J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles

Grandmothers Raising Grandchildren

http://grgahero.org is 49 Luo grandmothers and great-grandmothers raising 150 AIDS-orphaned grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Ahero, Kenya. They sell their baskets to buy animals, schoolbooks, and extra food through this one-woman zero-overhead NGO.

  <p style="font-size: 10px;">  <a href="http://posterous.com">Posted via web</a>   from <a href="http://delong.posterous.com/grandmothers-raising-grandchildren">delong's posterous</a>  </p>  

Today, November 15 only, Ann Marie and I are matching basket purposes.

If you want a hand woven basket or simply to spend $30 that would otherwise go to your surplus on their substance, please buy.

And we extend a special invitation to those who want to do the right thing for the wrong reason--who want to boast about how generous they are, or feel the warm glow of knowing that they are good people, or who simply think they need to buy advocates before the Judgment Throne: your deeds are as valuable and precious as all others.

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UPDATE: Well, that's a fair number of baskets--51, $1775 worth...

Econ 115: Mao Zedong, Plus Japan from Meiji to the Louvre

Econ 115: November 10 Lecture Audio

Econ 115: Really Existing Socialism (November 5, 2009)

pdf: Econ 115: Really Existing Socialism (November 5, 2009)

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Audio: Econ 115- Communism in Power (11.05.2009 01-47-34 PM).aac

Dictatorships and Double Standards: Jeet Heer Has a Ludwig Von Mises Quote...

An example of classical liberalism's elective affinity with authoritarian politics?

Ludwig:

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error...

So now I have to add Ludwig Von Mises, Liberalism to the pile...

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UPDATE: Yes, Ludwig von Mises does indeed do it: he does claim that the reason Mussolini's thugs murdered Giacomo Matteotti was that they were driven to do it out of horror at the crimes committed by the Russian Bolsheviks. It's an old line: they are the monsters, and it's only because they are the monsters that they force us into a situation in which we must act monstrously:

Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism, 1.10: The Argument of Fascism: Only when the Marxist Social Democrats had gained the upper hand and taken power in the belief that the age of liberalism and capitalism had passed forever did the last concessions disappear that [social democracy] had still been thought necessary to make to the liberal ideology. The parties of the Third International consider any means as permissible.... The frank espousal of a policy of annihilating opponents and the murders committed in the pursuance of it have given rise to an opposition movement.... The militaristic and nationalistic enemies of the Third International felt themselves cheated by liberalism. Liberalism, they thought, stayed their hand when they desired to strike a blow against the revolutionary parties while it was still possible to do so....

The fundamental idea of these movements—which, from the name of the most grandiose and tightly disciplined among them, the Italian, may, in general, be designated as Fascist—consists in the proposal to make use of the same unscrupulous methods in the struggle against the Third International as the latter employs against its opponents. The Third International seeks to exterminate its adversaries and their ideas in the same way that the hygienist strives to exterminate a pestilential bacillus.... The Fascists, at least in principle, profess the same intentions.... Only under the fresh impression of the murders and atrocities perpetrated by the supporters of the Soviets were Germans and Italians able to block out the remembrance of the traditional restraints of justice and morality and find the impulse to bloody counteraction. The deeds of the Fascists and of other parties corresponding to them were emotional reflex actions evoked by indignation at the deeds of the Bolsheviks and Communists. As soon as the first flush of anger had passed, their policy took a more moderate course and will probably become even more so with the passage of time....

Now it cannot be denied that the only way one can offer effective resistance to violent assaults is by violence. Against the weapons of the Bolsheviks, weapons must be used in reprisal, and it would be a mistake to display weakness before murderers. No liberal has ever called this into question.... The great danger threatening domestic policy from the side of Fascism lies in its complete faith in the decisive power of violence.... What happens, however, when one's opponent... acts just as violently? The result must be a battle, a civil war. The ultimate victor to emerge from such conflicts will be the faction strongest in number.... The decisive question, therefore, always remains: How does one obtain a majority for one's own party? This, however, is a purely intellectual matter. It is a victory that can be won only with the weapons of the intellect, never by force. The suppression of all opposition by sheer violence is a most unsuitable way to win adherents to one's cause. Resort to naked force—that is, without justification in terms of intellectual arguments accepted by public opinion—merely gains new friends for those whom one is thereby trying to combat. In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails. Fascism can triumph today because universal indignation at the infamies committed by the socialists and communists has obtained for it the sympathies of wide circles. But when the fresh impression of the crimes of the Bolsheviks has paled, the socialist program will once again exercise its power of attraction on the masses.... There is... only one idea that can be effectively opposed to socialism, viz., that of liberalism....

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.

The kindest thing that can possibly be said, I think, is that Ludwig von Mises here demonstrates as little clue to what fascism is all about as he elsewhere demonstrates he understands about capitalism, social democracy, or--indeed-liberalsim.

Hoisted from the Archives: Burkean Conservatism and the Burden of the Past on White America

Andrew Sullivan Is Wrong Again!!: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: On this issue the arguments that convince me are not liberal but conservative ones--Burkean ones, to be exact.

A liberal sees society as a result of a social contract implicitly made between all of us alive today: we agree to live by rules and laws that we then have a chance to rethink, remake, and reform. It's important that this social contract be fair to us. From this perspective, the questions "Why should recent Korean immigrants bear any responsibility for repairing the damage left by the marks of slavery and Jim Crow?" and "Why should African-Americans find their own capabilities and potential accomplishments still limited by the marks of slavery and Jim Crow?" are both very good ones. (Somehow Andrew Sullivan only asks the first, and never thinks to ask the second. But thinking about why would take us far afield.)

I begin from a different point, from the observations that we Americans alive today are all the recipients of an extraordinary and unmerited gift, an inheritance of institutions, principles, and organizations that is without peer anywhere on the world today and that is of inestimable value. We aren't independent liberal individuals making a social contract in the rational light of Enlightenment Reason. Instead, we are heirs who have received an enormous inheritance from our predecessors. As Burke wrote, we "claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity--as an estate specially belonging to the people." It's not a contract, or if it is a contract it is not one just between those alive today. Again, as Burke puts it, if you are to think of a social contract you have to recognize that it is not "a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties.... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

But estates that are inherited come not only with assets, they also come encumbered with debts. If we are to be Americans--if we are to take up the wonderul unmerited gift, accept the marvelous entailed inheritance that is offered to us--we must take up not just the benefits and advantages, but also the debts that America owes from its past actions as well. To do otherwise--to ignore the debts while grabbing the goodies with both hands--is to show that we are not the true heirs of Benjamin Franklin and company. And chief among the debts that America owes from its past actions is the obligation to erase the marks left by slavery and Jim Crow.

Now Andrew Sullivan wants Americans to welsh on the debts and responsibilities that are attached to our marvelous, unmerited inheritance of institutions, principles, and organizations. He wants us to grab the good parts of the inheritance with both hands, and to say that the bad parts are none of our concern--that the slaveholders are dead, the lynchers are dead, and those who fought hard to protect lynchers from the law are dead (although not all of them, and Strom Thurmond only very recently).

Edmund Burke would disagree. He would say, "Are you crazy? There's a history here!" He would reach back to Montesquieu, and say that if the ruling principle of despotism is fear (it collapses if the subjects no longer fear the despot), and if the ruling principle of monarchy is honor (it collapse if the nobles no longer seek to outdo each other in deeds to win honor, nobility, and the favor of the king), so the ruling principle of a republic must be virtue. What is virtue? Well, linguistically, virtue comes from the Latin "virtus": "vir" = man, "tus" = -liness: "virtue" = "manliness" [in a proper modern and gender-indeterminate way, of course]*. Practically, a republic requires virtuous citizens: citizens who will take up their responsibilities and shoulder their share of the obligations neecessary for the common good. People who won't shirk their responsibilities. "If you wish to be part of this great more than two-century partnership that is America," Burke would say, "you need to recognize that your inheritance is an entailed inheritance. First, it comes with an obligation not to waste it--an obligation to in your turn pass down to those not yet born a better nation than the one you live in. Second, it comes with debts attached: past deeds of America that were cruel and criminal, the memory of which is still shameful. Just because the particular members of the great partnership who incurred the debts (the three-fifths clause, the legality of the slave trade, the Missouri Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act, et cetera) are dead doesn't mean that that the debts aren't still owed by the great partnership."

So Andrew Sullivan is wrong again. On many issues I am an arrogant liberal. But not this one. On this issue, I'm an arrogant conservative.

Yet Another Note on Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand": What It Is and What It Is Not

Adam Smith's "invisible hand" argument: the sole occurrence of the phrase "invisible hand" in the Wealth of Nations:

An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth Of Nations: Every individual['s]... study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society.

First, every individual endeavours to employ his capital as near home as he can, and consequently as much as he can in the support of domestic industry, provided always that he can thereby obtain the ordinary, or not a great deal less than the ordinary profits.... In the home trade, his capital is never so long out of his sight as it frequently is in the foreign trade of consumption. He can know better the character and situation of the persons whom he trusts; and if he should happen to be deceived, he knows better the laws of the country from which he must seek redress.... The capital which an Amsterdam merchant employs in carrying corn from Koningsberg to Lisbon.... The uneasiness, however, which he feels at being separated so far from his capital, generally determines him to bring part both of the Koningsberg goods which he destines for the market of Lisbon, and of the Lisbon goods which he destines for that of Koningsberg, to Amsterdam; and though this necessarily subjects him to a double charge of loading and unloading as well as to the payment of some duties and customs, yet, for the sake of having some part of his capital always under his own view and command, he willingly submits to this extraordinary charge; and it is in this manner that every country which has any considerable share of the carrying trade, becomes always the emporium, or general market, for the goods of all the different countries whose trade it carries on....

[A] capital employed in the home trade, it has already been shown, necessarily puts into motion a greater quantity of domestic industry, and gives revenue and employment to a greater number of the inhabitants of the country, than an equal capital employed in the foreign trade.... Upon equal, or only nearly equal profits, therefore, every individual naturally inclines to employ his capital in the manner in which it is likely to afford the greatest support to domestic industry, and to give revenue and employment to the greatest number of people of his own country.

Secondly, every individual who employs his capital in the support of domestic industry, necessarily endeavours so to direct that industry, that its produce may be of the greatest possible value.... As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can, both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce maybe of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He... neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it...

Note that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" argument is not the argument economists make today. Adam Smith argues that there are:

• political failures--uncertainty about how to access and indeed the prevalence of the rule of law in other countries.
• psychological failures--people are so anxious to have some of their wealth around them where they can touch it that they pay longshoremen to unload and reload goods at Amsterdam rather than drop-shipping them straight from Konigsburg to Lisbon.

And he argues that, as a result, merchants are good patriots--that they deploy their capital to "render the annual revenue of the [national] society as great as he can."

Adam Smith's purpose here in Book IV, Chapter II is to argue against mercantilism, against the idea that you can make your country wealthier by imposing tariffs and other restrictions on imports. The problem with his argument is that mercantilism is correct (unless you are a very small country), at least in the absence of retailiation.

So Smith, ingeniously, argues that the biases toward home production that mercantilist goals would suggest should be incorporated into economic decision-making are already present in the market because of what modern economists would call political failures and psychological failures. Smith does not argue that the market maximizes wealth because there are no external benefits to home production and merchants are rational. Instead, Smith argues that the market maximizes national wealth because merchants' psychological propensities plus the inability of foreign governments to commit to the rule of law together match the external benefits to others in the national community of merchants' committing their capital at home.

I Just May Have to Readmit Andrew Sullivan into Polite Society

For this, which covers a great multitude of sins--perhaps even the sin against the Holy Ghost:

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: One does not quite know what to say about Pat Buchanan's latest. Is it too predictable to note? Or too ugly to record? Or too stupid to ignore? Upon reflection, I'll go with stupid. Take one simple point. Notice that for Buchanan in this column, it is axiomatic that America was once defined by its whiteness. This is what he means by "tradition." America - once uniformly white - is now, for him and those he speaks for, bewilderingly multicultural and multi-confessional. Hence the anxiety. Hence the panic. Hence, in some ways, the confluence of fear and paranoia among the 20 percent of Americans who seem to feel this way and see the federal government in some way as the enabler of this destruction.

But this axiom, while useful as a myth, has a problem. It is untrue. And this "country" that white Americans are allegedly losing is not, in fact, a country. It is merely a self-serving and solipsistic illusion of a country that some white Americans feel they are losing.

From its very beginning, after all, America was a profoundly black country as well.

This took a while for an Englishman to grasp upon arriving here, because it's so easy to carry with you all the subconscious cultural baggage you grew up with. England, after all, is deeply Anglo-Saxon. It makes some sense to refer to England's roots and ethnic identity as white, its language as English, its inheritance as a deep mixture of Northern European peoples - the Angles and the Saxons and the Normans and the Celts. And superficially, English-speaking white Americans might seem in the same cultural boat as white English people, dealing with a relatively new multiculturalism in an increasingly diverse and multi-racial society. And at first blush, you almost sink into that lazy and stupid assumption, especially if you arrive in Boston, as I did, and carried all the usual European prejudices, as I did.

The English, lulled by their marination in American pop culture from infancy, and beguiled by the same language, can live out their days in this country never actually noting that it is an alien land - stranger than you might have ever imagined, crueler than you realized, but somehow also more inspiring than you ever thought possible. This is the America I am trying to make my home, after 25 years. It is not the America of Pat Buchanan's or John Derbyshire's fantasies.

It struck me almost at once, if only in the music I heard all around me - and then in so many other linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, spiritual ways: white Americans do not realize how black they are. Even their whiteness is partly scavenged from the fear of - and attraction to - its opposite. Even something as stereotypically white as American Catholicism, I discovered to my amazement, was also black from the very start. (Yes, those Maryland slaves. If you've never been to a Gospel Mass in an ancient black Catholic parish, try it some time.)

From the beginning, in its very marrow, this country was forged out of that racial and cultural interaction. It fought a brutalizing, bloody, defining civil war over that interaction. Any European student of Tocqueville swiftly opens his eyes at the three races that defined America in the classic text. Has Buchanan read Tocqueville? And that's why it seems so odd to me that the election of the son of a white mother and a black father is seen as somehow a threat to American identity for some, when, in fact, Obama is the final iteration of the American identity - the oldest one and the deepest one. This newness is, in fact, ancient - or as ancient as America can be. The very names - Ann Dunham and Barack Obama. Is not their union in some ways a faint echo of the union that actually made this country what it is?

That some cannot see Buchanan's cartoon as a travesty of history remains America's tragedy of self-forgetting. It reminds me of the way in which Britain always defined itself as a Protestant country, even while, of course, it was deeply, deeply Catholic before it was ever Protestant - and for a much longer period of time. As a Catholic growing up in England, and having genealogical roots in both Catholic Ireland and in Domesday Book England, it took a while for me to appreciate the pied beauty of this identity. Tribalism is a powerful thing, especially for the Irish. I remember one day, as I was herded into the local Anglican church for my high school assembly, thinking: "This ancient building was once mine, ours." But that was before I realized that Anglicanism itself could not be understood without the profound inheritance of English Catholicism - and that Anglicanism was actually a hybrid of Protestant and Catholic Englishness. And that this was England - all of it. And to be truly English was to own it all.

Buchanan, of all people, should know better than these tedious recurring explosions of racial panic. And, of course, he does know better. He has read more history than most pundits. He is personally a civil and decent man. But he feels these things in such a profound and tribal way that what he knows is submerged by tribal fear and expressed as hateful hackery. But this much is true and deserves restating:

Black Americans have shed blood in every American war since the Revolution. This country, even the very Capitol building in which today's legislators now demand to see the birth certificate of the first black president, was built on the sweat and sinew of slaves. Before we were people in the eyes of the law, before we had the right to vote, before we had a black president, we were here, helping make this country as it is today. We are as American as it gets. And frankly, the time of people who think otherwise is passing. If that's the country Buchanan wants to hold onto, well, he's right, he is losing it.

And about time too.

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But I am sure that Daniel Davies will have something to say about the claim that "England, after all, is deeply Anglo-Saxon..."

Econ 115 Lecture Notes: October 13, 2009: Tyrannies

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20091015 slouch 18.pdf

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Lecture Audio: Econ 115-13--Tyrannies (10.13.2009 12-51-22 PM)

The State of Economics in the 2000s Analogized...

chunkyreesewitherspoonlookalike@gmail.com emails:

I've been watching the freshwater/saltwater economics wars with a kind of horrified fascination -- something like the way I feel on those rare occasions when I watch train wreck TV (Hoarders and the like.) One of the things I keep wondering is: how on earth did this happen? How did large chunk of the economics profession come so completely unmoored that Larry Summers could say "There are idiots", and have that be a useful response to anything? How did it come about that Richard Posner could write this:

The dominant conception of economics today, and one that has guided my own academic work in the economics of law, is that economics is the study of rational choice. People are assumed to make rational decisions across the entire range of human choice, including but not limited to market transactions, by employing a form (usually truncated and informal) of cost-benefit analysis. The older view was that economics is the study of the economy, employing whatever assumptions seem realistic and whatever analytical methods come to hand.

as though economics could just stop being "the study of the economy" using whatever methods seem useful and appropriate?

Plainly there has to be an intellectual explanation for this, which people like Paul Krugman have addressed. But I think there also has to be an explanation in terms of the sociology of academic disciplines. And in that light, it seems to me that if I were a journalist, I'd consider writing a piece comparing freshwater economics to the other major recent case in which an academic discipline went completely off the rails, namely English departments' swing into postmodernism in the '80s and early '90s. Offhand, there seem to be some real similarities, e.g.:

1. In both cases, the people involved maintained, credibly, that you couldn't really assess the work in question without putting a lot of effort into understanding it.
2. In both cases, that required mastering difficult stuff. (In econ, all the math and models; in pomo lit stuff, mastering the literally incomprehensible language in which a lot of that stuff was written.)
3. In both cases, that deterred a lot of people on the outside who were generally puzzled and skeptical, but didn't want to spend years getting into a position in which they could credibly say: yes, this is, in fact, nuts.
4. So in both cases practitioners were largely insulated from criticism they had to take seriously.

Relatedly, in both cases it took shocks from the outside to expose the problems in this (in the case of English, things like the Sokal hoax; in the case of econ, the near-collapse of the global economy.)

Both cases involved a lot of arrogance, and a generally dismissive attitude towards other approaches. Since, in both cases, practitioners were able to seize significant amounts of control over a discipline before their approach crashed and burned, this did real damage to the disciplines in question (leading to, e.g., large chunks of previous disciplinary history being forgotten.)

Both cases involved significant political motivation.

Of course, it's possible that I only think this would be fun to write, and/or read, because it would tweak the Chicago economists to be compared to pomo English professors. ;)

I Appear, by Accident, to Have Permanently Annoyed Jo Walton...

She writes:

papersky: Friday already?: It's a funny time for Brad Delong to think I lie on a couch and read all day, since not only have I been dashing around all over but I'm also very aware that I don't have (and don't want) a couch...

But I don't think she lies on a couch and read all day!!!!

I do, however, think that she clearlys enjoy reading books so much more than the rest of us do. And that as a result it would be a better world if the rest of us were to take up a collection so that she could lie on a couch and read all day.

She is, I think, a living, breathing example of the "utility monster" that serves as a brain teaser puzzle in philosophy courses.

And buy her books. My favorites:

• Tooth and Claw: if Victorian maidens were dragons...
• The King's Name and The King's Peace: the damnedest version of the Tale of Sir Lancelot I have ever seen--and that includes *Spamalot...

Hoisted from the Archives: DeLong Smackdown Watch: Julian Sanchez

Brad DeLong's Website: DeLong Smackdown Watch: Julian Sanchez gives an effective critique of (i) DeLong's version of preference utilitarianism and of (ii) attempts to figure out how to implement it by asking people what makes them happy.

Notes from the Lounge: No problem, say the utilitarian theorists (and economists), we'll switch to preference utilitarianism, wherein "utility" or "happiness" are defined in terms of the satisfaction of preferences. This has the virtue of realigning the object of maximization with what people subjectively value, which makes for a sturdier fact/value bridge. It has the disadvantage of making it much less clear whether that appealingly simple maximizing structure is still a good fit for the task. Even rendering the very different forms of satisfaction and dissatisfaction people are capable of feeling comparable seemed a bit of a stretch. (How many of the bon vivant's wild nights on the town does it take to equal the same amount of "utility" in the monk's serene satisfaction in a day of contemplation?) Preferences over states of the world that need not be experience by the subject who prefers them make things a much bigger tangle. And should we think it's better for people to have more (and more intense) preferences, so that more of them can be satisfied? But I digress.

DeLong's problem seems to be that he's using this second, preference-based sense of "happiness." But this isn't the colloquial sense of the word.... DeLong is like a Ptolemaic astronomer who... [claims] the proposition that the earth revolves around the sun... [is the same as] the absurd proposition that the earth doesn't exist, since "the earth" is defined as the thing at the center of the universe. Now, if we're defining happiness in terms of preferences, then DeLong's semantic objection isn't as wacky as it initially seemed: The claim that freedom might be more important than happiness amounts to the claim that one prefers freedom to the satisfaction of one's preferences.

But DeLong then goes on to argue in terms of "regret" and "being happy" when contemplating one's future life, which certainly sounds as though he's conflating the preference-based and experiential senses of happiness.... [T]he discussion further blurs the line between a technical, preference-based sense of happiness in which DeLong's claim sounds right, with happiness as a sort of feeling about how things will go for you. But if we want to stick with the preference-based version of "happiness", then (and this certainly runs against the grain of ordinary English) it no longer makes much sense to talk about "being happy", since "happiness" might be maximized by the choice that leads to my being killed instantly....

[Layard's] book is described as making use of a series of psychological studies about how satisfied people are. And it's only the experiential sense of "happiness" that's going to turn up in studies like that: First, because if you ask people how "happy" they are, then everybody but Brad DeLong is going to interpret that question in the colloquial way....

Powerful and well-argued, but (to me) ultimately unconvincing. For other philosophical traditions have equal or greater weaknesses when used as foundations on which to build discussions of the good life or the good society. And the question, after all, is whether Richard Layard's book should be ignored because of incoherence in its philosophical underpinnings...

Hoisted from Comments: Notre Dame's Economics and Policy Analysis Department, Mont Pelerin, etc.

Hoisted from Comments: John Emerson writes:

Department of "Huh?": Those of us who want to believe the worst of the economics profession get a new gift almost every day.

[Re:]

Ideologically, the neoliberal position is understandable as anti-statist. Certainly, this was Hayek's intent...

Mirowski's (with othrs) book "The Road From Mont Pelerin" argues that this is not true. He defines neoliberalism in terms of its differences from classical liberalism, one of which is a belief that an authoritarian state might be necessary at times to foster liberalism, as in Chile.

Let me agree with Emerson and Mirowski. The way I read Hayek, it is quite clear that (a) liberal democracy and (b) respect for private property are both good things, but it is also clear that (b) is by far the most important.

Hayek would much rather have a government that respected private property and ruled with an iron fist as a dictatorship than have a government that was a vibrant democracy but interfered with and regulated private property. And he would make his choice with a clear conscience--the second, after all, was on the "road to serfdom"...

Lying on Couches and Reading All Day

Jo Walton writes:

Post Comment: It's a funny time for Brad Delong to think I lie on a couch and read all day, since not only have I been dashing around all over but I'm also very aware that I don't have (and don't want) a couch and they don't (yet) have one even though they do... oh well. They get the keys tomorrow and the weekend is going to be mostly painting, then the actual moving truck is booked for Wednesday afternoon. It's going to be weird not living with Z; I've been doing it for a long time. I also have no idea what I'm going to do with his room, though I love 1crowdedhour's suggestion that I could fill it with all the junk that piles up and keep the rest of the apartment relatively tidy...

Tor.com posts: Doorways in the Sand, My love/hate relationship with funny fiction, David Weber's Off Armageddon Reef, Donald Westlake's Get Real. And of course, the way the economics works in the real world is that I get paid for writing my posts on Tor.com. If I didn't get paid, I'd still read just as many books, and I might even write about some of them now and then...

I didn't say that I think Jo Walton lies on a couch and reads all day. I don't.

I said that she clearly enjoys reading so much--so much more than I do--that a world in which the rest of us maintained her in style so that she could lie on a couch and read all day might well be a wonderfully good world from a utilitarian point of view.

And I urge Tor to pay her more money. I would even commit to buying a copy of Doorways in the Sand if they promised to do so...

If You Are So Rich, Why Aren't You Smart?

A correspondent emails me a link to http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/08/least-surprising-correlation-of-all.html...

Greg Mankiw looks at:

And says:

The Least Surprising Correlation of All Time: [S]o what? This fact tells us nothing about the causal impact of income on test scores.... Suppose we were to graph average SAT scores by the number of bathrooms a student has in his or her family home. That curve would also likely slope upward.... But it would be a mistake to conclude that installing an extra toilet raises yours kids' SAT scores. It would be interesting to see the above graph reproduced for adopted children only. I bet that the curve would be a lot flatter.

And he drops it there.

But merely saying that correlation is not always causation and dropping the issue is, I think, profoundly unhelpful--and shows a... lack of work ethic as well.

Off the top of my head...

IIRC, the age-adjusted correlation between log income and IQ is 0.4: take someone with a log income higher by one standard deviation than average--these days someone with a middle-age-adjusted family income of $100,000-$120,000 rather than $60,000-$80,000--and their IQ is likely to be 0.4 standard deviations (6 points) above average. The individual heritability of IQ is about 0.5: take an individual with a IQ 6 points above average and their children will be expected to have an IQ 3 points above average. SAT scores have a mean of 500, a standard deviation of 100, and a high but not a perfect (0.7) correlation with IQ.

So if we compare people whose parents have an income of $100,000-$120,000 to those with an income of $60,000-$80,000 we would expect to see 1 x 0.4 x 0.5 x 0.7 x 100 = 14 points. The actual jump in the graph Mankiw refers to is twice as large.

The rule of thumb, I think, is that half of the income-test score correlation is due to the correlation of your test scores with your parents' IQ; and half of the income-test score correlation is coing purely from the advantages provided by that component of wealth uncorrelated with your parents' (genetic and environmental!) IQ.

The curve is less steep, but there is definitely a "what" here to be thought about.

The masters at explaining this, of course, are (Googles) Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, "The Inheritance of Inequality" http://www.umass.edu/preferen/gintis/intergen.pdf...

---

UPDATE: Conor Clarke reminds me of Christiane Capron and Michael Duyme (1989), "Assessment of Effects of Socio-Economic Status on IQ: A Full Cross-Fostering Study," Nature http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v340/n6234/pdf/340552a0.pdf: "changes in IQ resulting from changes in postnatal environment are of similar magnitude and exhibit the same general trend independently of the SES of the adopted children's biological paretnts."

An Unresolved Issue in Moral Philosophy...

Jo Walton:

Beautiful, poetic, and experimental: Roger Zelazny's Doorways in the Sand

really does seem to enjoy lounging on her couch reading books much, much more than I do--or indeed than anyone else in the known universe does.

Does this mean that a good--utilitarian--universe is so ordered that people like me work like dogs manipulating piles of numbers to keep her fully absorbed in books?

In the Matter of Berkeley Law School Professor John Yoo...

Berkeley Law School Dean Chris Edley asks:

Berkeley Law School Dean Chris Edley: [T]he crucial questions... are these: Was there clear professional misconduct--that is, some breach of the professional ethics applicable to a government attorney--material to Professor Yoo's academic performance now?...

Dean Edley believes that this is a complicated question, to which we must never know the answer: the situation, he believes does "not warrant [Yoo's] dismissal or even a potentially chilling inquiry." The harm that would be done to academic freedom, Edley believes, is such that we must never take any steps to find out what the answer to Edley's question is.

I, by contrast, believe that we have already found out the answer to Edley's question.

I believe that this is a simple question.

A believe that this question has a very simple answer.

I believe that the answer is "yes."

In 2000, John Yoo published an article, "The Imperial Presidency Abroad" http://www.cato.org/events/000712con.html, in which he argued that President William Jefferson Clinton had unconstitutionally exceeded the bounds of his Commander-in-Chief powers:

accelerat[ing] disturbing trends in foreign policy that undermine democratic accountability and respect for the rule of law...

by placing:

American troops... under... non-American... commanders, such as British General Michael Jackson.... [This] threatens that basic principle of government accountability. International or foreign officials have no obligation to pursue American policy, nor do they take an oath to uphold the Constitution...

Note that this is a very strange thing to write. In the customary laws of war, the decision whether or not to place soldiers under the tactical, operational, or strategic command of allies is within the appropriate commander's[1] discretion whenever joint operations are underway. Thus the Duke of Wellington as theater commander placed British troops under Dutch command in the person of the Prince of Orange in the Waterloo Campaign. Thus did George Washington as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army place American troops under French command in the persons of the Marquis de Lafayette and the omte de Rochambeau during the Revolutionary War, thus did John Pershing as American field commander place American troops under French command in the person of Marshall Foch during World War I, and thus did Dwight Eisenhower as AEF commander place American troops under British command in the person of Field Marshall Montgomery during World War II. And nobody said "boo."

In striking contrast to what he had written thirty months before, on March 14, 2003 John Yoo wrote:

in the customary laws of war, the treatment of unlawful belligerents is left to the sovereign's discretion.... [T]he sovereign right of the United States on the treatment of enemy combatants is reserved to the President as Commander-in-Chief. In light of the long history of discretion given to each nation to determine its treatment of unlawful combatants, to construe these [congressional] statutes to regulate the conduct of the United States toward such combatants would interfere with a well established prerogative of the sovereign...

So we see, on the one hand, that when the President is William Jefferson Clinton, his Commander-in-Chief powers are so crabbed and restricted that Democratic President Clinton exceeded them by instructing American soldiers to obey the orders of the NATO theater commander.

And we see, on the other hand, when the President is George W. Bush, his Commander-in-Chief powers are so extensive and unconstrained that Congress's explicit authority to "make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces" can place no restrictions at all on what lawful orders Republican President George W. Bush can give to mistreat, abuse, and torture persons held by the U.S. armed forces.

These two Commander-in-Chief powers are very different indeed.

To advance as your basic principle of Constitional construction "don't worry: it's OK if you are a Republican" is a breach of professional ethics serious enough to more than pass the bar set by Dean Edley--unless, of course, all legal reasoning is just a crock of manure to mask partisan maneuvering.

Now it is plain that John Yoo does not believe both of his 2000 and 2003 statements of the legal extent of the Commander-in-Chief power. Indeed, he believes neither: if he believed the 2000 statement, he would never in his life have written what he wrote in 2003; if he believed the 2003 statement, he would never in his life have put forward what he wrote in 2000.

This has a bearing on the duty of the university to ensure and promote academic freedom. As medieval history professor Ernst Kantorowicz said, upon his resignation from the university rather than bow to the Regents' demand that he swear that he would not advocate communism:

[I] wish to emphasize the true and fundamental issue at stake: professional and human dignity. There are three professions which are entitled to wear a gown: the judge, the priest, the scholar. This garment stands for its bearer's maturity of mind, his independence of judgment, and his direct responsibility to his conscience and to his God. It signifies the inner sovereignty of those three interrelated professions: they should be the very last to allow themselves to act under duress and yield to pressure. It is a shameful and undignified action, it is an affront and a violation of both human sovereignty and professional dignity that the Regents of this University have dared to bully the bearer of this gown into a situation in which--under the pressure of a bewildering economic coercion-‑he is compelled to give up either his tenure or, together with his freedom of judgment, his human dignity and his responsible sovereignty as a scholar.

Academic freedom--like all freedoms--is thus not free: liberty is always paired with responsibility. A professor is freed from coercion by others to shape or constrain or limit what he or she decides to say. In return, a professor takes on a twofold "responsibility to his conscience and to his god": an obligation (a) to think as hard as he or she can, and (b) to then tell the world what he or she thinks. A university in which professors are freed from external constraint and pressure and in turn obey the internal constraint that is their reponsibility to think hard and tell what they believe to be the truth is one in which there is academic freedom.

What does a university's obligation to nurture and guard academic freedom entail? Clearly it means that a university has to protect its members by coercion from outsiders. And clearly it means that a university has to protect its members from coercion by insiders--those other professors who do not like where professors' responsibilities to their consciences and gods lead them. But what are a university's obligations with respect to a professor who wants the freedom from coercion but does not accept the responsibility to think hard and to say what those thoughts are? What if a professor uses freedom from coercion and constraint not to tell the world what he thinks, but rather to say at one moment that there is one set of constitutional rules for Democratic Presidents and at another moment that there is a very different set of constitutional rules for Republican Presidents?

Is academic freedom vindicated by claiming that the university has no responsibility to censure, no responsibility to correct, no responsibility to discipline, no responsibility to dismiss someone who so violates his direct responsibility to his conscience and to his god?

I leave this issue as an exercise for the dean.

---

[1] Note the difference between "commander" on the one hand and "sovereign" on the other. The American President's powers are of the "Chief Executive" class, inherited from the powers of the British King as chief executive of the United Kingdom as its constitution stood in 1776. The British King in 1775 was not the "sovereign" but rather the commander of the army: ever since 1689, sovereignty in the United Kingdom was held by the King-in-Parliament, a very different entity than the King.

Do Not Adjust Your TV Set...

"Have you seen our copy of Ghosts on the Roof by Whittaker Chambers?"

"Isn't it in that bookcase that you are looking at?"

"No."

"Perhaps in another bookcase... or your office... or Laura Tyson's office over which you have taken seisin... or in one of the boxes of books in the trunk of the blue car?"

Books will never replace the internet until they come with RFID tags so that their location can be pinged...

I am having a hard time understanding this. Sam Tanenhaus writes:

Conservatism Is Dead: The realist [Whittaker] Chambers... clung to the Beaconsfield position. He supported the Eisenhower administration's negotiations with the Soviets, defended civil liberties, praised the writings of John Kenneth Galbraith...

And I have no idea what he is talking about.

On page 506 of Tanenhaus's Whittaker Chambers, he writes that:

Chambers was stimulated by the Keynesian heresies of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society...

But "stimulation" is not praise. And the only note Tanenhaus gives to support "stimulation" is a reference to Chambers's 1959 National Review article "Foot in the Door" (reprinted in Ghosts on the Roof). In that article Chambers attacks the the claims of the education lobby that:

Willie... is fated to go forever un-higher-educated. For--a Delphic voice warns us--by 1984... secondary school graduates will be besieging the gates of campuses, quite futilely, since college facilities will be totally inadequate.... It takes no great wits to guess what we are supposed to do next: shake out what is left of our lank wallets while we pressure our legislators... to syphon federal taxes into higher education... tax-ravaged and inflated dollars fed into academic tills by other-directed and coercive means...

Besides, Chambers goes on to say, publicly-supported higher education is the vanguard of totalitarianism itelf:

[L]et us not delude ourselves.... [T]his is the Total State that is dawning... under various softening and dissembling names and forms, on various impressive pretexts or necessities...

And then comes the only reference to Galbraith:

Perhaps, of necessity the State must soon be into the Business of Education, as the witty and bracingly arrogant Professor J.K. Galbraith assured us, only the other day, that it must. But must it?..."

After that passage, Chambers is off and running with his argument that TV will come to dominate higher education. Three pages later Chambers pauses to summarize:

I am not suggesting... televised education can replace... Harvard.... I am not suggesting... televised education is... a cure-all.... I am only saying that the need is great... television [is] a means to meet the need... that it is comparatively inexpensive and need not involve the State.... One of the beneficent side-effects of the crisis of the twentieth century... is a dawning realization, not so much that the mass of mankind is degradingly poor, as that there will be no peace for the islands of prosperity until the continents of proliferating poverty have been lifted to something like the general material level of the islanders.... Unless the general level of mind is raised at the same time as the level of material well-being... we shall all risk resembling those savages... [with] top hats and tight shoes... leaving unredeemed the loin-cloth of their middle zones...

And Tanenhaus parses this in his "Galbraith" paragraph so:

Chambers was stimulated by the Keynesian heresies of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society. "There will be no peace for the islands of relative plenty," Chambers wrote in NR, "until the continents of proliferating poverty have been lifted to something like the general material level of the islanders." This, though Chambers did not say it, had been the summary objective of the New Deal...

In context, Chambers's hopes that TV can educate the degradingly poor mass of mankind in the continents of Asia, Africa, and Latin America sounds nothing at all like "the summary objective of the New Deal."

In his Whittaker Chambers Tanenhaus had merely taken Chambers's description of Galbraith as "witty and bracingly arrogant" and turned it into "Chambers was stimulated by the Keynesian heresies of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society..."

But by 2007, Tanenhaus's "stimulated by... heresies of JKG" has become "refashioned himself into a liberal... a defender of... the Keynesian policies promoted by JKG".

And we are still there today, with Tanenhaus claiming that Chambers "praised the writings of JKG..." with no support that I see other than an article in which Chambers says that the "witty and bracingly arrogant" JKG's arguments for federal aid to education are "the Total State... under various softening and dissembling names and forms, on various impressive pretexts or necessities..."

Is Tanenhaus referring to something other than "Foot in the Door" when he talks of Chambers praising the writings of JKG? If so, I cannot imagine what.

And National Review's archives have disappeared, or been disappeared:

"Pwogwessivism"

Arnold Kling is trolling, and Tyler Cowen rises to the bait:

Marginal Revolution: What is progressivism?: Arnold Kling asks this question, so I thought I'd try a stab at it, but trying to cast progressivism in the best possible light.  Of course my answer is not exclusive to Arnold's, as we might both be right about the elephant.  From an outsider's perspective, here is my take on what progressives believe or perhaps should believe...

The problem is that neither Kling nor Cowen anchors their discussion in a single word written or said by a single person who is in any sense an actual living (or dead) "pwogwessive." So each sets up an empty box and labels it with what he dislikes (in Kling's case) or likes (in Cowen's). The overall effect is like those famous lines from Henry IV:

"I can characterize pwogwessives fwom the Vasty Deep!"

"Why, so can I, and so can any man. But does anybody interesting fit your characterization?"

In order for this sort of exercise to be useful, you need to first name a canonical pwogwessive--or name a canonical group of thinkers and assert that "pwogwessivism" is what they all have in common, or at least their first principal component in some metric. And then you have to buttress that naming and assertion. After all, classical liberalism is John Locke and John Stuart Mill. Classical conservatism is the unholy offspring of Thomas Carlyle, Joseph de Maistre, and Edmund Burke. Classical Marxism is Vladimir Lenin. But modern pwogwessivism: Is it Barbara Ehrenreich? Joe Stiglitz? Barack Obama? Bill Clinton? Larry Mishel? John Rawls?

Matt Zeitlin Needs to Learn to Stop Respecting Social Conservatives

Matt Zeitlin writes:

Smart People Making Bad Arguments « Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper: Robert George is a very smart and accomplished man. He makes his arguments honestly and rigorously. So, when he goes to the Wall Street Journal to make an argument against gay marriage, it’s probably a good idea for gay rights defenders to perk up their collective ears...

Matt Zeitlin forgets the Iron Law of Intellectual Conservatism: intellectual conservatives are not smart and accomplished, and so they only sound smart and reasonable only for a particular historical instant--and then they are clearly seen as silly and stupid. Jacob Levy:

Jacob Levy: Conservatism and Its Absence of Contents: Tyler Cowen... makes the insightful point that "none [of the 20th century American conservatives] have held up particularly well..." It's a real problem.... [T]here's no modern work to teach alongside Theory of Justice and Anarchy, State, and Utopia that really gets at what's interesting about Burkean or social conservatism.... [H]istory keeps right on going--and so any book plucked from the past that was concerned with yelling "stop!" tends to date badly to any modern reader.... This is a particular problem because of race in America--no mid-20th c[entury conservative] work is going to endure as a real, read-not-just-namechecked, classic of political thought that talks about how everything will go to hell if the South isn't allowed to remain the South.... Oakeshott has his own version of these problems; doesn't "Rationalism in Politics" end up feeling faintly ridiculous by the time he's talking about women's suffrage?...

Indeed, as Matt writes immediately afterwards:

But what’s interesting about his pretty simple natural law argument for why gay marriage is a bad idea is how, well, silly it is. This isn’t really his fault. Natural law is a silly concept, and it’s often times just a cudgel used by conservatives to deny the rights claims of minorities. But anyway, here’s George:

Opponents of racist laws in Loving did not question the idea, deeply embodied in our law and its shaping philosophical tradition, of marriage as a union that takes its distinctive character from being founded, unlike other friendships, on bodily unity of the kind that sometimes generates new life. This unity is why marriage, in our legal tradition, is consummated only by acts that are generative in kind. Such acts unite husband and wife at the most fundamental level and thus legally consummate marriage whether or not they are generative in effect, and even when conception is not sought.

What makes George’s natural law argument better than most is that he points out how our current legal understanding of marriage is premised on some sort of possibly procreative sexual union between the two opposite-sex people. But this only gets you so far. All he’s established is that the institution of marriage... formally, embeds some assumptions about the gender and behavior of the couples. What George can’t prove is whether this set up currently meaningful or if it’s in accordance with our ideas of justice. Historians and social scientists who actually study the empirical reality of what marriage is today don’t agree with George. Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson... characterize modern marriage as “hedonic marriage.”... [T]he language and formal institution of marriage may not have catched up with the changes we’ve seen since, say, the 1960s, but those changes are real.... [A]side from any flaws in George’s description of how marriage actually works... there is the sheer lack of recognition of how gays are disadvantaged because of their sexuality by not allowing them to marry. As Jon Chait pointed out, conservative arguments about social policy tend to absolutely ignore the welfare of gay citizens, and instead make tendentious or speculative arguments about why affording them equal rights willhurt everyone or will irrevocably damage our institutions. This seems like the insurmountable challenge for opponents of gay marriage. The institution has already changed into one that is no longer based around procreation. Also, we are approaching a societal consensus that discriminating against gay people just because of they’re sexuality is bigoted and wrong. Lots of gay people want to get married and abide by the standards, rules, regulations and expectations of married people. So, it’s going to take a lot more than a legalistic, nostalgic definition of marriage combined with a slippery slope argument about polyamory to deny a strong claim from fairness and equality about why a group of people should enjoy some rather basic rights...

I say cut the Gordian knot. THERE ARE NO ATTRACTIVE MODERN SOCIAL CONSERVATIVES BECAUSE SOCIAL CONSERVATISM SIMPLY IS NOT ATTRACTIVE. DEAL WITH IT!!

You can see this most clearly if you take a close look at Edmund Burke and realize that Burke is by no means a social conservative. Burke does not think that Tradition is to be Respected; he thinks good traditions should be respected. When Edmund Burke argues that Britons should respect the tradition of English liberty they have inherited from the Ancestors, it is because in this particular case Burke thinks that the Ancestors--not his personal ancestors, note--were wise. Whenever Burke thought that the inherited political traditions were not wise, the fact that they were the inherited Wisdom of the Ancestors cut no ice. In Reflections, Burke doesn't argue that Frenchmen should build on their own political traditions--the traditions of Richelieu and Louis XIV, that is. He argues--well, let's let him talk:

Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France: You [in France] might, if you pleased, have... given to your recovered freedom... dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your constitution... suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls, and in all the foundations, of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. ... In your old [E]states [General]... you had all that combination, and all that opposition of interests, you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe.... You had all these advantages in your antient [E]states [General].... If the last generations of your country appeared without much lustre in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors.... Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves.... [Y]ou would not have been content to be represented as a gang of Maroon slaves, suddenly broke loose from the house of bondage.... Would it not... have been wiser to have you thought... a generous and gallant nation, long misled... by... fidelity, honour, and loyalty... that you were not enslaved through any illiberal or servile disposition... [but] by a principle of public spirit, and that it was your country you worshipped, in the person of your king?...

Burke's argument is not that France in 1789 should have followed its traditions. Burke's argument is that France in 1789 should have dug into its past until it found a moment when institutions were good, and drawn upon that usable past in order to buttress the present revolutionary moment. This isn't an intellectual argument about how to decide what institutions are good. It is a practical-political argument about how to create good institutions and then buttress and secure them by making them facts on the ground.

What are good institutions? Burke is close to Madison: checks-and-balances, separation of powers, rights of the subject, limitations on the state. Burke's views on what good institutions are Enlightenment views--that branch of the Enlightenment that took people as they are and politics as a science, that is, rather than the branch that took people as Rousseau hoped they might someday be and politics as the striking of an oppositional pose. Because he finds that the English past is usable as a support for his Enlightenment-driven views, Burke makes conservative arguments in Reflections. But whenever conservative arguments lead where Burke doesn't want to go--to Richelieu or Louis XIV or the plunder of Ireland or the Star Chamber or Warren Hastings or imperial centralization--Burke doesn't make them. For Burke, conservatism is a sometimes useful rhetorical weapon, not a principle.

Someone Is Saying Something Wrong on the Internet (Special McMegan Edition)

Congratulations to the bride-to-be, and the groom-to-be, and to their currently-unconceived issue-to-be (if any).

But...

McMegan:

Why I Oppose National Health Care: Look at the uptick in stories on obesity in the context of health care reform.  Fat people are a problem!  They're killing themselves, and our budget!  We must stop them!  And what if people won't do it voluntarily?  Because let's face it, so far, they won't. Making information, or fresh vegetables, available, hasn't worked--every intervention you can imagine on the voluntary front, and several involuntary ones, has already been tried either in supermarkets or public schools. Americans are getting fat because they're eating fattening foods, and not exercising. How far are we willing to go beyond calorie labelling on menus to get people to slim down? These aren't just a way to save on health care; they're a way to extend and expand the cultural hegemony of wealthy white elites. No, seriously.  Living a fit, active life is correlated with being healthier. But then, as an economist recently pointed out to me, so is being religious, being married, and living in a small town; how come we don't have any programs to promote these "healthy lifestyles"?...

And she quotes Paul Campos:

America's Moral Panic Over Obesity - Megan McArdle: There is literally not a shred of evidence that turning fat people into thin people improves their health. And the reason there's no evidence is that there's no way to do it...

Four comments:

(1) Both Paul Campos and Megan McArdle appear to have missed the point by several quadrants. We have managed to turn thin people into fat people--a great many Americans today who are fat would be thin if they had lived forty years earlier in the America-that-was a generation ago. Surely if we can do this, we can undo it?

(2) Both Paul Campos and Megan McArdle appear to have missed the point by several quadrants. Changing sedentary, high-cholesterol, high blood pressure, high blood sugar fat people into more active, low-cholesteral, normal blood pressure, normal blood sugar fat people certainly does improve their health.

The governor of California is incompetent at budgeting, but these words of his are well worth listening to:

This exercise is extremely effective for your lats[issimi dorsi] and your upper back. Stand with your feet on either side of an open door and grasp the doorknobs with both hands. Slowly sink away from the door so that your back jackknifes and your arms extend fully and lock. Now pull yourself back up to the starting position. Let your arms, not your legs, complete the motion. I will count out thirty repetitions. Beginners should do 10, intermediates 20, and advanced the full amount. LET'S DO IT! 1... 2... 3... 4, AND STRETCH YOUR BACK!... 5... 6... 7, DON'T USE YOUR LEGS!... 8... 9... 10... 11... 12... 13... 14... 15... 16, JUST USE YOUR ARMS!... 17... 18... 19... 20... 1... 2... 3, CONCENTRATE ON YOUR BACK!!... 4... 5... 6... 7, THREE MORE!... 8... 9, AND NOT LAST ONE!... 30... WE'RE DOING FIVE MORE!!... 31, 32... HA! HA!... 33, 34, 35. Next we have in our program a wonderful leg exercise, the lunges. This exercise develops the front part of your thighs...

(3) And we do have a great many programs and cultural norms to promote these alternative healthy lifestyles. As maureendowdsfriendwhoneverwantsanycredit@gmail.com emails:

Um, we do have public policies and programs that... subsidize or incentivize religion (nonprofit status of religious orgs, tax deductions for charitable contributions, various exemptions and civil rights protections for religious folk, release policies for religious instruction, etc.); being married (various legal benefits/protections connected to marriage, tax benefits for some people, and of course the government has actually spent money on programs explicitly promoting marriage!), and living in small towns (the U.S. Postal service, overinvestment in roads). In contrast, we have lots and lots of policies that incentivize or subsidize unhealthy food choices and not exercise and the measly policy efforts to encourage healthy eating and exercise don't hold a candle to those...

(4) The argument that "Obamacare is bad because it will oppress fat people" is... ummm... opportunistic. As maureendowdsotherfriendwhoneverwantsanycredit@gmail.com emails

We should just be clear that the embrace of this argument is 100 percent opportunistic. If the current political conversation were heading in a different direction, she'd be posting about how health reform will never save money and the real issue is that Americans are too fat. People may recall this argument from such events as "every time liberals point out that life expectancy is higher in Europe notwithstanding our allegedly better health care system."

Hoisted from Comments: How Rich Is Fitzwilliam Darcy?: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations: Number 16: How Rich Is Fitzwilliam Darcy?: The mother of the bride-to-be says:

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, Chapter XVII of Volume III (Chap. 59): Good gracious! Lord bless me! only think! dear me! Mr. Darcy! Who would have thought it! And is it really true? Oh! my sweetest Lizzy! how rich and how great you will be! What pin-money, what jewels, what carriages you will have! Jane's is nothing to it -- nothing at all. I am so pleased -- so happy. Such a charming man! -- so handsome! so tall! -- Oh, my dear Lizzy! pray apologise for my having disliked him so much before. I hope he will overlook it. Dear, dear Lizzy. A house in town! Every thing that is charming! Three daughters married! Ten thousand a year! Oh, Lord! What will become of me. I shall go distracted.... My dearest child.... I can think of nothing else! Ten thousand a year, and very likely more! 'Tis as good as a Lord! And a special licence. You must and shall be married by a special licence. But my dearest love, tell me what dish Mr. Darcy is particularly fond of, that I may have it tomorrow.

So how rich is Fitzwilliam Darcy, anyway? What does ten thousand (pounds) a year in the aftermath of the Napoleonic War mean, really?

I have two answers, the first of which is $300,000 a year, and the second of which is $6,000,000 a year.

Consider it first in relative income terms. Output per capita--annual GDP in America today divided by the number of people in America--is valued at some $36,000. Our crude estimates tell us that output per capita in Britain just after the Napoleonic Wars was valued at some 60 pound sterling a year.

Thus in relative income terms--relative to the average of disposable incomes in his society--Fitzwilliam Darcy's 10,000 pounds a year of disposable income gave him about the same multiple of average income in his society as an annual disposable income of $6,000,000 a year would give someone in our society.

On the other hand, my guess is that someone today with a disposable income of $300,000 a year can spend it to get the same or higher utility as Fitzwilliam Darcy could by spending his disposable income of 10,000 pounds a year. This is a guess--a guess that our material standard of living today is some twenty times that of Mr. Darcy's England.

Nevertheless, it is an informed guess. By our standards, early nineteenth century Britain was desperately poor. Moreover, things are made much more complex by the fact that there are lots of things we take for granted--and that are for us trivially cheap--that Fitzwilliam Darcy could not get at any price. Consider that Nathan Meyer Rothschild, richest (non-royal) man in the world in the first half of the nineteenth century, died in his fifties of an infected abscess that the medicine of the day had no way to treat.

My Day: Magister Ludi, or From Econ 115 to Tesla to Gernsback to "The Skylark of Space" to Oliver Wendell Holmes...

My day starts with the fall course: Econ 115, Twentieth Century Economic History. The question is how to teach the acceleration of global and North Atlantic economic growth around 1870. Before 1870 the capital- and resource-corrected efficiency of labor in the North Atlantic region looks to have grown by only some 0.4% per year--a pace at which it would take 180 years for the efficiency of labor to double. America supports real income growth of some 1.0% per year before 1870 only by conquering and expanding across the continent, greatly increasing the stock of natural resources the economy has at its disposal faster than its population grows.

Then around 1870 the frontier closes: natural resources per capita begin to fall. But real income growth does not fall: it doubles. Post-1870 real income growth is driven by (a) much faster increases in the efficiency of labor, and (b) capital deepening made possible by inventions that cheapen old and make possible the production of an entirely new range of capital goods. And both of these processes are in turn driven by (a) the application of science to technology, and (b) the scent of profit in the nostrils of financiers and entrepreneurs opened up by the possibility of applying science-based technologies to make both old goods (i.e., dyestuffs, steel, etc.) and new goods (electric lights, airplanes, etc.).

And I decide that the right way to teach this is to make them wake up by telling them about the life of autism-spectrum genius inventor Nikola Tesla, known for, according to Wikipedia: the Tesla turbine, teleforce, Tesla's oscillator, Tesla electric car, the Tesla principle, Tesla's egg of Columbus, Alternating current, Tesla's AC induction motor, the rotating magnetic field, wireless beamed-power technology, particle-beam weapons, death rays, terrestrial standing waves, the bifilar coil, telegeodynamics, and electrogravitics; recipient of the Elliott Cresson Medal (1893), the Edison Medal (1916), and the John Scott Medal (1934).[1]

Tesla then leads me to Tesla's autobiography, My Inventions, published in 1919 in Electrical Experimenter magazine, which was then edited by... science-fiction genre founder Hugo Gernsback, after whom science fiction's Hugo awards are named, who later edited Amazing Stories.

And so I found myself at the gym reading not David Wessel's In Fed We Trust nor Thomas Levenson's Newton and the Counterfeiter nor Gillian Tett's Fool's Gold nor Tyler Cowen's Create Your Own Economy nor Rafael Yglesias's A Happy Marriage but instead a book I last read when I was twelve: E.E. Smith's The Skylark of Space, written in 1915-1921 and published in 1928 in Gernsback's Amazing Stories--and then compounding the offense with Spacehounds of IPC.

Seven things strike me about E.E. Smith and Skylark:

• The hero is a chemist--admittedly, a chemist who liberates "intra-atomic energy" through some bizarre catalytic process and then directs the energy via electromagnetic and other etheric disturbances (weak? strong? whatever extension to the standard model produces proton decay?), but a chemist.
• The villains are big business--"World" Steel--and the effete wealthy financial WASP establishment--"Brookings"[2] (plus the adversarial Nietzschean chemist-uebermensch).
• The adversarial Nietzschean chemist-uebermensch--Marc DuQuesne--will steal, will kill, will kidnap, but he will not lie: his word is good. Moreover, he will not engage in preemptive violence: he will not kill you on general principles simply because you might be an obstacle later, because he is always sure that he could deal with you if it were to become necessary.
• A "computer" is not a machine but rather a human job description.
• Smith doesn't understand special relativity at all.
• The casual genocide--alien women and children (or perhaps I should say "brooders" and "younglings") are exterminated by the billions without anyone batting an eyelash.
• The casual eugenics--evolution as directed toward greater scientific nerdity (but it is a very buff scientific nerdity)[3] and intelligence, this directed evolution as desired by the First Cause or as the point of it all, and the duty to assist in the improvement of the species (or perhaps specieses).

And this then led me to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Buck v. Bell (1927):

Carrie Buck is a feeble-minded white woman who was committed to the State Colony.... She is the daughter of a feeble-minded mother... and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child.... An Act of Virginia, approved March 20, 1924, recites that the health of the patient and the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental defectives....

The attack is not upon the procedure [i.e., due process] but upon the substantive law.... We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson. v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Just as young men can be drafted and compelled to give their lives for the health of the state (or is it the volk?) in war, so feeble-minded women can be drafted and compelled to give their fertility for the improvement of the genome.

Let me say that this is a case where I suspect that a wise Latina justice might have been more able to consider the proper equities than Justice Holmes was.

And let me say that if we are going to play at genetics and eugenics it should be done not by a literary-intellectual judge but by a real live professional scientist, like Arianne Emory I:

[A]bsolutely essential... are adequately diverse [human] genepools.... We do not create Thetas because we want cheap labor. We create Thetas because they are an essential and important part of human alternatives. The ThR-23 hand-eye coordination, for instance, is exceptional. Their psychset lets them operate very well in environments in which... geniuses would assuredly fail. They are tough, ser, in ways I find thoroughly admirable, and I recommend you, if you ever find yourself in a difficult [wilderness] situation... hope your companion is a ThR... who will survive, ser, to perpetuate his type, even if you do not...[4]

Unfortunately, I only have half an hour of lecture--1/6 of one week--to talk about Tesla and company this fall--and I now easily have enough material outlined that I could now lecture for three weeks on science, invention, technology, popular culture, eugenics, and the idea of progress at the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries. God knows if I will ever teach it or write it up--or if anybody would be interested if I did...

---

[1] When Tesla died in 1943, an old man living on charity in the New Yorker Hotel and talking to pigeons, Wikipedia claims that FBI head J. Edgar Hoover seized his property and turned it over to the government's Alien Property Custodian (despite the fact that Tesla had been a citizen for 51 yeara) while the FBI searched frantically for a working model of Tesla's death ray. Six months later Chief Justice Stone of the Supreme Court ruled that Tesla's beamed-power patent of 1897 incidently invalidated Marconi's later radio patents, and so the U.S. Navy did not have to pay for using Marconi-designed radio equipment. (Marconi's patent by then had a company, and lawyers. Tesla's patent did not.)

[2] To name your chief villain "Brookings" and have him reside in Washington DC in a book written over 1915-1921--when Robert S. Brookings is one of the U.S. economy's wartime central planners on the War Industries Board, is Chair of the Board of Directors of Washington University (St. Louis), and founding the three organizations that are going to become the Brookings Institution (the Institute for Government Research, the Institute of Economics and the Brookings graduate school) and is bankrolling Harold Moulton who is drafting legislation to create the Budget Bureau (now OMB)--is perilously close to libel before the Supreme Court changes the law in New York Times v. Sullivan.

[3] I.e., the Hero and the Ingenue in Spacehounds of IPC:

"Well, you've seen it, Miss Newton," Stevens said regretfully, as he led her toward the captain's office. "The lower half is full of heavy stuff—accumulators, machinery, driving projectors, and such junk, so that the center of gravity is below the center of action of the driving projectors. That makes stable flight possible. It's all more or less like what we've just seen, and I don't suppose you want to miss the dance—anyway, a lot of people want to dance with you."

"Wouldn't you just as soon show me through the lower half as dance?"

"Rather, lots!"

"So would I. I can dance any time, and I want to see everything. Let's go!"

Down they went, past battery after battery of accumulators; climbing over and around the ever-increasing number of huge steel girders and bracers; through mazes of heavily insulated wiring and conduits; past mass after mass of automatic machinery which Stevens explained to his eager listener. They inspected one of the great driving projectors, which, built rigidly parallel to the axis of the ship and held immovably in place by enormous trusses of steel, revealed neither to the eye nor to the ear any sign of the terrific force it was exerting. Still lower they went, until the girl had been shown everything, even down to the bottom ultra-lights and stern braces.

"Tired?" Stevens asked, as the inspection was completed.

"Not very. It's been quite a climb, but I've had a wonderful time."

[...]

"I think it's all perfectly wonderful!" she breathed. "Just think of traveling in comfort through empty space, and of actually seeing through seamless steel walls, without even a sign of a window! How can such things be possible?"

"I'll have to go pretty well back," he warned, "and any adequate explanation is bound to be fairly deep wading in spots. How technical can you stand it?"

"I can go down with you middling deep—I took a lot of general science, and physics through advanced mechanics. Of course, I didn't get into any such highly specialized stuff as sub-electronics or Roeser's Rays, but if you start drowning me, I'll yell."

"That's fine—you can get the idea all x, with that to go on. Let's sit down here on this girder. Roeser didn't do it all, by any means, even though he got credit for it—he merely helped the Martians do it. The whole thing started, of course, when Goddard shot his first rocket to the moon, and was intensified when Roeser so perfected his short waves that signals were exchanged with Mars—signals that neither side could make any sense out of. Goddard's pupils and followers made bigger and better rockets, and finally got one that could land safely upon Mars. Roeser, who was a mighty keen bird, was one of the first voyagers, and he didn't come back—he stayed there, living in a space-suit for three or four years, and got a brand-new education. Martian science always was hot, you know, but they were impractical. They were desperately hard up for water and air, and while they had a lot of wonderful ideas and theories, they couldn't overcome the practical technical difficulties in the way of making their ideas work. Now putting other peoples' ideas to work was Roeser's long suit—don't think that I'm belittling Roeser at all, either, for he was a brave and far-sighted man, was no mean scientist, and was certainly one of the best organizers and synchronizers the world has ever known—and since Martian and Tellurian science complemented each other, so that one filled in the gaps of the other, it wasn't long until fleets of space-freighters were bringing in air and water from Venus, which had more of both than she needed or wanted.

"Having done all he could for the Martians and having learned most of the stuff he wanted to know, Roeser came back to Tellus and organized Interplanetary, with scientists and engineers on all three planets, and set to work to improve the whole system, for the vessels they used then were dangerous—regular mankillers, in fact. At about this same time Roeser and the Interplanetary Corporation had a big part in the unification of the world into one nation, so that wars could no longer interfere with progress."

"WITH this introduction I can get down to fundamentals. Molecules are particles of the first order, and vibrations of the first order include sound, light, heat, electricity, radio, and so on. Second order, atoms—extremely short vibrations, such as hard X-rays. Third order, electrons and protons, with their accompanying Millikan, or cosmic, rays. Fourth order, sub-electrons and sub-protons. These, in the material aspect, are supposed to be the particles of the fourth order, and in the energy aspect they are known as Roeser's Rays. That is, these fourth-order rays and particles seem to partake of the nature of both energy and matter. Following me?"

"Right behind you," she assured him. She had been listening intently, her wide-spaced brown eyes fastened upon his face.

"Since these Roeser's Rays, or particles or rays of the fourth order, seem to be both matter and energy, and since the rays can be converted into what is supposed to be the particles, they have been thought to be the things from which both electrons and protons were built. Therefore, everybody except Norman Brandon has supposed them the ultimate units of creation, so that it would be useless to try to go any further...."

"Why, we were taught that they are the ultimate units!" she protested.

"I know you were—but we really don't know anything, except what we have learned empirically, even about our driving forces. What is called the fourth-order particle is absolutely unknown, since nobody has been able to detect it, to say nothing of determining its velocity or other properties. It has been assumed to have the velocity of light only because that hypothesis does not conflict with observational data. I'm going to give you the generally accepted idea, since we have nothing definite to offer in its place, but I warn you that that idea is very probably wrong. There's a lot of deep stuff down there hasn't been dug up yet. In fact, Brandon thinks that the product of conversion isn't what we think it is, at all—that the actual fundamental unit and the primary mechanism of the transformation lie somewhere below the fourth order, and possibly even below the level of the ether—but we haven't been able to find a point of attack yet that will let us get in anywhere. However, I'm getting 'way ahead of our subject. To get back to it, energy can be converted into something that acts like matter through Roeser's Rays, and that is the empirical fact underlying the drive of our space-ships, as well as that of almost all other vehicles on all three planets. Power is generated by the great waterfalls of Tellus and Venus—water's mighty scarce on Mars, of course, so most of our plants there use fuel—and is transmitted on light beams, by means of powerful fields of force to the receptors, wherever they may be. The individual transmitting fields and receptors are really simply matched-frequency units, each matching the electrical characteristics of some particular and unique beam of force. This beam is composed of Roeser's Rays, in their energy aspect. It took a long time to work out this tight-beam transmission of power, but it was fairly simple after they got it."

He took out a voluminous notebook, at the sight of which Nadia smiled.

"A computer might forget to dress, but you'd never catch one without a full magazine pencil and a lot of blank paper," he grinned in reply and went on, writing as he talked.

"For any given frequency, f, and phase angle, theta, you integrate, between limits zero and pi divided by two, sine theta d...."

[4]The implications of the fact that Arianne Emory I is probably lying to some degree when she says that Union "do[es] not create Thetas because we want cheap labor. We create Thetas because they are an essential and important part of human alternatives..." is left as an exercise for the reader.

Education and Equal Opportunity

He writes, in the FT:

The mobile society stalls at the gates of academe: Making it has been the American dream for two centuries. Horatio Alger, who died 110 years ago this month, wrote dozens of hugely popular novels (Struggling Upward, Strive and Succeed) that imprinted the aspiration on millions of minds. In their pages boys would rise from poverty to the middle class, often through the kindly intercession of older men but always with a display of grit. The theme spanned the 19th-century Atlantic: Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) promoted the theme of social advancement through individual striving in Self Help (1859) and other works. The career of his fellow Scot Andrew Carnegie, moving from real childhood rags to world-beating riches in early middle age, gave foundation to such exhortations.

But where the myth had reality, it now has less. Recent studies show that the US is near the top, and the UK in the upper levels, of the league of developed states in which the poor do not or cannot help themselves to rise. One much quoted study notes that “the idea of the US as ‘the land of opportunity’ persists; and clearly seems misplaced”.

Why? Education is at the root. In the land of opportunity, the immigrants of the 19th and early 20th century could rise – or at least their families could – with the burgeoning industrial economy. In 1914, Ford’s workers were three-quarters foreign-born, and their jobs did become as solid and middle-class as Alger imagined – if more through militant unions than kindly benefactors. Now, the good jobs need at least one college degree: a PhD is no longer synonymous with genteel scholarly shabbiness but can be leveraged into great wealth, personal and corporate.

George Borjas, the economist, reckons that where children of immigrant parents had, for much of the last century, easily surpassed the earnings of their fathers and mothers, they now more often stick at the same level. Because US immigrants are disproportionately little-educated Mexicans, and because they tend to stay in Hispanic enclaves, their ability and willingness to mount the academic ladder is limited. The lesson travels: acculturation to norms of ambition, improvement through education and willingness to integrate into the broader society (which means a loss of distinct identity) are good ideas for social mobility in all societies. Insofar as some communities – including indigenous working-class communities – wish to emphasise their difference, their place on the lower rungs of class society will remain.

Thus, curiously, the university becomes an ambiguous social factor. The more education it confers, the better the possibility for advancement up through the classes. But it also functions as a filter: the professions, and higher earnings, are now so routinely associated with the degrees it gives that those without its benison find the career and class bonds tighter than ever.... This week’s British Cabinet Office report on access to the professions presents the narrowing of access in stark terms, forecasting a kind of caste society in which professionals are drawn largely from the 30 per cent of the most highly educated (and higher social classes) of the population. This is true of all professions in wealthy countries – even as they have recruited more women, as the gender pay gap has fallen and as minority groups have seen their representation in the professions rise....

[I]ndividual and family mobility – another irony – seems better served in states with a strong social democratic tradition. In the Scandinavian countries, Denmark in particular, movement up (and down) is better lubricated. One cannot have everything. The international tables of top universities are dominated by the US and the UK, which cater for global as well as their own elites. Hard-driving and expensive private schools are embedded in the Anglo-American social fabrics; the Cabinet Office report shows that some professions – such as the judiciary and journalism – are at the higher levels dominated by their products. When this writer began in a provincial newsroom, he was one of two graduates; the route to national glory could still be trod by a school leaver with shorthand and sharp elbows. Now, it would be far more difficult....

[P]arents who push for entry to better schools, or better schooling in the one they get, are the real motor forces of a dynamic society. The antidote to social ossification would thus seem to be a new kind of class struggle, a storming of the frozen winter palaces that tutor and employ our increasingly entrenched elites.

[1] "Intergenerational mobility in Europe and North America": Blanden, Gregg and Machin (LSE, 2005)

Three preliminary points:

• First, although the myth of upward relative mobility through luck and pluck did have some reality, it never had much.

• Second, very few Ph.D.'s can be "leveraged into great wealth, personal and corporate"--engineering and biotech and finance only, and not all of engineering and biotech and finance. For the overwhelming majority, Ph.D.s are still "synonymous with genteel scholarly shabbiness": don't get a Ph.D. if you aren't driven to spend your life telling people what you know and trying to learn more--it will be ta mistake.

• Third, Borjas's findings about income across the generations are mostly due to the stagnation society-wide of all incomes in America save those of the very top of the income distribution; I have seen no evidence that little-educated Mexican-Americans are following any different a path from the one that little-educated Slovak-Americans or Polish-Americans or Greek-Americans or Italian-Americans or Chinese-Americans of a century ago--and the incomes of little-educated Mexican-Americans today are definitely converging to the English-speaking norm much faster than did the incomes of little-educated ex-slave African-Americans of a century and a half ago.

And two main points:

• First, the more unequal a society is in an "inequality of result" sense, the more important is equality of opportunity--the greater is the injustice done by the deprivation of equality of opportunity--and the harder it is to attain equality of opportunity as parents of greater relative wealth and status have more social power to deploy to gain an edge for their children. It is no mystery, no surprise, and no irony at all that intergenerational social mobility is greater in countries with a strong social-democratic tradition.

• Second, it is very difficult to have a great deal of power in this society if you are not exquisitely well-prepared to compete when you are 25--which requires that you have or be able to rapidly acquire patrons and that you went to and took advantage of a good college or did something else functionally equivalent, which requires that you applied yourself in high school, which is very hard to do unless you got a solid foundation in terms of basic skills and study habits in elementary school. This means that (i) people who are scared off from going to college because of the debt it incurs have a very small shot at large amounts of upward mobility, and (ii) the decisions people make when they are seven about how to spend their time shape their lives for the next seventy years. In even a half-good society, one should not be able--it should not be the rule--that one can greatly narrow the possibilities for one's life by what one does or fails to do at seven.

I am still not sure whether my beliefs that in a good society higher education--indeed, all education--is free to the students and that elementary-school teaching is a very high-status profession reflect my own biases produced by my own position within this society or whether my beliefs are a rational assessment of reality, but it is worth thinking about...

Leszek Kolakowski, R.I.P.

Jeet Heer emails:

How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist

by Leszek Kolakowski.

Motto: "please step forward to the rear!" This is an approximate translation of a request i once heard on a tram-car in Warsaw. I propose it as a slogan for the mighty International that will never exist.

A conservative believes:

1. That in human life there never have been and never will be improvements that are not paid for with deteriorations and evils; thus, in considering each project of reform and amelioration, its price has to be assessed. Put another way, innumerable evils are compatible (i.e. we can suffer them comprehensively and simultaneously); but many goods limit or cancel each other, and therefore we will never enjoy them fully at the same time. A society in which there is no equality and no liberty of any kind is perfectly possible, yet a social order combining total equality and freedom is not. The same applies to the compatibility of planning and the principle of autonomy, to security and technical progress. Put yet another way, there is no happy ending in human history.

2. That we do not know the extent to which various traditional forms of social life--families, rituals, nations, religious communities--are indispensable if life in a society is to be tolerable or even possible. There are no grounds for believing that when we destroy these forms, or brand them as irrational, we increase the chance of happiness, peace, security, or freedom. We have no certain knowledge of what might occur if, for example, the monogamous family was abrogated, or if the time-honored custom of burying the dead were to give way to the rational recycling of corpses for industrial purposes. But we would do well to expect the worst.

3. That the idee fixe of the enlightenment--that envy, vanity, greed, and aggression are all caused by the deficiencies of social institutions and that they will be swept away once these institutions are reformed--is not only utterly incredible and contrary to all experience, but is highly dangerous. How on earth did all these institutions arise if they were so contrary to the true nature of man? To hope that we can institutionalize brotherhood, love, and altruism is already to have a reliable blueprint for despotism.

A liberal believes:

1. That the ancient idea that the purpose of the state is security still remains valid. It remains valid even if the notion of "security" is expanded to include not only the protection of persons and property by means of the law, but also various provisions of insurance: that people should not starve if they are jobless; that the poor should not be condemned to die through lack of medical help; that children should have free access to education--all these are also part of security. Yet security should never be confused with liberty. The state does not guarantee freedom by action and by regulating various areas of life, but by doing nothing. In fact security can be expanded only at the expense of liberty. In any event, to make people happy is not the function of the state.

2. That human communities are threatened not only by stagnation but also by degradation when they are so organized that there is no longer room for individual initiative and inventiveness. The collective suicide of mankind is conceivable, but a permanent human ant-heap is not, for the simple reason that we are not ants.

3. That it is highly improbable that a society in which all forms of competitiveness have been done away with would continue to have the necessary stimuli for creativity and progress. More equaliity is not an end in itself, but only a means. In other words, there is no point to the struggle for more equality if it results only in the leveling down off those who are better off, and not in the raising up of the underprivileged. Perfect equality is a self-defeating ideal.

A socialist believes:

1. Yhat societies in which the pursuit of profit is the sole regulator of the productive system are threatened with as grievous--perhaps more grievous--catastrophes as are societies in which the profit motive has been entirely eliminated from the production-regulating forces. There are good reasons why freedom of economic activity should be limited for the sake of security, and why money should not automatically produce more money. But the limitation of freedom should be called precisely that, and should not be called a higher form of freedom.

2. That it is absurd and hypocritical to conclude that, simply because a perfect, conflictless society is impossible, every existing form of inequality is inevitable and all ways of profit-making justified. The kind of conservative anthropological pessimism which led to the astonishing belief that a progressive income tax was an inhuman abomination is just as suspect as the kind of historical optimism on which the Gulag Archipelago was based.

3. That the tendency to subject the economy to important social controls should be encouraged, even though the price to be paid is an increase in bureaucracy. Such controls, however, must be exercised within representative democracy. Thus it is essential to plan institutions that counteract the menace to freedom which is produced by the growth of these very controls.

So far as i can see, this set of regulative ideas is not self- contradictory. and therefore it is possible to be a conservative- liberal-socialist. This is equivalent to saying that those three particular designations are no longer mutually exclusive options.

As for the great and powerful International which I mentioned at the outset--it will never exist, because it cannot promise people that they will be happy.

Robert Waldmann Has an Interpretation of Karl Marx that Is New to Me...

I would not have thought it was possible.

Robert Waldmann has an interpretation of Karl Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Program" that I had never seen before.

Robert argues that the correct interpretation of Marx's phrase "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," in context, is this Shorter Critique of the Gotha Program:

We socialists cannot now--and probably never will--inscribe on our banners the wacka-wacka primitive Christian slogan "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." And the Lasalleans are really stupid for thinking that we can and should...

I agree with Robert at least to the extent of: Shorter Critique of the Gotha Program:

We socialists cannot now inscribe on our banners the slogan "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." And the Lasalleans are really stupid for thinking that we can and should...

But Robert goes further, to a place where I do not think I can follow. The question is whether Marx is serious or sneering when he writes:

Critique of the Gotha Program: In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly--only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!...

He might be dead serious and really looking forward someday to the attainment of such a "higher phase of communist society"--but someday, and not now. Or he might (as Robert thinks) merely be making a nasty little inside joke: sneering that the "higher phase of communist society" in which the Lasallean program would be attainable is nothing but the millennium of Christian fellowship, as described in "Acts of the Apostles"--which is where the phrases:

Acts 11:29: "Then the disciples, every man according to his ability, determined to send relief unto the brethren which dwelt in Judaea..." ("τῶν δὲ μαθητῶν καθὼς εὐπορεῖτό τις ὥρισαν ἕκαστος αὐτῶν εἰς διακονίαν πέμψαι τοῖς κατοικοῦσιν ἐν τῇ Ἰουδαίᾳ ἀδελφοῖς...")

and:

Acts 4:35: "And laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need..." ("καὶ ἐτίθουν παρὰ τοὺς πόδας τῶν ἀποστόλων· διεδίδετο δὲ ἑκάστῳ καθότι ἄν τις χρείαν εἶχεν...")

come from.

I tend to read Marx as a Christian heretic--as writing in an eschatological mode in which the time when "labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly" is exactly as real and near to him as the expectation of Paul of Tarsus that someday soon: "we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord..." (1 Thess. 4:17).

Robert disagrees, and hears a sneer whenever Marx says "come the Millennium" that I cannot...

---

Robert:

The Critique of the Golgotha Program: Marx famously declared "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." This is... the grossest distortion of a quote by removal of context.... The words are (a translation from German) of two prepositional phrases from a sentence from The Critique of the Gotha program (the absence of a verb is a hint that maybe some relevant context may have been removed).... A more accurate but still partial quotation (of a translation) is

not... inscribe on our banner "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs"...

[T]here ought to be an absolute rule that while many words can be decently elided... "not" is not one of them.... The full (translation of) the quote is, IIRC:

It is not until work ceases to be a burden on life and becomes it's chief joy and purpose that we can inscribe on our banner "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"...

Marx believed... "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" to the same extent that he was an anarchist... that is, rather less than not at all.... I think that Marx considered it a good proposal to eliminate the state and give to each according to his need to exactly the same extent that Arthur Laffer aims to increase the amount of money the federal government has to spend....

Over at the First International, Marx had a problem called Bakunin... [who] promised people no capitalists, no private property, and no state. Marx claimed that you could get everything Bakunin was promising from Marx, because in the long long long run the state would wither away....

Later Marx had this problem that his few German followers (the Eisenachers) decided to join with the Social Democrats who had the inexcusable fault of... [following] Lassalle not Karl Marx. Hence the Gotha program and its only lasting fruit "The Critique of the Gotha Program."... [T]he proposal [was] that all workers be paid the same equal wage. Marx said that was nonsense.... Only when (not if -- when) people just work out of public spirit and joy in labor can we even think about demanding perfect equality....

I don't believe Marx's promises about the withering away of the state and the joy of work (comparing our work efforts one can at least understand how Karl and I have very different views about work). I therefore interpret "The Critique of the Gotha Program as implying, in practice:

from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, starting on the first of never...

OK, so what about those Apostles?... Marx is deliberately conflating [the Gotha Program] with a much much more egalitarian and extreme program as a rhetorical trick.... [T]he man was trying to insult the united Social Democrats and Eisenachers by conflating them with a bunch of lunatic extremists -- the Christians.... he phrases which can be translated (from Greek not German) as "from each according to his ability" and "to each according to his need" and fairly quoted without distortion due to removal of context come neither from "The Critique of the Gotha Program" nor from "The Gotha Program"... but from... "The Acts of the Apostles" which, quite frankly, makes "The Communist Manifesto" look like the McCain platform (with all due respect for McCain, Marx and the Apostles).

The Bible, New King James Version

Acts 4:35: ...they distributed to each as anyone had need...

Acts 11:29: ...the apostles, each according to his ability, determined to send relief to the brethren dwelling in Judea....

[H]istory is a prankster and karma is a bitch. Driven by envy and ambition, Marx decided to claim that when it came to wages Ferdinand Lasalle was an impractical impossiblist extremist just like Simon Peter. As a result, many people have decided that Karl Marx was an impractical impossiblist extremist egalitarian just like Simon Peter. This is crazy...

American Right Wing Crashed-and-Burned Watch: Watching Sarah Palin

The Jeffersonian Democratic ideal was that the agrarian salt-of-the-earth people were virtuous, and would choose smart and virtuous men to be public servants--stewards of their interests and protectors of their government against corruption and luxury.

There is, however, one difference between the rhetoric of the Irving Kristol generation and the rhetoric of the William Kristol generation. In the Irving Kristol generation it was OK for the "gentlemen" to be hard-working or smart--it wasn't necessary, but it wasn't a positive disability.

For the William Kristol generation, however, it is. For them there are four legitimate ways to become rich and powerful:

• You can peddle influence--use your Republican political connections to enrich a company, and take a share--that's OK.
• You can inherit money--that's OK.
• You can get a job though a relative--that's OK.
• You can marry money--that's OK.

But work hard? Learn stuff? Think hard? That's not OK--that marks you as an "elitist."

Former Public Interest editor Mark Lilla: How... could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin... ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery... everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? It's a sad tale that began in the '80s, when leading conservatives... began to speak of an "adversary culture of intellectuals."... Irving Kristol... telling readers... that the "common sense" of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by "our disoriented elites," which is why "so many people--and I include myself among them--who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism."... Over the next 25 years... a new generation of conservative writers... none of their elders' intellectual virtues... no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency.... They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists.... David Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives' "disdain for liberal intellectuals" had slipped into "disdain for the educated class as a whole."... There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone.... [T]he conservative intellectual tradition is already dead...

I cannot help but think that a big role in this is played by the "neoconservative" disciples of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss, who pursued a form of intellectual politics that had three planks:

• They sought as political front-men "gentlemen" who would not understand their ideas and doctrines but who could both be persuaded to follow their lead in designing policies and could win votes from the electorate--Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin. (George H.W. Bush's and Robert Dole's and Mitt Romney's problem, from their point of view, was that they were too smart).
• The neoconservatives routinely lied to the outside world--advocated a false "exoteric teaching" that they thought would have good poitical effects.
• The neoconservatives told the truth about what they believed and thought only to themselves--and not always then, for how could you know whether you were really one of those in on the con or one of the marks and suckers (hoi polloi, outer party, et cetera) for whom the point of the con was to make you think that you were in on the con.

But the "gentlemen" were supposed to undertand at some level that they were the front men and that they did need the smart guys in the back room to do policy and design message. Dan Quayle knew that he needed William Kristol. Ronald Reagan knew that he needed James Baker. What seems to be happening now is the coming of a generation--George W. Bush and Sarah Palin come to mind--who don't seem to understand that populist exultation of the salt-of-the-earth blood-and-soil kneee-jerk reactions of the regular-buy politician is the mask rather thqn the face:

Noah Milman had something to say about Sarah Palin--and Ross Douthat, who I take to be one of Mark Lilla's big targets:

Re-Entering the Palin-Drome: As someone who was quite enthusiastic about Sarah Palin for about 30 seconds, and then walked a long way back towards disliking her intensely.... I feel a certain obligation to make three points....

Point #1: There is an assumption running through Ross’ column that Palin... might have developed into the kind of right-populist leader that the GOP really needs. That was... what I thought... before her sudden stardom: this looks like someone really promising, and... [McCain] needs to take a big risk.... But it’s not what I think now, because I’ve seen how she actually performed. Ross is perfectly willing to say that she performed poorly. He doesn’t seem to be very willing to say that her performance reflects things about her fundamental character. Why?...

Point #2: The column, and Ross’ writing about Palin generally, treats her not so much as an actual person so much as a symbol... identity politics.... I’m surprised by the degree to which movement conservative politics in this country have become entirely the politics of identity, and the Palin phenomenon is the best evidence thereof...

Point #3: Ross is critical of the idea of meritocracy.... I’m interested, though, in how Sarah Palin represented a meaningful response to that idea. Meritocracy, in practice, means the selection of the “best and the brightest” for positions of power and authority, primarily by means of testing and scholastic hoop-jumping... “Mandarins.”... [T]here are alternative roads to power and authority... work[ing] your way up slowly through an organization... nepotism... "Talents”... who distinguished themselves by achievement in an entrepreneurial fashion.... Sarah Palin would, presumably, be one of this last group. But what, exactly, is her achievement, beyond her one election to the Alaska governorship?... [W]hat exactly is the great counter-meritocratic message that Palin purportedly embodies, and that Ross wants to salvage (presumably for some future candidate) from the wreckage of her brief career on the political stage?

The point that we want a multi-dimensional meritocracy is, I think, a very good one...

When in the Course of Human Events...

Thomas Jefferson's handwriting:

Andrew Samwick Is in Despair...

Pessimism of the intellect! But optimism of the will, Andrew! I must say I want my sensible bipartisan center back, I want it back real bad.

Andrew:

Climate Vote Shows Why I Am Still a Man Without a Party: I had three reactions to yesterday's cap-and-trade vote, two of which came from The New York Times article that I read this morning and one of which came from Stan's very smart post.  Here they are:

• From the article, "Only eight Republicans voted for the bill, which runs to more than 1,300 pages."
• From the article, "The bill would grant a majority of the permits free in the early years of the program, to keep costs low."
• From Stan, "But the bigger story is that the White House once again has demonstrated an excellent ability to get Congress to go along with the things it wants."

And now let me take each one in turn.

1) From the article, "Only eight Republicans voted for the bill, which runs to more than 1,300 pages." Much as you may like the idea, this is another 1300 pages of complexity and loopholes.  Buried in there, I'll wager, are more than enough ways for large organizations (the ones who hire lobbyists) to get all the exemption and evasion they'll need.  Consider the alternative of a carbon tax calibrated to achieve the same emission reductions, and applied to all sectors including vehicle fuel consumption.  I'm no expert on translating ideas into pages of a bill, but that can't be much.  And given that it allows us to do away with the CAFE standards, I figure we've done a great service of dramatically simplifying the whole regulatory process for carbon emissions.

2) From the article, "The bill would grant a majority of the permits free in the early years of the program, to keep costs low." That's a couple of interesting pages, no?  This is the critical issue and the bill is flawed for giving into the special interests who demanded and got this giveaway.  The caps require the price to go up, much like a tax would.  Advocates of a green tax swap, like me, would like the additional revenue that consumers of carbon-intensive products pay to be returned to the private sector in a way that lowers the taxes on something desirable, like payroll.  Giving the revenue back to the producers should not be an option.

3) From Stan, "But the bigger story is that the White House once again has demonstrated an excellent ability to get Congress to go along with the things it wants." I think that this sentence -- which is a completely accurate description of the way policy gets made in Washington -- is also an indication of what's backwards about the way policy gets made in Washington.  The power in government should reside with the legislature, not the executive.  I think that much of the reason why the presidential election season has grown to its current monstrous proportions (a full two years of campaigning) is that politicians have realized that the presidency has all the power and the Congress has made itself a weak, secondary player.  I'll be a much happier citizen when Stan has occasion to write, "But the bigger story is that the Congress once again has demonstrated an excellent ability to get the White House to go along with the things it wants."

So how does all of this make me a man without a party?  On each one of these issues, my reading of the polical landscape is that the Republicans are further from the correct policy action than the Democrats. 

It's a step. It's not a big step. It's a very small step. And it's mostly in a sideways direction. But at least it is a step that is not away from where we need to be, and the hope is that having taken one step it will then be easier to take another.

But God only knows what--if anything--will come out of the Senate and conference if this is what comes out of the House.

I want my Al Gore BTU tax from 1993 back!

Hoisted from the Archives: DeLong Smackdown Watch: Henry Farrell on Brad DeLong, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, James Scott, High Modernism, Jane Jacobs, the Collectivization of Agriculture, Karl Polanyi, Rubber Tomatos, the Despised Medieval Jewish M

DeLong Smackdown Watch:: Henry Farrell writes about me, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, James Scott, High Modernism, Jane Jacobs, the collectivization of agriculture, Karl Polanyi, rubber tomatos, the despised medieval Jewish Maghribi traders, and the cheap restaurants of Florence, Italy. I am silenced: I will return to the lists to defend the rubber tomato and American Chinese food someday--but not yet.

Henry Farrell:

Crooked Timber » » DeLong, Scott and Hayek: I think that [DeLong] is fair up to a point – [James] Scott should develop his critique of bureaucratic capitalism in [Seeing Like a State] much more explicitly than he does. But I also think that doing what Brad wants him to do would have led him to write a very different book. Seeing Like a State is in large part an intervention in an internal argument within the left, arguing against the grand planners and for the Jane Jacobs types and the anarchists. Introducing a proper critique of Hayek, Mises and the rest would have greatly lessened its impact within that debate, by allowing the targets of Scott’s critique to focus on the mean things Scott would have probably said about pro-market types who they dislike, while ignoring the flights of arrows intended to pierce their own hides. I should note that I’m an unimportant member of one of the broad groups that Scott is attacking (I like and use rational choice theory; this doesn’t change the fact that Seeing Like a State is the only book in the social sciences I have read in the last ten years that made me want to write a fan letter to the author after reading it).

What Scott argues, as I understand it, is as follows: First – that processes of rationalization lead to the destruction of metis, or local knowledge if you would prefer, and the prioritization of codifiable, quantifiable, epistemic knowledge. Second, that this process involves obvious and (sometimes quite important) trade-offs, but may often be worth it – e.g. there is no point in idealizing serf-like conditions that preserve local knowledge at the expense of human freedom. Third, that the real problem is when the creation of epistemic knowledge is combined with high modernist attempts to engage in social engineering. This arrives at similar conclusions to Hayek etc about how terrible collectivization processes are, but from different premises. Specifically, what Hayek etc would see as the result of state planning, Scott sees as the result of broader forms of rationalization (hence, perhaps, the linkages to Foucault that Brad worries about) when they coincide with a certain kind of state hubris (the hubris doesn’t necessarily follow from the creation of codifiable knowledge).

Thus, I think there is a argument against the Hayekians which is not very far from the surface of Seeing Like a State and which can be drawn out quite easily. First – Scott makes it clear that the processes of market development and of state imposition of standards goes hand in hand. Brad talks about how the very first example that Scott draws on – German scientific forestry in the nineteenth century – is intended to show the failures of state planning. But as Scott makes clear, the relevant failures are driven as much by the market as by the state – Scott writes about how the “utilitarian state could not see the real, existing forest for the (commercial trees)” and about how the

forest as a habitat disappears and is replaced by the forest as an economic resource to be managed efficiently and profitably. Here, fiscal and commercial logics coincide; they are both resolutely fixed on the bottom line.

This is an important sub-theme of the book, and indeed of our understanding of how states and markets have developed hand-in-hand. Sometimes, the state has sought to impose its view for reasons of its own interest and survival (whether this be the promotion of ‘public order,’ the increase of fiscal revenues or whatever), sometimes at the behest of market actors who are interested in standardization, and sometimes for rationales that blur these two together.

Scott doesn’t draw this out as a critique of the Austrians, but it is still clear evidence of his profound difference from them. He is much more interested than they are in the actual political processes through which markets come into being. To misquote Tilly, markets make the state and the state makes markets. This is something that is touched on by the new institutional economics in its own way (cf. Doug North) but that doesn’t, to my knowledge, get any proper attention in the Hayekian or von Misean corpus. I stress the words “to my knowledge” since Hayek’s arguments on this theme are scattered across various books – but I strongly suspect that there isn’t anything that is really germane to this. More generally, I think that there’s a kind of selective blindness in the Austrian corpus to the question of exactly how active states are in constituting markets, because this would raise all sorts of awkward theoretical and political problems. Markets – even and perhaps especially Hayekian markets – don’t exist in an institutional vacuum – and the institutions on which they rely are going to shape the extent to which they succeed or fail in making use of local knowledge. In particular, markets that involve interaction between people who don’t know each other (impersonal exchange) require substitutes for personal knowledge and relationships(in the form of mutually understood standards and enforcement mechanisms).

This leads on to the second point – that a lot of what Scott argues is correct. His claim, as I read it is less about the specific problems of state-created institutions, than the ways in which a large variety of abstracting institutions or standards miss out on, and perhaps undermine important forms of local knowledge. As I understand him, any standards sufficient for impersonal exchange are likely to abstract away the actual relationships that people have with their environment. Here, Scott is less a closet-Hayekian than a more-or-less-overt Polanyian, who develops some of Polanyi’s arguments (especially his claims about the institutional consequences of long distance trade, and the economy as an instituted process) to make them sharper and more interesting.

I think that Scott’s claims are more credible than Brad suggests. Again, modern markets require long distance exchange between people who don’t know each other, and hence require impersonal forms of knowledge that are instantiated in commonly held standards of one sort or another. My favourite example of this is the Codex Alimentarius’s standard lexicon describing different stages of putrescence in fish. These standards have to substitute for more intimate and more direct forms of knowledge – large scale markets typically can’t work without them.

A good example of this is credit markets. It used to be that they depended primarily on personal knowledge of the borrower and his character (here, I’m borrowing from the work of Bruce Carruthers). Now, they depend on a variety of formal metrics, risk scores and pseudo-quantified assessments by credit rating agencies and the like. This is by no means necessarily a bad thing – it has resulted in a vast expansion of credit, and allowed many people to borrow money who couldn’t previously. But it does mean that some forms of knowledge that may have been valuable, and that were available in an era when bank managers knew all their customers personally, have been lost. It also may result in a fetishization of the quantifiable and a lack of attention to the realities underlying abstract metrics (which is arguably part of the reason for the recent crash in mortgage lending markets – the metrics that markets used were palpably insufficient to describe the underlying risks of particular complex financial instruments).

Another, more homely example is food. Brad criticizes Scott’s discussion of the much-cited tasteless tomato arguing that it are an example of market success rather than failure – people bought tasteless tomatoes because they were cheap. This seems to me to have a bit of a flavor of a revealed preferences argument, and also to miss the point. I lived in Florence for three years, a city which has cheap and delicious tomatoes, despite being some distance from the parts of Italy where tomatoes are grown. While I can’t prove it, I strongly suspect that the deliciousness of the tomatoes had a lot to do with informal relationships between the small shops where you bought the tomatoes, the small companies that delivered them, and the small farms from where they were bought. Certainly, this would be consonant with the research that I and many others have done on the Italian political economy and how it works. Italy protects small businesses and local communities in a lot of ways. This means that it misses out badly on certain economies of scale. It also means that certain kinds of high quality production are possible in Italy that are difficult or impossible to replicate elsewhere – a myriad of small firms cooperating to produce final goods through purely informal means. Hence the success, for example, of Italian sunglasses, shoes, and (the rather unglamorous topic of my own research) packaging machinery. All of these build on forms of informal knowledge that would likely be damaged in a more standard market economy, where collaboration happened (to the extent that it did), within the hierarchy of the firm, or through arms-length contracts.

Thus, there are trade-offs. Italian firms in small-firm districts are excellent at gradual innovation and refinement of knowledge – in part because of their reliance on metis. They are not so good at producing profound, industry-changing forms of innovation. They also tend to stick closer to home than their equivalents in other countries (somewhat ironically, they replicate the logic of Avner Greif’s mediaeval Maghribi merchants far more than the behaviour of his Genoese traders).

To return to the more homely example of food, Florence has an excellent restaurant culture, where you can eat out cheaply and incredibly well if you avoid the tourist traps.(1) But it systematically emphasizes local cuisine, along with a few imports from the South (pizza and pasta) and the north (some Bolognese and Milanese dishes). Chinese food in Florence is (or was when I was there) terrible, and Indian food was relatively very expensive and no better than mediocre in quality. In contrast, most US cities of my experience have a lower overall standard of food, but a much greater variety of restaurants producing different cuisines, sometimes at a quite high standard of quality (if rarely as high as in the cuisine’s home countries or regions). US cities are far more open to different kinds of food than Italian cities. I suspect that much of this can be attributed to the dominance of particular forms of local knowledge in Italy, which on the one hand preserve certain traditions of quality that would be infeasible to preserve in the US, but on the other hand make people less likely to branch out into new forms of production and consumption that don’t fit with their prior experience.

This allows me to come back to the roots of my disagreement with Brad. Brad is a fan of markets, and believes that they contribute in very important ways to human freedom. I agree with him on this. But I think that Brad sometimes underemphasizes the real trade-offs that markets may involve, and overstates his criticisms of people who are concerned with these trade-offs. Sometimes, perhaps often, these trade-offs are relatively slight – as Brad says, many forms of redundant local knowledge can be discarded without compunction. Sometimes, these trade-offs are real, but still worthwhile – while we should acknowledge the costs of markets, we should acknowledge that the benefits of introducing them are higher. And sometimes they are not worth paying – there are areas of social life where marketization has more downsides than advantages. (the question of which areas of social life fall under which category is obviously important, but this post is much too long already).

(1) I seem to remember (although I can’t find the post) Brad rudely disagreeing a couple of years ago with someone who suggested that delicious cheap food was available in European cities in a way that it wasn’t in the US, and claiming that this was an illusion of the upper middle classes who could afford to eat well anywhere, or words to that effect (my memory could be flawed, in which case I apologize in advance). For what it’s worth, as a grad student with a relatively meagre stipend in Florence, I could afford to eat out three nights a week in good restaurants.

Paul Krugman Urges Greg Mankiw to Pay More Attention to Quality Control

There are very good health economists at Harvard--Newhouse, Cutler. He doen'ty have to manufacture his opinions on health care out of faxed Republican talking points.

Paul Krugman:

Live long and prosper: Via Andrew Gelman, Greg Mankiw describes the use of international comparisons of life expectancy as part of the argument for reform as “schlocky.” Grrr. Not many serious advocates of reform use the life expectancy differences to argue that health care is clearly better in other advanced countries than it is in the United States; when it comes to care, the general assessment seems to be that it’s comparable, with no advanced country having a clear advantage. The reform argument actually goes like this:

1. Every other advanced country has universal coverage, protecting its citizens from the financial risks of uninsurance as well as ensuring that everyone gets basic care.
2. They do this while spending far less on health care than we do.
3. Yet they don’t seem to do worse in overall health results.

So Greg suggests that maybe it’s all because we have an unhealthier lifestyle — what Ezra Klein calls the well-we-eat-more-cheeseburgers argument.... [W]e’re spending 6 or 7 percent of GDP more on health care than other countries — call it a trillion dollars a year — without any clear advantage. That’s not the sort of thing you wave away with a casual suggestion that maybe we have bad habits.... [Second,] people have thought about this — and tried hard to measure it... the huge McKinsey Research Institute... tried to quantify the costs of lifestyle-related issues — and found that it didn’t explain much. Third, read Atul Gawande!

Bottom line: this is the most important domestic policy issue we face. It deserves more than casual just-so stories about how the kids American health care might, despite all appearances, be alright.

To me, the thing to note about the economists--the Mankiws, the Lucases, the Beckers, the Barros, and all the rest--who have pledged allegiance to the Republican Party this year is how much they hagve stopped thinking like economists. When an economist thinks about American health care, he or she begins with what we give up and what we get: we give up $1 trillion dollars in real resources a year relative to other countries, and we get... what?... not much. But this is not how Mankiw or Becker approach it. When an economist thinks about nominal demand, he or she thinks about (a) the money stock and (b) the determinants of velocity--the incentives people have to spend their money quickly or to tend to hoard it. But that is not how Lucas or Barro think when they claim that fiscal policy cannot affect nominal demand.

I still remember being convinced by Rick Ericson when I had just turned 18 that thinking like an economist required that one always pay attention to three key principles: market equilibrium, individuals responding to incentives, cost-benefit tradeoffs. And I remember him convincing me that if you kept those three principles in mind always you could do a much better job in understanding the world. I thought that Chicago-School economists believed in these principles too. But someone--was it Mark Lemley?--told me more recently that intellectual principles almost always weigh much less in the balance than political allegiances.

Reading C.V. Wedgewood's "William the Silent"...

And watching the remake starring Mir Hossein Moussavi...

In Which Reihan Salam Moves to a Very Bad Neighborhood Indeed

To wit:

The Agenda on National Review Online

That is all.

The Duties and Privileges of an Academic Speaker

Eszter Hargittai writes:

Clueless? Rude? Neither? Both?: [A]n incident I experienced years ago. I was surprised economists didn’t get more of a mention in the thread following John H’s post earlier given what I’ve seen in their colloquia. I have close-to no experiences in philosophy exchanges... but I’ve attended quite a few talks among economists so I’m used to their style of Q&A.... [I]t often starts a few slides in – or in some famous cases the speaker doesn’t get to proceed past the title slide for most of the time allotted – and being rather aggressive seems standard. If that’s the local norm, they are likely used to it and it doesn’t raise any eyebrows. However, what if you put such an economist in a room full of sociologists? Is it okay for him to import his style or should he take a moment to familiarize himself with the local norms?

What struck me as rather curious was the way an economist behaved during a job talk I attended in a sociology department.... The economist engaged in the usual norms for his own department’s culture: interrupting at pretty much every slide. He didn’t take any cues from the rest of the group.... [S]ociologists don’t tend to interrupt a speaker, certainly not a slide or two in, and certainly not for questions that are more than mere points of clarification.... [T]his was a job talk, which in... this particular department meant that people would... more courteous [than] usual. (Do not confuse courteous with lack of very serious and difficult questions, of course.) The audience was listening intently and the room was quiet for the most part except for the economist’s questions.... [I]t is a bit surprising that he did not pick up on the fact that his approach was not in line with local norms. Perhaps he did, but just didn’t care. I was clearly not the only one bothered by the economist’s style. The uneasiness in the room was palpable. In the end, a senior sociologist stepped in. She turned to the economist and explicitly stated that this is simply not how we do things and asked that he hold his questions until the speaker had finished his talk. You could tell that everyone (presumably other than the economist) in the room was quite relieved to have had her do this...

Eszter seems to me to be getting three things wrong:

1. Economists are used to situations in which you are supposed to be quiet until the paper-giver has finished speaking, only those are not "workshops" but rather "conference presentations." A conference presentation would, typically, have the presenter speak for 30 minutes, an assigned discussant speak for 10, the presenter respond for 5, and then 15 minutes for questions from the floor and answers by the presenter. It's not a discipline-wide norm that economists follow in workshops, but rather one specific to the format of the "workshop."

2. The difference between interrupting and non-interrupting cultures is not a simple and arbitrary choice of social norm, but instead reflects a judgment about whose words are likely to be most valuable to hear. In an "interrupting culture" the presumption is that everyone has read and thought about the paper beforehand, and that to spend half or more of the available time with the presenter simply summarizing the paper (or, worse, reading large chunks of it) is a waste of everybody's time. Much better to have people raise and argue the points that puzzled them or that they think need to be expanded at their appropriate place in the argument. Moreover, when questions are asked in non-interrupting cultures at the end of the seminar, they don't lead to any discussion: questions come in response to things the presenter said 15, 30, or 45 minutes ago, and lead to formulaic thrust-and-parry-and-end rather than any more complex discussion. Now in a conference, where the presenter and the discussant are up at front for a reason, and where many in the audience have indeed not read the paper, the noninterrupting culture format makes a certain amount of sense. But in a workshop it does not.

3. The noninterrupting culture format is, in the last analysis, one that does even the presenter no favors. It greatly diminishes the fraction of the audience that will read the paper beforehand--for everyone knows that the presenter is going to eat up the lion's share of the time going over it with everyone else sitting around like bumps on a log. A good presenter is more interested in what an intelligent and thoughtful audience thinks of his or her argument than in listening to himself or herself summarize the paper one more time. And if for some reason the presenter gets off on the wrong foot and does not make contact with the audience, then an interrupting culture gives the presenter clues that may allow him or her to adjust on the fly and reconnect. In a non-interrupting culture--no chance of that.

This last was brought home to me when I heard about a job talk in another discipline than mine at... let me call it Potlatch State University...

The young presenter was, the story goes, making an argument that the British classical economists in fact had as much of the milk of human kindness and as much of a desire to build a better world as any group--but just found themselves by their observations and by the logic of their discipline led to conclude that lots of policies that you might think of as good were in fact counterproductive. And he went through example after example, while the audience sat silently. And then he got to the end of his presentation with ten minutes left, because he had gone over. And, the story goes, one of the most senior people asked the first question, which was:

It is said that Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, was seated at High Table next to British classical economist Nassau Senior during the Irish Potato Famine. And that Jowett asked Senior how many people would die in the famine. And Senior replied: "About one million--and that is not nearly enough..."

Now if there is a better anecdote to back the claim that the British classical economists were Enemies of Humanity--shills for the ruling classes, social darwinists before Darwin, who sought to exalt the wealthy while gleefully grinding the bones of the poor into meal in the Dark Satanic Mills of the Industrial Revolution--I don't know what it is.

If this question had been raised at the start or even in the middle of the seminar, the speaker could have scrambled to recover--qnd would have had a chance of fitting that story into his broad argument. He would have said that Nassau Senior:

• believed that Irish land was good enough to support 4 million people at a reasonable standard of living, but that at the start of the Potato Famine it had 8 million.

• thought that at a population of 4 million average labor productivity in agriculture would be high enough that children could be released from farmwork to go to school, where they would learn self-respect and the fear of God, that as a result the people of Ireland would be prudent and chaste and marry relatively late, and the population would be stable and the island prosperous.

• thought, on the other hand, that at a population of 7 million average labor productivity in agriculture would be so low that children too would have to work digging potatoes and would grow up illiterate and unchurched, that not fearing God they would have sex as often and as young as possible, and that the population would then grow back to its pre-Potato Famine level of 8 million--at which Ireland was starving even when the potato harvest was good, and at which population was kept from growing further only because babies were so malnourished that their immune systems were compromised and women so thin that they stopped ovulating.

Senior believed that Ireland was trapped in a bad poverty-stricken Malthusian subsistence equilibrium at a population of 8 million, and that while a fall in population to 4 million would knock it out of that bad equilibrium and put it on the road to a better one, that a fall in population to 7 million would not and thus, as Jowett later quoted Senior, "would scarcely be enough to do much good." This was, Jowett said, why he had "always felt a certain horror of political economists."

Now Senior was wrong: Ireland in the mid-1840s was no longer hopelessly trapped in a bad Malthusian equilibrium. And Senior's policy advice was wrong because his analysis of Ireland was wrong. You can judge Senior harshly: he ought to have figured out that the Age of Malthus was over. But Nassau Senior did not think that with each Irish famine death an angel got its wings.

That was the argument that the presenter could have made had he been embedded in an interrupting culture and figured out that the most senior people he was talking to were starting from Jowett's High Table at Victorian Balliol. But in a noninterrupting culture in which you have two minutes to respond to each question at the end because there are ten other senior faculty members who want to ask their questions that they have been nursing since minute 20? In a noninterrupting culture you are dead if your audience is starting at a different place than you think they are starting.

Can Anybody Tell Me Why Ross Douthat Rather than Hilzoy Writes an Op-Ed Column for the New York Times?

Hilzoy:

Obsidian Wings: Ross Douthat Makes No Sense: Ross Douthat has a very peculiar column on abortion in the New York Times. In it, he asserts, falsely, that "under current law, if you want to restrict abortion, post-viability procedures are the only kind you’re allowed to even regulate": in fact, it is possible to regulate abortions before viability, and the Supreme Court in Casey upheld precisely such restrictions. He claims, also falsely, that "Americans aren’t permitted to debate anything" besides post-viability abortions (which would surely come as a surprise to the First Amendment), and that abortion needs to be "returned to the democratic process." As Freddie at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen notes:

Setting aside the banal fact that the judicial system is a part of our democratic process, there is a clear, straightforward and well-known way to overturn Roe v. Wade– pass a constitutional amendment criminalizing abortion. That’s how you override Supreme Court decisions; that’s how Dred Scott was effectively overturned. That’s how the federal income tax was passed. There’s a method for overturning Supreme Court law you don’t like, it’s well known, it’s time tested, and it’s as open to abortion foes as it is to anyone else.

But what's really odd is his reasoning. Try, if you dare, to make sense of this:

The argument for unregulated abortion rests on the idea that where there are exceptions, there cannot be a rule. Because rape and incest can lead to pregnancy, because abortion can save women's lives, because babies can be born into suffering and certain death, there should be no restrictions on abortion whatsoever. As a matter of moral philosophy, this makes a certain sense. Either a fetus has a claim to life or it doesn't. The circumstances of its conception and the state of its health shouldn't enter into the equation. But the law is a not a philosophy seminar. It's the place where morality meets custom, and compromise, and common sense. And it can take account of tragic situations without universalizing their lessons.

First of all, the claim that "where there is an exception, there cannot be a rule" does not make sense as a matter or moral philosophy. If it's possible to distinguish clearly between the exceptions and the other cases, there's no problem at all with having a rule. This is why we can have such rules as: No parking in a handicapped spot, unless you have a handicapped badge. When it's not easy to tell the exceptions from the rest, whether or not it's OK to have a rule depends on how bad it is to miss those exceptions, and how bad it is not to have a rule. There are surely circumstances in which it would be fine to drive on the left, but we do not normally think that these should prevent us from having a rule about which side of the street to drive on. On the other hand, the existence of people who have been falsely convicted of capital crimes is a much more compelling argument against capital punishment: even one mistake is a horrendous injustice.

More importantly, consider this sentence:

Because rape and incest can lead to pregnancy, because abortion can save women's lives, because babies can be born into suffering and certain death, there should be no restrictions on abortion whatsoever.

How on earth is that supposed to be evidence for this?

Either a fetus has a claim to life or it doesn't. The circumstances of its conception and the state of its health shouldn't enter into the equation.

The whole point of bringing up cases of rape and incest is to argue that the circumstances of a fetus' conception are relevant to the question whether abortion should be legal. If we were convinced that a fetus was a full person, they wouldn't be: we do not think it's OK for a mother to kill her five year old child on the grounds that it is the product of rape or incest. Likewise, the point of bringing up the fact that "babies can be born into suffering and certain death" is to say that the state of the fetus' health is relevant, not that it isn't. What Douthat wrote makes about as much sense as saying: "The argument for not hitting yourself on the head with a hammer is that it would cause you a whole lot of pain. As a matter of moral philosophy, this makes a certain sense: hitting yourself on the head with a hammer is either right or wrong regardless of how it makes you feel." To which the only possible response is: Huh???

Douthat's column begins with a rather lovely meditation on the hard cases that George Tiller had to deal with: abortions on "women facing life-threatening complications, on women whose children would be born dead or dying, on women who had been raped, on "women" who were really girls of 10." He doesn't actually say much about how we should deal with these cases, other than the part I already quoted: the law "can take account of tragic situations without universalizing their lessons." How it should take these cases into account, and why it shouldn't universalize their lessons, are left shrouded in mystery.

And yet, somehow, he ends up here:

If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically. Arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester -- as many advanced democracies already do -- would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions. The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases -- and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller’s murder.

Because, as we all know, giving terrorists what they want is the surest way to prevent more terrorism.

There are arguments for making abortion illegal. I don't accept them, but they exist. Douthat should try making them sometime.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Berkeley Political Economy 101: Reference Document SECOND DRAFT

Title:

Modern Theories of Political Economy

Prerequisites:

Completion of PE 100 and IAS 45 are required before students can register for the course.

Sequence:

Students intending to become Political Economy majors will ideally complete PE 101 by the end of their sophomore year.

Objectives:

PE 101 examines modern approaches to the interaction between economics and politics--what in an earlier age would have been called "moral philosophy." Building on the knowledge of world history covered in IAS 45 and the thinkers of the classical political economy tradition covered in PE 100, it focuses on the usefulness of alternative theories of political economy, both the classical theories covered in PE 100 and the modern theories of the 20th and 21st centuries in the their historical context. The course is explicitly interdisciplinary: theories of political economy cannot do their job if they are constrained by discipinary boundaries. It is a thoeretical course: empirical and historical facts are used as aids to theoretical comprehension and yardsticks to assess the usefulness of alternative theoretical perspectives.

The first two-thirds or so of the course will introduce students to general theoretical works and current intellectual debates in political economy. The last third or so of the course will specialize. Political Economy majors here at Berkeley tend to concentrate in one of six areas:

• the political economy of post-industrial societies,
• economic late develpment and political democratization,
• international relations and globalization,
• comparative political and economic systems,
• historical issues of the Great Transformation,
• modern China.

The last third or so of each course should focus on those aspects of political economy theory that will be most useful to students concentrating in one (or at a pinch two) of these areas.

Topics:

Political economy and war, market and non-market systems, distributive justice, libertarianism and communitarianism, liberal democracy and regulated capitalism, social democracy and mixed economy, international economic orders and American hegemony, globalization, public choice, late development successes, late development failures, worlds of welfare capitalism, neoliberalism and its discontents, market reforms in post-industrial economies, transitions from communism, political economy and the digital age.

Authors:

Tentatively and provisionally, the teaching staff believe that all versions of the course taught should cover the thoughts and approaches of John Maynard Keynes, Karl Polanyi, Friedrich Hayek, Charles Lindblom, Anthony Downs, James Buchanan, Mancur Olson, Carl Schmitt, Georg Lukacs, Juergen Habermas, Antonio Gramsci, and Dani Rodrik--not necessarily through intensive reading of the works of the social scientists and moral philosophers themselves, but at least through readings that apply their theories and approaches to issues in 20th and 21st century political economy.

Authors whose works and approaches have been assigned recently in PE 101 include: George Akerlof, Benedict Anderson, Norman Angell, Hannah Arendt, Benjamin Barber, Robert Bates, Simone de Beauvoir, Isaiah Berlin, James Buchanan, Nancy Chodorow, Ronald Coase, Milovan Djilas, Anthony Downs, Barry Eichengreen, James Fallows, James Ferguson, Betty Friedan, Michel Foucault, Robert Frank, Milton Friedman, Francis Fukuyama, Alexander Gerschenkron, Peter Gourevich, Antonio Gramsci, Juergen Habermas, Peter Hall, Friedrich Hayek, Robert Heilbroner, Albert Hirschman, John Hobson, Stephen Holmes, Tony Judt, Terry Karl, John Maynard Keynes, Charles Kindleberger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Janos Kornai, Paul Krugman, Timur Kuran, Vladimir Lenin, Arthur Lewis, Charles Lindblom, Georg Lukacs, Charles Maier, Hyman Minsky, Mancur Olson, George Orwell, William Pfaff, Karl Polanyi, John Rawls, Robert Reich, Dani Rodrik, Elaine Scarry, Carl Schmitt, Joseph Schumpeter, James Scott, Amartya Sen, Robert Shiller, Judith Shklar, Jessica Stern, Joseph Stiglitz, Gordon Tullock, Michael Walzer, Eugen Weber, Fareed Zakaria. Instructors are certainly not expected to cover all of the topics or assign all the authors listed, but they should discuss enough topics and assign enough authors to span the space of political economy.

Course Boundaries vis-a-vis PE 100:

This course covers the twentieth century world since the Great Depression, which is where PE 100 ends. At most a week should be spent on pre-Depression theorists and events in this course, allowing students to see the ways in which the project of classical political economy set the stage for new kinds of theory to be discussed in PEIS 101. John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi are social scientists/moral philosophers whose thoughts straddle the boundary of the courses.

Assessments and Assignments:

The material lends itself to in-class exams, take-home exams, and research papers. Each instructor cam generate those kind of assignments that work best with that instructor’s teaching. At least three written assignments/exams should be required over the course of the semester, in order to observe student improvement. Provide studente with as many opportunities as possible to reflect upon tbe course content: it will be new and strange to many.

Course Instructional Support:

Since the last budget crisis this course is without GSI-led section support, but with readers/graders. The hope is that capping PE 101 sections at 50 will allow for meaningful interaction to take place in the lecture itself.

Rational Expectations, Efficient Markets, and Economic Welfare

I think Robert Waldmann is using the internet to carry on an argument among sometime roommates.

Robert Waldmann:

The REH vs the EMH: I think I should explain a claim I made in the post below. I assert that the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) does not imply the rational expecations hypothesis (REH). The EMH states that asset prices are the same as they would be if everyone had rational expectations. The strong form EMH adds the assumption that everyone has complete information. The semi-strong form, like the REH has implications only for expected values conditional on public information. The EMH makes no statement about individual portfolios. It is absolutely not assumed or implied that each investor has an efficient portfolio.

In contrast, the rational expectations hypothesis says that the expected value of expectational errors conditional on public information is zero.... As used it definitely amounts to much more the assumption that observable aggregates have the values they would have if everyone had rational expectations.... This use of the phrase "rational expectations" to refer to individual behavior not aggregates is common and, as far as I know, uncontroversial....

[T]he first welfare theorem requires the assumption of rational expectations. It is absolutely not sufficient for aggregates to be the same as they would be if people had rational expectations.... I think an extremely elementary proof might be useful...

---

Me:

• There are 2 time periods t = 1 and t = 2.
• There is a coin which is flipped. It comes up heads in period 2 with probability 0.5.
• There are 2 assets:
  • A is a risk-free asset, the numeraire: One unit of risk-free asset gives one unit of consumption good in period 2.
  • B is a risky asset that gives one unit of consumption goods in period 2 if the coin comes up heads. It sells for an equilibrium price p.
• There are a continuum of agents indexed by i over [0.5-z,0.5+z] who maximize their expected value of the log of their consumption in period 2.
• Each agent is endowed with one unit of the risk-free asset.

Rational expectations implies that agents know that the probability the coin comes up heads is 0.5. If everyone has rational expecations, then the market will clear with a period-1 price p = 0.5. Each risk averse agent will find it optimal to invest 0 in the risky asset. there is 0 net supply of the risky asset. Markets clear. This outcome is Pareto efficient and maximizes total utility. The EMH therefore is satisfied if the price of the risky asset is 0.5.

Now relax the assumption of rational expectations. Assume that agent i believes that the probability that the coin will come up heads is i.

The market clearing price is 0.5. At p = 0.5 agent i's net demand for asset B is:

x(i) = [i - p]/[p - p²]

The EMH still holds in equilibrium. Supply equals demand for the risky asset at its fundamental value of p = 0.5.

The welfare outcome, however, is different. In period 2 agent i's consumption is either 1+x(i) or 1-x(i). The outcome is no longer ex-ante Pareto efficient: people bet on their beliefs, and because their beliefs are wrong utility-subtracting risk enters the world. The expected utility of agent i is:

(1/2)ln(1+x(i)) + (1/2)ln(1-x(i))

(1/2)ln(1+4[i-0.5]) + (1/2)ln(1-4[i-0.5])

If z is small so that we can approximate ln(1+y) by y - y²/2, then the approximate expected utility of agent i is:

E(U(i)) = -8[i - 0.5]².

In the model with rational expectations, the optimal policy is laissez faire.

In the model with efficient markets but without rational expectations it would be preferable to ban gambling--to impose a 100% tax on net trading profits, and redistribute the proceeds (if any).

---

Robert again:

I think it is safe to say that... [the] difference...between a model in which the optimal policy is laissez faire and a model in which the optimal policy is confiscation and equal [re]distribution of all [trading profits is of interest to economists]. I do not see how it is possible for anyone who can understand the model above to conflate rational expectations and efficient markets. Oddly, however... well known economists have done exactly that...

This Means Interdisciplinary War!

Neil Sinhababu calls for the Revolt of the Moral Philosophers:

The Ethical Werewolf: Taking political philosophy back from the economists: The take-home message for you and me is that economists have managed to convince people of indefensible views on normative topics such as what it's rational for individuals to do, what's an appropriate object of moral criticism, and what would be a good distribution of resources. I don't know how many of them would, when pressed, defend these sorts of claims -- their discipline isn't supposed to be one that makes normative claims.

Saying you're not making any normative claims is, of course, a good way of getting people to accept the normative claims you make. A lot more in this sort of thing depends on the sorts of emotions that get communicated as people talk about stuff and the loaded words you use. Pareto optimality, for example, has 'optimality' built into it, and who doesn't like optimality? Of course, as Rawls tells us, a distribution where one person owns all tradable goods and services while nobody else has anything is Pareto optimal.

In any event, this is the kind of thing we ought to be concerned about, both as citizens and as philosophers. While ideas from other parts of academia can't get out to the public, economists are convincing people of ridiculous theses in moral and political philosophy that their research doesn't even support. (It probably helps that widespread social acceptance of these theses is favorable to the interests of very wealthy people.) I'm not really sure what we can do about the spread of bad political philosophy through economics 101, but there's got to be something.

He is responding to Matthew Yglesias:

Matthew Yglesias » Ideas Matter: [A]s Brad DeLong pointed out yesterday, economists’ protestations that they’re doing value-free social science actually embeds an implicit idea that “that shifts in distribution are of no account–which can be true only if the social welfare function gives everybody a weight inversely proportional to their marginal utility of wealth.” In other words, under guise of eschewing values, economics has adopted a philosophical value system which says that the well-being of rich people is more important than the well-being of poor people. Nobody ever says “social welfare function” when engaging in practical political debate, but the idea that not caring about distribution constitutes some kind of neutral middle ground is an important underlying premise of much practical political debate, and it’s viability stems from the fact that everyone remembers being taught that this is true in their Economics 101 courses.

As a third example, as a society we’ve become accustomed to the idea that when empirical evidence seems to contradict basic economic theory—as when the United States experienced rapid economic growth under conditions of widespread unionization and a high minimum wage—that we ought to accept the theory as true. This, again, is usually a claim you hear being made by economists, but its social prestige ultimately is a kind of idea in epistemology or the philosophy of science. And all this, of course, is to say nothing of the specific influence of particular empirical claims in economics which hold that high levels of taxation and government spending are everywhere and always economically destructive....

I do think that these big ideas matter.... They’re enormously important in terms of setting the terms of political debate, in terms of influence what’s considered “possible” and what kinds of people have standing to have their views taken seriously. Building a better world ultimately requires getting people to understand that both the empirical and philosophical underpinnings of America’s free market society are much weaker than is generally understood. That doesn’t mean these questions will ever be debated by politicians at a live town hall. But it does mean trying to press a better understanding of these issues on the mass elite who set the tone for much of American political life.

If any of those fighting on the anti-economist side of this disciplinary war want to contact me to ask me to serve as a spy reporting to them the plans of the inmost secret counsels of the economist, the password is "swordfish"...

Project Syndicate: The Hidden Purposes of High Finance

BusinessWorld Online: Commentary -- By J. Bradford Delong: "The hidden purposes of high finance": BERKELEY — No one questions the usefulness of "low" finance.

The ability to use checks, banknotes, and credit cards rather than having to cart around chests of silver, scales, and reagents to assay purity, and needing armed guards to protect the silver (and more guards to watch the first set of guards) has obvious efficiencies.

So does the ability of households to borrow and lend in order not to be forced to match income and expenditure every day, week, month, or year.

But what use is "high" finance?

Economists’ conventional description depicts high finance as providing us with three types of utility. First, it allows for many savers to pool their wealth to finance large enterprises that can achieve the efficiencies of scale possible from capital-intensive modern industry.

Second, high finance provides an arena to curb the worst abuses by managers of large corporations. Managers’ fear that if the stock price drops too low they will be out on their ears provides a useful restraint.

Finally, high finance allows for portfolio diversification, so that individual investors can seek high expected returns without being forced to assume large, idiosyncratic risks of bankruptcy and poverty.

But these are the benefits of high finance as they apply to the ideal world of economists — that is, a world of rational utilitarian actors who are skilled calculators of expected utility under uncertainty, who are masters of dynamic programming. We do not live in such a world.

Economists have spent their lives attempting to evolve theories that would account for how salient features of reality might emerge if we did live in their ideal world, but since we don’t, their theoretical enterprise is of doubtful utility. It is like describing how one could bake a delicious wedding cake using only honey, bicarbonate of soda, and raw eggplant.

If we take the world as it really is, we see that high finance performs two further tasks that advance our collective welfare. It induces us to save, accumulate, and invest by promising us safe, liquid investments even in extraordinary times.

It is a fact that we are much happier saving and accumulating, and that we are much more likely to do so when we think that the resources we have saved and accumulated are at hand. It is also true that when we invest our wealth — in Pfizer’s intellectual property, factories in Shenzhen, or worldwide distribution networks — it is not, in fact, at hand. Our invested wealth can only be made to appear liquid, and only if there is no general shift in our collective desire for liquidity.

And it is also a fact that we are happier saving and accumulating if we receive positive and negative feedback on our decisions on a time scale that allows us to believe that we can do better next time by altering our strategy — hence marketwatch.com and CNN/Money.

Of course, investors who believe that their wealth is securely liquid, and that they are adding value for themselves by buying and selling are suffering from a delusion. Our financial wealth is not liquid in an emergency. And when we buy and sell, we are enriching not ourselves, but the specialists and market makers.

But we benefit from these delusions. Psychologically, we are naturally impatient, so it is good for us to believe that our wealth is safe and secure, and that we can add to it through skillful acts of investment, because that delusion makes us behave less impatiently. And, collectively, that delusion boosts our savings, and thus our capital stock, which in turn boosts all of our wages and salaries as well.

Seventy-three years ago, John Maynard Keynes thought about the reform and regulation of financial markets from the perspective of the first three purposes and found himself "moved toward... mak[ing] the purchase of an investment permanent and indissoluble, like marriage...." But he immediately drew back: the fact "that each individual investor flatters himself that his commitment is ’liquid’ (though this cannot be true for all investors collectively) calms his nerves and makes him much more willing to run a risk...."

Moreover, for Keynes, "[t]he game of professional investment is intolerably boring and over-exacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst he who has it must pay to this propensity the appropriate toll...."

It is for these reasons that we have seemed frozen for the past generation or two whenever we have contemplated reforming our system of financial regulation. And it is why, even in the face of a severe financial crisis, we remain frozen today.

Brink Lindsey on Paul Krugman: Nostalgianomics: Liberal economists pine for days no liberal should want to revisi

Brink Lindsey shoots! He scores! The crowd goes wild!

"The God Told Me to Give You the Special Message that I Have No Special Message to Give You"

The Invisible College:

Aristocles, son of Ariston, of the deme Collytus (alias "Big-Head") (ca. 370 B.C.), Reason & Persuasion: Three Dialogues: Euthyphro, Meno, Politeia I, trans. by Belle Waring, comment. and illu. by John Holbo (Singapore: Pearson Asia).

There are much worse ways to spend a foggy Monday morning than in my office eighty feet above the Berkeley campus drinking espresso and talking about the good, the holy, education, and political order with John Holbo, Belle Waring, Sokrates, Meno, Euthyphro, Glaukon, Adeimantos, Polymarkhos, Kephalos, and Thrasymakhos: "Yesterday I went down to the Piraeus with Glaukon the son of Ariston..."

And, of course, I am alone. The campus is dead this week.

Who Does Sotomayor Hope Will Be Better Judges than Holmes and Cardozo?

Michael O'Hare parries:

The Reality-Based Community: Sotomayor and rhetoric: Brad DeLong raps my knuckles for being cavalier about the sentence talking heads have been endlessly parsing from Sotomayor's Berkeley speech. Here's the full paragraph:

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

Brad does a thorough rhetorical review of the speech and I agree with most of what he said (though his evaluation, in my view, suffers from some grade inflation). And with most of what she said, especially as it was not far from the main point of my post. But the famous sentence is wrong as delivered, no matter what she actually believes, and no matter that I was flip in the original post, for two reasons.

Substantively, I think she would, on reflection, say "Second, there are cases in which a wise Latina woman..." and it makes all the difference. There is no reason to believe that Latina upbringing or an extra X chromosome provide a systematic advantage over any other background or sex for all jurisprudence, or even "more often than not". That would really be racism, because justice and the law are not especially a distinctive part of being a woman, or growing up in the Bronx, and the things that are, like her beloved morcillas, are not much relevant to judging. But to the degree that judging is collaborative, literally as on upper-level appeals courts where panels of judges sit together, and more diffusely, because judges read each others' opinions and, I suppose, schmoose in the cloakroom and on the golf course and at law school reunions, a judiciary that has more different kinds of people will decide its cases on the average better than a homogeneous one.

Rhetorically, the sentence is wrong for the reason that keeps editors and political consultants up late going over every word of Obama's speeches, though it wasn't an important defect in a speech at a law school by a judge, especially as the speech does not say what the sentence says. It became wrong afterwards, when Sotomayor became a public figure of controversy whose every utterance would be picked over by adversaries for things that could be taken out of context and misused. Welcome to the world of national politics, Judge S, where savage little creatures with an instinct for the capillary scour the forest floor for trivia and cheap shot targets.

Let me riposte. Whether Michael is right or I am right depends on how you read the referent of "I would hope that a wise Latina woman..." Is the referent all wise Latina women? Or is the referent a single person named Sonia Sotomayor? If Michael O'Hare is correct then Judge Sotomayor was hoping that in general Latina women would be better judges than white men. If I am correct then Judge Sotomayor was saying that she hoped that she personally would be a better judge.

The rest of the speech, I think, fits my reading much better than Michael's.

David Frum's New Majority Site Endorses and Claims Earl Warren

This is very nice to see.

It has been a very long time since any prominent Republican acknowledged that great man, Earl Warren.

Sotomayor vs. Cardozo

Michael O'Hare gets one wrong:

The Reality-Based Community: Diversity: One of Sonia Sotomayor's lower-candlepower remarks was the one about a Latina judge making a better decision yada yada...

Actually, it was a high-candlepower rhetorical move, as Michael would realize if he had read Sotomayor's speech more carefully.

OK, boys, girls, and xenosophonts. Ready? Let's role the videotape:

Judge Sotomayor begins this part of a speech with a generally-accepted pious American liberal platitude:

A Latina Judge's Voice: Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases...

Everyone expects her to agree with O'Connor and develop the point. Instead, she cuts across the grain by questioning the platitude, introducing doubt into the issue. She then wakes the audience up by violating their expectations:

I am not so sure... that I agree...

Now that she has the audience's attention, she is playing for high stakes: she must justify her introduction of doubt into the mix. She does so by first making a general point:

First... there can never be a universal definition of wise...

Thus it seems likely that men's wisdom and women's wisdom will be somewhat different, and thus that their wise judgments will be somewhat different--not better and worse, but different. Then, however, she raises the stakes even higher with her assertion:

Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life...

Here she has raised the stakes by committing a form of heresy against modern liberal American values. Note that she is choosing her words carefully: she--for she is the "wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences" has not said that she is or will be a better judge (contra Michael O'Hare, who claims that she said "Latina jduge making a better decision yada yada..." which she did not say) but rather that she personally "hopes" that she will be a better judge--and one is always allowed to hope that one will turn out to be the best.

At this point in the speech she is all in. How can she justify her hope that her experience of being a brilliant upwardly-mobile Latina woman in twentieth century America will make her a better judge? She has the audience's complete attention by now, for that is a very ballsy assertion to make. And she delivers in the very next paragraph:

Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination...

This is game and set for Sotomayor. Holmes and Cardozo were great judges. Sotomayor is saying: even though they were great judges they judged wrong in cases of sex and race discrimination. Sotomayor is saying: I am a better judge in cases of sex and race discrimination than Holmes and Cardozo. Thus there is at least reason to hope that a "wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life..."

This is game and set for Sotomayor. But she still has to win the match. Why is there reason to hope that we judges going forward can do better than Holmes or Cardozo did? It is not that people who don't look like us or have the same plumbing that we do can't have the empathy--the "wise and understanding heart" that Solomon begged of The One Who Is--to be a good judge:

I... believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable.... [N]ine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions...

But it is hard work to always remember to have and use your wise and understanding heart:

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others... experiences limit their ability to understand.... Others simply do not care...

And it is perhaps slightly less hard work for people from groups that have historically been on the outside:

Hence... a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage...

But when will these differences in her judgments from those that Holmes and Cardozo would have made be good differences, and when will they be bad differences? This is the lesson Sotomayor draws:

Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that... I owe [the parties before me] constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives; and ensuring that, to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate [my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives] and change [them] as circumstances and cases before me require. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences, but I accept my limitations.... [W]e who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but [must] attempt... to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.

Match to Sotomayor.

To call this rhetorical journey a "lower-candlepower remark..." and to summarize is as "about a Latina judge making a better decision yada yada..." is highly unfair.

New York Times Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Edition (Ross Douthat Edition)

A friend who calls herself chunkyreesewitherspoonlookalike writes:

Ross Douthat:

1. believes that abortion is murder.
2. thinks that women who use birth control should be stigmatized as (or perhaps are) unattractive sluts.
3. thinks that single parents should be stigmatized too.

Don't you only get to pick two of those three? Unless you're a real p---- who thinks women should be locked up by their fathers until title to them is passed to their husbands, that is.

I agree. If you think birth control and single parenthood should both be stigmatized then you must be for abortion on demand. If you both forbid abortion and stigmatize birth control then single parents are valuable parts of society performing important work raising the next generation. If you forbid abortion and disapprove of single parenthood then women on the pill are Visible Saints.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Empathy and the Supreme Court: God Agrees with Barack Hussein Obama

Barack Obama has said that empathy is an important qualification for a Supreme Court justice. Republicans--John Yoo, Ann Althouse, Stanley Fish, Orrin Hatch, Mitch McConnell, the usual hacks--are opposed to an empathetic justice.

I went and asked God who was right: Obama? Or Yoo, Althouse, Fish, Hatch, McConnell and company?

God is clear: Obama is right. The first qualification of a judge is "an understanding heart":

I Kings: God said, "Ask what I shall give thee."

And Solomon said, "Thou hast shewed unto thy servant David my father great mercy, according as he walked before thee in truth, and in righteousness, and in uprightness of heart with thee; and thou hast kept for him this great kindness, that thou hast given him a son to sit on his throne, as it is this day. And now, O LORD my God, thou hast made thy servant king instead of David my father: and I am but a little child: I know not how to go out or come in. And thy servant is in the midst of thy people which thou hast chosen, a great people, that cannot be numbered nor counted for multitude. Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this thy so great a people?"

And the speech pleased the Lord, that Solomon had asked this thing. And God said unto him, "Because thou hast asked this thing, and hast not asked for thyself long life; neither hast asked riches for thyself, nor hast asked the life of thine enemies; but hast asked for thyself understanding to discern judgment; Behold, I have done according to thy words: lo, I have given thee a wise and an understanding heart; so that there was none like thee before thee, neither after thee shall any arise like unto thee. And I have also given thee that which thou hast not asked, both riches, and honour: so that there shall not be any among the kings like unto thee all thy days. And if thou wilt walk in my ways, to keep my statutes and my commandments, as thy father David did walk, then I will lengthen thy days."

And Solomon awoke; and, behold, it was a dream. And he came to Jerusalem, and stood before the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and offered up burnt offerings, and offered peace offerings, and made a feast to all his servants.

Then came there two women, that were harlots, unto the king, and stood before him. And the one woman said, "O my lord, I and this woman dwell in one house; and I was delivered of a child with her in the house. And it came to pass the third day after that I was delivered, that this woman was delivered also: and we were together; there was no stranger with us in the house, save we two in the house. And this woman's child died in the night; because she overlaid it. And she arose at midnight, and took my son from beside me, while thine handmaid slept, and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead child in my bosom. And when I rose in the morning to give my child suck, behold, it was dead: but when I had considered it in the morning, behold, it was not my son, which I did bear."

And the other woman said, "Nay; but the living is my son, and the dead is thy son." And this said, "No; but the dead is thy son, and the living is my son." Thus they spake before the king.

Then said the king, "The one saith, 'This is my son that liveth, and thy son is the dead': and the other saith, 'Nay; but thy son is the dead, and my son is the living'." And the king said, Bring me a sword. "And they brought a sword before the king." And the king said, "Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other."

Then spake the woman whose the living child was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said, "O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it." But the other said, "Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it."

Then the king answered and said, "Give her the living child, and in no wise slay it: she is the mother thereof."

And all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had judged; and they feared the king: for they saw that the wisdom of God was in him, to do judgment...

Sunday Morning Blogging: Someone Has Said Something Foolish on the Internet!

Thomas Riggins http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/8466/1/364/ Political Affairs Magazine - Misunderstanding Marx: Brad Delong and the Collapse of Neoliberalism:

[DeLong's] series of ill informed assertions and claims, without any supporting arguments in most cases, personal opinions and prejudices put forth in a pontifical manner, and value judgments dished out as if they were factual statements. I haven't the inclination to deal with all the nonsense in this garbled attack on Marx, but I will highlight a few examples.... Delong says that Marx was "part prophet."... "Large-scale prophecy of a glorious utopian future is bound to be false when applied to this world." He follows this up with a lot of idiotic comments about the New Jerusalem and Marx's not having visited the island of Patmos (the old stomping grounds of St. John the Divine)...

Ummm...

Karl Marx:

Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labor-process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated...

John of Patmos, after having gotten into the 'shrooms:

And there came unto me one of the seven angels which had the seven vials full of the seven last plagues, and talked with me, saying, Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the Lamb's wife. And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal; And had a wall great and high, and had twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and names written thereon, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel: On the east three gates; on the north three gates; on the south three gates; and on the west three gates. And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof, and the wall thereof. And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel. And the building of the wall of it was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; The fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst. And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass. And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it. And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there. And they shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it. And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb's book of life. And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads. And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever...

A certain family resemblance, no?

Now, you can walk the Paul Sweezy walk, and claim that the Gospel of the Holy Karl of Trier is "not so much a prediction as a vivid description of a tendency"http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000396.html. But the only proper response to that is to laugh.

Anthropology vs. Journalism: Jared Diamond Edition

Jared Diamond appears to have done a bad thing in publishing the real names of his source for his account of vengeance and war in Papua New Guinea. His source--and others also named in Diamond's New Yorker story--are pissed off, and perhaps now in some extra physical danger.

Michael Balter in Science reports. I think Balter's article is incomplete, and that it views Diamond's critics through rose-colored glasses--if you read Balter you don't get an accurate view of how much like a loon Rhonda Shearer and company sound ("‘We Never Make Mistakes’: Jared Diamond & David Remnick echo Stalinist police defending New Yorker article...") or how unconvincing Mako Kuwimb is ("Paragraph 1: 'In 1992... his beloved paternal uncle Soll was killed in a war.... In the New Guinea Higllands... an uncle's death represents a much heavier blow.... Soll had been very good to Daniel, who recalled him as a tall and handsome man, destined to become a leader. Soll's death demanded vengeance.' The very first words, 'In 1992', is wrong. It was in 1993. Soll was not tall. Soll was not destined to become a leader...).

Michael Balter:

'Vengeance' Bites Back At Jared Diamond: Diamond stands by his story, arguing that it was based on detailed notes that he took during a 2006 interview with Wemp as well as earlier conversations the two men had in 2001 when Wemp served as his driver in PNG. "The complaint has no merit at all," Diamond told Science in an interview in his office at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is a professor of geography. Diamond adds that he still considers Wemp's original account to be the most reliable source for what happened. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, also defends the magazine's story: "It appears that The New Yorker and Jared Diamond are the subject of an unfair and, frankly, mystifying barrage of accusations."... Pauline Wiessner... thinks Diamond was naïve if he accepted Wemp's stories at face value, because young men in PNG often exaggerate their tribal warfare exploits or make them up entirely. "I could have told him immediately that it was a tall tale, an embellished story. I hear lots of them but don't publish them because they are not true."

Three worlds collide in this case. First is the world of science, specifically anthropology.... Next is the craft of journalism, with its own set of ethics and practices aimed at reaching the general public. Finally, there is Papua New Guinea.... Diamond... has worked in all three domains.... Although Diamond's frequent merging of these worlds has brought him both success and some criticism, this time it may have landed him in legal trouble. When Diamond's article appeared in The New Yorker, it drew the attention of [Rhonda] Shearer, a fierce media critic....

Shearer already had contacts in PNG from an earlier investigation during which she chased down rumors that a Komodo dragon was running amok in the country. (It turned out to be a hoax.) She asked her contacts to try to find Wemp. One, biologist Michael Kigl... found Wemp in his Highlands village in July 2008 and tape recorded an interview with him. According to Shearer and the 10,000-word report, Wemp denied organizing the revenge warfare... expressed surprise at The New Yorker article... claimed that Diamond had never told him about it. (Wemp's attorneys in New York City and PNG declined to make him available for an interview for this story, saying that their clients preferred to tell their stories in court and not in the press.)... At least one other Papua New Guinean supports the account of Shearer's team. "Diamond's article is a confused story that names real places and persons but mixes up false, wrong, and defamatory allegations that bring into disrepute the good name of the named clans and their members," said Mako Kuwimb, a member of Wemp's Handa clan.... Diamond, Kuwimb says, "converted a simple, casual conversation [with Wemp] into an article that looks and sounds like an anthropological piece" but "never followed [anthropological] procedures and protocols." On 21 April of this year, Kuwimb sent The New Yorker's publisher, Lisa Hughes, a detailed, 30-page refutation of the Diamond article. Among Diamond's biggest errors, Kuwimb told Hughes, were his statements that the war he described had begun with the "pig in the garden" episode and had lasted 3 years. Kuwimb contends that the war was sparked by a gambling dispute and lasted only a few months....

[A]nthropologists have their own concerns... many think that the "Annals of Anthropology" banner was misleading.... Cultural anthropologist Alex Golub... who says The New Yorker fact checker spoke with him for about 10 minutes... "This affects our discipline's brand management," he wrote on an anthropology blog he participates in called Savage Minds. "It's important for people to know that if they meet an anthropologist, they are not going to be written up in The New Yorker without being told about it." Savage Minds has now teamed up with Stinkyjournalism.org to produce a series of invited essays on the case.... Wiessner thinks Diamond should have refrained from naming even the tribes involved. "That was a very big mistake," she says....

Diamond and Remnick insist that such anthropological criticisms are irrelevant, because Diamond was working as a journalist for a popular magazine.... Diamond says he did not find out about the "Annals of Anthropology" line until shortly before publication and now regrets it.... Says Diamond... "In journalism, you do name names so that people can check out what you write." Remnick agrees: "Journalistic practice differs from scientific practice in a number of ways," he says, "and this seems to be one of them. Using real names is the default practice in journalism." In 2001, Diamond says, Wemp drove him and Australia-based ornithologist David Bishop around the oil fields of Highland PNG.... [H]is article was based on detailed notes he took of the stories that Wemp told him.... Diamond says Wemp told them stories about the Highlands war that had supposedly begun when a man from Mandingo's clan, the Ombal, found that a pig had ruined his garden and blamed a Handa man for the damage. The ensuing warfare eventually killed Soll, whom Diamond says Wemp identified as his uncle, and it fell to Wemp to take responsibility for organizing a war for retribution.... Diamond says... [he] did nothing with the story until another trip to PNG in May 2006.... [H]e told Wemp explicitly that the story would go into the book. But he was unable to find Wemp again in 2007 when he decided to excerpt one of the book's chapters for The New Yorker; Wemp had left his job without leaving contact information....

In 2006, "I said to Daniel, ‘Would you be willing to tell the whole story in one piece and I will take notes?’" Diamond says. He pulled out a large, red notebook and took "sentence by sentence" shorthand notes of the conversation, Diamond says, adding that Wemp spelled out the names of the warriors and other individuals who would later be named in The New Yorker piece. (Both Diamond and Shearer agree that Bishop was present during some of the May 2006 conversation; reached by telephone, Bishop declined to comment.) The Shearer account agrees that Diamond took notes in shorthand in a red notebook but differs markedly about what Wemp said. Diamond says that although Wemp clearly understood that he would be named in the book, he did not try to get permission from Mandingo and the others: "I trusted Daniel's judgment about what was appropriate to discuss." Diamond says he did double-check Wemp's story with some younger members of his tribe, who confirmed that some of the people Wemp named had been involved in a tribal war. Diamond also told Science that he heard conflicting accounts about how serious Mandingo's injuries were and that Mandingo now may have recovered from his wounds....

[Rhonda] Shearer... scored her first victory: In a 12 September 2008 letter to a London attorney, The New Yorker general counsel Lynn Oberlander agreed, "as a sign of good will," that the magazine would remove Diamond's article from the freely accessible part of its Web site.... Remnick nevertheless defends the magazine's efforts to verify Diamond's story.... "we had Jared Diamond's meticulous, detailed notes from the 2006 interview with Daniel Wemp... and we consulted with people with expertise in the Southern Highlands, who confirmed that Daniel Wemp's description of the revenge battle was consistent with known practice." Remnick also insists that in the August 2008 conversation between Wemp and the fact checker—which was tape recorded by mutual consent—Wemp raised only relatively minor factual objections to Diamond's account and asserted that the stories were basically true. In Diamond's view, the case is really about scientists coming under fire for popular writing....

[T]he tribes of PNG do practice revenge warfare, says Wiessner.... In Enga, more than 300 tribal wars have taken the lives of nearly 4000 people since 1991.... Wiessner... is worried about the outcome of the case if it results in a large monetary award: She fears that the money could eventually go to buy weapons that would make the wars even more deadly. "When these wars first started, they were fought with bows and arrows, but now they have M-16s," she says.... Wiessner faults Diamond for apparently taking Wemp's stories at face value... believes Wemp himself violated clan ethics by telling them in the first place. "For him to have given the names of tribes and implicate[d] other people than himself," as Diamond reported, "that was wrong," she says...

Berkeley Political Economy 101: Reference Document DRAFT

Title:

Modern Theories of Political Economy

Prerequisites:

Completion of PE 100 and IAS 45 are required before students can register for the course.

Sequence:

Students intending to become Political Economy majors are expected to complete PE 101 by the end of their sophomore year.

Objectives:

PE 101 is examines modern approaches of the interaction between economics and politics--what in an earlier age would have been called "moral philosophy." Building on the knowledge of world history covered in IAS 45, it focuses on the usefulness of alternative theories of political economy, both the classical theories covered in PE 100 and the modern theories of the 20th and 21st centuries in the their historical context. The course is explicitly interdisciplinary: theories of political economy cannot do their job if they are constrained by discipinary boundaries. It is a thoeretical course: empirical and historical facts are used as aids to theoretical comprehension and yardsticks to assess the usefulness of alternative theoretical perspectives.

The first two-thirds or so of the course will introduce students to general theoretical works and current intellectual debates in political economy. The last third or so of the course will specialize. Political Economy majors here at Berkeley tend to concentrate in one of five areas:

• the political economy of post-industrial societies,
• economic develpment and political democratization,
• international relations and globalization,
• comparative political and economic systems,
• modern China.

The last third of each course should focus on those aspects of political economy theory that will be most useful to students concentrating in one (or at a pinch two) of these area.

Instructors are not expected to cover all of the topics or assign all the authors listed below, but they should discuss enough topics and assign enough authors to span the space of political economy.

Topics:

Political economy and war, market and non-market systems, distributive justice, libertarianism and communitarianism, liberal democracy and regulated capitalism, social democracy and mixed economy, international economic orders and American hegemony, globalization, public choice, late development successes, late development failures, worlds of welfare capitalism, neoliberalism and its discontents, market reforms in post-industrial economies, transitions from communism, political economy and the digital age.

Authors:

George Akerlof, Benedict Anderson, Norman Angell, Hannah Arendt, Benjamin Barber, Robert Bates, Simone de Beauvoir, Isaiah Berlin, James Buchanan, Nancy Chodorow, Ronald Coase, Milovan Djilas, Anthony Downs, Barry Eichengreen, James Fallows, James Ferguson, Betty Friedan, Michel Foucault, Robert Frank, Milton Friedman, Francis Fukuyama, Alexander Gerschenkron, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Hall, Robert Heilbroner, Albert Hirschman, John Hobson, Stephen Holmes, Tony Judt, John Maynard Keynes, Charles Kindleberger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Janos Kornai, Paul Krugman, Timur Kuran, Vladimir Lenin, Arthur Lewis, Charles Lindblom, Charles Maier, Hyman Minsky, Mancur Olsen, George Orwell, William Pfaff, Karl Polanyi, John Rawls, Robert Reich, Dani Rodrik, Elaine Scarry, Joseph Schumpeter, James Scott, Amartya Sen, Robert Shiller, Judith Shklar, Jessica Stern, Joseph Stiglitz, Gordon Tullock, Michael Walzer, Eugen Weber, Fareed Zakaria.

Course Boundaries vis-a-vis PE 100:

This course covers the twentieth century world since the Great Depression, which is where PE 100 ends. At most a week should be spent on pre-Depression theorists and events in this course, allowing students to see the ways in which the project of classical political economy set the stage for new kinds of theory to be discussed in PEIS 101.

Assessments and Assignments:

The material lends itself to in-class exams, take-home exams, and research papers. Each instructor cam generate those kind of assignments that work best with that instructor’s teaching. At least three written assignments/exams should be required over the course of the semester, in order to observe student improvement. Provide studente with as many opportunities as possible to reflect upon tbe course content: it will be new and strange to many

Course Instructional Support:

Since the last budget crisis this course is without GSI support. The hope is that capping PE 101 sections at 50 will allow for meaningful interaction to take place in the lecture itself.

---

Appendix: Bev Crawford's Outline:

1. Theoretical Perspectives on Political Economy (4 weeks)
   • The Political Economy of Freedom (Liberalism)
   • The Political Economy of Equality (Distributive Justice, Socialism, Social Democracy)
   • The Political Economy of Community (Communitarianism and Nationalism)
2. 20th Century Theory and 20th Century History * Liberal, Really-Existing Socialist, Nationalist, and Social Democratic Systems * How they worked and didn't work
   • Political Governance of the International Economy
     • How it worked and didn't work
   • Three Crises
     • The Great Depression
     • The Asian Financial Crisis
     • The Current Financial Crisis
3. Political Economy Theory and Economic Development
4. Political Economy Theory and 21st Century Globalization
5. Political Economy Theory and 21st Century Post-Industrial Societies

Berkeley Political Economy 100: Reference Document DRAFT

Title:

Classical Theories of Political Economy

Prerequisites:

NONE

Sequence:

Ideally students intending to major in Political Economy should complete PE 100 by the middle of their sophomore year.

Objectives:

Students must apply critical thinking skills to engage classical theories of political economy as they were originally written in primary sources. These primary sources may be bolstered, should the instructor choose, with some additional reading material explicating salient points of each text. The course should generally be chronological. Students should engage the writers and their ideas, and confront the ideas of one theorist with those of another, so that they can see hoq ideas grow out of other ideas in their particular historical contexts.

Students should learn the basic historical thinking skills, among them analysis; argumentation; chronological reasoning; interpretation; contextualization; comparison; and synthesis. Students should also be given practice at other critical thinking skills, such as Inquiry, as the instructor sees fit.

Topics:

The principal aim of the course is to engage the students with the central question of political economy: the evolving relationship between the state and the economy as analyzed in the “classical” texts which discuss (1) connections between people and their rulers; (2) the nature and purpose of the state; and (3) linkages between states and their economies. The inevitable focus of the course is the rise of liberalism and the various responses to it

Subjects that ought to be covered in each iteration of PE 100 include but are not limited to: mercantilism, capitalism, industrialization, liberalism, Marxism, socialism, imperialism, nationalism, and internationalization. Students should be constantly considering the applicability of the "classical" theories to the present day. Instructors follow their own judgment in assigning relative weight to these subjects and the degree of engagement of the course with current headlines.

Authors:

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; John Locke, Two Treatises on Government; Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality and/or On Social Contract; Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women; Thomas Malthus, Essay on Population; David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy; Friedrich List, National System of Political Economy; Karl Marx, Das Kapital; Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation; Max Weber, “On Bureaucracy” and/or The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; V.I. Lenin, “Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism”; Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism. In addition, students should be familiar with the work of J.M. Keynes

Course Boundaries vis-a-vis PE 101:

This course covers the early modern world (but may go back to antiquity or the middle ages) and the modern world ending with the Great Depression, which is where PE 101 will begin. At most a week should be spent on Keynesian political economy in this course, allowing students to see the ways in which he synthesized the classical theorists and set the stage for new kinds of theory to be discussed in PEIS 101.

Assessments and Assignments:

The material lends itself to in-class exams, take-home exams, and research papers. Each instructor cam generate those kind of assignments that work best with that instructor’s teaching. At least three written assignments/exams should be required over the course of the semester, in order to observe student improvement. Provide studente with as many opportunities as possible to reflect upon tbe course content: it will be new and strange to many

Course Instructional Support

This course has--until the next budget crisis--weekly GSI-led sections. Students find the material difficult, and having a regular weekly discussion section is usually the best way for them both to practice their critical thinking skills and internalize content.

---

Appendix: The Larger Barrington Moore Problematic:

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Letter on Toleration

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, The Social Contract

David Hume, Of Commerce, Of the Balance of Trade, Of the Original Contract, Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth

Bernard de Mandeville, Fable of the Bees

Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests

Adam Smith, Theory of the Moral Sentiments, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

Thomas Paine, Common Sense

James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women

William Godwin, An Enquiry Considering Political Justice

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revoution in France, Letters on a Regicide Peace

Joseph de Maistre, Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions

Thomas Malthus, Essay on Population

David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy

Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy

Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Democracy in America, Recollections

Karl Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Justice, Communist Manifesto, Wage Labor and Capital, Class Struggles in France, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Capital, Critique of the Gotha Program

Thomas Carlyle, Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question

John Stuart Mill, Essay on Bentham, Essay on Coleridge, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women, Principles of Political Economy

Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation, Science as a Vocation, The Chinese Literati, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The City, Class, Status, Party, Bureaucracy

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class

Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism

Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism

Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Civilization and Its Discontents

John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Essays in Persuasion

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation

Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

Berkeley International Studies 45: Reference Document DRAFT

Title:

World History

Prerequisites:

NONE

Sequence:

Ideally students intending to major in Political Economy should complete IAS 45 by the middle of their sophomore year.

Objectives:

Instructors must use a hybrid chronological-thematic organization. Within this model with, however, a great deal of leeway--there are many cases that can be used to illustrate colonization, of which only a very few can be taught colonization. Concepts are more important than the details; details are useful only as illustrations of larger processes. Thus world or global history differs from a series of regional histories in which students face a different country each week. The course should take a global rather than a civilizational approach.

Without reliable and detailed information about the past historical thinking is not possible. Yet historical analysis involves much more than the compilation and memorization of data. It requires the cultivation of seven distinct albeit interrelated and overlapping intellectual skills: analysis; argumentation; chronological reasoning; interpretation; contextualization; comparison; and synthesis. Students must learn these modes of historical thinking.

Topics: Periods and Themes:

No more than 20% (3 weeks) of the course should be spent before 1450. The focus of the course not be on the twentieth century. Otherwise, istructors are free to weight each period as they choose.

Periods:

• Period 1: pre-1450: (1) The peopling of the earth and the Neolithic Revolution; (2) state development and interaction; (3) the development and expansion of networks of communication and exchange; (4) the rise of cultural systems including religion.
• Period 2: c. 1450-c. 1750: (1) Globalizing networks of communication and exchange; (2) new forms of social organization and modes of production; (3) types and varieties of colonialism and empires.

• Period 3: c. 1750-c.1900: (1) imperialism and territorial expansion; (2) ideologies, revolutions and reforms; (3) industrialization and global capitalism; (4) global migration.

• Period 4: c.1900-present: (1) dissolution of global empires and the rise of nationalism; (2) global war and conflict; (3) new global institutions.

Themes:

• Theme 1: humans and their environment: during prehistory as hunters, fishers, and foragers whose migrations led to the peopling of the earth; since the agricultural revolution as farmers or pastoralists constrained by environmental factors such as rainfall patterns, climate, and available flora and fauna; intensified exploitation of nature as populations grew, migrated, and increased exponentially during the industrial revolution; the balance of sophisticated technology and limited natural resources; cities, trade networks, and diseases; the rise of global environmentalism.

• Theme 2: cultural evelopment and interaction: the origins, uses, dissemination, and syncretic adaptations of ideas, beliefs, and knowledge within particular societies and in circulation across societies; study of belief system(s) or religions, philosophical interests, and technical and artistic approaches as a key to understanding how the society views itself and others and how it responds to challenge; transmission and adaptation of culturel components at boundaries; the uniqueness and commonalities of human expressions and abilities; cultural trends and trace their influence across human societies.

• Theme 3: state building, expansion, and conflict: hierarchical modes of domination and their conflicts; state forms (e.g. kingdoms, empires, nation-states) across time and space; organizational and cultural foundations of long-term stability; internal and external causes of conflict on the other; contextualizing state development and expansion in relation to different modes of production (e.g. agrarian, pastoral, mercantile), cultural and ideological foundations (e.g. religions, philosophies, ideas of nationalism), and social and gender structures; interstate relations--war, diplomacy, and international organizations.

• Theme 4: creation, expansion, and interaction of economic systems: patterns and systems to produce, distribute, and consume desired goods and services across time and space; major transitions between modes of production; labor systems; ideologies, values, and institutions (such as capitalism and socialism) that support and sustain modes of production and forms of labor organization; trade and commerce; regional and global networks of communication and exchange and their relation to economic growth; cultural and technological diffusion, migration, state formation, social classes, and human interaction with the environment.

• Theme 5: the development and transformation of social structures: human societies group their members and pattern interaction across social groups; stratification based on gender roles, kinship systems, racial and ethnic associations, and hierarchies of wealth and class; processes through which such categories and practices were created, maintained, and transformed; connections between changes in social structures and other historical shifts, especially trends in political economy, cultural expression, and human ecology.

Assessments and Assignments:

Instructors must assign students a research paper that requires them to use primary source documents of some kind (either the student’s or the instructor’s choice). The paper must be submitted in stagesto give students a chance to master historical thinking skills and obtain feedback from the instructor and/or GSI. The paper should be no more than a dozen pages. Instructors must provide a final eam. All exams including midterms (if any) should require students to demonstrate critical and historical thinking skills--not simply the regurgitation of factual content.