The bitter thrashing of a former data darling: Nate Silver tweets through it

Giving more column inches to Nate Silver after he’s been showered with such a charitable amount of attention this week isn’t ideal, I know. After issuing a rash of half-baked tweets to the back-slapping applause of red-pill dinguses, Silver has given the internet’s Right-wingers a reason to welcome him to the club. That reason was his recent proclamation that some mysterious version of evolutionary science has anointed capitalism a triumph of natural selection. Fitting as it may be to watch one of Twitter’s earliest celebs follow the site’s latter-day arc into public odor and seeming disarray, any air you give this guy is still going to stink. So light a match.

The problem of sorting out the recent Nate fuss is that there’s already plenty of reason to survey the winding pipeline of his career. And there’s room for a sober assessment of his unique role in the landscape of digital journalism — from his days as the data-darling of baseball blogging, to his Twitter-hyped rise to fame on a lucky election prediction.

Mostly, it seems he was in the right place at the right time, or at least a product of it. He seemed to surf to success on the heady excitement of editors and reporters who thought data journalism could save newsrooms, the lucky beneficiary of the still-hopeful “pivot” era of journalism. It was back when a big chunk the country’s neo-liberal mainline Democrats believed most political problems could be solved with a West Wing walk-and-talk. Even “Orange is the New Black” intoned his name like a New Enlightenment saint in one 2013 episode.

“I believe in science. I believe in evolution. I believe in Nate Silver and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Christopher Hitchens. Although I do admit he could be a kind of an a**hole,” the protagonist chides in a plea for reason.

I bet it was a pretty plush gig, being Nate Silver back then.

For better or worse, it can’t be denied that his influence on a new wave of data-driven journalism may have actually helped fortify some of the more scurrilous parts of political coverage against the hemming and hawing of so much inflated punditry. (Not that we humans could ever fully root it out; and, God, who would even want to?) He’s not a political genius, nor is he all that great of a statistician — but for a while he was the biggest name in the game. And that name was the main reasons a lot of political journalists like me could make a little scratch freelancing roughly coded charts for embed into some aging news site’s gnarly old content management system.

But I’ll let proper cultural historians take it from there. Giving Silver his due props is not why I’m here. I’m here to collect. Not for myself, but for a few others to whom he is indebted as a self-professed honest thinker.

The precipitating event was as stupid and banal as you can imagine. On Tuesday, some podcast guy on Twitter pointed out a year-old academic analysis of some basic economic reforms that would be useful in shoring up social welfare and slowing climate-change impacts.

“The global economy is strictured around growth — the idea that firms, industries, and nations must increase production every year, regardless of whatever is needed,” reads the screenshot excerpt.

Apparently tripped up by the introductory paragraph of the analysis, the podcaster did not seem to grasp that infinite growth of any kind is not possible with finite resources.

“I didn’t find this article to be very convincing. But setting all that aside, I’ve always found this to be a weird framing. My sense is that growth or is just the normal byproduct of people going about their business as usual,” he tweeted.

Thankfully, Nate Silver was on hand to reassure the podcaster’s confidence.

"That's because you're actually a smart person instead of a weird academic and so you understand that capitalism works because it reflects human nature as selected for through thousands of generations of evolution,” Silver replied in a mystifying bolt of unintentional hilarity.

It’s a shame Silver didn’t stick around to dispute the actual analysis. Hope he at least read it. As a self-described “elite,” it would be a good time for him to brush up on the current affairs of us common parsnips. And I think the paper’s authors — a group of eight professors at internationally renowned schools across Spain, the UK, Switzerland, Austria, Canada and the US — are more than capable of speaking for themselves should Silver find himself at all interested in what they have to say before he offers his further profundity to the class.

Of “the idea that firms, industries and nations must increase production every year, regardless of whether it is needed,” researchers said. “This dynamic is driving climate change and ecological breakdown. High-income economies, and the corporations and wealthy classes that dominate them, are mainly responsible for this problem and consume energy and materials at unsustainable rates.”

You know what? Say more, profs.

“Wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being.”

The analysts add that this approach can not only “enable rapid decarbonization and stop ecological breakdown” but argue that so-called degrowth strategies aim to “stabilize economies and achieve social and ecological goals, unlike recession, which is chaotic and socially destabilizing and occurs when growth-dependent economies fail to grow.”

I may not be convinced that the strangling vines of kudzu-capitalism can be charmed back from their parasitic grasp on the poor by something that merits a polite euphemism like “degrowth.” But it seems to me, these professors are proposing one hell of a deal compared to the choppier alternatives that have worked in the past to bring down the rich.

That’s something the supposed elite often forget when they’re left to roast too long on the dais. Social-focused economic and health investment, strong labor and reproductive rights, transparent material assurance of their childrens’ safety and future — these things aren’t just some 21st-century vape-dreams of eccentric academic windbags. These are the handful of basic requirements for human survival that, historically speaking, poor people have routinely had to kill rich elites in order to secure for themselves and their families.

Sucks that every time some scant handful of blue-bloods goes too long without catching a good old fashioned beat-down, they have to learn that lesson all over again. But here we all are, entertaining pseudo-celebrity flirtations with played-out social Darwinist ideas, and wondering how anyone still has the energy to even say this dude’s name. For now, I think, we can stop. Until Nate can focus on the science again, it’s just too boring to focus on him.

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Salon's Lab Notes, a weekly newsletter from our Science & Health team.