The Failure Begins!

Very briefly, let us look at Megan McArdle's excerpt of How To Fail Up If You're Just Like Me. I will return to her excerpt later when I have more time. Here is The Secret To Shortening Long-Term Unemployment:

McArdle attacks the unemployment problem by dividing the world into Democrat and Republican approaches to the problem, and then telling us that the Republicans are right. She tells us there are no villains; evidently unemployment just happens for structural reasons. Although she earlier said that the government shouldn't create jobs because they would just be make-work, she now says that the government should provide jobs that pay less than "normal" jobs temporarily, waive the payroll tax for new employees, or provide "grants" so people could move to a place where jobs are available. Or perhaps, like Denmark, the government could pay support and for retraining, but McArdle understands if her reader doesn't like the idea of helping his fellow man.

She does not tell us how a guy over 50 in middle management in Pennsylvania with a house he can't sell, a wife who managed to hold on to her job, and a couple of kids in school could sell his home and move to North Dakota to work in the oil industry, but she can't solve everyone's problems, can she? And while it was a tragedy when the rich were no longer able to afford prep school for their children, it's nothing for a middle class kid to leave school and end up in North Dakota.

Failure: Too many people on unemployment for too long (note that the problem is not the lack of jobs)

Point of Failure: The unemployed stop looking for jobs until benefits are about to run out. Then they look for jobs again. (Note that McArdle does not discuss what happens if they can't find a job. For Randians, there is always another job out there just for the taking, if you look hard enough.)

Cause of Failure: Looking for work is painful so people stop, according to a survey McArdle read.

Solution: Make it easier to look for a job.

Unemployment solved!

A Failure Of Mercy

Let's look at an assessment of failure that has already been thoroughly discussed, the Newtown shooting. We know Megan McArdle will respond to the Newtown massacre by analyzing the failure and using that information to make correct decisions in the future. Alternately she will ignore failure since it is systemic and therefore indecipherable; it all depends on whether she is currently on Team Failure or Team Success. So McArdle (probably) will determine the point of failure, which will be fairly obvious, and that failure will point the way to success.

The universe being a complicated place, you can usually tell multiple stories from the same pieces of evidence. We learn by gambling on what we think the best answer is, and seeing how it turns out. Most of us know that we have learned more about the world, and ourselves, from failing than from success. Success can be accidental; failure is definite. Failure tells us exactly what doesn't work.

Yet--somehow---Megan McArdle was unable to figure out what to do about child massacres. She did manage to come up with a solution but sadly the Constitution would make it impossible to implement.

There's Little We Can Do To Prevent Another Massacre

But I doubt we're going to tell people to gang rush mass shooters, because that would involve admitting that there is no mental health service or "reasonable gun control" which is going to prevent all of these attacks. Which is to say, admitting that we have no box big enough to completely contain evil.

Problem Identified: Evil

Basis For Claim: Judeo-Christian mythology

Solution For Problem: None

And there you go. Megan McArdle has finished turning failure into success, as she has garnered what must have been an astonishing number of hits.

Not everyone is brave and honest enough to advise parents to train their children to rush a gunman firing an automatic weapon at them. It takes a libertarian to show that kind of personal responsibility and ability to obtain gains (freedom!) from trade (children's lives!). Not to mention a Randian disdain for childish weakness.

Let's look at the causes of the massacre, according to McArdle. As we just said, the massacre was caused by Evil.

The alternative is Newtown. When one tries to picture the mind that plans it, one quickly comes to a dead end. Even if I had been raised with no moral laws at all, even if there were no cops and no prisons, I'm pretty sure that I still wouldn't want to spend a crisp Friday morning shooting cowering children. Trying to climb this mountain of wickedness is like trying to climb a glass wall with your bare hands. What happened there is pure evil, and evil, unlike common badness, gives an ordinary mind no foothold. Since we can't understand it, we can't change it. And since we can't change it, our best hope is to box it in.

The obvious alternate cause is mental illness but McArdle does not discuss it as a cause. She states the killer had access to mental health professionals so obviously providing more mental health opportunities would not prevent future killings. McArdle does not compare this shooter to any other mass shooters; a sample of one is enough. Because we can do nothing about Evil, which is random and invisible and strikes without warning, any solution we come up with will fail.

Not every problem has a policy solution. We should always be mindful of Johnson's famous epigram:

How small, of all that human hearts endure  

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!

In this case, there probably is a policy which could stop mass shootings. But we are not going to implement that policy. And since nothing else is going to work, we are not going to pass a law that will stop these sorts of mass shootings. We may pass a law, mind you. But whatever we do pass, we will have more of these evil happenings ahead of us.

McArdle examines possible laws for flaws:

Ban guns and ammunition--can't be done, it's unconstitutional.

Lock up the mentally ill--can't be done, it's unconstitutional.

Naturally, nobody can do anything ever.

When I pointed out some of these things on Facebook this weekend, the responses were generally angry, or incredulous. "Megan, you're not presenting an argument, you're just poking holes in others' arguments," said one friend. "Anyone can do that. Bottom line, how do you suggest improving things?"  

The answer, I'm afraid, is that I don't. I know this is a very frustrating answer. It got me a fair amount of angry pushback on Facebook, particularly since my friends know that I am in favor of much less stringent gun control than they are. It's not surprising that they feel that I'm hiding the football--poking holes in the stuff that won't work while ignoring the stuff that will, in an attempt to deceive people into giving up on a gun control that I would oppose for entirely separate reasons.  

...  

There's a terrible syllogism that tends to follow on tragedies like this:  

1. Something must be done  

2. This is something  

3. Therefore this must be done 

. . . . and hello, Gulf War II.  

It would certainly be more comfortable for me to endorse doing something symbolic--bring back the "assault weapons ban"--in order to signal that I care. But I would rather do nothing than do something stupid because it makes us feel better. We shouldn't have laws on the books unless we think there's a good chance they'll work: they add regulatory complexity and sap law-enforcement resources from more needed tasks. This is not because I don't care about dead children; my heart, like yours, broke about a thousand times this weekend. But they will not breathe again because we pass a law. A law would make us feel better, because it would make us feel as if we'd "done something", as if we'd made it less likely that more children would die. But I think that would be false security. And false security is more dangerous than none.

Yes, nothing can be done and it is dangerous to try to find a solution. Which is what happens when you start off with an ideological platform that states we cannot enact serious gun laws ever. Now a pundit can avoid researching countries that have enacted serious gun laws and discourage any substantial increase in regulations, which are abhorrent to the Koch-fed.

My guess is that we're going to get a law anyway, and my hope is that it will consist of small measures that might have some tiny actual effect, like restrictions on magazine capacity. I'd also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once. Would it work? Would people do it? I have no idea; all I can say is that both these things would be more effective than banning rifles with pistol grips.

Remember this the next time someone tells you that we have to listen to the people in authority because they are smarter, better educated, richer and more successful than we are. They have no heart. They claim they do; they say their hearts bleed for the poor but they are lying, as they lie about so very many things.

It breaks my heart to even type these details; it was worse to read all the stories in which I collected them. 

...  

This is not because I don't care about dead children; my heart, like yours, broke about a thousand times this weekend.

And yet, the only solution McArdle could come up with was a little law tweaking and training children to rush gunmen "because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once." Doesn't that statement just ooze with heartbreak?

Dead children and a few parents don't support think tanks and provide internships, jobs, book contracts and tours and speaking fees. Anti-regulation billionaires do.

Jonah Goldberg Makes A Funny

In a strange, rambling post filled with unfunny "humor," Jonah Goldberg lowers himself even more than usual.

Cracked has a list of the three most depressing minor characters in major movies. But it leaves out The Gimp from Pulp Fiction. I understand it’s awkward since the man the character is based on is now the vice president of the United States. But come on.

Perhaps he sees an end to his gravy train and no longer bothers to be either coherent or marginally tasteful. But Goldberg should have enough self-preservation to realize that Mark Steyn is not the only one who can be sued for (in part) comparing a public figure to a sex offender.

An Examination Of The Mechanisms of Success Through Failure

On an earlier comment I attempted to discern the reasoning behind Megan McArdle's new book, Why Being Wrong Means I Am Better Than People Who Were Right, using the famous Underpants Gnome Theory as my template.

1.McArdle reiterates Warren is sloppy with data, basically ignoring the multitude of corrections. She will write another post describing that sloppiness and of how Warren's mistrust (of what? who?) manifests itself in paternalism. The rest is silence.  

So this is Step 2:  

1. Declare your argument is not destroyed and smouldering in a heap of broken glass and twisted metal.  

2. Promise that you will respond to your critics at a later date, perhaps in the sweet bye-and-bye.  

3. In the future link to debunked posts as proof of your argument.  

That's pretty much it.  

For her book we'll see more analysis no doubt.  

1. Admit failure.  

2. Declare that the analysis of failure leads to success.  

3. Declare success without any analysis of failure.  

Not that she did not try.

 1. Admit that her predictions were wrong and her reasoning was wrong. 

2. State that one must find out why one was wrong.  

3. Claim people who were wrong are now wiser.

In her post The Art Of Explanation, we see McArdle did indeed raise explaining to a high art. She also explained a question I have often asked; why should we listen to the people who were wrong instead of the people who were right?

It's very simple, as Megan McArdle tells us. People who were right for the right reasons only think they were right for the right reasons. They were not. Since they were not, they will not look for the right reasons. People who were wrong will look for the right reasons because they were disastrously wrong.

Slate's What I got Wrong series on the five-year anniversary of the Iraq War, and similar efforts from other media outlets, have triggered a fair amount of irritation, especially among those who opposed it. Says Timothy Noah:

Why should you waste your time, at this late date, ingesting the opinions of people who were wrong about Iraq? Wouldn't you benefit more from considering the views of people who were right? Five years after this terrible war began, it remains true that respectable mainstream discussion about its lessons is nearly exclusively confined to people who supported the war, even though that same mainstream acknowledges, for the most part, that the war was a mistake. That's true of Slate's symposium, and it was true of a similar symposium that appeared March 16 on the New York Times' op-ed pages. The people who opposed U.S. entry into the Iraq war, it would appear, are insufficiently "serious" to explain why they were right.

I heard a fair amount of that this weekend. But I think it's seriously misguided. The universe being a complicated place, you can usually tell multiple stories from the same pieces of evidence. We learn by gambling on what we think the best answer is, and seeing how it turns out. Most of us know that we have learned more about the world, and ourselves, from failing than from success. Success can be accidental; failure is definite.  

Failure tells us exactly what doesn't work.

There is no way to find solutions to problems. The universe is too complicated. The only way to make a choice or decision is to guess. If you are wrong you will be able gain in wisdom by examining the point of failure and determining the causes, so you are able to make better decisions in the future. Although those decisions are also complicated and nobody knows and choices must be made by guesswork.

Failure tells us more than success because success is usually a matter of a whole system.

Although failure is also systemic, as McArdle has told us many times.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a well-respected journalist who doesn't cover financial matters. She was pushing me for the culprit behind this mess, and was unsatisfied when I pointed out that there were a lot of good reasons to make most of these bad decisions. Ultimately she cried in frustration, "but somebody must have done it!" This is how we approach the problem: we want villains, guilt, punishment. But when systems fail, they usually fail systemically. If one person, even Alan Greenspan, could bring down the entire edifice, then we'd be in massive trouble, so we should be grateful that it isn't the case.

When you don't want someone to look into the causes of the recent massive economic crises you tell your readers that failure is systemic and too complicated to understand and nobody should be prosecuted for economic crimes. When you want to sell a book called The Up Side Of Down: Why Failing Well Is The Key To Success, you claim success is systemic and too difficult to understand, so we are forced to learn from failure.

And as development economists have proven over and over and over again, those complex webs of interactions are impossible to tease apart into one or two concrete actions. Things can fail, on the other hand, at a single point. And even when they fail in multiple ways, those ways are usually more obvious than the emergent interactions that produced a success.

McArdle goes on to reduce all emergent interactions with Iraq to two neocon bits of propaganda. This is a central feature in McArdle's inability to learn (and therefore teach others to learn) from failure. She starts reasoning from propaganda, not facts. McArdle knew nothing about Iraq and didn't care to learn. She knew a lot about propaganda and how to get hits. A female warblogger in 2001 was money in the bank.

When McArdle went to Penn, she stated, she was liberal because her friends were liberal. She became much more conservative after 9/11 and conservative warbloggers were all the rage. Koch-fed training and ample Koch-fed jobs made her libertarian. No doubt when she succeeds in failing her way to tv punditry she will sink easily into a comfortable stolid conservative ideology like the rest of them.

So Megan McArdle did not make a choice between two bad outcomes. She decided that we were forced to choose between two bad options that would both harm Iraqis. She ignored any information that conflicted with her ideology. She misapplied lessons from history, not taking the time and effort to figure out if they applied to the current situation. And she admitted that she did not think about the effect her decisions would make on Iraqis.

McArdle is considered an intellectual on the right. As Mark Kleiman said:

There’s something about Megan McArdle that drives some of my fellow Blue-team pundits crazy. She’s way smarter, way saner, far more nuanced in her thinking, and a much better writer than most of her Red-team colleagues. She doesn’t fawn on the rich or despise the poor. Her ideas about how to deal with failure fit no ideological mold, and imply policy positions that won’t make her any friends at Cato. But the Rage Against the McArdle seems to run deep in Left Blogistan.

Incidentally,  the Cato Institute will be hosting a forum for McArdle's new book on Feb. 24 in the Hayek Auditorium.

Remember, we examine failure to learn but you cannot learn from failure and you cannot make a decision based on the facts, which are too numerous to tease out.

At the decision point where we decided to go into Iraq, there were two hypotheses we could have tested:  

1) Something terrible will happen if we leave Saddam in power  

2) We can depose Saddam and leave the world a better place We chose to test hypothesis number two. So far, it looks like a dud.

Unlike our bombs.

Since it failed, the more interesting question is not what did you get right, but what did you get wrong.

McArdle has given her reasons for being wrong. She said that she failed to think like Saddam Hussein (and who can blame her?). She also underestimated the time and expense of the war because she had contemplated invading Iraq using the lessons we learned through the successful invasion of Japan and Germany.

a) I overlooked the fact that Japan and Germany were both stable bourgeois nations with solid industrial bases long before we got into the act.  

b) I overlooked the fact that we completely destroyed this nations before occupying and reconstructing them.

Sadly, we are forced to ask ourselves if McArdle has indeed learned how to succeed through failure. We did a rather thorough job of destroying Iraq, we just never bothered to build it up again. McArdle tells us that the reason Iraq wasn't rebuilt was the culture of corruption in Iraq and onerous Iraqi government rules and regulations. McArdle simply claimed that while Iraq might have its difficulties it was being rebuilt, as a rising invasion lifts all boats.

Since the invasion, I think it's pretty clear that living standards have risen (quality of life, which would include the heightened risk of violence, and also the lesser risk of being tortured by your awful authoritarian regime, is a little harder to assess). Access to electricity has improved pretty dramatically, as their government and ours have started to repair Iraq's crumbling infrastructure (though this has been uneven--Baghdad, which used to get 24 hours a day of electricity, now has to share with the rest of the country, so their service level has dropped, making the residents very angry). The sorts of consumer goods that require electricity have also risen substantially, as the lifting of sanctions has made it easier to bring these things into the country. Other basic needs such as potable water, adequate fuel, trash collection, fire service, and so on are also being better filled. Meanwhile, of course, higher oil prices are making the country richer--and since the government employs about half the country's workers, and many more Iraqis receive basic income support from the state, this has translated into a better standard of living for Iraqis.

Because McArdle's thinking begins and ends with ideology, she will never learn from failure.

The people who were right can (and will) rewrite their memories of what they believed to show themselves in the most attractive light; they will come to honestly believe that they were more prescient than they were.

Fortunately many people wrote up their reasons on that thing called the internet and they are still there, prescient as ever. Unlike Jane Galt's archives, which are thoroughly erased.

This is not some attack on people who were against the war: I was wrong, they were right. But everyone does this with almost everything--indeed, not rewriting memory in this way is so rare that there's a clinical term for it. We call it "major depression". They will also quite possibly simply be wrong about how they got it right; correct analysis often operates at a subconscious as well as a conscious level.

You may have been right but not as right as you thought you were or for the same reasons.

The people who failed will also do this. But unlike the people who were right, there is a central fact stopping them from flattering themselves too much: things are blowing up in Iraq and people are dying. Thus they will have to look for some coherent explanation. To be sure, many of those explanations are wan and self-serving--"I trusted too much." But others of them aren't. And the honest ones are vastly more interesting than listening to a parade of people say "Well, obviously, I'm a genius, and also, not mean."

Honest propagandists are vastly more interesting than those mean, stuck-up right people.

Ideology and money rule their world but a lonely, resentful child rules their hearts.

Learning Through Failure

Along with her book media blitz (really, she's going to be everywhere), Megan McArdle is going to appear at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University. Like many of McArdle's places of employment or venues to give speeches, the Center was a happy recipient of Koch funds, this time to the tune of over $30,000,000. Naturally, the Center is not exactly pro-consumer.

The F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the Mercatus Center invites you to a panel discussion featuring Benjamin Powell and his new book, Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy. This book provides a comprehensive defense of third-world sweatshops. It explains how these sweatshops provide the best available opportunity to workers and how they play an important role in the process of development that eventually leads to better wages and working conditions. Using economic theory, Professor Powell argues that much of what the anti-sweatshop movement has agitated for would actually harm the very workers they intend to help by creating less desirable alternatives and undermining the process of development. Nowhere does this book put "profits" or "economic efficiency" above people. Improving the welfare of poorer citizens of third world countries is the goal, and the book explores which methods best achieve that goal. Sweatshops will help readers understand how activists and policy makers can help third world workers. For a preview of this topic, watch this short Learn Liberty video featuring Professor Powell.

We will be pleased to hear from the author, Benjamin Powell, as well as chair, Peter Boettke, and commenters, Matthew Yglesias and Megan McArdle.

We do not need to guess which side McArdle will take; she is pro-sweatshop because it is paternalistic to think that we should force foreigners who manufacture our goods to have safety rules.

[... Should we lean on US and European corporations to impose our safety standards on Bangladesh? Or any safety standards? I don't think that answer is obvious, even if we concede that the Bangladeshi government is inadequately responsive. The obvious critique of such efforts is bascially the same critique that many of the same people made about Iraq: foriegners who impose themselves into a strange country's problems rarely do a very good job. Most of us probably agree that Iraq would be better off as a stable, pluralistic society. But imposing this coercively is problematic, no matter how well intentioned it may be. Even if we don't simply fail through lack of information, we will almost certainly end up subsituting our vision of a good society for the vision that the locals themselves hold, while creating considerable collateral damage in the process. [yipyip] Who's qualified to make that decision? Me, sitting in my comfy Washington office? You can argue that the workers shouldn't face those terrible tradeoffs, but absent an immediate revolution, they do. Should we shut down a factory that provides jobs, and great danger, or should we let it continue to operate, even though it may harm future workers who may not really grasp the risks? I don't know the answer to that in my own country. How can I answer it for Bangladesh? Even if we allow that the Bangladeshi government is thouroughly captured by the garment interests, it doesn't therefore follow that our intervention will be an improvement . . . just as you can think that Saddam Hussein was a horrible dictator who was dreadful for his country, and still think that the Iraq War was a bad idea.

So because invading Iraq was a bad idea, refusing to use sweatshops that kill their employees is a bad idea. Which is an excellent example of how Megan McArdle has learned through failure.

Failure Is For The Rich

The wait for Megan McArdle's new book, How To Succeed In Journalism Without Really Trying, continues! We eagerly anticipate its wealth of information on success through failure. But before we look to the future let us take a little look at the past, when McArdle was a tiny bit less bullish on failing miserably.

Fear Of Failure  

I'm a big proponent of the transformative power of failure. Failure is nature's way of saying "Don't do that any more!", and is therefore a necessary part of achievement and innovation. And so I'm inclined to like this speech very much. On the other hand, something niggles me about the end:

So here is the point: you are going to meet the dragon of failure in your life. You may not get into the school you want, or you may get kicked out of the school you are in. You may get rejected by the girl of your dreams, or, God forbid, get into an accident beyond your control. But the point is, everything happens for a reason. At the time, it may not be clear. And certainly the pain and the shame are going to be overwhelming and devastating. But as sure as the sun comes up, there will come a time on the next day or next week or next year when you will grab that sword and tell him "Be gone, dragon."

This seems like a pretty safe bet when you're talking to Buckley students, who have an ample safety net underneath them to allow them to bounce back from nearly any failure. But would he really say this to, say, a 55 year old man who'd just been fired from his sales job? Bad things--persistent bad things--happen to good people, and while it's comforting to think of them as merely a waystation, for lots of people that isn't really true. It only seems true.

McArdle expected to make a small fortune off of advising corporations and also expected to become a card-carrying member of the Ubermenschen. Nobody who used to blog under the name Jane Galt wants to be a failure and forever cast out of the hallowed halls of money and power. She has gone on to make a small fortune as a journalist but it's just not the same. John Galt, Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon didn't fail; they were so inherently superior that their every move was successful, as long as the lice and scum stayed out of their way. What is a Jane Galt to do when bad things happen to good little Randians?

(Note: McArdle has said that she posted under the name Jane Galt to tweak a New York Times forum commenter, not because she wanted to call herself Jane Galt in homage to Ayn Rand's hero. No doubt she kept on calling herself Jane Galt because as far as she knew the anonymous irritant was still alive and it was necessary to keep up the pressure.)

Failure is all well and good if you are able to profit from it. McArdle was and yet she still yearned for the good life lost through happenstance and misfortune. Others are usually not as lucky as McArdle, whose father was able to afford an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side and a very hefty private school tuition for McArdle so that she would be able to grow up with advantages that are far out of reach of most people.

For most people failure means years of catching up and paying for your mistake, suffering for bad luck or judgment or simply lack of opportunity to succeed. McArdle tells the poor that they could have been successful if they got married and educated and put off child-rearing because it worked for her, just as failure worked for her. However, the poor don't have her opportunities and their failures will not result in success. But they won't be buying her book anyway, so who cares?

Failure, like success, is only beneficial for the rich.

The Reviews Are Starting To Pour In!

Michael Barone, whose  "presidential predictions were among the least accurate offered by major political observers" and who demonstrated his keen analytical skills by declaring '"journalists trashed Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the Republicans' vice presidential nominee, because "she did not abort her Down syndrome baby,"' has written a review of Megan McArdle's book, "How Kindergartners Playing With Spaghetti Teaches Us To Throw Shit Against The Wall And See What Sticks." Let's take a look.

America succeeds because Americans fail and forgive. That's the intriguing message -- or part of it -- of Megan McArdle's new book The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.

McArdle, a Bloomberg blogger and columnist, stands out among economic writers, and not just because she’s the only woman among them who is 6-foot-2. She combines a shrewd knowledge of economics and practical experience with a writing style that every so often segues into comedy monologue.

Americans fail a lot, she argues. Most new businesses fail. Most predictions are wrong. As the screenwriter William Goldman wrote about Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.”

So don't blame McArdle if she is habitually wrong. Nobody knows anything ever.

And attempts to guard against failure can result in greater failures later on. Children prevented from rough-housing at recess may engage in riskier behavior later. Antibiotic overuse makes bacteria resistant to antibiotics, which then don’t work when you really need them.

But good judgment comes from experience. And experience comes from bad judgment — from failures. The key question is how you respond, whether you learn from failure and rebound.

That's the rub, isn't it? Do you learn or do you simply say you have grown wiser and keep making the same mistakes like McArdle?

Drawing from pre-history, McArdle contrasts farmers and foragers, the hunter-gatherers who lived before the development of agriculture.

Yeah, right. McArdle the anthropologist. We all know what happened the last time she tried to discuss prehistoric hunters.

Foragers tend to share success with neighbors, in the expectation that others will share later. They see success as the result of luck — the hunter who happens to spy a particularly vulnerable mammoth.

Farmers tend to share success only with family members. They see success — a plenteous harvest — as the result of their own families’ hard work and conscientiousness. They see no reason to share it with the lazy and feckless.

This book is going to be a gold mine of stuff McArdle just made up or misinterpreted. I am reminded of McArdle's declaration that the Depression made America more moral because they had to share to survive. Which is why the 1940s bloomed with peace and love.

Americans, in McArdle’s view, have values like those of farmers. Much more than Europeans, they believe that there is a connection between effort and reward. Those who have earned more deserve it.

Europeans tend to believe that success comes mostly from luck. They enlist government to, in President Obama's words to Joe the Plumber, “spread the wealth around.”

Nothing demonstrates keen analytical skill like gross generalizations.

But in some respects Americans behave like foragers. They’re often ready to forgive failures. High-tech entrepreneurs like to hire people whose businesses failed, because it shows a willingness to take chances.

The surest way to get a high tech job is to burn through your venture capital and flame out in a glorious burst of failure.

The United States, McArdle points out, has the most accessible bankruptcy laws in the world. You can slough off your debts (except for student loans) relatively easily. In supposedly progressive Denmark, they hang over you for life.

I don't know anything about Denmark that is outside a Hans Christian Anderson book but I've learned to not take McArdle's word for anything. In the US you can slough off your debts relatively easily in Chapter 7 if you have nothing but must arrange pay your debts back in Chapter 13 if you are not poor. Let's see what the European Union site says about Danish bankruptcies.

Coping with bankruptcy It is possible to start a new company even after bankruptcy. If, however, it is established that the debtor has committed a criminal offence, they generally forfeit their right to found the company, be the managing director or sit on the board of directors. ... Entrepreneurs having experienced bankruptcy should not lose confidence in their ability to embark on a new business.

No doubt McArdle's book clears up this little matter.

The result is that, contrary to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s adage, there are many, many second acts in American life.

Americans also, though McArdle doesn’t mention this, donate far more to charity than Europeans do. Great philanthropists have created beneficial institutions — Andrew Carnegie’s libraries, John D. Rockefeller’s research medical schools, many donors’ universities — which Europe can’t match.

Yeah. No institutions created by rich benefactors in Europe could possibly match those of the US. They have no charity hospitals, libraries, research centers. The schmucks.

McArdle mostly ignores religion, but this blend of farmer property-owning and forager sharing is in line with Christian teaching. There is such a thing as sin, and it should be penalized. But there is also the possibility of forgiveness and redemption and a duty to share in your own way.

"In your own way," not in Jesus' way.

Though not technically part of the Millennial generation (those born after 1980), McArdle presents a Millennials’ view of the world.

Gotta hook that Millennial demographic!

Sudden macroeconomic shifts can result in months of soul-deadening unemployment (she was working in IT just as the dot-com bubble burst).

The future is wildly unpredictable, failure is frequent, success seemingly serendipitous (her freelance blogging got her a job blogging at the Economist).

If you have an Ivy League degree, free room and board and influential parents, friends and teachers you, too, can profit from failure.

Her advice is to avoid enterprises that are in long-term decline, like General Motors starting in the 1970s. In business and public policy, try to learn from well-conducted experiments — but recognize that successful trials can’t always be replicated on a large scale.

That's why she went into journalism. It wasn't in long-term decline.

Don’t rush to conclude that disasters like the 2008 financial crash are the result of conspiracy or the errors of one easily identified group of malefactors. Bubbles happen in any free market economy and are hard to identify until they burst.

There Are No Villains!

“The world is an increasingly insecure place,” she writes, “and there is no way to make it less risky.”

The best way ahead is to admit mistakes quickly, understand that you may well fail but you can usually rebound and punish rule-breaking promptly and consistently but lightly.

Do as I say, not as I do.

This book about people who fail is also a book about how a nation succeeds. The “American Bourgeois Synthesis,” McArdle writes, is good but not perfect, promoting entrepreneurship but over-penalizing some mistakes.

Americans — and America — can succeed but only if people learn from their failures.

Thanks, but we already know that there is a sucker born every minute, and most of them read McArdle already.

Always Wrong. Never In Doubt.

We are entering an enormously exciting time. Megan McArdle's book, How To Turn My Failures Into My Success By Buying My Book, will be released February 11th and she is everywhere to promote it. In her own blog she discusses "Learning From Iraq, Katrina, And Other Policy Disasters" since failure must be on her mind now more than ever. McArdle interviews political scientist Steve Teles, and as always she is as wrong as she is certain.

MM: It's interesting with the financial crisis and the Iraq war. The people who "predicted the crisis," or said the war was a bad idea, were, by and large, not correct about what happened, or why it was a bad idea. 

ST: Yes, that's true. Although, just to be clear, in almost all cases of major policy mistakes, there were people who predicted what would happen. That is, the information that could have allowed you to know what was going to happen was available, but policy makers ignored it or discounted it.

McArdle's book tells us how to succeed through failure, and McArdle states that the people who made the correct assessment regarding the financial crises and the Iraq war just happened to be on the winning side of those issues. Their predictions about the outcome of events were wrong and their analysis of why the events would fail were wrong. This is not true and Dr. Teles was obligated to clarify the issue. Some might have been right for the wrong reasons but plenty of people were right for the right reasons.

Which makes it all the more curious that Megan McArdle was paid to write a book on success through failure. By all rights the people who were right should be the ones being paid to give advice. They should be teaching how to make correct decisions, instead of how to profit from failure while ignoring the consequences of those failures. Of course we need to learn to learn from our mistakes and improve our ability to reason but we do not need to indulge the callous, careless warbloggers and economically illiterate econobloggers while they attempt to cash in for a little while longer.