of Government Efficiency, I would bring ideas from those two articles. Reorganization can work at multiple levels. Under the President, a reorganization could improve the reporting structure. Below that, within each agency, reorgs could get rid of unnecessary sections and bad managers.
Feeling Lucky? - Econlib

Nov 4, 2024 | econlib.org | Arnold Kling

My appointment at Washington University was in the sociology department. During the autumn of my fourth year, I ran into a social work faculty friend of mine in the hallway of my building… she mentioned in passing that the social work school had a job opening that perhaps I might be interested in… on a whim I decided to apply… I was offered and accepted the job in March of that year.
Why are we badly governed?

Oct 27, 2024 | arnoldkling.substack.com | Arnold Kling

Simon Cooke writes,The US public, including lots who are going to vote Democrat, believe that their country is badly governed. Had it, in their view, been better governed since 2021 then it is unlikely that Donald Trump would be a whisker away from getting elected president. And, by the standards of the west, America is a long way from being the worst governed nation.
Risers and Fallers

Oct 24, 2024 | arnoldkling.substack.com | Arnold Kling

Which 20th century intellectuals have higher or lower status today than when they were in their “prime”? I think of status in terms of two factors: name recognition and idea penetration. Name recognition can be thought of as a guess as to what percentage of educated Americans can give a one-paragraph explanation of the person’s main thought and its significance.
How the national debt will play out

Oct 21, 2024 | arnoldkling.substack.com | Arnold Kling

Glenn Reynolds writes,At the national level, we also need to be cultivating the seeds of a Millei moment. Javier Millei took the helm in Argentina under similar conditions of fiscal disarray, and is using that to slash the bureaucracy – including, significantly, state-controlled media – with considerable success. This country could use something similar.
How Much Dissent is Optimal?

Oct 12, 2024 | arnoldkling.substack.com | Arnold Kling

The TL;DR for this essay:The authority to police disinformation will inevitably be used to crush dissent. Crushing dissent is bad. Therefore, we should not give anyone the authority to police misinformation. To dissent is to express a belief or opinion or claim that differs from. . .conventional wisdom; the Party Line; elite opinion; the scientific consensus. In terms of freshman statistics, a dissent is the Alternative Hypothesis, which differs from the Null Hypothesis.
Beware of Economic Misconceptions

Oct 7, 2024 | econlib.org | Arnold Kling

Herbert Stein, an economist who served in the Nixon Administration, wrote a memoir in which he looked back on his experience. He wrote that two main lessons he had learned were:1. Economists do not know very much. 2. Other people, including politicians who make economic policy, know even less about economics than economists do. In my own experience, non-economists often have some natural economic misconceptions.
The Cooperative Ape

Sep 2, 2024 | econlib.org | Arnold Kling

Unlike chimpanzees, which acquire the vast majority of their daily calorie intake from easy-to-find foods such as fruit and leaves, early humans occupied a more complex foraging niche, relying on foods they had to either extract (e.g., buried tubers, or nuts inside shells) or hunt. These more complex foraging techniques take time and skill to learn—and cannot easily be acquired through observation alone.