James E Hartley

Want to Hear a Story?

Would you rather hear a story or work through an economic model?

Yeah, I know that is a very tough question to answer. They are both so enticing. Fortunately, a good story and an economic model are not as different as you think.

Robert Shiller wants to talk about stories. Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events is all about stories. Bitcoin, Rubik’s Cubes, Stock Market Bubbles, Social Distancing. OK, that last one isn’t in this book, but it will almost certainly be in the extra chapter added in the paperback version whenever that comes out.

This is one of those books you really read just for the stories Shiller wants to tell. He has lots of stories (so many stories!) about how a narrative goes viral and suddenly everyone believes the narrative. Why? Well, you know the narrative is true because everyone else is saying the same thing, and if everyone believes it, then it must be true, right?

The interesting thing about the narratives that influence public policy making is that sometimes the narrative actually is true. But, not always. Once a narrative gets established in the popular imagination is it very hard to dislodge it. As Shiller notes, “Truth is Not Enough to Stop False Narratives.” Therein lies the problem. Think of all the things you know to be true about the economy. You most likely know these things are true because you have heard multiple people saying similar things. Some of those things you know actually are true. Some are not. How to tell the difference?

Shiller’s argument is that these narrative stories spread much like a virus. He even has an appendix on “Applying Epidemic Models to Economic Narratives.” (Sometimes a book and a particular historical moment just accidentally coincide.) How quickly the economic narrative spreads depends on the contagion rate and the recovery rate (you might have heard about these sorts of models lately). The contagion rate is how easy it is for someone to believe the economic narrative; the recovery rate is how easy it is for someone to stop believing the narrative.

If you think about all those internet stories about some absurd, impossible thing that people send around to each other, you see how this works. The contagion rate is how believable it is to people who want to believe such things. The recovery rate is how long it takes for people to look up the story on Snopes and find out it is yet another crazy story with no basis in reality. Some stories just die right away. Others linger for a very long time.

Shiller tells all sorts of stories about how people become convinced about economic reality. He does try to sketch out a theory on how this all works, but the theory is so cursory that it has zero predictive value. “Epidemics can be Fast or Slow, Big or Small.” Uh, yeah, that about covers all the options. “Narrative Constellations Have More Impact than Any One Narrative.” Well, that is at least an important observation. “Contagion of Economic Narratives Builds on Opportunities for Repetition.” Now that one is actually interesting.

I was talking with a student not too long ago about how quickly the coronavirus narratives spread—not the virus, but the stories about the virus. She noted that on social media, you can see a story and then five seconds later you see another person repeating the same story, and so after a few minutes on social media, you have seen the same story repeated many times. Extrapolate—if you see the same idea repeated every five seconds as you scroll through your favorite social media platform, then after 10 minutes, you have thought about it 120 times. Now that you have thought the same thing 120 times, you know it is true.

Think about product shortages. You read that stores are running out of essential products. You aren’t worried. Then you read it again, and again, and again as people keep sending out the same story over and over. Next thing you know, you rush to the store to buy everything is sight before everything is gone. Suddenly a store does run out of something, and that generates another round of stories and another panic wave of buying. Nothing at all happened to the supply chains here; there never was a real shortage. This is, by the way, exactly the same story as the bank runs of the early 1930s.

Shiller’s book is thus a fun read if you like to watch how economic narratives spread. But, it is also important in another way. There are far too many economists who have lost sight of what an economic model actually is. They look all mathy and exciting, so lots of economists think that an economic model is just a bunch of math giving an excuse to do some statistical work. But, economic models are narratives. They tell a story. If you step back from the math just a bit, you can see the story. And the dirty little secret of far too many economic models is that it is pretty obvious they are false as soon as you translate the story into words. But, most economists never do that.

Alfred Marshall, a first rate mathematician who was part of the move in the early 20^th century which increased the amount of mathematics in economics, once noted:

But I know I had a growing feeling in the later years of my work at the subject that a good mathematical theorem dealing with economic hypotheses was very unlikely to be good economics: and I went more and more on the rules—(1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the Mathematics. (6) If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3. This last I often did.

That is a lesson far too many economists have forgotten. Shiller is trying to convince economists to pay more attention to how narratives about the economy spread. But, the other important thing a book like this might do is convince economists that they already are looking at narratives every time they look at a mathematical model.

Want Some Advice?

“Should I read Persuasion?” you ask.

How shall I reply?

It is rare that a book creates such a problem of recommendation.

The novel is, as you know, by Jane Austen. Generally speaking, it is always a simple matter to recommend Austen. Pride and Prejudice is a serious candidate for Best Novel Ever. So, presumably if someone can write the Greatest Novel of All Time, the rest of her output is at least minimally worth reading. Right? Ah, but can I answer that?

Now only a churlish sort of person would ever disrecommend Austen. She writes beautifully about beautiful people in a beautiful world. There is a reason that a Jane Austen Ball has the tinge of the romantic hanging about it. But, does that mean it is OK to recommend reading Persuasion?

Why the angst? Persuasion the novel is about Persuasion the act. Before the story starts, our heroine Anne Elliot wanted to marry the dashing Captain Frederick Wentworth, but was persuaded to avoid this romantic entanglement by the well-meaning Lady Russell. Fast forward nearly a decade, the novel begins and Anne, still single, meets Wentworth, also, mirabile dictu, single. You know how it ends. It’s Austen.

A novel with a plot that hinges on the idea that persuading people to do things is a really bad idea. Should I persuade you to read it?

Is persuasion itself an ethical act? The act of persuading is an assertion that the persuader knows something the persuadee does not. The persuader has decided that the persuadee should act in a certain manner. There is no escaping the fact: if I try to persuade you to do something, then I am fundamentally asserting that I know better than you what will be best for you.

This raises a pair of deep problems. If you are trying to persuade me of something, how do I know that your motives are pure? After all, you are trying to change my behavior by asserting that your advice is in my interest, but you might equally well be trying to persuade me to do something because it is actually in your interest, not mine. This is exactly what you and everyone else does when playing games—admit it, you have tried to convince your opponent to do something because you thought it would help you win. Do you do that in life too?

Second, if you are genuinely trying to improve my lot by persuading me that a certain course of action is best, how do I know that you actually understand what is best for me? Why should I trust that your advice is good? And, now flip the matter around. If you are trying to persuade someone of something, how do you know that your advice is good? How do you know that you are right in what you are trying to persuade someone to do? Do you really know the other person and the situation that well?

It’s a tricky problem. You have a friend who is dating a person who is fundamentally unsuitable for your friend. But, your friend is in love, blind to the massively obviously failings of the beloved. Is it your right to try to persuade your friend that this relationship is manifestly not good? Is it your obligation to do so? Or do you stand by and watch your friend go down a path which you know will only end in misery?

That question is probably unsolvable. Persuasion is just a fact of life. Obviously, if I think you should do something, I will try to persuade you to do it. It’s hard to be a college professor and not think that I should, at a minimum, try to persuade students that learning is fun.

So, should you read Persuasion? Depends. If you have not read Pride and Prejudice and Emma, then you should most definitely read those two novels before you pick up this one. Having read those two, if you want more Austen, then this is a fine book.

Fine, not truly great, though. The prose is marvelously Austenish and the world is fun, so that redeems the book. But the novel itself is woefully undercooked. Other than Anne Elliot there is not a filled-out character in the book. Anne’s father, Sir Walter Elliott, is impeccably sketched. Nobody else in the novel rises to the level of three-dimensional or even interestingly two-dimensional.

The plot reads more like the outline of a plot than a plot itself. By two-thirds of the way through the novel, Anne has three suitors. You know which one she will end up with, so it isn’t like sitting on pins and needles. But, these two other suitors show up out the blue, begin something akin to courting Anne, and then abruptly vanish. There is also a whole coterie of other relatives and acquaintances, all of whom are interrelated and none of whom are terribly distinguishable from each other. In other words, the world of Persuasion is nowhere near as complete as the world of Austen at her best.

In fairness, it is worth noting that this novel was not published in her lifetime. Maybe she was planning to add another 100 pages and fill out the world. Indeed, even the title was not her own; the manuscript was entitled The Elliots, which would have been a much better title.

Other than the meditation on the nature of Persuasion, is there anything else to discover herein? Yep. And, it is one of the tragedies of the College Shutdown that I have missed the opportunity to have what would have been an incredibly merry discussion. I had assigned this book in one of my reading groups for the semester. We were slated to discuss it right after Spring Break.

Toward the end of the novel, there is a lengthy discussion on the difference between the affections of men and women. Which one is more constant? If a man and a woman love one another and then are torn asunder for a time, who is more likely to retain affection the longest? It’s a lively debate in the novel. I would have loved to have raised that question in a room full of Mount Holyoke students. It would have been an incredible conversation about love, gender roles, and innate sexual differences. To say the conversation would have been lively is an understatement. Curse you, coronavirus! (Insert raised shaking fist.)

Coronavirus and Shutdowns

I am writing this on March 17, but by the time you read it, the world will have changed. It is changing by the hour. One week ago, the college where I work shut down. It has been a rather chaotic week, to say the least. But, before this crisis morphs into whatever it will become, it is worth recording a couple of observations.

First, the details. I am a professor of economics at Mount Holyoke College. Last Monday (March 9) at 3:45 pm, the college sent out an announcement restricting travel and the size of campus meetings. On Tuesday (March 10) at 5:30 pm, we got another announcement saying that the campus was shutting down. Technically, we didn’t close; the students were told that they needed to leave campus by March 20 and that all courses were now going to be online. Since all of the students live on campus, the eviction notice affected everyone. None of our classes are online, so every course was also affected. This decision obviously raised a large number of logistical questions. On Wednesday (March 11), there was a Faculty Forum in which the President and Senior Staff, looking quite haggard, answered questions about the decision. There has subsequently been a steady stream of announcements covering assorted details.

Since last week, not only have other colleges shut down, but many other types of business and government offices have followed suit. Let me be very clear at the outset: this essay is not an argument about the shutdowns themselves. That is a question which will be discussed for decades. There are, however, two other societal questions about which the experience of the last week at one liberal arts college provides insights.

Read the rest at Public Discourse

Burning Books

“School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work.”

Ray Bradbury wrote that in 1953 in Fahrenheit 451.

Fast forward 67 years. The same thing could be said today, which all by itself in incredibly curious. If Bradbury was right in 1953, then shouldn’t we be further along in the destruction of books and learning than we are? How have we spent nearly three-quarters of a century right on the verge of the book burning apocalypse?

Actually, it isn’t just the last seven decades. Plato complained about the same thing.

The importance of Fahrenheit 451 is thus not about banning and burning books or the death of reading. Books and reading (like cockroaches?) seem to keep finding a way to survive. But, what is obvious when pondering Bradbury is that reading has neither become more nor less widespread over the decades. There are still readers, to be sure. But, people who regularly read for pleasure day in and day out are, and seemingly always have been, a small percentage of the population.

I read this book in an independent study with a couple of ridiculously bookish students—I am pretty sure they both read more than I do. We ended up spending an incredible amount of time talking about Millie, the wife of the protagonist in the novel. She spends her days watching her interactive television; three full walls in the room are occupied by the television, and her fondest dream is to get the fourth wall also converted to a television. Truly immersive TV! She has friends over, and they all sit and immerse themselves in this all-consuming TV. (Don’t laugh; it would look just like four people sitting in the same room all looking at their phones.) Our protagonist pulls the plug on the TV and reads to them the last two stanzas of Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Millie is annoyed and frightened by this book thing, turns in our hero to the book burning authorities, and flees. She is one of those people who really see no need for books. Here is the question: what can we do to convince Millie that she will be happier or better off if she shuts off the TV and reads?

Truth be told, I was greatly disturbed by the end of my conversation with my students. I want to say I am absolutely certain that Millie would be much happier if she was a reader. But, how do I know that she would be? How do I know that Millie will be better off reading the poetry of Matthew Arnold than she is by watching the latest mindless TV show? As my students (who are too clever for me) were very quick to point out, the fact that I am better off as a reader than I would be if I just watched TV all day is not the question. I, as they love to tell me, am weird.

How about this: Books make you think. Is that a good thing? One of the book burners in the novel notes:

If you don’t want a man unhappy, politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none….We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.

So, what if someone doesn’t want to think? What if someone likes simply being entertained and knowing there is good and evil and so you always know the right answer to everything without having to think about it? (Cue a reference to the cable channel your political opponents like.) Then I come along and say: “Look, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy and you should read all these books and be endlessly tortured by never really knowing the ultimate answers to all of the multitude of ultimate questions.” Have I just made that person’s life better off?

Fahrenheit 451, the book, is a great example. We have here a book that says we should not burn books. Lots of people have read this book. It is popular in high school English classes; it isn’t hard to guess why English teachers like to assign it. Everyone loves the message that those evil people over there want to take away the books we good people should read and we should fight against them. (One of my kids had a unit on banned books in 9^th grade English; each student had to pick a banned book, read it, and then present it to the class. But, the teacher assured us at Parents Night, don’t worry. She would not let the kids choose any inappropriate books. As hard as it is to believe, the teacher said this with zero awareness of the irony.)

Quiz Time: How many people after reading Fahrenheit 451 and its message that reading all these great books is the most important thing in the world, have gone out and read “Dover Beach”? The novel has the excerpts quoted above; when the poem is read in the story, the characters are stunned and brought to tears. But, what percentage of the readers of Bradbury do you suppose set out to find the full poem and read it? And if they had, would they really be happier and better off?

OK, maybe it is because people don’t like poetry. But, Bradbury also makes use of the books of Ecclesiastes and Revelation. He argues they are so vital to the preservation of civilization that it is massively important that people have those books so cemented in the mind that they will survive nuclear war (or coronavirus?). Did the readers of Fahrenheit 451 find those books and read them?

I am, truth be told, a bit surprised how hard it was for any of us to come up with a compelling argument that Millie’s life would be better if she was a reader. I know it would be; deep down inside, I have no doubt about it. But, finding the articulation of that knowledge, finding the way to show that reading and books are important, vitally important, not just for the knowledge, but vital in and of themselves, finding the way to articulate that is difficult.

I keep coming back to Hamlet:

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused.

That is the reason we need books and reading; they are keys to unlocking the potential of that godlike reason. But, the argument that this is what we were created to be may not be not enough to persuade Millie that she should read.

The Cursed Lust for Gold

Gold is once again all the rage.

Actually, come to think of it, it is hard to remember when gold wasn’t all the rage. Virgil talks about “the cursed lust for gold.” And let us not forget King Midas (or his most unfortunate daughter).

Why gold? Sure it is a shiny pliant metal, useful for making flashy jewelry. But, that isn’t enough to explain why coronavirus fears would send the price of an ounce of gold skyrocketing—surely you don’t think there has suddenly been a big increase in the demand for gold jewelry, do you?

The allure of gold has little to do with its use in decoration. Gold has the allure of being something like money. Money is really useful; with enough money, you can buy whatever you want. Gold feels like some sort of supermoney, a safe money, a money that you can rely on. You can make a big pile of gold and dive right in and revel in the tactile feel of the shiny metal. Well, you’ll enjoy that last bit if you are Scrooge McDuck.

Is gold actually like money? Not anymore. In 1971, the United States abandoned the even the pretense of being on a gold standard. That was the last link of any actual connection of gold with money. Five decades later, this still surprises people. If you have a gold coin and want to exchange it for money and you take it to your local bank, they will just laugh at you. (Well, your banker probably won’t actually laugh because I am sure your banker is nice.) Banks deal in money, not gold.

Gold is now just a metal which can easily be melted down and turned into little disks if you like your metals in shiny round circles. You could make little squares or triangles or octagons of gold too, but they are not as popular; people really like it when their gold is a circle. Why? Why do people still think of gold as something like money?

Enter James Ledbetter’s One Nation Under Gold: How One Precious Metal Has Dominated the American Imagination for Four Centuries, which was clearly competing for longest subtitle of the year.

This is an extremely good book. It is in that genre of books where someone picks a commodity and tell the history of the world as reflected by that commodity. So here we have the history of the US through the lens of gold. If you like history books, this book is really fun. I have read lot of US history and I have read a lot of books about money and I still learned a lot from this book. (My students also liked it.)

My biggest surprise: I knew that once upon a time private gold ownership was banned in the US. I never learned why. It was just one of those strange mysteries that nobody ever covered in a normal history class, and there was no point in covering it in a money and banking course, and I never got around to looking it up. Why make it illegal to hold gold?

The answer: it happened during the Roosevelt Years (FDR, not Teddy). Before that, the United States was on something resembling a gold standard, which meant if you had $20.67 in US currency, you could take it back to the government and get an ounce of gold. ($20.67 is the actual number—I know it looks like a made up number, but it’s not.) Well, in theory you could redeem all your currency for gold. The US, like every other country on the gold standard, started issuing lots of extra currency and there was no longer anywhere near enough gold to redeem it all.

Then the Depression (the Big One) hit and the government started getting concerned that people might actually start swapping their money for gold. So, what do you do if you are worried that people will exchange the currency for gold but you also want to pretend you are still on the gold standard? Easy. Make it illegal to hold gold.

See how brilliant that is? The country is still on a gold standard because all the currency is backed by gold and you can exchange your currency for gold any time you want. But, it is, of course, illegal to hold gold. So, even though you are perfectly free to exchange your money for gold, you’ll then be arrested for illegal gold possession, so maybe you don’t want to make that exchange after all. Sometimes you do have to step back and admire human creativity.

The strangest part of this episode came much later: when the US went off the gold standard, it was still illegal to hold gold for another 3 years. Eventually people began to realize how silly it was to prohibit people from holding a lump of metal that had zero connection to the monetary system. The fact that it took 3 years to realize this, shows how deep the mystical nature of gold penetrated the American psyche.

A side note: if you did want gold in those days when it was illegal to hold it, there was one country that manufactured lots of gold coins. This is when South Africa was able to make the Krugerrand into the status symbol for the rich people who wanted to engage in borderline illegal activities. When you watch old movies or read old books and see people talking about Krugerrands, this is why.

Once the US went off the gold standard and it became legal to hold gold, then there was no longer any reason to think of it as a special commodity, but of course people still do. So, it times of trouble, when people want a safe asset, they automatically think of gold. It will be interesting to see how long that will last.

There are still occasional arguments that the US should go back onto the gold standard. The basic reason for the argument is that the Federal Reserve can’t be trusted to maintain control of the money supply. But if you want control of the money supply, gold is also a really lousy choice—after all, your money supply is then dependent on the activity of gold miners.

It also isn’t really all that obvious that many people liked the gold standard back when countries were on it. Having gold be the unique money is a relatively recent innovation—go back a few hundred years and all sorts of metals were used as money. Even at the heyday of the gold standard, there was constant agitation to also have silver be used as a money. You knew that—think about William Jennings Bryan’s immortal speech at the Democratic National Convention:

If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

Ledbetter adds:

With these final lines, Bryan pressed his fingers against his temples to illustrate a crown of thorns, and stretched his arms out perpendicular to illustrate a crucifixion—a pose he held for a full five seconds. After a moment of stunned silence, the hall exploded with cheers.

A rather effective bit of rhetoric.

Nationalists vs Globalists vs Tribalists

The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony was the book of the moment after it came out. It even won an award for being the Best Conservative Book of the Year! So, it must be good, right?

Obviously if you are a liberal, you might not like or agree with Hazony’s argument, but the book at least must be a good book, right?

If you look at the title and the cover blurb and Hazony’s shorter essays, it is not hard to see why conservatives loved this book. Hazony sets up the contrast between the nationalists (good) and the globalists (bad). The globalists are those liberals who really want to run the world by creating all sorts of international rules that will stop all those deplorable little people clinging to God and guns. The UN and the World Bank are globalist. So is the EU.

The Nationalists on the other hand are the good noble people who care about their own people. They don’t want international bureaucrats telling them what to do. Brexit is a nationalist triumph. The rise of all sorts of politicians in country after country who care about their own nation is also a good thing. They stop the globalists running roughshod over the nations.

Now, I know what you are thinking. Nationalists are bad. Why do you think that? Well, the Nazis were bad, right? And they were nationalists, right? (That is the N in Nazi after all!) Ah, but Hazony cleverly notes. The Nazis were…globalists! The Nazi moment was when the Germans decided to take over all the other nations and tell them what to do. Just like the EU!

And now you see why conservatives love this book. Nazi=EU=Clinton! The thesis of this book is indeed what a particular slice of conservatives desperately wanted to have. It is perfect, perfect!, for those high-brow Twitter debates.

Then I read the book with one of my reading groups. The conclusion: there is no possible way that any of the judges for that Conservative Book of Year award actually read this book.

Don’t get me wrong. I am entirely sympathetic to the argument that the globalist crowd are doing vastly more harm than good. I am very sympathetic to the argument that nationalism is not inherently a bad thing, that it is a viscous calumny to equate nationalism with hatred, racism and intolerance.

But, with friends like Hazony…

Hazony’s argument runs as follows. We are not individuals; rather we are born into clans. You don’t get to pick your people (your immediate family and other more extended relations). Your clan has a loose affiliation with other clans based on mutual loyalty. These group of clans, called tribes, have good and bad things about them. We could organize society with tribes as the distinguishing unit; this is what Hazony dubs the anarchical order

But, there are some people who want to unite everyone in the word under a commons set of rules. These are the proponents of empire. Empires don’t care about tribal differences; they want to erase them in some grand superproject in pursuit of fairness or justice or some other goal.

Anarchy and Empire are both bad. What is good? National states. Nations are collections of tribes in mutual harmony. They inherit all the good things about tribes and none of the bad things. Nations are also concerned with fairness and justice and so inherit all the good things about empires but none of the bad things.

In other words: nations are good by definition. If a collection of tribes does not improve things, then that collection of tribes is by definition not a nation. It would be an empire.

Globalism then by definition is bad. It tries to unite nations in a way that is not built upon mutual loyalty and does not improve things for all the tribes. By exactly the same logic, tribalism would by definition be a bad thing…but curiously, Hazony never defines tribalism or warns against it. I think that would be off message. Globalists are the bad guys in this book.

The rest of the book is thus an exercise in tautology. If nations are good by definition then Nationalism is good and virtuous by definition. The key to understanding the argument of this book is simply to remember Hazony is right by definition and if you disagree with him, then you are wrong by definition.

So, take the Nazis. Nazis are bad, right? We all agree about that. So, the Nazis can’t be nationalists because nationalists are good by definition. Thus, when the Nazis try to take over Europe, they are not uniting the German people into a single nation, they are acting as globalists trying to make other nations bow to their will.

Now, here is a test for the reader. Who was right in the American Civil War? The South asserting its right to be its own nation against the globalist tendencies of the North? Or the North asserting that the North and South form a single nation? Easy! The South had slaves; slavery is bad; so the North was right because if the South seceded then the evil of slavery would have continued and the North would have been a weaker nation, so the South has no right to self-determination. I know you think I am making up this argument. But, here it is in Hazony’s own words:

He [Lincoln] needed only to look at the biblical account of the fratricidal wars between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which in the end weakened both of them and paved the way for their destruction, to see the future before him. And this future, together with the evil of allowing slavery to endure in America forever, did indeed justify denying national self-determination to the Confederacy. The reasons for distinguishing the case of American independence from that of Confederate independence are thus not to be found in the way we define what a “nation” is, or in the way we formulate a proposed universal right to national self-determination. The cases are distinguished only in the balance of moral and prudential considerations of supporting or opposing independence in a particular case.

See how easy this is? When the rule becomes simply if Hazony thinks it is good, then it is by definition a nation and if Hazony thinks it is bad, then it is by definition either globalist or tribalist, then it is really easy to figure out why nationalism is good.

I had a merry time arguing Hazony’s point with my students. But, honestly, as fun as it was, it was a pretty hard argument to sustain. The EU is bad; the Nazis are bad. That part is easy. But, then my students (who are annoyingly clever at moments like this) started asking questions like this: should Hawaii be a part of the United Sates? Should Scotland be in Britain? What about Ireland? Desperately, we can look back at Hazony’s definition of a nation:

By a nation, I mean a number of tribes with a shared heritage, usually including a common language or religious traditions, and a past history of joining together against common enemies—characteristics that permit tribes so united to understand themselves as a community distinct from other such communities as their neighbors.

Using that definition, distinguish between England/Scotland/Wales/Northern Ireland; the continental United States/Hawaii/Alaska; and Belgium/Netherlands/France/Germany/Italy/Greece/and the rest of the countries in European civilization. Which combinations can be united into a single nation? Well…uh…have I mentioned that the EU is really bad and they are a lot like the Nazis?

I know what you are thinking. Surely there is some principle here on which Hazony is building his theory, right? It can’t be this shallow, can it? Surely, Hazony’s argument could address a simple problem in international affairs. My nation wants to rule over your tribe. You don’t want to be ruled by me (for some unfathomable reason). Do you have the right to be independent from my rule?

Here is Hazony’s principle: “the order of national states is one that grants political independence to nations that are cohesive and strong enough to secure it.” (Italics in original, so you know it is important!)

OK, what does that mean? Is your tribe a nation? How do we find out?

Whether a people should be supported in a bid for independence is a determination that must be made in consideration of a number of factors, including the needs of the people in question; the degree of its internal cohesion and the military and economic resources it can bring to bear; its capacity, if continued as an independent national or tribal state to benefit the interests and well-being of other nations; and the threat that this people, once independent, may pose to others.

Yeah, Hazony really wrote that. So, when I determine that my military can roll over your military then it is obvious that you do not have the military resources to protect yourself and thus you do not merit independence. When I determine that your nation does not benefit my interests and well-being, then you do not merit independence. When I determine that your nation poses a threat to my people, maybe the threat of your bad example, then you do not merit independence. And then when I determine that the needs of your people will be better met by my rule, then you don’t merit independence. So, what exactly was the problem with globalism again?

In the end this was a ridiculously frustrating book. I really wanted to like it. I liked the idea of a book demonstrating that the globalists do not have the moral high ground. But, Hazony’s argument was ridiculously sloppy. Hazony should have stuck to the 2000 word version of his argument so I could have at least imagined that there was a cohesive longer version.