Insider Knowledge

Sometimes, people are slightly less discreet than they are in public.

Plus, you have to figure in the (fairly high, I’d guess) probability that they are bull-shitting, or flat out lying. There’s no good reason to think these people are telling the truth, and this will often be the case of “insiders” who what to make use of reporters to sell a particular view.

Note, too, that even gov’t agencies consistently miss-estimate the value of public information. As it turns out, Pravda provided a much more accurate estimate of Soviet economic and agricultural production, at least after Stalin, than did the CIA. There are lots of other examples.

Everyone is limited to the same 24 hours in the day. People, who are “generalists”, are also higher in the pyramidal hierarchy, but they don’t get any kind of time-bonus, to cope with the increased information-processing demands of the job. Instead, they rely on abstraction and other information-compression gambits, while disinvesting from their investment in priors — their stock of theory and prior knowledge (which is probably becoming obsolete pretty fast). “Bias” isn’t half the problem.

Journalists are generalists, too, and act as signal-repeaters and conduits for this highly compressed, highly abstract, framed-by-obsolete-notions information, in which we all trade. As the original post observes, “Communities of generalists relying on a very limited set of information sources are peculiarly vulnerable to self-reinforcing illusion.” Journalists, typically, want to know what the “self-reinforcing illusion” of the moment, is. That’s “news”. They don’t need to know “what’s really going on” in an objective sense of critical assessment or even denotation; they need to know “what’s really going on” in the subjective sense, of understanding the telegraphic jargon of the “self-reinforcing illusion” in all its slangy connotations.

To the extent that politics is a society thinking, the way these processes are structured is not healthy, but the problem is more fundamental than just advising journalists on how to find out, or figure out, stuff.

JW, there are two obvious instances of valuable insider knowledge, at opposite ends of a spectrum of control. The first is where the insiders have some real power over the system; knowing what, say, Stalin or, latterly, the al-Khalifa’s are going to do next in their respective countries would be of great use to local actors, since there are so few public mechanisms for challenging, altering, or, in some cases, even understanding those actions.

The other is when the insiders have, through observation in some key aspect of a large, unpredicatable system, have some sense of what is happening. If you are interested in, say, the development of telecommunications systems, the people who can observe traffic at significant border routers have a view of the world that is hard to replicate on the outside. If you care about books, what Amazon knows about the rise and fall of different authors, titles, and genres is pretty irreplaceable.

The happiest situation to be in, for an insider, is to be able mix these two patterns; Apple knows what the release date and set of features will be for its next iPad, and it knows that this information will move markets, and it takes steps (many expensive, paranoid steps) to make sure that this insider information stays inside.

And sometimes, it’s possible to invent a system which, to Henry’s original point, fails to capture significantly valuable inside information, but orders or frames it in such a way as to create this sort of privileged position. This is not just rent extraction, as with Westlaw or Reed-Elsevier; a better example might be US News and World Report’s college rankings, where the people making the list understand that changing the weights or measures for colleges will re-order the list in ways that affect those colleges, but the list can’t be re-produced by outsiders.

None of this disagrees with Henry’s major point, though, or Krugman’s, which is that journalists remain obsessed with secrets (e.g. the Watergate story) rather than mysteries (e.g. the Enron story, hiding in plain sight). The ‘secrets vs. mysteries’ phrase is Susan Landau’s, originally discussing the failure of the intelligence community to predict the fall of the Shah of Iran, but the observation remains general.

“It’s such a stunningly good argument that those wise people who run government should have more power over our lives, isn’t it?”
In fact it is! Thank you for agreeing that the average person is not equipped to figure out exactly how many parts per million of mercury in their food should worry them. Good on you for being intellectually honest enough to admit that your political philosophy is ridiculously simplistic and self defeating. Kudos!

As someone whose career (as a software engineer) has been in an area that has contacts with academia (to varying degrees at different jobs), as well as with generalist business managers, that outsiders would only sometimes get interesting information doesn’t seem surprising.

@LFC: However, my impression is that there are also a fair number of non-generalists

Yes, and their point of view will likely be rather different from that of the generalists, in part from not having a big-picture view, in part because of distorting effects from focusing closely on small, technical issues over long periods of time. Surely some scoops come from disgruntled people with less than big-picture views, though? And generalists and technicians are not always as easy to distinguish as you might think, and big-pictures possessed by technicians are sometimes generated via re-masticating general and/or outsider views (not always a bad thing obviously). In either case they can be fragile.

Harry Shearer’s Le Show was almost all an interview with Stephanie Kelton this week, one subject being the triumph of Pete Peterson’s view of the economy, social spending and deficits. Peterson’s a manufacturer of knowledge from within the establishment and contrasts with WikiLeaks which in the paper seems too disorganized to understand that it might be turning facts into knowledge beyond the idea that things will out.

In Halberstams book about the ‘nam war, isn’t there a scene where a non gov’t guy visits a friend who has gotten a gov’t job with super top secret clearance, and the Nongov guy says, don’t get taken in by all those briefings ?
and the gov’t guy goes, no, we have this incredible 24/7 round the world intelligence service that goes out and gets all this infoall over the world…
so the nongov guy goes out to the newstand, gets a bunch of eng language papers from around the world [for those of you under the age of say 30, in all big cities there use to be newstands that carried dozens, if not hundreds of papers from all over the world] and shows the newspapers to the govt guy and say, is there anything in your briefing that ins’t in the newspapers…..

I bet if we bothered to reread Liebling, or Mencken, or.. we find out that this story is old news, dog bites man, yesterdays’ paper….
its sort of the middle aged intellecutal version of teenagers thinking that they invented sex…

The problem with American journalism is not that there is no penalty for being wrong, but that there is no reward for being right. In the absence of some moral or ideological motive, why would any professional opt for reporting objectively? It just doesn’t pay.

While the argument is important, isn’t it essentially restating Izzy Stone’s journalistic philosophy, which every generation of journalists probably learns but certainly forgets?

I agree with the post generally, but I think a proviso is that ‘foreign affairs’ is an unusually bullshit-heavy field even for DC, full of ‘experts’ who aren’t even fluent in the languages of the countries they are supposed to be expert in. As other posters here have argued, the content of foreign affairs is sufficiently removed from the tangible interests and knowledge of the American public that there is little external check on expertise claims. Insiders tend to be people who are expert at working their way up in various bureaucracies and adept at spinning stories that justify expansion of the defense establishment or appeal to other key inside-DC constituencies (as opposed to appealing to the people actually affected by the policies).

Not that there isn’t plenty of BS in domestic policy and economics too, but you are much more likely to end up dealing directly with people who have first-hand knowledge of the business you are selling yourself as an expert on, and the impact of your ideas on politicians constituents is quite direct. Adding to that, insiders in domestic policy often do directly make decisions that have big impacts on large regulated industries — if I was interested in financial policy I would be very interested indeed in knowing what the Fed was going to do next.

I. F. Stone comes to mind.

Another thing to include in the paper might be discussion of another Wikileaks goal.

Assange wrote a treatise under his name but which was largely taken to be outlining one of Wikileaks strategies. (An Aaron Bady post on it, linked below, was praised by the Wikileaks twitter account as a “Good essay on one of the key ideas behind WikiLeaks”.) The basic idea was that by creating a costly culture of leaking, Wikileaks would induce governments to tighten up their internal information networks to try and prevent the leaks from getting out. This makes it harder for them to transmit information internally, which makes them slower, less responsive to events, less efficient overall, etc. Assange optimistically hopes for making governments so sclerotic if they wish to retain secrets that they can no longer function.

From the standpoint of pursuing this strategy, Wikileaks partnering with media organizations seems to be fairly beneficial. The more Wikileaks becomes an entrenched member of the international media landscape, the more stable and permanent it becomes, the more it becomes something that governments have to adapt to in the long term. And even if Nick’s criticism is correct, partnering with media organizations allowed governments to more immediately recognize what Wikileaks was doing, so that their internal responses to it are going to be much quicker than having to recognize an organic phenomenon that bubbles up from having tens of millions of people view the same piece of clandestine information.

Note that this strategy depends on Wikileaks’ information being transmitted into knowledge, but is independent of the consequences of that knowledge. A government won’t alter much in response to Wikileaks information which is not legitimated into knowledge; when it does act in response to knowledge it will take steps to limit the potential damage of future leaks, which doesn’t necessarily depend on the effect that knowledge of past leaks have had. The only worrying thing from Wikileaks’ standpoint in this arrangement is if they get too close to the media organizations they rely on so that they stop receiving information or can be pressured to not release information they receive. That is, this strategy starts to falter the less information Wikileaks receives and the more that Wikileaks can be pressured to keep the information it has from being transformed into knowledge.

This fits fairly easily into the structure of the draft of the paper, which talks about consequences of leaks in government behavior to other governments, but not really about intra-government behavior undertaken to keep secrets from being leaked. From a rational actor standpoint, the mechanisms assisting the Wikileaks strategy are fairly straightforward: increased transaction costs for information dispersal, increased principal-agent tension which increase costs for enforcement and degrade morale, the bounds within which rationality can operate become smaller, etc.

From a constructivist account, a government’s attempt to restrict leaks may create periods of disequilibrium within institutions and drastically change the relationship between the setters of institutional policy and agents tasked with carrying that policy out, the ideals of the agents and the tools with which to work towards those ideals, how institutional actors conceive their personal goals fitting within larger institutional frameworks, the bounds within which institutional actors are free to create and pursue their own conceptions of institutional goals, etc. All of which may have large effects in the functioning of those institutions.

Nascent as Wikileaks is, there are already empirical examples that seem ripe for the above kind of analysis. The database which Bradley Manning leaked was created to solve problems by the inefficient sharing of information, and its subsequent restriction has invited those problems back. Manning’s severe detention and Obama’s zeal in prosecuting whistleblowers has degraded attitudes of people working those institutions and has probably affected their behavior.

Just a few thoughts that seemed to track nicely with what the paper outlined.

Aaron Bady link:

http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracy-%E2%80%9Cto-destroy-this-invisible-government%E2%80%9D/#

Anarcisse @ 20
MQ @ 21

It might be revealing to get down to cases. For some reason, I have followed the career of Michael O’Hanlon, a “Senior Fellow” at the Brookings Institution, since the Iraq War was first anticipated in 2001. This is how the Brookings website describes him:

Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow with the 21st Century Defense Initiative and director of research for the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American foreign policy. He is a visiting lecturer at Princeton University, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. O’Hanlon is a member of General David Petraeus’s External Advisory Board at the Central Intelligence Agency. He is a commentator on Alhurra TV and also blogs for Fareed Zakaria’s Global Public Square site at CNN.com.

In other words, he’s pretty much an empty suit, who networks well enough to be able to produce the kind of pseudo-credentials that can get him on teevee, and on op-ed pages, from time to time. He’s not really an expert on anything. (A long time ago, he was a Defense department budget analyst at the Congressional Budget Office.) What he does, is journalism: he writes books and articles, and does quotes and punditry, glossing topics of current interest.

That O’Hanlon functions as a journalist, but by another name, seems deeply relevant to the kabuki, which surrounds “insider knowledge” and to the related production of propaganda, funded by billionaires and business corporations.

Like any journalist, he seeks out informed opinion, and repeats it. He uses his own authority as an “expert” to massage sources out of his production of conventional wisdom, but it is very clear that he knows that he’s synthesizing conventional wisdom. On the Iraq War, he was as firmly anchored in his judgments as a weather vane is, in indicating the direction of the wind. On Iraq, he was initially cautious, though he endorsed everything the Administration did, when it actually came to do them. He was also initially earnest; his Iraq Index was quite successful as a journalist citation magnet (according to Brookings at least), and it is clear, that he intended, at the outset, to track the success of the Administration’s ambitious Reconstruction plans, but he never let the accumulated documentation of the abject failure and deep corruption come between him, and currying favor with the Administration. Did I mention that he is a member of General David Petraeus’s External Advisory Board at the Central Intelligence Agency? Oh wait, Brookings bragged about that.

The Iraq Index — there’s now an Afganistan Index and a Pakistan Index, as well — is an example, I think, of what Clay Shirky in his comment above, called a “system”, which creates a privileged position for its author/publisher, by framing and ordering information, without actually capturing significantly valuable “inside” information (or generating any new information, as might be accomplished by original research).

What might be most interesting, though, about the Iraq Index, is what little use was made of it, despite Brookings’ claim of many journalistic citations. It was ready-made to document the scale of Bush’s Iraq Reconstruction failure, but O’Hanlon always ran away from that, and toward endorsing the policy of teh Surge, etc.

The supposed seeking after “inside information” would seem, on the strength of O’Hanlon’s curriculum vitae, just a cover story for cozying up to power, and journalists (doing PR on better stationery) feeding journalists of the conventional variety, with no genuine expertise involved anywhere in the process.

MQ @21
I agree with the post generally, but I think a proviso is that ‘foreign affairs’ is an unusually bullshit-heavy field even for DC, full of ‘experts’ who aren’t even fluent in the languages of the countries they are supposed to be expert in.

There’s some of that, no doubt. OTOH there are people — not necessarily mainly in Wash D.C. but some in D.C. too — who are fluent in the languages of the countries they are experts in. I guarantee you that the head of China studies at the Brookings Institution, to take one example, knows Chinese (I’m not sure offhand what the exact job titles are there, but you know what I mean). There are also people who may know a lot about a particular issue or issues (whether it’s trade, refugees, int’l labor rights, water, hunger, disaster relief, law of armed conflict, energy, arms control, or whatever, the list is v. long) and who don’t hold themselves out as being experts in a particular country (or if they do, they shouldn’t). Then there are people who, whether you agree w them or not, may have some claim to attention on broader issues, whether b.c of jobs they’ve held in the past, things they’ve written, or whatever. Then there are some academics who occasionally try to translate their work into non-technical language. When you add up all the publications, journals, briefings and whatnot, there’s a lot of BS to be sure, but if you know what to look for, there’s plenty of expertise out there. Can experts be wrong? Yes. Are they wrong? Sometimes, quite catastrophically. Should they be trusted implicitly? No. Do they agree on everything? Often not. But none of this means that expertise doesn’t exist.

Btw, of course, expertise may coincide with the possession of advanced degrees, but it is not synonymous with same. For example, I have a Ph.D. in international relations and I don’t consider myself an expert in anything (certainly in nothing policy-relevant), and I am the first one to admit it. But I also recognize that there are such things as genuine experts on particular countries and issues, which doesn’t, again, mean what they say is necessarily right.

Anarcissie — re “the apparent near-unanimity among foreign policy specialists that going into Iraq was a good idea”

Henry is using a particular definition of “foreign policy specialist” here, e.g. Michael O’Hanlon et al. (see Wilder above). It doesn’t apply to IR profs, some 50 or so of whom (I forget the exact number) took out a full-page ad in the NYT opposing an invasion of Iraq.

Bruce @28: “Viewed as the comment of a kind of business rival, this seems revealing.”

What O’Hanlon’s comment makes me think of is a reaction to a certain view of the way the world should be being threatened. It reminds me of what Corey Robin writes about conservatism. People like O’Hanlon construct an ideology that relies on hierarchical structures where people like himself are privileged gatekeepers, who have power due to their wisdom to use that power wisely. WikiLeaks is a threat to that order, bypassing the hierarchy, and disrupting the order that it creates. The vehemence of O’Hanlon’s reaction seems to indicate more than a professional rivalry, but a direct affront to his position in world affairs. I’m thinking Jack Nicholson’s “you want me on that wall; you need me on that wall.”

The thing about Iraq was that the status of being an expert got redefined as being one of the people who thought we should invade Iraq. There were plenty of actual experts who thought it was stupid. Now, the pseudo-experts in Tetlock’s sense tended to be much more in favour. Bad thinking drove out good. O’Hanlon’s response makes much more sense when you realise that being an Iraq-ist made him an expert.

One thing I will always remember about it was that expertise was actually used as an insult. Even speaking Arabic made you suspect. We were told that the camel corps arabists were all a bunch of saps and terrorist sympathisers, not like any given Kagan or O’Hanlon or Danielle Pletka and her black coffee briefings*. Ignorance was strength.

* still out there, on twitter, still propagating the same drivel in the same way, as if the huge pile of corpses hadn’t happened

In Australia, there’s a TV show called “Insiders” featuring pollies and pundits on Sunday morning (I think). I don’t suppose I would watch it in any case, but the name is sufficient to ensure that I wouldn’t do so even if they were going to announce the results of the next election.

Robert Conquest made this point years ago about the old USSR. He said you could learn just about everything that was going in in the Kremlin at any given time through a careful reading of Pravda, which makes the horrible misjudgements of the more ‘nuanced’ Kremlinologists of the time that bit more culpable.

as so often, the stock market got there first – if you want some pungent reflections on the value of “tips”, there are plenty in “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator”.

as so often, the stock market got there first – if you want some pungent reflections on the value of “tips”, there are plenty in “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator”.

I’d disagree with that. The stock market is about the one place where this isn’t true. That’s why you keep getting people making money through insider trading.

Intellectual dishonesty is when you pretend to believe P when you really believe ~P, non-intellectual dishonesty is the exact opposite.

Intellectual dishonesty is a Glenn Hubbard op-ed. Non-intellectual dishonesty is a Mitt Romney campaign speech.

You may get much the same effect among financial analysts. Analysts are employed in different strata of the financial system, with different levels of access to information. There’s analysts actually employed by the companies they analyse, then there’s sell side and buy side analysts employed by various financial organisations, there’s independent analysts and finally “blogger” analysts.

Each type of analyst has available different levels of information. Obviously an analyst working for, say, Apple has much better information about Apple’s performance. Then sell side analysts may have all kinds of market information, finally independent analysts only have entirely public information.

And yet, there’s a strain of opinion that the further away an analyst is from insider information, the better their performance is. As there’s so much public data to be had on this it would be interesting to see a study, the only thing I could find where someone has made an attempt (for one company) was this.

If true – then possibly analysts actually employed by companies feel they have to toe the company line in their predictions, and so are co-opted. Buy and sell side analysts are more agenda driven, and professionals who remain independent are still unnecessarily influenced and conservative.

Isn’t this exactly the Nate Silver story? The aggregate of publicly available information provides a far better indicator of what’s happening in the election than the “informed” musings of people with “insider” connections. Of course, I imagine the insiders find this quite threatening, hence the recent uproar over math’s well-known liberal bias.

Isn’t this exactly the Nate Silver story?

Part of the current Republican screeching is that Silver had access to internal polls from the Obama campaign, so if that’s true, no.

Gelman at The Monkey Cage says the election is too close to call. I’ll be glad when it’s over.

Btw, sorry for going off-topic, but does anyone know why U.S. political ads (which one hears on radio news stories and everywhere else) have that ghastly tinkly noise (it can’t be dignified with the term “muzak”) in the background? It sounds like a deranged gibbon trying to play a bad knock-off of Philip Glass. It’s as if the aural pollution of American life is so far advanced that political ad-makers think voters actually won’t be able to hear or comprehend the voices without that tinkly s**t in the background.

Suppose that I am a journalist.
I have to produce an article every X days, so I need a reliable news source.
The article is supposed to be about something the public doesn’t already know .
This makes insider gossip a really useful news source.
I think it is as simple as this.

LFC @57 -at the risk of being off topic. The soundtracks -and visual images in American political advertising are choosen by presumed psycological marketting experts. The goal is to provide near subliminal emotion -usually a bad emotion that the brain associates with the target of the add. The summation of automatic associations constitutes a persons gut reaction. The idea is that when the voter hits the voting booth, he just feels candidate X is icky and scary without knowing why he feels that way.

Politics is a team sport.

I would add that, although you can “learn as much or more from intelligently consuming publicly available information as you can from attending purportedly insider briefings” you do have to spend a lot of time reading and thinking about lots of information. The guy who has intelligently read Pravda et al for 15 years is much better at interpreting it than the one who skims it when something comes up. Most good intelligence is done by sitting the right kind of people in front of a feed of mostly public information for long periods. It usually takes even very good people two to three years practice as area specialists to get the hang of it.

What peter says. You can lots of info from public sources, but you need to know what your doing. And at least a little bit of insider talk, to be certain that your not missing a layer. Krugman is not really a reliable guide here, as he is already an expert, and he gets to talk to important people all the time. Even if I could get the same knowledge from sources as him, I cannot be as certain that my conclusions are sound.

I take Aristophanes’ caustic characterisation of the Sophists’ arguments as a touchstone for intellectual dishonesty: making the worse argument appear the better. It can be used as a tool for old-fashioned dishonesty, e.g. explaining why it’s better for everyone that corporations pay as little tax as possible, but it doesn’t have to be.

O.C. @61 — Thanks. I also wonder whether the fact that people are assaulted with background ‘music’ in a great many public spaces, esp. consumption spaces — supermarkets, malls etc. — makes the psychological marketing experts think that the ad would somehow be aurally ‘naked’ if it didn’t have a soundtrack. (But wouldn’t it be interesting if some [courageous] ad person decided to make an ad without a soundtrack? Might actually be quite effective.)

I.F. Stone spent his entire life proving that. Even the best of our current journalists are generally too lazy to follow his lead.

To add to Peter T @ 58, organizations contain different kinds of expertise. The core of the modern corporation, from a management perspective, is marketing. From an economics perspective, it is finance. Manufacturing or services aren’t really in there, unless they can be represented within those two (what product is marketed, how much product is sold) or they’re very visible to end-users and journalists (the iPad and Siri). The “important” people won’t be talking about those, at least not at cocktail parties and similar occasions (unless they’re so wonky and socially inept that\ they’re unlikely to be invited to those parties), and journalists won’t be writing about them. Pravda, similarly, was really informative just because the bureaucracy really was what determined what went on.

So, what is the value of the CIA? Why are there spies? Why is espionage a crime?

Big difference between people who want to find out information everyone wants hidden and those who are content to print what “insiders” tell them.

Alex @ 66 “[Secret intelligence] makes you see the world differently from consensus reality, gives you a sensation of cosmic insight, and makes you feel enormously important and confident . . . ”

This has never been my experience. Knowing official “secrets” has always felt like a burden or an obstacle. The “secret” nuggets are like rocks scattered about the landscape of your knowledge, which you have to self-consciously walk around, and which you cannot discuss, except under guarded conditions. They don’t actually add that much to your overall view, but they impose a cognitive burden, because you have to keep the secret.

Granted, I’ve never been a very important, powerful person — always more in the role of a technician/staff support/policy analysis/”expert” kind of position. In those lowly grunt roles, as some earlier commenter hinted, there’s often a shortage of arrogance, which makes one very anxious about making up definitions and constructing overarching frameworks to make sense of things, and prone to the nihilism of the paralysis of analysis, etc. Sometimes, a “secret” can be a useful bit of concrete, “certain” information, on which to nail a more elaborate, and speculative, narrative picture — an excuse to trim back the fog of caveats, which often obscure what you are trying to convey to the VIP.

I don’t know what secrets look like to the VIP. An embarrassing bit of gossip, perhaps, like knowing that the wife of a former Ambassador, which ambassador was sent to inquire about the possibility of uranium diverted to Iraq, is a spy. Maybe, what the VIP sees is like the negative of a photograph, where everthing black is white, and everything white is black, and everything I think is rank speculation is a secret, and everything I recognize as a secret is a trivial detail. Like the Secretary of State, who supposedly thought Saddam Hussein had portable chemical weapons labs, tooling around the desert, or that aluminum tubes were being diverted to a nuclear bomb project. The job of the CIA is to figure out that the aluminum tubes are, or are not, in some technical, trivial-detail-way, useful in a nuclear bomb project, or what you’d have to have, in the way of highly-specialized, can-only-buy-from-Siemens equipment, to build a mobile weapons lab, or even whether such a thing is even remotely plausible. At the CIA, NSA and other spy agencies, they are always looking for those trivial details, and trying to monitor “border routers” (as Clay Shirky said) or the import/export documentation generated at ports, and the like, to glean them.

The U.S. government has an elaborate system for classifying information communicated on its “secure” networks and stored in “secure” locations. There’s a hierarchy of security: like how good a safe, you have to use to store documents of a given level of classification, and who, with what “level” of clearance can see those documents. Classified doesn’t mean “secret”. Once something is “classified”, particularly in military nets, literally hundreds of thousands of people may have access to it. Very little that is classified is really secret, even to begin with (as a lot of State Dept cable traffic, for example, consists of news media reports), and the most important political and even diplomatic secrets, I suspect, are deliberately never classified.

In Britain, the Official Secrets Act, details the censorship powers of the government, and that seems to me to better express the usual agenda of governmental or political “secrets”. The WWII Manhatten Project type of secret is rare and exceptional. The confidential business plan type of secret is economically important, “moves markets” as they say, but is well handled by bureaucratic procedure. It is the “secret” qua authority to censor, which is politically most valuable, because the authority to censor, is a lever on power. In U.S., the Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it, is working assiduously to undo the constitutional separation of powers, which forces them into deliberation with the Congress and the Judiciary, by means of “secrets”.

What interests journalists, professionally, is the “secret”, which is really censorship in thin disguise. Some few journalists will be idealistically determined to defy the censor, but most will be rent-seekers, hoping to curry favor and win the valuable imprimatur of the censor, become the trusted conduit for “leaks”, etc. There’s a symbiotic relationship between publisher and censor, and journalists get their paychecks from publishers.

Great piece on wonkette on Nate Silver v pundits:
http://wonkette.com/488362/sad-pundits-why-wont-insiders-tell-us-who-will-win-the-election

Sb – Hobbes, if anything, seems to have tailored his ideas to piss off as many people as possible. Each new draft finds another constituency to alienate. He may not have had the physical courage to wait around in London to be thrown in the tower, but damn was he consistent. As for Hegel… he certainly avoided saying anything plainly that would offend Prussia or the Lutherans, but if we restrict ourselves to content rather than mode of expression, what are the goods on him?

I think the most obvious candidates for “respectable hack” are Cicero (practically every word is a thinly veiled apology for a pretty nasty oligarchy) and Voltaire. You could almost add Milton, but I rather suspect he took his propaganda seriously, even if it seems inadequate in places.

A good book on the history of professional hackitude might be Anthony Pagden’s Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France.

Krugman’s argument applies well enough to the pro/con side of policy question, but the value-added of journalism is also to tell us what is not available is public documents — which persons or agencies within the government, including Congress, support a particular position on issue x, are serious efforts being made to advance or retard action on the issues. In this sense, not-for-attribution and background interviews may be the only way to obtain information about what various players are doing.

Hobbes’ personal Leviathan was determined to hang all the members of Parliament, devout or otherwise, for their temerity in disbelieving in kings. To me he’s a Carl Schmitt figure – an apostle of the fake order tyrants boast of.

According to Quentin Skinner, Hogg incurred the enmity of the royalists because he said that it was ok for the Tories to go back to their ancestral English homes from their exile in France. Since Cromwell had kept their property safe, it followed that he was the legitimate ruler, and it also followed that as long as Charles II was in exile, he was not.

Whether this is pandering to Cromwell, or “la verità effettuale della cosa”, I couldn’t really say.

Alex @ 90: “Hobbes’ personal Leviathan was determined to hang all the members of Parliament . . . ”

Charles II did not try to hang all the members of Parliament. He went after those involved in the regicide. He was recalled by a Convention Parliament, and ruled in cooperation with the Cavalier Parliament for 17 years.

Alex: Is Carl Schmitt a hack or did you mean something else?

Hobbes not Hogg — grrr

Voltaire supported enlightened despotism, luxurious living, and did not think servants should be educated. He hated Rousseau’s egalitarianism. In this he differed from Diderot.

Tim Worstall: “. . . simply allowing market competition to solve that little problem . . . ”

I know this is the central intellectual self-deception in your life, and wouldn’t expect anyone to be able to disabuse you of it. I will say, though, that to those of us don’t share in the peculiar, ideological alternate reality, where the quoted assertion seems to make sense, re-asserting this nonsense just makes you look ridiculous.

“Market competition” is not a thing, not an actor, not an agent and not a cause. It is an abstraction. That is, “market competition” is, in a priori, analytic reasoning, isolating in the form of a concept, one aspect of a system. In the actual, a posteriori world, systems can exist whole, but concepts do not exist at all, and what you call, “market competition” is something people have to cooperate in doing — indeed, as a concept naming one aspect of the doing, one might say, that “market competition” is, at best, one possible range of styles, for organizing some parts of the doing. The doing still has to be done by people, and not by an immanent, abstract concept.

In the classic economic theory of the firm, the theory of production is that output is a function of input, because profit and output are assumed to be maximized, amid complete and perfect information. There is no management, no corporate strategy, no government. Here in the world, information is incomplete and imperfect, and governments and CEOs exist, and think themselves to have functions and purpose. You may try to disabuse them of their illusions about their existence as well as their usefulness all you like. It is a sad waste of life.

Git; I don’t think Grotius comes close. He was supposed to spend his life in prison for republicanism and anti-clericalism, remember? (Not that Grooty showed any moral courage in ratting out his boss to save his own skin, but…)

Bw – Personal leviathan, or geometry student? I don’t think Charles had any hand in the blasphemy legislation. (Maybe Clarendon did, but that was the one person in the world whom Hobbes most thoroughly alienated.)

Nine – Voltaire was a disgusting elitist, he was anti-political agitation (not sure how you missed that in Candide!), he was on the take from Frederick and took the role of defending despots and war-mongers from his slightly less hypocritical peers (Diderot, D’Holbach), and many other things that I’m sure I’m ignorant of. He was basically on the wrong side of all the intra-Enlightenment debates, and his sources of income give a pretty good idea of why. — As for Hobbes, I’m not sure exactly what you mean by pulling a Swift. A lot of his writing is meant to be amusing and insulting, but I think he really did believe that war is awful, vagueness in government breeds extremism and war, and that people have an obligation to obey the law.

““Market competition” is not a thing, not an actor, not an agent and not a cause. It is an abstraction.”

Excellent, so you’ll be able to let us know whether this abstraction has or is solving supply problems in the rare earths market then? Be sure to show your workings.

Bonus points for pointing to which RE company the incoming President of China’s family part owns. Who financed the US mine. Where the other two mines gearing up for production are. The number of junior miners touting projects.

What’s this nonsense about Hobbes being a hack? Have you read Leviathan? Dude was a fucking genius. (Yeah, ok, the arguments in favor of monarchy in chap. 19 are pretty weak, but at least he’s honest enough to acknowledge that monarchy is just one of several forms the commonwealth can take, that—in other words—there are no conceptual restrictions on who or what may be invested with the highest political authority in a given state.) You want some hackish arguments, I suggest you check out chap. 5 of Locke’s Second Treatise.

Git, that seems unlikely, since (I believe) he only wrote one (unpublished) tract on international law while he was a Dutch politician, and an extract of that was his essay “The free sea”. Everything in de iure belli ac pacis was done in prison or in France. Could be wrong. Do you know what the source you’re thinking of?

“The re-opened and new RE mines are substitutions for the REs that won’t be available from China in the near future, so it’s not really much to do with competition.”

Not so much. Outside China production coming online is larger than the shrinkage (even the announced, let alone what we’re actually likely to see) in supply from China. And that’s just the mines we know are coming online (if they’re not already), entirely disregarding those that might.

@109. Very good, yes. Although that wasn’t actually the point I was making. Rather, that I’ve had experience of talking to both pols and CEO types (maybe not C suite, but the decision makers within large firms) about “how” such alternative supplies might be developed. For example, rather than the German Government going off and making a deal with the Kazakh one about building a vast new mine and processing complex (one such is indeed under discussion) a better idea might be to spend a little money on the separation technology. That’s the real bottleneck in the system and there are several promising and as yet untried technologies that might solve it. And solving that problem then allows myriad small producers to be viable. And, my argument goes, having myriad small producers spread around the world would provide greater reliability of supply than replacing a mega-plant in Inner Mongolia with one in Kazakhstan.

Now my argument might be wrong. My observation though was that, in my experience, both the CEO types and the political types weren’t interested in the “lets foster a market” solution, preferring instead the “let’s have a grand plan” solution.

Meaning that I was agreeing with Henry’s (sarcastic but I’m agreeing with it as said straight) point at 11.

(For those who care about the technical stuff here. Rare earths just aren’t rare. We can get them from many different places. We could supply much of current world demand just from the wastes of other mining processes. However, each of those sources is small in and of itself. Which leads us to our problem. The separation of the REs, one from the other, is the bottleneck. It can cost $800 million to build a plant to do this using current technology (solvent extraction). And you need to have, to be efficient, a consistent homogenous stream into such a plant. You really do not want to be taking a number of small streams and trying to process them either together or in sequence. It is this processing technology that leads to having a few, several, large mines with their associated plants. Even while we have some similar amount of REs in other wastes that we don’t bother to process. My argument, and agreed I might be howlingly wrong, is that if you can use some other technology to reduce the capital costs of those processing plants, thus allowing the use of the smaller already extant streams, then you can supply world demand from those smaller extant streams and not be reliant on two or three large mines. Diversity of supply being the best way to ensure security of supply. As I say, this might be entirely wrong.)

Peter, Tim: you are missing the core of the distinction here. If the private executive is wrong, he has wasted his shareholders’ money. His shareholders can leave the firm at any time by selling the shares, so really no one is getting it who doesn’t deserve it.

By contrast a politician with a dumb idea will never be judged for it come election time. Given the ability of politicians to engage in outright theft in many places without much detection, their ability to cover up malfeasance with rhetoric is likely to ensure a lack of actual judgement.

The public welfare is an abstraction, while profit is not. Profit is either made or not, a check on any company. By contrast, it is unclear which actions contribute to the public welfare more than others.

Lastly, no mining company in the world is going to disclose improvements to its RE processing while such development is ongoing. If you disagree, you are free to allocate your own assets appropriately.

“claims, I’ve not actually run the experiment to check it but what they say is certainly feasible”

Perhaps I should explain that a little. I’ve run exactly the same technological experiment a couple of years back. It definitely works. At industrial scale. They’ve added one more wrinkle which makes it economic, rather than just technologically successful.

Actually, it really was the “Rousseau’s of Hazzard.” My great grandfather was a self-made man who used to say that he had “only the hills and woods and streams of Kentucky to give me a start in life.

He and his brother, born shortly before the Civil War, ” married two sisters named surnamed Hogg . But my great grandfather’s wife “ran oft” to Ohio, before he married his second wife, my 15-year-old great grandmother, a teacher.

You’re thinking of that 70s series “The Rousseaus of Hazzard”.
—

Emile, when you gonna get educated and stop acting like some sort of noble savage? You best remember you are in the State of Tennessee, not the State of durn Nature.

I’m not sure Iraq is the best example. Much of the information that was publicly available was, for a time, only publicly available because a journalist had been given information by an insider. Insider information – information as to how certain factions in the administration were analyzing and presenting intelligence, the intelligence itself, the biases and prior beliefs of the factions holding sway, etc. – was crucial to understanding whether an invasion and occupation would be a mistake, and the possible magnitude of that mistake.

My broader point here is that much of the valuable public information we have concerning immediate questions of foreign policy derives from insider interviews. Journalists are interested in insider interviews in part for reasons other than whether those briefings will result in greater insight into a question – there’s the fascination for the audience of learning various colorful details – but we turn to higher quality publications precisely because of the likelihood that we will encounter not only intelligent analyses and summaries of information already in the public domain, but also new information that is just passing out of the insider realm.

Roscoe, them Hazzard boys was born free, but will go everywhere in chains

Uh-huh, no chainin’ these two.

This shd work:

here

Voltaire supported enlightened despotism, luxurious living, and did not think servants should be educated. He hated Rousseau’s egalitarianism. In this he differed from Diderot.
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I would like to take a stand in favor of luxurious living and also gardening. Voltaire’s cynicism about ideological answers has certainly stood the test of time better than Rousseau’s somewhat dreamy theories about the State.

Rousseau was a gourmet cook, as it happened. I am not sure simplicity is entirely incompatible with pleasure.

Sorry… What about idolizing Frederick “the Great” and belittling universal education and democracy has stood the test of time? I’ll admit that there are still gardens, and many of them are awfully nice, but I have yet to find a homegrown salad that justifies authoritarianism. Franco died decades ago, I thought we were done with this game.

“Rousseau, the student of evolution, the anthropologist …. [also] appears as a pathbreaker for later socialist thought, with this difference, however, that his conclusion is not that everything hangs from economics, but that everything hangs from politics.” — Mario Einaudi, The Early Rousseau (1967).

Rousseau our master, Rousseau our brother, toward whom we have shown so much ingratitude, but to whom each page of this book [Triste Tropiques] should be dedicated.” — Claude Levi-Strauss, addressing a conference of anthropologists.

“Every service a citizen can render the State he ought to render as soon as the Sovereign demands it; but the Sovereign, for its part, cannot impose upon its subjects any fetters that are useless to the community, nor can it even wish to do so; for no more by the law of reason than by the law of nature can anything occur without a cause.” Jean-Jacques

“What about idolizing Frederick “the Great” and belittling universal education and democracy has stood the test of time?”

But of course that’s a peculiar summary of Voltaire’s work.

“The State, therefore, is the most flagrant, the most cynical, and the most complete negation of humanity. It shatters the universal solidarity of all men on the earth, and brings some of them into association only for the purpose of destroying, conquering, and enslaving all the rest. It protects its own citizens only; it recognises human rights, humanity, civilisation within its own confines alone. Since it recognises no rights outside itself, it logically arrogates to itself the right to exercise the most ferocious inhumanity toward all foreign populations, which it can plunder, exterminate, or enslave at will. If it does show itself generous and humane toward them, it is never through a sense of duty, for it has no duties except to itself in the first place, and then to those of its members who have freely formed it, who freely continue to constitute it or even, as always happens in the long run, those who have become its subjects.” – post by Mike B.

“Work then without disputing,” said Martin; “it is the only way to render life supportable.” – Voltaire

“his conclusion is not that everything hangs from economics, but that everything hangs from politics.”

And, for my part, these are both false totalizations. Society is neither economics nor politics and human beings are not reducible to subjects or economic atoms without violence.

Watson Ladd 11.03.12 at 12:51 pm

Peter, Tim: you are missing the core of the distinction here. If the private executive is wrong, he has wasted his shareholders’ money. His shareholders can leave the firm at any time by selling the shares, so really no one is getting it who doesn’t deserve it.
———-

Ha ha ha. Like many right wing economists, you have no idea how firms and markets, especially financial markets, work.

Why the long quote from M. Bakunin, rootless, in a discussion of Voltaire?

” Has Watson ever looked at a company report? Did he see the details of the many ideas which were considered, tried and failed? Did he see detailed consideration of the various financial, legal, technical, policy, perhaps even ethical, considerations that went into each decision?”

Free Market Economists opinions about the workings of the market are much like phrenologists ideas about the working of the mind.

I don’t follow you. Rousseau, we are discussing the author of The Social Contract, right? Not the painter? In The Social Contract, M. Rousseau argues that the state of nature gives way to the creation of The State:
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THE passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although, in this state, he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man.
—-

But that fable does not correspond to the development of human society.

Platypus.

Many political philosophers formulated “social contracts”, before and after, mostly before, Rousseau, whose contract is sometimes regarded as a criticism of the whole idea. Most of these were never intended to be taken literally. All were much criticized after the manner of Bakunin — beginning with Hegel.

There are lots and lots of good books about Rousseau, I wouldn’t just stop at Bakunin, who really doesn’t even mention Rousseau in the essay you quote from, except in the title. A very recent one is a compilation of the writings on Rousseau by Robert Wokler, Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment and Their Legacies (2012), reviewed very interestingly by our own Chris Bertram, an expert on the subject, in the August 10, 2012 issue of The Times [of London] Literary Supplement.

Rousseau favored the city state (such as Geneva) and direct democracy by male (not female) citizens. According to Wokler, during the French Revolution this was revised by the Abbé Sieyès, a self-proclaimed follower of Rousseau, who hailed the Third Estate as the embodiment of the nation. During the Terror, the Committee of Public Safety declared its acts “representative” of the General Will. All this would have been abhorrent to Rousseau. Bertram writes:
“The French Revolution would not have been possible without a rejection of some of Rousseau’s central doctrines. In The Social Contract, Rousseau had argued that popular sovereignty must be directly exercised and cannot be exercised via representatives. The Abbé Sieyès, by contrast – the first theoretician of the Revolution – repudiated this: the representatives of the Third Estate incarnated and represented the nation. Later, the Jacobins would claim that the edicts of the Committee of Public Safety were expressions of the general will, but for Rousseau, the people must always speak for themselves. For this reason, he favoured small republics, where life was simple and face-to-face communication possible. True, when asked by Corsican and Polish patriots to suggest political principles for their countries, Rousseau made some concessions to practicability, but he would surely have contemplated the modern nation state, the source of so much killing and oppression, with horror.”

Being consumed by doubt and self-criticism is skepticism. Being absolutely certain that 19 people out of twenty have no interests or abilities outside casual drunkenness, and they should really stick to cultivating plants, is more like “Prolegomena to any future bell curve”.