I liked Richard Hanania’s two prior books, but less like his new third one, Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster. (“Kakistocracy” means rule by the worst, least qualified, or most unprincipled.)
I never find Hanania's arguments persuasive: he just seems to be striving hard to wash away his illiberal past beliefs by going into sycophantic, craven and bootlicking mode towards liberal elites and their values which he fetishizes under the 'elite human capital' label. This doesn't mean he's wrong in that liberal democracy is pretty good and that having good elites is better than having bad ones, or that people (all of us) are terribly ignorant and have misaligned incentives. Fawning over elites seems both a mostly incorrect view of reality and the achievements of these and also a highway to really bad political takes in the direction of enlightened despotism.
I would say political leaders that don’t have elite support tend to be autocratic (what I think is meant by “govern worse”) because they are always on the defensive and need to consolidate their power or risk an uprising of elites who want nothing more than to take it away and may have the power to do so absent drastic measures. Has nothing to do with what IQ one side or the other may have.
And populist movements (by definition those without elite support) tend to be short-lived because the elites reconfigure to take the wind out of them.
To my mind the question of whether populist governments are good or bad is beside the point. Their primary function is to hold elites accountable to the people, which elites don't tend to do of their own accord. They serve as less disruptive versions of what the French elites faced with the guillotine.
You know Trump's done some dumb stuff. Like Iran war (which Richard probably supported at one point, he shifts his foreign policy views every five second).
But at the end of the day, even the stuff I hate about Trump is kind of small beans and correctable. He did give up on Iran after all.
When elites get something wrong, it's so massive and permanent. Immigration, COVID, etc.
Ultimately if I want to be *left alone*, populists are still the best bet.
Hanania: > Revolutions and transformative political movements tend to occur in waves
I doubt this. Complex dynamic systems never produce steady waves. (You can find steady or regular waves in nature, like tiger and zebra stripes, the Fibonacci series embedded in the whorls of many plants, and ocean waves; but these are basically 1-dimensional systems and so are not complex.) It's really hard to produce steady waves from a system with many moving parts! When they're working well, they produce events (of pretty much every kind) with a technically chaotic power-law (fractal) distribution. When they're breaking down, they behave randomly, or fall into stasis. Waves are an illusion, yet humans keep wanting to find them. The best-validated "wave" is perhaps the business cycle, and yet you don't see people making fortunes riding it.
> I accept Hanania’s core claim, which is that, all else equal, political factions whose supporters are less elite tend to govern less well.
I think that to evaluate that claim, we'd have to decide what we meant by "governing well", and what we meant by "elite". Historically, there is a strong Athens vs. Sparta split; people tend to either think Sparta was governed well and Athens was not, or vice-versa, without disagreeing about any of the underlying facts.
I would take Curtis Yarvin's recent approach of putting a price value on each economic entity within a nation, sum it up, and then express it as per capita.
With Sparta vs Athens we are probably looking at military force generation. There, Sparta was better off per capita. Very clearly better off...
I recall you writing about how farmer-era societies had more reverential views of their elites (ancient Egypt being a notable example), which was less accurate than today, but perhaps more functional compared to the declining levels of trust in the present. However, I don't recall off the top of my head where you wrote that. Maybe in a tweet.
EDIT: I had bad experiences with Twitter's search function recently, so I thought it would take longer, but instead https://x.com/robinhanson/status/2054926515997917405 was the first result and was precisely what I was thinking of. I tried Perplexity.ai first, which only returned blog posts.
"But as much as I like Hanania, and found his other books insightful, I am just not that interested in which particular political candidates and parties I should have supported in each particular time and place. I guess I’m not that political."
Yes. He's very self-conscious about his ideas' optics, instead of just holding them come what may; ideas qua ideas
Richard should develop a term for political commentators who didn’t see the obvious stupidity of the entire MAGA enterprise until after Trump was elected a second time, and then pretend to be trenchant critics of the morons they helped bring to power.
I never find Hanania's arguments persuasive: he just seems to be striving hard to wash away his illiberal past beliefs by going into sycophantic, craven and bootlicking mode towards liberal elites and their values which he fetishizes under the 'elite human capital' label. This doesn't mean he's wrong in that liberal democracy is pretty good and that having good elites is better than having bad ones, or that people (all of us) are terribly ignorant and have misaligned incentives. Fawning over elites seems both a mostly incorrect view of reality and the achievements of these and also a highway to really bad political takes in the direction of enlightened despotism.
Extremely well put.
Before he went full-blown TDS about 15-16 months ago, Hanania was always interesting, ~85% correct with ~15% infuriatingly bad, over-the-top takes.
Now this has been reversed.
Bigly sad.
I would say political leaders that don’t have elite support tend to be autocratic (what I think is meant by “govern worse”) because they are always on the defensive and need to consolidate their power or risk an uprising of elites who want nothing more than to take it away and may have the power to do so absent drastic measures. Has nothing to do with what IQ one side or the other may have.
And populist movements (by definition those without elite support) tend to be short-lived because the elites reconfigure to take the wind out of them.
To my mind the question of whether populist governments are good or bad is beside the point. Their primary function is to hold elites accountable to the people, which elites don't tend to do of their own accord. They serve as less disruptive versions of what the French elites faced with the guillotine.
Scott Alexander makes some relevant points in the final section of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan
Hanania responds to Scott on a related point in https://www.richardhanania.com/p/plutocracy-the-alternative-to-caesarism
Thanks. My comment was probably influenced by having read Scott’s post a few years ago.
You know Trump's done some dumb stuff. Like Iran war (which Richard probably supported at one point, he shifts his foreign policy views every five second).
But at the end of the day, even the stuff I hate about Trump is kind of small beans and correctable. He did give up on Iran after all.
When elites get something wrong, it's so massive and permanent. Immigration, COVID, etc.
Ultimately if I want to be *left alone*, populists are still the best bet.
Hanania: > Revolutions and transformative political movements tend to occur in waves
I doubt this. Complex dynamic systems never produce steady waves. (You can find steady or regular waves in nature, like tiger and zebra stripes, the Fibonacci series embedded in the whorls of many plants, and ocean waves; but these are basically 1-dimensional systems and so are not complex.) It's really hard to produce steady waves from a system with many moving parts! When they're working well, they produce events (of pretty much every kind) with a technically chaotic power-law (fractal) distribution. When they're breaking down, they behave randomly, or fall into stasis. Waves are an illusion, yet humans keep wanting to find them. The best-validated "wave" is perhaps the business cycle, and yet you don't see people making fortunes riding it.
Oh, if he meant "in bursts", then sure.
> I accept Hanania’s core claim, which is that, all else equal, political factions whose supporters are less elite tend to govern less well.
I think that to evaluate that claim, we'd have to decide what we meant by "governing well", and what we meant by "elite". Historically, there is a strong Athens vs. Sparta split; people tend to either think Sparta was governed well and Athens was not, or vice-versa, without disagreeing about any of the underlying facts.
I would take Curtis Yarvin's recent approach of putting a price value on each economic entity within a nation, sum it up, and then express it as per capita.
With Sparta vs Athens we are probably looking at military force generation. There, Sparta was better off per capita. Very clearly better off...
Sparta is almost a complete invention. Argos was the rival, not Sparta.
I recall you writing about how farmer-era societies had more reverential views of their elites (ancient Egypt being a notable example), which was less accurate than today, but perhaps more functional compared to the declining levels of trust in the present. However, I don't recall off the top of my head where you wrote that. Maybe in a tweet.
EDIT: I had bad experiences with Twitter's search function recently, so I thought it would take longer, but instead https://x.com/robinhanson/status/2054926515997917405 was the first result and was precisely what I was thinking of. I tried Perplexity.ai first, which only returned blog posts.
Hanania is such a repulsive creature.
Immigration is the main engine of populism in Europe, pretty clearly.
"But as much as I like Hanania, and found his other books insightful, I am just not that interested in which particular political candidates and parties I should have supported in each particular time and place. I guess I’m not that political."
Yes. He's very self-conscious about his ideas' optics, instead of just holding them come what may; ideas qua ideas
Richard should develop a term for political commentators who didn’t see the obvious stupidity of the entire MAGA enterprise until after Trump was elected a second time, and then pretend to be trenchant critics of the morons they helped bring to power.
Something must be rotten in the state of Denmark ... No tech, social media and thus social contagion