I nearly included this photo of Kevin Dowd in my Samizdata posting last night about his performance for the Adam Smith Club, but I wanted to get that posting posted more quickly and more briefly than including it would have allowed, so here it is here:

I took that right after Dowd’s speech (it is misleading to call it a mere talk), which was a tour de force of detailed pessimism.

Dowd and Detlev Schlichter are now approximately equal in my estimation, both about as high as it is possible to be, Schlichter for his doggedly Germanic theoretical rigour, Dowd for his command of the details of the disaster as it is actually playing out.  A year or so ago, I began to fear that Dowd was missing the forest through concentrating too closely on one of his preferred clutch of trees, namely his scheme to sort the banks out by supervising their bankruptcy instead of just squirting ever more money at them.  This scheme sounds good to me, but Dowd sometimes gave off the vibe that he thought this was the heart of the problem and solving it would sort everything.  I was, in short, starting to have doubts about having called Dowd one of the most important intellectuals in the world.  Last night, such doubts melted away.  Which, I now realise, is another reason why Dowd’s talk gave me such profound satisfaction.  (See my Samizdata piece for the other reason why Dowd made me cheerful last night.)

The heart of the problem, as Schlichter is now painstakingly explaining to anyone who will listen, and as Dowd made absolutely clear last night that he also understands, is the inevitable forthcoming collapse of all the paper currencies and the need to get the world’s currencies back to gold.  Last night was different.  Last night Dowd painted the big picture in all its horror, and also found time to allude to What Is To Be Done, as and when the world ever becomes ready to think intelligently about such things.

Schlichter also supplies media brilliance.  Dowd is at his best when he is doing his own big, set piece performance, untinterrupted, as he was last night.  That way he can deploy detail, yet remain on top of it.  Stick him in a TV studio and whichever mere detail the interviewer chooses to ask about is liable to swallow the big picture.  Schlichter’s grasp of the big picture is undeviating, and, unlike Dowd, he looks and sounds the part.  Schlichter has rationality and fluency and authority and cleverness and been-there-done-thatness and Good Germanness oozing out of every pour.  His accent is definitely Germanic but his English impeccable, which is the perfect combination for sounding really clever.  Dowd (to quote some words I cut out of my Samizdata posting) looks and sounds more like a man who ought to be wearing a brown coat and working for the Gas Board, rather than like any kind of economic policy Moses.  He only looks and sounds impressive if you agree with every word he is saying, as I did last night.  But even then there is a mismatch between the extreme excellence of his performance and his helpful and friendly service industry demeanour.