prior probability

That is the title of a spoof college essay posted by Alexis Pereira (@MrAlexisPereira) on Twitter the other day. (See picture below.) According to Wikipedia, Tom and Jerry is a series of animated short films created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera in the 1940s that “centers on a friendship/rivalry (a love-hate relationship) between the title characters Tom, a cat, and Jerry, a mouse.” The thing is, I used to watch Tom and Jerry cartoons (among other things) after school when I was a child, so I wish Mr Pereira would post the entire essay!

 

Once upon a time, the academic economist Harold Hotelling (pictured below, left) developed a formal mathematical model called the median voter theorem to help explain elections. According to this influential theory of politics, a majority rule voting system will select the outcome most preferred by the median voter. But what if this model is wrong or incomplete? Rachel Bitecofer (pictured below, right), who is a professor of politics at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, has developed a new way of forecasting elections. This excellent essay by David Freedlander (via Politico Magazine) summarizes her ideas about voting this way: “Bitecofer’s theory, when you boil it down, is that modern American elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote in the first place.” Freedlander adds: “To her critics, she’s an extreme apostle of the old saw that ‘turnout explains everything,’ taking a long victory lap after getting lucky one time. She sees things slightly differently: That the last few elections show that American politics really has changed, and other experts have been slow to process what it means. If she’s right, it wouldn’t just blow up the conventional wisdom; it would mean that much of the lucrative cottage industry of political experts—the consultants and pollsters and (ahem) the reporters—is superfluous, an army of bit players with little influence over the outcome. Actually, worse than superfluous: that whole industry of experts is generally wrong.”

Maybe they are not yet big enough! Check out the following excerpt from this report by David Roberts (via Vox; link in original): “It is impressive as an engineering feat, but the significance of growing turbine size goes well beyond that. Bigger turbines harvest more energy, more steadily; the bigger they get, the less variable and more reliable they get, and the easier they are to integrate into the grid. Wind is already outcompeting other sources on wholesale energy markets. After a few more generations of growth, it won’t even be a contest anymore”

 

The headline of a front-page story in last Friday’s New York Times (7 Feb. 2020) states that an estimated $1.6 billion in Hurricane Maria insurance claims remain unresolved. This sounds like a serious crisis of epic proportions, one requiring more governmental regulation of the insurance industry, but buried in the 13th paragraph on page 21 is this sentence: “Out of an estimated $8.5 billion in insurance claims filed since Hurricane Maria, $6.9 billion have been paid ….”

Review (part 2 of 2) of Matthew W. Slaboch, A Road to Nowhere: The Idea of Progress and Its Critics (U Penn Press, 2018).

In my previous post, I mentioned that the concept of progress might have a cultural or spatial dimension, one of the most important ideas I learned from reading Slaboch’s book on anti-progress. Here, I shall discuss another insightful idea in Slaboch’s book, what I call “the paradox of the anti-progress canon.” Simply put, why should anyone bother to improve man’s lot or change the course of history for the better if the ideal of progress is bullshit?

Slaboch presents this dire paradox in the chapter devoted to Henry Adams (Chapter 3), who attempted to apply the law of physics to the study of history. Briefly, Adams’s view of world history was a pessimistic one (p. 80): social and political collapse are inevitable; all such systems will “grow old and die.” At the same time, Adams deplored the venal nature of American democracy. For Adams (p. 76), politicians are not only corrupt; the citizens they represent are stupid and depraved! But as Slaboch astutely notes, these two positions–one macro (world history); the other micro (American democracy)–are in tension with each other (p. 81): “on the one hand, [Adams] freely castigates American government and society for their decrepitude, while on the other hand … [he] professes the inevitability of such decay.”

In other words, if all social and political systems must eventually “grow old and die,” to borrow Adams’s own formulation, how can one complain when history unfolds just as your theory of history predicts? Worse yet, if decline is inevitable, then any effort to reverse this decline is doomed to fail! Furthermore, this tension can easily be generalized to all critics of progress. Although Henry Adams is easy to dismiss as a crank of a bygone age (after all, who still believes that history is governed by the laws of physics?), the works of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, by contrast, have withstood the test of time, and if you find either Schopenhauer or Tolstoy’s critiques of the concept of progress to be persuasive (as I do), i.e. if progress is either a futile or dangerous ideal, then what is to be done?

This ominous contradiction reappears in Chapter Four of Slaboch’s book, where the author turns to the leading 20th-century critics of progress: the German historian Oswald Spengler, Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and American cultural critic Christopher Lasch. All three thinkers rejected the idea of progress: Spengler, for example, famously diagnosed “the decline of the West” (p. 89) and predicted the outbreak of war between the forces of liberalism and socialism (p. 95). For his part, Solzhenitsyn emphasized the finite nature of our natural resources, describing the idea of perpetual progress as a “nonsensical myth” (p. 99), and denied that an ideal form of political organization existed (p. 101). Likewise, Lasch lamented Western decadence (p. 106) and believed that Americans are unwilling or unprepared to deal with the future (ibid.).

The problem, however, is that if any of these criticisms are true–if war is inevitable, if resources are finite, if Western culture is materialist and decadent–how are we to avoid the dangers of nihilism? Slaboch acknowledges this danger in his conclusion, and this is why I recommend A Road to Nowhere. Slaboch’s beautiful book is worth reading because it poses and answers two significant questions for us today: why should we be skeptical of the ideal of progress, and how should we act given this skepticism? In the course of addressing these questions, his book makes two important contributions to the anti-progress literature. One is purely historical: Slaboch goes back in time and reacquaints us with the leading 19th- and 20th-century critics of the ideal of progress. The other contribution is at once philosophical and practical. Slaboch identifies a paradox in the anti-progress canon. Simply put, if progress is an incoherent concept or an unattainable goal, to what great purpose or end, if any, should we devote ourselves to in the here and now? Is it even possible, in principle, for a critic of the concept of progress to solve this paradox?

Review (part 1 of 2) of Matthew W. Slaboch, A Road to Nowhere: The Idea of Progress and Its Critics (U Penn Press, 2018).

As soon as I heard about Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen’s recent call for a new field of “progress studies” (Collison & Cowen, 2019, available here), my initial reaction was one of deep skepticism. Simply put, I mistrust our collective ability to discover, let alone implement, a reliable recipe for boosting long-term economic growth or for promoting ever-higher levels of human flourishing generally. But my skepticism poses a deeper, second-order question: is this mistrust warranted, or is it the result of my own Burkean and Humean biases or what Cowen likes to call “mood affiliation”? It turns out that I am not the only one to be skeptical of the concept of progress. Matthew Slaboch, a research fellow at Princeton, has devoted an entire scholarly tome (whose cover art is pictured below) to this question.

As Slaboch explains in his introduction, his book is organized temporally and geographically. Slaboch devotes the first three chapters of his book to the leading critics of progress in the 19th century: the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (ch. 1), the great Russian author Leo Tolstoy (ch. 2), and the New England historian Henry Adams, the great grandson of President John Adams (ch. 3). Next, Slaboch surveys the ideas of a trio of 20th-century anti-progress intellectuals (ch. 4) and then concludes with his own thoughts about the nature of progress. Because Slaboch’s excellent survey is so compact and concise–spanning only four chapters–I will resist the temptation to cover the same ground as previous reviewers of Slaboch’s work, such as Daniel Eisenberg and Inder Marwah. In place of a comprehensive review, I will instead share a few of the most surprising or counterintuitive ideas I learned from Slaboch’s beautiful book, starting with the introduction.

To begin with, when we think of “progress,” we may often have in mind economic or moral forms of progress–the accumulation of material comforts or expanding notions of moral and human rights. Are we not becoming more prosperous as measured by the Economic Holy Grail of GDP; are we not making moral strides in terms of animal rights, gender and racial equality, the prosecution of war crimes, etc.? One of the most unexpected ideas I got from reading the introduction, however, is that we should also think about progress along a spatial dimension. Specifically, is progress a universal concept, an ideal that transcends any particular time and place, or is it a mere Western or cultural construct, inseparable from one’s time and place?

Another powerful idea that appears in Slaboch’s survey is Schopenhauer’s “doctrine of the unceasing will.” (Slaboch presents this idea on p. 18 & pp. 56-57 of his book.) Or, in the immortal words of Schopenhauer himself (p. 18), “we yet always have before us only the same, identical, unchangeable essence.” In other words, people are basically the same, for our wants, needs, and desires are insatiable. Furthermore, even when we’re able to satisfy our human cravings (whatever these sundry appetites may consist of), our happiness will be fleeting, for as Slaboch explains (p. 18), summarizing Schopenhauer’s critique of progress, “almost as soon as a desire is met, boredom arises, and it remains until we have some new end to pursue.” This insight is the foundation of Schopenhauer’s “metaphysical pessimism” (p. 19) and of his philosophical critique of the idea of progress (p. 20): no matter how much material prosperity we might achieve or enjoy, we will always end up wanting more!

Yet another surprising tidbit I learned from Slaboch’s survey is Leo Tolstoy’s admiration of Schopenhauer. In fact, Tolstoy so revered the German philosopher that he hung a portrait of Schopenhauer in his private study. For Tolstoy, however, progress was not only a futile pursuit; it was also a dangerous one. As Slaboch explains (p. 58), summarizing Tolstoy’s critique of progress, “European elites terrorized not only far-off populations, but also exploited their own countrymen in the name of progress ….” To my mind, Tolstoy’s critique of the dangers of progress is still valid today: the pursuit of moral progress often leads to overzealous efforts to shape or mold man’s character, and once progress becomes a public ideal or a political imperative (as opposed to just an individual one), great crimes will inevitably be committed in her name, regardless of who is in charge, i.e. monarchs, revolutionaries, classical liberals, etc.

But perhaps the most original idea I learned from Slaboch’s survey (especially Ch. 3) is what I will call “the paradox of the anti-progress canon.” I will delve into this paradox in my next post …

Via Wikipedia (footnotes omitted): “Double chess is a chess variant invented by Julian S. Grant Hayward in 1916. The game is played on a 12×16 chessboard with each player in control of two complete armies placed side-by-side. The rules were published in the January 1929 issue of British Chess Magazine.” (Hat tip: @pickover.)