Seeming Rather Than Being

One of the ways in which people who know little to nothing about a specific topic seek to act like they know something is to insist on the universality of some aspect of the topic under consideration.  So, for example, if someone argues that the Russian Revolution succeeded because the army abandoned the state, let's say, the know nothing can argue that the American Revolution succeeded without the British army going over to the
revolutionary side.  The proper response to this is: that's a non sequitur, we're not talking about the American Revolution, which was quite a different kettle of fish.  Oh yeah, the know nothing might respond, then how's a come we call them revolutions?  Well, you might seek to explain, we call them the same thing but we understand the causes of the revolutions as well as the causes of success or failure are the results of the concrete reality of this or that historical moment and aren't attributable to some abstract law or other universally true something or another. Well, the know nothing might continue, how about scientific law? That's universally true, aina?  Yes, your might continue, but the act of discerning historical causes has little to nothing to do with science and rather more to do with making coherent arguments based on plausible readings of the available evidence while avoiding claims to universal truths.  Consider the problems with Hemple's Covering Laws

We might even go further and point out that all manner of events, financial panics, wars' beginnings and conclusions, etc, are historical events and it is best to understand them based not on some universal truth but rather on the facts of the matter and their interpretation. We might also make the point that insisting that an explanation of a discrete moment of history explain all similar or similarly classified moments is more of an attempt at seeming like you know something.

What has this do with Matt Yglesias?  I have already tried to show that his arguments often result from misreading specific texts or on his general and unfounded hostility toward sensible government intervention in the markets to avoid consumer fraud or protect labor.  Today, because I feel like it, I want to point out his reliance on universal truth when stuck.  Recently, Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber fame criticized Yglesias' interpretation of the recent Irish economic collapse by recourse to evidence and argued that

[t]he simplified political economy story goes as follows. Ireland had low nominal and even lower effective corporate tax rates. It also had low personal taxes, both because of the belief that this would foster entrepreneurship etc, and because the government used to periodically sweeten bargains between business and labor by promising tax cuts (which of course favored the rich more than the poor), inter alia buying off unions who might otherwise have started getting feisty about organizing the unorganized bits of the new Irish economy.

The result was that even with booming economic growth, the government faced a fiscal hole. This hole was filled by taxes on property transactions which, as the property market got ever more bubbly, became an ever more important source of government revenue. This provided the government with an extremely strong incentive not to deflate the bubble, reinforcing the already considerable incentives towards inaction resulting from cronyism between politicians and property tycoons, ideological notions about not interfering with ‘free’ markets etc.

Whether this is true or not, I don't know but it's a clear and coherent argument about a specific moment.  Yglesais responds

As a causal story, I still don’t really buy this. We had property booms in the United Kingdom, in Spain, in the United States, in Iceland, etc. all under different tax trajectories. And I can’t think of any examples of a government anywhere deliberately acting to deflate asset prices. The fact that the Irish government didn’t do so isn’t really a fact in need of explanation.

See what he did there?  Unable to discuss the Irish case in detail, he insists that any explanation of this or that historical moment has to explain all similar or similarly classified moments. More importantly, it is a rhetorical slight of hand designed to win an argument, if only because some of your readers might think you've scored, rather than trying to understand an argument about an event. However, as is the case in seeking to find a common cause for "success" in the American and Russian revolutions this demand for a universal causal narrative is a non sequitur. This desire, to "win" as opposed to understand or -- even better -- learn something lies at the heart of Yglesiasism and all of the juice box mafiosi.  So when you read him or McArdle remember they aren't as interested in knowing things as they are in seeming to know more than the rest of us.