No Actual Problem

Tyler Cowen grades the year

Tyler Cowen went on Prof G Markets this morning and spent an hour demonstrating the only kind of useful idiocy worth writing about: the kind with complete information.

The useful idiot in the old times was someone who was duped. That was the excusing condition. Tyler Cowen is not a man who is duped. What makes this interview worth your time is that he narrates the entire indictment himself, accurately, in the pleasant cadence of a man grading a quiz he wrote.

Asked about Trump’s promise to balance the budget, he is plain: “It was all lies to begin with. Anyone who believed it was a fool.” Asked whether economic policy has been driven by nativism bordering on racism, he does not hesitate: “Our immigration policy. Yes.” He describes the immigration agenda as something the president “outsourced” to Stephen Miller, whose project he summarizes as returning the country to “how we were culturally, ethnically, linguistically, in terms of religion, Christianity.” He calls the fiscal position a top-tier crisis — forty trillion in debt, “we’re in a very bad state,” “we’re going to suffer for that” — and states the national strategy in one sentence: “Our plan A is AI and we have no plan B.”

Then he grades the whole arrangement: “Overall, it’s still pretty awesome, I have to say. I know it sounds a little crazy. Can I give it a B+?”

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Asked to answer the AI trade’s most prominent critic, the chair of the Mercatus Center cites “a tweet circulating on Twitter” about the critic’s past predictions. That is the evidentiary standard on a several-hundred-billion-dollar question.

The point on which Cowen finds himself in complete agreement with the administration is, not coincidentally, the point nearest his own house. “It’s one of these small number of issues where I completely agree with Trump,” he says of the data-center buildout. He lives in Northern Virginia next to Loudoun County — “ground zero for data centers for the entire world,” he says, “the wealthiest county per capita in the whole United States” — and from that vantage he delivers the finding: “There’s no actual problem.” The objections of the people being asked to host these facilities are, in his taxonomy, aesthetic: “Maybe you think they’re ugly or there’s some slight humming noise.”

Here is what does not appear in his ledger. The grid operator for his own region has watched capacity prices rise from about $29 to $329 per megawatt-day in two auction years, and its independent market monitor attributes 63 percent of one auction’s increase to data-center demand — $9.3 billion loaded onto ordinary ratepayers in a single year, and the region’s households facing rate hikes of as much as 60 percent over five years. None of this exists for him. The richest county in America is doing fine.

His remedy for the politics is more instructive than his analysis. The public distrusts its elites, he concedes, for understandable reasons, and “you can’t overturn those perceptions.” So: “Maybe just talking about it less and having it happen in a few places and stop trying to persuade everyone.” Governors who campaign against the facilities and then sign the deals get his approval, because “what they’re saying or announcing is not really binding.” He jokes that paying off local communities “reminds me of my favorite movie, There Will Be Blood“ — the one about the oilman who buys a town in order to drain it. Sit with all of this for a moment. It is the chair of the Koch-founded Mercatus Center — an institution that exists, on paper, to defend free exchange against concentrated power — explaining that public speech is cheap talk, that the deals are the real politics, and that this arrangement is, his word, “the beauty of federalism.”

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The tell arrives as a joke, the way it usually does. Asked how he would fix the budget as president, Cowen muses that “even me as dictator, maybe as dictator I could do it, but I don’t see a feasible path from here to there.” Notice the shape of the thought experiment. Asked to imagine political agency, the economist reaches past every democratic instrument and lands on the dictator — and the obstacle, in his telling, is the public itself: “The voters love debt and deficits.” The citizenry is the problem. He means it as a joke about gridlock. Taken with the rest of the hour — persuasion does not work, voters are the problem, public statements are not binding — it is less a joke than a summary. And it lands differently in a year when the administration he “completely” agrees with is killing people on the water without chargesand paying a torture state to warehouse deportees.

Some on the right may want to defend Cowen as one of their reasonable ones — the one who will say the true things. And he does. The lies are lies, the nativism is nativism, the fiscal path is ruin, and he will tell you all of it himself, in order, if you ask the questions in order. What he will not do is let any of it touch the grade. Still pretty awesome. B-plus.A man who sees the whole board and is moved by none of it is not providing analysis. Then comes the sedation: the service of metabolizing alarm into wry amusement for an audience that would like to feel informed without feeling implicated.

That is the function. The regime gets its deals, the profession keeps its access, the audience gets to nod along, and nobody has to say the word complicity at a respectable volume.

Cowen is, as best I can read him, a technological determinist and an accelerationist. The changes are coming, the changes are largely good, and the job of the analyst is to describe the arrival weather and advise on adaptation. I have argued at length across two years of this newsletter that these are functionally evil positions. I stop short, on principle, of calling the people who hold them evil; I have friends who hold versions of them, and the epithet flattens what is actually a disagreement about what a human society is for. But the positions themselves are the thing that makes an hour like this one produce the answers it produces. If the buildout is providence, the ratepayer in Maryland is not a citizen with a claim; the ratepayer is friction in the arrival. If the immigration policy is going to happen and can be routed around by high-skilled visas, the family disappeared into CECOT is not a moral fact; the family is a policy externality outside the growth question. B-plus is what this worldview gives you when it grades a year like this one, because a year like this one is, for a determinist, mostly a delivery schedule.

The useful idiot turns out not to be the man who fails to see. Cowen sees everything, says most of it out loud, and changes nothing. He lives next to the wealthiest county in America, and from where he sits, there is no actual problem.

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