Another very good post. In my field (economics) we were taught to focus on how people behave, not what they say. To some extent, that's because expressed views are often insincere (as you emphasize)--people wish to "say the right thing". Over time, I've come to realize that there is another problem with expressed views, cognitive errors. For instance, when people rely on "common sense" they tend to underestimate "elasticities", the extent to which people respond to incentives.
When a city proposes something like a congestion charge, it will generally be opposed by a public that is skeptical that it would reduce traffic. When traffic congestion does end up falling, the congestion charge often becomes more popular.
My favorite example involved my father, who was a heavy smoker. He would deny that cigarette taxes would reduce smoking, a habit he viewed as an addiction. Much later in life my mother casually mentioned that she had smoked in college, something I never imagined. I asked her why she stopped, and she said "When your father and I got married we decided we could only afford one smoker in the family." My father (who had a high IQ) had failed to see the impact of economic incentives even when it operated within his own family, which shows how much our common sense intuition can mislead us on incentive effects.
Many public policies such as minimum wages, mandated job benefits, and rent controls would be less popular if people correctly understood the relevant elasticities.
In regard to smoking taxes, it's know that the major effect is in teenagers, which is the point at which people usually become smokers or not. And teenagers are *very* price sensitive. Your father, once he had a stable job, probably didn't grasp how strong the effect is on teenagers -- their elasticity is a lot higher than his.
Economics can't be used to make these determinations and results in bad data, fueling bad conclusions and more bad policy. Traffic congestion has never fallen because of congestion charges, smoking/alcohol have never been reduced by taxes either. Even outright bans led to the opposite of the intended result.
This is because economics is downstream of politics, which in turn is downstream of ethics. Politics is ultimately applying ethics to a social context, which in turn will determine the kind of economy that you have. It doesn't work in reverse.
Today the majority of people believe it's moral to sacrifice individuals for a greater good, this has everyone supporting rights-violating/authoritarian government policies (MAGA anti-trade/WOKE anti-fossil-fuels, etc.) which is producing increasingly negative economic results.
To address this requires educating the public that morality actually consists of individuals pursuing their own lives and goals, while leaving others to do the same. No greater good, just individuals with equal rights. This would lead to rights-protecting government policy (liberal) and in turn a capitalist economic system. This would then produce positive economic results.
To use your example, public policies such as minimum wages, mandated job benefits, and rent controls would be less popular if people correctly understood that they are *unethical*.
If we want better outcomes, we have to stop treating economics as the foundation. It’s the output. The real starting point is ethics. Until that’s addressed, the cycle of bad policy and bad results will continue, returning us back to pre-industrial and pre-rights horror.
> Traffic congestion has never fallen because of congestion charges, smoking/alcohol have never been reduced by taxes either.
Um what? What I've seen in the mainstream press is that congestion charges do reduce traffic, and smoking (among teenagers) is strongly affected by cigarette price.
I wonder whether people who object to giving Palestinians refuge on the grounds that it would be complicity with ethnic cleansing would say the same thing about giving Jews refuge from Europe before WWII? Clearly it would have saved hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives, but in a sense it may also have given Hitler what he wanted.
And there's even evidence that Hitler was much more interesting in getting rid of the Jews in Germany than in killing them per se: The man Hitler chose to run Denmark for an unclear reason allowed the word to get out that the Jews in Denmark were to be rounded up, so about 90% of them went into hiding and escaped to Sweden. He even kept the German coastal patrol boats in port for repainting over the few weeks it took the Jews to escape in fishing boats across the strait. When Hitler complained, he replied that he had been ordered to render Denmark "Judenrein"(sp?) -- litterally free of, or cleansed of, Jews -- and had succeeded. Hitler didn't punish him for it.
But of course, no country is willing to admit several million refugees on short notice.
The difference with the Palestinians is that this mess has been running for over 50 years and that there are explicitly Arab countries with a total population of around 350 million. So it seems like any reasonable immigration quotas would have been sufficient to make the problem go away.
IIRC there were also a lot of European Jews who wanted to emigrate in the years leading up to WWII but couldn't find a country that would take them. If other countries had welcomed them, perhaps Hitler would have settled for a gradual expulsion over many years.
They probably would. We need to push back against the idea that ethnic cleansing is comparable to genocide. My controversial opinion is that ethnic cleansing isn't so bad. I'm happy my great grandparents were ethnically cleansed by pogroms in the early 20th century.
Yeah, though you probably want to phrase it "Ethnic cleansing isn't as bad as genocide." And sadly we're in a world where the choices are often between those two.
Of course, in any reasonably advanced country, we need to taboo ethnic cleansing heavily as part of liberalism (in the broad sense). But that's still a minority of the world.
"My natural instincts are fascist, but every modern anti-liberal thinker I find painfully embarrassing at an intellectual level, and so the instincts have changed. I can now appreciate trans women. Maybe this is why I hate rightists so much. They’re what I would be if I were dumber, which I find horrifying. I sometimes am tempted to come up with my own non-liberal philosophy, but I don’t think I would have any followers. So liberalism easily defeats all the alternatives."
"I think a “free Palestine” would be a basket case anyway, and if I found myself among a people with a political culture that screwed up, I would support surrender to most foreign enemies or mass emigration." Those of us whose anti-Zionism is a consistent aspect of our anti-wokeness don't want a "free Palestine" either as Palestinian identity politics is no better than Jewish identity politics. If you have a libertarian conception of rights as belonging to individuals and not groups (which anti-woke people say for every group except Jews) you can easily navigate what is right and wrong in the Zionist/Palestinian conflict. The problem of Zionism isn't that it trampled on "Palestinian" rights, but it trampled on the rights of individuals who happen to be Palestinians. Groups don't have rights. Individuals do. You don't need to be "pro-Palestinian" to know that it was wrong for a sacred victimhood identity group to claim it had rights over third parties owing to their identity and you don't need to be pro-Palestinian to understand Palestinians have rights as individuals. And you also can reject Hamas denial that Israelis living in the land in 2026 also have rights. You don't need Zionism to recognize that a Jew born in Tel Aviv has rights and it isn't relevant to respecting those rights that their great grandfather might have violated the rights of others. You can't selectively believe in identity politics. You either have to criticize all of it or none of it. Jewish libertarian Jake Klein has written extensively about the myside bias in so many who claim to be anti-woke on this issue. https://www.wetheblacksheep.com/p/you-cant-be-anti-identity-politics
It would be moral, but probably unfeasible. Palestinian refugees in Jordan are known to engage in terrorist activity - look up Black September. Resettling Palestinian would be unpopular in the Middle East due to a historic precedent, and would be unpopular in the West because of the refugee crisis. They are kind of stuck in a war zone.
All of this column is correct but it ignores that *what people say* is fundamentally a move in a game whose goal is to maximize the speaker's social status. The difference between expressed preferences and revealed preferences is quite natural from that point of view. Has Hanania even read Triver's introduction to The Selfish Gene, which describes how we bury in our subconscious *the facts we act on that we are not allowed to speak*?
For more detail, see Dan Williams' "Conspicuous Cognition" blog:
> If humans were solitary animals, we would have evolved to approximate the behaviour of Homo economicus, the idealised rational agent imagined in much of twentieth century economics. We would act in ways that are predictable, sensible, and consistent. The characters depicted in Dostoevsky's novels would be unintelligible to such a creature, except as victims of mental illness.
> But we are not. We are social creatures, and almost everything puzzling and paradoxical about our species is downstream of this fact.
Although I suspect Hanania has a large enough dose of ASD (like me) that he's not very subject to the passion to be thought well of.
I highly appreciate your work, and I support the liberal worldview. But, sorry, in this piece your argument against the political right is the usual brought on by leftist: "rightists are dumb, I am smarter, so the left is the correct way". I can appreciate a person with dysphoria, this doesn't change the empirical fact that there are no "trans women", they are just men in drags. And that rainbow ideology is like a smart ideology, but without the smart part, and dumber.
The idea of 'being rational' obviously has limitations on the fringes. For example, maybe many people would choose to be drug addicts in the face of widely available drugs that were good enough. Maybe many young men would choose to never date if they had high quality AI porn. Obviously leftists take this type of objection too far, but it is worth not going in the opposite direction and assuming that your worldview smuggles in no ideology in with it whatsoever.
I believe, following Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, that the political is friend vs. enemy, and the moral is good vs. evil.
This means that politics is a boy thing, about the Sharks going after the Jets; morality is a girl thing, where women all gang up to socially exclude a woman they think is evil.
But modern politics combines the two, and nowhere more than in lefty politics.
But what "liberals" are you talking about? Liberals in the classic definition are supporters of individual rights and rights-protecting government and that means support for capitalism in economics. There are no liberals in the mainstream political discourse today, nor are there any voters for these ideas.
The people calling themselves "liberal" today are an assortment of authoritarians that want government involved in every aspect of our lives. The correct term for these people is politically illiterate leftists. Not liberals.
And that describes most of the voices in the mainstream today. Anti-fossil-fuels and anti-Israel is no different to being anti-vaccine and anti-Ukraine.
I think it’s important for extreme economic libertarians to note that experience and psych studies show people generally care very little about “absolute” wealth as a function of happiness.
Perhaps we should care less about the top 10% of society who can really perceive these high levels differences, and more about the others who care about jobs and stability of their communities.
And further, behavioral econ really likes to take a lot of words to say that people frequently fall short of their ideals. Hasn’t the West been saying that for thousands of years?
The difficulty is that sometimes people fall short of their ideals because of akrasia, but at other times they fall short of their ideals because their ideals are poorly-thought-out, impractical, or conflict with a greater ideal. Distinguishing which is which can be difficult, but is important. Richard's distinguishing between "collective action problems" and "aesthetic visions" is a good start, but I don't think it isnthe whole story.
Yes, certainly. And I think all present agree that we’ve got to a place where the vast majority of the electorate does not attempt any such distinction, and that that’s bad.
Of course there’s the question of whether this was ever not the case…
As in, in what sense is he now able to appreciate them where before he could not? Does he mean he had such a psychological block against trans identified males that he couldn't appreciate a single thing about any one of them? I'm asking for clarification.
While the sentence is not particularly complex, you should be able to come up with a simpler one. I can.
I'd like to learn more about the non-liberal Hanania ideology you mentioned.
Another very good post. In my field (economics) we were taught to focus on how people behave, not what they say. To some extent, that's because expressed views are often insincere (as you emphasize)--people wish to "say the right thing". Over time, I've come to realize that there is another problem with expressed views, cognitive errors. For instance, when people rely on "common sense" they tend to underestimate "elasticities", the extent to which people respond to incentives.
When a city proposes something like a congestion charge, it will generally be opposed by a public that is skeptical that it would reduce traffic. When traffic congestion does end up falling, the congestion charge often becomes more popular.
My favorite example involved my father, who was a heavy smoker. He would deny that cigarette taxes would reduce smoking, a habit he viewed as an addiction. Much later in life my mother casually mentioned that she had smoked in college, something I never imagined. I asked her why she stopped, and she said "When your father and I got married we decided we could only afford one smoker in the family." My father (who had a high IQ) had failed to see the impact of economic incentives even when it operated within his own family, which shows how much our common sense intuition can mislead us on incentive effects.
Many public policies such as minimum wages, mandated job benefits, and rent controls would be less popular if people correctly understood the relevant elasticities.
In regard to smoking taxes, it's know that the major effect is in teenagers, which is the point at which people usually become smokers or not. And teenagers are *very* price sensitive. Your father, once he had a stable job, probably didn't grasp how strong the effect is on teenagers -- their elasticity is a lot higher than his.
Economics can't be used to make these determinations and results in bad data, fueling bad conclusions and more bad policy. Traffic congestion has never fallen because of congestion charges, smoking/alcohol have never been reduced by taxes either. Even outright bans led to the opposite of the intended result.
This is because economics is downstream of politics, which in turn is downstream of ethics. Politics is ultimately applying ethics to a social context, which in turn will determine the kind of economy that you have. It doesn't work in reverse.
Today the majority of people believe it's moral to sacrifice individuals for a greater good, this has everyone supporting rights-violating/authoritarian government policies (MAGA anti-trade/WOKE anti-fossil-fuels, etc.) which is producing increasingly negative economic results.
To address this requires educating the public that morality actually consists of individuals pursuing their own lives and goals, while leaving others to do the same. No greater good, just individuals with equal rights. This would lead to rights-protecting government policy (liberal) and in turn a capitalist economic system. This would then produce positive economic results.
To use your example, public policies such as minimum wages, mandated job benefits, and rent controls would be less popular if people correctly understood that they are *unethical*.
If we want better outcomes, we have to stop treating economics as the foundation. It’s the output. The real starting point is ethics. Until that’s addressed, the cycle of bad policy and bad results will continue, returning us back to pre-industrial and pre-rights horror.
Yeah all of that you wrote? It’s nonsense.
> Traffic congestion has never fallen because of congestion charges, smoking/alcohol have never been reduced by taxes either.
Um what? What I've seen in the mainstream press is that congestion charges do reduce traffic, and smoking (among teenagers) is strongly affected by cigarette price.
I wonder whether people who object to giving Palestinians refuge on the grounds that it would be complicity with ethnic cleansing would say the same thing about giving Jews refuge from Europe before WWII? Clearly it would have saved hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives, but in a sense it may also have given Hitler what he wanted.
And there's even evidence that Hitler was much more interesting in getting rid of the Jews in Germany than in killing them per se: The man Hitler chose to run Denmark for an unclear reason allowed the word to get out that the Jews in Denmark were to be rounded up, so about 90% of them went into hiding and escaped to Sweden. He even kept the German coastal patrol boats in port for repainting over the few weeks it took the Jews to escape in fishing boats across the strait. When Hitler complained, he replied that he had been ordered to render Denmark "Judenrein"(sp?) -- litterally free of, or cleansed of, Jews -- and had succeeded. Hitler didn't punish him for it.
But of course, no country is willing to admit several million refugees on short notice.
The difference with the Palestinians is that this mess has been running for over 50 years and that there are explicitly Arab countries with a total population of around 350 million. So it seems like any reasonable immigration quotas would have been sufficient to make the problem go away.
IIRC there were also a lot of European Jews who wanted to emigrate in the years leading up to WWII but couldn't find a country that would take them. If other countries had welcomed them, perhaps Hitler would have settled for a gradual expulsion over many years.
They probably would. We need to push back against the idea that ethnic cleansing is comparable to genocide. My controversial opinion is that ethnic cleansing isn't so bad. I'm happy my great grandparents were ethnically cleansed by pogroms in the early 20th century.
Yeah, though you probably want to phrase it "Ethnic cleansing isn't as bad as genocide." And sadly we're in a world where the choices are often between those two.
Of course, in any reasonably advanced country, we need to taboo ethnic cleansing heavily as part of liberalism (in the broad sense). But that's still a minority of the world.
"My natural instincts are fascist, but every modern anti-liberal thinker I find painfully embarrassing at an intellectual level, and so the instincts have changed. I can now appreciate trans women. Maybe this is why I hate rightists so much. They’re what I would be if I were dumber, which I find horrifying. I sometimes am tempted to come up with my own non-liberal philosophy, but I don’t think I would have any followers. So liberalism easily defeats all the alternatives."
I love this - this is why I keep coming back!
"I think a “free Palestine” would be a basket case anyway, and if I found myself among a people with a political culture that screwed up, I would support surrender to most foreign enemies or mass emigration." Those of us whose anti-Zionism is a consistent aspect of our anti-wokeness don't want a "free Palestine" either as Palestinian identity politics is no better than Jewish identity politics. If you have a libertarian conception of rights as belonging to individuals and not groups (which anti-woke people say for every group except Jews) you can easily navigate what is right and wrong in the Zionist/Palestinian conflict. The problem of Zionism isn't that it trampled on "Palestinian" rights, but it trampled on the rights of individuals who happen to be Palestinians. Groups don't have rights. Individuals do. You don't need to be "pro-Palestinian" to know that it was wrong for a sacred victimhood identity group to claim it had rights over third parties owing to their identity and you don't need to be pro-Palestinian to understand Palestinians have rights as individuals. And you also can reject Hamas denial that Israelis living in the land in 2026 also have rights. You don't need Zionism to recognize that a Jew born in Tel Aviv has rights and it isn't relevant to respecting those rights that their great grandfather might have violated the rights of others. You can't selectively believe in identity politics. You either have to criticize all of it or none of it. Jewish libertarian Jake Klein has written extensively about the myside bias in so many who claim to be anti-woke on this issue. https://www.wetheblacksheep.com/p/you-cant-be-anti-identity-politics
Israeli identity v Gazans isn't based in idpol (there's millions of non-jewish Israeli citizens), it's based on "terrorists should stop murdering us".
It would be moral, but probably unfeasible. Palestinian refugees in Jordan are known to engage in terrorist activity - look up Black September. Resettling Palestinian would be unpopular in the Middle East due to a historic precedent, and would be unpopular in the West because of the refugee crisis. They are kind of stuck in a war zone.
All of this column is correct but it ignores that *what people say* is fundamentally a move in a game whose goal is to maximize the speaker's social status. The difference between expressed preferences and revealed preferences is quite natural from that point of view. Has Hanania even read Triver's introduction to The Selfish Gene, which describes how we bury in our subconscious *the facts we act on that we are not allowed to speak*?
For more detail, see Dan Williams' "Conspicuous Cognition" blog:
> If humans were solitary animals, we would have evolved to approximate the behaviour of Homo economicus, the idealised rational agent imagined in much of twentieth century economics. We would act in ways that are predictable, sensible, and consistent. The characters depicted in Dostoevsky's novels would be unintelligible to such a creature, except as victims of mental illness.
> But we are not. We are social creatures, and almost everything puzzling and paradoxical about our species is downstream of this fact.
Although I suspect Hanania has a large enough dose of ASD (like me) that he's not very subject to the passion to be thought well of.
I highly appreciate your work, and I support the liberal worldview. But, sorry, in this piece your argument against the political right is the usual brought on by leftist: "rightists are dumb, I am smarter, so the left is the correct way". I can appreciate a person with dysphoria, this doesn't change the empirical fact that there are no "trans women", they are just men in drags. And that rainbow ideology is like a smart ideology, but without the smart part, and dumber.
The idea of 'being rational' obviously has limitations on the fringes. For example, maybe many people would choose to be drug addicts in the face of widely available drugs that were good enough. Maybe many young men would choose to never date if they had high quality AI porn. Obviously leftists take this type of objection too far, but it is worth not going in the opposite direction and assuming that your worldview smuggles in no ideology in with it whatsoever.
Really good😊
I believe, following Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, that the political is friend vs. enemy, and the moral is good vs. evil.
This means that politics is a boy thing, about the Sharks going after the Jets; morality is a girl thing, where women all gang up to socially exclude a woman they think is evil.
But modern politics combines the two, and nowhere more than in lefty politics.
Houston We Have a Problem
But what "liberals" are you talking about? Liberals in the classic definition are supporters of individual rights and rights-protecting government and that means support for capitalism in economics. There are no liberals in the mainstream political discourse today, nor are there any voters for these ideas.
The people calling themselves "liberal" today are an assortment of authoritarians that want government involved in every aspect of our lives. The correct term for these people is politically illiterate leftists. Not liberals.
And that describes most of the voices in the mainstream today. Anti-fossil-fuels and anti-Israel is no different to being anti-vaccine and anti-Ukraine.
I think it’s important for extreme economic libertarians to note that experience and psych studies show people generally care very little about “absolute” wealth as a function of happiness.
Perhaps we should care less about the top 10% of society who can really perceive these high levels differences, and more about the others who care about jobs and stability of their communities.
And further, behavioral econ really likes to take a lot of words to say that people frequently fall short of their ideals. Hasn’t the West been saying that for thousands of years?
The difficulty is that sometimes people fall short of their ideals because of akrasia, but at other times they fall short of their ideals because their ideals are poorly-thought-out, impractical, or conflict with a greater ideal. Distinguishing which is which can be difficult, but is important. Richard's distinguishing between "collective action problems" and "aesthetic visions" is a good start, but I don't think it isnthe whole story.
Yes, certainly. And I think all present agree that we’ve got to a place where the vast majority of the electorate does not attempt any such distinction, and that that’s bad.
Of course there’s the question of whether this was ever not the case…
“No control over what happens means no incentive to get things right, which means there is little reason to expect rationality.”
Maybe I’m too fussy but it seems incorrect to label ignorance/error irrational. Does a high-IQ, erudite person transform into an “irrational” person the second he makes an error due to ignorance? See this article by the high-IQ and erudite Jeffrey Friedman. https://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/11/14/jeffrey-friedman/irrationality-or-just-plain-ignorance
"If I had asked people what they want, they would have said 'Faster horses'" -- Henry Ford
What do you mean by "appreciate transwomen"?
Which word in that sentence are you struggling with? I'm not sure if I could come up with a simpler sentence.
As in, in what sense is he now able to appreciate them where before he could not? Does he mean he had such a psychological block against trans identified males that he couldn't appreciate a single thing about any one of them? I'm asking for clarification.
While the sentence is not particularly complex, you should be able to come up with a simpler one. I can.