Dining with wolves

Earlier today on Bluesky I had the misfortune to encounter this rather strange post from Justin Wolfers, an academic economist of no small renown. The best cure for ideological bias is find someone on the other side and go to lunch with them.⁣ Sometimes we disagree about facts. Sometimes we disagree about values. Figuring out which is which is fun part. This was his summary of a slightly longer set of remarks he made in a blog post, the gist of which is that he has evidently had some productive discussions with his libertarian friends, and comes to the deeply anodyne conclusion that concentration of political power can sometimes be bad.1 Setting aside the blandness of the political claim (does anyone dispute this version of the thesis?), the thing that struck me as frustrating is that when – inevitably – hundreds of people started getting very, very angry at his “go have lunch with your ideological opponents” strategy, Professor Wolfers felt he was being misunderstood and tried to…