This column reminded me of a few things. Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics. He was commissioned by the New York Times to ruminate on foreign policy. I have no doubt that other economists and pseudo-intellectuals laying claim to mathematics have been prepping “game theory” type analysis of Eurasian affairs. Tyler is a very smart guy who has many interesting things to say. Still, I’m old enough to remember when no one would ask an economist to discuss anything outside of economics, narrowly understood. Even there, they were one voice, the one wearing the green eye-shade and holding a calculator. Today, the local economist feels free to poke his nose into everything.

The reason for this is economists are the new priestly class. In another era, religious leaders routinely commented on the morality of public policy, including foreign policy. Today that role is filled by members of the local economics faculty. The reason is the morality of Christianity has been replaced by a new materialist morality amongst the ruling classes of the West. Every act is judged based on its impact on the cost/benefit to society. If the costs outweigh the benefits, the act is deemed immoral. On the other hand, anything that can be shown to have a positive integer on the bottom line is morally good. It is why passing a Byzantine health care bill was treated as a moral triumph. An economist somewhere said it would add wealth to the nation.

The flaw in this calculus is that the benefits of public policy often lie well over the horizon. The costs are often right now. Raise taxes on short-term stock flipping and there’s a real cost today. The long term benefit – fewer pump and dump schemes – lie down stream and are difficult to quantify. The result is a form of short term thinking about public policy that veers into the myopic. In America, living in the moment morality has produced a nation of amnesiacs incapable of remembering yesterday. This summer Democrat politicians will be out campaigning against ObamaCare and few will notice they were vociferous supporters just last year.

In foreign policy, this new morality is at the heart of our troubles with Russia. Putin and his coevals running Russia reject the materialism of the West, despite living like medieval royalty. They look at the Crimea as a part of their cultural history and a part of their patrimony. It is a part of what they hope will be their shadow, in which future generations will stand. That changes their cost benefit analysis. Russia is willing to lose a lot to get what to Western minds has limited value. The West wants Ukraine in the Euro so their bankers can loot what little remains in Ukraine. Russia wants it in their orbit because it defines who they are as Russians.

The other thing that comes to mind is just how deeply our elites are marinated in cultural nihilism. Top to bottom they think culture is witchcraft from a bygone era. People everywhere, according to our rulers, are the same. Everyone wants what we want, loves what we love and hates what we hate. You see this in domestic policy all the time. Education starts with the assumption that everyone can be above average, as Bush hilariously claimed. IQ, ethnicity and sex are declared off-limits as remnants from the barbaric era the rest of us call our past.

It is what drove policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush people truly believed that if they setup institutions the right way, Iraq would become Texas. The neo-con crowd is still stunned that the Iraqis preferred their tribal customs over what the American were offering. The CML is worse than the neo-cons in this regard. The bungling in the Maghreb during the recent revolts was like watching someone hit themselves with a hammer over and over, despite being told to put down the hammer.

In the competition with Putin, the West’s inability to see his motives through his eyes is leading to one error after another. John Kerry throws a temper tantrum thinking it will have the same effect it has when he does not get seated on time at the club. Instead Putin sees a weak, feckless man who is no threat to him. In Obama, he probably sees a guileless provincial surrounded by equally inept courtiers. The fact that Obama and his people cannot imagine that being the case means we have informational disequilibrium.

Consider this from Tyler:

A more reassuring kind of deterrence has to do with the response of Russian markets to the crisis. Russia is a far more globalized economy than it was during the Soviet era. On the first market day after the Crimean takeover, the reaction was a plunging ruble, and a decline in the Russian stock market of more than 10 percent. Russia’s central bank raised interest rates to 7 percent from 5.5 percent to protect the ruble’s value. Such market reactions penalize Russian decision makers, who also know that a broader conflict would endanger Russia’s oil and gas revenue, which makes up about 70 percent of its export income.

In this case, market forces provide a relatively safe form of deterrence. Unlike governmental sanctions, market-led penalties limit the risk of direct political retaliation, making it harder for the Russian government to turn falling market prices into a story of victimization by outside powers.

The underlying assumption is that Putin wants what we want. He and his coevals love what we love, hate what we hate and see themselves as citizens of the world, just like Tyler! Maybe the folks running Russia put a high price on having swank Miami condos and houses in Switzerland. It is just as likely they love their country, their forebears and their own place in the Russian time-line more than those trinkets. We don’t know, but Putin knows. He also knows those trinkets count for everything in the West.