“Let’s be honest. Hillary Clinton is going to be the next president of the United States.” I uttered those fateful words on election day 2016 and then proceeded to lose a few hundred dollars at Predictit.org, where I had bet on a Clinton victory. The experience made me appreciate Yogi Berra’s maxim that “it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future” even more. That experience combined with what I’ve read about experts’ lousy records making concrete predictions was chastening, to say the least, and now my default answer to, “What do you think is going to happen?” and, “What should we do about [whatever]?” is, “I don’t know.”
It’s a good lesson to remember as we mark the second anniversary of Russia invading Ukraine. I’d say allow more immigration, but that’s a good idea regardless. Reading Richard Hanania’s Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy: How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy, convinced me sanctions will be ineffective if not counterproductive. They stand a very good chance of being worse than doing nothing, and the paradigmatic case for successful sanctions–the end of Apartheid in South Africa–was not due to sanctions but due to other causes.
Was the Russian invasion bad? Yes. Is Vladimir Putin a bad guy? Yes. Do those two facts alone mean we can make things better? No.
The world is filled with problems we do not know how to solve, and it’s unwise to try to keep up with all of them and foolish to try to solve all of them. I basically stopped keeping up with current events after reading Rolf Dobelli’s essay “Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet.” Dobelli argues that news is to the mind as candy is to the body, and he explains that news takes our faulty ways of thinking about risks and makes them worse. As he puts it, for example, “Terrorism is overrated. Chronic stress is underrated.” Most of what you see on the evening news or read on your favorite news website is irrelevant to your daily affairs, and many of the confident pronouncements people are making about this or that will be wrong or correct only fortuitously. Checking the news is like going to the pantry for a bag of chips. It’s OK to do every so often, but just as chronic snacking on junk food ruins our bodies, chronic snacking on junk information ruins our minds.
I’m also inspired by Michael Huemer’s article “In Praise of Passivity” and Chris Freiman’s argument for why it is OK to ignore politics. I don’t think we’re at the stage in our knowledge of the social and moral sciences where we can confidently predict the actual, long-run consequences of many actions and interventions. We can make predictions based on models, which can be informative, but there’s enough randomness in the system that, once again, even the best forecasters aren’t very good at it. For someone who doesn’t specialize in a particular area, a citizen’s or observer’s Hippocratic Oath: first and foremost, don’t make things worse. As Hanania argues, many American military adventures abroad wind up with ad hoc justifications based on jingoism and short-run political expediency. Huemer is right: it’s OK to stand by and watch. Huemerian passivity, of course, isn’t the same as apathy. We should care about what happens in the world, but not to the point of distraction or neglect of our other duties.
In any event, politics is hard and the world is an unimaginably complex place. To the objection that it is not OK to ignore politics and that we have a duty to be informed citizens, Freiman responds by pointing out the overwhelming intellectual burden one needs to bear in order to really understand things and account for the consequences of different policies and proposals. It is hard enough for me to keep up with the scholarly literature in my very narrow field of specialization within economics, and even then, there is a lot I don’t know and end up missing. Christopher Freiman thinks it’s OK to ignore political debates even about very sensitive issues because of the sheer complexity of what is involved and because it’s by no means certain that we will make things better overall. I tend to agree.
So what are we to do? I am learning to pray with Reinhold Niebuhr for the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference. What’s happening in Ukraine right now is getting a lot of attention, but it’s almost certainly something I can’t change.
Art Carden is Professor of Economics & Medical Properties Trust Fellow at Samford University, and he is by his own admission as Koched up as they come: he has an award named for Charles G. Koch in his office, he does a lot of work for and is affiliated with an array of Koch-related organizations, and he has applied for and received money from the Charles Koch Foundation to host on-campus events.
READER COMMENTS
David Seltzer
Feb 18 2024 at 5:14pm
Art, F.A. Hayek cautioned us about the insuperable limits to our knowledge. It’s impossible to overcome. The great statistician Harry V Roberts said, more often than not, I don’t know is the best answer. He counseled me to remain both skeptical and curious.
Michael Sandifer
Feb 18 2024 at 11:50pm
You can’t hide your head in the sand just because there are limits to knowledge and forecasting. Those limits also apply to our adversaries. We should not accept a world in which naked aggression, such as that by Russia in Ukraine, is rewarded. We also should not forget that actions taken by the US and NATO allies helped guarantee the longest period of peace in Europe in the age of modern diplomacy.
vince
Feb 19 2024 at 7:57pm
Others say NATO expansion is what has backed Russia in a corner and triggered its response. Interestingly, Putin said he asked Clinton about the possibility of Russia joining NATO. Clinton later told him his “people” said it wouldn’t work.
Michael Sandifer
Feb 21 2024 at 1:52pm
Vince,
I think it’s very likely that NATO expansion helped sour the relationship between NATO and Russia, and I think it undermined Russia’s national security. But, that has to be put into context.
First, it’s a gross exaggeration to say that NATO expansion made it more likely Russia would be invaded. Russia is a strategic nuclear power, so that wasn’t the issue. However, it did limit Russia’s influence in eastern Europe, and a loss of influence anywhere, ceteris paribus, is a loss of influence everywhere.
Hence, second, we don’t want a country like Russia to have the kind of influence they want in eastern Europe, or anywhere else. They want to be able to dominate their neighbors and exploit their people just as they exploit their own. Putin runs a criminal racket and wants the rest of the world to become more amenable to his sort of corruption to enhance his personal security and profit-seeking.
I opposed NATO expansion when it occurred, because I doubted the sustainability and even relevance of such an expansion, post-cold war. I was quite wrong about the relevance.
In retrospect, the biggest mistake we made, other than perhaps failing to offer eastern Europe a Marshall-like plan, was to publicly promise Ukraine and Georgia pathways to NATO membership, with no NATO consensus on doing so, and hence no actual plan to do so.
That said, whatever one thinks of past policy, we are where we are, and we have to oppose the violent actions of an evil, criminal gangster dictator who is Hell-bent on rebuilding the old Russian sphere of influence at the expense of self-determination and democracy in eastern Europe.
vince
Feb 21 2024 at 3:38pm
Fear is the best friend of the military industrial complex. And it’s already beating the war drums for China.
Scott Sumner
Feb 19 2024 at 2:48pm
When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia there were people in America saying, “It’s not our problem”. Eventually it did become our problem. I’d prefer to provide aid to Ukraine rather than wait until it becomes our problem.
vince
Feb 19 2024 at 7:55pm
Sounds similar to the domino theory about communism in the 60s …
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 19 2024 at 3:25pm
Interesting take. The problem, it seems to me, is that most of the people who are not interested in politics are those who don’t have a strong desire to tell others how to live, while most (or at least very many) of the ones who are interested in politics are precisely motivated by their desire to dictate how others live. It is true, of course, that we cannot confidently predict the details of the social-political-economic configuration at any point in the future (I was also resigned to Clinton being elected in 2016), but there are still some broad features of the environment that we can reasonably forecast with a bit of economic and historical knowledge: for example, the higher the expected rewards of tyranny for them, the more tyrants and would-be tyrants will try to tyrannize. Even some details can be forecasted with a good degree of probability in the short run, given some initial conditions. For example, if Putin conquers Ukraine, he will be incited to conquer some other country. If Trump loses this year, he will claim that the election was rigged (or at least unfair given that he was in court or even more if he is in jail); and if he is elected, he will try to stay in power in four years’ time–assuming that he is still alive, that he has not fled to Russia, and so on, and so forth.
Warren Platts
Feb 19 2024 at 7:18pm
Gimme a break Pierre! This is pure psychological paranoia.
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 20 2024 at 9:33pm
Warren: Could I suggest that you try to remember how, four years ago, you thought Trump would be a genius and what you thought was paranoia?
Monte
Feb 19 2024 at 9:27pm
This “whatever it takes, as long as it takes” attitude is getting old. The U.S. has spent over $100 billion to date and a majority of Americans no longer have a stomach for continuing to support the war in light of everything else going on within what’s left of our own borders. Until the Biden administration can articulate a clear plan of how U.S. support and its allies will lead to victory for Ukraine, our foreign policy should remain focused on crafting a solution for bringing the parties together for a peaceful resolution.
Michael Sandifer
Feb 19 2024 at 10:03pm
Monte,
First, $100 billion is about 0.03% of GDP. The idea that we can’t afford to fund the war in Ukraine is ludicrous.
Second, there is no immigration crisis. There is a real GDP boom apparently being caused by increased immigration, which not only expands production via the expanded labor force, but also with increased efficiency. This is reducing the deficit and debt/GDP ratios.
Monte
Feb 20 2024 at 3:23am
It’s not of question of being able to afford it, it’s a question of ROI. “At any cost” is too high of a cost to pay based on pure supposition that Putin will broaden his objectives beyond Ukraine and instigate WWIII. We either broker a settlement between the two countries or resolve to support Ukraine ad ifinitum, which most Americans have little appetite for. Ending this war will require a compromise, even if the results are unsatisfactory to each side, but that would at least allow us to put a price tag on it. Funding a proxy war by virtue of an expanding GDP due to immigration is a white elephant, IMO.
You are an intelligent man, sir, but to suggest that there is no immigration crisis is to be completely divorced from reality. I agree with the findings of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability that Biden’s Border policies “have fueled the worst border crisis in U.S. history.”
vince
Feb 20 2024 at 1:11pm
Your comment suggests our GDP is over $300 trillion.
Michael Sandifer
Feb 21 2024 at 6:57pm
It should have been 0.37% of GDP. Typo.
Comments are closed.