the theory of optimal quibbling

another in the “how I read books” series

I am going through “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. (I have not finished it yet, so I don’t know if this review by Dave Karpf is right or not, but it makes some interesting points). The thing that has struck me so far is that it’s a very honest book – it’s quite open from the start about what it’s trying to do and who it’s trying to talk to. Anyone complaining on social media that they feel scolded certainly can’t ask for their money back; the book is very clear from the start that its project is to tell a bunch of home truths to well meaning liberals about how the regulatory state gets in the way of itself.

Are these home truths true? Time and reading the thing will tell. The subject of this post, though, is something I noticed myself doing while reading the book, which is making mental checkmarks for all the times I found myself thinking “no, don’t agree with that at all, move on”.

The early chapters of “Abundance”, the ones where you’d expect the strongest examples and the stylised facts on which the rest of the argument is based, include a number of things which will be familiar to regular readers of this Substack as bugbears and bees-in-the-bonnet of mine. We have “the use of house prices rather than rents as the measure of housing cost”. We have quite a lot of “scatterplot agglomerationism and city size”. I think that if and when I write a review, some other people are going to rightly feel aggrieved that I am giving Klein and Thompson a pass for things which would have me going in rugby-style on other books.

And yet … I kind of feel like I want to give a lot of those passes. As I noted above, I have regularly found myself thinking “well, that’s kind of wrong, but fair enough housing costs in San Francisco are high so I’ll look through that”. Or “there’s absolutely no reason to believe that you would get twice as much financial services if New York was twice as big, but let’s see where they go with this”. I’ve even got a note saying “somewhere in China there’s the Silicon Valley of foldable umbrellas, we are talking about industry clusters here, not accomodation, but maybe the same ideas apply”.

Why am I doing this, rather than quibbling all the time like I usually do? I thought it might be interesting to make a bullet list of the things that incline me to think about things in big picture rather than detail, and the list grew – many of the points below are general and reflective in nature, rather than directly arising from “Abundance”:

• Possibly the most important thing is that I am just generally more reluctant to quibble as I get older. Increasingly, I find the sort of “and what, pray, is an assault rifle? Do you perhaps mean…” style of rhetoric exhausting. I know a lot of people in banking analysis who get very het up about the phrase “hold capital”, because regulatory capital is a liability, not an asset. And … who cares? We all know what it means. “Devastating critiques” and “debunkings” are a bit like thrash metal to me these days - I remember being a fan, and I can still appreciate the artistry but christ, too old for it, mate.

• I’m also less inclined to quibble, the more that I’m aware of how complicated and debatable things can be. I happen to have done a bit of work in broadly Abundance-adjacent things recently, and it is really complicated. If there’s a decent chance that someone is likely to be talking at cross purposes in a field of ambiguous definitions, or about a different geography or legal system, quibbling feels like a great opportunity to make a fool of oneself.

• If a piece of work has a clear “big picture” argument, then time spent quibbling over details is probably time lost from thinking or talking about the big argument on its merits. Very few factoids and assumptions are genuinely load-bearing; they can always be swapped in and out. It’s possible to make a big deal out of congratulating oneself for “intellectual charity” or “steelmanning” or “something something Habermas probably”, but in my view it’s just commendable idleness – if you can do the work arguing about the big picture, you don’t need to sweat out minor victories on points that can quickly be repaired.

• And it shouldn’t be missed that the degree of quibbling one feels necessary to hand out depends a lot on the overall aim of the work you’re reading. Quibbling and nitpicking are, as well as rhetorical and analytical techniques, hobbies and forms of recreation. It’s simply more fun to do them when you know you’re unsympathetic to the overall project of the author you’re nitpicking.

• Related to which, there’s something of an overlap between quibbling and factchecking. Sometimes a good quibble is part of a general project of checking an author out, to see if they make defensible statements you don’t agree with, reasonable mistakes, unreasonably skewed mistakes or straight out distortions. There’s much less point in quibbling with the work of someone you basically trust not to be pulling a fast one.

I said in the first bullet point that I have got a lot better about this as I got older, so please don’t take this as an opportunity to remind me of past behaviour which isn’t consistent with these principles. (Unless it was really epically bad of me, in which case I will consider requests for apologies on the merits). Instead, I am setting the exam question –

David Graeber’s description of the founding of Apple Computer in “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” is about as absolutely wrong as it could possibly have been. Is this a quibble, and if so is it a quibble worth quibbling? (10 points).