Tyler Cowen went on Prof G Markets this morning and spent an hour demonstrating the only kind of useful idiocy worth writing about: the kind with complete information.
The useful idiot in the old times was someone who was duped. That was the excusing condition. Tyler Cowen is not a man who is duped. What makes this interview worth your time is that he narrates the entire indictment himself, accurately, in the pleasant cadence of a man grading a quiz he wrote.
Asked about Trump’s promise to balance the budget, he is plain: “It was all lies to begin with. Anyone who believed it was a fool.” Asked whether economic policy has been driven by nativism bordering on racism, he does not hesitate: “Our immigration policy. Yes.” He describes the immigration agenda as something the president “outsourced” to Stephen Miller, whose project he summarizes as returning the country to “how we were culturally, ethnically, linguistically, in terms of religion, Christianity.” He calls the fiscal position a top-tier crisis — forty trillion in debt, “we’re in a very bad state,” “we’re going to suffer for that” — and states the national strategy in one sentence: “Our plan A is AI and we have no plan B.”
Then he grades the whole arrangement: “Overall, it’s still pretty awesome, I have to say. I know it sounds a little crazy. Can I give it a B+?”
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Asked to answer the AI trade’s most prominent critic, the chair of the Mercatus Center cites “a tweet circulating on Twitter” about the critic’s past predictions. That is the evidentiary standard on a several-hundred-billion-dollar question.
The point on which Cowen finds himself in complete agreement with the administration is, not coincidentally, the point nearest his own house. “It’s one of these small number of issues where I completely agree with Trump,” he says of the data-center buildout. He lives in Northern Virginia next to Loudoun County — “ground zero for data centers for the entire world,” he says, “the wealthiest county per capita in the whole United States” — and from that vantage he delivers the finding: “There’s no actual problem.” The objections of the people being asked to host these facilities are, in his taxonomy, aesthetic: “Maybe you think they’re ugly or there’s some slight humming noise.”
Here is what does not appear in his ledger. The grid operator for his own region has watched capacity prices rise from about $29 to $329 per megawatt-day in two auction years, and its independent market monitor attributes 63 percent of one auction’s increase to data-center demand — $9.3 billion loaded onto ordinary ratepayers in a single year, and the region’s households facing rate hikes of as much as 60 percent over five years. None of this exists for him. The richest county in America is doing fine.
His remedy for the politics is more instructive than his analysis. The public distrusts its elites, he concedes, for understandable reasons, and “you can’t overturn those perceptions.” So: “Maybe just talking about it less and having it happen in a few places and stop trying to persuade everyone.” Governors who campaign against the facilities and then sign the deals get his approval, because “what they’re saying or announcing is not really binding.” He jokes that paying off local communities “reminds me of my favorite movie, There Will Be Blood“ — the one about the oilman who buys a town in order to drain it. Sit with all of this for a moment. It is the chair of the Koch-founded Mercatus Center — an institution that exists, on paper, to defend free exchange against concentrated power — explaining that public speech is cheap talk, that the deals are the real politics, and that this arrangement is, his word, “the beauty of federalism.”
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The tell arrives as a joke, the way it usually does. Asked how he would fix the budget as president, Cowen muses that “even me as dictator, maybe as dictator I could do it, but I don’t see a feasible path from here to there.” Notice the shape of the thought experiment. Asked to imagine political agency, the economist reaches past every democratic instrument and lands on the dictator — and the obstacle, in his telling, is the public itself: “The voters love debt and deficits.” The citizenry is the problem. He means it as a joke about gridlock. Taken with the rest of the hour — persuasion does not work, voters are the problem, public statements are not binding — it is less a joke than a summary. And it lands differently in a year when the administration he “completely” agrees with is killing people on the water without chargesand paying a torture state to warehouse deportees.
Some on the right may want to defend Cowen as one of their reasonable ones — the one who will say the true things. And he does. The lies are lies, the nativism is nativism, the fiscal path is ruin, and he will tell you all of it himself, in order, if you ask the questions in order. What he will not do is let any of it touch the grade. Still pretty awesome. B-plus.A man who sees the whole board and is moved by none of it is not providing analysis. Then comes the sedation: the service of metabolizing alarm into wry amusement for an audience that would like to feel informed without feeling implicated.
That is the function. The regime gets its deals, the profession keeps its access, the audience gets to nod along, and nobody has to say the word complicity at a respectable volume.
Cowen is, as best I can read him, a technological determinist and an accelerationist. The changes are coming, the changes are largely good, and the job of the analyst is to describe the arrival weather and advise on adaptation. I have argued at length across two years of this newsletter that these are functionally evil positions. I stop short, on principle, of calling the people who hold them evil; I have friends who hold versions of them, and the epithet flattens what is actually a disagreement about what a human society is for. But the positions themselves are the thing that makes an hour like this one produce the answers it produces. If the buildout is providence, the ratepayer in Maryland is not a citizen with a claim; the ratepayer is friction in the arrival. If the immigration policy is going to happen and can be routed around by high-skilled visas, the family disappeared into CECOT is not a moral fact; the family is a policy externality outside the growth question. B-plus is what this worldview gives you when it grades a year like this one, because a year like this one is, for a determinist, mostly a delivery schedule.
The useful idiot turns out not to be the man who fails to see. Cowen sees everything, says most of it out loud, and changes nothing. He lives next to the wealthiest county in America, and from where he sits, there is no actual problem.
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Being a pseudoconservative, Cowen won’t consider anything a real problem until it negatively impacts him. At that moment it will cease being a regrettable but acceptable harm to others and become the worst thing in the world. Put that humming data center next to his house (hint: it’s many decibles above tolerable and never stops) and he will be agitating for someone to do something to stop his pain.
Yesterday, I listened to some Texans on my TV, and they sounded just like me.
They were eviscerating their representative, who had supported Trump's attempt to limit voter registration. They were angry, vocal, and confrontational. I wanted to reach out and shake their hands. This confirmed my belief that good people live in every state, and that if I could talk with them personally, we would agree that dramatic changes are needed. I believe they would agree with and support my new party's agenda for reforming our government.
One caveat is that we may be too large a country to find similar values, because we are larger than the European Union, which functions as a conglomeration of separate countries with different values that remain separate. We may be made up of different states that eventually have to separate into their own countries.
I think that in every state, regardless of party affiliation or physical location, most citizens are fed up with Trump and his MAGA program. I have referred to this group as the 70 percenters, distinct from the 30 percent who still support Trump. I think 70 percent of our population are reasonable, moral people ready to help create change in our country. I also believe that if I could talk with them and present my agenda for a new party, they would want to join.
This new party would be the party of the people, by the people, and for the people, and it would not be affiliated with the existing Democratic or Republican parties. This would be the party of the 70 percent of people in our country who have a sense of social morality and believe in the principles defined in the Declaration of Independence, people who are proud to be American.
The main objective of this party would be to run a government by the people and to serve the people. I think we have universally accepted values we can use as the basis for this party, and 70% of our citizens have approved of them. These values are easy to enumerate, as the voting public has acknowledged them: a national healthcare program covering all health issues, including care for seniors; a substantial retirement plan by expanding our Social Security program; eliminating ICE and redirecting its funds to other programs; eliminating the Electoral College so voting would be done by the people, not by a committee; providing free education, including advanced degrees; raising taxes on millionaires and legalizing abortion. The list of services is enormous, and I think it is universally accepted and can be found in all advanced countries. We, the richest country in the world, do not have a national free health plan. This list of programs is simple and, I think, universally accepted by most citizens.
This new party's structure would be radically different from today's parties, focusing on reestablishing the power and importance of citizen control. One major criticism of our founding fathers was that they replaced the vote of the many with the vote of a few. This party would correct that fault by returning responsibility to the states and, in turn, to the citizens in those states. Every citizen would form and vote on this party's values; it would eliminate politicians and political appointments. This party would have only administrators, not politicians. The public would have to approve every action and program. Arrangements would be made for direct voting on all or any policy changes.
The House of Representatives would be restructured and expanded, allowing better state representation because voters in each state would direct it. Voters could change or remove representatives at any time if they were dissatisfied with their performance. Representatives would have no guaranteed terms; their performance would be subject to review by their state. States would have more power. The Senate would be abolished, as it is a ridiculous idea that two representatives from each state would control the voting public. Control of our government would rest only with the voting states, and we, the people, would control their representatives.
We would reform our Supreme Court so that its only function would be to review the legality of decisions made by state supreme courts; it would not rehear cases presented to the states. No country has a judge in the court system remain active after age 75, and we will follow that age limit in our courts. We will establish a mechanism to review all judges' actions and performance, and citizens can initiate a review by voting. Also, the voting public, not the Federalist Society or political parties, will select candidates for Supreme Court positions.
We would review government structures and ways for voters to participate in government in countries like Denmark, Germany, and France, where, because of the Second World War, they had a chance to rethink and improve citizens' involvement in government. Denmark's government has stronger safety nets for its citizens than ours, and we could learn from them.
As in many countries, the president will not have a fixed four-year term, and citizens can initiate removal procedures through the states and into the House of Representatives. Conservative organizations have sought to increase the president's power and independence, reduce Congress's power, and control the courts by having judges selected by the Federalist Society rather than by the citizens of our country. They want to select judges who support their agenda to benefit MAGA-rich funding. Our new party would eliminate these procedures that benefit the rich at our expense. Again, to quote Lincoln, we would be the party of the people, by the people, and for the people.