Matt Yglesias

Philosophy Knows About Emotions

David Brooks’ column about empirical research into the emotional underpinnings of moral judgment contained an oddly brief and sweeping remark about philosophy:

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people.

I really don’t think this is right. Philosophy has been interested in questions about the emotional elements of moral judgment for a long time. To cite just one famous eighteenth century author, Adam Smith wrote an important book on The Theory of Moral Sentiments in which “sentiments” are what we would call “emotions.” And Smith was part of a larger school of “sentimentalist” philosophers culminating in David Hume.

It’s true that Kant’s hugely influential moral thinking proceeds on a more-or-less exclusively rationalist basis, but latter-day Kantians like T.M. Scanlon and Christine Korsgaard who taught me this material are not blind to this issue and work to bring it into their thinking. And people working more in the Humean tradition have this even closer to the heart of their work. There’s a reason that Simon Blackburn’s main book on moral reasoning is called Ruling Passions.

But I think the main point that all modern philosophers would agree on is that one salient fact about human beings is that we have intuitive emotional moral responses to events and we also have the power to reason about those responses. A person who sees bailout funds going to a bank owned and operated by wealthy individuals and there’s an instinctive moral outrage, a desire to see the fat cats put in a bag and drowned. But that’s the beginning of a discussion about What Is To Be Done not the end. And the ensuing process of reasoning can range over empirical and theoretical issues in economics, to abstract moral principles and efforts to articulate coherent ideas about fairness and so forth. The emotional drivers are crucial, in other words, but so is the faculty of reason which can, yes, even be applied in “bookish” ways.

Of course arguably I should just tell people to read Actual Philosopher Hilzoy on this subject.

Commercial Republics and Public Policy

“In short,” writes David Brooks, “the United States will never be Europe. It was born as a commercial republic. It’s addicted to the pace of commercial enterprise. After periodic pauses, the country inevitably returns to its elemental nature.”

And it’s true, the United States will never be Europe. Among other things, I find it doubtful that we’re going to build any Gothic cathedrals or Versailles-style palaces over here. But at the same time, before the United States was born as a commercial republic, the Netherlands (pictured above) was a commercial republic. For that matter, Venice was a commercial republic even before that. These days, the Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy. But it’s still pretty commercial in nature. Which doesn’t stop the Netherlands from having universal health care, a robust public transit network, and relatively strong labor unions. For that matter, I don’t think anyone could deny that Dutch-derived New York City has a pretty commercial nature. And yet New York has a “European-style” brand of walkable urbanism, relatively strong labor unions, and if federal policy where made by New York’s elected officials you can bet we’d have universal health care.

Now I doubt Brooks would deny any of that. But the point is that “Europe” is a very strange and shifting signifier in the discourse of the American right.

Why Education Reform Can’t Wait

Noam Scheiber says it makes sense to pursue health care reform at the same time as economic recovery, but that the Obama administration should consider sidelining the rest until the crisis can be dealt with, but he felt Larry Summers mounted a convincing case for energy. Still:

I was less persuaded by the case for doing education reform now. (Though, interestingly, David Brooks, who made the case for paring down even before Galston did this week, seemed high on Obama’s education reform plans–and precisely because he thinks they’re ambitious.)

On Brooks, I think this just shows that we shouldn’t take his timing objections very seriously. Brooks’s views about education policy are, on the merits, close to my views and close to Obama’s views. Consequently, he likes Obama’s education reform agenda. Brooks’ views on other matters are more conservative and he objects to them on the merits, but he’s pretending to be concerned about the timing. Feh. Meanwhile, one could argue for pursuing education reform now on the grounds that education reform is very important. But I think there’s a real technical reason for avoiding delay.

The first aspect of this is simply that the main pillar of federal K-12 education—the Elementary and Secondary Education Act whose most recent re-authorization was dubbed No Child Left Behind—is due to be reauthorized. Which is to say re-written. Congress and the White House can just stall on this, but since a bunch of people want to see a whole bunch of things changed, and since the schedule says it’s time to change the law, it would take time and political capital to maintain the status quo. Better to spend that time and political capital on making change for the better.

The second aspect of this is that macroeconomic considerations have compelled a very large short-run increase in federal education spending. The reason for this is that probably the least controversial aspect of federal fiscal stimulus is the idea that aid should be sent to state and local governments. The reason for that, in turn, is that such spending isn’t even really new net public sector activity. Rather, the federal government is stepping in to reduce the extent to which state and local governments need to enact pro-cyclical anti-stimulus in the form of spending cuts. Meanwhile, the main non-entitlement item in state budgets is education. So in practice, increased financial aid to states primarily entails a substantial shift in financial responsibility for education toward Washington. This by no means requires a rethinking of federal education policy, but it does make thinking harder about how that money is used a fairly natural complement to the macroeconomically dictated trend toward the federal government being responsible for more of the money.

Last, we’re talking about very different policy silos. It’s not as if Arne Duncan can tell the permanent staff at the Department of Education to lay off the schools and spend time thinking about AIG. The president probably should not, personally, be letting school reform take up a great deal of his time and mental energy. But the president had plenty of time in his past life as a State Senator, a U.S. Senator, and a Presidential candidate to outline his philosophy on this subject and he has the backbone of an education policy team in place. Having that team twiddle their thumbs won’t accomplish anything—they may as well press forward.

David Brooks: Spending Freeze is “Insane”

David Brooks on ABC’s “This Week” shows he has the guts to go where the MSM dares not tread and observes that whatever you may think of the Obama administration’s plans, the main alternative coming from the dominant conservative wing of the GOP would be laughable were it not so dangerous:

BROOKS: The problem with them and the problem with Limbaugh in terms of intellectual philosophy is they are stuck with Reagan. They are stuck with the idea that government is always the problem. A lot of Republicans up in Capitol Hill right now are calling for a spending freeze in a middle of a recession/depression. That is insane. But they are thinking the way they thought in 1982, if we can only think that way again, that is just insane.

Obviously, it’s appropriate for the press to devote more scrutiny to the powers that be than to the opposition party’s ideas. But virtually none of the coverage I’ve read of Republican criticisms of Obama’s economic strategy is taking note of the fact that the alternative being offered us is insane. Recall that John McCain was calling for an economy-destroying spending freeze back during the campaign and nobody seemed interested in how nutty that was.

Our Interrelated Crises

David Brooks seems to think that Barack Obama is trying to do too much at once. Steve Benen retorts that “The notion that multiple problems — healthcare, energy, education, infrastructure, economic growth — may be inter-connected seems to elude Brooks entirely.”

Obviously, people who want to do a lot of stuff like to make those kind of interconnection arguments. So it’s worth trying to think clearly and explicitly about the relationships. The starting point, I would say, is growth. There are a lot of factors behind growth including, of course, old fashioned human ingenuity at coming up with new products to offer and new ways to offer old products. But perhaps the most important things policy can do to impact the capacity for sustainable growth—i.e., growth that’s not based on asset price bubbles—is to increase the availability of high-quality human capital and the availability and quality of public sector physical capital. Which is to say education and infrastructure. Energy is related to this in two ways. First, the power grid on which our electricity flows is part of the infrastructure. And second, a lot of energy is used in transportation, and the quantity of energy used in this way is impacted by the nature of the available transportation infrastructure. The goal of curbing carbon emissions probably isn’t vital to our growth prospects except in the sense that over the long run an increasingly deadly and inhospitable environment will be disastrous for all human endeavors. But though avoiding ecological catastrophe is something of a freestanding goal, our growth prospects require new investments in infrastructure, so it makes sense to try to make sure this new infrastructure is suited to our environmental goals. Last, health care. These kind of investments we’re talking about will cost money. Some of that money can and should come from taxes. And some of that money can and should come from short-term borrowing. But to make the investments sustainable we need to put the budget on a sustainable basis. And that requires tackling the health care system in a systematic way.

And so—ta da—it’s all connected. I think there’s plenty of room for disagreement as to exactly what needs to be done on those fronts. But I really don’t think it’s credible to say that we ought to just slow-walk things. What it is fair to say is that it’s too bad the previous administration spent eight years doing nothing whatsoever on the infrastructure, health care, and energy pieces of the puzzle. They tackled education, the smallest of these segments, early on and made some progress but then didn’t seem very interested in following-through.

The Intra-Republican Fight

The delivery of Bobby Jindal’s speech Tuesday night was so bad that my first instinct was to focus on that. But David Brooks, as seen in this clip below from PBS, went straight to it:

There’s an intra-Republican debate. Some people say the Republican Party lost it’s way because it got too moderate. Some people say got too weird, too conservative. He [Jindal] thinks they got too moderate and so he’s making that case. I think it’s insane, and I just think it’s a disaster for the party; I just think it’s unfortunate right now.

I would be a bit more optimistic than Brooks about the political merits of the hard-right agenda. This certainly isn’t where the country is right now but it’s not so unreasonable to think that things might change. I think we’ll be growing again in late 2012 and Obama will probably get re-elected no matter Republicans say or do. But it’s possible that things will really go off the rails and we’ll have a years-long L-shaped recession in which case if what the opposition party has to offer is hard-right nihilism, then hard-right nihilism is what the voters will embrace. The problem with the “Republicans must become more conservative” viewpoint is that it’s bad for the country. Ultimately, both parties matter. And neither party is ever going to be perfect—beyond ideology, there’s a lot of corruption, self-dealing, interest-group mucking around, etc. To have good policy on a sustained basis required both parties to have some level of interest in good policy.

What “Belongs” In the Stimulus?

I saw Senator Ben Nelson (”D”-Nebraska) on teevee earlier today objecting to the fact that the economic recovery plan contains money for things like Pell Grants and other programs Democrats like that, he said, were worthy in their own terms but didn’t “belong in the stimulus plan.” David Brooks offers similar concerns in today’s New York Times column, complaining about “big increases for Pell Grants, alternative energy subsidies and health and entitlement spending” and arguing:

The best course is to return to the original Summers parameters — temporary, targeted and timely — thus making the stimulus cleaner and faster.

Strip out the permanent government programs. Many of them are worthy, but we can have that debate another day.

A few points in response to the Brooks/Nelson objections. One is that this sort of thing really does need to be kept in perspective. The stimulus bill is huge. It’s huge because the macroeconomic situation requires a huge stimulus. The stimulus bill is also multi-faceted. And it needs to be multifaceted because it’s so huge. Targeted tax cuts can be good stimulus, but you can’t do $850 billion of well-targeted tax cuts. Infrastructure can be good stimulus, but you can’t do $850 billion of good infrastructure projects. Long story short, the grab-bag character of the stimulus is a feature rather than a bug. Now, boring down into the bag you can find some specific spending provisions that probably are mistakes. Elsewhere in the piece Brooks singles out Head Start expansion as not such a hot idea. And my understanding is that he’s basically right—it would be better to target early childhood spending on Community Development Block Grants to allow child care services to keep running, and on construction of new facilities for early childhood programs. The existence of these kind of problems are good reason to hope that the Senate version of the bill is improved on these fronts. It’s also a good reason to push the future conference committee to fix these problems. But this is a pretty piece of the overall puzzle. The existence of a handful of sub-optimal provisions in an enormous program does not justify the kind of irresponsibility shown by the House members who voted against the overall package. The House version of the stimulus isn’t perfect, but it’s way better than doing nothing and way better than Jim DeMint’s Dr. Evil stimulus.

Second, with a lot of this stuff whether or not it really “belongs in the stimulus” seems irrelevant to me. If you have a program that actually is worthy, then funding it will make the country better, whether or not it truly “belongs” in the stimulus. If you have a program that’s worthy, and that doesn’t really belong in the stimulus, and you have a Republican who doesn’t think the program is worthy, and he’d be willing to vote for the stimulus if you stripped that program from the bill, then it seems to me that you have a decent case for dropping a worthy program. But if you’re Ben Nelson and you think the program is worthy, then why not just support the worthy program? It’s true that doing so doesn’t fit a perfectly pristine notion of how the legislative process should work, but anytime the process is working in favor of worthy programs rather than crappy ones, that’s a lot better than the normal functioning of the legislative process.

Meanwhile, as Matt Corley observes, there’s a decent case to be made that some of the stuff Nelson objects to—including higher NIH funding and money for Pell Grants—actually are a good use of stimulus funds.

Conservatives Prepare to Abandon Newfound Love for CBO

The Congressional Budget Office produces a lot of sober-minded, sensible, reality-based policy analysis. Consequently, 99 days out of a 100 conservatives ignore what it says. For the past week, however, there’s been a CBO report that says liberal stimulus plans are likely to be ineffective, so suddenly the right-wing’s decided it loves the CBO. And with the minor problem that the report they’ve been touting doesn’t exist, it’s been a charming love affair. But late yesterday out came the real CBO analysis largely supporting the efficacy of the recovery plan. And now there’s this:

The nation’s current recession is likely to be the longest since World War II, and by some measures could be the worst since the Great Depression, a new Congressional Budget Office forecast said Tuesday.

Without a major economic stimulus plan, “the shortfall in the nation’s output relative to its potential would be the largest — in terms of both length and depth — since the Depression of the 1930s,” said new CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf in testimony prepared for the House Budget Committee.

The analysis is sure to add important momentum to the effort to enact an $825 billion stimulus by mid-February.

Last week, referring to the non-existent report, David Brooks wrote that Obama’s “going to have to prove the hard way that he meant what he said about being pragmatic and evidence-based. That means he won’t sweep a C.B.O. study under the rug simply because the findings are inconvenient.” My guess is that few conservative legislators and no conservative New York Times columnists will wind up meeting the Brooks Test in this regard.

Ruffini: Kristol, Brooks, and Will Not Conservative Enough

Right-wing rising star Patrick Ruffini Twitters:

How representative are Will, Kristol, and Brooks of conservative media?

This strikes me as somewhat reminiscent of Erick Erickson’s planned “Operation Leper” targeted at right-wingers insufficiently wingnutty to recognize Sarah Palin’s eminent qualifications for high office.

Bloggers Loving It

Barack Obama went to a dinner party last night with conservative pundits such as George Will, David Brooks, and Bill Kristol, prompting the pool reporter to snark “This is for real, folks. The bloggers are going to love this one.”

Honestly this blogger is ready to wholeheartedly endorse a strategy of acting in a personally cordial manner to conservatives. I’m not enthusiastic about doing things like larding down a stimulus package with ineffective business tax cuts in a misguided effort to attract massive Republican support for the bill. But sitting down and being nice? Hard to see what’s wrong with that. Obama appears to be very effective at convincing people he speaks to in small group settings that he’s a good guy (I got to witness this firsthand in the summer of 2007 and you can see it indirectly as well) so it seems worth trying. Kristol’s probably a lost cause, but neither Will nor Brooks is a dogmatically on-message partisan.

The Sweet Smell of Success

David Brooks critiques Malcolm Gladwell and the renewed interest in the considerable evidence that success is mostly due to good fortune:

Most successful people begin with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so. They were often showered by good fortune, but relied at crucial moments upon achievements of individual will.

Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention. We know from experiments with subjects as diverse as obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers and Buddhist monks that people who can self-consciously focus attention have the power to rewire their brains.

I think these are fine points, but they also reflect precisely the sort of misconceptions that books like Outliers and Fooled By Randomness are aimed at clearing up. We look at successful people and see that they share certain common elements. From that, it’s easy to infer that the successful succeeded because of these characteristics in a way that’s unduly strong. We forget to look at all the other people who also share those characteristics.

To get rich in the United States you pretty much have to work hard. But the idea that success is due to hard work ignores the fact that there are all these other people working hard and not succeeding. Hard work is much more common than success. And advantages of birth and dumb luck are making the difference — separating the hard-working partner at the corporate law firm from the hard-working guy who moved the furniture into the law firm’s office. Similarly, if you only look at the successful traders on Wall Street you’ll probably decide they got rich because they’re smart — these firms usually try to hire smart guys who went to good schools. But if you look at the failures, you’ll see that they’re smart guys who went to good schools, too. The difference between the two groups is luck.