By Kevin
D. Williamson
Monday,
June 05, 2023
Anybody
else remember “peak oil”?
“Peak
oil” was the name given to a once-popular claim that worldwide demand for oil
would soon outstrip the ability of producers to supply it, sending energy
prices skyrocketing. The idea wasn’t that we were on the verge of running out
of oil in the immediate future—though some of the more excitable types did
frame the issue that way—but that cheap oil and gas were, or soon would be,
things of the past.
Of
course, the opposite was the case. The bundle of techniques known colloquially
as “fracking” opened up supplies of oil and gas previously thought too
expensive to extract. We pointy-headed types with stacks of Milton Friedman
books were not particularly surprised by that, because one of the things free
markets do—if we let them—is discover new, more efficient ways to do familiar
tasks. The promise of upward pressure on the price of oil encouraged innovation
and investment in efficiency. A technology that isn’t economical with a barrel
of oil at $x might prove very economical with a barrel of oil at
$2.2x. And once a technology has been brought online, then the miracle
of marginality comes into play: It cost Apple something well north of $1
billion to build the first iPhone, but the second iPhone
probably cost about $80. Spread that initial $1 billion development cost across
the 2.5 billion or so iPhones that have been sold so far, and it looks like a
bargain.
Of
course, econ nerds are not the only ones who might have seen the problem with
“peak oil.” People with a general familiarity with recent history might have
guessed as much.
Before
peak oil, there was The Population Bomb, that “controversial, hastily written,
sloppy, error-filled, ridiculous, racist, eugenicist, and forthrightly
authoritarian 1968 polemic” that remains a powerful force on the thinking of political movements
ranging from abortion rights to anti-war activism. Like “peak oil,” The
Population Bomb was an exercise in vulgar Malthusian economics, rooted
in the erroneous assumption that how we produce a given product or commodity
today is how we will always do it, ignoring the ways in which scarcity
encourages innovation and investment. Paul Ehrlich, the book’s author,
predicted with unassailable confidence and utter contempt for disagreement that
the United Kingdom would see widespread famine by the end of the 20th century,
and that “in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in
spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
Asked
why he got it so wrong, Ehrlich—who remains invincibly unembarrassed by his
risible prophesying—said that nobody could have predicted the increase in food
production worldwide that would be brought about by the work of Norman Borlaug
and other contributors to the Green Revolution. Same pattern as “peak oil,” of
course. Population forecasters and economists who pay attention to their work
worry that the great threat to worldwide human flourishing a century or so
hence will be a precipitous population decline rather than the
overpopulation menace we’ve heard about all our lives.
As the
old proverb has it: “It ain’t so much men’s ignorance that does the harm as
their knowing so many things that ain’t so.” “Peak oil” and the population
scare are not conspiracy theories as such, but they scratch the same itch and
work in the same way.
The
Population Bomb was
a very bad book—somewhere between incompetently written and wicked—but it had,
and continues to have, enormous influence on certain quarters of intellectual
life. It is not the only book of its kind.
Millions
of people around the world believe that there exists a thing called
“multiple-personality disorder,” which doesn’t actually exist, at least in the
version stuck in the population imagination. The idea much of the world has
about “multiple-personality disorder” is largely based on a very famous 50-year-old book, Sybil. The book’s influence was amplified
by the 1976 made-for-TV movie based on it and starring Sally Field. Sybil fell
somewhere between very bad journalism and outright hoax—a wildly profitable
hoax, with the first run of the book numbering 400,000 copies. The problems
with its claims have been known and understood for many years. But that hasn’t
done very much, if anything, to reduce the power of the Sybil-style
“multiple-personality disorder” myth.
Sybil and other similar books about women
suffering from mental-health problems (such as Prozac Nation and Girl,
Interrupted) effectively pressed certain feminist buttons, and were taken
up and defended on those grounds. It isn’t that people want to believe
something untrue for its own sake—they want to believe something untrue for a
particular reason. As with conspiracy theories, hoaxes such as Sybil fortify
a certain worldview.
The
environmental movement had its Silent Spring, which, like Sybil,
was somewhere between incompetent and
fraudulent. The
indigenous-peoples’ movement had I, Rigoberta Menchu, a work of fiction masquerading as
memoir. A
generation of Middle Eastern scholars and activists was deeply moved by Edward
Said’s account of his hardscrabble Palestinian childhood, which he invented. Every story you’ve ever heard
based on the recovery of repressed memories is a lie.
A
particularly ugly subgenre of this school of fiction is the weaponization of
false rape stories for political purposes. There was the Brett Kavanaugh
matter, prominently, but also Rolling Stone’s lurid—and
made-up—account of a rape at the University of Virginia, which was supposed to
tell us something profound about the relationship between “privilege” (white,
male, what have you) and sexual violence. Lena Dunham did the same thing when
in her memoir—another work of fiction masquerading as nonfiction—she invented a
rape by a College Republican named “Barry,” a claim her publisher was obliged
to retract after it failed to stand up to about 20 minutes’ worth of
journalism. The
New Republic’s infamous tale of sexual debauchery at CPAC was invented (by the notorious Stephen Glass) for the same purpose. The need to
believe that those who disagree with us are evil overpowers the capacity to
think critically.
This
holds true at the individual level and, more importantly, at the institutional
level. “Peak oil” was mostly shoddy analysis, Rolling Stone’s
campus-rape story was an excessively credulous repetition of obviously
questionable claims, Lena Dunham’s story was simply made up; what they have in
common is that they got past editors and fact-checkers and ran right through
basic institutional guardrails because the people entrusted with the
responsibility for investigating such claims wanted them to be true.
Dunham did not invent a rape perpetrated by the president of the campus chapter
of the Sierra Club or the International Socialists—the political valence
of the hoax was the point.
“Sanity,”
as the poet said, “is a full-time job.”
It takes
a great deal of effort to keep oneself grounded in the real, in the particular
facts of the case. Everybody knows a fragment of a related quote from George
Orwell, but the sentences that follow are worth reading:
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant
struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any
rate, to keep some kind of record of one’s opinions about important events.
Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may
simply forget that one ever held it.
And
that’s something we’ve all heard a million times: “None of us ever really
believed that!” But they did. People went to prison as a result of
some of these inventions. And there are millions of people who died of
malaria who didn’t have to, thanks, at least in part, to Silent Spring. We have made
energy policy, environmental policy, population-control policy, medical policy, economic policy, criminal-justice
policy—based on lies. We have done so for decades and will do so
for decades more.
Remind
me: Which road is it that is paved with good intentions?
Economics
for English Majors
A woman
who is an expert in financial regulation observes that under ESG rules, a firm
may derive a financial benefit from having more women on its board of
directors, but may derive an equal benefit from increasing its use of recycled
materials. That means that, in purely financial terms, a woman’s value could,
under those rules, be expressed as an equivalent amount of garbage—surely
not exactly what was intended.
ESG—“environmental,
social, governance”—programs are part of the broader tendency toward what is
sometimes known—idiotically, in my view—as “stakeholder capitalism,” a
formulation that is meant to throw a little shade at shareholder capitalism.
Shareholder capitalism is the kind of capitalism that is characterized, or was
characterized, by what is sometimes known as the “Friedman Doctrine,” after
Milton Friedman. The Friedman Doctrine is the radical idea that the people who
own a company should act like they own the place—that the company should be run
for the benefit of the people who own it, within the obvious boundaries of law
and ethical behavior. The most important competing set of interests isn’t
shareholders-vs.-general public, but shareholders-vs.-CEO, or
shareholders-vs.-management more generally.
Friedman wrote:
In a free‐enterprise, private‐property system, a corporate executive is
an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his
employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with
their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while
conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and
those embodied in ethical custom. Of course, in some cases his employers may
have a different objective. A group of persons might establish a corporation
for an eleemosynary purpose—for example, a hospital or school. The manager of
such a corporation will not have money profit as his objective but the
rendering of certain services.
In either case, the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate
executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation
or establish the eleemosynary institution, and his primary responsibility is to
them.
(“Eleemosynary”
means charitable.)
Like
textualism in legal interpretation, the so-called Friedman Doctrine is
something that ought to be utterly uncontroversial. People have a general right
to use their property as they see fit for their own ends; more to the point,
other people do not generally have a right to commandeer property that is not
theirs to use for their own ends. But that is what “stakeholder capitalism”
advocates and requires. “Stakeholder capitalism” treats people who are not the
owners of a certain bit of capital as though they were. The idea is that this
is a way to make firms serve some socially desirable end—defined by
non-shareholders, of course—as though firms did not provide socially important
goods in the ordinary course of doing business. Steel companies, for example,
provide society with a very important good: steel. In fact, profits are one way
of measuring how much social value a firm actually produces—if by social
value we mean the things society actually values, rather
than the things politicians and activists and others think society should value.
Society is made up of people, and people, damn their eyes, act as though they
have minds of their own, their own priorities, their own values, and their own
desires. This can produce results that are mystifying to me: I don’t think that
Twitter is any better for the world than is pornography or heroin, but the standard
isn’t “What Kevin D. Williamson Likes.” People get to make their own choices,
almost as though they had their own little brains and their own little
plans.
People
used to ding Steve Jobs because he didn’t give away a lot of money to charity.
He gave away gazillions of dollars more than his critics did, of course. But
the value Steve Jobs brought to the world isn’t whatever money he spread around
the do-gooder space—it was Apple and Apple products. Henry Ford’s philanthropy
did a lot less good for the world than his cars and his car company did.
The
“stakeholder capitalism” notion that businesses should be run with an eye to
the social interest begs the question. Creating all the useful and needful and
desirable goods and services we need is the social value that firms create.
There are ancillary goods, too, of course: jobs and incomes for workers, taxes
paid, the development of new technologies and new markets that create benefits
outside of the firm’s particular offerings, etc.
Another
way of looking at the question is that running businesses in the interest of
shareholders is the same thing as running businesses in the interest of
society—if society needs cars and steel and avocados and pharmaceuticals and,
egad, social-media platforms and such.
Words
About Words
Here is
a bit of dishonest—and ironic—legal analysis in Slate, precisely the sort of thing that
alert readers have come to expect from Dahlia Lithwick. Writing about a note
Chief Justice William Rehnquist sent to Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor
in an affirmative-action case, Lithwick and co-author Richard L. Hasen write:
Whether or not Rehnquist’s point about the goal of the Civil War was
right as an historical matter, it is reprehensible that he did not want the
court to even suggest that integration of American society was
a worthy objective embodied in one of the Reconstruction Amendments.
What
Rehnquist actually wrote to his colleague:
You say that the Fourteenth Amendment embodies “the goal of a fully
integrated society.” The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits discrimination; it does
not require integration, and I think it is a mistake to intimate that it does
even as a “goal.”
Hasen
and Lithwick would have readers believe that Rehnquist objected to a Supreme
Court justice taking the position that racial integration is a worthy goal;
what Rehnquist actually was writing about, as the text makes clear, is whether
the lawmakers who wrote and ratified the 14th Amendment believed that they were
creating a law that codified such a goal. Rehnquist is writing about a question
of fact—what the 14th Amendment actually says and was understood to
say at the time it was ratified—while Hasen and Lithwick slander him on
unrelated normative grounds. Rehnquist wasn’t writing about his goals or
O’Connor’s goals but about the goals of the authors of the 14th Amendment. If
Hasen and Lithwick understand this and have willfully misrepresented it, they
are engaged in intellectual dishonesty; if they do not understand this, then
they are suffering from intellectual incompetence. In neither case should such
work be permitted to go unchallenged.
Funny
thing, here: Rehnquist came from a legal tradition holding that what the text
actually says matters; Hasen and Lithwick come from a different tradition—one
that holds that those with power should use the law for their own ends as they
see fit and worry about interpretive plausibility afterward, if at all—and the Slate authors
have here shown the most obvious shortcoming of their defective approach: Words
can be willfully misinterpreted with malicious intent.
The
school of legal analysis known as “textualism”—a fancy way of saying that we
write our laws down for a reason and hence that we ought to pay attention to
what they actually say—looks first to the language of a statute or a
constitution for guidance. In cases in which the language is ambiguous or
subjected to meaningfully contested interpretation, the related “originalist”
tendency looks to the “original public meaning” of a law, i.e., to what the
people who wrote the law thought it meant, what the people who elected them
thought it meant, etc. The standard is, roughly, “What would a well-informed
person at the time of the provision’s passage have understood the provision to
mean?” Whether the authors of the 14th Amendment, writing in 1868, should
have created a constitutional provision that forbade, say, the racial
segregation of schools prohibited after the Brown decision, is
a separate question from whether they did create such a
provision.
Reading
the Constitution in an “original public meaning” frame is something progressive
activists would very much like to avoid, because it is unlikely that the
authors of the 14th Amendment or the citizens who ratified it thought they were
enacting a constitutional reform that would nullify state bans on same-sex
marriage or enable any of the many other ends to which the 14th Amendment has
been put over the years. It would be helpful to the cause of an open and
intelligent public discourse if our progressive friends would stop pretending
that such questions as (e.g.) whether it is desirable to get rid of anti-gay
laws on the statute books is the same question as whether the Constitution requires
this. We ought to have the maturity and good civic sense to understand that
not every good thing we might imagine in Anno Domini 2023 was somehow magically
previsioned and mandated by guys in powdered wigs in the 18th century
or by Puritan-inflected abolitionists in the 19th century. The
Constitution is not a magic hat out of which we can pull any rabbit we fancy;
we will have to do some work in our own time.
Slate is not a great outlet in
general (which may be why its once-amusing advice columns have degenerated into
this generation’s answer to Penthouse Forum) but its legal
commentary is shamefully dishonest and incompetent.
Speaking
of Slate …
Alexander
Sammon has written a very entertaining report from the annual convention of the
nation’s politically engaged car dealers, held in Dallas. If you do yourself the favor of
reading it, you
will come across these lines:
I retreated to a side room, where a man named Andrew—bald, besotted—told
me it was his seventh NADA convention. So far this one was tame compared with
last year’s in Las Vegas, he said, chewing on a pork slider from a nearby
buffet table and swallowing the finer syllables of his words. “You know why
they couldn’t have it in Vegas this year?” he asked. “Too many divorces.”
Behind him, two men in vests went up and down on a seesaw in the shape of a
mustache, each sitting atop one curl of the handlebar.
Read in
its contemporary sense, we would conclude from the above that a bald car dealer
has fallen in love with Alexander Sammon, which I suppose is possible. But I
think Sammon here is using besotted to mean drunk, rather than to
mean what it usually means, infatuated. Drunk is
listed as an “archaic” meaning of besotted in the dictionaries
where it appears at all (though I consulted only a few), but the meaning is
stuck in there pretty deep: A sot may be in modern English a
foolish or feckless person, but the literal meaning of the word is, or
was, drunkard. I found Sammon’s usage jarring, and I prefer the
precision that is enabled by having different words for different things, but I
also enjoy a good archaic usage as much as the next pedant.
A
parallel case is intoxicate. A very alluring woman may be described
as intoxicating, and everybody knows what is meant; the effects of
romantic attraction have been compared to the effects of wine for millennia,
across languages and cultures. (And the comparison of these both to religious ecstasy is equally widespread.) One rarely hears
men described as intoxicating, though many of them are branded with the related
adjective toxic.
So, I
would guess that Sammon’s car dealer was intoxicated, in a purely
heterosexual way, or besotted, in an archaic one.
Two
Republican guys on a mustache-shaped seesaw? I might have thought there was a
little Stephen Glass at work but for the pictures.
In Closing
“California Spent $17 Billion on
Homelessness,”
reads the Wall Street Journal headline. “It’s Not Working.”
That may seem puzzling, until you consider the possibility that homelessness in
this, the wealthiest major country in the world, is not an economic phenomenon.
We the people of these United States have many serious problems—lack of
financial resources is not one of them. We currently are spending more in our
entitlement-dominated federal budget than we spent in 1942, when we were
fighting World War II, and we will not have anything more to show for it than
California does for its billions spent on homelessness. When you are rich—and
we are so rich!—problems that can be solved with money are the kind of problems
you want to have. But our big problems are not money problems. Even our money
problems aren’t really money problems.
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