Monday, May 3, 2021

Josh and the toasty warm take

Following up on a comment by Andrew Gelman, I was going to open this post with a discussion of hot takes, but going through the Twitter feed around this topic, and I saw that lots of mainstream media and political thinkers had the same take, greatly reducing its hotness.

If you'll remember, this started with the following tweet from Josh Barro:




Before we go on, I think it's useful to break down the implicit and explicit points Barro is making. Here's my attempt:



a. Musk is fighting climate change

b. But many environmentalists dislike him

c. Because they disapprove of his style and image

The first two points establish a mystery to be solved; the third offers an explanation. While Barro may have intended this conclusion to be provocative, he treats the premise as axiomatic, as do many others.




And a whole damned essay by James Pethokoukis.

More deeply, Musk is offering an attractive techno-optimist vision of the future. It's one in stark contrast with that offered by anti-capitalists muttering about the need to abandon "fairy tales of eternal economic growth," as teen climate activist Greta Thunberg has put it. Unlike the dour, scarcity-driven philosophy of Thunbergism, Muskism posits that tech-powered capitalism can solve the problems it causes while creating a future of abundance where you can watch immersive video of SpaceX astronauts landing on Mars while traveling in your self-driving Tesla. As journalist Josh Barro neatly summed it up recently, "Environmentalism is supposed to be pain and sacrifice. Because Musk offers an environmental vision that is fun, futuristic and coded with all sorts of 'bro' aspects, he is deeply suspicious and must be stopped."

You'll notice that that these examples include liberals, conservatives and centrists. This is one of the many cases where trying to approach this with an ideological filter not on fails to help, but actually obscures what's going on. The distinction we need to focus on isn't left vs. right but close vs. far.

I don't know of another case where the standard narrative and the story told by reporters on the front lines diverge this radically, and the gap has only grown larger. In one version Musk is a visionary and spectacularly gifted engineer who, though flawed, is motivated only out of a passion for saving the planet. He does amazing things. In the other, he is a con man and a bully who, when goes off script, inevitably reveals a weak grasp of science and technology. Outside of the ability to get money from investors and taxpayers, his accomplishments range from highly exaggerated to the frauulent.

While this view may not be universal among journalists covering the man, it is the consensus opinion. 

The explanations of Barro et al. are not all that reasonable, but they are probably as good as you can get when you start with the assumption that the standard narrative is right.


3 comments:

  1. Mark:

    Wow. I had no idea. I'm also baffled by Jonah Goldberg asking for the progressive case. Goldberg's a conservative, right? So I assume he would not find the progressive case very convincing.

    But, if you want, I can do a 2x2 grid:

    Conservative case for Musk: The guy's a success. Leave him alone.

    Conservative case against Musk: The guy's a rent-seeker living off government subsidies. Government subsidies should go to people who are actually productive.

    Progressive case for Musk: The guy's changing the world. Help him do it.

    Progressive case against Musk: The guy's a rent-seeker living off government subsidies. Government subsidies should go to ordinary people, not rich people.

    I guess this kind of makes your point: the case for or against Musk doesn't change so much if you flip the political ideologies.

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    1. Goldberg is very conservative and I'm sure he was issuing a challenge he thought would make progressives look bad.

      I think the critics would be less likely to complain of rent seeking and more about Theranos-level fraud and Match King level cons, but it would still hold with liberal and conservative critics.

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    2. Mark:

      But I was trying to come up with politically tinged (left or right) criticism. To say someone's a con man or an asshole is not a liberal or conservative criticism.

      The progressive criticism of a con man or an asshole is that Musk is a plutocrat, and our society celebrates and rewards the sort of toxic behavior of plutocrats that would get ordinary people fired from his job or thrown into jail.

      The conservative criticism of a con man or an asshole is that Musk is sucking up government funds and that the powers that be let him get away with it because he's Hollywood connected and, like Al Gore, talks big about the environment but actually goes around in a private plane.

      In either case, the con man / asshole thing is key, but the political criticism gets to the point of who's allowed to get away with such behavior in plain sight.

      Just by analogy, the progressive criticism of criminals such as Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Epstein is that normal-looking or well-connected white guys can get away with just about anything and get endless second chances. The conservative criticism of these criminals is that our justice system is biased in favor of criminals and is not decisive enough. Partisans on both sides find the crimes despicable, but they use these crimes to reinforce their different views of society. With Musk it's more complicated because there are also people on both sides who like the guy.

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