2024 Spring Link Review

It's way late, but here are my top recommendations from the previous season.

Cargo Cult Science

Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman’s 1974 commencement address at Caltech delves into the tragedy of the Cargo Cult. A Cargo Cult occurs when the environment that justifies a behavior disappears, but people continue to engage in it despite the practice becoming nonsensical. He provides an example of Pacific Islanders repeatedly preparing runways for planes as they did in WWII. This is despite the war ending and no Americans returning to use the Islanders’ airstrip and share cargo in return.

Feynman brings this up because he’s upset with academics. The Cargo Cult that he worries about is an unchallenged “scientific method.” Many will follow the steps of the scientific method – from writing an abstract to peer review to analyzing data – and claim the title and authority of science, yet their science fails to pass a basic test: the experiment is repeatable. He argues that there are some environments where the scientific method isn’t the right tool for the job, or at least its use shouldn’t command confidence like in other environments. This prescience is yet another reason that Feynman stands out through the ages.

Here’s an interesting fact while on the topic: only 75% of Nobel Prize winners and major discoveries since 1900 applied the common scientific method in its entirety. The scientific method may be a good post hoc framework for discovery and knowledge generation, but it isn’t discovery and knowledge generation.

Sublimated Femininity

Regan Arntz-Gray

One of my favorite bloggers that I’ve latched onto in the past year provides a perspective on a conflict that I’ve only been able to catch glimpses of. Regan describes the struggle many women endure as Life creeps up on them. For most of her youth and adult years, there was a desire to stand out through “masculine” endeavors such as skill, education, or career and a rejection of femininity. Femininity was low status, simple, and engaged with by women who had nothing better. That attitude began to change with time. The things she had thought of as feminine molds and shackles set by the maligning patriarchy were appealing to her.

I’ll leave the rest to Regan because she communicates everything so well. I strongly recommend reading and subscribing.

The Managerial Revolution

James Burnham

Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution” is one of the most impressive books I have read in the last year. This is not because of his prose, clarity, wit, or book length. It’s because Burnham astutely characterized and then predicted the socioeconomic changes that occurred in multiple societies from the Russian Revolution to the present day, all from a leather seat in 1941. Orwell wrote the foreword (which was 11% of the book per Kindle, I might add) and notes that Burnham made some bad predictions on the specifics but ended up being completely right about the big picture.

So, what is the managerial revolution? It starts with the idea of managerialism as a form of capitalism distinct from bourgeois capitalism. He makes this distinction by pointing out that the capitalist system granted property owners two inalienable rights: the right to control access to their goods or services and the right to benefit from the profits. Managerialism is when the bourgeoise forfeits control of their means of production, which Burnham points out is upstream of the profits. Control of the means of production is separated from ownership, so the controllers’ interests are separate from the owners’ interests. He identified the principal-agent problem decades before economists Jensen and Meckling published “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure.”

Burnham was a staunch Communist and friend and supporter of Trotsky, but he recoiled at the horror of the Russian Revolution. His reaction led him to observe similarities between Soviet Communism, German Nazism, and the nascent American New Deal: they all benefited a new class of people. Burnham’s managerial revolution is a phase in which capitalist societies morph into managerial societies. One moment, The Man is a full owner and founder with his name on the door. The next, The Man is a hired CEO with an MBA and an option plan. This is the early work describing the emergence of a professional, managerial, and technocratic class: the PMC.

Burnham is careful not to dismiss managerial society as inherently bad. He took what I believe is a wise route of ‘this evolved for a reason.’ The problems of large organizations did require more coordination between many individuals and disciplines, and managing this new kind of organization was a problem in its own right.

What one should take from this book is that the ideologies, political narratives, and social dynamics of managerial society will largely benefit the PMC, which is disparate from bourgeois capitalists like Elon Musk. Studying the actions and incentives of the two requires different frameworks. The differences between the PMC’s and the bourgeoise’s socioeconomic games will be reflected in their political and social attitudes.