Recently Gwen Moore, a congresswoman from the great state of Wisconsin said, “We need to continue to seek creative market-based solutions to problems.” Sadly, there was not a sliver of market in what she was referring to.

It was a bill she sponsored in which, if passed, FEMA would conduct a study analyzing the feasibility and benefits of a community-based flood insurance program. What is this beautiful idea of market-based community flood insurance? Well, you see, it’s where the local government purchases a flood insurance policy for their jurisdiction funded by property taxes or a utility-esque fee structure.

This is what “market-based” has become—a term that means almost nothing. Here, it means taking a federal program and shifting it to more local government structures. But clearly there’s not a market in sight. Perhaps devolution would have been a better choice of words.

That being said, the type of program that Congresswoman Moore’s sponsored bill would investigate is actually an improvement over the status quo—a federal program. But even some people have referred to that as market-based.

The federal flood insurance program was recently found to be fiscally unsound. It was amended so that higher premiums are phased in over several years to bring the price of “insurance” more in line with the risks of living on a coast. I suppose what they’re trying to get at is bringing the prices people pay into a federally funded program closer to what some hypothesize they would be under a market structure. To call that market-based is quite a stretch.

What’s odd is that in both these cases, people are using “market-based” to try and impart a positive spin on their political efforts, even though any actual market activity in the flood insurance world is hard to find. The term “market-based” functions, sadly, as an empty marketing phrase. It’s been so abused by people in elected office that any program that doesn’t give stuff away for free is now “market-based.”

People also often use the phrase when they’re trying to disparage something they don’t like. The most obvious example of this is when people disparage the current/old broken health care system in the U.S. as market-based when nothing could be farther from the truth.

John Cochrane in his essay After the ACA, has a good example of a rule in the current “market” for healthcare:

“In Illinois as in 35 other states, every new hospital, or even major purchase, requires a “certificate of need.” This certificate is issued by our “hospital equalization board,” appointed by the governor and, like much of Illinois politics, regularly in the newspapers for various scandals. The board has an explicit mandate to defend the profitability of existing hospitals. It holds hearings at which they can complain that a new entrant would hurt their bottom line.”

Clearly a system such as this is a far cry from something market-based. And yet, people have claimed just that. Here’s President Obama: “The market alone cannot solve the problem—in part because the market has proven incapable of creating large enough insurance pools to keep costs to individuals affordable.”

What he’s claiming may be true, and an accurate critique of the old health care system, but it certainly isn’t a critique of a market.

To be fair, sometimes people spend more time on political nomenclature than creating actual solutions–think of liberal, Liberal, conservative, neo-conservative, progressive, etc. etc. These debates get old and pointless very quickly. But the case of the term “market-based” is actually rather important.

When people misuse it, they’re not using a made up word to describe an ethereal political idea or the general leanings of a coalition. “Market-based” actually means something. By using it incorrectly, and as the examples above show, ascribing to it the opposite of its meaning, it gives a bad name to solutions that actually might be market-based.

And so, at this point, correcting its usage isn’t out of the question. Write a letter to the editor when a journalists slips, or to a congressperson when they use it incorrectly. Or perhaps it’s best that whenever someone proposes an actual market-based solution, they should use the phrase “market-based (no really)” in all of their writings, speeches, and informal drunken discussions.

On an intuitive level, it is fairly obvious that 1979 has had a number of lasting effects on our present era. Whether it is the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the Thatcher-Reagan revolution, the rise of Islamism, and the catch up growth in China, and later India, they all seem connected with with the events of 1979. An economist may be reminded of Acemoglu and Robinson’s idea of “critical junctures,” as 1979 seems to have been such a “critical juncture” in many places.

In an earlier piece, I argued that the notion of “critical junctures” as part of a model of institutional change lacked predictive power and was only retrospectively fitted to account for the observed history. However, as the events of 1979 suggest, there may be another problem with the way economists think about institutional change. In the UK, the notion that the market economy needed to be freed from its shackles was pivotal to Thatcher’s victory. Similarly, in China, the insight that the country could not progress economically without harnessing the productive powers of markets was behind Deng Xiaoping’s reform agenda. And in Iran, Afghanistan and Poland, religious beliefs started to reassert their place within the public space—albeit with very different results. Clearly, ideas and ideologies clearly matter a lot, yet they tend to be conspicuously absent from economic models.

This is not to say that economists are ignorant of the power of ideas. In fact, Douglass North’s Nobel Lecture provides as good an account as any of the notion that ideas matter:

Belief structures get transformed into societal and economic structures by institutions—both formal rules and informal norms of behavior. The relationship between mental models and institutions is an intimate one. Mental models are the internal representations that individual cognitive systems create to interpret the environment; institutions are the external (to the mind) mechanisms individuals create to structure and order the environment.

Yet, economists have produced painfully little work on (1) how exactly ideas (or “mental models”) matter for institutional and economic outcomes, and (2) how and why ideas change. That is paradoxical given that shifts of ideas seem paramount to many important issues in social sciences—whether it is accounting for political revolutions, large-scale changes in policy, or perhaps even modern economic growth.

There has been research on the relationship between beliefs and institutional and policy outcomes, (e.g.) most of it relying on imperfect, survey-based measures of beliefs. Even in cases when scholars believe they have reasonable proxies for their beliefs and the data indicate a causal relationship between ideas and institutions, it remains difficult to convincingly model the link between the two.

Only very few have attempted to systematically account for the evolution of ideas. Economic models treat beliefs mechanistically—following some version of rational expectations and Bayesian updating—and the departures from the baseline models of belief formation always seem somewhat ad-hoc and unsatisfying—even in cases when those allow people to get some traction in explaining real-world events, like in the case of Timur Kuran and his work on public and private beliefs, Tyler Cowen’s work on self-deception, or Bryan Caplan’s notion of rational irrationality.

However that may be, it is far from obvious that the toolbox of empirical economics is particularly well-suited to form testable claims about beliefs and ideologies. The large-scale social phenomena that seem to be driven by shifts in beliefs—say, the Iranian Revolution, the Chinese economic take-off, or the gradual crumbling away of communism in Eastern Europe—are singular occurrences, with no obvious counterfactuals available.

Maybe economists who are interested in these events might do best by emulating the practices of the best journalists and historians. Instead of investing into an abstract theory that matches reality in a small number of measurable attributes, they may get more traction by building compelling narratives, with humility and attention to historical detail. For many, reading Caryl’s book would be a good place to start.

Rather than foretelling the certain demise of this quirky digital currency, these trials tested and strengthened the network’s resilience. Bitcoin prices quickly re-equilibrated following each crash.  The protocol exploitation became a case study in how quickly the Bitcoin community is able to spot and respond to coding problems: After a problem with the update in March was spotted on a Bitcoin forum, all of the major exchanges voluntarily suspended payments while the problem was patched. What could have been a death knell for this fledgling network was quietly handled before most traders even noticed. After withstanding considerable uncertainty and stress-testing, it appears that the Bitcoin model is here to stay.

While the viability of Bitcoin as a decentralized peer-to-peer payment system is becoming less of a question, the regulatory future of the cryptocurrency is still murky. An early red flag shot up with the reveal of FinCEN’s guidance on Bitcoin users and exchanges this March. The guidance appears to have been applied for the first time last week when the Department of Homeland Security suspended operations and seized the assets of Mt. Gox’s mobile payments account serviced by Dwolla.

Despite the troubling uncertainty that this new regulatory environment injects into the Bitcoin platform, Bitcoin prices have remained steady since the unprecedented expropriation. Still, public regulatory wishes from other powerful agency heads should give us cause for concern about the government’s capacity to stifle the full potential of this still-nascent technology.

Many people, if they have heard of Bitcoin at all, associate it with libertarian pipe dreams of overturning the dollar and that rascally Federal Reserve. I can’t blame anyone for holding this impression; after all, the average Bitcoin user is an atheist libertarian male in his early 30′s. However, to primarily view Bitcoin as, for better or worse, a libertarian dream currency is to overlook the wonder of its potential as a platform for financial innovation. The problem that Bitcoin’s mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto (he will never be found), outlined in his original white paper is how to replace relatively-costly third party trust-based transfers with a system based on relatively-inexpensive cryptographic proof. I think that people of all political persuasions can find something to like about Bitcoin’s properties as a decentralized digital payment system.

First, Bitcoin holds enormous potential to help lift the world’s destitute out of abject poverty. Insufficient access to basic financial services is one of the biggest problems facing the poor in developing countries today. Jeff Fong observes that mobile payment services, like M-Pesa, are already wildly popular in countries like Kenya, Tanzania, and Afghanistan. An open, global system like Bitcoin will be a natural financial fit for the fiduciary needs of the world’s poor–and with the benefits of no middleman and more discretion. Additionally, Bitcoin’s capacity to cheaply transfer funds will save new immigrants the 20% fee that they currently pay to send remittances back to capital-starved relatives in their home countries.

Bitcoin’s assurance of privacy will also improve the lives of those in oppressive situations who need to make confidential transactions. Both women who need to gather their children and discreetly flee from a domineering husband and exploited citizens of oppressive regimes need some way to transfer funds away from the prying eyes of their particular tyrant. Already, citizens in Argentina are turning to Bitcoin as a way to escape the devastation of the 25% Argentine inflation rate. On the other side of the transaction, Bitcoin’s pseudonymity ensures that persecuted groups will not be blocked access to capital because of their ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, or disability.

Conservatives will find much to like about Bitcoin’s potential to help lift developing countries out of poverty through market means and export the Western values of industriousness and self-sufficiency. Progressives will be excited to learn of Bitcoin’s ability to help subvert to despotic regimes and obviate the potential for race-based and gender-based discrimination in transactions. Both groups will likely appreciate the privacy that Bitcoin can restore to our over-tracked and over-marketed digital lives. And of course, libertarians like myself will continue to enjoy sticking it to the central banks. But in terms of Bitcoin’s capabilities, these ideas still only scratch the surface of what is possible.

Many functions built into the Bitcoin protocol have yet to be harnessed. During the Bitcoin 2012 convention last year, Mike Hearn, one of the original developers of the Bitcoin protocol, unveiled a few of Bitcoin’s dormant features that programmers can harness. In true Satoshi style, the mastermind only provided a few comments on these in-built features, called “contracts,” before digitally vanishing. Hearn took to the task of discovering these capabilities himself; the possibilities are promising. The Bitcoin protocol contains the ability for seamless micropayments, dispute mediations, assurance contracts, and smart property, among other features that can be developed independently. This allows for the easy development of cheap internet translation services, Kickstarter-like services, and peer-to-peer stock and bond markets. If you’re excited about Bitcoin now, trust me: You ain’t seen nothing yet.

As I write now, scores of Bitcoin developers, investors, journalists, plain old enthusiasts, and one lucky Ümlaut editor are gathered in San Jose for the Bitcoin 2013 convention, discussing plans and possibilities for Bitcoin’s future. Amid high profile calls for protected areas of open experimentation and floating rumors of a new autonomous region that will officially recognize cryptocurrencies, the Bitcoin community is standing at a precipice. Either we can convince government regulators of Bitcoin’s promise as a financial innovation and procure a pledge for open experimentation, or we can risk losing the core capabilities of this cryptocurrency to the confused dictates of the state. It is time for the Bitcoin community to educate policymakers and the public of the vast untapped possibilities that this cryptocurrency can create, lest government regulators be allowed to unknowingly extinguish the potential of this force for good.

Nassim Taleb is most famous for his books on radical uncertainty and randomness, but he made his money in the options market. For the unfamiliar with options, the short version is that you only make money on a put option when a stock goes down to a certain price, and you only make money on a call option when a stock goes up to a certain price. The options themselves are priced based on the probability that the market has assigned the event of getting up or down to those particular prices.

Taleb employed a “barbell strategy”—that is, two risk extremes with no medium level. He put a big majority of his money in the safest assets he could find, such as treasury bills or cash. The rest he put into what are called way out of the money options—put options that are massively below the current market price of the stock, or call options that are massively above, and are priced as being extremely improbable events. The strategy is to make sure you could lose all of your money each time without getting wiped out, because you only need to be right once. And indeed, in the 1987 crash Taleb made tens of millions of dollars, and in the 2008 crash he did it again.

There is a similar strategy available to those who would devote themselves to a craft. The heart of Taleb’s philosophy is that you should minimize the downside risk to yourself, while maximizing the potential upside. When it comes to a craft, the best way to accomplish this is to prepare yourself for the possibility that all you will get out of it is the enjoyment of doing something well. Meanwhile, you should be putting your work out on the public web in order to make it possible for it to get a lot of attention—but again, only if you can emotionally prepare yourself for the fact that it probably won’t.

The first part should not be hard. As Richard Sennett eloquently describes, craft work has long been about devotion to doing good work for it’s own sake. There is a big cognitive payoff from putting in a lot of upfront effort to hone a set of skills over a period of years, and finally arriving at a point of tangible progress. The feeling of flow, in which one has the sensation of working right at the peak of what they’re capable of, is a sensation that craft workers are able to earn by taking on increasingly ambitious projects and developing their skills to a point where they can see those projects through.

The problem comes in when people think that doing good work by itself is something that translates into business success. That is not the case. If you’re a writer, for instance, you may be able to find work writing, but it’s unlikely to pay well and it’s probably not going to be doing the kind of writing that you’re interested in. Moreover, if you think simply putting yourself out there on a blog or elsewhere is going to allow you to do what you love and get an audience, you’ve probably got another thing coming. The vast majority of people who try to get into writing, fail. An enormous supermajority of people who post online end up getting, on average, maybe a few dozen pageviews. Writing is a power law industry, where a tiny minority dominates the entire business landscape.

Those at the top all started at the bottom at some point, of course. But the odds of making it to the very top are vanishingly small; if we could assign it an option value it would be as far out of the money as it gets.

The point is, if you start blogging thinking that you’re well on your way to achieving Malcolm Gladwell’s career, you are setting yourself for disappointment. It will suck the enjoyment out of writing. Every completed post will be saddled with a lot of time staring at traffic stats that refuse to go up. It’s depressing.

Instead, the perfect balance is committing to only those crafts that you can perform with satisfaction even if you have to do so in utter obscurity. Then, put your work out in public as part of the process itself—if you’re making homebrew beer or an Arduino hack, make a video or write about the process as a means to think harder about the details of it. If you’re a writer, think of putting it online as simply having the work backed up in one more place.

In this way, you open yourself up to the spectrum of possibilities, ranging from utter obscurity at one end to global fame at the other. Far more likely is something closer to the obscurity end but much more satisfying—that you will draw the attention of a relative few who share your interests.

In my mind, this is the best way to take advantage of modernity while minimizing its costs. We are an affluent enough society that we’re able to make enough money as individuals to have time to devote to doing something we love for its own sake. We are also an interconnected society where some artisans are able to rise to sudden prominence and make a living doing what they love. A satisfying life will focus on the former while keeping the door open to the latter possibility.

One such attribute is the paleo diet’s deep appreciation of traditional ways of life. While it is often parodied as the “cave man” diet, the paleo lifestyle is actually a rejection of many modern “innovations” that go against the accumulated wisdom of countless generations. Modern agriculture has been around for a relatively short span of time compared to modern homo sapiens’ existence on Earth; the Standard American Diet (SAD) is even more recent. Conservatives know that “new” does not automatically mean “better” (paging Dr. Guillotin) and that revolutionary events, like the advent of modern agriculture or refined foods, are especially likely to have negative consequences. In the same way that conservatives rail against contemporary higher education or the breakdown of the family and embrace traditional values of learning and prudence, they should also embrace the even older values of ancestral health.

The paleo lifestyle also emphasizes the virtues of self-control and moderation. While the stereotype is of a meat-eating, vegetable-avoiding neanderthal, there are many varieties of the paleo diet. What most have in common, though, is the difficulty of maintaining such a diet in the modern world. As anyone who has actually tried to both follow a paleo diet plan and have a social life and/or friends soon finds out, the world is full of temptation and vice. In many situations, the paleo practitioner has to choose between giving in to peer pressure or being labeled as “that guy,” the one who always takes the bun off of his burger or asks if there is any sugar in the salad dressing. The fortitude required to maintain such a diet or lifestyle in the face of temptation should earn praise from conservatives who often value the same personality trait when it comes to avoiding out-of-wedlock pregnancy, deficit spending, or vulgar mass culture.

Finally, the paleo lifestyle is one of the few forces in contemporary America that actually promotes traditional family values. Instead of the corporate rat-race or keeping up with the Joneses, paleo emphasizes slowing down and relaxing with close friends and family. Instead of endless hours of watching left-wing dominated television and playing violent and sexually explicit video games, paleo prescribes that children go outside and play with siblings and neighborhood friends. Instead of bowling alone (the status of bowling within the paleo community is unclear at this moment), paleo friends can go on short, intense sprints or intermittent fasts together. For adults, the sheer difficulty and annoyance of maintaining the paleo diet at most restaurants will lead them to stay home and to prepare and eat meals together as a family. In an unintended way, the high “cost” of the paleo lifestyle turns into the benefit of family togetherness and encourages the creation and perpetuation of what the great 18th century Irish conservative thinker Edmund Burke called “little platoons:”

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.

Contrary to Jordan Bloom’s misgivings about the anti-civilization aspects of the paleo diet, conservatives and paleo adherents are natural allies. Both recognize the fallen nature of our modern world and encourage the hard work, prudence, and determination necessary to maintain their respective lifestyles in the face of a hostile culture. In slightly different ways, they are both standing athwart history, yelling stop. So, to Jordan and his conservative brethren, I extend a hand of friendship and an offer to break free-range, grass-fed, GMO-free steak together.

The basic idea behind paleo is as follows. Evidence suggests that hunter-gatherers (past and present), with whom we share DNA, are healthier than those of us modern western societies. This fact might be useful to anyone seeking to achieve optimal health. It suggests that we may want to adopt, as best as we can in our modern world, some of the lifestyle habits of our healthier ancestors. Diet, physical activity, and sleep patterns are most obviously relevant. Stress management, career choices, and social lives may even be worth examining as well.

This framework is not about romanticizing the past or caveman re-enactment. Rather, it is about examining the past to generate hypotheses. While we suspect that adopting ancestral lifestyle habits will make us healthier and happier, there’s more investigating to do. Before jumping to any practical conclusions, the hypotheses that we generate are to be “tested.”

First, they should be put to the rigors of modern science, such as the principles of biochemistry and the results of actual studies. Secondly, we must consider the practicality of adopting these practices in the modern world. The lifestyle habits which find scientific support and can reasonably be implemented here and now are advocated and adopted. The rest are scrapped or modified.

As it turns out, many of these hypotheses are increasingly finding support in the science. It appears that we can indeed improve our health by avoiding grains, eating more plants and animals, exposing our bodies to sunshine, and ditching the long boring cardio sessions in favor of higher-intensity workouts and walking.

It also turns out that going paleo isn’t unreasonably restrictive. Contrary to some caricatures of paleo, cannibalism and misogyny are neither required nor recommended. You don’t have to go barefoot all the time to improve running mechanics, so long as you don a pair of minimalist shoes. And, last I checked, the local paleo Meetup groups are still letting night-shift nurses and office workers join.

Understanding paleo in this way highlights the fact that it is a best-of-both-worlds approach. The purpose is not to base our lives on some ideal historical period, but to base them on principles of health and well-being that transcend time and place. It’s about improving our lives by embracing the best aspects of both our ancestral past and the modern world.

Even further, remember that the paleo framework looks to the past to generate hypotheses. This means that paleo is only justified when it finds scientific support and produces results. At that point, all of the caveman talk becomes completely unnecessary. If paleo lifestyle guidelines produce results, then who really cares what our ancestors did and ate during the Paleolithic era?

Few in the paleo movement do care about cavemen. This is clear by the fact that the “paleo diet” does not in fact resemble the diet of prehistoric humans as closely as you might imagine. (And this is not to mention the widely acknowledged fact that there was no single ancestral diet, but many variations that shared some key features.) While starchy tubers weren’t consumed much in the Paleolithic, many embrace them as an excellent source of carbs. (Yes, while paleo shuns grains and refined sugars, it is not necessarily a low-carb diet.) Others are open-minded about dairy, provided that it is minimally processed and comes from pastured cows.

And it’s worth pointing out that most people adopt paleo lifestyle principles to become healthier and happier and enjoy better lives. Complete deprivation would defeat the purpose. That’s what the 80/20 principle is for. Unless you’re lactose intolerant or have celiac disease, there’s no reason you can’t go out for pizza or enjoy one of mom’s chocolate chip cookies every now and then.

I could go on, but I think that I’ve painted a pretty reasonable picture of the paleo lifestyle for any Umlaut readers who may have been turned off by its original hearing.

But, on the other hand, I fear that I’m putting other Umlaut readers to sleep. Perhaps, at this point, the paleo lifestyle sounds pretty boring. Well, it doesn’t have to be. Paleo isn’t just a set of rules for living a healthy lifestyle. It’s a perspective for taking a critical look at the status quo of our modern lives and world. You can adopt the diet and call it a day, and that’s great. But there is an endless supply of further exciting applications.

Feeling overwhelmed by your thousands of Facebook “friends”? Perhaps you should take Dunbar’s Number seriously and emphasize the quality over quantity of your relationships. A “friend-purge” may be in order.

Think there’s something fishy about the rat race society we live in? Turns out that most hunter-gatherer societies may have been highly egalitarian gift-economies. How about a paleo-inspired re-examination of your political convictions?

And then there’s K-12 schooling, government, shampoo, the internet, and eating 3-5 small meals per day. All of these modern staples are incredibly new from an evolutionary perspective. Am I saying we should scrap them? Not necessarily. For many of these things, it’s up to the individual to choose. But when you take the paleo perspective seriously, you can be sure that many of your choices will come from a more careful and honest process of deliberation.

At first glance, this kind of social arrangement looks like it could have been copied and pasted from the imaginative pages of For a New Liberty or The Machinery of Freedom. Indeed, liberals (classical, mind you) of all stripes embrace the decentralization of power as a go-to remedy in our toolbox to beat back the prying tentacles of the state and reestablish the primacy of the individual within society.

Any liberal enthusiasm for the society described above would quickly evaporate upon hearing the important details left out of the original description. For one, participation in these social groups is not euvoluntary at best and directly coercive, particularly towards women, at worst. In fact, the very idea of the “individual,” let alone any recognition that individual humans have dignity and rights that should be respected, is foreign to this society. People in this society are recognized and valued in proportion to the power of their social group and their position within it.

The norms of behavior that developed, while useful to maintain order, significantly infringe on an individual’s unique identity and claims. In this society, not only are you only your brother’s (legal) keeper, you are also your aunt’s, your nephew’s, your sister-in-law’s, and your second cousin’s (twice removed)…and they are all yours. This complex and contextual system of influence, history and nuance is not easily navigable by outside parties willing to trade and therefore not exactly conducive to a developed system of exchange. The collective emotions of honor and shame, rather than individual feelings of self-interest and guilt, primarily motivate action in this world. Even the seemingly amicable inter-group arbitration system is backed by the imminent threat of ceaseless blood feud, which has destroyed both clan-based societies and the dreams of star-crossed lovers on more than one occasion.

The world described is the social system of clannism, a form of governance that has marked the histories of most modern nations and still exists in much of the world that the U.S. military attempts to erect states upon today. This system is explored in great detail in Mark Weiner’s new book, The Rule of the Clan. Building upon Henry Maine’s dichotomy between Societies of Status (clans) and Societies of Contract (modern states), Weiner paints lush pictures of clan-based systems in history and today. Whisking us through vivid impressions of life with the Nuer of Southern Sudan, medieval Icelanders, and the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan, among others, Weiner illustrates the logic of clannism in societies that completely lack states, have ineffective states, or exhibit some attributes of both.

The book is interesting enough as a series of anthropological vignettes and colorful collection of the world’s more dramatic creation and history myths (“if you liked A Song of Ice and Fire, then you’ll LOVE the Brennu-Njáls saga!”), but it also raises questions for those interested in stateless governance. In one of this month’s featured articles at the Library of Economics and Liberty, Arnold Kling reviews The Rule of the Clan and summarizes the relevant arguments:

1. A decentralized order is possible. Indeed, it is natural for human societies to achieve such an order, rather than degenerate into the Hobbesian war of all against all.

2. The natural decentralized order is, however, highly illiberal. It requires a set of social norms that bind the individual to the clan. Under the rule of the clan, peace is broken by feuds, commerce is crippled by the inability to put trade with strangers on a contractual basis, and individual autonomy is sacrificed for group solidarity.

3. In the absence of a strong central state, the rule of the clan is the inevitable result. In order to graduate from the society of Status to the society of Contract, you must have a strong central state.

Kling concludes that point 2 was most aptly demonstrated by the author and that point 3, while plausible, needs more evidence to be convincing. Weiner closes his book by warning against taking the state’s capacity for protecting a liberal social order for granted and regressing into the stifling and volatile collectivism of clannism. He raises an interesting question: We know that clan-based societies grow more liberal and less violent after they develop states, but would state-based societies grow less liberal if a decentralized order was to emerge and replace the state?

One point that Weiner did not explore in depth was the development of liberal morality that accompanied the rise of the state. Like Henry Maine, who was driven to write about the then-unappreciated distinctions between Societies of Status and Societies of Contract while immersed in the enchanting exotica of 19th century India, psychologist Jonathan Haidt first came to appreciate the deep differences between WEIRD and non-WEIRD moral systems while living among and learning from the Indian families that hosted him. There appears to be a strong association between the development of liberal states and the rise of WEIRD morality. This morality might be enough to save a modern post-state society from the illiberal byproducts of a decentralized order.

As John Hasnas has noted, we already live a large part of our lives in a decentralized order. Much of the order that we enjoy in our lives is not the direct result of government provision, but rather the product of tradition and experimentation among civic organizations and social groups. Where our ancestors’ clan identities used to broil over into honor brawls of all against all, we now channel these tensions into friendly sports rivalries, sorority philanthropic dance marathons, and company chili cook-offs. The state was probably instrumental in promoting the relative peace that allowed for the development of this new face of benign clannism, but this doesn’t mean that it hasn’t outlived its usefulness.

Consider the audience for a franchise like the Yankees as a power law distribution. The largest segment by far is really only interested in whether or not their team has won, and may not watch more than a couple of games each week. The smallest, most niche segment consumes absolutely every piece of information and rumor about the team that they can find. They frequent Yankees forums and chat rooms and get into angry fights about pointless minutia. There’s a sliding scale of obsession—devotion?—between the head and the outermost niche of the tail.

So why do they care? It’s all about belonging to a group, as well as simply living vicariously through stories. Just as soap opera audiences love to feel outraged by the scandals of fictional characters, some sports fans love to feel outraged by the scandals of professional athletes. Just as we can take comfort in being a part of a family, people take comfort in being a fan of a team, and having that in common with other fans.

Political news consumption follows exactly the same patterns. All news consumption does, whether we’re talking technology, video games, celebrities, economics—you name it, it’s all the same. It’s about group affiliation, regardless of whether it’s the Yankees vs the Red Sox, Republicans vs Democrats, or Android fanboys vs Apple fanboys. It’s also about stories with strong moral frameworks baked in—whether we’re talking the fight between the parents and husband of Terri Schiavo, the use of performance enhancement drugs in baseball, or Nintendo’s decision to pursue a general market rather than cater to their longtime fans. People get exhilarated by these stories, and by the feeling that they are a part of a group that cares about these stories.

News was never high minded in the way that people like Shirky want it to be. To defend the romantic point of view, people will drudge up a handful of examples of investigative journalism that was consequential. There are indeed specific cases, such as Brian Deer’s remarkable work exposing the fraudulent study claiming a link between vaccination and autism. But as Rolf Dobelli points out, this kind of work does not need the news. It can live in long form pieces, and in books. Especially nowadays, this kind of work can be supported and promoted directly without connecting it to the vast news apparatus which produces a sea of informational garbage every hour of every day.

And if you pooled together all of such consequential work in the entire history of the news, it would not even amount to one atom in the universe of content produced in one single year in one single segment of the news industry. News is not about being informed. It is about entertainment, about feeling good—in the broadest sense of feeling good, which includes indulging in outrage and feeling smugly superior to some other set of people.

Also included is indulging in a sense of righteousness—which brings us back to the notion that journalists are the great defenders of democracy. Certainly political junkies like to believe that they are better informed than those of us who abstain to the extent that the modern information environment makes abstinence possible. But this is at odds with everything cognitive research has told us about bias and how beliefs form and are reinforced. It is well known that presenting a political junkie with a story that contradicts their beliefs tends to make them more vehement rather than more skeptical.

When you look at everything through the lens of sports news, it all starts to make sense. Why would you ever think that some scandal in the Republican party would suddenly get people to switch affiliations? Do you think that a lifetime Cubs fan would abandon his team because he found out that Sammy Sosa was taking steroids? He’s far more likely to start reciting a list of people on other teams who did the same in order to justify his continuing loyalty.

A lot of people have worried about the fate of the news in the current technological landscape. Personally, I have not lost a single minute of sleep over it. Why should I? The stakes are no higher than if we were discussing whether or not ESPN was going to be able to make it, or People magazine. I will admit it was pretty terrible when I found out that Nintendo Power wasn’t going to make it, but I think democracy will find a way to soldier on without it.

o

“And when the hour was come, he sat down, and the twelve apostles with him. And he said unto them, I have earnestly desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer: For I say unto you, I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves: For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come. And he took [a steak], and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.”

o

An account from Gombe National Park, 2002:

The chimpanzee approached the two women, and at that distance they had no time to run and were too weak to do anything to protect their child, so he took the baby from the girl’s back, and moved off into the forest. When he was next seen, by one of the researchers, he was in a tree and the baby was dead, but after eating only a little portion he left the baby on a branch, descended the tree, and moved away, apparently to avoid the observer. Luckily the male was alone with no other chimps around, and so the researchers were later able to retrieve the baby’s body.

Cannibalism by paleolithic humans is a controversial subject, though neolithic people and pre-humans both seem to have practiced it.

o

Paleo diet internet forum, 2011, in response to the question, “Is the paleo diet sustainable on a global scale?”

“This more of an argument against overpopulation than against paleo.”

Beyond observing that modern cavemen share with their prehistoric cousins, or at least their televised versions, a difficulty with copulae, both parties to the exchange buy into some weird theory; the questioner that the Australian government does “understand that grains are a ‘new’ food, but they need to push it, or face issues with the food supply.” The other responds by saying, “peak oil/gas are real issues, as is the amount of clean water over the next several generations. As bad as it sounds, the world’s population needs to be decreased significantly.”

o

One of the paleo diet’s main medical proponents today, and the author of an eponymous book, is Dr. Loren Cordain. He describes it as “the one and only diet that ideally fits our genetic makeup,” and one that our species had used for the past 2.5 million years. The problem with that assertion—and it’s one he still makes in interviews and is widely repeated in the paleo web universe—is that the human species is not 2.5 million years old. The creatures walking around on two legs back then were about four to five feet tall and had brains less than half the size of modern man.

o

Humans’ dietary habits played an underappreciated role in the development of the species. Anthropologist Richard Wrangham persuasively argued in a 2010 book that it was cooking that spurred the development of the human brain toward its unusually large size, since cooked food requires far less energy to digest. Since then, the next most important change in the human diet is the introduction of baking and fermentation; bread and beer.

Controlled fire is a much older invention than bread; claims for its first widespread use range anywhere from 125,000 years ago to more than a million, whereas baking was not widespread until the Neolithic era (though there’s some evidence Paleolithic humans ate early forms of bread, which is awkward for today’s paleo-dieteers). In terms of boosting humans’ caloric intake, they’re comparable innovations. Abundant evidence exists that they consumed legumes and starches, both of which are forbidden by the paleo diet.

o

Bread, unlike meat or vegetables, goes hand in hand with civilization. It is the embodiment of social cooperation, of order itself. A sliced loaf is the benchmark invention to which all others are compared. The typical paleo-dieteer seeks to rid him/herself of gluten, and can be identified by an inability to order anything normal from a restaurant menu, turning down hors d’oeuvres, and wearing ridiculous shoes.

o

Paleo guru and clinical nutrition therapist describes why peanuts are dangerous:

There are hypotheses, but no concrete reason for the increase in allergic response to peanuts. One theory has to do with the aflatoxin present in most of the peanuts (and wheat, rice and other major crops) in the U.S.

Aflatoxin is a poison, and it’s regulated by the FDA. Today’s peanut butter contains vastly less than it did even 20 years ago. There have been no major studies linking it to peanut allergies.

Monsanto takes on something of a demonic status among some aspects of the paleo community.

o

It’s unfair to focus on the strange nutritional ideas in some aspects of the paleo community; they don’t all share them. But in general I think it’s fair to say most paleo-dieters believe two things:

1. The modern system of mass food production is poisonous and/or corrupt
2. The paleo diet resembles the diet of prehistoric humans

Both of these things have shades of truth, but are basically dishonest.

o

Am I saying the paleo diet is for misanthropes? Not exactly, it really is a mostly harmless collection of somewhat conspiratorial nutritional advice, common sense, and a dubious exercise program (stand more at work! lift heavy things!); and some aspects are even healthy. But that rejection of bread often goes along with rejecting society is no coincidence, and if we’re being honest, it helps to explain why the diet appeals to so many libertarians. The extremely circumscribed quality of the paleo diet fits, psychologically, with the paleo diet’s other antisocial aspects, but it comes at the expense of experimentation and variety, things I’ve always thought libertarians valued. They’re not having their cake or eating it either.

For background on the FAA, air traffic controllers, and the sequester, see here, here, here, here, oh, and here. Yes, it’s been written about to death. But most journalists and commentators take one of a few perspectives: 1) The rich and connected were the only ones able to avoid the consequences of the sequester; 2) The FAA used some very sneaky budgetary practices to be one of the only agencies not meaningfully affected by the sequester; or 3) The FAA used the fact that they deal with the public in a very direct way to exert political pressure in their favor. All of these are correct. However, they’re just part of the larger incentive schemes that public choice theorists have been writing about for decades.

The best book on this issue is most likely The Politics of Bureaucracy by Gordon Tullock published in 1965, with a foreword by James Buchanan. Another classic is James Q. Wilson’s Bureaucracy. The key insight of both books is that workers in government bureaucracies are actors the same as anyone else and face and react to incentives the same way. However, the incentives are set up very differently compared to businesses, even very large ones. Those in charge of agency and department budgets have an incentive to inflate and defend it as best possible. And, unlike in business bureaucracies, there’s rarely a reason to look for ways to cut budgets.

Throw in some more insights from the public choice school—mainly about concentrated benefits and dispersed costs—and you get a much clearer idea of what happened with the FAA furloughs. What’s actually scary though is that we only got to see this commonplace practice of most government bureaucracies because of the the rare occurrence of the sequester and subsequent furloughs. This type of behavior happens constantly, and yet it’s rarely discussed.

Nothing major will change without changing the incentives that guide the behaviors of bureaucrats. Of course, trying to borrow incentive schemes from the business world is both impossible—there’s no profit and loss mechanism in the public sector—and may not be a good idea anyway. We don’t want our government to be run like a business, or else why not just have a business do its work.

Here’s an idea: let’s reward hard working government employees who discover ways to save their agency money. Here’s how it would work: An employee prepares a detailed report on how to save money. Such a report could be about anything from buying cheaper pencils to restructuring departments with overlapping workflows. The employee submits this plan to the inspector general of their agency. The inspector general for each agency (which is sadly now a rather neutered position within the federal government) sorts through the proposals, eliminates non-serious ones, and uploads them to a public website. There people can go and vote up or down on various proposals. A low-level manager, the agency head, or even the president can then choose whether a proposal has received enough public support to warrant implementation. Then, the employee or team who originally submitted the change can be awarded a percentage, say 5%, of the overall savings from the project change. The taxpayers pocket the rest.

It’s true, financial incentives are not everything, especially when it comes to one’s profession. See the work of Dan Ariely and other behavioral economists. Employees should be engaged with and passionate about their work, and many government employees are. This new program doesn’t disrupt that engagement. In fact, it might strengthen it. A policy like the one I’m proposing allows employees to take pride in their department and agency, and contribute to its improvement.

Another byproduct may be that the general public would have a new avenue to investigate how their government actually works. Now, wading through budget materials is a tedious exercise. However, through a program like the one I’m suggesting, citizens could read about specific causes they’re contributing their tax dollars towards.

This isn’t a perfect idea. But something needs to be done to help American government bureaucracies look critically at their budgets and make some hard decisions that, as it currently stands, they’re very unwilling to make.