Alienation & doublethink

“The right side lost, but the wrong side won”. I was reminded of John Le Carre’s assessment of the Cold War by a recent exchange in which Allison Pearson claimed that she knew “hardly anyone” who knew somebody who’d had Covid only to immediately say that her whole family had had it.

This seems nonsensical. But it’s not. It reminds me of what happened in the former USSR, where the conflict between the reality of day-to-day life and the imperative to conform to ideology led to an Orwellian doublethink. As Timur Kuran has written:

The individual citizen’s mind was divided into two layers, one “pragmatic” and the other “ideological”. The former layer contained the practical information necessary to get things done, derived mostly from experience…The latter consisted of abstract information, drawn primarily from public discourse. (Private Truths, Public Lies, p218)

People had to present different personalities. Kuran cites one Russian who said after the collapse of the USSR that he had six faces – one each for his wife; his children; close friends; acquaintances; colleagues; and for public display. There was, says Kuran, a sharp distinction between public and private opinion.

Ms Pearson was practising just such doublethink. Her public persona in the griftmedia required her to present an ideological face and downplay Covid, but her lived experience in her private life dictated otherwise. In that exchange she jumped from one face to another.

That she had to do so is the product of our latter-day media, well described by Sarah Ditum. She says she would look for “something that I could be mad enough about to write 600-800 fiery words on it.” But, she says, some of this writing “had a dishonesty that made me feel ashamed”. As with Pearson and Soviet citizens, there was a public persona and a private one.

It’s not just journalism that produces such doublethink, however. Tony Yates tweeted yesterday:

I teach models with optimizing consumers, and spent 1/1000 time buying a new washing machines as I have so far spent sourcing a second hand 2nd bike.

Now, you can perhaps salvage some rationality from this particular example (see thread). But there is a general point there – that many academics have taught about optimizing consumers whilst knowing that such beasts don’t exist in reality. Students, Deirdre McCloskey has written:

Come to believe (until experience drives the madness out) that economics is about a certain mathematical object called an “economy”. They have no incentive to learn about the world’s actual economy. (Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics, p173).

Again, we see a conflict between the public lie of academics telling their students about optimizing behaviour, and the private truth that they know people behave otherwise.

The point broadens. In Bullshit Jobs, the late David Graeber described the “spiritual violence” caused by a paradox – that our sense of self-worth is tied to working for a living, but we hate our jobs. Our jobs require us to pretend. Not just the pretence of grifter journalism or teaching about rational behaviour, but the pretence that managerialist waffle is meaningful or that bullshit jobs are actually worthwhile. Most of us, to some extent or other, must wrestle with the dissonance this causes.

This is of course not a new observation. Here’s Marx in 1844:

What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor?

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. 

In capitalism, even well-paid, comfortable jobs – perhaps especially well-paid comfortable jobs – require a denial of ourselves and of reality, that we adopt a different personality.

Which brings us back to Le Carre. One good objection to Soviet communism was that enforced widespread dishonesty. People had to deny fundamental truths which thwarted their true natures and hence their freedom. That’s why the right side lost the cold war. But capitalism does the same thing. Which is why the wrong side won.

Comments

[Dan Davies]

I think Tony's decision was perfectly rational, as long as one considers "researching second hand bikes" to be a leisure activity, which for a lot of people it obviously is.

[William]

Not sure that Pearson is doublethinking. In doublethink, each aspect has to be consistent, but may contradict other aspects.

Pearson simply lies all the time; truth is irrelevant. She is, in the sense of Harry Frankfurt, a bullshitter.

[Joe Otten]

I think this sort of doublethink is terribly common.

Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon discusses it in relation religion: that people are quite happy to profess the correct supernatural beliefs but behave as if they aren't true.

I think there is an awful lot of it in politics too. It is not always a great idea to live by the nostrums of your political tribe, and it is helpful to maintain this separation.

I'm less convinced of the example of economics. The important thing is not whether the assumptions behind our models are correct, but to what extent our models are robust against them being incorrect.

[Peter Briffa]

Or maybe Ms Pearson just meant she didn’t know anyone who had had it badly.

[rsm]

"In capitalism, even well-paid, comfortable jobs – perhaps especially well-paid comfortable jobs – require a denial of ourselves and of reality, that we adopt a different personality."

Spot on. My brother had a well-paid, comfortable, corporate accounting job, complete with corner office and underlings, but he used to tell me he had to lie all the time. He killed himself a few years ago. I think the stress of trying to justify what he knew in his heart was wrong tore him apart. I miss most the times we had as kids, playing catch, before he decided he needed to go into accounting to make money.

[ltr]

Please explain this essay to me in a sentence or 2; I am lost after a careful reading.

Thanks!

[dilbert dogbert]

Tony Yates:
So many levels in the sentence.
The one that struck me is that Tony does not use the washing machine.

[dilbert dogbert]

Deirdre McCloskey;
"They have no incentive to learn about the world’s actual economy."
Please tell me how you learn about the world's actual economy? I think you try to measure what is happening and see if you can make sense of it. In engineering the saying goes: If you can't measure it you can't control it. Economists just might be interested in controlling the bad effects of turbulence in the "actual" economy.
Not talking to friends and reading BS put out by special interests.

[ltr]

Deirdre McCloskey,

Thanks; this gave me a sense of the essay which I had missed and your explanation is perfect and what I too teach.

[DS]

It's fair to say economics education lacks real world empiricism and is model heavy. But it's entirely unfair on economics lecturers and students to suggest they're taught or believe that individuals are rational maximisers.

Lecturers were at pains to say that this is an assumption that definitely doesn't apply to individuals and individual decisions, and there's debate abut if and when it is useful assumption in models. Even if they didn't say this, it would be patently obvious to any student that real life's not like that.

Where it does slip in is -
- often probably not as good an assumption as economists think/thought
- often economists and, more often, others don't realise the work the assumption is doing in a given theory
- non-economists cite it blindly as a critique of whatever economics they currently don't agree with

[ltr]

Allison Pearson claimed that she knew “hardly anyone” who knew somebody who’d had Covid only to immediately say that her whole family had had it.

This seems nonsensical. But it’s not....

[ Again, I am lost. Of course this is nonsensical. What am I missing? Please explain. ]

[ltr]

December 17, 2020

Coronavirus

UK

Cases   ( 1,948,660)
Deaths   ( 66,052)

Deaths per million   ( 971)

Germany

Cases   ( 1,438,438)
Deaths   ( 25,165)

Deaths per million   ( 300)

[D]

@rsm sorry for your loss

[derangedlemur]

@itr
As long as she doesn't know anyone who knows her family (besides other family members, obvs), but knows a large number of other people, none of whom had covid, it could be true.

[Jim]

Really enjoyed Richard Dearlove in the Tgraph putting the poison into David Cornwell. Like a bitch fight between two fantasy peddlers.

Can't look at the Telegraph's 'journo' lineup without thinking 'how can they possibly believe that'.

Taking a closer look we find failed politicians and SPADs, wannabe politicos and SPADs, the children of politicos wanting to get on the gravy train. Then an assortment of more or less professional journos who plainly enjoy the Tgraph's shilling. Worth a free squint but no more.

More widely I have met plenty of professionals who say privately 'I know this won't work - but the boss says....' Only a fool or a ditch digger can afford to be honest. Therein lies the rub, it rarely pays to speak truth to power, just say yes boss and think of one's villa in Provence.

But back to the Tgraph's journos. A common factor is they are all clinging to the greasy pole. Only a few failed articles or unwise words from an ordinary job on a measly £50K. Business is full of people who have clawed their way up the pole and damn well intend to stay there whatever sucking up it takes. To be paid more than £150K you have to be a bit of an a-hole even if you smile sweetly. Or you could be one of the very very few of us with any talent.

[rsm]

D: thanks. I blame my brother's death on indoctrination in neoliberalism at the hands of Berkeley economics professors during the height of Reaganism in the mid-1980s. I thus dedicate my efforts to destroying economic professors' influence on public policy. It's personal!

DS: the problem is if economic agents deviate from rational maximising behavior, prices are arbitrary and noisy, as Fischer Black contrarily said in Noise (ironically also published during the height of Reaganism, and roundly ignored since).

If prices are arbitrary, inflation is psychological, and the best way to deal with it is through the central bank controlling inflation expectations by buying and selling inflation swaps using open market operation to set expectations as they wish.

[Steven Evans]

" That’s why the right side lost the cold war. But capitalism does the same thing. Which is why the wrong side won."

How old are you? 16?
How many millions of its own people did the Soviet regime murder? How many did it send to forced labour camps?

That's why they had to have 6 faces - it was a matter of life and death. Allison Pearson has 2 faces so she can earn a living. It's quite common. Grow up.

[kartheek]

1.during the stalin purge 7,50,000 killed.(Wikipedia)
2. Czars have also sent people to those cold areas.sending people to labour camps (with backing of law)may look less sinful in light of US imprisoning its citizens(by law).Same percentage in USSR & USA.
3.the starvation due to drought (Ukraine )is not murder despite what Anne applebaum says.It is mismanagement because there are no such things afterwards in USSR.(starvation deaths).

About two face or three face, these are roles we play depending on circumstances.(father,brother,son,friend,boss,subordinate etc.,

[ltr]

My brother had a well-paid, comfortable, corporate accounting job, complete with corner office and underlings, but he used to tell me he had to lie all the time....

[ I was so moved and I am so dearly sorry. ]

[ltr]

As long as she doesn't know anyone who knows her family (besides other family members, obvs), but knows a large number of other people, none of whom had covid, it could be true.

[ Agreed, but this is just playing a role. ]

[ltr]

December 18, 2020

Coronavirus

UK

Cases   ( 1,977,167)
Deaths   ( 66,541)

Deaths per million   ( 978)

Germany

Cases   ( 1,469,761)
Deaths   ( 25,997)

Deaths per million   ( 310)

[aragon]

This appears relevant and current:

"Everything We’ve Learned About Modern Economic Theory Is Wrong"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-11/everything-we-ve-learned-about-modern-economic-theory-is-wrong

"His beef is that all too often, economic models assume something called “ergodicity.” That is, the average of all possible outcomes of a given situation informs how any one person might experience it. But that’s often not the case, which Peters says renders much of the field’s predictions irrelevant in real life. In those instances, his solution is to borrow math commonly used in thermodynamics to model outcomes using the correct average."

[ltr]

Conservative leadership essentially abandoned us or at least ordinary residents to the coronavirus. Labour, after Jeremy Corbyn was driven from the party, ceased to care.

December 19, 2020

Coronavirus

UK

Cases   ( 2,004,219)
Deaths   ( 67,075)

Deaths per million   ( 986)

Germany

Cases   ( 1,479,579)
Deaths   ( 26,181)

Deaths per million   ( 312)

[ltr]

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-12-20/British-health-secretary-says-new-virus-strain-out-of-control–WnG1l1d6zC/index.html

December 20, 2020

British health secretary says new virus strain ‘out of control’

British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said Sunday that the government has imposed a strict Christmas lockdown in London and southeast England because a new strain of the coronavirus was “out of control.”

Hancock warned that new restrictions may have to remain in place for several months until the virus vaccine is fully rolled out.

A number of European countries have or are considering suspension of flight and train arrivals from the UK to prevent the spread of the virus….

[Blissex]

Our blogger and many previous commenters are misdescribing the wondrous concept of "DoubleThink": it is not the same as hypocrisy, that is believing one thing and saying another, or saying something in private and something different in public; it is not even the genuinely believing two contradictory things without realizing that they are contradictory.

"DoubleThink" is the ability to genuinely believe two contradictory things, knowing that they are contradictory. In one of the examples by O'Brien IIRC it is the ability to see someone still standing on the ground, and at the same time knowing with certainty that he is floating in mid-air, because the Party said so.

That's why "DoubleThink" is hard to achieve and has to helped along by switching to thinking in "DoubleSpeak".

[Blissex]

«“ergodicity.” [...] which Peters says renders much of the field’s predictions irrelevant in real life.»

The story with "ergodicity" could be regarded as trivial: there are "synchronic" ("ensemble") and "diachronic" ("time") statistics, and the latter is effectively taken to mean "path dependency", which is a very old concept.

"Mainstream" Economics does not accept "path dependency" because models including it are incompatible with the three parables of J.B. Clark, of which the central one is that the distribution of factor income depends solely on "merit", absent government distortions.

The whole field of Economics is based on the notion of "internal consistency", that is consistency with the those three parables, and not with the outdated concept of "external consistency" (that is with the much overrated "real life"), so that the "field’s predictions" are "irrelevant in real life" is itself irrelevant.

«In those instances, his solution is to borrow math commonly used in thermodynamics to model outcomes using the correct average.»

That's just borrowing inappropriate tools from physics or thermodynamics; even if for example that Prigogine guy wrote interesting things about thermodynamics are also useful in studying the political economy.

The concept of ergodicity that applies, at least in the short term, to statistical modelling of the political economy is instead that from information theory (statistics is founded on information theory more than on thermodynamics). As to that JM Keynes, who also wrote a "Treatise on Probability" already discussed a century ago the limits of assuming ergodicity (in the information theory sense) of statistics about the political economy.

My favourite idealization of the state political economy is as a viscous fluid in a simulated annealing system with many local maxima, which is inspired by both thermodynamics and information theory (and implicitly by the outer reaches of game theory in which the payoff matrix is not known in advance and varies with time).

[rsm]

Finance has figured out how to create ergodicity even if it does not exist naturally: Exchange Traded Funds allow any individual investor to tie their returns to the ensemble average. Peters completely misses this fairly recent financial innovation. I can make a bet on the S&P 500 index, relying on the top performers, whoever they happen to be at any one time, to drag my own returns up.

Peters' naively simplistic model of betting ignores the way bets are made in the real world. He also ignores options, volatility ETFs, and the fact that many agents (such as Trump) go bankrupt (six times) and still get to continue betting.

[rsm]

> the payoff matrix is not known in advance and varies with time

A significant volume of financial bets are defined risk, where you know the payoffs beforehand. You can pay a small premium for in-the-money option butterflies and get out while the trade is still profitable. You are guaranteed a profit, as long as you set stops or actively monitor.

In other words, financial uncertainty can be virtually eliminated, thanks to financial derivative innovations.

[Dipper]

UK vaccination total now just over 500,000 bringing the combined UK and EU total to just over 500,000.

[ltr]

UK vaccination total now just over 500,000 bringing the combined UK and EU total to just over 500,000.

[ Importantly stated. ]

[cjcjc]

"3.the starvation due to drought (Ukraine )is not murder despite what Anne applebaum says.It is mismanagement because there are no such things afterwards in USSR.(starvation deaths)."

I murdered a man yesterday. But I am not a murderer since there has been no such thing afterwards.

[ltr]

December 21, 2020

Coronavirus

US

Cases ( 18,473,716)
Deaths ( 326,772)

India

Cases ( 10,075,422)
Deaths ( 146,145)

France

Cases ( 2,479,151)
Deaths ( 60,900)

UK

Cases ( 2,073,511)
Deaths ( 67,616)

Germany

Cases ( 1,534,116)
Deaths ( 27,297)

Mexico

Cases ( 1,320,545)
Deaths ( 118,202)

Canada

Cases ( 515,314)
Deaths ( 14,331)

China

Cases ( 86,852)
Deaths ( 4,634)

[ltr]

December 21, 2020

Coronavirus   (Deaths per million)

UK   ( 994)
US   ( 984)
France   ( 932)
Mexico   ( 912)

Canada   ( 378)
Germany   ( 325)
India   ( 105)
China   ( 3)

Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases are 9.0%, 3.3% and 2.5% for Mexico, the United Kingdom and France respectively.