Thanks for taking these things into account. I also won’t have the time to go too much deeper on this stuff. I would say a general response to relying on things like rankings of think tanks or other establishment measures of institutional credibility won’t be very persuasive to a lot of people on the left. The world is dominated by capitalist countries, companies, and institutions that support/defend them. There is a lot of money to be made in defending free markets. See Dark Money by Jane Mayer for a detailed investigation into how a handful of billionaires built alternative ideological infrastructure that became mainstream and established, despite having a self-interested, market fundamentalist ideology. The ranking you linked appears to based on surveys of other people in the establishment. If you’re broadly critical of the establishment, you don’t find their rankings to be credible. For a quick example of the Cato Institute misrepresenting data in its writing see: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/never-trust-the-cato-institute
Not trusting the establishment creates a lot of problems, which is why a lot of leftists (more prevalent in the past I think) believe some crackpottery and align with some cranks. The establishment may be right about a lot of things, but in some cases it’s collectively wrong and there won’t be many establishment sources you can cite to say so.
As stated in the report, the academic establishment is not universally pro-capitalist now nor was it universally pro-capitalist in the past. Academia is broadly left wing compared to the rest of America. Another thing to note is how consistently climate scientists have investigated global warming despite the presence of fossil fuel interests. So the idea that everything is being controlled is just implausible on its face.
There is a lot of money to be made in defending free markets.
Humans seek prestige as much as money, and can get both of these things from attacking free markets as well.
Note how many reviews authors get for writing about the economy of Cuba, compared to how many reviews authors get for writing about billionaires funding the radical right. Who’s the one making money now?
See Dark Money by Jane Mayer for a detailed investigation into how a handful of billionaires built alternative ideological infrastructure that became mainstream and established,
I just ctrl-F’d for every mention of “university” and find that most of the time the author is citing the views of university faculty or talking about times when they contradicted what the Koch brothers or Republican Party wanted. Haven’t yet seen anything about a conspiracy to control their ideological infrastructure.
Robinson says that the studies are only talking about getting pay of some kind rather than full leave, but that’s apparent to anyone reading Calder’s report. Straightforward and correct citation.
Robinson objects that Calder only cites the part of a study that pertains to wages, but that section of her paper was about wages. It would have just been out of place to talk about the other effects in that section of her paper.
Robinson objects that another study doesn’t contemplate eliminating paid leave, but that’s a normative question separate from what was really studied; there’s no reason to be shackled to interests of the authors of the paper.
Robinson objects that there are exceptions to the general trend of OECD countries, but this is silly—of course the overall trend matters most. You can find counterexamples to the trend, but then you can also find super-examples which emphasize the trend even more starkly. (Note: just three days ago Robinson took National Review to task because they were using individual examples of government failures and ignoring the general trends.)
The one strong takeaway is that Calder didn’t include a fair amount of evidence that presented mandatory paid leave in a better light. Not misrepresentation, more like being one-sided. And that’s all that Robinson could find wrong with this >20 page document. There are 52 footnotes, and Robinson finds that countervailing evidence was excluded from 2-3 of them, and finds 3-4 more good sources that should have been included, after saying he spent “a long time” on it. It’s not very jarring. Calder’s report does seem flawed, but this falls short of the standard required to “never trust” the author (let alone CATO).
In any case, the CATO institute does not produce the economic freedom rankings.
And finally there is a big difference between a report that was released by a person at a think tank, and a dataset that was released by the think tank that has now been used in hundreds of papers of published academic research.
Not trusting the establishment creates a lot of problems,
Yes, the main one being that it doesn’t lead anywhere.
Everything you’ve said about problems with universities or think tanks applies equally well to the microcosm of leftist bloggers and philosophers and journalists. Much more so, honestly. Of course there is less billionaire money, but lots of other crap instead. I’ve previously found reasons to “never trust” Nathan Robinson, flaws that are worse than those in Calder’s report. So we need to be very clear that the conclusion of this sort of narrative, no matter how sound it is, is not that socialism is better. The conclusion, if this narrative is true, is just that everything is super vulnerable to bias or deceit and there is no useful expert guidance.
Now you could preserve the idea of expert consensus, but redefine ‘experts’ to mean the associated collection of freethinkers and heterodox bloggers and crackpots with no institutional ties. If you do this, then you’re still not going to get a consensus for socialism either. You’ll get a fair number of capitalists/libertarians, plus an assortment of anarchists (both right-wing and left-wing), socialists/communists and then a few people with really weird ideas like monarchism or fascism or whatever. Also lots of conspiracy theories. And many people (like me) will say that the idea of relying on such an ecosystem to create a kind of expert consensus is rather bonkers in the first place.
Then our only way to come to any substantial conclusion is to just read through the sources and arguments in detail to see who is actually right about socialism. But insofar as we’ve seen no good arguments that leftists are actually right about this, you can see that it’s rather pointless to keep talking about The Establishment. Instead of trying to argue that it’s just turtles all the way down, it would be a lot more productive to present arguments that leftists are actually right in the first place, and then investigate them, and in the process of investigating them some truths about the reliability of ‘the establishment’ can be uncovered.
To put simple numbers on the whole thing, let’s say that P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.1 if the establishment is good and P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.5 if the establishment is corrupt. If we currently think the establishment is 90% likely to be good, then P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.14. If we see some strong evidence and arguments against the establishment then maybe we’ll change our trust in it down to 70%. Then P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.22. Well that’s not a very big change.
OTOH, if we saw a good argument that socialism is actually good, then we would now say that P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.2 if the establishment is good and P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.7 if the establishment is corrupt, and then we’d also change our trust in the establishment from 90% to 80% because we’ve presumably caught something that they weren’t able to answer. Now P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.30. Well that’s still a low probability, but you’ve gone further.
Thanks for taking these things into account. I also won’t have the time to go too much deeper on this stuff. I would say a general response to relying on things like rankings of think tanks or other establishment measures of institutional credibility won’t be very persuasive to a lot of people on the left. The world is dominated by capitalist countries, companies, and institutions that support/defend them. There is a lot of money to be made in defending free markets. See Dark Money by Jane Mayer for a detailed investigation into how a handful of billionaires built alternative ideological infrastructure that became mainstream and established, despite having a self-interested, market fundamentalist ideology. The ranking you linked appears to based on surveys of other people in the establishment. If you’re broadly critical of the establishment, you don’t find their rankings to be credible. For a quick example of the Cato Institute misrepresenting data in its writing see: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/never-trust-the-cato-institute
For another example of ostensibly opposed think tanks working together (because they both serve the interests of capitalists) see: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/12/why-is-the-center-for-american-progress-betraying-the-left
Not trusting the establishment creates a lot of problems, which is why a lot of leftists (more prevalent in the past I think) believe some crackpottery and align with some cranks. The establishment may be right about a lot of things, but in some cases it’s collectively wrong and there won’t be many establishment sources you can cite to say so.
As stated in the report, the academic establishment is not universally pro-capitalist now nor was it universally pro-capitalist in the past. Academia is broadly left wing compared to the rest of America. Another thing to note is how consistently climate scientists have investigated global warming despite the presence of fossil fuel interests. So the idea that everything is being controlled is just implausible on its face.
Humans seek prestige as much as money, and can get both of these things from attacking free markets as well.
Note how many reviews authors get for writing about the economy of Cuba, compared to how many reviews authors get for writing about billionaires funding the radical right. Who’s the one making money now?
I just ctrl-F’d for every mention of “university” and find that most of the time the author is citing the views of university faculty or talking about times when they contradicted what the Koch brothers or Republican Party wanted. Haven’t yet seen anything about a conspiracy to control their ideological infrastructure.
Robinson says that the studies are only talking about getting pay of some kind rather than full leave, but that’s apparent to anyone reading Calder’s report. Straightforward and correct citation.
Robinson objects that Calder only cites the part of a study that pertains to wages, but that section of her paper was about wages. It would have just been out of place to talk about the other effects in that section of her paper.
Robinson objects that another study doesn’t contemplate eliminating paid leave, but that’s a normative question separate from what was really studied; there’s no reason to be shackled to interests of the authors of the paper.
Robinson objects that there are exceptions to the general trend of OECD countries, but this is silly—of course the overall trend matters most. You can find counterexamples to the trend, but then you can also find super-examples which emphasize the trend even more starkly. (Note: just three days ago Robinson took National Review to task because they were using individual examples of government failures and ignoring the general trends.)
The one strong takeaway is that Calder didn’t include a fair amount of evidence that presented mandatory paid leave in a better light. Not misrepresentation, more like being one-sided. And that’s all that Robinson could find wrong with this >20 page document. There are 52 footnotes, and Robinson finds that countervailing evidence was excluded from 2-3 of them, and finds 3-4 more good sources that should have been included, after saying he spent “a long time” on it. It’s not very jarring. Calder’s report does seem flawed, but this falls short of the standard required to “never trust” the author (let alone CATO).
In any case, the CATO institute does not produce the economic freedom rankings.
And finally there is a big difference between a report that was released by a person at a think tank, and a dataset that was released by the think tank that has now been used in hundreds of papers of published academic research.
Yes, the main one being that it doesn’t lead anywhere.
Everything you’ve said about problems with universities or think tanks applies equally well to the microcosm of leftist bloggers and philosophers and journalists. Much more so, honestly. Of course there is less billionaire money, but lots of other crap instead. I’ve previously found reasons to “never trust” Nathan Robinson, flaws that are worse than those in Calder’s report. So we need to be very clear that the conclusion of this sort of narrative, no matter how sound it is, is not that socialism is better. The conclusion, if this narrative is true, is just that everything is super vulnerable to bias or deceit and there is no useful expert guidance.
Now you could preserve the idea of expert consensus, but redefine ‘experts’ to mean the associated collection of freethinkers and heterodox bloggers and crackpots with no institutional ties. If you do this, then you’re still not going to get a consensus for socialism either. You’ll get a fair number of capitalists/libertarians, plus an assortment of anarchists (both right-wing and left-wing), socialists/communists and then a few people with really weird ideas like monarchism or fascism or whatever. Also lots of conspiracy theories. And many people (like me) will say that the idea of relying on such an ecosystem to create a kind of expert consensus is rather bonkers in the first place.
Then our only way to come to any substantial conclusion is to just read through the sources and arguments in detail to see who is actually right about socialism. But insofar as we’ve seen no good arguments that leftists are actually right about this, you can see that it’s rather pointless to keep talking about The Establishment. Instead of trying to argue that it’s just turtles all the way down, it would be a lot more productive to present arguments that leftists are actually right in the first place, and then investigate them, and in the process of investigating them some truths about the reliability of ‘the establishment’ can be uncovered.
To put simple numbers on the whole thing, let’s say that P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.1 if the establishment is good and P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.5 if the establishment is corrupt. If we currently think the establishment is 90% likely to be good, then P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.14. If we see some strong evidence and arguments against the establishment then maybe we’ll change our trust in it down to 70%. Then P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.22. Well that’s not a very big change.
OTOH, if we saw a good argument that socialism is actually good, then we would now say that P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.2 if the establishment is good and P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.7 if the establishment is corrupt, and then we’d also change our trust in the establishment from 90% to 80% because we’ve presumably caught something that they weren’t able to answer. Now P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.30. Well that’s still a low probability, but you’ve gone further.