Though I still think it’s darkly funny that he wrote a companion volume “On Truth” that is the same pocket size but completely gold, and nobody seems to know it
And the Democrat agenda? Taxing billionaires more will solve America's obvious fiscal irresponsibility? The middle class won't need to be taxed more, much more, to achieve responsible fiscal policy? Bullshit in, bullshit out ... from both political parties. Political opportunism is bipartisan.
You know, I thought that my snarky tone in 2011-2014 came from grad school, and from being young in general. Now I wonder if part of it was anger that the people in charge of my country had been dumb enough to crash the financial system and throw millions of people out of work. In the years since 2011, our economic policy was never optimal, but it was never very stupid, including under Trump 1.0 and Biden.
Now our policy is getting stupid again, and I'm getting angry again.
Well, I *wish* people would be a little angrier about the stupid tariffs, but in fact people seem to be responding simply by getting quietly grumpy and sour about it all.
Unfortunately, policy often goes crazy just as the grassroots is calming down. Another example is the 1930s.
Cass illustrates the fundamental problem in many MAGA areas, turning the Scientific method on its head. They choose the outcome they want, then invent a series of ‘proven’ steps that lead to that outcome. It’s basically the same mistake made by Intelligent Design folks.
A similar mistake is made in the MAGA political world. They invent the country they think we ought to be and then try to bend our history to fit their design.
This flaw is encapsulated in two of my favorite old wall posters”
'My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts'.
'We do not see things the way they are; we see them as we are'.
This is a problem with ideologues in general unfortunately, and it plagues our social sciences. We would all be better if we start with the following assumptions:
1) To promote a better world, we need to first understand the world.
2) The most significant barrier to our understanding of the world is our own preconceived biases.
3) Ideology is the mother of all preconceived biases.
Unfortunately, acknowledging the above requires Humility, which ideologues typically lack.
I would substitute ‘blind’ ideology. After all, the United States is the product of a hard headed kind of ideology. We are, after all, the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human society and government ever attempted. Without any kind of ideology, we wouldn’t be.
Yes, but I would say that the ideology of the founders was based on a hard-nosed observation of the results of previous systems in the real world. They also combined it with an acknowledgement of the limitations of humans in the real world. One can particularly see this in the checks and balances they built into the constitution.
Yes, I agree completely. Humility is key. Do-gooders want to save the planet, penalize "the rich", redistribute the fruits of our labors, open borders, be a citizen of the world, all things for everyone no matter (provided it doesn't affect them of course), and be lauded for their "compassion".
Oh well. Bullshit in, bullshit out ... as someone has already opined.
This is the only way MAGA exists as a political movement - intellectuals like Cass and people like JD Vance who clearly know when Trump's policies are complete BS repeatedly reverse engineer them into the outcome they've already decided they want. There is no coherence to Trump's economic policies. Its just impulse, platitudes, misreading of history, and vague gesturing to some imagined time when the U.S "was great." So Cass and Vance have to repeatedly contort themselves into rationalizing the irrational.
Ross Douthat, also a frequent defender of Cass and Vance, took this to new levels recently with his op-ed about why the "TACO" (Trump Always Chickens Out) moniker that traders have placed on his tariff policy are a reason Trump is so "successful." In Douthat's telling, it is precisely because Trump has no coherence to his policies that voters trust him - if he veers in one direction they don't like, its only a matter of time before he veers in another. Somehow Douthat thinks is an effective way to run a country - that infinite flexibility and the willingness to swerve is a way of accomplishing something of lasting value versus patience, discipline, expertise, and long-term thinking.
It all nets out to MAGA - like Trump himself - fundamentally being a lazy project. As Noah points out in his critque of Cass's work, there's no need to ever dive deep into a topic - MAGA practitioners can simply wave way decades or even centuries old work because its "elitist" or the product of an "elite institution." They can substitute whatever they want in its place and then through pure sophistry (which is Vance's only skill) claim that it will lead to some outcome they've already decided would be desirable.
In MAGA's world, there aren't any really hard problems - the solutions to everything are obvious and its just a matter of will to apply them. As Bart Simpson proclaims in the episode where he's running for student council president, "My opponent says there aren't any easy solutions. I say he's not looking hard enough!" If there's a better description of the MAGA project than that, I haven't seen it yet.
It's always astounding to me how much grace and patience Ross Douthat and his ilk will give people like JD Vance and Trump, but they don't have that for anyone outside of their own political circle. They seem to think that because they are the good guys the instability and chaos is fine from what I can tell. It also doesn't help that a lot of MAGA supporters are just bad faith and low info, so its almost impossible to have an intellectually honest conversation.
It's all a vibe to them, and their main impulse is to be contrarian no matter what. They can't govern but they sure know how to critique and break things. That's the most good faith understanding of what they are currently doing, the bad faith is that they frankly don't care as long as they can impose their regressive worldview on the rest of us and just gain power. The ends justify the means to them.
Couple of quick thoughts. One, in reading your intro, it sounds like you misinterpreted Cass - my initial take was he was saying that, here on earth, actual movement of objects is not just physics, but is also affected by other factors, such as human actions.
Which kind of flows into my second point, which is that, of what I’ve read of Cass’s writing, many of his points appear to be that maximizing wellbeing is not synonymous with maximizing economic output. Values, culture, and even just preferences need to be considered in making economic policy decisions.
In particular, many people’s experiences of human and economic wellbeing tend to be tied to things like owning a home of their preferred type and being able to comfortably raise a family and later retire securely. For example, owning a single family home with a yard and a deck but with less net worth is very frequently seen as being better off than having a higher net worth and living in an apartment.
Many people measure much of their wellbeing by their community, their local and regional culture, and proximity to friends and family. That latter proximity, for many, is a source of housing, childcare, retirement safety, and an economic safety net. Those cultural and familial things together are often what makes life meaningful to them. Moving away is thus often a wrenching loss, not a simple economic decision.
When economists push mobility and agglomeration by looking only at economic output and not what matters to the people involved, you create a tension between policy goals and what people actually want. And if you keep pushing, eventually something breaks.
"it sounds like you misinterpreted Cass - my initial take was he was saying that, here on earth, actual movement of objects is not just physics, but is also affected by other factors, such as human actions." <-- I don't think this is what he was saying. He's saying that since there are other forces of nature besides gravity, understanding only gravity will prevent you from understanding motion. The analogy he's trying to make is that if you understand only market forces, you won't understand what makes human life good -- you'll neglect things like community, social solidarity, trust, etc.
And of course that's true, in general. But just like there are many situations where you can neglect forces other than gravity and describe the motion of bodies just fine (like in the Halley example), there are many situations in which you only need to understand market forces in order to predict the effects of a policy. For example, putting >40% tariffs on all of the U.S.' trading partners is a policy where you don't need a subtle understanding of the effects of economics on community and solidarity in order to know that it's a bad idea.
I'm not sure Democrats need to engage in the wider argument. This is essentially a squabble between the Republican party's past and its present. It was neo-liberal Republicans who promoted unlimited free trade with all the terrible consequences it had for blue collar America. Now they're trying walk that back and cover their tracks by crossing nationalism with socialism to create something recognizably right-wing that appeals to the victims of their previous policies. Something that they claim is definitely not 'Socialism' - hence all the quotes from dead conservatives about community and social cohesion (and I do mean all the quotes). Maybe they should call it 'national socialism'. Something about that name, though . . .
"I don't think this is what he was saying. He's saying that since there are other forces of nature besides gravity, understanding only gravity will prevent you from understanding motion."
He seems pretty clearly to be saying that understanding only gravity will prevent you from *fully* understanding motion. When other forces are absent or irrelevant, like celestial bodies traveling much less than light speed, you can use the gravitational law alone.
When we talk about laws that are true 'ceteris paribus' we sometimes really mean 'ceteris absentibus' (other things absent), or 'ceteris normalibus' (other things normal/standard). The latter are sometimes true scientific laws, and sometimes axiomatic rules we protect from disconfirmation by privileging ideal conditions, such as a type of instrumentally rational action.
> He seems pretty clearly to be saying that understanding only gravity will prevent you from *fully* understanding motion
I dunno. If someone mostly, but but fully, understands something I would never call them a moron. I don't think I'm an outlier there.
It is Cass's pointless name calling that gives his statement a totalizing feel.
If he had written "using only gravity will, in some situations, lead you to make mistakes small and large" that'd be one thing. Or even "it would be naive to think gravity can explain everything in all situations".
I think he used the term moron because the situation he’s describing is absurd. Imagine trying to predict where a hockey puck will fly based only on the law of gravity (and not laws describing force transfer from the arms to the end of the stick around a fulcrum point, friction of wind resistance, etc.).
Or imagine trying to predict the motion of a car using only the law of gravity, and not various other laws governing the power of internal combustion engines, the friction of tires gripping the road, etc., etc. When we get concrete like this we are dealing not just in isolated laws but multiple full blown models with many elements, each describing a part of the process.
Ok, now try to describe the actions of a person using only laws of economics, and ignoring their commitments that are independent of the subject matter of economics (love of family, emotional commitments to their tribe, etc.). The rational utility maximizer is homo economicus, not Homo sapiens.
This is only one of Cass’s two points. The other one relates to reflexivity and how the measured regularities of economics are not governing regularities in the same way as those of physics. They arise from action and can be changed by action.
Yes, the difference between physics and economics is not fundamental but one of degree and ultimately subject matter I think. Two old jokes capture it nicely. The one about the physicist who comes up with a solution to improve a farmer's egg yield, which only works for spherical chickens in a vacuum and the one about the economist stranded on a desert island with only tinned food, who solves the problem by assuming a tin opener.
Except in that second joke there is also a physicist, who proposes smashing it with a rock in the version I remember. The physicist is concerned with, and successful at, prediction except at the remotest reaches of theory (string theory, etc.). The economist is concerned with prediction, sort of, but waives it off when he fails at even basic tasks like predicting sales of a product next month, or GDP, or unemployment, etc., etc.
When one science can confirm (replicate) laws with constants that are precise to 7 digits or more, and the other science cannot confirm a constant to even 1 significant digit, we are not talking about a difference of degree but of kind.
Reflexivity is a big part of why there is a difference of kind.
Not in terms of final results maybe, but they both proceed by isolating the phenomena they're studying and measuring, modelling and then drawing conclusions that are as generalisable as they think their models will stand and exposing the results to objective testing sometimes, but not always, by making predictions. Of course physicists have the advantage that the systems they study are far less complex - they are either naturally isolated or can be isolated experimentally and have far fewer entities with fewer interactions between them. Economists and other social scientists study systems that are far more complex - more entities embedded in a web of interactions with each other and with factors .
It's true that promulgating a social science prediction can affect whether or not it is proved correct, whereas molecules, particles and forces don't care what you say about them. But that's the point of the social sciences - they're policy sciences. Their research is usually undertaken with a view to trying to solve or ameliorate a problem that affects people. In a sense we have a more pressing need for economics than for physics. That's why economists have to keep doing what they're doing, always attempting to improve it. In time, economic problems will turn up repeatedly and policies used previously will be adjusted and tailored to them. In the Great Recession economists said 'we are all Keynesians now' because reflationary policies were fairly well-understood and their use largely agreed. Some disagreed but the handling of the recession was largely successful.
Improvements in economics are mostly conceptual. We have new ways to understand phenomena. To the extent we are better at prediction, it mostly is not through theory but through massively complex algorithms that don't care about theory, they are just pattern-finding machines. But again, the patterns can and do change, so the predictive power is local and temporary, and basically just depend on social/psychological intertia.
Economics doesn't isolate phenomena in the same way. It destroys the interest of the subject matter to do so. Imagine isolating a transaction from all other causal influences...it wouldn't have the same meaning or function. A sandwich is worth $10 only relative to other options I have at the moment, how hungry I am, my attitudes towards buying vs making my own sandwiches, my income, etc. You cannot isolate from these things, and they are all dynamic, and NONE of them follow laws that have been confirmed with numerical constants. Ceteris are not paribus.
A physicist can isolate an effect from all causal factors but one (use a faraday cage to neutralize electric fields, etc.), and/or determine that ceteris are paribus. That's how they discover the constants.
I am generally pro-econ. I get frustrated when "trust the Science" people don't consider it a science. Just accepting that supply and demand are real things will get you to the correct answer on many questions.
However, I agree with this critique. Like a lot of smart people, economists can get really wrapped up in a single-variable optimization problem. For the most part that's served us well through the last couple of centuries. But at the forefront of wealthy societies you do start to see it fray. You do seem to have a lot of unhappy people.
One other thing with economists is they can be bad accountants. Their somewhat reasonable obsession with growth can cause them to support anything that seems to cause it, often times just vaguely, "infrastructure", which is often needless sprawl fuel and bridges to nowhere and such that give us a lot of liabilities and shitty places. Lean too hard on growth and you can find yourself something of a Ponzi salesman.
But econ is fundamentally different than hard science. That doesn't make it wrong, but if you want to "trust the science" like that, you do have to be very restrictive over what you call "science" and most of econ doesn't make the cut.
"Just accepting that supply and demand are real things will get you to the correct answer on many questions"
I also think in terms of supply and demand, but these are refinements of everyday language about intentional action. It's like saying that you should just accept that belief and desire are real things to get the correct answer on so many questions. Yes, agreed, but it isn't science in the modern sense of that term. It's our conceptual framework for thinking about action, or thinking about action under conditions of scarcity.
The "law" of supply and demand is necessarily qualitative and divorced from an operationalized definition or confirmation. This is totally unlike physics. The speed of light in a vacuum is so tightly operationalized that it is now defined as exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. A meter literally has been defined in terms of the speed of light, and a second has been defined in terms of the oscillation frequency of cesium atoms. Yes, the speed of light is defined in terms of the oscillation of cesium atoms, down to 9 significant digits of precision.
Nothing even remotely like that exists in economics. They are not the same kind of science.
Lisa, you are a wise woman indeed. Lifestyle matters, a lot. Noah, a gifted economist, apparently doesn't fully understand this. It's relatively easy to be snarky if you're intelligent and well-educated, probably more difficult to learn the practicalities of "flyover voters".
It doesn't matter to their supporters though, because they speak in a way that drips psuedo intellectualism, and they seemingly present simple answers to complicated problems for all of societal ills. Additionally, they give cover for people in power that don't even follow the policies that they themselves are presenting imo.
Nailed it. There is science to the dismal science notwithstanding all its limitations. Policy that ignores that science will fail absent some exogenous event. Well written piece. Thanks
Agreed, people that fail against it, almost always do so because they don't like the answers it provides. In contradicts the way they want the world to work..
Natural experiments are inferior to laboratory experiments because you can't isolate your proposed causal mechanism as well. In the laboratory, you can make sure that the test tubes are identical other than having difference amounts of chromium in an injected fluid, or whatever. Natural experiments try to identify cases where it's not plausible that anything differed other than the variable of interest that is proposed as causal, but it's usually unconvincing as experimental design.
More generally, economics doesn't stand up very well to a comparison with natural sciences like physics, chemistry, or even biology, if you assume that those sciences represent the epistemic gold standard. They often deal uncertainties or near certainties, and they can pass Karl Popper's test of falsifiability. Economics is almost never like that.
But economists also have an important advantage over physicists and chemists. Introspection. You can't learn anything by supposing that you're an electron and reasoning about what you would do in the situations where electrons find themselves. But economics deals with people, and we are people, and we can learn a lot simply by thinking clearly and consistently about what we would do in lots of different situations.
That's where you get an insight like the demand curve from. A demand curve is, in principle, an infinite series of hypothetical statements about counterfactual situations. You can never really have data that would give you a warrant for drawing one. But we don't need it. You can't really begin to understand the epistemic basis for economics until you understand that we don't even need evidence for the law of demand because we know from theory that it must hold, and that's enough. Not that there isn't corroborating evidence. But if you think that one's confidence in the law of demand should be proportional to the corroborating data, you're off track from the very beginning.
Unfortunately, economists largely have lost a real understanding of the actual epistemic basis for economics over the past generation. The "empirical" turn has impoverished the field. Markets are not a tool, but few economists today can understand the error of such a claim nearly as well as Hayek or Milton Friedman. More is the pity.
Markets are not a tool. Nor are they a force of nature. Markets are freedom.
Natural experiments VERY frequently have confounding factors that are not properly considered. Particularly when those factors push the outcome in a preferred direction.
Well, true, but if you design your natural experiment well, those confounders are limited to *interactive* confounders -- for example, the difference in the effect of minimum wage in cities with different underlying levels of productivity.
Also astronomy and meteorology. Some sciences do need to rely on observational data.
But economics is different in that it can use *introspection.* The idea that wants are unlimited, resources are limited, which is so central to economics, couldn't really be derived from observation. We know that just by being human.
There was a beautiful natural experiment in epidemiology recently that studied the effect of shingles on dementia by observing the result of a Scottish policy that gave shingles vaccines to people born before a certain date and not those after (or maybe it was vice versa?). The researchers looked at people born the week before the date and the week after, identified the number of shingles cases in those people, and identified rates of dementia, showing that it was driven by shingles and not confounded by the vaccine itself. As long as the fact of birth a week earlier or later was not further confounded, this identified some likely real causal factors.
Of course, you have to get lucky to find a natural experiment (or get really unethical to conduct such an experiment).
Reading a post like this, I really hope you’ll write a book: “what every non-dumbass should understand about economics” I try not to be a dumbass about economics, but it was a lot easier back in school. It’s harder to get a sense of what’s important and what economists really know (and how) when there’s so much misinformation out there. Most of the time I don’t even know what questions to ask!
Also Economics Without Illusions by Joe Heath, whom I’m a big fan of. (Original title is Filthy Lucre but I think they changed it for the U.S.) this one is less an Intro to Economics and more so debunking persistent myths about economics on the left and the right. But it definitely fits the bill of what non-dumbasses should understand, and it tackles some pretty popular misconceptions.
D'oh. Cass is correct. "Bodies" isn't a term that only means "heavenly bodies", which is why when talking about planets and moons you have to qualify it. In physics, it refers to any kind of material object. Check the dictionary. And indeed, you cannot predict the physical behavior of arbitrary objects using only gravitational laws. Most obviously, anything on our planet is going to be affected by resistance of various kinds unless it's in some highly artificial environment.
That's why to make Cass look dumb you have to cut his argument off early. His very next sentence is: "Anyone who declared flight impossible would be instantly embarrassed." Why are you talking about predicting the motion of planets when Cass is talking about objects here on Earth?
Reading this comment is like watching a cornered hamster bare its tiny fangs.
Oh, so it's "heavenly bodies" where we only need gravity to analyze their motion? How about Napoleon using gravity to predict the paths of cannonballs, before electricity or the strong nuclear force was even understood or theorized?
The fact is, sometimes all you need *is* gravity. And if you think someone who neglects other forces is a moron, it might be the case that you're simply exposing yourself.
If you use nothing but gravity you're going to be very surprised when you try to invade Switzerland and suddenly your batteries are firing over the enemy. But your overall point is solid.
With a cannonball, you can get decent first shots even neglecting air resistance! After that you have to calibrate, of course. It wasn't until *much* later that we got fire control systems that take air resistance into account.
I did the math. You are correct, and it turns out to be quite interesting. I came at it in my head from the angle that everybody knows baseballs go further in Denver and since air resistance is proportional to v^2 and a cannonball is so much faster than a baseball the drag has to be even more of an issue. However that turns out to be incorrect.
A baseball coming off a bat at 120mph (close to the highest recorded) will face a drag force of 3.7N, but since a baseball only weighs ~144g that will result in a deceleration of 25m/s^2 which is enough to cut the velocity in half in 1 second.
A 32 pounder fired at its max range of 500m will have a muzzle velocity of around 450m/s (depending on powder charge) and face a drag force of 510N and a deceleration of 35m/s^2, so only enough to slow it 8% in the first second of flight (which is its max range). And if you go to Denver altitude this will be 30 m/s^2, so that's only about 5m difference in landing position!
The most interesting part is that this is made possible by the fact that baseballs and cannonballs fly at a fundamentally different flow regime through the air which lowers the cannonball's drag coefficient from ~.5 to ~.2. So without this effect the cannonball would decelerate at ~87m/s^2 and have a much more significant range difference at altitude.
Yes, and you're simply agreeing with Cass, who says:
> To understand and operate in the physical world—and to ensure that its outcomes promote human flourishing—requires familiarity with many other laws too, and an enthusiasm for engineered interventions that channel the various forces productively.
Air resistance, pressure, powder charge, etc - all this just proves his (entirely trivial) point, which is why it's baffling that Noah went off on him over a statement nearly as obvious as "the sky is blue".
Yes, that's right. There's a good reason the laws of gravity were worked out by looking at solar orbits and not anything here on Earth.
Artillery trajectories have nothing to do with electricity and Napoleon's armies didn't compute firing angles by using Newton's Laws, they used tables worked out using test firings. If they had tried to compute it on the fly using just gravitational theory they'd have failed, because cannonball trajectories depend not only on that but also things like the type of gunpowder and cannon used. If anyone had argued to Napoleon you only needed an understanding of gravity to understand where a cannon will fall, he would, in fact, have considered you a moron - just as Cass says.
I wasn't going to get personal but seeing as you went there first, honestly, this whole article is just embarrassing and you're capable of better. The sub-head is "Before you criticize something, at least try to understand it", you criticize Cass for not having training in physics, and then you go on to demonstrate profound confusion about both the basic laws of nature and what Cass is even saying. The statement you excerpted should be a statement of the obvious to anyone who remembers high school science.
More importantly, this is BY FAR not the first time I've checked your sources and found you to be mischaracterizing them. Cass was talking about bodies in motion here on Earth that are affected by the air, as his full quote makes clear. I've seen other people post the same complaint to your comment section: this problem crops up regularly and it massively diminishes your potential as a pundit of influence. There are some interesting insights on your blogs, but the frequency with which you mislead readers about what your sources are saying is way too high. At some point, something you write with this problem is going to go mega-viral and then everyone will notice.
Actually Napoleon did used the equations of projectile motion to target his artillery (though of course it did require calibration after the initial salvo)! He was the first to use this technique. You really just have to know the muzzle exit velocity and the angle to get a good approximation of where it'll fall.
"you criticize Cass for not having training in physics, and then you go on to demonstrate profound confusion about both the basic laws of nature and what Cass is even saying."<-- I studied physics at Stanford, sir! You don't really have any idea what you're talking about; you're just scrambling to come up with some reason to think that what Cass said was smart. It wasn't. Cass tossed off a lazy analogy without thinking. He wasn't talking about air resistance.
Your problem is that you think teleologically. You start from the assumption that anything your Dear Leader does must be good for the country -- and that it must be good for the country for precisely the exact reasons that its chief advocates claim. Thus, you're forced to defend the nonsensical idea that A) tariffs will somehow restore community and meaning and social solidarity to America, that B) this will happen because "economics isn't a science", and that C) we know economics isn't a science because of an analogy with the physics of air resistance.
That's how you ended up saying all these silly things in the comment section of a blog that you pay to hate on.
> Cass tossed off a lazy analogy without thinking. He wasn't talking about air resistance.
He talks about flight through the air in the very next sentence. Not air resistance - I brought that up, not him - because his point was only that if you exclude everything except gravity you can't explain flight, which is trivially true.
Now. What you wrote next is yet another reoccurrence of the problem I'm trying to wake you up to, whereby you keep mischaracterizing things you read. I believe this is NOT deliberate but rather a result of you getting angry, combined perhaps with having spent too much time in environments where, apparently, precise thinking isn't rewarded. For example:
1. I haven't said anything about tariffs, let alone that they'll restore solidarity to America. I also haven't opined on Cass' wider argument one way or another - in fact I don't agree with it! You just made all that stuff up.
2. You claim I start from the belief that whatever Trump does is good for the country. In reality I'm not American, don't live in America, Trump is not my leader, I don't agree with him on many things (especially his economics), and this entire thread has nothing to do with Trump.
3. I haven't argued that what Cass said was smart, but rather that it's so trivial it'd be understood by a 10 year old.
So you attacked a straw man, and that kind of completely random mis-representation is THE biggest problem with your work. It's fixable, but you have to actually recognize the problem exists and want to fix it. Knocking down arguments you made yourself is surely more enjoyable, but of inherently limited impact.
Now you're right that I'm paying you to give you this feedback. I didn't pay to "hate on" your blog, I subscribed originally with the goal of staying informed as to what non-crazy center left American thinkers were talking about. And it did succeed at that goal! Unfortunately the frequency with which your glosses fail source checks makes the actual content of what you're saying much less interesting, and in recent times I've just not been reading you as much. The money can be better spent elsewhere, so now I'll give you what you want and unsubscribe. Best of luck with making improvements.
> Artillery trajectories have nothing to do with electricity
Drag on the shell from air resistance is fundamentally an electromagnetic interaction as is friction of the shell against the barrel. The force generated by the powder charge is also derived from the electromagnetic force, which is also the reason that the firing chamber holds pressure and the shell doesn't fly right through its target.
But actually, as Noah pointed out in response to my previous comment (and I confirmed with the math) you can calculate quite accurate trajectories (at least for the relatively very short range guns of the time) with just a pure ballistic trajectory.
Cass's article has an actually interesting thesis that would have been worth discussing, so it's a pity this has devolved into a very silly physics discussion.
Electromagnetism between atoms isn't the same thing as electricity, which is why there are two different words for them - as you well know, I'm sure. And although it doesn't matter to the argument at all, as Cass's point was much more general than Napoleonic cannons (lol), your calculations seem way off. A 32 pounder could easily send a cannonball over 1.5km:
This hits very close to home. The lay people wrongly believe that sociology, economics and psychology are still stuck in circa 1900s when armchair experts argue their cases out of a mixture of anecdotes, personal tastes and moral persuasion. But hell no, it's no longer the case, and the public needs to understand that. And to stop thinking that some anti-intellectuals hand waving econ/social science bashing carries any weight.
The theory of comparative advantage is used in international trade to explain why there are trade surpluses and deficits. The comparative advantage of America is a population of over 300 million, a single currency and no restrictions on movement of people or goods within the country. One would think that size of economy would prevent any trade deficits. When the Industrial Revolution started in the 18th century Britain had an enormous advantage with industrial products over most European countries. Whole industries in France could not compete with imports from Britain. A balanced was created when the rich British factory owners could import vast quantities of French wine. The same happened when the EEC (EU) abolished restrictions on the trade in industrial goods. France had 11 companies making refrigerators. Within two years they were down to one company. The Italian makers of refrigerators had taken most of the market.
Cass perhaps best illustrates MAGA's intellectual underpinning - bullshit in, bullshit out.
Indeed. Bullshit in the Frankfurt sense, even - speaking with complete disregard for truth, purely for the effect it has on swaying the listener.
Exactly and Frankfurt's book was brilliant!
Though I still think it’s darkly funny that he wrote a companion volume “On Truth” that is the same pocket size but completely gold, and nobody seems to know it
I didn't know it, thanks for the pointer.
But his Bullshit book is probably the perfect "field guide", to MAGAism, no?
It really is. It’s not bad for understanding the failure modes of LLMs either.
And the Democrat agenda? Taxing billionaires more will solve America's obvious fiscal irresponsibility? The middle class won't need to be taxed more, much more, to achieve responsible fiscal policy? Bullshit in, bullshit out ... from both political parties. Political opportunism is bipartisan.
It's bullshit through and through!
Damn! The righteous annoyance is dripping from every word here in a way I don’t usually perceive in your work. Thoroughly enjoyable!
You know, I thought that my snarky tone in 2011-2014 came from grad school, and from being young in general. Now I wonder if part of it was anger that the people in charge of my country had been dumb enough to crash the financial system and throw millions of people out of work. In the years since 2011, our economic policy was never optimal, but it was never very stupid, including under Trump 1.0 and Biden.
Now our policy is getting stupid again, and I'm getting angry again.
Noah, you have been telling us that the US is cooling down emotionally. I think that was wishful thinking. There is plenty to be angry about in 2025.
Well, I *wish* people would be a little angrier about the stupid tariffs, but in fact people seem to be responding simply by getting quietly grumpy and sour about it all.
Unfortunately, policy often goes crazy just as the grassroots is calming down. Another example is the 1930s.
Does one ever need an excuse to not suffer fools gladly?
Which people crashed the economy In 2008?
Exactly as it should and exactly why I appreciate it.
Yes indeed. Righteous annoyance, exactly right. Noah clearly prefers Democrat absurdities to Republican absurdities.
Cass illustrates the fundamental problem in many MAGA areas, turning the Scientific method on its head. They choose the outcome they want, then invent a series of ‘proven’ steps that lead to that outcome. It’s basically the same mistake made by Intelligent Design folks.
A similar mistake is made in the MAGA political world. They invent the country they think we ought to be and then try to bend our history to fit their design.
This flaw is encapsulated in two of my favorite old wall posters”
'My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts'.
'We do not see things the way they are; we see them as we are'.
This is a problem with ideologues in general unfortunately, and it plagues our social sciences. We would all be better if we start with the following assumptions:
1) To promote a better world, we need to first understand the world.
2) The most significant barrier to our understanding of the world is our own preconceived biases.
3) Ideology is the mother of all preconceived biases.
Unfortunately, acknowledging the above requires Humility, which ideologues typically lack.
I would substitute ‘blind’ ideology. After all, the United States is the product of a hard headed kind of ideology. We are, after all, the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human society and government ever attempted. Without any kind of ideology, we wouldn’t be.
Yes, but I would say that the ideology of the founders was based on a hard-nosed observation of the results of previous systems in the real world. They also combined it with an acknowledgement of the limitations of humans in the real world. One can particularly see this in the checks and balances they built into the constitution.
“If men were angels........” J Madison.
Yes, I agree completely. Humility is key. Do-gooders want to save the planet, penalize "the rich", redistribute the fruits of our labors, open borders, be a citizen of the world, all things for everyone no matter (provided it doesn't affect them of course), and be lauded for their "compassion".
Oh well. Bullshit in, bullshit out ... as someone has already opined.
As much as I would love to ascribe that only to MAGA that is sadly present across American society, and has been for a very long time.
There is, however a distinct difference between ignorance of the facts, which is widespread, and denial of them.
This is the only way MAGA exists as a political movement - intellectuals like Cass and people like JD Vance who clearly know when Trump's policies are complete BS repeatedly reverse engineer them into the outcome they've already decided they want. There is no coherence to Trump's economic policies. Its just impulse, platitudes, misreading of history, and vague gesturing to some imagined time when the U.S "was great." So Cass and Vance have to repeatedly contort themselves into rationalizing the irrational.
Ross Douthat, also a frequent defender of Cass and Vance, took this to new levels recently with his op-ed about why the "TACO" (Trump Always Chickens Out) moniker that traders have placed on his tariff policy are a reason Trump is so "successful." In Douthat's telling, it is precisely because Trump has no coherence to his policies that voters trust him - if he veers in one direction they don't like, its only a matter of time before he veers in another. Somehow Douthat thinks is an effective way to run a country - that infinite flexibility and the willingness to swerve is a way of accomplishing something of lasting value versus patience, discipline, expertise, and long-term thinking.
It all nets out to MAGA - like Trump himself - fundamentally being a lazy project. As Noah points out in his critque of Cass's work, there's no need to ever dive deep into a topic - MAGA practitioners can simply wave way decades or even centuries old work because its "elitist" or the product of an "elite institution." They can substitute whatever they want in its place and then through pure sophistry (which is Vance's only skill) claim that it will lead to some outcome they've already decided would be desirable.
In MAGA's world, there aren't any really hard problems - the solutions to everything are obvious and its just a matter of will to apply them. As Bart Simpson proclaims in the episode where he's running for student council president, "My opponent says there aren't any easy solutions. I say he's not looking hard enough!" If there's a better description of the MAGA project than that, I haven't seen it yet.
It's always astounding to me how much grace and patience Ross Douthat and his ilk will give people like JD Vance and Trump, but they don't have that for anyone outside of their own political circle. They seem to think that because they are the good guys the instability and chaos is fine from what I can tell. It also doesn't help that a lot of MAGA supporters are just bad faith and low info, so its almost impossible to have an intellectually honest conversation.
Also reminds me of a quote I heard when I was younger.
> "People's perception is their reality"
It's all a vibe to them, and their main impulse is to be contrarian no matter what. They can't govern but they sure know how to critique and break things. That's the most good faith understanding of what they are currently doing, the bad faith is that they frankly don't care as long as they can impose their regressive worldview on the rest of us and just gain power. The ends justify the means to them.
Couple of quick thoughts. One, in reading your intro, it sounds like you misinterpreted Cass - my initial take was he was saying that, here on earth, actual movement of objects is not just physics, but is also affected by other factors, such as human actions.
Which kind of flows into my second point, which is that, of what I’ve read of Cass’s writing, many of his points appear to be that maximizing wellbeing is not synonymous with maximizing economic output. Values, culture, and even just preferences need to be considered in making economic policy decisions.
In particular, many people’s experiences of human and economic wellbeing tend to be tied to things like owning a home of their preferred type and being able to comfortably raise a family and later retire securely. For example, owning a single family home with a yard and a deck but with less net worth is very frequently seen as being better off than having a higher net worth and living in an apartment.
Many people measure much of their wellbeing by their community, their local and regional culture, and proximity to friends and family. That latter proximity, for many, is a source of housing, childcare, retirement safety, and an economic safety net. Those cultural and familial things together are often what makes life meaningful to them. Moving away is thus often a wrenching loss, not a simple economic decision.
When economists push mobility and agglomeration by looking only at economic output and not what matters to the people involved, you create a tension between policy goals and what people actually want. And if you keep pushing, eventually something breaks.
"it sounds like you misinterpreted Cass - my initial take was he was saying that, here on earth, actual movement of objects is not just physics, but is also affected by other factors, such as human actions." <-- I don't think this is what he was saying. He's saying that since there are other forces of nature besides gravity, understanding only gravity will prevent you from understanding motion. The analogy he's trying to make is that if you understand only market forces, you won't understand what makes human life good -- you'll neglect things like community, social solidarity, trust, etc.
And of course that's true, in general. But just like there are many situations where you can neglect forces other than gravity and describe the motion of bodies just fine (like in the Halley example), there are many situations in which you only need to understand market forces in order to predict the effects of a policy. For example, putting >40% tariffs on all of the U.S.' trading partners is a policy where you don't need a subtle understanding of the effects of economics on community and solidarity in order to know that it's a bad idea.
I'm not sure Democrats need to engage in the wider argument. This is essentially a squabble between the Republican party's past and its present. It was neo-liberal Republicans who promoted unlimited free trade with all the terrible consequences it had for blue collar America. Now they're trying walk that back and cover their tracks by crossing nationalism with socialism to create something recognizably right-wing that appeals to the victims of their previous policies. Something that they claim is definitely not 'Socialism' - hence all the quotes from dead conservatives about community and social cohesion (and I do mean all the quotes). Maybe they should call it 'national socialism'. Something about that name, though . . .
I wish I could like this 100x..
"I don't think this is what he was saying. He's saying that since there are other forces of nature besides gravity, understanding only gravity will prevent you from understanding motion."
He seems pretty clearly to be saying that understanding only gravity will prevent you from *fully* understanding motion. When other forces are absent or irrelevant, like celestial bodies traveling much less than light speed, you can use the gravitational law alone.
When we talk about laws that are true 'ceteris paribus' we sometimes really mean 'ceteris absentibus' (other things absent), or 'ceteris normalibus' (other things normal/standard). The latter are sometimes true scientific laws, and sometimes axiomatic rules we protect from disconfirmation by privileging ideal conditions, such as a type of instrumentally rational action.
> He seems pretty clearly to be saying that understanding only gravity will prevent you from *fully* understanding motion
I dunno. If someone mostly, but but fully, understands something I would never call them a moron. I don't think I'm an outlier there.
It is Cass's pointless name calling that gives his statement a totalizing feel.
If he had written "using only gravity will, in some situations, lead you to make mistakes small and large" that'd be one thing. Or even "it would be naive to think gravity can explain everything in all situations".
But used moron.
I think he used the term moron because the situation he’s describing is absurd. Imagine trying to predict where a hockey puck will fly based only on the law of gravity (and not laws describing force transfer from the arms to the end of the stick around a fulcrum point, friction of wind resistance, etc.).
Or imagine trying to predict the motion of a car using only the law of gravity, and not various other laws governing the power of internal combustion engines, the friction of tires gripping the road, etc., etc. When we get concrete like this we are dealing not just in isolated laws but multiple full blown models with many elements, each describing a part of the process.
Ok, now try to describe the actions of a person using only laws of economics, and ignoring their commitments that are independent of the subject matter of economics (love of family, emotional commitments to their tribe, etc.). The rational utility maximizer is homo economicus, not Homo sapiens.
This is only one of Cass’s two points. The other one relates to reflexivity and how the measured regularities of economics are not governing regularities in the same way as those of physics. They arise from action and can be changed by action.
Yes, the difference between physics and economics is not fundamental but one of degree and ultimately subject matter I think. Two old jokes capture it nicely. The one about the physicist who comes up with a solution to improve a farmer's egg yield, which only works for spherical chickens in a vacuum and the one about the economist stranded on a desert island with only tinned food, who solves the problem by assuming a tin opener.
Except in that second joke there is also a physicist, who proposes smashing it with a rock in the version I remember. The physicist is concerned with, and successful at, prediction except at the remotest reaches of theory (string theory, etc.). The economist is concerned with prediction, sort of, but waives it off when he fails at even basic tasks like predicting sales of a product next month, or GDP, or unemployment, etc., etc.
When one science can confirm (replicate) laws with constants that are precise to 7 digits or more, and the other science cannot confirm a constant to even 1 significant digit, we are not talking about a difference of degree but of kind.
Reflexivity is a big part of why there is a difference of kind.
Not in terms of final results maybe, but they both proceed by isolating the phenomena they're studying and measuring, modelling and then drawing conclusions that are as generalisable as they think their models will stand and exposing the results to objective testing sometimes, but not always, by making predictions. Of course physicists have the advantage that the systems they study are far less complex - they are either naturally isolated or can be isolated experimentally and have far fewer entities with fewer interactions between them. Economists and other social scientists study systems that are far more complex - more entities embedded in a web of interactions with each other and with factors .
It's true that promulgating a social science prediction can affect whether or not it is proved correct, whereas molecules, particles and forces don't care what you say about them. But that's the point of the social sciences - they're policy sciences. Their research is usually undertaken with a view to trying to solve or ameliorate a problem that affects people. In a sense we have a more pressing need for economics than for physics. That's why economists have to keep doing what they're doing, always attempting to improve it. In time, economic problems will turn up repeatedly and policies used previously will be adjusted and tailored to them. In the Great Recession economists said 'we are all Keynesians now' because reflationary policies were fairly well-understood and their use largely agreed. Some disagreed but the handling of the recession was largely successful.
Improvements in economics are mostly conceptual. We have new ways to understand phenomena. To the extent we are better at prediction, it mostly is not through theory but through massively complex algorithms that don't care about theory, they are just pattern-finding machines. But again, the patterns can and do change, so the predictive power is local and temporary, and basically just depend on social/psychological intertia.
Economics doesn't isolate phenomena in the same way. It destroys the interest of the subject matter to do so. Imagine isolating a transaction from all other causal influences...it wouldn't have the same meaning or function. A sandwich is worth $10 only relative to other options I have at the moment, how hungry I am, my attitudes towards buying vs making my own sandwiches, my income, etc. You cannot isolate from these things, and they are all dynamic, and NONE of them follow laws that have been confirmed with numerical constants. Ceteris are not paribus.
A physicist can isolate an effect from all causal factors but one (use a faraday cage to neutralize electric fields, etc.), and/or determine that ceteris are paribus. That's how they discover the constants.
I am generally pro-econ. I get frustrated when "trust the Science" people don't consider it a science. Just accepting that supply and demand are real things will get you to the correct answer on many questions.
However, I agree with this critique. Like a lot of smart people, economists can get really wrapped up in a single-variable optimization problem. For the most part that's served us well through the last couple of centuries. But at the forefront of wealthy societies you do start to see it fray. You do seem to have a lot of unhappy people.
One other thing with economists is they can be bad accountants. Their somewhat reasonable obsession with growth can cause them to support anything that seems to cause it, often times just vaguely, "infrastructure", which is often needless sprawl fuel and bridges to nowhere and such that give us a lot of liabilities and shitty places. Lean too hard on growth and you can find yourself something of a Ponzi salesman.
But econ is fundamentally different than hard science. That doesn't make it wrong, but if you want to "trust the science" like that, you do have to be very restrictive over what you call "science" and most of econ doesn't make the cut.
"Just accepting that supply and demand are real things will get you to the correct answer on many questions"
I also think in terms of supply and demand, but these are refinements of everyday language about intentional action. It's like saying that you should just accept that belief and desire are real things to get the correct answer on so many questions. Yes, agreed, but it isn't science in the modern sense of that term. It's our conceptual framework for thinking about action, or thinking about action under conditions of scarcity.
The "law" of supply and demand is necessarily qualitative and divorced from an operationalized definition or confirmation. This is totally unlike physics. The speed of light in a vacuum is so tightly operationalized that it is now defined as exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. A meter literally has been defined in terms of the speed of light, and a second has been defined in terms of the oscillation frequency of cesium atoms. Yes, the speed of light is defined in terms of the oscillation of cesium atoms, down to 9 significant digits of precision.
Nothing even remotely like that exists in economics. They are not the same kind of science.
Lisa, you are a wise woman indeed. Lifestyle matters, a lot. Noah, a gifted economist, apparently doesn't fully understand this. It's relatively easy to be snarky if you're intelligent and well-educated, probably more difficult to learn the practicalities of "flyover voters".
People like Cass have what I call, the "Arrogance of the Ignorant"
It's a corollary to another I call the "Arrogance of Always Being Right"
These exists as core tenants of the far left and far right types, who view the "other", with sheer intolerance.
Exactly
Huh, for all the press he gets I assumed Cass was an economist by training but had taken a heterodox turn. That he's not explains a few things.
The MAGA brain trust is pretty depleted. That might be the best they can do.
It doesn't matter to their supporters though, because they speak in a way that drips psuedo intellectualism, and they seemingly present simple answers to complicated problems for all of societal ills. Additionally, they give cover for people in power that don't even follow the policies that they themselves are presenting imo.
Nailed it. There is science to the dismal science notwithstanding all its limitations. Policy that ignores that science will fail absent some exogenous event. Well written piece. Thanks
Agreed, people that fail against it, almost always do so because they don't like the answers it provides. In contradicts the way they want the world to work..
Natural experiments are inferior to laboratory experiments because you can't isolate your proposed causal mechanism as well. In the laboratory, you can make sure that the test tubes are identical other than having difference amounts of chromium in an injected fluid, or whatever. Natural experiments try to identify cases where it's not plausible that anything differed other than the variable of interest that is proposed as causal, but it's usually unconvincing as experimental design.
More generally, economics doesn't stand up very well to a comparison with natural sciences like physics, chemistry, or even biology, if you assume that those sciences represent the epistemic gold standard. They often deal uncertainties or near certainties, and they can pass Karl Popper's test of falsifiability. Economics is almost never like that.
But economists also have an important advantage over physicists and chemists. Introspection. You can't learn anything by supposing that you're an electron and reasoning about what you would do in the situations where electrons find themselves. But economics deals with people, and we are people, and we can learn a lot simply by thinking clearly and consistently about what we would do in lots of different situations.
That's where you get an insight like the demand curve from. A demand curve is, in principle, an infinite series of hypothetical statements about counterfactual situations. You can never really have data that would give you a warrant for drawing one. But we don't need it. You can't really begin to understand the epistemic basis for economics until you understand that we don't even need evidence for the law of demand because we know from theory that it must hold, and that's enough. Not that there isn't corroborating evidence. But if you think that one's confidence in the law of demand should be proportional to the corroborating data, you're off track from the very beginning.
Unfortunately, economists largely have lost a real understanding of the actual epistemic basis for economics over the past generation. The "empirical" turn has impoverished the field. Markets are not a tool, but few economists today can understand the error of such a claim nearly as well as Hayek or Milton Friedman. More is the pity.
Markets are not a tool. Nor are they a force of nature. Markets are freedom.
But natural experiments have ecological validity that lab experiments may lack.
Natural experiments VERY frequently have confounding factors that are not properly considered. Particularly when those factors push the outcome in a preferred direction.
Well, true, but if you design your natural experiment well, those confounders are limited to *interactive* confounders -- for example, the difference in the effect of minimum wage in cities with different underlying levels of productivity.
https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/edward.leamer/selected_research/Tantalus%20by%20Leamer.pdf
Good point.
Most people would not say epidemiology is not a science, but it sure is, and experimentation is also a limitation
Also astronomy and meteorology. Some sciences do need to rely on observational data.
But economics is different in that it can use *introspection.* The idea that wants are unlimited, resources are limited, which is so central to economics, couldn't really be derived from observation. We know that just by being human.
There was a beautiful natural experiment in epidemiology recently that studied the effect of shingles on dementia by observing the result of a Scottish policy that gave shingles vaccines to people born before a certain date and not those after (or maybe it was vice versa?). The researchers looked at people born the week before the date and the week after, identified the number of shingles cases in those people, and identified rates of dementia, showing that it was driven by shingles and not confounded by the vaccine itself. As long as the fact of birth a week earlier or later was not further confounded, this identified some likely real causal factors.
Of course, you have to get lucky to find a natural experiment (or get really unethical to conduct such an experiment).
Nailed it again!
It's been enjoyable to see the return of classic economics lately. Americans will likely learn this to our sorrow
Reading a post like this, I really hope you’ll write a book: “what every non-dumbass should understand about economics” I try not to be a dumbass about economics, but it was a lot easier back in school. It’s harder to get a sense of what’s important and what economists really know (and how) when there’s so much misinformation out there. Most of the time I don’t even know what questions to ask!
That book has been written, fwiw
Any title you’d recommend?
Here is a good place to start:
https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell-ebook/dp/B00L4FSSTA/
https://mru.org/principles-economics-microeconomics
Also Economics Without Illusions by Joe Heath, whom I’m a big fan of. (Original title is Filthy Lucre but I think they changed it for the U.S.) this one is less an Intro to Economics and more so debunking persistent myths about economics on the left and the right. But it definitely fits the bill of what non-dumbasses should understand, and it tackles some pretty popular misconceptions.
On the science side, a good intro is Physics for Future Presidents
D'oh. Cass is correct. "Bodies" isn't a term that only means "heavenly bodies", which is why when talking about planets and moons you have to qualify it. In physics, it refers to any kind of material object. Check the dictionary. And indeed, you cannot predict the physical behavior of arbitrary objects using only gravitational laws. Most obviously, anything on our planet is going to be affected by resistance of various kinds unless it's in some highly artificial environment.
That's why to make Cass look dumb you have to cut his argument off early. His very next sentence is: "Anyone who declared flight impossible would be instantly embarrassed." Why are you talking about predicting the motion of planets when Cass is talking about objects here on Earth?
Reading this comment is like watching a cornered hamster bare its tiny fangs.
Oh, so it's "heavenly bodies" where we only need gravity to analyze their motion? How about Napoleon using gravity to predict the paths of cannonballs, before electricity or the strong nuclear force was even understood or theorized?
The fact is, sometimes all you need *is* gravity. And if you think someone who neglects other forces is a moron, it might be the case that you're simply exposing yourself.
If you use nothing but gravity you're going to be very surprised when you try to invade Switzerland and suddenly your batteries are firing over the enemy. But your overall point is solid.
With a cannonball, you can get decent first shots even neglecting air resistance! After that you have to calibrate, of course. It wasn't until *much* later that we got fire control systems that take air resistance into account.
I did the math. You are correct, and it turns out to be quite interesting. I came at it in my head from the angle that everybody knows baseballs go further in Denver and since air resistance is proportional to v^2 and a cannonball is so much faster than a baseball the drag has to be even more of an issue. However that turns out to be incorrect.
A baseball coming off a bat at 120mph (close to the highest recorded) will face a drag force of 3.7N, but since a baseball only weighs ~144g that will result in a deceleration of 25m/s^2 which is enough to cut the velocity in half in 1 second.
A 32 pounder fired at its max range of 500m will have a muzzle velocity of around 450m/s (depending on powder charge) and face a drag force of 510N and a deceleration of 35m/s^2, so only enough to slow it 8% in the first second of flight (which is its max range). And if you go to Denver altitude this will be 30 m/s^2, so that's only about 5m difference in landing position!
The most interesting part is that this is made possible by the fact that baseballs and cannonballs fly at a fundamentally different flow regime through the air which lowers the cannonball's drag coefficient from ~.5 to ~.2. So without this effect the cannonball would decelerate at ~87m/s^2 and have a much more significant range difference at altitude.
Enough math, let’s just invade Switzerland and find out for sure! (We’ll tell Trump they’re Greenland sympathizers, it’ll be fine.)
I could maybe get behind this if we get to bring their cheap lift ticket prices to the US.
Yes, and you're simply agreeing with Cass, who says:
> To understand and operate in the physical world—and to ensure that its outcomes promote human flourishing—requires familiarity with many other laws too, and an enthusiasm for engineered interventions that channel the various forces productively.
Air resistance, pressure, powder charge, etc - all this just proves his (entirely trivial) point, which is why it's baffling that Noah went off on him over a statement nearly as obvious as "the sky is blue".
Yes, that's right. There's a good reason the laws of gravity were worked out by looking at solar orbits and not anything here on Earth.
Artillery trajectories have nothing to do with electricity and Napoleon's armies didn't compute firing angles by using Newton's Laws, they used tables worked out using test firings. If they had tried to compute it on the fly using just gravitational theory they'd have failed, because cannonball trajectories depend not only on that but also things like the type of gunpowder and cannon used. If anyone had argued to Napoleon you only needed an understanding of gravity to understand where a cannon will fall, he would, in fact, have considered you a moron - just as Cass says.
I wasn't going to get personal but seeing as you went there first, honestly, this whole article is just embarrassing and you're capable of better. The sub-head is "Before you criticize something, at least try to understand it", you criticize Cass for not having training in physics, and then you go on to demonstrate profound confusion about both the basic laws of nature and what Cass is even saying. The statement you excerpted should be a statement of the obvious to anyone who remembers high school science.
More importantly, this is BY FAR not the first time I've checked your sources and found you to be mischaracterizing them. Cass was talking about bodies in motion here on Earth that are affected by the air, as his full quote makes clear. I've seen other people post the same complaint to your comment section: this problem crops up regularly and it massively diminishes your potential as a pundit of influence. There are some interesting insights on your blogs, but the frequency with which you mislead readers about what your sources are saying is way too high. At some point, something you write with this problem is going to go mega-viral and then everyone will notice.
Actually Napoleon did used the equations of projectile motion to target his artillery (though of course it did require calibration after the initial salvo)! He was the first to use this technique. You really just have to know the muzzle exit velocity and the angle to get a good approximation of where it'll fall.
"you criticize Cass for not having training in physics, and then you go on to demonstrate profound confusion about both the basic laws of nature and what Cass is even saying."<-- I studied physics at Stanford, sir! You don't really have any idea what you're talking about; you're just scrambling to come up with some reason to think that what Cass said was smart. It wasn't. Cass tossed off a lazy analogy without thinking. He wasn't talking about air resistance.
Your problem is that you think teleologically. You start from the assumption that anything your Dear Leader does must be good for the country -- and that it must be good for the country for precisely the exact reasons that its chief advocates claim. Thus, you're forced to defend the nonsensical idea that A) tariffs will somehow restore community and meaning and social solidarity to America, that B) this will happen because "economics isn't a science", and that C) we know economics isn't a science because of an analogy with the physics of air resistance.
That's how you ended up saying all these silly things in the comment section of a blog that you pay to hate on.
> Cass tossed off a lazy analogy without thinking. He wasn't talking about air resistance.
He talks about flight through the air in the very next sentence. Not air resistance - I brought that up, not him - because his point was only that if you exclude everything except gravity you can't explain flight, which is trivially true.
Now. What you wrote next is yet another reoccurrence of the problem I'm trying to wake you up to, whereby you keep mischaracterizing things you read. I believe this is NOT deliberate but rather a result of you getting angry, combined perhaps with having spent too much time in environments where, apparently, precise thinking isn't rewarded. For example:
1. I haven't said anything about tariffs, let alone that they'll restore solidarity to America. I also haven't opined on Cass' wider argument one way or another - in fact I don't agree with it! You just made all that stuff up.
2. You claim I start from the belief that whatever Trump does is good for the country. In reality I'm not American, don't live in America, Trump is not my leader, I don't agree with him on many things (especially his economics), and this entire thread has nothing to do with Trump.
3. I haven't argued that what Cass said was smart, but rather that it's so trivial it'd be understood by a 10 year old.
So you attacked a straw man, and that kind of completely random mis-representation is THE biggest problem with your work. It's fixable, but you have to actually recognize the problem exists and want to fix it. Knocking down arguments you made yourself is surely more enjoyable, but of inherently limited impact.
Now you're right that I'm paying you to give you this feedback. I didn't pay to "hate on" your blog, I subscribed originally with the goal of staying informed as to what non-crazy center left American thinkers were talking about. And it did succeed at that goal! Unfortunately the frequency with which your glosses fail source checks makes the actual content of what you're saying much less interesting, and in recent times I've just not been reading you as much. The money can be better spent elsewhere, so now I'll give you what you want and unsubscribe. Best of luck with making improvements.
> Artillery trajectories have nothing to do with electricity
Drag on the shell from air resistance is fundamentally an electromagnetic interaction as is friction of the shell against the barrel. The force generated by the powder charge is also derived from the electromagnetic force, which is also the reason that the firing chamber holds pressure and the shell doesn't fly right through its target.
But actually, as Noah pointed out in response to my previous comment (and I confirmed with the math) you can calculate quite accurate trajectories (at least for the relatively very short range guns of the time) with just a pure ballistic trajectory.
Cass's article has an actually interesting thesis that would have been worth discussing, so it's a pity this has devolved into a very silly physics discussion.
Electromagnetism between atoms isn't the same thing as electricity, which is why there are two different words for them - as you well know, I'm sure. And although it doesn't matter to the argument at all, as Cass's point was much more general than Napoleonic cannons (lol), your calculations seem way off. A 32 pounder could easily send a cannonball over 1.5km:
https://www.nelsonsnavy.co.uk/broadside6.html
Where did you get the 500m figure from?
This hits very close to home. The lay people wrongly believe that sociology, economics and psychology are still stuck in circa 1900s when armchair experts argue their cases out of a mixture of anecdotes, personal tastes and moral persuasion. But hell no, it's no longer the case, and the public needs to understand that. And to stop thinking that some anti-intellectuals hand waving econ/social science bashing carries any weight.
The theory of comparative advantage is used in international trade to explain why there are trade surpluses and deficits. The comparative advantage of America is a population of over 300 million, a single currency and no restrictions on movement of people or goods within the country. One would think that size of economy would prevent any trade deficits. When the Industrial Revolution started in the 18th century Britain had an enormous advantage with industrial products over most European countries. Whole industries in France could not compete with imports from Britain. A balanced was created when the rich British factory owners could import vast quantities of French wine. The same happened when the EEC (EU) abolished restrictions on the trade in industrial goods. France had 11 companies making refrigerators. Within two years they were down to one company. The Italian makers of refrigerators had taken most of the market.
Well put in footnote 1
Wow, decorate that first Cass quote with some appropriate Derrida-babble and you're in postmodernist territory. Another example of the "horseshoe"?