Loading summary
Transcript35 lines
- [00:00]
A
And we're live on Matchday as Doug reaches for a Buffalo wing. He's got it. Oh, and he's gone for a can of Pepsi too. What a finish. There's no doubt about it. It just tastes better. Matchdays deserve Pepsi then in a way, there is no such thing as the scientific method. That doesn't mean I'm against science or I don't believe in being careful and thinking about things. I just mean that there's no formula.
- [00:28]
B
And now the good fight with Jasia Monk. It's only a few days until Francis Fukuyama and I discuss together how liberals can respond to all of the attacks on liberalism that have become so dominant in the public sphere and even in intellectual circles over the last years. On Wednesday, July 15th at 6pm, Frank and I will sit down together in Washington, D.C. to have a fun conversation about this topic. The event is co sponsored by Johns Hopkins SAIS and made possible with a generous support of a John Templeton Foundation. It will take place at SAISS new location in the Hopkins Bloomberg center at 555 Pennsylvania Ave Northwest in room 820 this coming Wednesday, July 15th from 6pm if you want to sign up, there should be a link in show notes or go to www. Persuasion.community P. Our events tickets are free. That's www. Persuasion.community P. Our to hear Frank and I discuss how to reinvent liberalism for a Post Liberal world this coming Wednesday, July 15th at 6pm at 5:55 Penn. For thousands and thousands of years, there was barely any economic growth. And then suddenly, in the late 18th and the 19th century, humanity achieved rates of economic growth in one part of Europe that were totally unprecedented. What is it that led to the economic takeoff of the Industrial Revolution? Is it the right kind of institutions that were put in place? Is it that people finally had incentives to become rich? Is it capital as science? Well, my guest today says that all of these explanations are wrong, that it really is rooted in a total change of our ideas about the world and in particular about the assault on hierarchy, the permission to each individual to live their lives as they wish, to the adoption of broadly philosophically liberal ideas. Well, Deirdre McCluskey is one of the world's most distinguished economic historians. She was for a long time at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and she is today the holder of the Isaiah Billin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Kato Institute in Washington, dc. In the last part of this conversation, we talk about a very different topic. Deirdre is a trans woman she transitioned in the 1990s. This resulted in a lot of conflict with her family. Her sister, with whom she since reconciled, had her committed to a psychiatric institution twice. And so she is in a particularly interesting position to reflect on what a liberal approach to trans issues may might look like. As you'll see in the part of this week's conversation that is reserved for paying subscribers, we have some areas of strong agreements on this topic and also some areas of interesting and strong disagreement, something that we're able to discuss in our not just a civil, but actually a warm way to listen to that part of a conversation to support the work we do here. Please go to writing.dashamonk.com and and become a paying subscriber. That's writing.yashamon.com to become a paying subscriber. Dear Dan McCloskey, welcome to the podcast. I'm really excited to talk to you, in part just because of the span of your work. And I really want to discuss your case for liberalism, but in a way that starts with the Industrial Revolution and the enormous economic progress we've made over the last centuries. And there is a big debate in history, in economics, about what actually caused that unprecedented economic liftoff that started some, you know, 250 years ago. You have a slightly surprising point of view on this, that ideas are actually more central to the origin of economic growth than certainly than most economists think. Tell us perhaps what the conventional story is and why I disagree with it.
- [05:20]
A
There are two conventional stories from the left and the right. From the left, the story is exploitation, the exploitation of the English working class, and then the exploitation of imperialism and slavery and so forth. So exploitation is supposed to result in surplus value, which then is used to invest. And investment then makes for the modern world, makes for increasing income. That's on the left. On the right, it ends up being the same story without the exploitation. Virtuous capitalists save more, according to the conventional story, and that results in capital accumulation, just as they say on the left, and that leads to the modern world. So it's essentially capital investment accumulation that's supposed to have caused our enrichment. But that doesn't make a lot of sense from a historical point of view. We've always invested. Humans always invest. We invest in paddy fields going up mountainsides and irrigation works and Roman roads. And then, indeed, even in the Middle Ages, peasants had to save a quite high percentage of their crop for seed. So they were investing. So there's nothing new about investment. That's the historical problem. And the economic problem is that Sheer capital accumulation, sheer piling up buildings, machines, or indeed university educations comes very quickly. Economists have known always to diminishing returns. If you had two cars, I guess that'd be nice. Three would be junk, four would be a burden. Diminishing returns is very strong. So those don't work. And, and I've written extensively on why they all don't work. Coal, you know, is one explanation. Well, that doesn't work and they all don't work. So why, why did we get rich? How did we get rich?
- [08:00]
B
Interesting. So this traditional story is that it's just over time people were able to save and accumulate these things, and that then allowed him to reinvest and so on. Okay, so we, we'll come back to a Steelman version of that, perhaps later. But if you've ruled that out, if that isn't working, then what's the alternative view that in fact can make sense of this growth?
- [08:21]
A
The alternative view that I favor is the creation in the 18th century in Northwestern Europe, first in Holland and then in Britain, and most particularly in Scotland, and then more or less accidentally at the same time in the English colonies in North America. The idea of liberalism in a certain way, a certain ideology. Ideology is Marx's word, and I think it's a very useful one. Ideology changed in this corner of the world, especially in the late 18th century. The idea of equality, of permission became much stronger than it had been in the past. Hierarchy, in other words, was in question. We still have hierarchies, but often they're hierarchies of a sort that we admire and want more of. Inventors, money, and good singers make money, and good football players make money. But in earlier times, of course, hierarchy was inherited and had nothing to do with progress. And the result was, I claim and I show, I think that innovation enormously increased. Ordinary people were allowed to have a go. This is English commonplace. And having a go made the poor even innovative. So it's through innovation, not through sheer accumulation, that we became rich. And then the question is, why innovation? And my claim is this change in ideology, and once that genie was out of the bottle, other people in the world became interested in this matter. When you look at protests, the ones in Iran last year or the ones a few years ago against Putin or the Arab Spring or New Tiananmen Square, always what they're asking for is this equality of permission. They're not asking for special subsidies or government programs to help this person or that person. So it's this ideological change that made the modern world so Let me get
- [11:09]
B
at the heart of why it is that hierarchy is such an impediment to economic growth and the specific ways in which hierarchy went away, right? There's two kind of challenges to this, right? So one is to say, well look, you can have hierarchy and have economic growth. The king still wants to be richer, even if most of the benefits of economic activity flow to a few people. So why is it that before these new ideas come into being, the specific kind of hierarchy that existed really was such an impediment to innovation that it basically stopped economic growth for thousands of years. And then of course, one challenge that people are going to have is to say, but you look at 1850 and there still are very steep hierarchies between men and women, between one social class and another, between people in Britain and people in the colonies. So in what sense is sort of the difference in the nature of a hierarchy between 1750 and 1850, or between 1650 and 1900 if you prefer, so qualitatively important, but it gives you just enough non hierarchy that this kind of innovation can start to occur in a way it didn't earlier.
- [12:17]
A
It's slow, it's gradually expanding once the first great victory of this ideology indeed is abolishing slavery in the British Empire in 1833 and then eventually in the United States. And then the women say, well, why not us? And that takes a long time to, to come to fruition. And the queers in northern Europe there's a hundred year reign of terror against homosexuals, especially male homosexuals. And so yeah, as you say, and then there's in the United States this horrible continuation of slavery and so called Jim Crow. And eventually in the 1960s it starts to fall, but it's reviving right now as we speak. So yes, there are these hierarchical, racist, classist, imperialist in general, radical conservative forces that keep trying to make it go away. But as Tocqueville pointed out in the 1830s after his visit to the United States, it's the great modern movement is equality, is that everyone's supposed to be the same and there's not to be at least inherited hierarchy. Now of course we all have bosses, at least I do and lots of people do. But we're free to leave if we want. We might have to leave to a much poorer job, but on the other hand we're free to leave, whereas a slave isn't. A wife under English common law could own no property except her dress and her jewelry. That was it. So it's slow now as far as the earlier hierarchy, as you point out, why wasn't it in the interest of the ruling class to allow people to innovate? Because they could themselves take the rents, say, on land that would be increased by this. And to some degree, the British ruling class in the 18th century realized this. And indeed, the aristocrats owned mines and built canals and were involved in trade, as many comparable aristocracies were forbidden to do. The fact of the United States was very important, I think, in all this, at least. So it was said frequently by commentators in the 19th century, and not only American commentators, that this strange claim, which of course wasn't true, but was slowly being implemented, that all people are created equal, was a powerful solvent, so to speak, of hierarchy in Europe. And it worked eventually. So it's not. If we're quite sure it's not accumulation, and I think many economists now are understanding this, and economic historians, too, then it's got to be ideas. Now, my friend Joe McCier, a great economic historian, he thinks it's science. He and I agree that ideas are where the action is, but his idea is about science. And I think it's certainly true that right now, the world, a lot of innovations come from science. But I don't think Joel's correct that it in the 19th century, very many of them did.
- [16:55]
B
When I started persuasion, one of the hardest things was not figuring out what I wanted this project to be or who I wanted to be involved. It was setting up a lot of the straightforward stuff that you need in order to run a business. And I'm sure that many of you are sitting on business ideas that you would really love to do, but perhaps you don't know how to overcome those obstacles. That is where Shopify comes in to help you. Shopify makes it really easy for customers to check out whatever it is they may be purchasing from your business. And because it simplifies this whole process, it also allows you to really focus on growing your business instead of dealing with terrible bureaucracy and minutiae. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at shopify.com Good fight. Start your free trial at shopifY.com Goodfight so Joel Mulcah, of course, is one of the winners of the Nobel Prize, I think, this past year, in 2025. So tell us a little bit more about the difference of opinion you have. So in his view, it is really the sort of beginning of the application of a scientific method and scientific progress which allows us to develop a steam engine and do all the other kinds of things that are at the heart of that material explosion that you start to get in the factories of Manchester and so on, and in the England of the late 18th and then the 19th century. Now, you're somewhat sympathetic to this idea, but. But you actually put a broader emphasis on things like the sort of different valuation of the bourgeoisie and bourgeois values that once upon a time, to be a merchant is shameful, whereas to be a priest is to have an honorable profession. And over time, in one part of the world, that starts to change. And suddenly to be a merchant, an inventor, a tinkerer who comes up with things that increase material wealth comes to be seen in a much more positive way. And that is actually what presumably is also necessary for people to become scientists and these other things. So tell us a little bit sort of where exactly the difference of opinion lies and why it is where we should buy your ideas based story rather than Mokir's ideas based story.
- [19:23]
A
An illustration of it is the case of the Dutch. Joel was in fact raised in Holland before he moved to Israel. And he would agree that in the 16th and 17th century, this high valuation of merchants and the ending of kings, Spanish kings most particularly, allowed the Dutch to invent many things, both commercially and scientifically in the 1600s, especially so even from his own country. There's, so to speak, an example of this, what I call the bourgeois revaluation causing science to progress. But the problem with his argument is that most of the inventions that matter to the economy have nothing to do with science. In the 18th and 19th century, for example, the steam engine. Yeah, yes, but it's not entirely a scientific innovation. People didn't. They had to have a notion that air was heavy and that's right, you could call that science. But in fact, the subsequent history of the steam engine shows that it wasn't terribly important until well into the 19th century. John Clapham, a great economic historian of a much earlier generation, pointed out that by the middle of the 19th century, most manufacturing wasn't using steam. It was still handicraft or water power. If you look across the Atlantic, water power was crucial in New England manufacturing through most of the 19th century. And it was important in England too. England and Scotland in the 18th and into the 19th century. And then there are all these other innovations which Joel and I agree are important, like concrete reinforced concrete in particular, which has nothing to do with science. And road building has nothing to do with science. Canals are greatly made much easier to maintain and to build with the Invention of the steam engine, the steam shovel. But most of the canals in Britain were dug by hand. And so it goes.
- [22:45]
B
To what extent is this a disagreement about what exactly we mean by science? So what I mean by that is that obviously there's kind of capital S science where you are very self consciously applying some form of a scientific method and you are publishing your findings in a peer reviewed journal and so on and so forth. And then there's a kind of broader sense in which the invention of concrete surely stands at the tail end of a process in which people come to have a much more empirical mindset, come to learn how to engage in experiments. You know, there may not be a PhD scientist involved and I don't know the history of the invention of concrete. I take it you do know it quite well. You know, it may not be that this is sort of happening at a fancy university by somebody who's publishing about it is sort of, you know, an entrepreneur playing around on the building side. But they're still in some sort of broader sense applying something like the lessons from a few centuries of scientific inquiry to how they are advancing this technology.
- [23:48]
A
I understand. And since the main triumph of the scientific revolution was the discovery of the forces for planetary motion, it's clear that high science is not practical for quite a long time. But I think it's wrong and I would argue in detail with Joel about this, to think that the empirical mindset is something new. People have always been trying out stuff, they just do it all the time. French cuisine, which comes from Italy originally in the court. But then the real source of French cuisine is thousands and thousands of housewives and then men, chefs trying out things. So I think it's, it's a calumny on our ancestors to say that the scientific method is new. I don't think it is.
- [25:09]
B
This relates to one of my favorite moments from grad school when a grad student challenged my professor by saying that something was just that means ends reasoning was just a western construct. And he's of a wonderful story of an anthropologist whose name I forget who was studying the customs of some tribe I believe in the highlands of Ghana. I may be wrong about the exact location. And after many months of effort he's sufficiently taken to the confidence of his tribe. Taking him to see the rain man. And he goes up to the rain man and it's a perilous journey across the desert and he's hiking up this mountain and finally the rain man says, well, I mean I have a secret stone and you know, if I manipulate it in this particular way. Well then most of the time, the next day it rains and he looks at the stone and it's a child's marble. And so the next time that he's getting a little bit of ah and ah, in the next town and he's staying with friends and the kid has marbles, he has an idea and he asks the kid, could I take one of your marbles? And the kid says, sure, have his marble. And so he asks, can I go back to see the rain man? And he treks across the desert and he scales the mountain and he nearly falls and dies. And he makes it to the rain man and he says, you know this holy stone that you have of which there's only one in the world. Well, I found another one. Look at this. And the rain man is completely astonished and looks at this marble that he's presented with. And the anthropologist asks, what do you think? If you use this stone, you know, in your ceremony, is it gonna rain tomorrow? And the rain man pauses for a second and says, I don't know. Shall we give it a try?
- [26:47]
A
There you go. That's the scientific method. You know, this imperial provinciality of Europeans about how foolish their ancestors were who just believed in, if they were highly educated in Aristotle and if they weren't highly educated, they believed in only in the traditions of their fathers and those were irrational. And the assumption that people with non white skin are inferior and stupid and they do what they do. That, as you agree, and I'm sure Joel agrees, has been entirely exploded by modern anthropology and modern history. Actually, I'm just. I've just finished a book on English open fields and enclosures. And the theme of the book, it's quite long and I've been working on it since 1970, is that the English peasants, in their very peculiar seeming open fields, so called, were pretty sensible. They weren't, you know, perfect. They got some things wrong, but they knew how to get their daily bread this way and had every incentive to be reasonable, experimental, thoughtful, soberly observant. And that's all the scientific method is. In fact, I've argued in other books that along with certain philosophers and sociologists and historians of science, then in a way there is no such thing as the scientific method. That doesn't mean I'm against science or I don't believe in being careful in thinking about things. I just mean that there's no formula.
- [28:56]
B
Yeah, but we've sort of. The scientific method has become this kind of slightly weird, simplified slogan. And it's interesting how that happens to science. I mean, you know, again, I deeply believe in science, but part of the point of science is that science never proves X or Y. That part of insofar as there is a scientific method, it is to retain the understanding that things which we provisionally believe to be right may turn out to be wrong. And in popular discourse, the slogan of science is often used to say, this is beyond any doubt. And if you don't go along with my point of view of my political opinion, then you're against science, which is actually the least scientific way that you can think about things.
- [29:37]
A
But observe, if you don't have a liberal society, that skepticism, reasonable skepticism, you know, whole, whole, you know, complete skepticism. I don't believe in anything. I don't believe that there's a door there or anything. That's obviously insane. But reasonable skepticism can't flourish. And that's where to come back to the example of Holland. It was a liberal society in the 16th century, and no wonder it prospered in the 17th century. It fought against the Spanish empire, which had the best army in Europe for 80 years. And like the Ukrainians, it won. So you see the connection between a free society, free speech, freedom of religion is where it all comes from, of course. But free, free speech, free movement, free contracting, free this, free that, makes for a scientific and technological explosion. Now, by the way, there's a problem we have in thinking about this connection between science and industry or prosperity, which is we tend to put together the science and technology as though it were one word. It's as though it's the science and technology. And that downplays. Well, it elevates the role of what you described, the university scholar, and it downplays the role of the guy on the Toyota factory floor making a suggestion.
- [31:47]
B
So how does all of that story fit one of the cases of the most impressive economic growth today, in fact probably the fastest economic growth in history, which is China. One way of looking at China is to say that this is a society that lacks key hallmarks of liberalism. It certainly does not have free speech. It only to some extent has some of that valuation of bourgeois virtues that you talk about. On one hand, it's a quite materialist society. On the other hand, there's not a lot of sanction from on high about the pursuit of money, et cetera. It's still the idea of being a member of a party and a civil servant, so on, is in some ways valued more highly. But what it did start to have under Deng Xiaoping was Something much simpler, which is just the market mechanism, right, the invitation for the open exchange of goods. So does that indicate that your theory kind of pegs what is required a level too high, that what we need is something kind of rather simpler, which is just the ability to profit from free exchange of goods and services and the incentives that that creates.
- [32:59]
A
Well, two points. One is that the devices, such as the electric light and so forth, and that the Chinese adopted actually much earlier than 1978, were invented. In free societies, slaves don't invent as much. It's conceivable they can invent, but ordinarily they don't. And that's the first point. The second point is that actually the Chinese Communist Party said making money is glorious. They in fact sponsored the idea after 1978. Again, it was slow, but they finally, until 2003, being a millionaire in China was a capital offense. Of course they didn't enforce it after Mao, but they in fact had their bourgeois revaluation. Except that, as you say, nothing else changed in the sense that the Chinese Communist Party is still in charge. The same thing happened in a milder way in Singapore, which is a tunan tyranny. Now, it's a sensible tyranny and tries not to be too obvious about it, but it is. The father and son in Singapore put people in jail for being opposed to them. But the key point you make is perfectly true that what here express it this way, there's no Chinese model, so to speak. What the Chinese Communist Party did was adopt capitalism. That's completely obvious. That's now there was corruption involved. You had to pay off the Communist Party official in your neighborhood, but still you were allowed to open a store or to start a factory or to move. The largest migration in human history happened in China in the 1990s and 2000s. 200 million people moved from the interior of China to the coast to work in the new factories. Now again, they weren't completely free. If you move from the interior to Beijing, you can't send your child to university. You still have to have permission to live in Beijing, and lots of people don't, even though there they are. And further point is that the Chinese, in their 50 years of experience with socialism, didn't lose their ability to open a store and run a factory or work in a factory. Well, they certainly. They'd worked in factories before, but so they. So it was by adopting capitalism that this happened.
- [36:25]
B
I'm currently at my beloved place in Italy working on the next book, which I'm excited to share with you. And while it is less oppressively hot here than it is in most of Europe at the moment, it's still pretty damn warm. That's why I'm very lucky to be wearing my linen shirts and pants from Quince. Quince's 100% European linen pants and shirts are breathable. They're really easy to throw on, whether you're just sitting at home writing or going out to meet friends with a summer upgrade your rotation needs. And they start at just $34 make your summer wardrobe easier. Go to quinns.com Good fight for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com Good fight for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com Good fight. What about the ability to invent things? Like you're talking about the fact that obviously a lot of the basis for the rapid economic growth in China of The certainly the 80s and the 90s was imported technology. And then perhaps in the 2000s and early 2010s, a lot of it was, you know, technology was then emulated in China. You know, the kind of copycat approach to a lot of technology which, you know, allowed China to ascend the technological ladder at a very rapid pace. But at this point, China is actually able to compete and to outcompete the west on many goods and services. China is probably somewhat behind on artificial intelligence compared to the United States, but is well ahead of countries in Western Europe on a lot of robotics. The country is arguably ahead on electric cars. China is at this point arguably ahead in a lot of very specialized areas. The country is ahead. So if we think that that kind of innovation requires liberal values or liberal institutions, do we need to say that China has liberal values or institutions? Or how do we square the circle here?
- [38:42]
A
Where the liberalism is is crucial. If in a Chinese research university, ideas are entertained freely, not ideas about politics or society, but ideas about the technology that they're focusing on, then you get the same effect. I mean hierarchy of the old sort, which is re established under often re established under socialism or or ashism. Two those kinds of hierarchies reach down into the details of the society and they stop innovation. So it's not terribly surprising that China has become in lots of fields, innovative. For example, on electric cars, what should happen is that the United States and Europe should allow Chinese electric cars to come into their come here and there. And that would be true liberalism. But of course there are Forces preventing that protectionism of various sorts. So in a way, in some fields, China is more free in its economy than in Britain or the United States. For example, in building in both Britain and the United States and in lots of other rich countries, we have a big problem of housing scarcity in London compared with the north, and on the coast in the United States compared with the Midwest. And that's entirely caused by interventions in the market that don't exist in China. So in that respect, they're more free economically, not in all. Now, you know, this is a tragedy for the Chinese that they're not free, as the students in Tiananmen Square demanded. Allow us equality of permission, make us free in all things. By the way, it's not only China that grows fast by allowing the economy to work well. I'm of Irish descent, and when I first went to Ireland in 1967, it was a third world country. When I went back in 1996, O' Connell street was thronged with prosperous Irish people. And in the meantime, Ireland had adopted capitalism, so to speak, in a thoroughgoing way. And the result was that Ireland is one of the per capita richest countries in the world. And by the way, China is still quite poor. I hope it improves, and Xi Jinping is probably going to stop it from improving, but its income is about equal to that per capita, is equal to that of Brazil or about the world average.
- [42:39]
B
What do you think is the state of an appreciation for the kind of bourgeois virtues that you think stand at the root of this economic progress in the West? On the one hand, you look at opinion polls, and a lot of young people value a lucrative career and making money over a lot of other things that you might think are important, like love or meaningful private life and so on. So it seems like we're more materialist than we've ever been in ways that perhaps aren't always positive. On the other hand, I think there's a lot of attacks on enterprise that are coming both from a growing share of the left of a political spectrum, but also in a weird way, from a kind of post liberal right. JD Vance just a couple of days ago, attacked the idea of GDP as not really what we should care about and value. Do you think that those values, you know, if you think that the origin of economic growth was, in a sense, a rhetorical move, a set of ideas, then are we in danger of discontent with our current reality, inspiring a new rhetorical move that then, you know, casts off these ideas in ways that make it impossible to continue growing?
- [43:55]
A
Yes, we are. And that's why I write my books endlessly. It's a pathology. Stop me before I write another book defending liberalism. For some reason, Freud will have to be consulted. I always stutter on my favorite word, liberalism, so you'll have to allow for that. I don't know what's going on here. Something strange. I was. When I was young, I was a Marxist, so maybe it's my young self attacking my old self. I don't know.
- [44:27]
B
You traitor, is what's going on in some part of your brain.
- [44:29]
A
Yeah, I used to sing the people's flag is deepest red, it sheltered oft our martyred dead.
- [44:36]
B
I, growing up, sang the International, whereas the People's flight is deepest Wreck in German is the melody to the most famous Christmas song. So I didn't sing that.
- [44:48]
A
Well, it's not that I do that. I sing now the land of hope and glory. I'm not a tourist, I'm a classical liberal. Anyway. Yeah, and it comes from both. The threat comes from both the left and the right in the United States. This lunatic we have as president is from the right. Not that this guy actually had any political ideas worth the name, but he's gotten into alliance. He's got people around him who are straightforwardly fascist. You can't call them anything else. Stephen Miller, for example, and a number of others. But then from the left we have the kids, the young people saying, well, let's try socialism. I mean, socialism sounds nice anyway. It sounds like a family. We're going to make the country into a family. And families are socialist enterprises and should be. You don't send your 6 year old out to work to pay for lunch. But these are young people or people who haven't experienced actual hardline socialism such as prevailed in Eastern Europe. So there's always going to be a job to persuade people that neither authoritarianism, the daddy kind of model, or socialism, the mommy kind of model, is wise. I call liberalism adultism. The proposal is that people should treat themselves and others as adults. Robert Burns, great anthem of 1795. A man's a man for a. That is an appeal to be a self respecting adult though, er, support choice
- [47:01]
B
hotels get you more of what you value. Comfort Inn, it's calling your name. Save on the stage. Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Bookdirect@storieshiotels.com so tell us a little bit about how you think about what the nature of liberalism is. You've mentioned a couple of times in the conversation the idea that permission really stands at the center of liberalism, the permission to pursue the life you want and to do the things that you find to be particularly important. And more broadly, even though you're an economist, we might think that you think the most important thing about liberalism is that it's efficient or that it leads to economic growth, but you really have a kind of deeper defense of what it is that you think that this permission that liberalism comes with gives to people. How should we think about why liberalism is important?
- [48:00]
A
I'm, and I take it you are too an egalitarian. I believe that everyone and I believed that when I was a Marxist. It's why I was a Marxist and I believe it now that I'm a non Marxist. And so I think the good society is one in which we're equal. But then the question is what you mean by equal. And the first wave of liberalism I claim and try to show was equality of permission alone. It wasn't subsidies for poor people or government projects on a massive scale and so forth. That wasn't the appeal. That wasn't what the Revolutionaries of 1776 in the United States and in 1789 in France. That's not what they were thinking of. That's not what they wanted. They wanted, you could say it in a kind of crude way, they wanted to be left alone. But that doesn't mean sort of nasty, extreme individualism where I only care about myself. That's Donald Trump. No, it's that they didn't want kings and husbands to rule over them. But there's a second wave of liberalism after 1848 in particular in Europe. And it's well illustrated by the personal history of John, of John Stuart mill, who in 1848 is a Liberal of the sort. I admire this first kind, this equality of permission. But then he becomes, under the influence of his female friend and eventually his wife, more socialist. So it happens in the middle of the 19th century in Britain and also in the United States and France and everywhere else, that a statist version of equality comes to the fore. And if you had to have a motto for the first 18th century primary, I call it primary liberalism, it would be no involuntary masters. And if you had to have a motto for the second kind socialism and the so called new liberalism, which both of which are still lively in the world, the bumper sticker would be no deserving poor. And the only way you can achieve the new deserving poor, according to the 19th century theorists, was to involve the state, to expand the state, to redistribute from you to me Whereas I claim, and I've been claiming for a while, that the first kind, the equality permission, such as you see in China in the economy and not in politics, leads to enrichment and leads to equality of important abilities. You have a roof over your head, you have some education, you're not starving. So the equality that the mid 19th century so called liberals advocated is in fact achieved in a free society.
- [52:00]
B
I think this distinction between the two different notions of equality that we might care about is very helpful. I also wonder whether in a lot of political debates people's instincts lie somewhere in between, or the distinction between which of these notions is actually at stake is not quite as clear as it might be. I found it striking that you describe the later John Stuart Mill as sympathetic to socialism. Certainly he writes a very interesting essay called I think Notes on Socialism or An Essay on Socialism Socialism or something like that. But it's not clear to me. That essay goes all the way into the second camp. And the point here is not a disagreement about Mill, but I think it says something broader that is interesting. So the part of that essay that I remember most vividly is where Mill talks about a hundred yard dash that some Nero might imagine, some sadist might imagine. And he's saying, let's imagine that this is a totally fair race, a race in which you're not artificially making somebody carry a heavy backpack or one person has to jump over hurdles and the other person is jumping straight ahead, running straight ahead, said, even so, if the winner of this race got great riches and the last three people were shot or would starve, nobody would say that that is a good idea right? Now the connection here is that you're saying, well, look, actually what happens if you have a free market and the incentives that go that and so on is that everybody becomes a lot richer. And I think there's very strong evidence for that. If you look at the history of China after it opens up to the market, if you look at the history of Ireland, as you pointed out, it's absolutely true that we need free competition, these market incentives in order to do that. But of course, Mill was writing at a time when there was no universal elementary school education. When you know, if you went into debt somewhere, you might be put in prison and so on, so forth, right? When, you know, if you happened to be disabled and you didn't have relatives who were kind enough to take care of you, well, then you'd be a beggar on the street and be put in some kind of poor house, if you were lucky Right. And so surely there's a way of recognizing both of those values. And even the people who are relative libertarians today fully do to some extent. They don't want to abolish universal primary education. They might want primary education to come with vouchers from the state so that there's competition within elementary schools or something like that. But they don't want to say, you know, if you don't happen to have parents who want to pay for your education at the age of eight, you're just not going to learn to read or write. Right. So isn't there a way to recognize both of those points, to say that part of what we want with equality is that absence of arbitrary masters, that absence of rules that constrain our economic activity for no good reason, which then allows social wealth to accumulate and is the reason why we're so much richer today than we were 300 years ago. But of course we also want to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to a good education, which requires some kind of state intervention, and that those people who are most at risk of the vicissitudes of life are protected in some kind of way. You know, whether that is some kind of help to those who are disabled or those who had some kind of accident and were unable to care for themselves, or whether that's some kind of social insurance schemes like Social Security, so that people aren't destitute in old age or unemployment benefits.
- [55:28]
A
Yeah, well, I've entertained that feeling earlier in my life and thought, yeah, that's right, we should have the social, the economic and social safety net, as it's called. And I've become slowly convinced that it's. That it has grave dangers. The Swedes were, of course, the great example of a democratic country with free speech and free press and so forth, that nonetheless had a very big and impressive social safety net. They had a crisis in the 1990s, 78% of production in Sweden went through the state. Now, it wasn't state owned enterprises. It was very high taxation and then very high social benefits of various kinds. And in the early 1890s and since the 1990s, I'm a historian, they realized that this wasn't working very well. And they introduced, for example, vouchers for schools. So though the state was paying for the schools, it was allowing private schools. Now 1/4 of the K through 12 students in Sweden are in private schools. And in a number of other ways, Sweden liberalized. That's a kind of nice example of trying to get, trying to get the balance Right, but the trouble, one of the troubles with social democracy is that it's easy to corrupt. Now, in Sweden, the standards of public morality are extremely high and I could give you lots of examples of it, but they're not so high in Britain and they're really not high in the United States. And right behind me, I have to see it all day long. That orange building in the back is at one end of what's known as K Street. It's called K Street in Washington. And that's where the lobbyists live, that's where they work. And there are an astonishing number of them. And with the excuse of helping the poor or organizing this or that public service, they create wealth for the rich. There are 1500 registered lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry alone on K Street.
- [58:36]
B
And to be clear on the lobbyists, I mean, a lot of people on the left would say, well, that's precisely the problem with capitalism, these big companies paying lobbyists. But you're saying actually this is because the state is so involved in the private economy that there's something for them to lobby for and to argue for. So you sort of put the lobbyists at the feet of a kind of deviation from capitalism.
- [58:58]
A
And I go with my left wing friends and my former self, I am going to protest the takeover of the government by corporations or by the rich. I want that to stop. How to achieve it? Alas, my friends on the left and I still have lots of them, and they say, let's get the government to do it, which is to put the fox in the charge, in charge of the hen house. I say, let's make the government less important. Let's make the government a lot smaller. And indeed, I would be perfectly happy with a small government. Look, in France, 55% of national income goes through. It's not as bad as Sweden was, but 55% of national income goes through the government. And it's quite high in Britain. It's in the, in the 40th, in the 40s. And it's high and it's high enough in the United States. I would be perfectly happy with a 10% government that really did help poor people and really did protect the country. I mean, here in the United States, I'm terrified of the prospect of a Canadian invasion. I mean, you know how violent and aggressive the Canadians are.
- [60:25]
B
I live in fear of the Canadians every day. Especially now being so close to the Canadian border up here in New Hampshire. It's very scary.
- [60:32]
A
Oh, that's right. They're very dangerous and they're going to invade us at any moment. We don't need a so called Department of War, as Donald Trump wants to call it, which I don't mind too much of the size we have. It's absurd. And most of the help to alleged poor people goes to rich people. Perfect example is publicly financed education which is not entirely, but largely operated for the benefit of the school teachers and the professors. And that's shameful and shouldn't happen, but it does. That came out in Covid when we closed. We closed the public schools. They didn't in Sweden, by the way, which makes my point that Sweden has become much more liberal. But anyway, it's the only, virtually the only country that didn't. We closed the public schools because the old teachers were afraid to teach kids who might be transmitting. COVID 19 and that's, you know, that's appalling. Agricultural subsidies, both in Europe, in the uk, outside the EU and in the United States are disgraceful. Their subsidies to rich farmers. So I want a small, competent government that does the jobs that you and I can completely agree it ought to do, indeed, help the people who can't take care of themselves. I'm all for that. I'm an Anglican, I'm an Episcopalian, we call it here. And I give 10% of my income to my church because my church is good at charity.
- [62:40]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, we talk about a topic that is both very different but actually ends up being related to the rest of our conversation. We talk about Diedre's transition in the 1990s to becoming a trans woman. We talk about how challenging that experience was at a time when society was much less accepting of trans people. And we also talk about how, as a liberal and libertarian, she thinks we should adjudicate a number of contentious issues, from medical transitions for minors to the participation of people who went through male puberty in female competitive sports. We have some real areas of agreement, some real areas of disagreement, which we talk through in a civil and even warm way. And in a way, our disagreement, I think, ends up coming down about our respective feelings about libertarianism, which is a kind of interesting way of reanimating a sometimes polarized and very simplistic debate through the lens of, of a particular political ideology. To listen to this part of the conversation, to support the work we do here to make it possible for us to bring you these two interesting conversations a week, please go to writing.yashamunk.com and become a paying subscriber,
- [64:16]
A
Sam.