Bari Weiss interviews Peter Thiel. There’s a two-hour video and, below it, an edited transcript.
David Foster
Formalism and Credentialism: Reversing the Trend?
The Trump victory represents in significant part a popular reaction against the excesses of credentialism. I’m remembering a 2018 post at the Federalist: Our Culture War Is Between People Who Get Results And Empty Suits With Pristine Credentials….Donald Trump declines the authority of the cultural sectors that most assertively claim it. That’s the real conflict going on.
The post reminded me of an interchange that took place between Picasso and Matisse as the German Army advanced through France in 1940. Matisse was shocked to learn that the enemy had already reached Reims. “But what about our generals?” asked Matisse. “What are they doing?”
Picasso’s response: “Well, there you have it, my friend. It’s the Ecole des Beaux-Arts”…ie, formalists who had learned one set of rules and were not interested in considering deviations from same.
It was an astute remark, and it fits very well with the observations of Andre Beaufre, who before the invasion had been a young captain on the French General Staff. Although he had initially been thrilled to be placed among this elevated circle…
I saw very quickly that our seniors were primarily concerned with forms of drafting. Every memorandum had to be perfect, written in a concise, impersonal style, and conforming to a logical and faultless plan but so abstract that it had to be read several times before one could find out what it was about… “I have the honour to inform you that I have decided…I envisage…I attach some importance to the fact that…” Actually no one decided more than the barest minimum, and what indeed was decided was pretty trivial.
The consequences of that approach became clear in May 1940.
In addition to the formalism that Picasso hypothesized (and Beaufre observed) on the French General Staff, the civilian side of the French government was highly credential-oriented. From the linked article:
In the first days of July, 1940, the American diplomat Robert Murphy took up his duties as the charge d’affaires at the new U.S. embassy in Vichy, France. Coming from his recent post in Paris, he was as impressed as he expected to be by the quality of the Vichy mandarinate, a highly credentialed class of sophisticated officials who were “products of the most rigorous education and curricula in any public administration in the world.”
As the historian Robert Paxton would write, French officials were “the elite of the elite, selected through a daunting series of relentless examinations for which one prepared at expensive private schools.” In July 1940, the elite of the elite governed the remains of their broken nation, a few days after Adolf Hitler toured Paris as its conqueror. Credentials were the key to holding public office, but not the key to success at the country’s business.
Trade, Tariffs, and Prices
Several items:
1–At X, there’s some knowledgeable commentary on the relationship between tariffs and retail prices, from Craig Fuller @FreightAlley: “When products are imported into the US, the importer is charged a tariff based on the declared value of those imports, not the marked-up retail price consumers will eventually pay…The markup might be only 5% for big-ticket items like cars, while it could be as high as 500% for luxury goods. Most retail goods have markups of over 100% over their declared value.” He discusses the alternatives available to importers and suppliers, of which ‘raise retail prices’ is only one. Link.
2–The WSJ, a while back, had several letters on tariffs in response to an article on that subject. One of them said:
Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux don’t mention the basic evil of tariffs: that they negate comparative advantage. If Product A can be produced cheaply or efficiently in Location 1 and Product B in Location 2, each location should concentrate on its speciality and trade to the benefit of both.
Imagine Massachusetts enacting a tariff on oranges to protect an industry of heated orange groves and Florida a tariff to support air-conditioned cranberry bogs. State politicians could trumpet creating a new industry, but OJ would be $25 a glass in Boston and cranberry sauce would be $10 a scoop in Miami. Tariffs amount to a “beggar thyself” policy. The Constitution’s framers recognized this and crafted the Commerce Clause to forbid restriction of trade by states. The same principle applies to trade between nations.
Trade based on relative efficiency of production, as for the orange/cranberry example, is a classic example of the advantages of trade. But a high proportion of trade today is not of this nature: it is simply labor arbitrage, based on differentials in wages. The primary reason why products made in China have been so much lower cost than those made in the US is because Chinese people would work for lower wages than US people. There was nothing inherent in Chinese geography or climate, or Chinese skill sets, that made assembly of iPhone more efficient in China than in Iowa.
3–In my Labor Day post for 2021, I said:
In a world with global and highly-efficient transportation and communications…and billions of people who are accustomed to low wages…is it possible for a country such as the United States to maintain its accustomed high standards of living for the large majority of its people?…and, if so, what are the key policy elements required to do this?
This question should be fundamental to discussions of trade policy, along with national defense and resilience considerations.
4–Bill Waddell, a very experienced manufacturing practitioner and consultant, who used to comment here sometimes, has a new book out: Reclaiming American Manufacturing: Take Back the Middle Class From Globalism. A quick and worthwhile read, available on Amazon Unlimited. Also, this post at LinkedIn.
5–Although offshoring is usually discussed in terms of its impact on manufacturing, there is also plenty of offshoring going on in service: Telemigration.
Your thoughts?
Breakup Music
The lyrics don’t quite fit the situation, but the spirit of this song seems appropriate for today: Goodbye to You!
The Squirrel, the Raccoon, and the Bureaucrats
The sad story of Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon has inspired many people to think about the nature of bureaucracy. I’m reminded of a few stories:
When the fire alarm went off at Como Park High School in Minnesota in 2013 , a 14-year-old girl was rousted out of the swimming pool–dripping wet and wearing only a swimsuit–and was told to go stand outside where the temperature was sub-zero and the wind chill made it much worse. Then, she was not allowed to take refuge in one of the many cars in the parking lot because of a school policy forbidding students from sitting in a faculty member’s car. As Bookworm noted:
Even the lowest intelligence can figure out that the rule’s purpose is to prevent teachers from engaging sexually with children. The likelihood of a covert sexual contact happening between Kayona and a teacher under the actual circumstances is ludicrous. The faculty cars were in full view of the entire school. There was no chance of illicit sexual congress.
But the whole nature of bureaucratic rules, of course, is to forbid human judgment based on actual context.
Fortunately for Kayona, her fellow students hadn’t had human decency ground out of them by rules: “…fellow students, however, demonstrated a grasp of civilized behavior. Students huddled around her and some frigid classmates [sic], giving her a sweatshirt to put around her feet. A teacher coughed up a jacket.” As the children were keeping Kayona alive, the teachers were working their way through the bureaucracy. After a freezing ten minutes, an administrator finally gave permission for the soaking wet, freezing Kayla to sit in a car in full view of everybody.
As Bookworm notes, this sort of thing has become increasingly common. In England in 2009, for example, a man with a broken back lay in 6 inches of water, but paramedics refused to rescue him because they weren’t trained for water rescues. Dozens of similar examples could easily be dredged up.
In Sweden, also in 2013, there was rampant rioting that included the torching of many cars. The government of Sweden didn’t do a very good job of protecting its citizens and their property from this outbreak of barbarism. Government agents did, however, fulfill their duty of issuing parking tickets…to burned-out cars. Link with picture.
The behavior of these bureaucrats is very similar to the behavior of a computer program confronted by a situation for which its designers did not explicitly provide. Sometimes the results will be useless, sometimes they will be humorous, often they will be harmful or outright disastrous.
Here’s an essay written by a Spanish naval official in 1797, on the subject ‘Why do we keep losing to the British and what can we do about it?’ The pathologies that Don Domingo Perez de Grandallana saw in his country’s naval operations are now disturbingly present in many American organizations.
Thoughts from Peter Drucker, the great writer on management and society, on the nature of bureaucracy.
An old SF story, “Dumb Waiter,” by Walter Miller, is very relevant to the subject of mindless and destructive bureaucratic behavior. (Miller is best known for his philosophical/theological novel A Canticle for Leibowitz.)
In the story, cities have become fully automated—municipal services are provided by robots linked to a central computer system. But when war erupted–featuring radiological attacks–some of the population was killed, and the others evacuated the cities. In the city that is the focus of the story, there are no people left, but “Central” and its subunits are working fine, doing what they were programmed to do many years earlier.