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“The fact that this book has won two prestigious prizes raises a question: does evidence count anymore in history?” http://people.hss.caltech.edu/~kousser/book%20reviews/maclean.pdf
NB: Part 1 of this series can be found here . The concluding chapter of Democracy in Chains is titled “Get Ready”. Here MacLean gathers all of her implications together and portrays the arc of influence that I summarized in Part 1 of my responses . Readers absorb details of just what the cause is capable of doing. I won’t recount the chapter. Instead, I would like to focus on pages 225-228, where MacLean argues that constitutional checks and balances should be removed because they…
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I only yesterday finished reading Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains. Until now I haven’t commented publicly on the book, besides brief editorials when sharing posts on social media. Now I will begin writing my substantive responses. This first post is meant to establish some context that will help me be clear in later posts. Disclaimer: I first disclose my involvement with the subject matter. I am not mentioned in MacLean’s book, nor have I been…
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Originally Posted to Division of Labour (DOL) on April 16, 2007 at 03:39 PM in Culture (Links have been updated and typos corrected.) Kurt Vonnegut passed away last week. I am no Vonnegut expert, although I’ve read some of the novels and found much of it disturbingly delicious and deliciously confounding. DOL readers are probably familiar with the short story, “Harrison Bergeron” ( text here ), which I first read as an undergrad in Eric Schansberg’s poverty…
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From the Pages of Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers (p.189, ch.7) The most successful entrepreneurs know what they do well, they know the market and the opportunities within it, and they choose those activities that create the most value. This is true in economic as well as political markets.
From the Pages of Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers (p.178, ch.7) [W]hen the right elements come together at the right time and place and overwhelm the status quo, it is because special people make it happen. We call them political entrepreneurs.
From the Pages of Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers (p.176. ch.7) While we started this book with Danny Biasone saving basketball, we end it with Norman Borlaug saving a billion lives. These stories are not that different. Both faced vested interests, which were reinforced by popular beliefs that things should be a certain way—that is, until a better idea came along.
From the Pages of Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers (p.174, ch.6) Because there was a general belief that homeownership was a good thing, politicians found the public with open arms.... Everybody was winning—except Alfred Marshall, whose supply and demand curves were difficult to see through the haze of excitement at the time, and except Friedrich Hayek, whose competition as a discovery procedure was befuddled... In short, once politicians started getting credit for homeownership rates, the housing market was doomed.
From the Pages of Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers (p.166, ch.6) Everyone responded rationally to the incentives before them. In short, the rules that guided homeownership changed over time, which in turn changed the incentives of these actors. And bad things happened.
From the Pages of Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers (p.153, ch.6) They understood the economics. The ideas had already won in ... the regulatory agency itself. All that remained to be overcome were some vested interests and a handful of madmen in authority.
From the Pages of Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers (p.146, ch.6) If the idea for auctions of spectrum use rights had been part of the public debate since at least 1959, why didn’t the relevant institutions change sooner? What interests stood in the way?
From the Pages of Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers (p.121, ch.5) When an academic scribbler comes up with a new idea, it has to resonate well with widely shared beliefs, which in turn must overcome the vested interests at the table. Many forces come together to explain political change, even though it may seem like coincidence of time and place.
From the Pages of Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers (p.120, ch.5) It’s the rules of the political game that deserve our focus, not politicians’ personalities or party affiliations.
From the Pages of Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers (p.119, ch.5) In short, ideas are a type of higher-order capital in society. Like a society that is poor in capital and therefore produces little consumer value, a society that is poor in ideas and institutions will have bad incentives and therefore few of the desirable outcomes that people want.
