{"id":31076,"date":"2016-11-24T01:00:51","date_gmt":"2016-11-24T06:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31076"},"modified":"2016-11-15T09:38:07","modified_gmt":"2016-11-15T14:38:07","slug":"qotd-black-hats-and-white-hats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/11\/24\/qotd-black-hats-and-white-hats\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Black hats and white hats"},"content":{"rendered":"

When considering the major failures of recent American governance \u2013 the 2008-09 financial crisis, the catastrophe that is U.S. policy in the Mideast \u2013 the one thing that any honest-minded person must conclude is: Nobody meant for things to turn out this way. It is impossible to make precise predictions about the effects of government policy; that is the nature of systems characterized by high levels of complexity. It\u2019s one thing to predict that it\u2019ll be colder during the winter, but another thing to predict down to the millimeter how much snow will fall on a particular acre in rural Maine on the third Wednesday in February, which is really what we expect from our public policy.<\/p>\n

Classic cowboy movies, in contrast, are not complex at all: The good guys wear white hats, the bad guys wear black hats, all hats remain firmly affixed to all heads at all times, and that\u2019s that. You can pretty much always predict how an old Western is going to turn out.<\/p>\n

But that isn\u2019t how the real world works.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, I had a conversation about Elizabeth Warren and Wall Street, pointing out that the popular version of that story \u2013 Senator Warren vs. Wall Street \u2013 is so oversimplified as to be not merely useless but misleading. The reality is that there are people working on Wall Street who dislike Senator Warren \u2013 investors and bankers, mainly \u2013 and people who adore her \u2013 notably Wall Street lawyers, who are reliable donors to her campaign and to those of other Democrats. My na\u00efve interlocutor said: \u201cHopefully, it\u2019s the lawyers that fight against Wall Street,\u201d as though there were such a thing, as though there weren\u2019t nice progressive lawyers in Manhattan who jokingly refer to their yachts as the SS Dodd-Frank<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Spend any time writing about this sort of thing and you\u2019ll hear angry and panicked denunciations of derivatives-trading from people who pretty clearly do not know what a derivative is, just as you\u2019ll hear paeans to Glass-Steagall sung by people who don\u2019t understand the difference between a commercial bank and an investment bank, who don\u2019t know how Goldman-Sachs makes its money or what it is that Standard & Poor\u2019s does.<\/p>\n

But they\u2019re quite sure they know who is wearing the black hats.<\/p>\n

Kevin Williamson, “Black Hats and White Hats”, National Review<\/em><\/a>, 2015-04-15.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When considering the major failures of recent American governance \u2013 the 2008-09 financial crisis, the catastrophe that is U.S. policy in the Mideast \u2013 the one thing that any honest-minded person must conclude is: Nobody meant for things to turn out this way. It is impossible to make precise predictions about the effects of government […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,84,53,41,13],"tags":[436,768,571,529,661],"class_list":["post-31076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-government","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-banking","tag-democrat","tag-investment","tag-lawyers","tag-regulation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-85e","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31076"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31078,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31076\/revisions\/31078"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}