Money Talks: Philosophy of The Budget
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Hello, and welcome to Money Talks from Slate Money, the show where I, Felix Salmon, and occasionally my co-host, Emily Peck, will talk to the most interesting people in the world about the most interesting things in the world. And right now, quite amazingly and wonderfully, we get to talk to Barry Lamb about finance.

This is a money show, I promise, but this is going to be a very philosophical money show. Barry, welcome to Money Talks. I'm so happy to be here. You know, philosophy is polarizing. Either you've turned it off or you're like, oh, that's going to be great. Yeah. At this point, the only people still listening are the people who are like nerding out and going, this is really cool. So now we can just be total nerds.

We are going to talk about all manner of philosophical things and specifically how they apply to the current budget debate. And we bring in some great philosophers, starting with Descartes and Hume and running all the way through Willard van Orman Quine and Saul Kripke and other wonderfully named people. It's all coming up on Money Talks. Slate Money is brought to you by Charles Schwab.

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We are kind of sort of colleagues, even though we've never actually met, because you have your very own podcast under the Slate umbrella. That's right. I've been here for, I don't know, three, four years. So HiFi Nation, new episodes coming back later on this year. I've been gone for a couple of years, but happy to have a new episode. And that's HiFi with a P. That's right. H-I-P-H-I. Because apparently, if you want to abbreviate philosophy, it becomes Fi. Fi.

You could say fee, which I don't know what's the proper like Latin way. I mean, because it's a Greek letter, but people speak in Latin. I don't know. Some people say fee. Some people say fi. I'm going to have to brush up on my Latin. I am very rusty indeed when it comes to Latin. I'm slightly less rusty when it comes to...

the philosophy of language. Well, I don't even know if it's the philosophy of language. Well, it's both. It's philosophy of language and it's this thing that is, yeah, it's the philosophy of language or epistemology, you might say. I feel like this is a real epistemic problem here. And the problem that we are struggling with is the very simple or deceptively simple statement that people will make about the budget.

because we are in the middle of budget chaos right now on Capitol Hill and all manner of tax bills are being proposed and members of Congress are opposing them or supporting them or whatever. Donald Trump wants a big, beautiful bill. And the number one question which people have about this bill, any given bill, is what does it do to the budget deficit? And so people will say something like, it increases the deficit by this much or it decreases the deficit by this much. And

It sounds like that is a nice, simple, easy to understand sort of empirical statement. But the more you think about it, the harder it becomes to actually know or understand what that statement means. What you're talking about, I think, is also economic projections based

period. The idea that you're projecting based on some kind of policy. So the deficit is one kind of projection. It'll do this to the deficit in whatever, next year, five years, 10 years. But there's also these other things like we're going to project this kind of economic growth or something. I think that's the general problem.

So let's get that one out of the way first, because I think that's the easy one. The thing that everyone understands is that you can't know the future. No one knows what the future holds. And so what, you know, the Congressional Budget Office will project

certain facts about the future, you know, that we'll have growth of this much, the interest rates will be there and so on and so forth. And then once those assumptions have been made, they're like, well, OK, if all of these assumptions hold, then the deficit will be this in dollars.

And then we can ask, you know, the next question, which we'll get to in a minute, which is, is that higher or lower than it is right now? But before we even get to the is it higher or lower than it is right now, we have to definitely caveat that with assumptions or assumptions, and they are certainly false. And they will, with 100% certainty, either be too optimistic or too pessimistic in terms of economic growth and tax revenues and all of that kind of stuff.

And indeed, the Republicans love to come out with their own projections, which say like, oh, you know, growth is going to increase by 5.6% because we're no longer, you know, levying tax on tips. And that means that everyone is going to become a waiter and make lots of money and there'll be a much bigger economy and all of this kind of like crazy assumptions. So let's just stipulate for the time being.

that we have no idea what the future holds, but there is a projection, there is a forecast, and...

the question isn't so much will the deficit go up or down, but it's more like assuming that this forecast holds, does the deficit go up or down? Let's put to one side this question of like forecast error, because I think that's properly not really a philosophy of language problem. Right. Okay. And instead, let's concentrate on the other bit of the sentence, like, you know, under this budget, the deficit goes up, which is the

goes up a bit, you know, the increase or decrease thing. So let me just ask you as a kind of naive observer who occasionally reads the newspaper, how would you define that? What would you consider it to mean if I were to say under this budget, the deficit goes up? So not somebody who studies the economics of the budget. You know, I would have thought there is a portion of the budget that goes to paying off

debt and there's a portion of the budget that goes to pay for other stuff. Yep. Social security and Medicare and like the discretional spending and defense spending and so forth.

And the deficit is how much we add to the debt every year. That's my understanding of what it is. And the amount we add to the debt is only peripherally related to how much we spend paying off the debt. There is this line item as part of the budget, which is debt service, which is basically paying interest on the debt. But the amount that we add to the debt is basically the amount that we spend minus the amount that we receive in tax revenue.

And if you wind up spending more than you take in in tax revenues, that delta, that difference is known as the budget deficit. So if the deficit goes up, then it's a larger number this year than it is last year. That's like my naive understanding. That's a really, really good, sensible, we'll call that one option A. Yeah, that's right. Which is you just compare the deficit in...

2026 to the deficit in 2025. And if the deficit in 2026 is larger than the deficit in 2025, then the deficit has gone up. And we're measuring that in nominal dollars. Okay, good. So it's just an absolute number, like the way that I would do my budget, you know, at home, right? If my deficit this year is larger than the deficit last year, then the deficit has gone up.

Exactly. Okay. So that's only option one then. Would it surprise you to learn that naive definition of number go up is not what the Congressional Budget Office, the independent bipartisan official arbiter of such matters, determines whether the deficit goes up or not? That is not how they do it. No. Oh, okay. How do they do it? Yeah.

Take a guess. Why would you think that they would look at this some other way? You know, if I had to guess, I would say it has something to do with acceleration or deceleration or something like that. The way that I would think about, am I going faster than I was five minutes ago? You're looking at like the first derivative or the second derivative, I guess. Yeah. My guess is that maybe it's something like that. Maybe if like it's grossly

going faster than they would do? But that would just be my guess. So the answer is interesting. The answer is actually legislative. And what the CBO does is it scores bills. There's, as we all know, a big, beautiful bill trying to make its way through Congress. And the idea is, does this bill increase or decrease the deficit? And so what you need to do is you need to compare

compare two different things. You need to compare the world with this bill to the world ex ante, as you might say, like the current world, the world that we live in right now without the bill where the bill has not been passed. So we live in a sort of this kind of, you know, beautiful prelapsarian state where the bill has not been passed. And there is something called current law.

And then what the CBO does is it looks at a different possible world, which is the world where the big, beautiful bill has been passed. And it says, what is the difference between the deficit in the world where the big, beautiful bill has been passed compared to the current world where the big, beautiful bill has not been passed?

And that difference is the amount by which the bill increases the deficit. Okay. But they're both future worlds you're comparing. So you're not comparing like 2026 to 2025. You're comparing two different 2026 worlds. Correct. One in which the bill has passed. Okay. I don't understand why they're doing it this way, but I could see how it's different, right?

from comparing a 2026 to a 2025 number. You're comparing two hypothetical 2026 numbers. So as we have already ascertained, we are assuming that we know the future. We are assuming that CBO assumptions about growth and interest rates and unemployment and all of that stuff come to pass. We know for a fact that they won't, but this is just the ex-hypothesis assumption.

And then we're just saying under these assumptions, what happens to the deficit under this bill and what happens to the deficit under current law? And that difference is basically the effect of the bill. And so what you're trying to do, what the CBO is trying to do is basically saying, if you pass this bill, this is the difference that you're going to make to deficit or revenues or whatever next year.

So I can immediately see the problem without knowing anything about the budget. Like what a philosopher will immediately say is that, look, there are a lot of different hypothetical 2026 worlds, right? And when you said according to current law, but we could imagine different ways of understanding what current law is as you project a possible 2026 world. So I could immediately see that there's so many different ways you can choose between

a 2026 future world to compare to the big, beautiful bill world, 2026. So you are very smart, Barry, and you are realizing why I got a philosopher on this show to talk about this. Right. Because let's introduce a very important term here, which is baselessness.

baseline. What the CBO is doing is it's scoring the budget deficit, assuming that the big beautiful bill has passed, and then it's subtracting or looking at the difference between that number and some baseline. And the baseline that the CBO uses is this thing called the current law baseline.

which basically just says, let's assume that no one passes anything and we just continue with the law as it currently stands. What is the difference? And that is the difference that this bill makes. And what you said absolutely correctly is, well, there are lots of other possible baselines you could use. You don't need to use current law. Why...

Would you specifically choose that thing? And in saying that you are aligning yourself with JD Vance, bunch of Republicans who all say the exact same thing. And they're basically saying, well, why, why use current law as a baseline? Why don't we do something a bit more intuitive, which is say use current tax rates as a baseline. And this is where you buried furrow your brow at me and go, wait, what's the difference?

Yeah, well, I can imagine that some differences might be that current laws... I mean, look, this is what I'm imagining, right? Laws are complex. Some laws have provisions in it that expire.

Some laws have provisions that don't expire. I don't understand. Do current tax rates just continue if the big, beautiful bill doesn't pass? I'm not quite sure. You are asking all the right questions and saying all the right things. Because, yes, it turns out that current law, when it comes to taxes, is pretty much the law of the land as passed in something called the TCJA, the Tax Cut Act.

and Jobs Act of 2017, which was passed in the first year of Donald Trump's first term as president. Now, when the TCJA was passed,

The CBO did all of its scoring and everything. And as you will remember, if you remember 2017, it was a big tax cut. A lot of people got tax cuts. The standard deduction went up a lot. The top income tax rate came down from like 39.6% to 37%, whatever it was. So there were a whole bunch of tax cuts that happened. And the CBO basically said, if you do all of these tax cuts and make them permanent, then...

The cost will be a gazillion dollars and you can't afford to do that. And so what the Republicans did when they passed this law was they made sure that the tax cuts were not permanent and that they would expire after eight years at the end of 2025.

Why did they do it at the end of eight years? Because they reckoned that Donald Trump would serve two terms of president and then right around now, like it would be someone else's problem and he wouldn't be president anymore. It's very weird that you would have someone be president and then not be president and then come back and be president again. That was not completely foreseeable in 2017. Right.

So turns out, whoops, he now basically owns this problem, which is that at the end of 2025, under current law, which is the CBO baseline, all of the tax cuts expire and

tax rates go up. So if we go back to your original idea of what does it mean for the deficit to go up or the deficit to go down? Well, under current law, the deficit comes down quite substantially in 2026. Yeah, because tax rates go up. Because all of those tax cuts expire. And so people pay more in taxes. And so the deficit goes down. Right. And so the Republicans are like,

shit that's that makes everything look bad to us because the current law is very sort of fiscally tight you know it's really fiscally hawkish

And so what they are trying to do is push something called like current practice or current taxes or whatever you want to call it, which is basically this idea that let's compare the big, beautiful bill, not to current law as the baseline, but to current tax rates as the baseline. And if you use current tax rates, and remember the current tax rates are artificially low because, you know, they were pushed down in 2017 for a fixed period of,

eight years, and then they're meant to bounce back up again. But if you compare to current tax rates, then that makes the fiscal impact of the big, beautiful bill look much smaller. Well, Felix, answer this political question for me. I thought that the Republicans were deficit hawk

So wouldn't they want to say that the bill reduces the deficit? Obviously, they also don't want tax rates to go up. It's really hard to be a deficit hawk and not want taxes to go up. But somehow you're right. The Republicans claim to be deficit hawks. And to be fair, there are, I would say, a minority of them who genuinely are deficit hawks. Yeah.

The vast majority of them just kind of say like to take Donald Trump as a prime example. He campaigned on a

a balanced budget. Basically, there would be no deficits at all. That was his promise on the campaign trail. So that is highly unlikely. I mean, I'm going to just come out and say that's not going to happen. Yeah, of course. But that's a very sort of deficit hawk position is to say, I'm going to balance the budget. You know who did balance the budget? Weirdly, it was Bill Clinton. No one's managed it since. But in practice, Republicans tend to not govern as though they were deficit hawks.

Okay. Republicans do two things, well, a couple of things that make it very difficult to run small deficits. One is that every chance they get, they cut taxes. And when you cut taxes, that increases the deficit. And then another thing that George W. Bush in particular would do would be to get involved in extremely expensive foreign wars. And those wars tend to increase the deficit because they tend to be very expensive. Right.

And then another thing that Donald Trump did in 2020 was do a massive stimulus plan when the pandemic hit. And that also increases the deficit. So if you look at their actions, they don't tend to care very much about the deficit, certainly since Reagan. And in fact, broadly speaking, it kind of seems as though the Democrats

Democrats, or at least the kind of Clinton-Obama Democrats, cared more about the deficit than the Republicans. Biden didn't seem to care about the deficit at all. He was happy doing big stimulus programs and all the rest of it. But I would hesitate to say that either party is really made up of deficit hawks. Okay. Okay. Yeah, it's just trying to understand. I'm trying to understand why it is they want to use the current tax rate way to project the deficit and...

It helps me understand it if they're not deficit hawks. But at the same time, if they're really good propagandists, they want to say they are, but then run a larger deficit anyways, right? Exactly. And the best way to say that you're a deficit hawk while running a big deficit anyway is to use...

The current tax rate is a baseline rather than current law as a baseline, because that way you can say my bill doesn't increase the deficit, even if, you know, compared to current law, it massively increases the deficit. Okay. There you go.

Now, and this is where I come in and I will mention that there are lots of other ways that you can measure the deficit and whether it's going up or down. Like one is the intuitive one that you started off this podcast with, which is just like, does it go up or down in dollars from year to year? Right.

Another way is, does it go up or down as a percentage of GDP from year to year? Another one is to just say, basically the baseline is zero. We should always assume that there should be a balanced budget. And

the size of it's just the absolute size of the deficit in any given year that matters or the over 10 years that matters there are lots of different baselines you can use and depending on which baseline you use that makes the big beautiful bill seem like incredibly profligate and stimulative and full of deficit or it makes it look relatively sober and sensible and responsible

And so the choice of baseline is absolutely crucial. And it's another one of these, like, the facts are the same, but we're talking about a different way of describing the accounting for it. Exactly. Exactly. We are assuming, and this is what we stipulated at the top of the show, which is we are assuming that the facts, we know the facts, we know what the economic outlook is going to be. And then the only question is, how do we describe

the facts. And this is where I want to bring in your friend and my Mr. Nelson Goodman. Mr. Nelson Goodman, right. So tell me who is Nelson Goodman? Okay. So Nelson Goodman was a philosopher, mid 20th century philosopher at the University of Pennsylvania, famous for a lot of different things. One of the things he was famous for was, I think he was the first philosophy teacher of Noam Chomsky, a very young Chomsky who, when he was a undergraduate at University of Pennsylvania, taught him

And Nelson Goodman, I think, Felix, for your purposes, formulated this problem in the 50s, I want to say, 40s and 50s, that reminds you of what's happening. I mean, you're reminded of that problem when you're thinking about these kinds of deficit projections. The idea is always we have this intuition.

that if you don't change something, it will just continue. You know, it's the kind of Newton's first law, you know, of philosophy. It's like something like if something exists and it doesn't change, then it will just continue in the same state. And what Nelson Goodman did was he massively problematized that and said, well, basically trying to define what is the same state is much harder than you think.

So do you want me to describe this little problem that Goodman formulated? Yes, do. Yeah, so the problem that Goodman formulated is kind of descendant of this older problem that David Hume formulated. What David Hume formulated was something called the problem of induction. And this is the problem of how you are supposed to learn about the future when you have data about the past.

Yeah, we assume that the future will resemble the past. If the sun has always risen in the morning in the past, we assume that it's going to rise in the morning in the future. Right, and famously, Hume claimed, well, you can make such an assumption, but you don't have any rational basis for it.

Nothing about reason forces you to conclude that the sun will rise tomorrow. This is so Scottish of him. Only a Scot would be like, oh, I don't know. You don't really know that the sun's going to rise in the morning. So famous, you know, 18th century philosophical problem. And Goodman just starts off by just saying, suppose we just have a solution to that.

Suppose, all right, we're not going to be that skeptical about that problem. We're not going to be the Scottish skeptics like David Hume. There's a way of learning about the past and drawing some conclusion about the future. So Goodman claimed there's this new problem. He called this the new problem of induction, where given the exact same data you have about the past, you can make completely contradictory conclusions.

predictions about what the future is going to be like. And all of those predictions are 100% consistent with the same data. One example that Goodman used is if you have an emerald in your possession and you observe it and it's always been green, you can safely see

solution to this humian problem believe that it's going to be green in the future, right? So that's it. Seems sensible. If I'm not going to do anything to the emerald, I'm not going to change the emerald. And if it was green yesterday, it's going to be green tomorrow. That's right. So then Goodman constructed this new property. He called it GRU, right? The way that you should think about GRU is just

It's green and has been observed prior to since it's 2020, prior to 2026. So every time you look at an emerald, your emerald, including looking at it now, it's grew because it's green and is being observed prior to 2026. But the property for Goodman is look to be grew is to be green and having been observed prior to 2026 or blue and having been observed prior

After 2026. So that's the new property. And so if this emerald was grew and it has always been grew up until now, then basically I would expect it to be blue if I looked at it next year. That's exactly right. Just the way that you construct this property grew, it's always been grew, just like it's always been green. So because of the way you constructed it, you will expect it to be blue after 2026.

And that's kind of arbitrary how he constructed it. You just have to put a little or after, you know, it's green and it's before 2026. You or something else. You just add something else to it. And you will notice that the emerald has always been grew in the past.

And so you can safely project that it'll be grew in the future, which is completely incompatible with it being green in the future, right? So that's the paradox. The paradox is now you can conclude that it's green in the future and you can conclude that it's blue in the future and you can conclude that it's red in the future or anything. You can conclude that it's not an emerald in the future.

And the thing which I love about this paradox is that the first thing anyone wants to do when they hear this objection is they want to say, well, that's the dumbest property you can possibly imagine. What kind of a dumb property switches just according to the calendar? And like, you know, suddenly it goes from being green to being blue on some arbitrary date on January 1st, 2026.

That's really dumb. Obviously, green is a real property and grew as a made up dumb property to which Goodman has the perfect response. Well, so Goodman says, well, you can think of green as a made up property too, right? So green isn't the thing that appears a certain color in a certain way. Green is grew and it's before 2026, right?

Or you construct this other property, BLEAN, right? BLEAN is the inverse of GRU. BLEAN would be, it looks blue up until 2026, right? Or it's after 2026 and it looks green, right? Then you define green in terms of GRU or BLEAN, and you define blue as BLEAN or GRU or whatever. Exactly. I love this so much. So basically everything that we've thought is green,

Green suddenly becomes this incredibly artificial property, which is time-based. And green is just... Anything in the world that is green, that's the craziest thing in the world because what you're saying is it's going to suddenly switch on the 1st of January 2026 from being grew to being glean. And if it doesn't do that, then only then are you going to be right. It needs to make that switch from grew to glean. And so...

Green and grew are both in their own way, if you define them in terms of each other, time-dependent properties. Yeah. Yeah. And you know what, Felix? One of the things I used to tell my students when I used to teach this is that there really are time-dependent properties that are perfectly okay.

Right? Like it has nothing to do with Grublin. It's not made up. One of them is the current law of the tax bill. Yeah. Both of you and I are old enough, but there was this property, whether computers are Y2K ready or not Y2K ready. And it was like this thing that we were really concerned about in 1998, 1999. That's a time-dependent property. It's like it worked.

and it's before 2000 or it doesn't work and it's after 2000. That's exactly what, that's a grew property. And Y2K ready was definitely one of these things that we were really worried about. Let's check these computers and see if they're Y2K ready or not. So the idea of it being gerrymandered or not gerrymandered as a property isn't enough to help us solve this kind of a problem. Yeah, and so what happens is that the good old econowonks

at the Congressional Budget Office basically have to struggle with this, right? They have to struggle with this question of what is the Humean thing? What is the thing that just continues if we don't change it? And what they, what,

What they say is it's current law. But could they use something else? Could they say current tax rate? Could they say current debt to GDP? Could they say zero deficit? Like they could say lots of things and they just need to kind of pick one. And be consistent with it. Do you know the legislative history? Is there a reason why they choose current law that was legislated for the CBO to do that as a baseline? So the intuition is, I think...

understandable. I totally understand why they picked current law, because when you introduce a bill to Congress, people want to know what difference does this bill make? And so the alternative to passing the bill is not passing the bill. And so the question is, like, when you want to know what difference does it make, you want to know what is the difference between passing the bill and not passing the bill. And not passing the bill means current law. So that's why they choose current law.

It just so happens that current law can expire. Well, yeah, I mean, the current law, this is interesting, let's be very clear about this. The current law does not expire. The tax rate expires, but the current law remains the same. The tax rates expire. Yeah.

Gosh, it seems wide open when you use these different kinds of baselines. You know, the problem that Goodman pointed out is you can, the word he used, project anything, anything that you want to project. And as if there's not enough incentive for politicians to be able to say contradictory things at once, you know, it's almost like it's built into the logic of actual rulemaking that you're allowed to do that. At least that's what Goodman's paradox is supposed to show.

We're now quite quietly grateful that Nelson Goodman never went into politics. Although I guess Noam Chomsky kind of did, right? That's right. So Felix, if you will indulge me for a second, when I knew I was going to come on and talk about this, I thought there's another paradox that came out maybe about 20 years later that is 100% the same kind of problem you're talking about. So are you aware of Kripke's Wittgenstein paradox?

Or as it's also known, Kripkenstein. Yes, yes. So the plus, I don't even know how to pronounce this, the plus versus quuss. So, you know, this was green versus grew. And this one's easier to explain. So this is the idea of being, you watch people do addition their whole life, and you're trying to figure out what's the rule they're following when they're adding these two numbers together. And we conclude, oh, it's addition. It's this rule that takes two numbers together.

and then takes their sum. But what Wittgenstein pointed out was, but it's completely consistent with everything that you observe that when they get to the bigger numbers, the answer is always five, right? Because you haven't seen them add numbers

Google numbers that big, right? So everything they've done is consistent with it's plus when it's small numbers and it's, you know, the answer is five when it's big numbers. And so this new function, we'll just call it quuss. And that's consistent with everything they're doing. So maybe we're all just quussing things together, like two quuss two.

is four because it's small. Yeah, but it's because it's small. This sounds just like exactly the same kind of thing that you're talking about, too. It's perfectly consistent with all current data that people are going to project in. So was it Wittgenstein who came up with Quas or was it Kripke? It was Kripke. It was an interpretation of Wittgenstein, but it's really Kripke. It's really Kripke's puzzle. I feel like this is the kind of thing that philosophers love

coming up with. I remember some deeply buried part of my memory. Quine had this concept of an undetached rabbit part. Yes, that's right. That's right. It's a very similar kind of puzzle, which is that you are trying to figure out what a language you've never spoken and you're just observing the behavior of a community. And they point at what we would call a rabbit, right? And they say gavagai. And you're like, have hypotheses. What are the various hypotheses of what this word means? One is that it means rabbit.

Another one is that it means undetached rabbit parts. And you can't tell the difference between whether they mean rabbit or undetached rabbit parts. And I like undetached rabbit parts because it's funnier than quers. Right. And it's important to have a sense of humor in the philosophy of language. Yeah, and this is all the same exact time, right? Same people, Goodman, Quine, Kripke, they were all hanging out. They were all thinking about these kinds of puzzles. And

From what you tell me, they've just basically described ways that you can be a propagandist and draw whatever conclusion you want to draw about whether the deficit goes up or down or whatever. Let me stop you right there. We're going to take a quick break. And then when we come back, we're going to talk about all of the other philosophers who've been making kind of the same point and what it means to defeat skepticism.

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and what GMC has done for over 100. We are professional grade. Visit GMC.com to learn more. Assembled in Flint and Hamtramck, Michigan and Fort Wayne, Indiana of U.S. and globally sourced parts. Did this line of the philosophy of language ever sort of escape the academy and make it into politics at all, to your knowledge? I think...

to be honest, that all of these special puzzles from the late 20th century, the more you think about them and the more philosophers wrote about them, the more they all seem to be reducible to a just general problem of knowledge and skepticism, period, right? That you can always construct alternatives that are completely consistent with everything you see, that the world is radically different. I think that the kind of skepticism, selective skepticism,

you see a lot in politics and you see a lot in ordinary discourse today. It definitely reminds me of the whole concept of alternative facts or the idea, going back even further, that weak democratic institutions care about reality, but like strong Republican institutions will create their own reality just by sheer force of will. And

There's this slogan, which you sometimes hear on the left, much more on the right, that you're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts. Facts are some objective thing out there in the world that we all have to agree on. And the pretty standard move is...

in Republican politics since the George W. Bush administration has been basically to deny that and to be like, no, we can just change the facts if we want to because we are in charge. Yeah. So I think that sometimes it's even more insidious than just changing the facts. So there's changing the facts, which is literally to deny data by raising skeptical concerns about what the data really shows and so forth. I think there's a kind of insidiousness to the appeal to... So...

Basically, this era in philosophy had all of these skeptical worries about a lot of very ordinary common sense concepts.

like green. But one of them was, for instance, what causes what? It was like this big, huge area in 20th century philosophy that, you know, you can raise very interesting skeptical puzzles about whether smoking really causes cancer or carbon really causes global warming. And these kinds of skeptical puzzles do make it into political discourse these days. I think I've

I was watching something recently about whether RFK, I think RFK says he doesn't think viruses ever cause diseases, something to that effect. That if you look at deaths from COVID or it's always like pneumonia. And so that's the thing that causes it.

It seems very related to the very popular theory in parts of Africa 40 years ago that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. No, that's exactly right. But there's something in the vicinity that philosophers have talked about, which is to cause anything requires a nexus of things to be true.

You have to have an immune system. It's got to do something in order for HIV to damage it. But are you dying of the HIV virus? Well, there's this idea of a secondary infection and so forth. And you can do all that kind of skeptical worrying. But when you come out and describe things using ordinary language, there is a way of describing a truth that HIV has never killed anybody. That can be true.

Yeah, like every single death is caused by the blood stopping flowing to the brain. That's basically...

Let's put it that way. That's another way of describing it. It's the same family of problems. I think GRU is like this. I think COS+, causes and things, all of these weird little skeptical puzzles, it's kind of a reflection of something humans really can do.

If you really wanted to sow some doubt about something, you start getting super fancy. You are saying something half true when you say viruses have never killed anybody, right? And like far from like dealing in the realm of Quine and Kripke and Goodman, we're now going all the way back to Descartes and Hume. That's right.

That's right. I think that all of these problems in the mid-20th century are versions of the same problem. I think it's Descartes, it's Hume, it's reducible to the same kind of skeptical concerns. And it's a whole long project in philosophy to sort of defeat skepticism, which will never completely win, and which it kind of seems, given the vibes, it kind of seems that we're losing. The skepticist side is like on the ascendant right now.

Yeah, except that it's a very selective kind of skepticism. So like the problem that goes back to the 16th, 17th century is global skepticism. If you want to be a skeptic about the moon landing, one way to do that is to be so skeptical that you're skeptical about whether you're awake right now.

You're skeptical whether the whole world is being hallucinated by you. And that we know how to respond to. We're just like, that's kind of like a crazy person. But it's so selective, right? It's like you deploy this kind of really old style skeptical reasoning, but only to the kind of things that you want to win against somebody in terms of policy or politics. But you're completely credulous about tons of other stuff. Like if you could be completely credulous about hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, right? Just like, but you've deployed...

Deploy, you know, these standards that quantum mechanics can't pass when it comes to the COVID vaccine, for instance. So the skepticism is on the rise. It's the same kind of skepticism that's deployed, you know, like all the way back to the 17th century, but it's selective. And it's being deployed tactically. Yeah, it's deployed tactically. That's right. Just like the GRU thing, like you're mentioning, like that's deployed tactically, right? Yeah.

So I think where we end up here is bemoaning the tactical weaponization of skepticism and political discourse. Yeah, that's exactly what it is, right? You know, I mean, the right way to respond to this kind of stuff is, oh, you're doing the Gru thing. Okay, well, if you're doing the Gru thing, then, you know, you can project anything. Like, that was the consequence, right? If you're going to make that move, there's no deficit. Exactly.

Exactly. And I think that's exactly the right thing to do whenever you hear a politician saying, well, we should use current taxes rather than current law or any such thing, which is basically, listen, you agreed to the rule when you passed the TCJA in 2017.

The whole reason why these things are expiring at the end of 2025 is precisely because of those rules. And so the rules have been set. We are playing the game now. We have started the game. The game is ongoing. You can't just change the rules in the middle of the game. And trying to talk about like, does this particular rule set make sense is a way of trying to sort of point people at a shiny object off to one side and distract them from the meat of what you're actually trying to do. So everything,

Anytime people try and change the rules or say that what really matters is something procedural rather than substantive, you're like, yeah, what are you doing here? Something about gaming things using selective skepticism is happening. So what's the opposite of a skeptic, Barry? Oh, gosh. Well, we haven't come up with a good term for it.

My advisor came up with this term, which is a horrible term. He called it a dogmatist, but a dogmatist, you know, like that's not a good word. It's so pejorative, right? Yeah. So I wouldn't, you know, some people say anti-skeptic is like the right, is the right word. I really don't know. You know, some people think that the movement called rationalism is a, you know, but I don't, but I'm not quite sure. I know there's like a bunch of Silicon Valley, you know, tech. I wouldn't place that lot.

among the anti-skeptics necessarily. But you and I, we are placing ourselves in the dogmatist camp, pejorative connotations notwithstanding, and we are skeptical of the skeptical move. Shoot it down wherever we find it. That's exactly right. I mean, the right way, so like just to give a heuristic for the listeners is, you know, when they feel like something is...

Like, there's a trick about what people are saying. Viruses don't cause disease. And then they, you know, the move they're making is that, well, you not healing is the thing that's caused you to die or something like that. You know something is going wrong. And I think the right way to do it is, oh, you're appealing to this really radical skepticism such that I can conclude that the world is going to explode and not explode in the future. OK, if we're playing that game, we can do a philosophy seminar thing. But

But ordinary life requires us to have already had a solution to that problem. Like we know that there's a solution to the do viruses ever kill people thing, right? So like we don't need to solve the deep Cartesian skeptical problem in order to go about living. I know I don't have to go around proving that I'm not dreaming, right? Like we already have that solution. If somebody's playing that game selectively. I am not a brain in a vat. That's right. If somebody's playing the brain in the vat game, pretty much.

pretty soon it feels that way to you because they're arguing these kinds of things that are completely irrefutable. Like the world is completely different when you're not looking. And maybe when you're looking, it's just one way. You're like, oh, okay. If that's the game we're playing, we can do the philosophy game. But if we're not playing that game anymore, we already think, okay, we already think smoking causes cancer. So whatever cause means, that's what cause means. We already know that

Their existing law projections have been made about the deficit. And so we're playing that game. That's how I feel about it. I think that's exactly, exactly right. Well, I'm glad that we have ended up on the same page here. I feel like this is the obviously correct Bienponcent Slate Group opinion to hold. That's right. At some point, we will throw this podcast over to the political gab fest and get them to...

But for the time being, we have arrived at the correct, the right, correct and honorable conclusion for which Barry Lamb, I thank you very much. Thank you for having me, Felix. And HiFi Nation back in your podcast feed later this year. Absolutely. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Listen now. Thanks to Barry Lamb. Thanks to Shana Roth and Jessamyn Molly and Ben Richman for producing. And we'll be back on Saturday with a regular Slate Money.

I'm Leon Nafok, and I'm the host of Slow Burn, Watergate. Before I started working on this show, everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie All the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends? Woodward and Bernstein are sitting with their typewriters, clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories about campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes, about audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the cover-up. The last story we see is Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in the movie.

In real life, it took about two years. Five men were arrested early Saturday while trying to install eavesdropping equipment. It's known as the Watergate incident. What was it like to experience those two years in real time? What were people thinking and feeling as the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters went from a weird little caper to a constitutional crisis that brought down the president?

The downfall of Richard Nixon was stranger, wilder, and more exciting than you can imagine. Over the course of eight episodes, this show is going to capture what it was like to live through the greatest political scandal of the 20th century. With today's headlines once again full of corruption, collusion, and dirty tricks, it's time for another look at the gate that started it all. Subscribe to Slow Burn now, wherever you get your podcasts.