It is hard to find people with what I would call 'academic integrity'. I generally got the impression from both you and your father that the truth was more important than what you believed.
For example, in the case of Milton, I can't think of another person who, after creating a documentary series promoting their ideology, decided to release it alongside people criticizing those same ideas.
With you, I have generally found the best arguments against your beliefs to be ones stated by you, that is, despite my best efforts to find arguments from well known opponents of your views.
Everyone is going to spread falsehoods from time to time, I'm glad there are people like you who seem to be at least aiming at the truth.
I’m not a big fan of replying to one’s own comments, but here, I have to give props to Smjth for calling out the “dumbness” on his own side of the aisle.
Noah interprets Smith differently than you do, and does so in a way consistent with his biases. Your counter interpretation, which is closer to correct from my perspective, is a different interpretation. Neither is truth. His conclusion is obviously over the top, but the whole article was written with the explicit purpose of arguing /to the left/ that they should be more on board with Smith, and done in a slightly tongue in cheek style. If you claim that Noah is not worth reading based on this article, that makes me question your judgement more so than Noah's truthfulness. I'm not going to stop reading either of you based on this, but you don't come out looking that good given that you claim to be seeking truth, rather than expressing opinion as 'Noahpinion' does.
He said things that were not true, that he probably had obtained in a way that he knew to be unreliable — snippets quoted online by people using them to support their views. He did not bother to check against the text, easy to do now since the text is available online and searchable. That by itself is evidence that he does not put much weight on being sure that what he writes is true.
Add to that his ignoring my comment, which included evidence not just my interpretation, and the conclusion is either that he is willing to have things up that he has written and now knows are false or is incompetent to tell what is true in an easy case. Either of those makes him useless as a source of reliable information.
Have you read the book? What part of my interpretation is not truth?
I don't know. I read most of what Scott wrote on Slate Star Codex, much less since it closed. But in any case, the post of Noah's that I am criticizing was written several years ago. And I don't know that Noah reads Scott — probably not.
I read the book, though that is beside the point. I agree largely with a more standard interpretation (such as yours) rather than progressive interpretations of Smith, of which Noah is not the only exponent and which I believe are largely incorrect.
The point is interpretation can at best be correct, an accurate reflection of what an author intends. Interpretation can never be truth. Saying 'I am going to ignore someone because they have interpreted something differently from me" is not fundamentally truth seeking behavior. Claiming that it is is wrong.
I do not understand your distinction between "correct" and "true." Is it true that Noah's interpretation is incorrect?
I am not claiming that what Adam Smith believed is true (or untrue). I am claiming that Noah Smith's assertions about what Adam Smith believed are untrue and offering evidence for that claim.
You are actually claiming to have ground truth (discovering what is true) in a scenario where ground truth is not available. We have no way of knowing what Adam Smith would have said about modern ideas of redistribution (for example)--we can infer some things and some ideas are more likely to be correct than others but we cannot observe his true opinion. If you disagree with a claim, that is fine, but claiming ground truth is wrong.
Further, having read a good bit of @noahpinion I believe your claim that he doesn't care about truth is very much incorrect. It actually seems more like you just misinterpreted what he was doing in that article--which seems to be trying to get the left to take Adam Smith seriously, as opposed to an economics history debate on how Smith would view various issues. Dismissing him on the grounds you present seems counterproductive if truth seeking is actually important to you.
We don't know what Adam Smith would have said about modern issues in the modern world but Noah Smith's claims were about what Smith said his views were and, as I think I showed, were false. Getting the left to take Adam Smith seriously by misrepresenting his views as demonstrated in his writing is dishonest.
I don't know what you count as "ground truth." There are few if any things one can know for certain; I cannot prove for certain that Donald Trump is not the angel Gabriel, or Satan, in disguise. But if I pretended to know that he was either of them, even to have good reason to believe it, I would be lying.
If you believe Noah Smith cares about truth, can you point to examples of his reporting something that most of his readers did not know that was evidence against his political views? If not, what is the evidence on which you believe it?
I found that in about 15 seconds. There are more instances where Noah has updated his position as new evidence came in, which is a hallmark of truth seeking. I'm not sure where the idea of "reporting things against ones political views" comes from. He is an opinion writer, not a reporter. Nor is he an academic economist for that matter--each of those have different standards.
I wrote a longer response, but to summarize:
--If you want to talk about 'what is true' you should have at least a basic understanding of terms like 'ground truth'. Otherwise just disagree with people and make your case without accusing them of dishonesty.
--Noah's point was ABSOLUTELY NOT to exhaustively describe Adam Smith's beliefs with those quotes. It was to show that Smith was not a knee jerk 'free marketer' and that he engaged with ideas that progressives didn't realize he engaged with.
--the ultimate point of that was to get people who dismissed economics to engage with Smith's ideas and economics in general
--He was clear about this. He stated it in the article, as well as pointing out that THIS WAS NOT THE ONLY SET OF VIEWS SMITH HAD.
--Somehow you missed all of this. You missed the entire point of what he was saying and apparently thought this was the equivalent of a paper presented at a seminar. It was not.
--Then you accuse Noah, who probably is in the to 5% (at least) of opinion writers in terms of observable truth seeking behavior, of 'not caring about the truth' because you thought his opinion piece was supposed to be a seminar paper.
--From where I sit you have shown yourself not to have a clear understanding of what truth seeking behavior is, and to be a poor judge of who to read.
Thank you for engaging with my critique, despite not understanding it. I am moving on. I hope this has helped someone.
“… but you don't come out looking that good given that you claim to be seeking truth, rather than expressing opinion…”
Due respect, DF did not claim that all of what Noah writes is untrue; he claimed rather than Noah has low credibility with him because “he does not very much care whether what he writes is true as long as it supports his political views, hence is probably not worth reading.”
Noah is an archetype, the guy who reads whatever factoids are in his feed and gives it a preconceived spin that is on brand.
As an example he's been big on talking up Medicare Drug Price Negotiation and the IRA Biden passed. He's spoken its praises multiple times, and regurgitated the "savings" that have been claimed in its name.
Now, some I could forgive him. He doesn't know what the pre-IRA net prices were, and therefore doesn't know that the government negotiated worse prices like I do.
But he could easily be aware of the "Medicare Part D Premium Stabilization Demonstration". It was the multi-billion dollar bribe the Biden admin gave plans to keep prices down for the election, because rather then lowering premiums (which you would expect if they got better prices) it raised them. The Republicans made a big stink about this before the election. You could also just look at what happened to the National Average Bid Amount and Direct Subsidy.
If this were a one off I wouldn't expect Noah to do even this minimal amount of research, but since he touts the program constantly I think he ought to know more. Especially with it set to be a much bigger disaster this year, which Noah will probably blame on Trump because everything is Trumps fault even though he didn't do a thing.
I would go beyond Noah. If you Google "medicare part d drug negotiation savings" the first page will be a bunch of "reputable institutions" repeating the propaganda. Some will even make an attempt to verify CMS claims, but the math is wrong. None talk about the Demo or the Bid Results, even though that's real money at stake and not a theory. Those groups have an even higher bar to expect accurate results from and they don't do their duty.
This is just one example, but there are others I see Noah make. This is a general problem. I talked to a good friend who just had a baby via IVF about my moving to Florida. He is a smart accomplished individual. But he was convinced the IVF was illegal in Florida (it isn't) and that Trump was trying too bad IVF (he's subsidizing it). He could easily update his information with a simple Google search, but he's outsourced his information to a left wing echo chamber.
Does the Medicare Part D Premium Stabilization Demonstration have ongoing annual premium increases, or is it a one-time adjustment? When I googled it, it looked like a single-year cost of approximately $7 billion, overwhelming the estimated $6 billion in drug cost savings. But, it looked like this adjustment was a one-time thing while the drug cost savings was each year and would provide substantial savings over time--or did I miss something?
These days, most topics come with at least two opposing opinions, often more. I prefer to start by finding common ground between them. My method is cruder than yours, but it’s practical, fast, and generally effective… unless there is no common ground, in which case I may adopt your more robust methods.
I tend to blame schools for most people’s struggle to distinguish fact from fiction. In school, you’re taught to accept a single authority—the teacher (and I guess also the textbook)—without question, rather than learning to think critically for yourself.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
"The skill of judging sources of information is anti-taught by a model of education in which the student is presented with two authorities, the teacher and the textbook and, unless the teacher is an unusually good one, instructed to believe what they tell him."
One useful approach to topics with opposing opinions is to find an extended argument, usually online, between intelligent people on both sides. They do the work of finding the evidence and arguments for their positions, making it easier for you to evaluate them. Ideally they are people you have observed in other contexts and know to be reasonably honest.
The quote, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so", is usually attributed to Twain but it ain't so. Nice bit of irony there.
Thanks for the information. Noah is one of the few substacks I pay for, in this case so I can hear a viewpoint from someone of the left. I am now considering cancelling.
“Noah Smith's opinions are not based on facts, but instead on bias.”
Sorry, *this* claim is untrue and far too strong.
Like every human being, Noah’s opinions are based on both.
Now I agree that there is sufficient leftist bias in Smith’s opinion to cause him to have low credibility, and so I have no problem with your “Not worth listening to” conclusion. But I actually suspect Noah’s relative proportion of facts is far higher than the average person, and decidedly far higher than the average Dem voter.
There is also the distinction between how partisan on the one hand, and how much they spin on the other.
Of the 3 center-left folks commented on in this comments section, I find:
Yglesias the furthest left, but the least biased in terms of spin, and the most honest and trustworthy.
Barro, the most partisan, but very open about it, and never actively dishonest and rarely untruthful. His policy takes are the most reasonable, but you gotta know when he is spinning politically, usually re politicians, and discount for that.
Noah is not as leftist as Yglesias, not as partisan as Barro, and yet is the least trustworthy of the 3 by far, for the reasons you cite, and either because he is oblivious to his left bias or is dishonest about some of it. Which of these is of course hard for an outsider to know.
I think that is a necessary clarification. If we write off everyone who is biased, we will have very few people to read. Since we're likely biased, we might be wrong about who is and is not biased. The most likely scenario is that we create an echo chamber for ourselves. But we can and should avoid dishonest people, as they are a waste of time and/or will lead us to wrong conclusions.
Totally agreed. I also like Barro and Yglesias, who are definitely pro-Dem but more moderate Dems. Biased but honest is worth listening to from time to time. Biased and dishonest is rarely worth the effort.
Two of my favorite essayists are G.K.Chesterton and George Orwell. They are obviously biased, I believe honest, and I have learned from both. One of my posts discusses my own biases:
Are there any public intellectuals that don’t take shortcuts via confirmation and authority bias? The SPJ Code of Ethics, if followed, would pretty much limit people to one essay a week. If that. Fact checking is time-consuming. So is attempting to disprove your own hypothesis
There are no penalties for select quoting and editing. And certainly not for incorrect conclusions.
It is possible to be biased in favor of your prior beliefs and authorities you trust and still be honest, still do your best to only say things you have good reason to believe are true. Baude might be — I can deduce from his writing that he may sometimes be mistaken in his beliefs through trusting authorities he should not have trusted. Noah Smith is not, as I think I demonstrate.
Ironically, I stopped reading Noah Smith because his post-UMR-assassination post about how providers were the real corrupt villains in the healthcare system (as opposed to those poor insurance companies whose internal numbers show they barely even make a profit and barely ever deny anything) was so divorced from the reality I know (as an exec at a small healthcare provider) and relied so heavily on presuming insurers’ self-reported numbers were infallibly honest that I couldn’t take what he wrote seriously anymore.
Noah Smith “does not very much care whether what he writes is true as long as it supports his political views, hence is probably not worth reading.” The distortion in his writing will be the greater the more erroneous are his political views, which I judge to be middling—bad, but not terrible. But many matters about which he writes will be orthogonal (irrelevant) to his political views, and on these topics he may care about accuracy (though the political cases are worrying(, and so be worth reading.
Conclusions about how reliable a source is are rarely all or nothing, so I agree that his posts on other topics might contain valuable information. But there are a lot of sources of information out there and I am not inclined to spend time on ones I have found to be unreliable. If I happened to come across something he wrote on a subject of particular interest to me I might make an exception.
The stuff on Smiths Noah and Adam was particularly excellent and valuable. I came to a similar but not identical conclusion about Noah Smith for similar but not identical reasons. But on credibility none were nearly so bad as the Adam Smith examples you cite.
As you concluded, I give his pronouncements low credibility, and long ago stopped reading all his stuff.
But I do read it occasionally, as some of it is interesting - still my #1 decision criterion - and Noah at least being center-left, not hard-core leftist, is often a decent weather vane on what the sane left believes and is discussing.
Similarly, I used to read all of Richard Hanania’s free stuff, because I found him almost always interesting, even if infuriatingly wrong on about 15% of his assertions.
But he has gone *so* overboard on his claims about the right being the stupid party while the left is “Elite Human Capital” (which definition he has stretched to include midwits) and that Trump and Musk are uniquely awful people and liars while “The Mainstream Media is Honest and Good”, that he has simultaneously become less interesting and less credible.
1. You fail to mention the correction at the bottom of the FP interview about the exclusion of "had not seen direct evidence of Russian involvement". Although it is true that Baud is incorrect about "never observed the slightest trace of Russian units," knowing about the correction makes it probable that Baud was referring to that excluded part. His conversion of "had not seen direct evidence of Russian involvement" into "never observed the slightest trace of Russian units" may speak of his bias but this is much weaker than it appears if you do not know about the correction.
2. Although you are correct that the link Baud provides does not show that Biden "announced that Russia would attack Ukraine in the next few days" this is largely irrelevant for his purposes since Baud's focus was not on whether Biden was sure about the invasion as on the *source* of Biden's information. He could easily replace the sentence with "Biden said that Russia will possibly launch invasion" and then ask how he got this info, which is his focus (if you take into account the sense of the whole paragraph). Furthermore, parts of the linked article are without any qualifiers (such as "possibly" or "probably") making it appear as if they are pretty sure about the invasion. For example: "Russia will start a physical assault on Ukraine as soon as Feb. 16, multiple U.S. officials confirmed to POLITICO, and Washington communicated to allies that it could be preceded by a barrage of missile strikes and cyberattacks." Again, this may speak of Baud's bias but it is much weaker than it appears if you don't all of this.
3. You write "Baud takes it for granted that Putin is telling the truth." That may be the case. It also may be the case that in the quoted part, Baud was actually replying to those people who took it for granted that Putin's pre-invasion speech, where he was supposedly denying Ukraine's nationhood, meant he was bent on conquering the whole of Ukraine. If so, the quoted part should be interpreted as: "So, FOR PUTIN it is not a question of taking over the Ukraine, nor even, presumably, of occupying it; and certainly not of destroying it."
4. You write that all of this is "clear evidence that [Baud's] account cannot be trusted". Well, as someone who read many accounts, I can tell you that they are all biased. A lot of the disagreements seem to be about wording (or framing), where different wording has different moral connotations and where available facts may provide insufficient means for distinguishing the adequacy of different wording. Did Putin invade because he wanted "to turn Ukraine into a puppet state" or because he wanted "a political alignment of a large country right next door to Russia", or because he wanted "to change the regime that is anti-Russian" or because he wanted to "to restore Ukrainian constitutional neutrality"? Which description is the unbiased one and with which facts do you determine this? The reason it is hard to distinguish the adequacy of different frames is that we’re dealing here with concepts that don’t have sharp boundaries— as is the case with most of our everyday concepts—and are observer-dependent, i.e. their application hinges on whether one is looking at things from one perspective or the other. (More on this point here: https://triangulation.substack.com/p/the-inside-outside-view-asymmetry)
So if all accounts are biased, does that mean we shouldn't trust any account? Exactly, no account should be fully trusted. But that only begs the question: why single out Baud's (non-Russophobic, let's call it) account when there are literally hundreds of biased articles written daily? Isn't this very selection of Baud's bias itself biased?
You insist on interpreting 18th century Edinburgh English as if it were 21st century American English. Words change their meaning, so your understanding of what Adam Smith meant may be entirely mistaken. "Ought to do nothing to encourage" may be an oblique, understated and subtle way of saying somethin stronger. Educated Scots tend even today to understatement and nuance, so it would be unlikely for Smith to express himself in an 'obvious' modern way. If we consider the role of government in th 18th century in everyday life was very different from how governments behave, or are expected to behave, today. It is unlikely that Smith would say, for example "the government ought to legislate to prevent such assemblies". At most he might suggest that it ought to be frowned on - which is pretty much what he does. Smith may not have expressed what he thought should be done to prevent oligopolist behaviour, but he obviously disapproved of it and, more importantly, considered it to be damaging to the best functioning of an economy.
Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments clearly shows that 18th century 'enlightenment' views of human behaviour were rather different from 21st century views, and trying to interpret his writings through a 21st century lens is likely to lead to misunderstandings. Trying to classify Adam Smith's political leanings this way is absurd. He was a man of his time, not ours. But it is almost as absurd to use how someone interprets him as an indicator of their integrity, or of the value of what they write.
I have read both _The Wealth of Nations_ and _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_, taught the former multiple times in three different universities. I think I have a reasonable understanding of his language. Under what interpretation of his language is his first maxim of taxation consistent with supporting progressive taxation?
The book is readily available online. I suggest finding the passages Noah Smith quotes, reading them in context, and seeing whether it is still possible to believe that Noah was giving an honest account of Smith's views.
You seem to be ignoring my main point which is that applying modern day labels to people who lived in very different times is nonsensical. Surely the point is that we can’t know what side of the line AS would be on today. If he lived now, in our economic circumstances, in 21st century society with its norms and values, he might be very much in favour of progressive taxes, we just don’t know. Pretending that what he wrote in 1773 is directly applicable (or even very relevant) to 2025 is daft. The world was utterly different then in thought, and in how society operated. In that time, for example, slavery was booming and a key part of the economy. Smith thought it immoral but did not believe that it would ever be abolished. He thought it likely there would be more slavery as society became more wealthy. WoN has a place because it is a founding text of economics, but its role is in the historiography of economics, carefully located in context of 18th century society.
At a tangent to our discussion, I think you badly overestimate the difference. What matters are ideas, not the details of language, and the economic logic of Smith's society is the same as ours. One of my recent posts included a quote from Ricardo on the economic effects of AI. He was making it in the context of machinery but it was the same issue and, of course, he got it right. His understanding of the economics of trade is better than that of most modern non-economists — and the foundation of the way modern economists understand it is his ideas. Economics is about ideas, not language.
When I taught History of Thought at UCLA I started my first lecture by telling the students to imagine it was 1776, they were grad students preparing for their prelims, and The Wealth of Nations was the latest thing in the field. That was to make it clear that the course was economics, not history.
Asking people to imagine themselves into the mindset of an 18th century person when they live in and are born out of late 20th to early 21st century society is a curious exercise. How could you, or they, know what it was like to be such a person? We can barely imagine what it is like to be another contemporaneous person, where we share a culture and mindset. All you are doing is layering 21st century understanding and experience on a fantasy of 18th century equivalents.
It is curious how many economists look to Adam Smith’s work of 250 years ago to confirm their own views of how the economy operates today. Rather than accepting that how societies function is dependent on context, and subject to continual change, like all aspects of culture, they see it as subject to natural laws - like gravity or thermodynamics. Unchanging and absolute. Hence the physics envy. But, economics is a social science, and there is no single model for society, just a series of shifting options, and the choices made according to multiple complex factors mean every society is subtly different. Imposing one model on all that complexity leads to all the mistakes and disasters that economists have inflicted upon us. Depressions, recessions, boom and bust, endless cycles of burgoning inequality followed by crashes or revolutions, only to start again. Yet still you imagine that some Scotsman 250 years ago has all the answers… I bet that were he alive today he would be horrified at what economics has become. Dismal indeed.
" Yet still you imagine that some Scotsman 250 years ago has all the answers… I bet that were he alive today he would be horrified at what economics has become. Dismal indeed."
That is utter nonsense. Neither I nor any modern economist believes that Adam Smith had all the answers. David Ricardo starts his book by saying that he agrees with Smith wherever he does not say he disagrees and then demonstrating that Smith's price theory has to be wrong and constructing his own. Smith was an important figure, but it is not until Alfred Marshal and his contemporaries more than a century later that you get what modern economists would view as a reasonably correct picture of the field.
All of which you would know if you knew enough about the field to be competent to criticize it.
The argument, as should be obvious to anyone who read my post, is not over whether Adam Smith's views were correct but over what they were. That one can learn by reading what he wrote.
My guess is that Noah Smith never read the book, formed his view of the subject from a collection of out of context quotes that fitted what he wanted to believe or at least what he wanted his readers to believe, probably quotes he came across online, where all of them can be found.
So far as the term "Dismal Science," it was coined by Thomas Carlyle who was unhappy that economists rejected his arguments for reintroducing slavery to the West Indies:
So your view is that Noah Smith's post was dishonest not because what he said was false but because he was claiming things that could not be known?
That is nonsense. He didn't say that if Smith was alive today he would be in favor of progressive taxation. He said that Smith was in favor of progressive taxation, attempted to support that claim by a quote from what Smith wrote. Similarly for the rest of what he wrote.
I appreciate the Smith commentary, but with regards to your last example, the description of the video says, "All stories are fictional. Any coincidence of names or facts is coincidental."
It is hard to find people with what I would call 'academic integrity'. I generally got the impression from both you and your father that the truth was more important than what you believed.
For example, in the case of Milton, I can't think of another person who, after creating a documentary series promoting their ideology, decided to release it alongside people criticizing those same ideas.
With you, I have generally found the best arguments against your beliefs to be ones stated by you, that is, despite my best efforts to find arguments from well known opponents of your views.
Everyone is going to spread falsehoods from time to time, I'm glad there are people like you who seem to be at least aiming at the truth.
"With you, I have generally found the best arguments against your beliefs to be ones stated by you"
That may be the best compliment I have ever received.
Thinking about why it is the best compliment, better than people complimenting my ideas.
Smart is something you are, honest is something you do.
I read Noahpinion from time to time, and occasionally find myself saying: “Wait, what?” Thank you for the skewering.
I’m not a big fan of replying to one’s own comments, but here, I have to give props to Smjth for calling out the “dumbness” on his own side of the aisle.
https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/the-corporate-feudalism-thing-wont?r=2jvoi&utm_medium=ios
Noah interprets Smith differently than you do, and does so in a way consistent with his biases. Your counter interpretation, which is closer to correct from my perspective, is a different interpretation. Neither is truth. His conclusion is obviously over the top, but the whole article was written with the explicit purpose of arguing /to the left/ that they should be more on board with Smith, and done in a slightly tongue in cheek style. If you claim that Noah is not worth reading based on this article, that makes me question your judgement more so than Noah's truthfulness. I'm not going to stop reading either of you based on this, but you don't come out looking that good given that you claim to be seeking truth, rather than expressing opinion as 'Noahpinion' does.
He said things that were not true, that he probably had obtained in a way that he knew to be unreliable — snippets quoted online by people using them to support their views. He did not bother to check against the text, easy to do now since the text is available online and searchable. That by itself is evidence that he does not put much weight on being sure that what he writes is true.
Add to that his ignoring my comment, which included evidence not just my interpretation, and the conclusion is either that he is willing to have things up that he has written and now knows are false or is incompetent to tell what is true in an easy case. Either of those makes him useless as a source of reliable information.
Have you read the book? What part of my interpretation is not truth?
Didn't Scott Alexander have a comment on this exact error about a year ago, if not more..? Noah Smith has known for quite a while.
I don't know. I read most of what Scott wrote on Slate Star Codex, much less since it closed. But in any case, the post of Noah's that I am criticizing was written several years ago. And I don't know that Noah reads Scott — probably not.
I read the book, though that is beside the point. I agree largely with a more standard interpretation (such as yours) rather than progressive interpretations of Smith, of which Noah is not the only exponent and which I believe are largely incorrect.
The point is interpretation can at best be correct, an accurate reflection of what an author intends. Interpretation can never be truth. Saying 'I am going to ignore someone because they have interpreted something differently from me" is not fundamentally truth seeking behavior. Claiming that it is is wrong.
I do not understand your distinction between "correct" and "true." Is it true that Noah's interpretation is incorrect?
I am not claiming that what Adam Smith believed is true (or untrue). I am claiming that Noah Smith's assertions about what Adam Smith believed are untrue and offering evidence for that claim.
You are actually claiming to have ground truth (discovering what is true) in a scenario where ground truth is not available. We have no way of knowing what Adam Smith would have said about modern ideas of redistribution (for example)--we can infer some things and some ideas are more likely to be correct than others but we cannot observe his true opinion. If you disagree with a claim, that is fine, but claiming ground truth is wrong.
Further, having read a good bit of @noahpinion I believe your claim that he doesn't care about truth is very much incorrect. It actually seems more like you just misinterpreted what he was doing in that article--which seems to be trying to get the left to take Adam Smith seriously, as opposed to an economics history debate on how Smith would view various issues. Dismissing him on the grounds you present seems counterproductive if truth seeking is actually important to you.
We don't know what Adam Smith would have said about modern issues in the modern world but Noah Smith's claims were about what Smith said his views were and, as I think I showed, were false. Getting the left to take Adam Smith seriously by misrepresenting his views as demonstrated in his writing is dishonest.
I don't know what you count as "ground truth." There are few if any things one can know for certain; I cannot prove for certain that Donald Trump is not the angel Gabriel, or Satan, in disguise. But if I pretended to know that he was either of them, even to have good reason to believe it, I would be lying.
If you believe Noah Smith cares about truth, can you point to examples of his reporting something that most of his readers did not know that was evidence against his political views? If not, what is the evidence on which you believe it?
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/four-things-i-got-wrong-since-i-started
I found that in about 15 seconds. There are more instances where Noah has updated his position as new evidence came in, which is a hallmark of truth seeking. I'm not sure where the idea of "reporting things against ones political views" comes from. He is an opinion writer, not a reporter. Nor is he an academic economist for that matter--each of those have different standards.
I wrote a longer response, but to summarize:
--If you want to talk about 'what is true' you should have at least a basic understanding of terms like 'ground truth'. Otherwise just disagree with people and make your case without accusing them of dishonesty.
--Noah's point was ABSOLUTELY NOT to exhaustively describe Adam Smith's beliefs with those quotes. It was to show that Smith was not a knee jerk 'free marketer' and that he engaged with ideas that progressives didn't realize he engaged with.
--the ultimate point of that was to get people who dismissed economics to engage with Smith's ideas and economics in general
--He was clear about this. He stated it in the article, as well as pointing out that THIS WAS NOT THE ONLY SET OF VIEWS SMITH HAD.
--Somehow you missed all of this. You missed the entire point of what he was saying and apparently thought this was the equivalent of a paper presented at a seminar. It was not.
--Then you accuse Noah, who probably is in the to 5% (at least) of opinion writers in terms of observable truth seeking behavior, of 'not caring about the truth' because you thought his opinion piece was supposed to be a seminar paper.
--From where I sit you have shown yourself not to have a clear understanding of what truth seeking behavior is, and to be a poor judge of who to read.
Thank you for engaging with my critique, despite not understanding it. I am moving on. I hope this has helped someone.
“… but you don't come out looking that good given that you claim to be seeking truth, rather than expressing opinion…”
Due respect, DF did not claim that all of what Noah writes is untrue; he claimed rather than Noah has low credibility with him because “he does not very much care whether what he writes is true as long as it supports his political views, hence is probably not worth reading.”
Noah is an archetype, the guy who reads whatever factoids are in his feed and gives it a preconceived spin that is on brand.
As an example he's been big on talking up Medicare Drug Price Negotiation and the IRA Biden passed. He's spoken its praises multiple times, and regurgitated the "savings" that have been claimed in its name.
Now, some I could forgive him. He doesn't know what the pre-IRA net prices were, and therefore doesn't know that the government negotiated worse prices like I do.
But he could easily be aware of the "Medicare Part D Premium Stabilization Demonstration". It was the multi-billion dollar bribe the Biden admin gave plans to keep prices down for the election, because rather then lowering premiums (which you would expect if they got better prices) it raised them. The Republicans made a big stink about this before the election. You could also just look at what happened to the National Average Bid Amount and Direct Subsidy.
If this were a one off I wouldn't expect Noah to do even this minimal amount of research, but since he touts the program constantly I think he ought to know more. Especially with it set to be a much bigger disaster this year, which Noah will probably blame on Trump because everything is Trumps fault even though he didn't do a thing.
I would go beyond Noah. If you Google "medicare part d drug negotiation savings" the first page will be a bunch of "reputable institutions" repeating the propaganda. Some will even make an attempt to verify CMS claims, but the math is wrong. None talk about the Demo or the Bid Results, even though that's real money at stake and not a theory. Those groups have an even higher bar to expect accurate results from and they don't do their duty.
This is just one example, but there are others I see Noah make. This is a general problem. I talked to a good friend who just had a baby via IVF about my moving to Florida. He is a smart accomplished individual. But he was convinced the IVF was illegal in Florida (it isn't) and that Trump was trying too bad IVF (he's subsidizing it). He could easily update his information with a simple Google search, but he's outsourced his information to a left wing echo chamber.
Does the Medicare Part D Premium Stabilization Demonstration have ongoing annual premium increases, or is it a one-time adjustment? When I googled it, it looked like a single-year cost of approximately $7 billion, overwhelming the estimated $6 billion in drug cost savings. But, it looked like this adjustment was a one-time thing while the drug cost savings was each year and would provide substantial savings over time--or did I miss something?
These days, most topics come with at least two opposing opinions, often more. I prefer to start by finding common ground between them. My method is cruder than yours, but it’s practical, fast, and generally effective… unless there is no common ground, in which case I may adopt your more robust methods.
I tend to blame schools for most people’s struggle to distinguish fact from fiction. In school, you’re taught to accept a single authority—the teacher (and I guess also the textbook)—without question, rather than learning to think critically for yourself.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
-Mark Twain
"The skill of judging sources of information is anti-taught by a model of education in which the student is presented with two authorities, the teacher and the textbook and, unless the teacher is an unusually good one, instructed to believe what they tell him."
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/unschooling-1
One useful approach to topics with opposing opinions is to find an extended argument, usually online, between intelligent people on both sides. They do the work of finding the evidence and arguments for their positions, making it easier for you to evaluate them. Ideally they are people you have observed in other contexts and know to be reasonably honest.
The quote, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so", is usually attributed to Twain but it ain't so. Nice bit of irony there.
Thanks for the information. Noah is one of the few substacks I pay for, in this case so I can hear a viewpoint from someone of the left. I am now considering cancelling.
Indeed, Noah Smith's opinions are not based on facts, but instead on bias. Not worth listening to.
“Noah Smith's opinions are not based on facts, but instead on bias.”
Sorry, *this* claim is untrue and far too strong.
Like every human being, Noah’s opinions are based on both.
Now I agree that there is sufficient leftist bias in Smith’s opinion to cause him to have low credibility, and so I have no problem with your “Not worth listening to” conclusion. But I actually suspect Noah’s relative proportion of facts is far higher than the average person, and decidedly far higher than the average Dem voter.
I don't think bias by itself makes a source of information worthless. It is possible to be both biased and honest.
Certainly.
There is also the distinction between how partisan on the one hand, and how much they spin on the other.
Of the 3 center-left folks commented on in this comments section, I find:
Yglesias the furthest left, but the least biased in terms of spin, and the most honest and trustworthy.
Barro, the most partisan, but very open about it, and never actively dishonest and rarely untruthful. His policy takes are the most reasonable, but you gotta know when he is spinning politically, usually re politicians, and discount for that.
Noah is not as leftist as Yglesias, not as partisan as Barro, and yet is the least trustworthy of the 3 by far, for the reasons you cite, and either because he is oblivious to his left bias or is dishonest about some of it. Which of these is of course hard for an outsider to know.
I think that is a necessary clarification. If we write off everyone who is biased, we will have very few people to read. Since we're likely biased, we might be wrong about who is and is not biased. The most likely scenario is that we create an echo chamber for ourselves. But we can and should avoid dishonest people, as they are a waste of time and/or will lead us to wrong conclusions.
Biased people will also lead us to wrong conclusions, so also require caution.
But I agree with DF that they are not necessarily worthless.
I read and value Josh Barro, e.g., but take into account his strong pro-Dem views when I read him
Totally agreed. I also like Barro and Yglesias, who are definitely pro-Dem but more moderate Dems. Biased but honest is worth listening to from time to time. Biased and dishonest is rarely worth the effort.
Two of my favorite essayists are G.K.Chesterton and George Orwell. They are obviously biased, I believe honest, and I have learned from both. One of my posts discusses my own biases:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/why-i-believe-things
Are there any public intellectuals that don’t take shortcuts via confirmation and authority bias? The SPJ Code of Ethics, if followed, would pretty much limit people to one essay a week. If that. Fact checking is time-consuming. So is attempting to disprove your own hypothesis
There are no penalties for select quoting and editing. And certainly not for incorrect conclusions.
It is possible to be biased in favor of your prior beliefs and authorities you trust and still be honest, still do your best to only say things you have good reason to believe are true. Baude might be — I can deduce from his writing that he may sometimes be mistaken in his beliefs through trusting authorities he should not have trusted. Noah Smith is not, as I think I demonstrate.
Ironically, I stopped reading Noah Smith because his post-UMR-assassination post about how providers were the real corrupt villains in the healthcare system (as opposed to those poor insurance companies whose internal numbers show they barely even make a profit and barely ever deny anything) was so divorced from the reality I know (as an exec at a small healthcare provider) and relied so heavily on presuming insurers’ self-reported numbers were infallibly honest that I couldn’t take what he wrote seriously anymore.
Noah Smith “does not very much care whether what he writes is true as long as it supports his political views, hence is probably not worth reading.” The distortion in his writing will be the greater the more erroneous are his political views, which I judge to be middling—bad, but not terrible. But many matters about which he writes will be orthogonal (irrelevant) to his political views, and on these topics he may care about accuracy (though the political cases are worrying(, and so be worth reading.
Conclusions about how reliable a source is are rarely all or nothing, so I agree that his posts on other topics might contain valuable information. But there are a lot of sources of information out there and I am not inclined to spend time on ones I have found to be unreliable. If I happened to come across something he wrote on a subject of particular interest to me I might make an exception.
Very nice piece.
The stuff on Smiths Noah and Adam was particularly excellent and valuable. I came to a similar but not identical conclusion about Noah Smith for similar but not identical reasons. But on credibility none were nearly so bad as the Adam Smith examples you cite.
As you concluded, I give his pronouncements low credibility, and long ago stopped reading all his stuff.
But I do read it occasionally, as some of it is interesting - still my #1 decision criterion - and Noah at least being center-left, not hard-core leftist, is often a decent weather vane on what the sane left believes and is discussing.
Similarly, I used to read all of Richard Hanania’s free stuff, because I found him almost always interesting, even if infuriatingly wrong on about 15% of his assertions.
But he has gone *so* overboard on his claims about the right being the stupid party while the left is “Elite Human Capital” (which definition he has stretched to include midwits) and that Trump and Musk are uniquely awful people and liars while “The Mainstream Media is Honest and Good”, that he has simultaneously become less interesting and less credible.
noah is 100% dishonest. dont pull your punches.
Your case against Baud is pretty weak IMO:
1. You fail to mention the correction at the bottom of the FP interview about the exclusion of "had not seen direct evidence of Russian involvement". Although it is true that Baud is incorrect about "never observed the slightest trace of Russian units," knowing about the correction makes it probable that Baud was referring to that excluded part. His conversion of "had not seen direct evidence of Russian involvement" into "never observed the slightest trace of Russian units" may speak of his bias but this is much weaker than it appears if you do not know about the correction.
2. Although you are correct that the link Baud provides does not show that Biden "announced that Russia would attack Ukraine in the next few days" this is largely irrelevant for his purposes since Baud's focus was not on whether Biden was sure about the invasion as on the *source* of Biden's information. He could easily replace the sentence with "Biden said that Russia will possibly launch invasion" and then ask how he got this info, which is his focus (if you take into account the sense of the whole paragraph). Furthermore, parts of the linked article are without any qualifiers (such as "possibly" or "probably") making it appear as if they are pretty sure about the invasion. For example: "Russia will start a physical assault on Ukraine as soon as Feb. 16, multiple U.S. officials confirmed to POLITICO, and Washington communicated to allies that it could be preceded by a barrage of missile strikes and cyberattacks." Again, this may speak of Baud's bias but it is much weaker than it appears if you don't all of this.
3. You write "Baud takes it for granted that Putin is telling the truth." That may be the case. It also may be the case that in the quoted part, Baud was actually replying to those people who took it for granted that Putin's pre-invasion speech, where he was supposedly denying Ukraine's nationhood, meant he was bent on conquering the whole of Ukraine. If so, the quoted part should be interpreted as: "So, FOR PUTIN it is not a question of taking over the Ukraine, nor even, presumably, of occupying it; and certainly not of destroying it."
4. You write that all of this is "clear evidence that [Baud's] account cannot be trusted". Well, as someone who read many accounts, I can tell you that they are all biased. A lot of the disagreements seem to be about wording (or framing), where different wording has different moral connotations and where available facts may provide insufficient means for distinguishing the adequacy of different wording. Did Putin invade because he wanted "to turn Ukraine into a puppet state" or because he wanted "a political alignment of a large country right next door to Russia", or because he wanted "to change the regime that is anti-Russian" or because he wanted to "to restore Ukrainian constitutional neutrality"? Which description is the unbiased one and with which facts do you determine this? The reason it is hard to distinguish the adequacy of different frames is that we’re dealing here with concepts that don’t have sharp boundaries— as is the case with most of our everyday concepts—and are observer-dependent, i.e. their application hinges on whether one is looking at things from one perspective or the other. (More on this point here: https://triangulation.substack.com/p/the-inside-outside-view-asymmetry)
So if all accounts are biased, does that mean we shouldn't trust any account? Exactly, no account should be fully trusted. But that only begs the question: why single out Baud's (non-Russophobic, let's call it) account when there are literally hundreds of biased articles written daily? Isn't this very selection of Baud's bias itself biased?
It was the only one that came up in the comment thread and useful as an example of how to evaluate sources of information.
You insist on interpreting 18th century Edinburgh English as if it were 21st century American English. Words change their meaning, so your understanding of what Adam Smith meant may be entirely mistaken. "Ought to do nothing to encourage" may be an oblique, understated and subtle way of saying somethin stronger. Educated Scots tend even today to understatement and nuance, so it would be unlikely for Smith to express himself in an 'obvious' modern way. If we consider the role of government in th 18th century in everyday life was very different from how governments behave, or are expected to behave, today. It is unlikely that Smith would say, for example "the government ought to legislate to prevent such assemblies". At most he might suggest that it ought to be frowned on - which is pretty much what he does. Smith may not have expressed what he thought should be done to prevent oligopolist behaviour, but he obviously disapproved of it and, more importantly, considered it to be damaging to the best functioning of an economy.
Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments clearly shows that 18th century 'enlightenment' views of human behaviour were rather different from 21st century views, and trying to interpret his writings through a 21st century lens is likely to lead to misunderstandings. Trying to classify Adam Smith's political leanings this way is absurd. He was a man of his time, not ours. But it is almost as absurd to use how someone interprets him as an indicator of their integrity, or of the value of what they write.
I have read both _The Wealth of Nations_ and _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_, taught the former multiple times in three different universities. I think I have a reasonable understanding of his language. Under what interpretation of his language is his first maxim of taxation consistent with supporting progressive taxation?
The book is readily available online. I suggest finding the passages Noah Smith quotes, reading them in context, and seeing whether it is still possible to believe that Noah was giving an honest account of Smith's views.
You seem to be ignoring my main point which is that applying modern day labels to people who lived in very different times is nonsensical. Surely the point is that we can’t know what side of the line AS would be on today. If he lived now, in our economic circumstances, in 21st century society with its norms and values, he might be very much in favour of progressive taxes, we just don’t know. Pretending that what he wrote in 1773 is directly applicable (or even very relevant) to 2025 is daft. The world was utterly different then in thought, and in how society operated. In that time, for example, slavery was booming and a key part of the economy. Smith thought it immoral but did not believe that it would ever be abolished. He thought it likely there would be more slavery as society became more wealthy. WoN has a place because it is a founding text of economics, but its role is in the historiography of economics, carefully located in context of 18th century society.
At a tangent to our discussion, I think you badly overestimate the difference. What matters are ideas, not the details of language, and the economic logic of Smith's society is the same as ours. One of my recent posts included a quote from Ricardo on the economic effects of AI. He was making it in the context of machinery but it was the same issue and, of course, he got it right. His understanding of the economics of trade is better than that of most modern non-economists — and the foundation of the way modern economists understand it is his ideas. Economics is about ideas, not language.
When I taught History of Thought at UCLA I started my first lecture by telling the students to imagine it was 1776, they were grad students preparing for their prelims, and The Wealth of Nations was the latest thing in the field. That was to make it clear that the course was economics, not history.
Asking people to imagine themselves into the mindset of an 18th century person when they live in and are born out of late 20th to early 21st century society is a curious exercise. How could you, or they, know what it was like to be such a person? We can barely imagine what it is like to be another contemporaneous person, where we share a culture and mindset. All you are doing is layering 21st century understanding and experience on a fantasy of 18th century equivalents.
It is curious how many economists look to Adam Smith’s work of 250 years ago to confirm their own views of how the economy operates today. Rather than accepting that how societies function is dependent on context, and subject to continual change, like all aspects of culture, they see it as subject to natural laws - like gravity or thermodynamics. Unchanging and absolute. Hence the physics envy. But, economics is a social science, and there is no single model for society, just a series of shifting options, and the choices made according to multiple complex factors mean every society is subtly different. Imposing one model on all that complexity leads to all the mistakes and disasters that economists have inflicted upon us. Depressions, recessions, boom and bust, endless cycles of burgoning inequality followed by crashes or revolutions, only to start again. Yet still you imagine that some Scotsman 250 years ago has all the answers… I bet that were he alive today he would be horrified at what economics has become. Dismal indeed.
" Yet still you imagine that some Scotsman 250 years ago has all the answers… I bet that were he alive today he would be horrified at what economics has become. Dismal indeed."
That is utter nonsense. Neither I nor any modern economist believes that Adam Smith had all the answers. David Ricardo starts his book by saying that he agrees with Smith wherever he does not say he disagrees and then demonstrating that Smith's price theory has to be wrong and constructing his own. Smith was an important figure, but it is not until Alfred Marshal and his contemporaries more than a century later that you get what modern economists would view as a reasonably correct picture of the field.
All of which you would know if you knew enough about the field to be competent to criticize it.
The argument, as should be obvious to anyone who read my post, is not over whether Adam Smith's views were correct but over what they were. That one can learn by reading what he wrote.
My guess is that Noah Smith never read the book, formed his view of the subject from a collection of out of context quotes that fitted what he wanted to believe or at least what he wanted his readers to believe, probably quotes he came across online, where all of them can be found.
So far as the term "Dismal Science," it was coined by Thomas Carlyle who was unhappy that economists rejected his arguments for reintroducing slavery to the West Indies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science
So your view is that Noah Smith's post was dishonest not because what he said was false but because he was claiming things that could not be known?
That is nonsense. He didn't say that if Smith was alive today he would be in favor of progressive taxation. He said that Smith was in favor of progressive taxation, attempted to support that claim by a quote from what Smith wrote. Similarly for the rest of what he wrote.
Earned you a subscriber
I appreciate the Smith commentary, but with regards to your last example, the description of the video says, "All stories are fictional. Any coincidence of names or facts is coincidental."
Thanks. I missed that.
But my point was not that the video was dishonest but that you could check whether it was fictional with tools readily available to you.
But given it was flagged as fiction...why would you?
As a simple intellectual exercise and to demonstrate one simple way of using the tools available to test the truth of something online.