Grasping Reality with Both Hands

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.

How Much Intellectual Steam Did the Conservative Movement Ever Have?

Richard Posner writes that the American conservative movement is losing intellectual steam:

Is the Conservative Movement Losing Steam? Posner: Until the late 1960s (when I was in my late twenties), I was barely conscious of the existence of a conservative movement. It was obscure and marginal... Barry Goldwater... Ayn Rand, Russell Kirk, and William Buckley--figures who had no appeal for me. More powerful conservative thinkers... Milton Friedman... Friedrich Hayek... George Stigler, were on the scene, but were not well known outside the economics profession.

The domestic disorder of the late 1960s, the excesses of Johnson's "Great Society," significant advances in the economics of antitrust and regulation, the "stagflation" of the 1970s, and the belief (which turned out to be mistaken) that the Soviet Union was winning the Cold War--all these developments stimulated the growth of a varied and vibrant conservative movement... free-market economics... "neoconservatism" in the sense of a strong military and a rejection of liberal internationalism... cultural conservatism, involving respect for traditional values, resistance to feminism and affirmative action, and a tough line on crime.

The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the surge of prosperity worldwide that marked the global triumph of capitalism, the essentially conservative policies, especially in economics, of the Clinton administration, and finally the election and early years of the Bush Administration, marked the apogee of the conservative movement.... By the end of the Clinton administration, I was content to celebrate the triumph of conservatism as I understood it, and had no desire for other than incremental changes.... I saw no need for the estate tax to be abolished, marginal personal-income tax rates further reduced, the government shrunk, pragmatism in constitutional law jettisoned in favor of "originalism," the rights of gun owners enlarged, our military posture strengthened, the rise of homosexual rights resisted, or the role of religion in the public sphere expanded. All these became causes embraced by the new conservatism that crested with the reelection of Bush in 2004....

[T]he policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings... weak in conception... failed in execution... political flops.... The major blows to conservatism... have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

And then came the financial crash last September and the ensuing depression. These unanticipated and shocking events have exposed significant analytical weaknesses in core beliefs of conservative economists concerning the business cycle and the macroeconomy generally. Friedmanite monetarism and the efficient-market theory of finance have taken some sharp hits, and there is renewed respect for the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Kenyes, a conservatives' bête noire...

At least Posner knows (unlike his co-blogger Gary Becker) what "conservatism" means.

But is he arguing that conservatism has lost steam or that it never had much steam in the first place?

Richard Posner sees things wrong with Bush era conservatism:

• fiscal incontinence
• the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect
• cultural-conservative issues ("continued preoccupation with abortion" "religious criteria in the selection of public officials")
• the failure of military force as a first resort in attempting to achieve U.S. foreign-policy objectives

But weren't these also the key components of the Reagan administration. Ronald Reagan was the original fiscal incontinence. And the substitution of will for intellect--was it ever any greater than in the rush to cut taxes to raise revenues, or in Alexander Haig's belief that U.S. national security would be enhanced if the IDF gave the Syrian army a thrashing in Lebanon? We had to rely on the alliance of Nancy Reagan and her astrologer to get a sane policy toward Gorbachev, for God's sake. And cultural conservatives--if I understand Posner, his complaint is that Reagan paid them only lip service and they patiently sat in the back of the bus and were quiet, while Bush, Palin, and Joe the Plumber take them seriously.

And, of course, the piece of Reagan-era conservatism of which Posner was most proud--deregulation and the trimming-back of government--has either turned out to be (a) destructive, or (b) accomplished by Carter and Clinton.

How much intellectual steam did hte conservative movement ever have?

John Quiggin Should Write a Book

Over at Crooked Timber Miracle Max writes:

Benefits of blogging: The discredited ideas theme really needs a book, and JQ appears to be the ideal person to write it. I will even contribute the title: “Dead Ideas from New Economists.” No charge.

The reference is to:

• Refuted economic doctrines #1: The efficient markets hypothesis at John Quiggin
• Refuted economic doctrines #2: The case for privatisation at John Quiggin
• Refuted economic doctrines #3: The Great Moderation at John Quiggin
• Refuted economic doctrines #4: individual retirement accounts at John Quiggin
• Refuted economic doctrines #5: Trickle down at John Quiggin
• Refuted economic doctrines #6: Central bank independence at John Quiggin
• Refuted/obsolete economic doctrines #7: New Keynesian macroeconomics at John Quiggin

Has Gary Becker Ever Met a Conservative? It Does Not Seem Likely

Gary Becker plays intellectual Calvinball with his definitions of both modern American and classical "conservatives." Edmund Burke would weep. Joseph de Maistre would weep. William F. Buckley would weep.

It is, I suppose, something to see:

The Serious Conflict in the Modern Conservative Movement: The roots of conservatism go back to philosophers of the 17 and 18th centuries, such as John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith.... They claimed further that making decisions for oneself and suffering the consequences were usually good for people, even when these decisions led to bad outcomes, because learning from one's own mistakes helps improve future choices.

Modern conservatism[']... support of competition and private markets, and hostility to sizable regulations, is a direct descendant of the classical liberal views.... Classical conservatism would recognize that the intervention of the Fed and Treasury in the finance sector may be necessary, given the crisis in that sector, but classical conservatives would look for this involvement to end as soon as possible.

The other pillars of modern conservatism are aggressive foreign policy to promote democracy in other countries, and government actions to further various social goals, such as fewer abortions or outlawing gay "marriage". These views fit less comfortably in the conservative tradition.... Classical conservatives would argue that governments are no more effective at interventions internationally or on social issues than they are on economic matters. So governments should usually not get involved....

[F]or parties to compete at the national level, or in other large political arenas, they have to put together coalitions of groups with different interests.... The Democratic Party is now fairly well united in the belief that governments frequently do better than private decision makers in both the economic and social spheres.... [T]he Republican Party under the leadership of Eisenhower and Reagan had a more consistent classical conservative philosophy of supporting private markets in the economy, little military involvement in other countries, and even little interference in social arrangements.... The shift in the attitudes of the Republican Party toward more interventionist views on social issues, and to some extent also on military involvement... has created this crisis in conservatism. Better stated, it has created this crisis in the conservatism of the Republican Party.

I believe that the best way to restore the consistency and attractiveness of the conservative movement is for modern conservatism to return to its roots of skepticism toward governmental actions....

Such a shift in attitudes would require more flexible approaches toward hot button issues like gays in the military, gay marriage, abortions, cell stem research, and toward many other issues of this type. It will not be easy for the Republican Party to emerge from the doldrums if it cannot embrace such a consistently skeptical view of government.

Notes for Econ 210a: May 6, 2009: The Great Divergence

Start with Marx:

Karl Marx (1853),"The Future Results of British Rule in India," New York Daily Tribune (August 8): The political unity... imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph. The native army, organized and trained by the British.... The free press.... From the Indian natives... educated at Calcutta under English superintendence, a fresh class is springing up, endowed with the requirements for government and imbued with European science. Steam has brought India into regular and rapid communication with Europe.... The day is not far distant when... the distance between England and India, measured by time, will be shortened to eight days, and when that once fabulous country will thus be actually annexed to the Western world....

[N]ow the ... millocracy have discovered that the transformation of India into a reproductive country has become of vital importance... [and] it is necessary... to gift her with means of irrigation and of internal communication. They intend now drawing a net of railroads over India....

I know that the English millocracy intend to endow India with railways with the exclusive view of extracting at diminished expenses the cotton and other raw materials.... But... [y]ou cannot maintain a net of railways... without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the application of machinery to those branches of industry not immediately connected with railways. The railway-system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry... the capacities and expertness of the native engineers in the Calcutta mint... the natives attached to the several steam engines in the Burdwan coal districts.... Mr. Campbell himself... is obliged to avow “that the great mass of the Indian people possesses a great industrial energy, is well fitted to accumulate capital, and remarkable for a mathematical clearness of head and talent for figures and exact sciences.” “Their intellects,” he says, “are excellent.”

Modern industry, resulting from the railway system, will dissolve the hereditary divisions of labor, upon which rest the Indian castes.... All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people.... But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?...

The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world... universal intercourse... the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions.... When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain...

What went wrong?

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Lant Pritchett, "Divergence, Big Time":

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Lewis: The Evolution of the International Economic Order:

"How did the world come to be divided into industrial countries and agricultural countries?"

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rodrik: Getting Interventions Right: How Korea and Taiwan Grew Rich:

Neocolonial origins of economic development:

Role of the Cold War in Asia?

Will Wilkinson on Peter Thiel

He doesn't quite get it, I think. He treats Peter Theil as suffering from a generic libertarian democraphobia--rather than the more specific Fear of an Ovarian Planet.

Will Wilkinson:

Libertarian Democraphobia: Which brings us to Thiel’s boneheaded quip about women’s suffrage. Extending the franchise to women is, in my estimation, one of the great triumphs... the rejection of a shameful tradition of paternalism.... I cannot see how anyone who accepts basic liberal assumptions about freedom and equality can see the establishment of equal political rights as anything but an unequivocal good... unless he rejects the legitimacy of politics in principle. I think this is were Thiel was coming from.

But if politics is in-principle illegitimate, it was illegitimate before women got the vote, so why bring it up? By bringing it up as a reason why democratic progress is hopeless, Thiel does make it sound like he thinks the problem’s not democratic politics per se, but democratic politics without good prospect of producing the right answer...

But it is not democratic politics as corrupted by the votes of the unwashed, the illiterate, the media-dazzled, or the organized and interested that Thiel denounces, it is democratic politics as corrupted by Persons with Ovaries--plus, don't forget, "welfare recipients." There are and always have been lots of sources of "false consciousness" in politics. But few indeed are those who have focused on estrogen levels as a cause.

Will goes on:

[L]iberalism starts from the recognition that free and equal people don’t agree about the right answer but need to find a way to live together anyway.... Thiel’s comment seemed to imply that political recognition of the fundamental equality of persons is not only tangential to the right answer, but might even get in the way of arriving at it, which is just screwed up.

If establishing equal rights to political participation in fact created an impediment to the political success of libertarianish ideas, maybe there are some very good reasons for that.... [I]f libertarian-style politics seems especially unnatractive to members of formerly oppressed and disenfranchised groups, maybe that’s because... [they] suspect that a politics that focuses relentlessly on the inviolability of property... is a politics meant to protect those who reap the gains of a still-rigged and unjust system.

Benefit-Cost Analysis

The extremely sharp-witted Rob Stavins gets one wrong.

Rob:

Harvard UniversityAn Economic View of the Environment: Does economic analysis shortchange the future?: Much skepticism about discounting and, more broadly, the use of benefit-cost analysis, is connected to uncertainties in estimating future impacts.... Benefits also depend on the values future generations would attach.... But how can we predict future generations’ values?  Economists and other social scientists try to infer them through surveys and by inferring preferences from individuals’ behavior. But these approaches are far from perfect, and at best they indicate only the values or tastes of people alive today. The uncertainties are substantial and unavoidable, but they do not invalidate the use of discounting (or benefit-cost analysis).  They do oblige analysts, however, to assess and acknowledge those uncertainties in their policy assessments, a topic I discussed in my last post (“What Baseball Can Teach Policymakers”), and a topic to which I will return in the future...

But he does not mention the elephant in the room: cost-benefit analysis sums up Benthamite utilities of individuals weighting each one's by the inverse of their personal marginal utility of wealth. The richer you are, the lower your marginal utility of wealth, and the more weight your preferences get in benefit-cost analysis. This is a problem. This is especially a problem when real interest rates are high, for when real interest rates are high the future is (relatively) poor and thus gets (relatively) little weight.

Is Anything Karl Marx Wrote After He Turned Thirty Worthwhile?

Circling around again to Chris Bertram's whine about how lousy my "evaluating Karl Marx as an economist" lecture is, and how he would do something else:

Explaining Marx to newbies: Suppose I were lecturing about Karl Marx: I’d do the same thing. I’d probably start by discussing some of the ideas in the Manifesto about the revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie, about their transformation of technology, social relations, and their creation of a global economy. Then I’d say something about Marx’s belief that, despite the appearance of freedom and equality, we live in a society where some people end up living off the toil of other people. How some people have little choice but to spend their whole lives working for the benefit of others, and how this compulsion stops them from living truly truly human lives. And then I’d talk about Marx’s belief that a capitalist society would eventually be replaced by a classless society run by all for the benefit of all. Naturally, I’d say something about the difficulties of that idea. I don’t think I’d go on about Pol Pot or Stalin, I don’t think I’d recycle the odd bon mot by Paul Samuelson, I don’t think I’d dismiss Hegel out of hand, and I don’t think I’d contrast modes of production with Weberian modes of domination...

Something occurs to me: Bertram thinks that the lecture should be exclusively about the Communist Manifesto and before. Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto when he was 29, drawing substantially on what Engels had written about the condition of British textile workers in Manchester in his Condition of the Working Class in England when he was 23. Chris Bertram doesn't think that what either of them wrote about for the rest of their lives is worth wrestling with.

That is, I think, a much harsher judgment of Karl Marx-as-economist than I would deliver...

John Kay Weighs in, Calling for a Practical Macroeconomics

Me? I think that we ought to be turning out a lot of macroeconomic historians and historians of economic thought, and that only they should be allowed to serve in government or comment on public affairs at least as far as the business cycle is concerned.

John Kay at the FT:

John Kay: How economics lost sight of real world: The past two years have not enhanced the reputation of economists.... Although more economic research has been done in the past 25 years than ever before, the economists whose names are most frequently referenced today, such as Hyman Minsky and John Maynard Keynes, are from earlier generations. Since the 1970s economists have been engaged in a grand project. The project’s objective is that macroeconomics should have microeconomic foundations. In everyday language, that means that what we say about big policy issues – growth and inflation, boom and bust – should be grounded in the study of individual behaviour.... Most economists would claim that the project has been a success... the criteria are the self-referential criteria of modern academic life....

But policymakers and the public at large are, rightly, not interested in whether models are rigorous. They are interested in whether the models are useful and illuminating – and these "rigorous" models do not score well here.... That people respond rationally to incentives, and that market prices incorporate information about the world, are not terrible assumptions. But they are not universal truths either. Much of what creates profit opportunities and causes instability in the global economy results from the failure of these assumptions. Herd behaviour, asset mispricing and grossly imperfect information have led us to where we are today.

There is not, and never will be, an economic theory of everything....

Keynes... explain[ed] that economic understanding required an amalgam of logic and intuition and a wide knowledge of facts, most of which are not precise: “a requirement overwhelmingly difficult for those whose gift mainly consists in the power to imagine and pursue to their furthest points the implications and prior conditions of comparatively simple facts which are known with a high degree of precision”. On this, as on much else, Keynes was right.

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Marx on India

Apropos of DeLong: Understanding Marx Lecture for April 20, 2009, Michael Perelman--whose knowledge of the history of economic thought far exceeds mine--takes exception to my classifying Marx's writings on the British in India as Marx in his "prophetic mode"

Michael Perelman: I have done some work on the subject. It was not Marx the prophet. The articles [on India] were directed toward Henry Carey, who was undermining Marx's position on the New York Tribune. The story is very interesting, including others, including Frederick Law Olmstead.

Marx says that Carey sent him at least one book. I have tried to locate Marx's correspondence with Carey, but have been unsuccessful.

I am not sure. When I read Marx's:

All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises.... Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?... The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world... universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind... the development of the productive powers of man.... When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch... and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain...

I definitely hear the voice of Daniel and see the Great Social Revolution coming on clouds of glory...

Attempted DeLong Smackdown Watch: Uncle Joe He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named Edition

Chris Bertram has not yet learned that a lecture about Marx that does not mention Pol Pot or Joe Stalin shouts their names out more loudly than would otherwise be possible:

Explaining Marx to newbies: Suppose I were lecturing about Karl Marx.... I’d probably start by discussing some of the ideas in the Manifesto about the revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie, about their transformation of technology, social relations, and their creation of a global economy. Then I’d say something about Marx’s belief that, despite the appearance of freedom and equality, we live in a society where some people end up living off the toil of other people. How some people have little choice but to spend their whole lives working for the benefit of others, and how this compulsion stops them from living truly truly human lives. And then I’d talk about Marx’s belief that a capitalist society would eventually be replaced by a classless society run by all for the benefit of all. Naturally, I’d say something about the difficulties of that idea. I don’t think I’d go on about Pol Pot or Stalin...

DeLong: Understanding Marx Lecture for April 20, 2009

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Download now or preview on posterous

• Audio File: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2009_mov/20090420_stanford_Marx_audio.mov

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Posted via email from http://braddelong.posterous.com/delong-understanding-marx-lecture-for-april-2 at Brad DeLong's Scrapbook

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Understanding Karl Marx
J. Bradford DeLong
University of California at Berkeley and NBER
brad.delong@gmail.com

http://delong.typepad.com/>
+1 925 708 0467
April 20, 2009

In the beginning was Karl Marx, with his vision of how the Industrial Revolution would transform everything and be followed by a Great Communist Social Revolution—greater than the political French Revolution—that would wash us up on the shores of Utopia.

The mature Marx saw the economy as the key to history: every forecast and historical interpretation must be based on the economy's logic of development. This project as carried forward by others ran dry. Sometimes--as in, say, Eric Hobsbawm's books on the history of the nineteenth century--this works relatively well. But sometimes it led nowhere. The writing of western European history as the rise, fall, and succession of ancient, feudal, and bourgeois modes of production is a fascinating project. But the only person to try it seriously soon throws the Marxist apparatus over the side, where it splashes and sinks to the bottom of the sea. Perry Anderson's Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State are great and fascinating books, but they are not Marxist. They are Weberian. The key processes in Anderson's books concern not “modes of production” but rather “modes of domination.” And when Marx and Engels's writings became sacred texts for the world religion called Communism, things passed beyond the absurd into tragedy and beyond tragedy into horror: the belief that the logic of development of the economy was the most important thing about society became entangled in the belief that Joe Stalin or Mao Zedong or Pol Pot or Kim Il Sung or Fidel Castro was our benevolent master and ever-wise guide.

But let us go back to a time before Marxism lost its innocence. Let us go back and look at the thinker, Karl Marx, and what he actually wrote and thought.

Karl Marx had a three part intellectual trajectory. He started out as a German philosopher; became a French-style political activist, political analyst, and political historian; and ended up trying to become a British- style economist and economic historian. At the start of his career he believed that all we had to due to attain true human emancipation was to think correctly about freedom and necessity. Later on he recognized that thought was not enough: that we had to organize, politically. And then in the final stage he thought that the political organization had to be with and not against the grain of the truly decisive factor, the extraordinary economic changes that the coming of the industrial revolution was bringing to the world.

At each stage Marx had the enthusiasm of the true-believing convert: it was never the case that philosophy alone could bring utopia, it was never the case that after the revolution all problems will be resolved, and it was never the case that the underlying economic mode of production was the base and that its evolution drove the shape of the superstructure. Karl Marx never completed the intellectual trajectory he set himself on. He tried as hard as he could to become a British-style classical economist- -a "minor post-Ricardian theorist" as Paul Samuelson once joked--but he did not make it: the late, mature Marx is mostly an economist and economic historian, but he is also part political activist--and also part prophet.

Marx the prophet, here is a sample: Marx on India:

The ruling classes of Great Britain.... The aristocracy wanted to conquer [India], the moneyocracy to plunder it, and the millocracy to undersell it. But now the... millocracy have discovered that the transformation of India into a reproductive country has become of vital importance.... They intend now drawing a net of railroads over India... exclusive view of extracting at diminished expenses the cotton and other raw materials for their manufactures....

You cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the application of machinery to those branches of industry not immediately connected with railways. The railway-system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry.... All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises.... Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?...

The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world... universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind... the development of the productive powers of man.... When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch... and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain...

Large-scale prophecy of a glorious utopian future is bound to be false when applied to this world. The New Jerusalem does not descend from the clouds "prepared as a Bride adorned for her Husband." And a Great Voice does not declare: "I shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away..." But Marx clearly thought at some level that it would: he never got to the island of Patmos on which John the Divine lived, but there is a sense that he got too much into the magic mushrooms.

Marx the political activist. As I see it, he had three big ideas:

1. that while previous systems of hierarchy and domination maintained control by hypnotizing the poor into believing that the rich in some sense “deserved” their high seats in the temple of civilization, capitalism would–replace masked exploitation by naked exploitation. Then the scales would fall from people's eyes, for without its masking ideological legitimations unequal class society could not survive. This idea seems to me to be completely wrong. Cf. Antonio Gramsci, passim, on legitimation and hegemony. See also Fox News.

2. that even though the ruling class could appease the working class by using the state to redistribute and share the fruits of economic growth it would never do so. They would be trapped by their own ideological legitimations--they really do believe that it is in some sense “unjust” for a factor of production to earn more than its marginal product. Hence social democracy would inevitably collapse before an ideologically-based right-wing assault, income inequality would rise, and the system would collapse or be overthrown. The Wall Street Journal editorial page works day and night 365 days a year to make Marx’s prediction come true. But I think this, too, is wrong.

3. that factory work was the wave of the future, and factory work-- lots of people living in cities living alongside each other working alongside each other--would lead people to develop a sense of their common interest. Hence people would organize, revolt, and establish a free and just society in a way that they could not back in the old days when the peasants of this village were suspicious of the peasants of that one, and peasants formed not a class for themselves but, rather, a sack of potatoes which can attain no organization but simply remains a sack of potatoes. Here I think Marx mistook a passing phase for an enduring trend. Active working-class consciousness as a primary source of loyalty and political allegiance was never that strong. Nation and ethnos trump class, never more so that when the socialists of Germany told their emperor in 1914 that they were Germans first and Marxists second.

Add to these the fact that Marx's idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was clearly not the brightest light on humanity's tree of ideas, and I see very little in Marx the political activist that is worthwhile today.

Marx the economist--well, Marx the economist had six big things to say, some of which are very valuable even today across more than a century and a half, and some of which are not. I would call them the three goods and the three bads:

1. Marx the economist was among the very first to recognize that the fever-fits of financial crisis and depression that afflict modern market economies were not a passing phase or something that could be easily cured, but rather a deep disability of the system--as we are being reminded once again right now, this time with Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and Larry Summers in the Hot Seats. Marx pointed the spotlight in the right direction here. However, I don't think that his theory of business cycles and financial crises holds up. Marx thought that business cycles and financial crises were evidence of the long-term unsustainability of the system. We modern neoliberal economists view it not as a fatal lymphoma but rather like malaria: Keynesianism--or monetarism, if you prefer--gives us the tools to transform the business cycle from a life- threatening economic yellow fever of the society into the occasional night sweats and fevers: that with economic policy quinine we can manage if not banish the disease.

2. Marx the economist was among the very first to get the industrial revolution right: to understand what it meant for human possibilities and the human destiny in a sense that people like Adam Smith did not. In his Politics Aristotle observed that it was not possible to run a household in a way that permitted its head enough leisure and freedom to, say, become a lover of wisdom unless the household owned slaves, and that this would be true unless and until we had instruments like "the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods;' if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves..." Karl Marx was among the very first to see that the industrial revolution was giving us the statues of Daedalus, the tripods of Hephaestus, looms that weave and lyres that play by themselves--and thus opens the possibility of a society in which we people can be lovers of wisdom without being supported by the labor of a mass of illiterate, brutalized, half-starved, and overworked slaves.

3. Marx the economist got a lot about the economic history of the development of modern capitalism in England right--not everything, but he is still very much worth grappling with as an economic historian of 1500-1850. Most important, I think, are his observations that the benefits of industrialization do take a long time--generations--to kick in, while the costs of redistributions and power grabs in the interest of market efficiency and the politically- powerful rising mercantile classes kick in immediately. You have to take seriously the idea that the industrial revolution did not make most or even many people better off right away. Reflect also that, as Tyler Cowen observes, capitalist systems can produce less autonomy than small scale production. Standards of living do rise from industrialization--which can undercut the cultures and networks of suppliers that make the choice of a petit bourgeois lifestyle sustainable.

Now on to the three bads:

1. Marx believed that capital is not a complement to but a substitute for labor. Thus technological progress and capital accumulation that raise average labor productivity also lower the working-class wage. Hence the market system simply could not deliver a good or half-good society but only a combination of obscene luxury and mass poverty. This is an empirical question. Marx's belief seems to me to be simply wrong.

2. Marx the economist did not like the society of the cash nexus. He believed that a system that reduced people to some form of prostitution--working for wages and wages alone--was bad. He saw a society growing in which worked for money, and their real life began only when the five o’clock whistle blows--and saw such an economy as an insult, delivering low utility, and also sociologically and psychologically unsustainable in the long run. Instead, he thought, people should view their jobs as expressions of their species-being: ways to gain honor or professions that they were born or designed to do or as ways to serve their fellow- human. Here, I think, Marx mistook the effects of capitalism for the effects of poverty. The demand for a world in which people do things for each other purely out of beneficence rather than out of interest and incentives leads you down a very dangerous road, for societies that try to abolish the cash nexus in favor of public- spirited benevolence do not wind up in their happy place. We neoliberal economists shrug our shoulders and say that we are in favor of a market economy but not of a market society, and that there is no reason why people cannot find jobs they like or insist on differentials that compensate them for jobs they don’t.

3. Marx believed that the capitalist market economy was incapable of delivering an acceptable distribution of income for anything but the briefest of historical intervals. As best as I can see, he was pushed to that position by watching the French Second Republic of 1848-1851, where the ruling class comes to prefer a charismatic mountebank for a dictator--"Napoleon III"--over a democracy because dictatorship promises to safeguard their property in a way that democracy will not. Hence Marx saw political democracy as only surviving for as long as the rulers could pull the wool over the workers' eyes, and then collapsing. I think that Western Europe over the past fifty years serves as a significant counterexample. It may be difficult to maintain a democratic capitalist market system with an acceptable distribution of income. But "incapable" is surely too strong. Beveridgism or Myrdalism--social democracy, progressive income taxes, a very large and well-established safety net, public education to a high standard, channels for upward mobility, and all the panoply of the twentieth-century social- democratic mixed-economy democratic state can banish all Marx’s fears that capitalist prosperity must be accompanied by great inequality and great misery.

The good things that Marx was able to think must, I believe, be credited to his own account--to his thoughtfulness, his industry, his intelligence, and his desperate desire to try to get things right. The bad things have, I believe, two of his intellectual origins: Marx's beginnings in German philosophy, and the fact that he hooked up in the 1840s with Friedrich Engels whose family owned textile factories in Manchester. German philosophy, or perhaps rather Hegel. I remember reading Capital for the first time. The first three sections of chapter 1 seemed (a) boring, and (b) tautological. For example:

When, at the beginning of this chapter, we said in common parlance that a commodity is both a use value and an exchange value, we were, accurately speaking, wrong. A commodity is a use value or object of utility and a value. It manifests itself as this twofold thing that it is as soon as its value assumes an independent form – viz., the form of exchange value. It never assumes this form when isolated but only when placed in a value or exchange relation with another commodity of a different kind. When once we know this such a mode of expression does no harm...

And then I hit section 4: "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof":

A commodity is… a mysterious thing… in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product… the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented… as a social relation… not between themselves but between the products…. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve but as the objective form of something outside the eye…. But in the act of seeing there is at all events an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There the existence of the things quâ commodities and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities have absolutely no connection with their physical properties… [I]t is a definite social relation between men that assumes in their eyes the fantastic form of a relation between things… we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world… the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life and entering into relations both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour so soon as they are produced as commodities…. This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them...

Marx describes this as coquett[ing] with the modes of expression peculiar to [Hegel].

Put me on record as saying that this “coquetting” is profoundly unhelpful.

What is going on here? What I think is going on inside Marx's head is something strange. To say that "the value relation[s] between the products of labour... have absolutely no connection with their physical properties" is simply wrong: if the coffee beans are rotten--or if their caffeine level is low--they have no value at all, for nobody will buy them. Marx says that the value of a good is something inscribed within it and attached to it--the socially-necessary labor time for its production—that then bosses people around. And it is the values--not the prices at which things are actually bought and sold--that are the elements of the real important reality. And those values: "appear as independent beings endowed with life and entering into relation both with one another and the human race." Now I have never found anybody who thinks this way.

Nobody I talk to believes that "values" are objective quantities inherent in goods by virtue of the time it took to produce them.

Everybody I talk to believes that things are both (a) useful to me and (b) useful to other people, and moreover (c) we live in a society where we exchange stuff--where we, in Adam Smith's words, truck, barter, and exchange. If the combination of my wealth and its usefulness to me makes me value it the most, then I use it--it is to me what Marx calls a use value. If there is somebody else out there whose combination of their wealth and its usefulness to them makes them value it more than I do, then I trade it away to them directly or indirectly for stuff that I value more--they consume it, and it is to me what Marx calls an exchange value. But what Marx calls exchange values are really use values to others: a combination of (a) bargaining power--wealth--and (b) utility to actual concrete breathing humans. Things have value not because of the abstraction that socially-necessary labor time is needed to produce them but because of the concretion that somebody somewhere wants to use it and has something ese that others find useful to trade in turn. What Marx calls the mysterious and bizarre dual character of commodities is nothing mysterious or bizarre: it is simply the fact that I am not the only person in the world, and that things very useful to me may be less useful to others, and vice versa.

Moreover, capitalist production has nothing to do with what Marx describes as this mysterious dual character of commodities. The distinction between use-value and exchange-value is not something invented by or peculiar to the capitalist mode of production: it is found in all human societies, no matter how large or small, no matter what the glue that holds them together. The cattle slaughtered and cooked by the thralls of Hrothgar, King of the Geats, have use-value to Hrothgar: He and his family can eat (some of) them. The cattle have exchange-value to Hrothgar as well: He feeds them to his warriors at their nightly banquets in his great hall of Heorot. In exchange for livery and maintenance, the warriors fight Hrothgar's wars. Success in war gains Hrothgar more thralls, more cattle, and a bigger and better reputation as a great drighten worth following--until Grendel comes along and makes eating Hrothgar's cattle in exchange for following him into battle too hazardous to life and limb.

In my view, Marx has trapped himself. He has been primed to expect a deeper layer of real reality underneath mere appearances. And he has chosen the wrong model of the underlying real reality--the labor theory of value, which is simply not a very good model of the averages around which prices fluctuate. Socially-necessary labor power usually serves as an upper bound to value--if something sells for more, then a lot of people are going to start making more of them, and the prices at which it trades are going to fall. But lots of things sell for much less than the prices corresponding to their socially-necessary labor power lots of the time. And so Marx vanishes into the swamp which is the attempt to reconcile the labor theory of value with economic reality, and never comes out.

This matters because one conclusion Marx reaches is that markets and their prices are a source of oppression--that they aren't sources of opportunity (to trade your stuff or the stuff you make to people who value it more) but rather of domination by others and unfreedom: the system forces you to sell your labor-power for its value which is less than the value of the goods you make. And it is that conclusion that human freedom is totally incompatible with wage-labor or market exchange that leads the political movements that Marx founded down very strange and very destructive roads.

I've done Hegel. Now let me do Manchester.

The British interests of the German partnership of Ermen and Engels were not in London or in Birmingham but instead in Manchester. Engels's 1845 Condition of the Working Class in England, cribbed for section 1 of the Manifesto, was about the condition of the working class in Manchester. Yet as Asa Briggs (1963) stressed most strongly, Manchester was not typical of England. Briggs quotes Tocqueville's descriptions of Manchester as a city with "a few great capitalists, thousands of poor workmen and little middle class" compared to Birmingham with "few large industries, many small industrialists... workers work in their own houses or in little workshops in company with the master himself... the working people of Birmingham seem more healthy, better off, more orderly and more moral than those of Manchester..." Briggs speculated that Engels's book would have been very different indeed had Ermen and Engels's interests been elsewhere than Manchester: "his conception of ‘class’ and his theories of the role of class in history might have been very different.... Marx might have been not a communist but a currency reformer..."

Back in 1998, we got George Boyer of Cornell to take a look at the historical circumstances of the composition of the Manifesto:

[A]verage age of death of "mechanics, labourers, and their families" in Manchester was 17, as compared to 38 in rural Rutlandshire... despite the fact that laborers’ wages were at least twice as high in Manchester... 57 percent of children born in Manchester to working class parents died before their fifth birthday.... Engels arrived in Manchester in the late fall of 1842, Britain was just beginning to recover from the deep depression of 1841-42... "crowds of unemployed working men at every street corner, and many mills were still standing idle" (Engels, 1845 [1987], pp. 121 – 22).... The Economist reported that in the first six months of 1848 [as the Manifesto was being written], 18.6 percent of the workforce in Manchester’s cotton mills was unemployed, and another 9.5 percent was on short time (Boyer, 1990, p. 235)....

John Stuart Mill (1848 [1909], p. 751)... concluded that "hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes."... Marx and Engels… were not alone in asserting that the standard of living... was quite poor, and perhaps declining... during the "hungry ’40s."... [A]rmy recruits born around 1850 were shorter than those born around 1820...

It looks as though Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto--and made their permanent intellectual commitments--in 1848, at the nadir of living standards as far as British Lancashire textile workers were considered. Their assertion that wages declined as capitalism progressed looks good up until 1848 if you take Manchester as your guide. Thereafter it proved wrong. By 1880 manual workers were earning 40% more than in 1850. Parliament began to regulate conditions of employment in the 1840s. Parliament began to regulate public health in the 1850s. Parliament doubled the urban electorate in 1867, just as volume 1 of Capital was published. Parliament gave unions official sanction to bargain collectively in the 1870s.

Marx appears to have responded to this not by rethinking his opposition to markets as social allocation mechanisms or by reworking his analyses of the dynamics of economic growth, capital accumulation, and the real wage level, but by blaming British workers for not acting according to his model in response to predictions by Marx of continued impoverishment and ever- larger business cycles that had not come to pass. Boyer quotes Marx writing in 1878 about how British workers "had got to the point when [the British working class] was nothing more than the tail of the Great Liberal Party, i.e., of the oppressors, the capitalists." And Boyer quotes Engels writing in 1894 of how "one is indeed driven to despair by these English workers... bourgeois ideas... viewpoints... narrow-mindedness..."

In the late 1870s--after the failure of the British working class to become more militant, the failure of the Paris Commune and the founding of the French Third Republic, and Bismarck's creation of a unified Prussified German Empire--Marx and Engels started to turn their attention toward Russia.

4500 words

Really Existing Socialism

Since 1989 American conservatives have been saying that European countries like France, Germany, Sweden, Britain, and Spain are "socialist." They are pretty nice places: lots of parks, lots of museums, good public transportation, no worries about being unable to pay for health care, good food, wine that approaches that of California, et cetera.

As a result, when you ask the young about "socialism" they think of wetern Europe--quite a change from the days when really existing socialism was East Germany or the Soviet Union.

Matthew Yglesias:

Matthew Yglesias » The Declining Unpopularity of Socialism: Steve Benen observes that one problem with attacking Barack Obama as a “socialist” is that opposition to socialism isn’t as popular as it used to be:

Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure which is better. Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided.

The generational change here is interesting. I think it reflects the fact that on a basic level “socialism” is good branding. The whole idea is that we should put society first rather than capital, or money. That sounds good! But in the United States we never had a Socialist Party so “socialism” was primarily associated with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which was not at all good. But to people under 30, there’s less of that old resonance. And saying that Obama, who’s popular, is a “socialist” may simply tend to make people have warmer feelings toward the word “socialism.”

Hoo Boy: We Need Better Senators Badly

Pat Garofolo on Senator Blanche Lincoln:

Think Progress: Lincoln’s $250 billion estate tax plan would cut taxes for only 60 ’small businesses.’: Last week, 10 Democrats in the Senate joined all 41 Republicans in voting for a $250 billion proposal to cut estate taxes, designed by Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ). More than 99 percent of this cost would go to the inheritors of estates worth over $7 million. Touting the tax cut in a press release, Lincoln claimed that it was “aimed at farms and small businesses.” However, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, Lincoln’s $250 billion proposal would save just 60 small businesses or farms from the estate tax:

An always charged issue is how the estate tax affects small farms and family-owned businesses. We estimate that under the Obama proposal, 100 family farms and businesses [a year] would owe tax.... The Lincoln-Kyl proposal would cut the number to 40.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, “almost all such estates are able to pay the tax bill without having to sell business assets.”

Are We Handcuffed by Golden Fetters?

Paul Krugman writes:

What’s our gold standard?: I’ve just reread Eichengreen and Temin, The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, which does a great job of showing how the “gold mentality” — what they call mentalite, with an accent — paralyzed policymakers. (The longer-form version, with more personal color, is Liaquat Ahamad’s Lords of Finance.) What E&T show is that circa 1930 key decision-makers had spent so many years equating adherence to gold not just with prosperity, but with morality, decency, civilization itself, that they couldn’t even contemplate breaking with that orthodoxy — even in the face of total catastrophe. I think we’re more flexible now. But my sense is that the mystique of finance is playing a somewhat similar role.

More on this when I’m not waiting for a delayed plan at O’Hare.

My view is that we are not now bound by golden fetters--that by and large we know what to do and how to do it to keep the world economy out of a depression. But, I would say, there are three groups of people who are trying to handcuff us with today's equivalents of the golden fetters that constrained economic policy and made the Great Depression so great. Each group is doing so for its own reasons:

1. Out of ignorance: the modern-day Chicago School of economists, which is arguing against effective use of policies to manage aggregate demand because they have never read Metzler or Friedman (or Keynes), and never thought at all seriously about the transmission mechanisms by which changes in monetary policy (and fiscal policy) affect the price level in the long run and affect output, employment and demand in the short run.

2. Out of malevolence: the Republican members of congress and all their intelletual enablers who would have fallen in line behind what are now the policies of the Obama administration had McCain won the election and had they been the policies of the McCain administration instead--but who are right now opposed because they think making Obama's presidency a failure is the road to electoral success in 2010 and 2012.

3. Out of justice: avoiding depression requires supporting asset prices--which means that for many financiers the wages of overspeculation will be not bankruptcy but fortunes. People rebel against the fact that in a financial crisis the banking sector has got the rest of us by the plums, and that there is no effective way to make sure they get their justice without creating prolonged mass unemployment for the rest of us.

American Enterprise Institute: World's Worst Thinktank (Yet Another Charles Murray Edition)

A correspondent writes:

Once, for reasons I cannot recall, I agreed to serve as a discussant at AEI... on economic returns to religion.... I noted that there appeared to be significant differences in economic outcomes by religion (Jews do well, for example), and commented that this might be because of unobserved heterogeneity. Murray, another discussant, said that [the] research could answer the question about the "true religion," since obviously the ones most blessed should gain the most financially. I thought that only at AEI would people subject God to a market test...

Let's give the mike to The Παντοκράτωρ:

The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: And he thought within himself, saying, "What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?" And he said, "This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry'." But God said unto him, "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?" So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.

Moneyblogging vs. Sexblogging

At the moment "Fear of Reese Witherspoon Look-Alikes on the Pill" has 116 comments, while "The Geithner Plan FAQ" has only 89 comments. I confess this leaves me somewhat disappointed: I thought money would be dominating by this point...

So Say We All!

Edward James Olmos on the social construction of race. Eric Rauchway:

He kept his shoes on. « The Edge of the American West: On his authority as Admiral of the battlestar Galactica, Edward James Olmos addresses a crowd in the United Nations chamber and gets them to condemn the constructedness of race with a shout of “So say we all!” Apart from the, I believe, indisputable general awesomeness of this moment, I’m not sure there’s that much else to say.

Fear of Reese Witherspoon Look-Alikes on the Pill

I was once approving of Ross Douthat as a New York Times oped columnist. But that was when I was younger. And easily misled.

From Ross Douthat, Privilege, bottom of p. 184:

One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend's parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point--"Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?" she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn't sure what to say, but then I wasn't sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business... and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered--"You know, I'm on the pill..."

What squicks me out is (a) that the real turnoff for Ross Douthat is that she has taken responsibility for her own fertility and gone on the pill, and (b) that Ross Douthat does not take this to be a learning moment--is not self-reflective enough to say "Hmmm... If there are other men like me who are turned off by women who take responsibility for fertility control, isn't that likely to be a cause of more abortions?"

Combine that with what Ross Douthat's dismissal of Belle Sawhill's point that free-as-in-beer (but not free-as-in-no-hassle) birth control appears to prevent 1/5 of abortions--and there is an awful lot here not to like, and an awfully good reason to think that Tyler Cowen or Kerry Howley or Virginia Postrel or any of a large number of other candidates would be an infinitely better choice for the job.

And, of course, there is the other point: here is a Reese Witherspoon look-alike who has offered Ross Douthat the extremely precious gift of wanting to make love to him, and he writes her into his book in this way with what look to be sufficient identifying details. You can write that paragraph in a way that is calculated to try to make her feel bad about herself should she ever read it; you can write that paragraph in a way that does not try to make her feel bad about herself should she ever read it; normal human sociability and empathy suggests that one should try to do the first second; Ross Douthat chooses to do the second first.

The Appeal to "Undecidability" as Last Gasp

Ross Douthat:

The Case For Small Government: I think the argument suffers from a problem that's common to both sides in the debates over the desirability of European-style social democracy - namely, the hope that what's ultimately a philosophical and moral controversy can have a tidy empirical resolution.... [T]he philosophical case for limited government - that human existence in the shadow of a nanny state doesn't conduce to "Aristotelian happiness"... because it strips human beings of the deeper sorts of agency and responsibility that ought to be involved in a life well lived - he's on firm (if obviously arguable) ground. But when he segues into the possibility that the emerging science of human nature will "prove" the limits of welfare-statism, and force liberals to give ground... there's an unwarranted hope that the right facts and figures can settle a debate that ultimately depends on the philosophical assumptions that you bring to it...

Matthew Yglesias calls bullshit:

Matthew Yglesias: Crippling Poverty is Not Service to Family: Left out of here is what the right always loves to leave out of discussions of economic policy choices: interest. If you’re poor in the United States and you live in a neighborhood where poor people can afford to live, you will almost certainly be living in a neighborhood that’s much more dangerous than the neighborhoods in which poor Dutch people live. You’ll also find yourself living in a country that’s much less friendly to the interests of people who can’t afford a car than is the Netherlands. Conversely, if a European executive meets an American executive and feels a twinge of jealousy, it’s not for the American’s greater level of “entrepreneurship” it’s for the fact that the U.S. social model leaves top executives much richer than European executives.... [I]ncome level is fairly predictive of voting behavior and this is neither a coincidence nor the reflection of an abstract disagreement about the value of “voluntarism.” It reflects the fact that politics is, among other things, a concrete contest over concrete economic interests.... I don’t think, for example, that America’s high child poverty rate reflects American preference for “service to one’s family” over “ease of life”...

As Milton Friedman put it back in 1953:

The basic objectives, shared, I am sure, by most economics, are political freedom, economic efficiency, and substantial equality of economic power. Thes objectives are not, of course, entirely consistent.... I believe--and at this stage agreement will be far less widespread--that all three objectives can best be realized by relying, as far as possible, on a market mechanism within a "competitive order" to organize the utilization of economic resources...

Friedman's argument against social democracy was that it would not do the job--that you would lose a lot of economic efficiency and some political liberty and in return get no equalization of economic power because the government would redistribute income and wealth the wrong way, and the beneficiaries would be the strong political claimants to governmental largess who would not be those with strong claims to more opportunity.

By the time you have resorted to arguing that "human existence in the shadow of a nanny state doesn't conduce to 'Aristotelian happiness'... because it strips human beings of the deeper sorts of agency and responsibility that ought to be involved in a life well lived..." you have lost the argument completely. And I have not even raised the point that Aristotle thought that Aristotelian happiness was possible only if you yourself owned lots of slaves:

Aristotle: There is in some cases a marked distinction between the two classes, rendering it expedient and right for the one to be slaves and the others to be masters.... The master is not called a master because he has science, but because he is of a certain character.... [T]here may be a science for the master and science for the slave. The science of the slave would be such as the man of Syracuse taught who made money by instructing slaves in their ordinary duties.... But all such branches of knowledge are servile. There is likewise a science of the master... not anything great or wonderful; for the master need only know how to order that which the slave must know how to execute. Hence those who are in a position which places them above toil have stewars who attend to their households while they occupy themselves with philosophy or with politics...

Notes After Econ 210a: February 25, 2009: The Economics of Thugs with Spears Who Take Your Stuff

Economics 210a: February 25, 2009: The Economics of Thugs with Spears Who Take Your Stuff...

Domar: In order to have a rich upper class of warriors/administrators/bureaucrats, you need to have:

• sufficient productivity to support an upper class...
• sufficient differential in military effectiveness to make becoming a lord or an unproductive specialist in coercive violence worth the risk...
• scarce land, or an effective "recapture technology" (Cossacks, language competence, black skin as a marker, etc.) to keep your slaves/serfs/debt peons from successfully running away...

Austen and Smith: Colonial-era Caribbean slavery requires:

• guns that European merchants can sell to African kings on the coast...
• prior slave-raiding that can be made more effective and larger scale by guns...
• caravels and equivalent to carry slaves to the Caribbean reliably...
• Europe rich enough to pay for sugar...
• Europe with a taste for sugar...
• Legal systems that will support colonial slavery...

Marx and Engels: Things are not that different:

• formal judicial equality is not substantive equality...
• over time, variance means that some of the rich get richer and others lose their wealth and fall into the proletariat--hence income gets more concentrated...
• Marx believes working-class wages are doomed to remain at "subsistence." It is not clear why. His arguments for rising inequality are, I think, coherent. His arguments for the absolute immiserization of the working class are, I think, not coherent at all...

Didn't get to Engerman and Sokoloff...

---

Abraham Lincoln Blogging

Let's turn the microphone over to Abraham Lincoln:

Abraham Lincoln: First Inaugural Address: If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might in a moral point of view justify revolution; certainly would if such right were a vital one. But such is not our case. All the vital rights of minorities and of individuals are so plainly assured to them by affirmations and negations, guaranties and prohibitions, in the Constitution that controversies never arise concerning them. But no organic law can ever be framed with a provision specifically applicable to every question.... Shall fugitives from labor be surrendered by national or by State authority? The Constitution does not expressly say. May Congress prohibit slavery in the Territories? The Constitution does not expressly say. Must Congress protect slavery in the Territories? The Constitution does not expressly say.

From questions of this class spring all our constitutional controversies, and we divide upon them into majorities and minorities. If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the Government must cease. There is no other alternative, for continuing the Government is acquiescence on one side or the other. If a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them, for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority.... Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left....

One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. The fugitive-slave clause of the Constitution and the law for the suppression of the foreign slave trade are each as well enforced, perhaps, as any law can ever be in a community where the moral sense of the people imperfectly supports the law itself. The great body of the people abide by the dry legal obligation in both cases, and a few break over in each. This, I think, can not be perfectly cured, and it would be worse in both cases after the separation of the sections than before....

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.... I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution—which amendment, however, I have not seen—has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service.... [H]olding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable....

By the frame of the Government under which we live this same people have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief, and have with equal wisdom provided for the return of that little to their own hands at very short intervals. While the people retain their virtue and vigilance no Administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can very seriously injure the Government in the short space of four years. My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.... Such of you as are now dissatisfied still have the old Constitution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive point, the laws of your own framing under it; while the new Administration will have no immediate power, if it would, to change either.... Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty.

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it."

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

I trust that is fairly clear: Abraham Lincoln says that the Constitution protects minority rights--that for a majority to deprive a minority of any vital constitutional right is just cause for revolution--but that the Constitution must be interpreted according to majority rule, for the alternative to majority rule is anarchy or despotism.

Now comes Sandy Levinson attacking

Levinson: [William] Safire's almost literally thoughtless description of Lincoln's "overriding purpose: to establish the principle of majority rule in the world's most daring experiment in self-government by insisting that the whole country abide by the results of its national election"...

What is Levinson's argument that Lincoln did not believe in the principle of majority rule (with minority rights)? It is this:

Lincoln's election is in almost no sense a vindication of "majority rule"; he received, after all, only 39.8% of the popular vote.... It is absolutely dismaying to me that even somone so generally able as Safire... is unable to engage in the elemental distinction between "majority rule" and the particular system of electing presidents from which Lincoln benefitted.... We will literally never know who might have come out on top if Americans in 1860 had been able to vote either in a runoff election between the two top candidates or cast an alternative transferrable vote.... I put to one side, though many might not, the fact that the electorate in 1860 included only white males, largely because it would be anachronistic to expect Lincoln to share our modern sensibilities about the prerequisites of "majority rule"...

I call an intellectual foul: Levinson's attack on Safire as "almost literally thoughtless" is in its turn completely literally thoughtless.

Abraham Lincoln got 39.8% of the white vote in 1860. Add in the African-American vote and he gets 49.9% of the popular vote. Surely he would have picked up an extra 0.1% in any runoff process--and thus beaten Bell, Breckinridge, or Douglas in any runoff. The most that Levinson can claim is that Lincoln's election was contrary to the principle of rule by the majority of white guys. And that was not a principle that Lincoln believed in:

Lincoln at Lewison: Wise statesmen as they were, [the founders]... established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle... that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built. Now, my countrymen... if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution. Think nothing of me—take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever—but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. You may do anything with me you choose.... I do claim to be actuated in this contest by something higher than an anxiety for office. I charge you to drop every paltry and insignificant thought for any man's success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity, the Declaration of American Independence...

There is something in the air of the weblog Balkinization that leads to a number of really strange and bizarre posts around the King-Washington-Lincoln Birthday holidays. This year we have Levinson stating that somehow the installation of Lincoln rather than Breckinridge in the White House in 1861 was a defeat for the principle of majority rule.

Back in 2007 we had Mark Graber, writing in defense of Southerners' moral and legal right to forbid the election of a Republican president in 1861 via an extended analogy:

Dred Scott v. Sanford Blogging for Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Weekend!: Suppose two tribes who have some reason to cooperate but whose members do not like each other very much ratify a constitution that grants the northern half of their territory to Tribe A and the southern part to Tribe B. Each party is rather happy with the bargain. Each believes that, in the next hundred years, climate changes are likely to enhance the value of their land and make the other tribe’s land nearly uninhabitable. As a result of this constitutional bargain, members of both tribes are able to form an army that provides for the common defense and make mutually beneficial trade agreements with other nations. After 100 years of no apparent changes, evidence conclusively indicates that Tribe A has won the constitutional bet. The soil on the northern half of the continent is becoming increasingly fertile, while the soil of the southern half of the continent (for natural reasons) is slowly killing the members of Tribe B...

To which I commented:

There are two parties to the American constitutional contract in Mark Graber's imagination. There is Tribe A--the North. There is Tribe B--the slaveholders of the South. Notice anybody missing? Yep. There is no Tribe C--there are no slaves at the table.

One of the most ancient principles of any law worthy of the name is that, at some appropriate level, quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbari debet. And in 1861 the slaves of the United States America were certainly within the scope of the direct object of the verb tangit as far as contemplated revisions of the 1787 constitutional order were concerned. Any just revision of the constitutional bargain thus must win their approbari as well.

Mark Graber says that if changes in circumstances greatly disadvantage how a constitution impacts some group, that constitution should be revised and amended so that the losers should not have to pay up the full amount of the constitutional bet that they have lost. Well, there were powerful changes in circumstances from 1787 to 1860. In 1787, with the exhaustion of tobacco soils, Thomas Jefferson believed he would someday free all his slaves. In 1860, with the cotton gin and the industrial revolution boosting the profits of cotton and making it king, Jefferson Davis was damned sure he would not free any of his slaves. These changes in circumstances greatly, greatly disadvantaged Tribe C. Does not Graber's argument that the free-soil North should not have collected on its victorious bet from the slavemasters entail much more strongly that the slavemasters of the South--transformed by the profits of cotton from seeing slavery as a temporary evil to seeing slavery as a permanent good--should not have collected on their victorious bet from the slaves?

But in the world of Mark Graber's imagination there is no "Tribe C." They are socially dead. They, you see, have not made a constitutional bet because they are not parties to the constitution. They are not and never can be citizens of the United States. They are not among the people who have inalienable rights. Governments are not instituted to secure their rights to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness: they have none. Their claim that they are among the "we the people" for whom the constitution is supposed "to secure the blessings of liberty" is null and void, if not simply laughed out of court. We don't have to think about the impact on Tribe C. For, as Roger B. Taney wrote, African-Americans are:

beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

I maintain the contrary. I maintain that we do have to think about Tribe C. I maintain that everybody doing politics and law in the United States--today or in the 1850s, whether Roger B. Taney or Mark Graber--ought not to pretend that Tribe C is absent from the table. Tribe C has a seat at the table, for as Abraham Lincoln said in 1858:

I agree with Judge Douglas that [the Negro] is not my equal in many respects, certainly not in color--; perhaps not in intellectual and moral endowments; but in the right to eat the bread without the leave of any body else which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man.

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UPDATE: I had forgotten Mark Graber's claim that the differences in constitutional interpretation between Abraham Lincoln and Roger Taney were "almost trivial." Where do they make these law professors, anyway?

Law Professor Mark Graber Strikes Again: Taney wrote the opinion for the Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1856)... that persons of color could not be American citizens.... While the bulldozers are rented we might get our money’s worth and tear down all statues honoring Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln insisted he "never complained especially of the Dred Scott decision because it held that a negro could not be a citizen..." From a contemporary perspective, the differences between Lincoln and Taney seem almost trivial.... [His] only serious dispute [with Taney] was over whether slaveholders could take their human property to North Dakota, a place few if any slaveholders had expressed interest in settling...

Let us bring Abraham Lincoln back on stage, and let him say more than the nineteen words from his Alton speech that Graber lets him say. Here is what Lincoln said about the "almost trivial" differences between him and the anti-anti-slavery Democrats like Stephen Douglas (let along the pro-slavery Democrats like Roger Taney):

Last Joint Debate, at Alton. Mr. Lincoln's Reply: Judge Douglas... says he “don’t care whether [slavery] is voted up or voted down” in the Territories.... Any man can say that who does not see anything wrong in slavery; but no man can logically say it who does see a wrong in it, because no man can logically say he don’t care whether a wrong is voted up or voted down. He may say he don’t care whether an indifferent thing is voted up or down, but he must logically have a choice between a right thing and a wrong thing.... You may turn over everything in the Democratic policy from beginning to end... it everywhere carefully excludes the idea that there is anything wrong in [slavery]. That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—-right and wrong—-throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle...

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UPDATE 2: Ooh boy. And ooh boy boy.

Virtual Office Hours: John Yoo Edition

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 9:41 AM, student@highschool.net wrote:

Dear Mr. Delong,

I am a seventh grade student at High School in Place, and I am working on a project for my critical thinking class. I am preparing a simulation focusing on the controversy over John Yoo’s professorship at Boalt Hall School of Law. I am representing you in this simulation, so in order for me to accurately present your views. I am hoping that you will assist me by answering these questions:

Question: Why should John Yoo’s viewpoints on torture and politics affect his professorship at Boalt Hall?

Answer: Quite possibly they should not. Ernst Kantorowicz resigned his Berkeley professorship during the Cold War on the grounds that his obligation to tell his students what he thought was the truth was inconsistent with the Regents' request that he swear not to oppose the constitution of the United States under any circumstances. There is an argument that a professor's first duty is to state what he believes, and that universities are and should be safe harbors where people of intelligence and expertise can safely state what they believe.

This does, however, raise two further questions:

1. Should Berkeley Law School have tenured John Yoo in the first place? Some law professors I know say that the shoddy quality of the argument in his OLC memos is powerful evidence that BLS should not have. I don't have expertise to evaluate whether their quality is so low as to make it impossible for him to be an effective teacher of future lawyers and researcher into the state of the law. But I do think that the question is open.

2. Does academic freedom protect you when you say what you do not believe? In a 2000 article, "The Imperial President Abroad" http://tinyurl.com/dl20090205, John Yoo writes that President Clinton exceeded the bounds of his powers as commander-in-chief: "accelerat[ing] disturbing trends in foreign policy that undermine democratic accountability and respect for the rule of law" by "render[ing] the War Powers Resolution a dead letter..."; using "troops... not to achieve total victory or to contain the spread of Soviet influence but in order to achieve more limited goals... whose long-term benefits for American security are unclear..."; and placing "American troops... under... non-American... commanders... threaten[ing] that basic principle of government accountability... [for] foreign officials have no obligation to pursue American policy, nor do they take an oath to uphold the Constitution..." In 2000 John Yoo "believed" that the president's commander-in-chief power was tightly circumscribed--that the president could not even lawfully order an American soldier to obey the orders of an allied commander. In 2003 John Yoo "believed" that the president's commander-in-chief power was plenary and unrestrained: that no matter what orders the president issued soldiers were absolutely and lawfully bound to obey them. It seems that John Yoo does not use "belief" in a normal way--that what John Yoo "believes" at any moment is simply what is convenient for his faction within the Republican Party. Does academic freedom protect a professor who argues not what he or she believes to be the case but what is momentarily convenient for his or her political masters? I think the question is open.

Question: What consequences, if any, do you think John Yoo should receive? If not, why not?

Answer: I'm an academic. In this case, I don't know what the consequences should be, but I do know that I am an academic. And as an academic I think that the natural thing to do when there is an important question that you don't know the answer to is to think about it--collectively. That is what we professors do: we have an discussion, and in the end either people change their positions as the feel the force of different arguments and a consensus emerges or people at least understand why they disagree.

So I think the BLS faculty should have a debate that the rest of us can watch. Do John Yoo's memos at the OLC exhibit such a shoddy grasp of legal doctrines and arguments that he is not capable of being a qualified teacher and researcher? Will the accrediting authorities take action if BLS graduates make arguments of similar quality in their professional careers, taking John Yoo as a model? Or is the BLS faculty happy with the quality of the argument--and happy to turn out students who take the quality of Yoo's arguments as a model for their own future work?

And I think that the Berkeley Faculty Senate should have a debate: Given that John Yoo's "beliefs" about the extent of the president's commander-in-chief power spin about like a weathervane depending on the direction of the prevailing Republican wind, does academic freedom extend to cover his "beliefs"--or does academic freedom only cover you when you advocate positions that you sincerely believe?

Depending on the outcome of those two debates, I think that the consequences for Professor Yoo should then be clear.

Question: Why do you think the Berkeley City Council should have a say in the prosecution of John Yoo?

I don't think I do. I think that the BCC has a right to express its view. I don't think it has the power to remand John Yoo for trial, or to dictate to the university who is on the university's faculty, or to impose sanctions on the university if the university continues to employ John Yoo. I think that this is first of all university business, as well as being the business of any court that takes jurisdiction.

Question: Why do so-called progressive council members who want him terminated, fail to see that such action would violate academic freedom?

Answer: It is not clear that it would. It may be the case that (a) academic freedom does not cover you when you make arguments that you do not believe but are convenient for your political masters, and (b) John Yoo does not believe what he wrote in his OLC memos. If (a) and (b) hold, then terminating Yoo would not be a violation of academic freedom. It may also be the case that (c) terminating Yoo would violate his academic freedom, but that (d) a professional school like BLS has a higher duty than respecting the academic freedom of its professors--a duty to teach its students to be good professional lawyers, and that the shoddy quality of Yoo's legal arguments at the OLC make retaining him a violation of this higher duty to the BLS students.

If either of these is the case, then Berkeley is under an obligation to terminate Yoo. But I don't know if either is. As I said, I think the BLS faculty and the Berkeley academic senate have an obligation to discuss these issues and figure out what they think about them.

Running from Pillar to Post...

• Jeff Greenbaum: "Endowents, Child Labor, and the Development of Public Schooling: Evidence from the Early 20th Century United States" Evans 601
• Erzo Luttmer: "What Good Is Wealth Without Health? The Effect of Health On The Marginal Utility of Consumption" Evans 608-7

We Are Live at The Week: Our Economic Appetite

Our economic appetite - THE WEEK: http://www.theweek.com/article/index/92638/Our_economic_appetite

Nearly eighty years ago, John Maynard Keynes did the math on economic growth and concluded that within a few generations—by the time his peers' great-grandchildren came of age in, say, the 2000's—the persistent economic problem of too-scarce resources and too-few goods would no longer bedevil a substantial portion of humanity. He was right—even in the midst of our current hard times, he is right.

The current recession may turn into a small depression, and may push global living standards down by five percent for one or two or (we hope not) five years, but that does not erase the gulf between those of us in the globe's middle and upper classes and all human existence prior to the Industrial Revolution. We have reached the frontier of mass material comfort—where we have enough food that we are not painfully hungry, enough clothing that we are not shiveringly cold, enough shelter that we are not distressingly wet, even enough entertainment that we are not bored. We—at least those lucky enough to be in the global middle and upper classes who still cluster around the North Atlantic—have lots and lots of stuff. Our machines and factories have given us the power to get more and more stuff by getting more and more stuff—a self-perpetuating cycle of consumption.

Our goods are not only plentiful but cheap. I am a book addict. Yet even I am fighting hard to spend as great a share of my income on books as Adam Smith did in his day. Back on March 9, 1776 Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations went on sale for the price of 1.8 pounds sterling at a time when the median family made perhaps 30 pounds a year. That one book (admittedly a big book and an expensive one) cost six percent of the median family's annual income. In the United States today, median family income is $50,000 a year and Smith's Wealth of Nations costs $7.95 at Amazon (in the Bantam Classics edition). The 18th Century British family could buy 17 copies of the Wealth of Nations out of its annual income. The American family in 2009 can buy 6,000 copies: a multiplication factor of 350.

Books are not an exceptional category. Today, buttermilk-fried petrale sole with pickled vegetables and parsley mayonnaise, served at Chez Panisse Café, costs the same share of a day-laborer's earnings as the raw ingredients for two big bowls of oatmeal did in the 18th Century. Then there are all the commodities we consume that were essentially priceless in the past. If in 1786 you had wanted to listen to Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro in your house, you probably had to be the Holy Roman Emperor, Archduke of Austria, with a theater in your house—the Palace of Laxenberg. Today, the DVD costs $17.99 at amazon.com. (The multiplication factor for enjoying The Marriage of Figaro in your home is effectively infinite for those not named Josef von Habsburg.)

Today we still spend about one dollar in five on food—down from the half of income that Americans spent in 1776. The share hasn't fallen more because some of us buy buttermilk-fried petrale sole with pickled vegetables and parsley mayonnaise cooked, served, and cleaned up by others rather than (or in addition to) oats in the gunnysack. One reason is that the oats-for-five-meals-out-of-six-diet of 18th Century Scots was monotonous, and we are glad to escape it. Another is we play status games: oats taste worse when you know somebody else is tasting petrale sole and, conversely, the fish tastes better to those of us with money and luck enough to dine at Chez Panisse.

Keynes thought that by today we would have reached a realm of plenty where "We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin."

But no dice. I look around, and all I can say is: not yet, not for a long time to come, and perhaps never. I'm convinced that everyone I know can easily imagine how to spend up to three times their current income usefully and productively. (It is only beyond three times your current spending that people judge others' spending as absurd and wasteful.) And everybody I know finds it very difficult to imagine how people can survive on less than one-third of what they spend—never mind that all of our pre-industrial ancestors did so all the time. There is a point at which we say "enough!" to more oat porridge. But all evidence suggests Keynes was wrong: We are simply not built to ever say "enough!" to stuff in general.

Don't Bet on It Ross...

Ross Douthat writes:

Perspective - Ross Douthat: But the most pressing issue, it seems to me, is whether we've reached - or will reach - a point at which all our abundance cushions us against the political consequences of suddenly-diminished expectations. In 1932 or so, the West's porridge-eating past wasn't nearly as far in the rearview mirror as it is today, but a Brad DeLong of the Great Depression could still have marshaled all sorts of statistics to prove that even amid economic crisis, your average Westerner was in vastly better shape than his pre-industrial forefathers.

Indeed, John Maynard Keynes did--that was his essay on "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren"...

Ross continues:

Yet that underlying reality didn't save Europe from a [Great Depression] decade in which democratic capitalism was thought to be discredited, and the whole edifice of modern civilization was very nearly torn apart. Hopefully the world - not only DeLong's North Atlantic cluster, but the developing powers as well - has grown rich enough and stable enough that something like that simply couldn't happen again, no matter how hard the fall and how deep the depression. Hopefully.

Don't bet on it, Ross.

Let Those Who Do Justice and Love Mercy Say "Amen"

Barack Hussein Obama's Inaugural Address:

Benediction for Barack Hussein Obama's Inaugural by the Reverend Dr. Lowery: