Even though I like the broad brush-strokes of Reno’s ideas, as I mentioned in my previous post, I think there are important points where Reno goes wrong.
First of all, while Reno (to his credit) acknowledges that the banishing of the strong gods was motivated for good reasons, and in response to real horrors, he often seems entirely too blasé about the prospect of such horrors returning. He argues that people are too focused on the problems of the past, and talks as though those problems are simply behind us:
Our societies are not gathering themselves into masses marching in lockstep. Central planners do not clog our economies. There is no longer an overbearing bourgeois culture bent on “exclusion.” Bull Conner isn’t commissioner of public safety in Birmingham.
Later on in his book he reiterates his claim that these concerns are misplaced, or at least given an undue level of focus:
But we are not living in 1945. Our societies are not threatened by paramilitary organizations devoted to powerful ideologies. We do not face a totalitarian adversary with world-conquering ambitions.
In fairness to Reno, he wrote these words for a book that was published in 2019 – not so long ago, but enough has changed since then that the idea of totalitarian governments bent on conquest doesn’t exactly seem like a problem of the past, nor does the threat of authoritarianism within our own society. Still, Reno’s words remind me of this point made by Matt Yglesias, highlighted by Scott Sumner. Yglesias pointed to an article in the progressive publication American Prospect, arguing that insurance companies were overrating the risk of fire in areas like Eaton Canyon in California, because there hadn’t been a major fire there in a long time. This led them, in Yglesias’s words, to the belief that “activist regulators could price this risk better than the market.” Of course, this proved grimly ironic because not long after the American Prospect article, the whole area was engulfed in flames. A problem can lay dormant for a long time without ever truly being behind us.
Indeed, one could argue that the authoritarian risk Reno dismisses only seems remote precisely because of the kinds of ideas he finds so lamentable. There was a headline in the New York Times that has been the butt of many jokes that read “Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops.” The joke, of course, is that one could easily and plausibly claim that the prison population growing is responsible for the crime rate dropping, and this scenario is a sign of success and not a basis to argue that prison populations are too high. (“Firefighters continue to hose down house, despite receding flames!”) Reno does briefly anticipate this, but he asserts that social disunity is a larger threat than the prospect of authoritarianism from within or without. Unfortunately he’s very thin on arguments detailing the relative risk between them. He does spend a great deal of time arguing in detail about the causes and nature of the social disunity that troubles him, and why it’s a serious problem – but the argument for why it’s the greater problem is minimal and rather hand-wavy.
So it’s possible for someone to read Reno’s book and agree with him that there is a problem of social fragmentation, and agree with him about what is driving this fragmentation, yet not be convinced by Reno’s claim that it’s a larger risk relative to the prospect of authoritarianism or social oppression. Note, I’m not making the claim that Reno is wrong is his assertion about the relative risk – I’m only making the weaker claim that his argument isn’t sufficient to justify the conclusion.
But aside from that, Reno makes many stumbles when discussing both economics and the ideas of economists. I’ll be detailing those problems in the next post.
