Your Moment Of WTF??

by hilzoy

From the normally sane Will Wilkinson (h/t):

"Obama and his devotees are Bizarro World Randian romantics in the grip of an adolescent faith in the generative powers of the state."

Savor that sentence. Cherish it. Roll it around on your tongue. It has to be the one and only time anyone will ever call Barack Obama a Randian. So enjoy it while you can. 

To be fair, Wilkinson does not seem to mean that Obama is a closet Objectivist. He means that Obama, like Rand, believes in "saltative, game-changing, lone-genius invention" rather than "an accumulation of tiny productivity-enhancing innovations" as the driver of economic growth, and hopes to achieve it via government intervention. I don't see that at all: I think Obama's economic policy is driven not by a particular view of the specific types of technological change that drive growth, mainly by quite different ideas: that we need to replace demand to get out of the recession, that we cannot defer dealing with energy and health care without doing lasting damage to the economy, and that we have underinvested in public goods and infrastructure in ways that we cannot afford to continue.

But insofar as I can discern a position on the question "saltative invention vs. an accumulation of tiny enhancements?", I would have put Obama in the second camp. He is, after all, known to be a fan of behavioral economics, with its many tiny tweaks, and his whole history as a Senator is full of small legislative improvements of the sort that no one who cared only for game-changing leaps would have bothered with. But I can't think of a single analog to Galt's amazing static-powered engine in Obama's entire set of beliefs. In any case, I'd be interested to hear Wilkinson's reasons for thinking as he does.

Comments

[lightning]

I thought that "romantics" were Rand's Bad Guys. In this view, Obama is being an "anti-Rand". What the world needs is to be run by True Believers like Greenspan. There's a danger that Obama will ruin the Randian paradise that Greenspan worked so hard to create. [/sarcasm]

[KCinDC]

"Bizarro World Randian romantics" can be parsed as "romantics who are followers of Bizarro Ayn Rand", so he didn't exactly call Obama a Randian.

[Delicious Pundit]

We really are beset with too many maleducated ideologues to get out of this fix.

[Gary Farber]

"It has to be the one and only time anyone will ever call Barack Obama a Randian."

Without reading context (yet), I'd say that "Bizarro World Randian" clearly means opposite of Randian.

That's what a Bizzaroism (originally, anyway, and in popular usage) and "Bizzaro World" means, after all.

[Gary Farber]

Okay, and in context, he clearly means opposite of Randian.

[Gary Farber]

Mind, I had to look up "saltative" to figure out what it meant. The evolutionary meaning, I derived.

But I was amused to see that "Saltation" also a book by my old friends Steve and Sharon. :-)

[Jim Satterfield]

Wilkinson is sane? Wow. Then it wasn't really him making those commentaries that completely ignore reality on PRI's Marketplace?

[garyb50]

Please, someone translate this in english.

[Harald Korneliussen]

Will Wilkinson must be one of these Kantian nihilist types.

[Debra]

For once, Hilzoy, I must say that I prefer Wilkinson's formulation to yours.
More poetic. It speaks more to the imagination.
If I were Barack, I think I would rather be qualified with Wilkinson's words than with yours.
Being right with the wrong words is...being wrong.
And I rather like the idea of Barack being qualified as a romantic.
We certainly need more of those these days...

[jonnybutter]

And I rather like the idea of Barack being qualified as a romantic.
We certainly need more of those these days...

Pardon me, but we need *fewer* of those these days. It is a short step from Idealist to Ideologue. A romantic and an ideologue are two names for a very similar thing. An ideologue loves their theory about how the world should work more than the world itself; a romantic loves his love (i.e. himself) more than his beloved. We are choking on romanticism in its various forms. Less of that, p[ease.

[Ben Alpers]

Please, someone translate this in english.

"Hayek good. Keynes BAD!"

[Dan S.]

I'm not sure we all read Hilzoy's post past the first paragraph?

[Bernard Yomtov]

Is Wilkinson sane? Maybe, but it would be easier to tell if he wrote with the objective of making his thoughts clear.

[John]

A romantic and an ideologue are two names for a very similar thing. An ideologue loves their theory about how the world should work more than the world itself; a romantic loves his love (i.e. himself) more than his beloved. We are choking on romanticism in its various forms.

I'm fairly certain that this is not what romanticism is.

[jonnybutter]

I'm fairly certain that this is not what romanticism is.

I'm fairly certain that this is one, non-academic, definition of a 'romantic'. ROMANTIC.