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Liars, Damned Liars, and Statisticians
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish caudillo, is surely a typical politician of our times — our very, very, very stupid times. Faced with high inflation caused in part by his illiterate crackpot regime’s loosey-goosey monetary policy, he ordered an even loosier-goosier policy, cutting interest rates even further on the theory that high interest rates are just a bankers’ plot against him — and by “bankers” you can go ahead and just say “Jews,” which is what the Erdogan regime habitually does.
The unsurprising result is record-high inflation. And when his government’s chief statistician produced statistics attesting to the collapse of the Turkish lira, Erdogan — who has the heart of a tyrant and the brain of a not especially bright wombat — responded by firing the statistician.
That’ll show ’em!
That’s the great magical thinking of our time — that every fact of every case is subject to infinite revision as long as you can find lackeys and sycophant lickspittles who are debased enough to swallow their pride, take the paycheck, and repeat whatever bullsh** story you tell them to.
As of this writing, inflation in Turkey is — according to the kind of calculation that will get a minor bureaucratic henchman fired from his job — running just a bit under 40 percent. The people who don’t work for Erdogan’s ghastly little junta estimate the inflation rate at just above 80 percent.
If this were Washington, then Jen Psaki would be advising everybody to have a margarita. But having a margarita is not the kind of advice that the pious Turkish dictator typically gives.
(My colleague Alexandra DeSanctis writes that Psaki hawks cocktails as though the country were full of nothing but callow Cosmopolitan readers, but I think Cosmopolitan readers drink more cosmopolitans than margaritas.)
But, of course, this sort of thing is not unknown in Washington. As I will explore at some length in the forthcoming issue of National Review, the United States has an inflation problem, too, though it is not so bad as Turkey’s situation. As with Turkey, the American inflation problem is caused in part by bad public policy. And as with Turkey, such powers as be in our country refuse to accept the facts of the case because doing so would oblige them to admit, if only tacitly, that they are to some extent to blame for the higher prices Americans are paying at the grocery store and the gasoline station.
Unlike their Turkish counterparts, our Democrats do not typically blame Jews corporately for the nation’s political woes. Not typically, I repeat: From time to time, Ilhan Omar will say the quiet part out loud or Barack Obama will be photographed cavorting with a Jew-hating weirdo such as Louis Farrakhan (a photograph buried by a friendly news media), but old-fashioned Jew-hating is a distinctly minority position (though not an extinct one) within the Democratic Party, mostly associated with a dying school of black urban politics in cities such as Philadelphia and Chicago.
(The new antisemitism is anti-Zionism, which is a lot like the old antisemitism except that these Jews are despised on political rather than ethnic grounds — progress! In a similar way, old-fashioned Holocaust denial has been supplanted by a strategy of dilution and distraction, for example by larding up Holocaust remembrances with references to every act of oppression, including those well short of attempted genocide, and every injustice suffered by any people anywhere in the world, as is now commonly the case in European commemorations of the Nazi atrocities against the Jewish people. This is done not out of overflowing compassion but to erase the particularities of the Holocaust, a particular atrocity done to a particular people at a particular time and worth remembering and understanding on those terms rather than merely as an exemplary episode in a general trend.)
The American Left is not beyond practicing race hatred, religious hatred, national hatred, or any other kind of hatred, but it prefers class hatred, as, indeed, does the American Right at the moment. Class hatred is useful because class in the American context is infinitely plastic. That isn’t the case everywhere else in the world: In England, for example, class lines are as plain to most people as racial differences are in the United States — no Englishman has any more trouble seeing that Boris Johnson is posh than any American would have had seeing that George Plimpton was white. (George Plimpton was the second-whitest American of the 20th century, after Thacher Longstreth. Readers of this magazine will be surprised to learn that William F. Buckley Jr. was only No. 71.) But because the United States has such a weak sense of class — patrimony and provenance do not matter nearly as much to us as plain old crass gobs of money do — we can get away with abusing the notion.
That is the origin of our strange little gold-plated haters of “elites,” the peculiar situation in which American “elites” are denounced by private-jet hectomillionaires such as Sean Hannity, sneered at by Ivy League–educated rich men such as Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, lectured by Enron advisers such as Paul Krugman or by Walmart board members such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, howled at by Yale deans and MacArthur fellows, while “the Real America” is represented by Manhattan-based employees of multi-gazillion-dollar global media conglomerates, salt-of-the-earth-type figures such as Laura Ingraham of Dartmouth and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, a white-shoe law firm with a name Charles Dickens would have blushed to invent.
Among the greatest and saltiest of these anti-elitists is Senator Elizabeth Warren, the phony Cherokee princess who holds forth on the plight of the dispossessed from her Cambridge manor while negotiating tax cuts for rich metropolitan property owners such as herself. Do you know the expression, “That’s the least you could do!” That was Professor Warren’s job description at Harvard: She did the least she could do, teaching only one class and collecting a paycheck in excess of $400,000 for doing so. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is who is here to tell us that the problem with inflation isn’t daft Democratic policies but — angels and ministers of grace defend us! — greed, in the form of “price gouging” enabled by “concentrated corporate power.”
What is happening in the economy? For one thing, the people who work the late shift at McDonald’s are getting paid more, as are delivery-truck drivers and warehouse workers, and hooray for them — but concentrated corporate power should be made of sterner stuff: McDonald’s, to take one big example, just missed its quarterly earnings targets while the bosses were handing out raises to the fry guys. (Don’t worry, the shareholders are going to be okay.) Denounce “elites” all you like, but the suits who run McDonald’s do business in the same economy as their customers do, and they have to deal with economic reality as they encounter it. McDonald’s isn’t paying workers in Austin twice the minimum wage out of the goodness of its plaque-clogged heart — no matter what Senator Warren or Boss Erdogan or Comrade Grumpy Muppet or Subcomandante Malarkey or any of the effusive recta of the cable-news world tell you, the economy is not run by a secret committee operating out of some smoke-filled back room. The villains change from generation to generation — Freemasons, Illuminati, the Elders of Zion, “international capital,” “globalists,” etc. — but the story is always the same.
And it is always wrong.
Of course, Senator Warren knows that it is not “concentrated corporate power” that is causing the price of bread to go up in Seekonk or Shutesbury — or in Istanbul: She may not be as smart as she thinks she is, but she isn’t as dumb as she seems, either. Elizabeth Warren knows what Joe Biden knows and what Recep Tayyip Erdogan knows: That they can defeat almost any political enemy except the truth.
Four hundred years ago, they burned heretics. Three hundred years ago, they hanged witches. Two hundred years ago, some of our ancestors still lived in abject terror of fairies. One hundred years ago, the leading lights of the Left were executing “reactionaries” and “Cossacks” by the hundreds of thousands.
Next time around, it may well be statisticians.
Words About Words
The word inflation is related to the words flatulent and blasé — which is appropriate given the usual tenor of conversations about inflation.
Inflation in the monetary sense dates only from the 19th century. At that time, inflation denoted an increase in the money supply — which is what some of us still mean by the word. The effect of such inflation — a general rise in prices — is what most people mean by inflation today.
But I think this is a distinction worth preserving. One can (and often does) have inflation in the first sense without having much or any inflation in the second sense. Often, we fail to take account of inflation in the second sense, partly because of our bias toward the present. If the price of a gallon of gas is x today and x tomorrow, then we assume that any inflation there has been in the first sense (expanding the money supply) has not produced inflation in the second sense (higher prices), but we do not really know that, because we do not know what the price of gasoline would have been absent the change in the money supply. Which is to say, we think there has been no inflation when prices remain the same, because we expect prices to remain the same rather than to go down. But prices go down all the time: The typical American family spends radically less on groceries than it did a generation ago, restaurant food costs less, televisions cost less, computers cost less, etc. Cars and houses don’t seem to cost less, until you consider what it could have cost you to have a car or a house something like the one you have today in 1960 — you couldn’t get a car or a house like the ones we have now back then, but the closest substitutes you could have found would have been impossibly expensive. Clothes are less expensive (a well-off society lady in my grandmother’s generation might have owned three good dresses, and a middle-class high-school student in the 1970s might have owned only two or three pair of jeans and one pair of sneakers), travel is less expensive, etc.
If you really want to get mad about something, think about how much richer you — and almost everybody else — would be if not for destructive government policies that have prevented the natural emergence of prosperity. Think about the smart phone in your pocket vs. the semi-mobile phones that were the toys of Wall Street millionaires a generation ago. Many of the things you own and use get better and cheaper every year, but some things — some heavily regulated, government-dominated things — get more expensive every generation, while the quality stagnates or declines. Prominent among these are education and health care. I am not one of those libertarians who just says, “The free market will take care of it!” as though that were an answer to every question. But imagine if the evolution of health care or higher education looked more like the evolution of the personal computer or the mobile phone and think about what that would have meant for the world. Capitalism does amazing things when we let it.
One of the reasons we don’t let capitalism do its thing is that we let our words confuse us. Inflation is one of those words. So is greed. So are profit, competition, compassion, cooperation, and capitalism itself.
We cannot think clearly until we can speak and write clearly.
Rampant Prescriptivism
When you are in a state of stressful suspense, you are on tenterhooks, not tender hooks.
A tenter is a wooden frame used for stretching and drying cloth. Think of a tent: cloth stretched over a frame. To be anxious about future developments was figuratively, at one time, to be on tenters, and later, on tenterhooks. One can see the general outline of how on tenterhooks might have evolved — stretched, taut, suspended, awaiting completion — but none of the sources I have seen gives a really persuasive account of precisely how that etymological evolution went.
But you are on tenterhooks, not tender hooks — though maybe you are on Tinder hooks, if that is your thing.
Send your language questions to TheTuesday@NationalReview.Com
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In Other News . . .
After a hard day’s beastliness . . .
Recommended
I have been enjoying Daniel Mark Epstein’s The Loyal Son: The War in Ben Franklin’s House. Did you know that Ben Franklin’s bastard son, William, was one of the leading Loyalists during the American Revolution? Now, that is a complicated family.
In Closing
Today is the feast day of St. Brigid, who is one of the patrons of Ireland and a great favorite of the pooh-poohers and would-be sophisticates, who revel in the fact that St. Brigid is a pretty clearly mythological figure, the pre-Christian pagan goddess Brigid swallowed whole by Catholic hagiography in the early days of Irish Christianity. This would not have come as a surprise to early Irish Christians, at least some of whom seem to have been well aware that the saint was none other than the goddess in minimal disguise and put that observation into writing more than 1,000 years ago. The church has long experience with this kind of thing: St. Christopher medals remain popular devotional items, but there isn’t much reason to suppose that the story about his carrying Jesus across a river on his back is anything other than a “charming legend,” to use a frequently recurring phrase in the Catholic literature. I would think that people who cannot quite agree about what happened in the last election — or what is happening right now with Covid or Russia or the economy — would understand that any enterprise that is still going after 2,000 years is going to have some stories attached to it, some legends, and some myths — and some outright fabrications, too.
The Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc once observed: “The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.” It is a great big vineyard, one that happily makes room for such knaves as us.
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