Spencer Starr's an Intellectual Superstarr

20/08/2026

Why did Thomas Carlyle dub economics "the dismal science" in the mid 1800s? Because he hated economists for spearheading the emancipation of blacks from slavery.

The quote comes from an essay literally called "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question." Not kidding. He argued that Black people in the West Indies should be forced to work as servants rather than granted freedom.

Carlyle especially hated the great classical economist John Stuart Mill for arguing that all human beings share equal natural rights, regardless of race! This was truly despicable to Carlyle.

He despised classical economists because they taught that market forces, supply and demand, and individual liberty—rather than racial hierarchies and whippings—should govern society. He called political economy "dismal" because it rejected his desire for racial subjugation and presumed human equality.

20/08/2026

This is copy+pasted from ChatGPT's summary and explanation of chapter 23 of "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy", which I am still reading right now (I am halfway through actually reading the chapter right now, and this part of the chapter summary has been accurate to what I have read thus far for the record), and I just cannot help but share this because it is simultaneously extremely fascinating, impressive, and disturbing to me that Trump specifically, but also major elements of both parties in general recently (I am not saying who started it or who is to blame, just making considered observations here) are violating ***All FOUR*** of necessary conditions Schumpeter sets out for a Democracy to function in this book (which was published in 1942!) to a greater or lesser extent and have been for roughly the last decade!


ChatGPT:
"The four conditions for successful democracy: This is the analytical center of the chapter.

Schumpeter says that the democratic method works differently in different societies because its success depends on conditions external to the electoral mechanism itself. He therefore rejects any universal claim that democracy always works or always fails.

He gives four main conditions.
1. A sufficiently high-quality political class.
A society must produce enough capable people who are willing to enter politics.

Schumpeter's argument is quite elitist, but precise: democracy does not select from the whole population. It selects from the subset willing and able to become politicians. If talented and serious people avoid politics, electoral competition cannot magically produce high-quality leadership.

He thinks Britain historically benefited from possessing a relatively stable political stratum with traditions, professional norms, and experience.

The sociological point is:
Good democratic institutions cannot compensate indefinitely for a bad recruitment pool.

2. The effective range of political decision must be limited.
This is one of the most important—and easily misunderstood—parts of the chapter.
Schumpeter does not necessarily mean:
The state itself must always be small.

He means:
Not every technical or administrative decision undertaken by the state should become an object of day-to-day partisan political competition.

For example, Parliament may decide that there should be a criminal code, but specialists must work out much of its technical content. Courts, central banks, regulatory commissions, and universities can exercise public functions while retaining substantial independence from ordinary partisan politics.

So the key distinction is:
public authority ≠ continuous political micromanagement.

This is extremely important for his later socialist argument. A socialist economy can, in principle, put huge areas under public ownership without putting every factory decision up for election or parliamentary bargaining.

3. A strong, competent, relatively autonomous bureaucracy.
Modern democracy needs an expert civil service.

Schumpeter thinks elected politicians are necessarily amateurs in many technical fields. Therefore democracy requires a professional bureaucracy that:
• has expertise,
• possesses institutional memory,
• develops its own professional standards,
• is sufficiently independent to resist foolish political demands.

He goes surprisingly far here, saying that the bureaucracy must be “a power in its own right” and capable, when necessary, of instructing politicians.

That is a very Weberian part of Schumpeter.
He is not imagining democracy as complete popular control of administration. Quite the opposite: successful democracy requires zones of technocratic autonomy.

4. Democratic self-control.
This may be the most sociologically important condition.

The major political actors must accept the rules of the game even when they lose.
Government supporters cannot sabotage their own government every time they dislike a measure. Opposition parties must oppose within accepted limits. Voters must tolerate politicians actually governing between elections rather than treating every policy question as a plebiscite.

Most fundamentally, the major groups in society must substantially accept the basic institutional order.

Schumpeter says democracy works poorly when society splits into hostile camps over fundamental principles and can cease to work when the sides refuse to compromise at all.

In modern language, he is saying that democracy requires a fairly strong losers' consent equilibrium.

If every election is perceived as existential, competitive politics becomes unstable."


I am not necessarily endorsing all 4 of these as THE correct necessary extra constitutional/civic structure conditions for democracy to work here, but I think they are pretty good.

And what was so notable was that in real time as I was reading this summary before reading the chapter, I thought to myself "Huh, weird, we are kind of moderately violating the first 3 of them" as I read them, thought "That is a strange coincidence, I am sure we won't be violating the 4th one, what are the odds?!" Only to discover that we are completely violating the 4th condition with great enthusiasm lol!

19/08/2026

Over the years, I have often heard many people say that economists should study evolutionary theory and Charles Darwin's work more than they do, and I agree with this.

But as a factual matter, it is important to note that Charles Darwin himself came up with his theory of natural selection in 1838 while he was reading a biography of Adam Smith. So it was Darwin who learned from Smith and evolutionary theory already has insights from economics built into its very foundations.

Stephen J. Gould discusses how Adam Smith's economics influenced Da...

14/08/2026

Prompt:
"Back to chapter 22 real quick, footnote 17 on pages 277 and 278 sounds surprisingly Trumpy for 19th century British politics. Not as severe perhaps, but I am sure you can probably catch my drift.

Do you agree and if so, do think that's why Schumpeter included it or maybe I should ask, why do you think he included it?"


PerplexityAI:
"Yes — I see the resemblance you mean, with an important qualification. Footnote 17 describes an episode in which party machinery, voter mobilization, accusations against opponents, newspapers, rhetoric, and local party “agents” overwhelm the calm ideal of citizens independently weighing arguments; that certainly has a Trump-era feel in its populist antagonism and its willingness to treat politics as an all-consuming partisan struggle.

But Schumpeter’s larger point is not that nineteenth-century Britain was uniquely “Trumpy,” nor that this style originates with any one leader. His point is that mass electoral competition naturally creates incentives for parties to manufacture loyalty, mobilize passions, simplify issues, demonize opponents, and turn political participation into organized combat.

What the footnote says:
The footnote recounts a local British election in which political campaigning becomes socially pervasive: party activists organize voters, partisan newspapers shape opinion, and social pressure makes it hard to remain politically detached.

It portrays electoral politics not as a serene public deliberation over a common good, but as a struggle in which partisan identities and organized persuasion pe*****te ordinary social life.

That is close to the phenomenon you are recognizing: political affiliation becomes a social identity; opponents are not merely people with different policy views but figures to be distrusted, defeated, or morally condemned.

Why Schumpeter includes it:
He includes it as empirical color for his broader theory of democracy in Chapter 22. He wants to show that the electorate does not first form a fully rational, independent “will” and then select leaders to carry it out. Instead, parties and leaders actively create, organize, and channel voter opinion in the course of competing for power.

The episode illustrates his reversal of the classical picture:
• Classical doctrine: citizens generate demands and leaders carry them out.
• Schumpeter’s theory: leaders and parties generate programs, identities, and appeals; voters choose among the resulting alternatives.

Why the comparison has limits:
The analogy should not be pushed too far. The institutions, electorate, media technology, legal context, party systems, and scale of nineteenth-century British politics differed radically from contemporary U.S. politics. And Trump’s political role is not reducible to generic partisan mobilization.

Still, the footnote is striking precisely because it supports Schumpeter’s broader, transhistorical claim: modern electoral politics repeatedly produces intense party organization and emotionally charged mass persuasion.

He likely included it to make clear that the departure from democratic idealism was not an aberration of his own interwar moment; it had been visible in an admired nineteenth-century parliamentary system as well."

12/08/2026

Note: conflict theory is an extremely broad umbrella term for an entire social theory paradigm I learned about in my introductory sociology class at UCI. Prominent conflict theorists include Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hi**er, and Friedrich Nietzsche, among many others.

It is a way of looking at the world which sees conflict between different groups (whether they be races/ethnicities, socioeconomic classes, cultures, civilizations, countries/nations, religions/denominations, etc.) as fundamental and unavoidable.


My prompt:
Game theoretically speaking, conflict theory is a self fulfilling prophecy, to some extent at least.


ChatGPT's response:
Yes. More precisely, conflict theory can generate self-reinforcing strategic dynamics that make its own description of society increasingly accurate.

Suppose two groups, A and B, could potentially cooperate and create a positive-sum outcome. But members of A adopt a strong conflict-theoretic model:
B's apparent cooperation is really an attempt to advance B's interests at our expense.

That changes A's optimal strategy. Concessions become dangerous, compromise looks like weakness, and accumulating power becomes prudent. So A defects, organizes politically, withholds trust, or tries to capture institutions.

Now consider B. Even if B didn't initially have the worldview attributed to it, it observes A behaving antagonistically. Given that behavior, it may become rational for B to organize defensively and seek power itself.

You can represent the resulting interaction as something resembling a Prisoner's Dilemma or security dilemma (see attached image):
*See attached image*

If each side comes to believe that the other is likely to play conflict, then playing conflict becomes individually rational—even though mutual cooperation Pareto-dominates mutual conflict.

And that's where the self-fulfilling aspect gets especially interesting:
belief that social relations are fundamentally conflictual → defensive/competitive behavior → reciprocal defensive/competitive behavior → genuinely conflictual social relations → apparent confirmation of the original belief.

This is closely related to the Hobbesian security dilemma in international relations.

Two states might both prefer peace, yet if each interprets the other's military buildup as evidence of aggressive intentions, defensive precautions by each can produce an arms race. The belief needn't initially be true for behavior based upon the belief to make it more nearly true.

There is an important qualification, though: this doesn't show that conflict theory is false. Sometimes interests really are opposed.

If A's gain necessarily entails B's loss—or one group really is attempting to dominate another—then recognizing the conflict may simply be accurate strategic reasoning.
So I'd sharpen your observation to:

To the extent that actors' interests are potentially compatible, widespread adoption of a worldview that interprets social relations primarily as contests for power can endogenously alter incentives and behavior in ways that make those relations more antagonistic, thereby partially validating the worldview that helped produce the antagonism.

That's a genuinely interesting game-theoretic criticism because it attacks neither the motives nor intelligence of conflict theorists. It's an equilibrium-selection argument: beliefs about what game we're playing can sometimes help determine which equilibrium we end up inhabiting.

11/08/2026

When I was in my late teens, I was told that serious people exist. People who actually take the time to carefully read an article or a book before commenting on it.

People who, if they don't understand calculus or regression analysis, would never comment on a book or paper which fundamentally involves calculus or regression analysis. And I naively believed this to be true.

I now realize I was misled. I'm sure there are serious people out there, I am sure that they do exist. But even if you deliberately go out looking for them, they can still remain elusive.

07/08/2026

From the article:
"The Self-Interested Voter Hypothesis (SIVH):
The self-interested voter hypothesis is exactly what it sounds like, it is the hypothesis that most voters in democracies cast their votes with the goal of electing candidates who will pursue policies which will benefit them personally. Most people take this view for granted when talking about how other people vote, but not how they themselves vote. It is seldom treated as a hypothesis.

This is viewed as obviously negative by most citizens; however, interestingly, if people vote in a narrowly selfish way, there is no simple way to untangle the overall effect of misconceptions on policy, the problem becomes untractable. Fortunately for the theorist, according to Caplan, the SIVH is unfounded. Quoting Caplan’s summary of the literature testing the SIVH in political science:
'Start with the easiest case: partisan identification. Both economists and the public almost automatically accept the view that poor people are liberal Democrats and rich people are conservative Republicans. The data paint a quite different picture. At least in the United States, there is only a flimsy connection between individuals’ incomes and their ideology or party. The sign fits the stereotype: As your income rises, you are more likely to be conservative and Republican. But the effect is small, and shrinks further after controlling for race.

A black millionaire is more likely to be a Democrat than a white janitor. The Republicans might be the party for the rich, but they are not the party of the rich. We see the same pattern for specific policies. The elderly are not more in favor of Social Security andMedicare than the rest of the population. Seniors strongly favor these programs, but so do the young.

Contrary to the SIVH-inspired bumper sticker “If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament,” men appear a little more pro-choice on abortion than women. Compared to the overall population, the unemployed are at most a little more in favor of government-guaranteed jobs, and the uninsured at most a little more supportive of national health insurance.

Measures of self-interest predict little about beliefs about economic policy. Even when the stakes are life and death, political self-interest rarely surfaces: Males vulnerable to the draft support it at normal levels, and families and friends of conscripts in Vietnam were in fact more opposed to withdrawal than average.'"

Note: This article will be much easier to understand for anyone who has taken (and understood and remembered) at least one economics…

06/08/2026

This is fascinating to me for some reason. I listened to this interview carefully all the way through at least twice when it was posted back in January or February, and felt like I understood most of what this long time world leading authority on fascism was saying at the time.

But I knew so much less about Hi**er, Mussolini, the 3rd Reich, fascism, Na**sm, WWII, the historical context of the 20s in Germany and Europe more generally, etc. that now after listening to it again yesterday, I realized that I did not understand nearly as much of it as I thought I had the first and second times around.

Moreover, now I can really tell the difference in caliber between his takes as a scholar who literally specialized most of his entire research career on fascism and the takes of others I have listened to who have never done any proper scholarly research on it and have not had decades of learning to go off extemporaneously like he does!

What do we actually mean when we say “fascism,” and who gets to dec...

06/08/2026

I usually dislike my own writing a lot and find proof reading very painful because of that, but going back and re-reading this article of mine from well over a year ago, I was pleasantly surprised.

I stand by this article completely and I am proud of it:

Note: This article will be much easier to understand for anyone who has taken (and understood and remembered) at least one economics…

06/08/2026

(This post has nothing to do with Israel or Palestine or Zionism, just so you know.)

I'm really glad I never caught the jew hating mental parasite despite growing up in a rural area with roughly zero jews per square mile because if I had, I would have never believed anything economists say because most of my favorite economists and most of the great economists of all major schools of economic thought have been and are Jewish lol.

I never even used to notice this or think about it at all until recently because it was completely irrelevant to me. For instance, I didn't even know Bryan Caplan is half Jewish until a few months ago and I have 3 of his books on my bookshelf, but I also have David Friedman, Rosenberg, and Landburg on my bookshelf. Plus, I also recently found out that Gary Becker was Jewish too, I had no idea, and he's one of the GOATs of economics.

And literally while writing this post, I found out that David Ricardo and Kenneth Arrow were Jewish as well lol! So was Paul Samuelson, Simon Kuznets, Ludwig Von Mises, Abba Lerner, Robert Solow so is Paul Krugman and Israel Kirzner, and it just keep going.