I don’t quite understand what your view is in your section on macro advocacy and in particular what you think is the relevance of that Weyl quote.
To be clear, I think this episode really shouldn’t be taken as a lesson against technocracy. The technocrats were on the right side of this one—sure the Fed was too loose in ’21 but if it had been controlled by politicians it probably would have been even worse. The size of the stimulus was also a textbook expression of populism.
Of course you could also argue that Fed tightness prior to 2021 was a failure of the technocrats. Still, I was rather perplexed to see numerous EAs and adjacent folks at the time call to erode Fed independence just because of one (admittedly persistent) mistake that was already being corrected. There is a lot to say in defense of central bank independence and it shouldn’t be jettisoned so lightly.
Regardless, Open Phil grantmaking is not technocracy because Open Phil is not a government. Open Phil is a component of civil society. It’s important to uphold this distinction because a common tactic of bad faith critics like Weyl is to hyperbolize private actions and judge them by the standards of government actions. Technocracy is a form of government not the mere belief that one has the merits to try to lobby the government to act differently.
Sorry for being unclear—the main point was about that blind spots are excessively techno (not necessarily technocratic but technophilanthropic), a la Autor’s China Shock literature, where technocrats overemphasized ‘gains from trade’ (reform), which everyone benefits from because we have slightly lower consumer prices on average, but the lowest income decile lost a lot and then you got populist backlash and Trump.
Analogously, OpenPhil and Econtwitter overemphasized ‘we’re irrationally afraid of higher inflation, unemployment is really bad’, let’s change central bank policy. In contrast to the above, this might have benefited the lowest income decile (at least till 2021) and was well-intentioned, but it was still very top down, and theory-driven, with very few feedback loops. We might see unintended consequences like Democrats losing elections, because 150m Americans have lower wages now (and perhaps unrest in poorer countries?).
But generally, the distinction doesn’t matters here, as civil society and philanthropy are part of the policy-making ecosystem, and there’s no principled argument that they shouldn’t be held to the same utilitarian standard as policy-makers and everyone else. Especially if they affect such large levers—there’s nothing sacred about philanthropic vs. government dollars. Anything else would be deontological libertarianism.
I took out Weyl’s name because several reviewers said people would be triggered by it. Maybe I should have reworded it and taken out the citation to avoid ad hominems and have the point stands on its own.
I don’t quite understand what your view is in your section on macro advocacy and in particular what you think is the relevance of that Weyl quote.
To be clear, I think this episode really shouldn’t be taken as a lesson against technocracy. The technocrats were on the right side of this one—sure the Fed was too loose in ’21 but if it had been controlled by politicians it probably would have been even worse. The size of the stimulus was also a textbook expression of populism.
Of course you could also argue that Fed tightness prior to 2021 was a failure of the technocrats. Still, I was rather perplexed to see numerous EAs and adjacent folks at the time call to erode Fed independence just because of one (admittedly persistent) mistake that was already being corrected. There is a lot to say in defense of central bank independence and it shouldn’t be jettisoned so lightly.
Regardless, Open Phil grantmaking is not technocracy because Open Phil is not a government. Open Phil is a component of civil society. It’s important to uphold this distinction because a common tactic of bad faith critics like Weyl is to hyperbolize private actions and judge them by the standards of government actions. Technocracy is a form of government not the mere belief that one has the merits to try to lobby the government to act differently.
Sorry for being unclear—the main point was about that blind spots are excessively techno (not necessarily technocratic but technophilanthropic), a la Autor’s China Shock literature, where technocrats overemphasized ‘gains from trade’ (reform), which everyone benefits from because we have slightly lower consumer prices on average, but the lowest income decile lost a lot and then you got populist backlash and Trump.
Analogously, OpenPhil and Econtwitter overemphasized ‘we’re irrationally afraid of higher inflation, unemployment is really bad’, let’s change central bank policy. In contrast to the above, this might have benefited the lowest income decile (at least till 2021) and was well-intentioned, but it was still very top down, and theory-driven, with very few feedback loops. We might see unintended consequences like Democrats losing elections, because 150m Americans have lower wages now (and perhaps unrest in poorer countries?).
But generally, the distinction doesn’t matters here, as civil society and philanthropy are part of the policy-making ecosystem, and there’s no principled argument that they shouldn’t be held to the same utilitarian standard as policy-makers and everyone else. Especially if they affect such large levers—there’s nothing sacred about philanthropic vs. government dollars. Anything else would be deontological libertarianism.
I took out Weyl’s name because several reviewers said people would be triggered by it. Maybe I should have reworded it and taken out the citation to avoid ad hominems and have the point stands on its own.