However, I do think we can provide certain empirical predictions. My general prediction regarding Obamacare, for instance, I think is very likely to occur… although it might take beyond 2016 to happen, because the law will only be in effect for about a year by the time the next election season begins. However, given the effect of Romneycare which is nearly identical, it seems reasonable to expect a similar effect, at least in states where the law will be fully implemented. The variables there are — if certain states do not enact the Medicare expansion, that will clearly negatively impact the number of insured, and moreover any states which drag their feet on implementing the exchanges will also be similarly affected. However, with those caveats (stated prior to the numbers coming in), I’d say that the likely effect in states that enact the Medicare expansion and the exchanges on a timely basis, within 3-4 years or perhaps less, will see a drop in uninsured of approximately 50% to 2/3rds. Cost increases will continue, but I would predict at a slightly lower rate — as you may or may not know, in our existing system, costs have historically gone up twice the rate of inflation, which is obviously unsustainable.

As for the economy, it’s pretty obvious that unless the government fails in some major way (hitting the fiscal cliff for instance), there will be a steady continued recovery, and pretty strong job growth by the end of Obama’s term. Again, as I say, the same thing would have happened under Romney. My belief is the economic effects of Republican vs Democratic policies are more long-term. I.e., I think Republican policies tend towards larger bubbles and crashes… i.e., the S&L crisis, the 2008 crash, etc., I believe were caused primarily by excessive deregulation of markets which initially caused a boom and then a crash. (Again: I’m not saying I’ve “proved” this, this is merely my take on the evidence I have evaluated). I think it is more prudent to have somewhat lower growth but more stability (as Canada does).

I wanted to make a brief comment about free speech. I am well aware that Canada and the UK and most countries other than ours lack the First Amendment sort of protections on free speech. However, when I say liberals are steadfast on those principles, I mean American liberals. I think our system with respect to that is clearly superior. I don’t think the reason Canada and the UK lack this is because “liberals” don’t believe in free speech, however, I think it’s just a historical accident: their Westminster system doesn’t have a tradition of difficult-to-change constitutional law. That just isn’t part of how their older systems are architected.

Finally, examples of things pragmatic liberals believe but leftists do not: they abound, I already listed them. I have leftist friends and acquaintances who are hard core Marxists. Most of them subscribe not to Stalinist Marxism, however, but something like “libertarian socialism” (I know that sounds like an oxymoron to you), decentralized government, etc., but still, not what I as a pragmatist believe in. There are many on the left who believe that free markets should be either eliminated or much more tightly regulated than most liberals believe. Almost all my leftist friends are against ANY foreign policy intervention the United States has engaged in, and always look for some reason (i.e., that we are trying to support some corporate interests). They have reasons for thinking this: the CIA has done lots of terrible things in the past. I don’t think that drives our foreign policy as much as it did during the Cold War. Many of my leftist friends think the Palestinians are the clear victims and Israel is entirely to blame; most liberals have a more nuanced view, or actively support Israel as the more sympathetic side. Pragmatic liberals are in favor of a largely free market system with some regulation, but less than exists in European social democracies, for the most part. And so on.

kolnai you do not have to be either modest or a braggart. You are one of the most informed posters on neo’s blog. I applaud the depth of your posts. Be of good cheer.

I see what you mean.

Sorry I forgot to acknowledge your remarks. It is much appreciated, but know this –

I read your comments every day, and I don’t think I have a greater intellect than you (or anyone here for that matter). All I’ve done is read books and articles and engage in this kind of discussion for going on fourteen years now. I’m not a falsely modest man, but I’m pretty dim about a lot of things, rather slow. I just happened to have that spark for reading and ideas, and once anyone, basically, reads a thousand books, he or she can talk or write in such a way as to appear really smart. “Learned,” is how I would describe it.

Curtis pointed out in a comment on an earlier post that people like me should be used as very particular weapons by the conservative brigade. We’re not fit to be the tip of the spear – that requires media savvy and a certain knack for dealing with image (like Breitbart). But we can be the body of the spear, or at least an important part of it.

People like me are marooned in academia, and instead of things getting better for us in the universities, they are getting worse. Jonathan Haidt, bless his soul, is basically trying to change that single-handedly, and he’s not even a conservative. But, I am sorry to say, we have no place in academia today, despite the efforts of people like Haidt. The good we can do is minimal, the strain and stress of having to be a living lie (never, ever openly professing one’s beliefs until one gets tenure, if then) is, to quote Jerry Maguire, an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege.

If the academics had their way, we’d all be lined up and shot. I mean that quite literally. They despise us, with a fury I can barely process.

But there are quite a few of us, and maybe we could be put to better use than languishing in pot-bellied equanimity in think tanks. I don’t have any good ideas on the subject. Perhaps it’s just a tragedy and waste of resources we will have to accept as the price of our current culture.

Thanks for that, and I agree.

I have no idea why I’ve taken so much time to engage in this back-and-forth. Must be getting loopy.

1) Well, I’ll give you this, my friend – you’ve convinced me that you’re sincere. For some strange reason you actually are interested in this quixotic “across the aisle” discussion. I think it’s a waste of time – note that I said in my first response that you’d be better off reading books about and by conservatives than doing this back-and-forth here – and the result has been pretty much what I said it would be: Neither of us has budged an inch and we (I gather) don’t want to kill each other.

Reflect on that when you depart neoneocon city this time ’round. It has implications.

2) I realize you think I’m overly pessimistic about social science, but remember I do this for a living, and you didn’t provide me with the studies I asked for because, obviously, they don’t exist. And they never will.

It’s not postmodernism to note that human beings can’t flap their arms and fly. It’s also not postmodernism to note that human beings can’t – by the nature of their being free, conscious, limited beings – discover laws of behavior and response exact enough to provide a scientific etiology of policy or a social statics.

I think it is the social sciences that are postmodernist (though unaware of it). When you read political psychology, particularly the work of Kahneman and Tversky, the picture of human reason is naturalistic, and thus as incoherent as one would expect (one who knows, that is, that philosophical naturalism is incoherent).

3) “Anyone can convince themselves of anything…”

No, that is exactly the opposite of what I’m saying. I’m saying that we are by and large fixed in our beliefs, and no “study” is going to – or should – change that. At best, a study or studies should be one relatively small component of a change of mind, and in practice that proves to be true. In other words, in actual fact we all give studies the exact weight they deserve, because in actual fact – behavior as opposed to mere avowal – we all know how well nigh worthless they are.

And this is not the same thing as saying “empirical evidence” is worthless, or “evidence” is worthless, or all of our views are and should be “unfalsifiable.” That would only be true if a “social science study” was equivalent to a revelation of reason itself. It’s not. It is no accident that nothing about politics, economics, rationality, statesmanship, or scientific inquiry has been made better by the advent of social science studies on the causality of policy. No accident at all.

4) You continue to confuse descriptive statistics about people’s expressed opinions – the accuracy of which only depends on the reliability of the sample – with normative statistics meant to explicate causal relationships. I’m not sure you understand the difference. I never denied that polls, poll analysis, or predictions from polls could be accurate; I explicitly said otherwise (and I would be insane to deny it – you have a disarming way of reducing those you disagree with to insanity – I wish you could see how typical this is of liberal thought in general).

Anyway, at least do me the courtesy of reading what I write before you reply. The principle of charity – Learn it. Follow it. No real debate is possible without it.

5) “Liberals and leftists have different views.”

Right. How about some examples of “pragmatic liberals” who have different views from leftists?

6) Obamacare… “I will admit I was wrong.”

I look forward to it. (But it won’t happen, because the studies you rely on will tell you you’re right, and you won’t credit the ones that tell you you’re wrong – pro tip).

But Mitsu could still perform a service and reach across the gap, if that is his intent, by leaving off the intellectual and disinterested posturing and by sharing his narrative. What have been the life experiences that cause him to believe what he believes? On the face of it, floating around Palo Alto and Cambridge, San Francisco and New York and living in the tech world is almost the definition of living in a bubble, and an elitist bubble at that.

Everyone has a story, and where you have been determines a lot of what you see.

I come here primarily because I think we’re all isolated in little filter bubbles, the Internet has isolated us into Balkanized zones of “speaking with people you already agree with.” I actually would welcome discussion across party lines, though kolnai, you seem to be arguing that such a discussion is impossible. Perhaps it is, but I’d like to hope that it isn’t. There must be some universe of data we can at least try to understand *why* it is we disagree about. I am, quite sincerely, interested in having that sort of discussion, although I’ve only managed to find it in rare circumstances when I come to blogs that are on the right. It happened with Belgravia Dispatch, a former neocon blog in which the author eventually concluded the Iraq War was, in fact, a mistake, as those of us on the liberal side of the argument had been arguing. I don’t actually hope to convince any of you guys here to change sides, but I do think it’s worth making the attempt to at least understand each other, why we think what we think.

kolnai, I apologize if I’ve mischaracterized your views in any of my posts, but please keep in mind that I’m putting out my understanding of your views primarily so I can see if you agree or disagree with the characterization, so I can learn what it is you actually think. As you may have guessed nearly all my friends are liberals or leftists (and I must say, leftists and leftists can get into fights nearly as intense as liberals and conservatives, or more so).

What I’m trying to outline here is how much we actually do agree on, however. We agree that the free market is a good optimizer of allocation of goods and services. I think the vast majority of goods and services should be provided by the private sector. I think Hayek’s argument against central planning is transparently obviously correct, and so on. I made this very argument myself when I first encountered leftist thinking in college, and I rejected statism and command economies, even though some of my classmates (not many) actually argued in favor of it. I was a physics major; math and physics and numerical modeling are my thing, and it’s obvious that decentralized systems have a tremendous advantage: they parallel process information.

Regarding “studies”, I think you’re a bit overly pessimistic about the possibility of learning anything from these things. You sound almost like a postmodernist — anyone can convince themselves of anything if they look in a biased enough way at the evidence! I think that may be true, but I think you can cut through the noise. For instance, in this election I thought that election.princeton.edu was probably the most accurate poll aggregator out there. He gave an extremely accurate projection of the race. So did Nate Silver and a number of others. This was an empirical prediction that was validated by observation, as we all know by now.

When it comes to Obamacare, my prediction is that it is going to perform pretty much as Romneycare has in Massachusetts. We already know what that looks like. Costs will continue to rise, but at a lower rate, because Obamacare has some incentives to reduce costs through innovation (i.e., experiments with alternate forms of Medicare reimbursement, for instance, which incentivize preventive care, etc., paying for outcomes rather than paying for procedures, the latter of which is clearly an incentive for doctors to overprescribe treatments.) The number of uninsured will drop by about half to 2/3rds. The overall effect of the program will be deficit neutral. Those are my empirical predictions. And yes, if it varies significantly from those predictions, I will admit I was wrong.

>I didn’t ask for a litany

The point I’m making is that many of the things I think you’re afraid of are solved by at least having those basic Constitutional protections carefully agreed upon by everyone. For instance, even if it were Constitutional (which the Supreme Court has ruled it would not be) for Congress to pass a law mandating that everyone buy and eat spinach, there’s obviously no way in hell people would reelect a politician who voted for such an insane law. Democracy, in other words, is a very strong principle, it isn’t enough to prevent all abuses of power but it certainly prevents the most egregious, in stable democracies, that is, such as ours. I mean the last election was close enough that if “liberals” push things too far it’s easy for a libertarian to push back and win the election and change the policy. Free speech, democracy, elections, rule of law, independent judiciary, etc… those are bedrock procedures, if you will, which act to limit abuses of power.

We are, as a country, enamored of written rules; it’s interesting that countries like the UK are based more on unwritten “traditions”. There aren’t rules for everything. Parliament can pretty much pass any law it likes, within the limitations of “tradition”. There aren’t separation of powers as we have. I think our system is superior, but theirs seems to work somewhat adequately. They are constrained by both tradition and precedent, and by democratic pressures, as well.

I think this passage is interesting:

“I didn’t like their apologies for communism, yes. I didn’t like their hostility to Israel. I didn’t like their philosophical statism. I didn’t like their incessant knocking down of America. I didn’t like their affinity for ascription and breaking people up into groups and classes. All of that was evident to me, and I didn’t need studies to show me that I was wrong about my previous views.”

What you’re talking about sounds like college leftist politics, not liberal politics. Liberals and leftists have different views. I’ve always considered myself a progressive, and I’m sympathetic to the aims of my leftist friends, but I disagree with many of their ideas. I don’t hate Israel, but I do sympathize with the plight of Palestinians. I don’t think America is always wrong in foreign policy. Sometimes it is wrong, sometimes right (I was pro Gulf War and pro Kosovo and pro Libyan intervention and pro Afghanistan war in the beginning. I was anti Iraq War, anti Grenada, anti our many CIA operations to overthrow democratically elected governments abroad and replace them with pro-US dictators, etc.)

Pragmatic liberalism is not the same as politically correct leftist politics.

While I can agree that Ryan/Romney’s numbers do not add up; I have to note (with a loud sheeeee-it) Obama-Reid-Polosi can’t add 2+3 or cipher 5-2. Its kindergarten math Mitsu, and it doesn’t require many hundreds of words to explain. Only four are required: sixteen trillion and counting.

kolnai,

You have far more patience and a much greater intellect than I. I marvel at your willingness to engage the likes of Mitsu in conversation. Keep on trucking.