Nobody does it better than Tyler Cowen, and it’s not even close.
What am I talking about? I’m talking about the extremely difficult art of asking the question that is the title of this blog post, and then answering it by writing about it.
There was a post over on MR recently titled “Will Milei Succeed in Argentina?”. In the very first paragraph, Tyler points out that he (Tyler Cowen) wants Milei to succeed.
I give him a 30-40% chance, which is perhaps generous because I am rooting for him. Bryan Caplan, who is more optimistic, offers some analysis and estimates that Milei needs to close a fiscal gap of about five percent of gdp.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/01/will-milei-succeed-in-argentina.html
But the rest of the post doesn’t lay out reasons for why Tyler is right to root for him, or why Milei might succeed. It is, instead, the exact opposite. Tyler asks the much more difficult question: why might Milei fail?
You may or may not agree with the rest of Tyler’s post, and about his take on whether Milei will succeed or not. The real lesson to take away from here is the point that Tyler is forcing himself to ask, and answer, the most difficult question of them all for a writer: “What is the best possible argument for how I might be wrong?”
And this is a really, really difficult thing to do. Say, for example, that you are opposed to PM Modi. Your task is to write about ways in which his policies have been good for India, and will be good for India in the years to come. On the other hand, if you are a supporter of PM Modi, your task is to write about the ways in which his policies have been bad for India, and will be bad for India in the years to come.
You could take the easy way out and do a round-up of what other people (on the other side of the fence) are saying. But that’s not the point – that simply shows what other people are saying. Worse, supporters and detractors have a way of confidently expressing hopeful assertions. The causal pathways are often missing from their analyses – it isn’t so much an expression of ways in which they might be wrong. Rather, it is a statement to the effect that “if x materializes, I will have been proven to be wrong.”
What we’re looking for is this instead: “Here’s why I don’t think x will materialize. Here are my reasons for thinking what I do, and here are the ways in which I could be wrong, and for the following reasons.”
This is really, really hard to do (trust me). But the more you force yourself to do it, the better a thinker you are likely to become. I try and do these exercises every now and then, and the reason I don’t post the results of such exercises very often is because a) I avoid doing this as much as possible b) I’m not very good at it when I do get around to doing it (if you’re itching to point out the causal link between these two, I’m way ahead of you. Go away.)
So hypocrisy alert aside – I don’t practice what I’m about to preach, you see – do give it a try. Ask yourself how you might be wrong about your model(s) of how the world works.
Good luck, because you will need it.
EconForEverybody 