Felix Salmon

Brad DeLong has found a 1995 article by Niall Ferguson which pretty much puts the lie to Ferguson’s claim about his take on John Maynard Keynes. Here’s what Ferguson now says:

My disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation. It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life.

And here’s what he wrote in 1995:

Research in German archives shows that Keynes’s critique of the Versailles Treaty was based on anything but dispassionate economic analysis. Few, if any, of its readers can have appreciated how far the ideas contained in The Economic Consequences of the Peace — the book which made him a celebrity — were actually inspired by members of the German peace delegation at the Versailles conference. Still fewer knew that their appeal to him owed as much to his homosexuality as to his Germanophilia.

Ferguson writes that “the attraction Keynes felt” for the German representative Carl Melchior “strongly influenced his judgment”, and adds for good measure that “those familiar with Bloomsbury will appreciate why Keynes fell so hard for the representative of an enemy power”. Here’s the whole thing:

This is a slightly different argument, of course, to the idiotic remarks Ferguson made at a conference in California last week, where he said that Keynes didn’t care about future generations because he was gay and didn’t have children. If those remarks were, in Ferguson’s own words, “doubly stupid”, then maybe his Spectator article is maybe only singly stupid. Except it was carefully written, edited, and committed to print: Ferguson can’t claim that his article was merely a regrettable “off-the-cuff” error.

At first blush, Ferguson’s apology is full and unqualified. But in light of this and other information, it seems that Ferguson has rather more to apologize for than a single verbal response to a question from Paul McCulley. Either Ferguson still believes today what he wrote in 1995, or else he has changed his mind and now believes that what he wrote back then is “simply false”. It’s about time he clears this up.

Update: It seems we can’t take Ferguson’s apology at face value after all. In an ill-tempered letter written to the Harvard Crimson, Ferguson says that he can’t be prejudiced because he has a Somalian wife and a gay friend; says that “the strong attraction Keynes felt for the German banker Carl Melchior undoubtedly played a part in shaping Keynes’ views on the Treaty of Versailles and its aftermath”; and adds that Keynes and the other members of the Bloomsbury Group “had no doubt at all that sexual orientation had a significance beyond the narrow confines of the bedroom, and that intellectual life and emotional life were intertwined”. I guess it’s not “simply false” after all to suggest that Keynes’s approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life.

The forced retirement of Helen Thomas is further proof, if any were needed, that it’s still unacceptable, in public discourse, to be wrong in one’s opinions. I find that sad.

Thomas gave voice to an opinion which she then, almost immediately, retracted; no one, in the subsequent debate, defended the substance of her remarks. She was wrong; everybody, including Thomas, agrees on that point, and no real harm was done to anyone but Thomas when the video of her remarks surfaced.

But if you turn out to be wrong, even temporarily, even only once, on a hot-button issue, that’s enough for effective excommunication from polite society. That, to me, is chilling: I’d much rather live in a world where people should be able to change their minds and should be allowed to be wrong on occasion. For surely we are all wrong, much more often than we like to think.

A couple of years ago, Tyler Cowen, in conversation with Wil Wilkinson, said something quite profound:

Take whatever your political beliefs happen to be. Obviously the view you hold you think is most likely to be true, but I think you should give that something like 60-40, whereas in reality most people will give it 95 to 5 or 99 to 1 in terms of probability that it is correct. Or if you ask people what is the chance this view of yours is wrong, very few people are willing to assign it any number at all. Or if you ask people who believe in God or are atheists, what’s the chance you’re wrong – I’ve asked atheists what’s the chance you’re wrong and they’ll say something like a trillion to one, and that to me is absurd, that even if you think all of the strongest arguments for atheism are correct, your estimate that atheism is in fact the correct point of view shouldn’t be that high, maybe you know 90-10 or 95 to 5, at most.

My view at at the time was that this was not only true, but was much more true of men than of women, and that women, being more rational and more sensible than men, tend to be less sure of their own opinions.

This morning, I had an interesting conversation with Christopher Hitchens, who’s in town plugging his memoir. He professed to be a man of few beliefs, political or otherwise: “my only commitment is to a group of skeptics who are not sure of anything,” he said. But when I asked him what he wasn’t sure about, he started talking about galaxy formation, of all things. He said that “my greatest delight is being proved right in my own lifetime”, and said that he couldn’t think of the last time that he was wrong about anything. In other words, he’s highly skeptical of others, but utterly incapable of interrogating his own opinions with the same kind of approach.

Hitchens, in other words, would make an atrociously bad trader. He has the cocky-and-arrogant bit down, to be sure — in order to beat the market you have to think that you’re smarter than the market. But you also have to be incredibly insecure, willing to change your mind and your opinions very quickly.

At the beginning of the conversation, Hitchens expressed a certain amount of intellectual pleasure in noting that the statement “Christopher Hitchens is dead” is false now, but will be true in the future. But that’s trivial. When it comes to the opinions he expresses in his columns and books, he’s much less willing to admit that any of them are anything but certainly and timelessly true.

I try hard to believe the opposite: that many if not most of my opinions are wrong (although of course I have no idea which they are), and that many of the most interesting and useful things I write come out of my being wrong rather than being right. This is not, as Wilkinson noted to Cowen, an easy intellectual stance to hold: he calls it “a weird violation of the actual computational constraints of the human mind”.

But I think it’s undoubtedly worth working on, and, as I say, I think it’s one which is more common in women than in men. And I think it’s a serious weakness of Hitchens’ that he places so much importance on his being right.

Jim Cramer has decided that people upset at Wall Street bonuses are in fact revolutionary Marxist-Leninists, intent on “stringing up guys like John Mack and feeling great about it”. A brief edited transcript, if you can’t bear to watch the whole thing:

Melissa Francis: Jim, let me ask you very quickly: what did you think about John Mack’s answer to the big question of the day, which is the divergence between Main Street and Wall Street. We see Dow 10,000, and bonuses are back; at the same time Main Street is in a shambles.

Jim Cramer: When I took a Master’s reading communism we learned these things. I took seven courses in communism. Lenin when he came in in 1917 thought that the bankers were making too much money, and confiscated all the wealth. The peasantry felt terrific about it. The bankers, many of them, were killed. And there was a terrific surge of opinion that Lenin was a great man. It didn’t work out.

It’s very easy for me. I know that, I can do that rap, I studied it. I know most of Lenin’s speeches during the period. And it’s really about stringing up guys like John Mack and feeling great about it. I’m not being facetious. I studied Lenin, and I was very caught up in this notion that the peasantry should win.

Melissa Francis: Speaking of the peasantry, let’s give ‘em some trades.

Yeah, let’s.

(HT: David Gaffen)