Jun
10
2026

Noah Smith May Have Read Pun Salad Five Years Ago

Way back in 2021, in a post about Sidney Powell's delusional claims about the 2020 election, I said:

By the way: if you would like Pun Salad to link to your content, having the word "wacky" in the headline will measurably improve your chances.

It's not in the headline, but the subhed of Noah Smith's latest "Roundup" contains: "Piketty gets wacky".

At issue is French economist Thomas Piketty's latest effort to drive the entire world down the Road to Serfdom, expressed in (many) tweets. A sample:

It really must be seen to be believed: those arrows in the bottom schematic represent a massive worldwide transfer of cash from "rich" to "poor". The W-word appears once again in Noah's commentary: it's a "truly wacky policy proposal" meant to combat "climate change."

First of all, Piketty’s baseline climate change scenarios appear based on a very outdated model — the RCP8.5 scenario, an extreme projection that essentially all serious climate scientists have now rejected. This choice of baseline suggests that Piketty et al. were trying to find ways to justify maximal policy intervention, instead of starting from the science.

Piketty’s preferred solution to climate change is degrowth. He envisions detailed central planning to achieve deliberate impoverishment of large portions of the world’s population — mandated reductions in the consumption of various specific goods, including food.

In addition to the dubious morality of deliberately impoverishing untold millions of human beings based on scientific models that have already been rejected, this kind of scheme is just utterly unworkable. Back in 2021, when I wrote about why degrowth is a political nonstarter, I declared that “implementing the kind of reallocation schemes that degrowthers throw around with abandon would require global economic planning that would put Gosplan to shame.” Piketty knows this, and thinks it’s a good thing.

Noah is a relatively mainstream Democrat economist, so his criticism is (for me) actually too kind to Piketty and his co-plunderers. Don Boudreaux is more on my wavelength with his letter to the Guardian: Unsustainable Piketty, et al..

Progressives love to boast of their devotion to “sustainability.” Advertisers seeking their patronage trumpet certain foods and other consumer goods as being “sustainably grown” or “sustainably sourced” – advertisements that exploit progressives’ economically naïve conviction that the normal practice of businesses in market economies is to myopically disregard access to inputs tomorrow in order to unsustainably maximize sales today. Indeed, Messieurs Piketty and Co. share this naïve conviction: their report predicts that myopic market forces will inflict severe damage on the environment – damage that’s avoidable only by adopting their scheme for soaking the rich and harshly restricting economic growth.

This prediction is ironic. There’s nothing unsustainable about free-market activities, for the greatest protector of the environment and surest insurance against resource depletion are secure, tradeable property rights.

But if anyone wants an unambiguous example of a genuinely unsustainable policy, look no further than the scheme endorsed by Messieurs Piketty and Co. Such seizure of wealth and government central economic planning will kill golden-egg-laying geese and destroy the capital that’s necessary for ordinary workers to earn wages high enough to afford these workers the modern luxury of caring about the environment. The end result would be massive poverty, a pathetically puny tax base, and a dirtier and more dangerous environment.

Soak-the-rich taxation and economic central planning, under whatever guise, have always been, and will always be, unsustainable.

Well, I'll quibble: There's always Orwell's sustainable scenario: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”

Also of note:

  • But speaking of George… Kyle Smith appreciates Orwell the Fortune Teller. (WSJ gifted link) Excerpt:

    “Politics and the English Language,” from 1946, is perhaps Orwell’s most famous essay, and should be studied intently by anyone who wants to be a writer. But take a look at the same year’s “The Prevention of Literature,” in which he describes an anticensorship conference in which the participants defend the suppression of disfavored texts. Step on any nominally “freethinking” campus today and you’ll find bookstores jauntily if nonsensically promoting “censored” or “banned” books that haven’t been censored or banned. Nearby, speeches promoting disfavored viewpoints continue to be canceled because of credible threats of violence, research is threatened for being culturally inappropriate and students want bans on speech that could upset “marginalized peoples.” “In its net effect,” writes Orwell of the event he attended, “the meeting was a demonstration in favor of censorship.”

    “In England,” he wrote, “the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats.” But over time, “the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all.”

    There’s no exact analogue for Big Brother in America today. But that’s because there doesn’t have to be.

    Today, the person wearing the boot stamping on your face is likely to be an intellectual.

  • Live Free or Bike. The WSJ reports some local political maneuvers: Rahm Emanuel Pedals Hard to Show Vitality as Aging Potential 2028 Candidate.

    (I must protest: everybody is "aging". What they really mean to imply is "old".)

    (And he's not that old.)

    (Anyway:)

    NORTH HAMPTON, N.H.—Rahm Emanuel has long been exercise-obsessed, swimming 3 to 4 miles a week, plus weight training, machine workouts and yoga. He put his vitality forward in a more public way over the weekend as he biked across a state vying to hold the first 2028 Democratic presidential nominating contest.

    The 66-year-old Democrat is likely to be one of the oldest—if not the oldest—in the field from either party if he enters the race. The former congressman, White House chief of staff, Chicago mayor and ambassador to Japan has a long résumé, but his more centrist instincts and age are potential strikes against him in a party that has moved leftward and faces calls for younger leaders.

    For the record, Rahm is getting a 2% chance at Polymarket for being the Democratic nominee in 2028. And Rahm is (indeed) one of the older people in their list.

  • Fortunately, the headline on Tyler Cowen's article is misleading. It is: AI Isn’t Conscious. Neither Are We.

    I'm more interested in whether "we" are, so skipping over the stuff about AI:

    As for the people, it does not work to deny human consciousness and awareness altogether, as that would lead to a self-contradiction. Who or what, after all, would be doing the denying or would be aware that such denying is going on? It is more accurate to speak of human awareness as a kind of epiphenomenon operating on top of whatever the true decision-making processes may be. For whatever reason, Darwinian evolutionary processes have seen fit to place some partial awareness on top of a much larger set of operations in the brain.

    It is easy enough to see that some “primitive” animals may not be conscious, yet they can make complex calculations all the same. It is harder to admit that many of our decisions proceed on the same basis, just as sometimes you may drive or walk to work in the morning without much conscious awareness of how to take the proper route. All of a sudden you have arrived at your destination, as if by a miracle. More likely, that is how your brain usually is working, namely that lots of calculation goes on with a minimal or perhaps zero level of explicit awareness.

    Sometimes I like to say that “I am only conscious at the margin.” Tongue in cheek, I will suggest that I am only conscious enough to avoid the self-contradiction of asserting that I am not conscious at all. I feel I am honest enough to just not be very impressed by my own flow of conscious awareness or its ability to perform complex calculations. Still, I recognize that it is all I have got, so I need to treasure it, however paltry it may be.

    I am (a little) relieved that Tyler loads his argument with enough caveats to "avoid the self-contradiction of asserting that I am not conscious at all." But labelling it an "epiphenomenon" denies that it has any control over the lower-level mental processes. I'm pretty sure it does.

  • It's Disagreement Day here at Pun Salad. It's turning out that way, anyhow. The UnPopulist site has Marlene Laruelle of George Washington University’s Illiberalism Studies Program interviewing Shikha Dalmia, purporting to explain How the Libertarian Movement Missed the Authoritarian Moment.

    Illiberalism Studies Program: Shikha, thank you for joining us for this Agora interview. I wanted to open with a personal question about your own ideological journey: Why did you leave libertarianism? How do you dissociate libertarianism from liberalism and which elements do you still believe are important?

    Shikha Dalmia: My break with libertarianism happened when Trump arrived on the scene. I was working at Reason magazine at that time and, the minute Trump came down the golden escalator, it was clear to me that he was a different kind of politician: he was a demagogue and an authoritarian, he didn’t really understand liberalism, and he didn’t understand America’s core commitments. He was closer to demagogues that I had seen in India, like Narendra Modi, who preceded Trump by a few years. Given this, I was a little bit more sensitized to demagogues in general and Trump in particular, so it was pretty clear to me that the libertarians around me were just not seeing him as the same kind of threat as I was.

    In fact, there was general chuckling at the way he was sticking his finger in the eye of the left and going after liberals. It is not that libertarians were completely unconcerned about Trump; it’s that they were just not taking the threat seriously. They were treating him as a normal politician, just bad in a different kind of way and, at best, maybe a corrective to the excesses of the left. This chasm between me and libertarian circles just kept growing, and it was getting hard to get my point of view taken seriously.

    Trump "came down the golden escalator" on June 16, 2015. Shikha kept writing for Reason for another 5½ years.

    Other than that timeline quibble, it seems that Shikha fuzzed up her disappointment with (some) of her Reason co-workers into a general distaste for (either) the libertarian "movement" or libertarianism itself. I think her specific criticisms miss the mark. I regret the cliché, but here it is anyway: It's a big tent, and there's plenty of room inside for people to disagree.