The Prediction Panopticon

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, October 18, 2024

 

So I spent way too much time trying to do a “Who’s on first?” kind of riff on how the refrain to the song “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” made famous by Manfred Mann in 1964, sounds a bit like a bad transcription of Mongo from Blazing Saddles and King Shark from The Suicide Squad being surprised by the allegations and being disappointed in the rapper.  

 

“Diddy Do whah?

 

“Wha Diddy Do?”

 

“Diddy dum”

 

“Diddy, do.”

 

But I really couldn’t make it work, so let’s move on.

 

Evidence is mounting that China is “turning Japanese.” This is shorthand for the growing consensus that China’s really exceptional economic run is petering out. This in no way suggests that China won’t be a geostrategic threat to the U.S. in the near long term. It’s entirely possible that economic decay will make China more, not less, dangerous.

 

But it’s worth revisiting the point that China’s economic decline wasn’t supposed to happen, according to a slew of intellectuals, across the ideological spectrum. There have been a lot of predictions about China over the last 30 to 40 years. One was that its easing into the market order would hasten democratization. Then some said the Chinese model of managed, authoritarian or “one party” capitalism was the new secret sauce, while American democracy was the real problem. Then there’s the idea that American capitalism was the problem, and free market orthodoxy was a mistake because China’s statists exploited it. Ergo the U.S. needed to become more statist, too. I’m skipping some stuff because I don’t want to argue about political economy, but every new school of thought about China was presented with certainty about how present conditions would continue into the future.

 

Well, one of my longest-standing gripes is over the tendency to make straight-line projections based on present conditions. I first started writing about this a long time ago, after I read one of my favorite essays by George Orwell, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham.” Writing in 1946, Orwell noted that during World War II, British intellectuals would regularly change their minds about the course of the war and the future of the country based on the latest headlines. “If the Japanese have conquered South Asia, they will keep South Asia forever,” or “If the Germans take Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo.” So essentially, their predictions boiled down to, “Whoever is winning at the moment will seem to be invincible.”

 

But the tendency to predict the future solely based on a snapshot of the zigzagging present, wrote Orwell, “is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.” Orwell goes on:

 

Suppose in 1940 you had taken a Gallup poll, in England, on the question ‘Will Germany win the war?’ You would have found, curiously enough, that the group answering ‘Yes’ contained a far higher percentage of intelligent people – people with IQ of over 120, shall we say – than the group answering ‘No’. The same would have held good in the middle of 1942. In this case the figures would not have been so striking, but if you had made the question ‘Will the Germans capture Alexandria?’ or ‘Will the Japanese be able to hold on to the territories they have captured?’, then once again there would have been a very marked tendency for intelligence to concentrate in the ‘Yes’ group. In every case the less-gifted person would have been likelier to give a right answer.

 

I think about this insight all of the time, in part because I see it on display all of the time. Forget war and peace stuff. It’s baked into daily punditry about conventional politics, particularly around things like polling. And don’t kid yourself: Poll-worship is a kind of power-worship. 

 

For instance, back when Democrats were agonizing about whether to boot Joe Biden from the ticket, the main argument against it was that Kamala Harris had even lower approval ratings than Biden. Therefore, you’d have to dump both of them because she couldn’t win either. Well, Democrats defenestrated Biden, promoted Harris, and lo and behold her approval ratings soared. She still may lose, but the conviction that she’d do even worse than Biden because she was less popular than Biden was wrong, because when the present changed, so did public opinion. Indeed, the idea that you couldn’t dump Harris because “the base”—mostly African American women—wouldn’t tolerate it is based on the same kind of thinking Orwell hated: believing some changeable variable will hold constant forever. If you look at where Harris is over– or under-performing, the assumption that the party had no choice but to stick with her looks deeply flawed. 

 

Or consider Biden’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. Polls said lots of people wanted to get America out of Afghanistan. Biden did, and Americans were pissed. This isn’t what we had in mind. This kind of thing happens all of the time. Ask people what they want or what they think the future will look like and when they get it, they get pissed, or disappointed. Right now, much is being made about polling that shows a majority of Americans support the mass deportation of illegal immigrants (which I don’t think is an unreasonable position to hold). But if you think that an actual, serious effort involving forcibly moving millions of people at gunpoint into camps and then out of the country will retain popular support once it begins, I think you’re naïve. Americans were done with war in the Middle East, the polls said. Then ISIS beheaded a couple Americans, and America turned on a dime. 

 

Some of what I am getting at is captured by former United Kingdom Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s apocryphal reply—“Events, dear boy, events”—when supposedly asked what the greatest challenge for a statesman is. Political leaders who just follow the polls—or “public opinion,” a term that predates polling—will eventually get blindsided by the fact that giving the people what they want is often a recipe for pissing off the people when that approach creates problems. Reforming Social Security and Medicare is unpopular, which is one reason politicians aren’t interested in doing anything about it. But, at some point, we’re going to have a financial crisis of some sort, and “the people” will respond, “It was your job to do something about this.” 

 

But this doesn’t capture all of it. Let’s go back to Orwell’s example.

 

“Intellectuals,” broadly defined, make a living by spotting patterns in the past, the present, and the future. They separate the signal from the noise, or at least claim to. They’re also good at imagining worst-case scenarios. Some are okay at describing best-case scenarios, but because our brains have a negativity bias, the worst-case stuff is easier to conceive of and there’s more market demand for it anyway. Those British intellectuals, particularly the vast majority of them who probably knew nothing about military stuff, found it easy to extrapolate from a new data point and draw a straight line to victory or defeat.

 

There are probably a bunch of reasons normal British citizens remained confident they would win. They were more patriotic than the intellectuals for a start. But another might be that they just didn’t pay close attention to every development, taking it on faith that the Brits would muddle through any snags they hit. Relatedly, one of the reasons was simply that they didn’t have, in Orwell’s words, the intellectual’s “habit of mind” that “leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end.” 

 

Don’t worry, I’m not going to get into another rant about catastrophism, but I will say that catastrophism is precisely the habit of mind that defines intellectual political discourse today. Whether it’s vanishing bees and polar bears or vanishing free speech rights or capitalism itself, elite political discourse is dominated by straight-line, catastrophic thinking about how enduring things are fragile and probably doomed if the trend of the day is allowed to continue much longer.

 

This is a glorified way of saying: Surprise! Intellectuals overthink things!

 

But I think there’s a more important point here. Intellectuals are famously fond of having intellectuals in charge of things. The reason statism, economic planning, industrial planning, this planning and that planning, always come back into fashion is that intellectuals are really good at coming up with new—or old—arguments for why they should be running things. It’s no wonder that experts tend to exaggerate the success of systems run by experts and the failures of systems that aren’t. They’re looking for patterns that support their worldview.

 

There’s a certain kind of intellectual who at some deep level dislikes the whole “give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish, he eats for the rest of his life” thing because he can see himself as the head of the Ministry of Fish Distribution.

 

Which gets me to a little political economy. The advantage of democratic, market-based, systems is that they push more problem solving to the people closest to the problems, and they create better incentives for people to fix those problems. Everyone who thinks China was doing great because experts ran it well miss the fact that experts ran it before it embraced markets. The key wasn’t the experts, but the markets. The Chinese recognized this, which is why their officials were charged with protecting market mechanisms more than managing them. China abandoned that commitment over the last decade or so, and the result is that China is floundering economically. It’s moving back into the Ministry of Fish Distribution model.

 

I think people sometimes underappreciate the “teach a man a fish” thing. The point isn’t merely that teaching a person a skill will set them up for life. After all, skills can become obsolete. “What if we run out of fish?” the intellectuals might ask. Best not to make people dependent on a depleting resource. The point is that teaching people to take care of themselves rather than rely on caretakers is the better way to go through life. The person who fishes everyday for his sustenance won’t respond to a fish shortage by saying, “Well, I guess I’ll starve.” They work the problem in new ways.

 

The Chinese were right to embrace markets as much as they did. But if the plan was to hold onto power forever, they were fools. North Korea’s rulers are much smarter than the Chinese in this regard. If all you care about is holding onto power, the dumbest thing you can do is loosen state control of society. The Chinese think they’ve solved this problem with technology, constructing a digital panopticon. They may be right, for a while. But markets teach people to fish.

 

I agree that the idea that Chinese prosperity would lead to Chinese democracy was oversold in the 1990s. It was never going to be a straight-line thing. But neither was victory in World War II. Call me anti-intellectual if you like, but I don’t think that Chinese democracy is an impossibility, nor do I think it’s guaranteed. Because nothing is guaranteed and life never unfolds in a straight line.