Opportunism versus Identifying Opportunities
In a recent email, a friend who basically shares my political views wrote:
If your solutions to the “problems of capitalism after COVID” are the same as those you were advancing to the “problems of capitalism” before COVID, I suspect COVID has had no bearing on your thinking other than to advance your opportunism.
I told him that I thought this was not the slam-dunk argument he thought, and he actually agreed with me and asked me not to quote him by name.
But I am quoting the thought because I’ve heard a similar thought expressed over the years by people of various political persuasions. During the financial crisis of 2008-2009, for instance, I advocated getting rid of deposit insurance or at least reducing the amount of a deposit on which people could get insurance, along with getting rid of various other government restrictions (such as the ratings cartel set up by the feds) that had contributed to the financial crisis. The person I was talking to–I forget who–said “I see so many people of your persuasion advocating things they advocated before the crisis and not advocating anything they didn’t already advocate.”
He said this as if he thought this was a winning argument against the reforms I advocated. I replied that the reforms I advocated would help make things better and were relevant and that, moreover, if they had been implemented well before the financial crisis, the financial crisis would have been less bad. So, I said, the fact that I advocated them well before the crisis should give me more credibility, not less, because I could connect some of the bad things that happened with the absence of those reforms.
I think that the “this crisis hasn’t caused you to change any of your views” argument is a poor one. Maybe it shouldn’t cause you to change any of your views. It’s always better, if your goal is the truth, to analyze the measures being advocated whatever the time line of your advocacy.
Go back to the original quote above. Notice the charge of opportunism. It could be opportunistic; I don’t know the people my friend is talking about. But it could also be identifying an opportunity to make a point against capitalism when the person identifying it sincerely believes that capitalism made the particular crisis worse. Again, the best way to handle this, if truth is your goal, is to ask the person to explain how capitalism contributed to the Covid disaster if, indeed, that’s what the person is saying.
READER COMMENTS
Steve X
Jun 23 2021 at 7:27pm
This brings to mind the amusing piece “Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics”
It’s hard to balance the two. In some cases there is a good argument for saying ‘this thing I advocated before would have reduced the impact of some event’. In other cases it’s tired opinion writers just trying to add another reason for why their desire would be a good idea.
David Henderson
Jun 24 2021 at 10:55am
You write:
Both are possible. That’s why it’s not a slam dunk, which is my original point. You still need to examine the analysis. Is it true that the policy would have reduced the impact? We can often figure that out. It might be hard; it might not be.
Dylan
Jun 23 2021 at 10:09pm
I agree with you that just because you advocated for something before a major event and the same thing after it doesn’t mean you’re wrong and it is fine to use that event as supporting evidence for your view. However, like both your friend and whoever you were speaking with about deposit insurance, I do tend to discount the opinions of people whose views don’t seem to change with new evidence. Particularly if they didn’t predict the event that they are now using as evidence that they were right all along.
More generally, I find that I heavily discount opinions from people that too perfectly match their priors. Libertarians arguing against government intervention isn’t going to do much for me (even if I tend to agree), but if someone is consistently libertarian in their views but is arguing for government involvement in a particular case, that gets me to sit up and take notice (I won’t necessarily agree, but I’ll be a lot more inclined to entertain the argument). Same goes for a progressive arguing for a laissez-faire solution.
Basically, someone advocating for a view that is different than what you would expect given their worldview is a decent signal that they’ve considered this topic fairly carefully and managed to come to a different approach than their standard knee-jerk reaction, and that makes me want to listen (of course, it could also be that this position lines up better with their own self-interest too, i.e. libertarian farmers that are strongly supportive of farm subsidies)
David Henderson
Jun 24 2021 at 11:11am
You wrote:
Then we agree because this is the entirety of my point.
You write:
Shouldn’t that depend on whether the evidence agrees with or conflicts with their prior views?
You write:
That’s much trickier. In the spring of 2001, I told a class at the Naval Postgraduate School that I wouldn’t be surprised if terrorists, pissed off at U.S. intervention in other countries, concocted a big explosion that killed a few thousand Americans. But I didn’t predict it. Prediction is hard because timing is everything.
You write:
I don’t think it’s that decent a signal. And your last sentence goes part of the way to explaining why.
Panic can also help explain why. I was surprised at the many libertarians who favored lockdowns during the pandemic. It’s possible that they were considering new evidence. It’s also possible that they panicked. Remember that the original purpose was to flatten the curve for a few weeks. Many libertarians favored that. But they forgot what they knew: governments that take on extreme powers don’t give them up easily.
Or consider another case: P.J. O’Rourke. I still have a T-shirt from an O’Rourke event that says “Giving money and power to government is like giving whisky and car keys to teenage boys.” At a Cato event in San Francisco at which he and I spoke in October 2001, he advocated giving more money and power to the federal government. Specifically, he advocated bombing Afghanistan to “turn sand into glass.” I think he panicked and was incredibly ignorant of the role of Afghans in 9/11. So he changed his view quickly but it didn’t show a lot of thinking.
As I said in the post, you still need to examine the arguments and recognize that the approach I criticized is not a slam-dunk. It’s good to see that you do recognize that.
Dylan
Jun 24 2021 at 12:03pm
It should, but I think that is hard to judge in practice. People have a tendency to find almost any evidence supports their prior worldview.
It is trickier and. I’ll admit, a little unfair. My target with that line was the seemingly endless pundits that tell us that something was inevitable after it happened, given this policy or that lack of policy or what have you. Yet, seemed to not predict the event (even without the benefit of perfect timing) before it actually happened.
100% agree. The fact that someone changed their mind on something or makes an exception is not sufficient to prove it’s a good argument. You still have to listen to the argument and make a judgement. I find it a decent signal that I should at least listen more carefully, but then I might overvalue opinions from people that demonstrate a certain amount of pragmatism and openness to ideas that don’t support their priors.
zeke5123
Jun 24 2021 at 8:20am
There is, after a traumatic event, a kind of narcissism of the moment where the only thing that matters is the traumatic event and all policy discussions are viewed through this lens.
Unless there is a strong reason to believe the traumatic event is a new norm, then it seems to me we should give it the same weight we give a bunch of other concerns.
Bill Conerly
Jun 24 2021 at 4:02pm
If your policy opinion comes from consequences (free markets bring prosperity) then they should be reevaluated in light of new events. But if based on principles (people are free to do as they wish so long as they don’t initiate force or fraud) then no such reevaluation is warranted.
Dylan
Jun 25 2021 at 9:00am
This is a good point, succinctly said.
I was thinking through something along the same lines, but was having trouble articulating it. By way of example, take a common libertarian response to AGW, which is to deny or minimize the problem. I assign close to zero weight to those kinds of opinions, because they seem to come to the conclusion more based upon their feelings about the ideal size of government rather than an impartial read of the science.
I’m more willing to entertain an argument from the same person who is agnostic on whether AGW is a big problem, but argues from principle against government mitigation efforts or else points out all the way that those attempted mitigation efforts are likely to not get the outcome we would want and may be worse than the status quo.
David Henderson
Jun 25 2021 at 11:41am
You wrote:
I agree. And sometimes, as in the case I mentioned in the post, the new events are consistent with the prior policy opinion. Re-evaluating, as I’m sure you realize, doesn’t always mean changing one’s mind.
You wrote:
True, but my guess is that few people actually come to their policy views based solely on principles. They also have, implicitly or ideally explicitly, an idea of how well those principles would do in the world. I wrote about that in Chapter 2, titled “Hooked on Economics,” of The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey.
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