This column is interesting. First off, Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics. Why was he commissioned by the New York Times to ruminate on foreign policy? That’s not his area of expertise, even if we want to pretend that economics is an area of expertise. His credentials don’t add authority to his analysis and they don’t suggest his analysis is based in anything ore than his own ruminations. If he was a professor of game theory, then it would maybe make some sense.

Now, Cowen is a smart guy, who has many interesting things to say, so maybe he gets some leeway. Still, it used to be that no one would ask an economist to discuss anything outside of economics and even that was a very narrow topic. Today, the local economist feels free to poke his nose into everything. They are the court magicians and the local soothsayer. Serious men consult them to divine the will of the gods. Maybe they should be required to dress like Gandalf.

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 The reason is the morality of Christianity has been replaced by a new materialist morality among the ruling classes. 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 and there can be no higher good than increasing the GDP.

The flaw in this is that the benefits of public policy often lie well over the horizon, while the costs are often right now. Of course, the reverse is often true. The benefits of debt creation, for example, are immediate, while the long term costs are passed onto future generations. The result is a form of short term thinking about public policy that veers into the myopic. In America, the “live for the moment” morality has produced a nation of amnesiacs incapable of remembering yesterday or contemplating tomorrow.

In foreign policy, this new morality is at the heart of our troubles with Russia. The Russian elite reject the materialism of the West. 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. Putin is willing to sacrifice now, for what he assumes will be a legacy passed onto his people. The West cannot understand such reasoning.

The other thing is just how deeply our elites are marinated in cultural nihilism. Top to bottom they think culture is witchcraft from a bygone era. Their extreme egalitarianism leads them to assume all people are the same. Everyone wants what we want, loves what we love and hates what we hate. In domestic policy we see this all the time. Education starts with the assumption that everyone can be above average, as Bush hilariously claimed. Diversity demands that no one notice the diversity of man.

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 the Cowen post:

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 people love what we love, hate what we hate and see themselves as citizens of the world, just like Tyler Cowen! 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. The elites int he west are no longer able to understand such thinking.