Matt Yglesias

Beck and Plato on Politics and Aesthetics

Glenn Beck’s bizarre Connect Four antics Thursday afternoon were amusing, but the best part of that segment was actually Beck’s thoughts on the relationship between art and politics:

Landsman gave an interesting description of his job interview with Valerie Jarrett saying he’d “use art to change the world.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t want art to change the world. I’d like people to change the world. Together, and out in the open. Not through some painting that makes me feel like that’s a great idea. Fox viewers are always called zombies and idiots. But who are the zombies, somebody who’s are getting real political discussion every day, or somebody making their decision through a painting or a broadway show?

At first glance, this seems like part of Glenn Beck’s continuing effort to get people to ensure the continuing relevance of Richard Hofstadter, by melding the paranoid style with anti-intellectualism. But another way of looking at it is that Beck is recapitulating an argument Plato makes in The Republic about the inferiority of art to philosophy. The complaint, essentially, is that art is a kind of cheating that bypasses the faculty of reason and can mislead the people. This leads him to the conclusion that poetry ought to be banned in a well-governed society.

In contrast to Plato, Beck at least superficially has a strong libertarian streak. But I think there’s reason to believe that authoritarianism is the main driver of right-wing politics in the contemporary United States. That’s part of the reason why these days some libertarians are strangely enthusiastic about unlimited government surveillance power (see also Jonah Goldberg who thinks cigarette taxes are fascism, but torture and indefinite detention are great) while others don’t seem very right-wing.

Justice or Politesse

I think this Jay Nordlinger item illustrates a pretty profound ideological divide:

Wanted to share a note that made me smile — maybe it will you, too. A reader wrote in response to an item I have in today’s Impromptus about personal wealth and personal politics. He said, “Fifty-five years ago, my New Deal dad said of some of his friends, ‘I never knew a Communist who was good to his maid.’”

Perfect. And it reminded me of an old line, which I learned — and learned the truth of — long ago: “A Marxist is someone who loves humanity in groups of 1 million or more.”

I have no particular interest in defending Communists or people who are rude to their employees. But the interesting thing here is that Nordlinger appears to believe that if you could actually prove that people with left-wing political views are disproportionately likely to be rude to their subordinates that this would in some substantial way debunk left-wing politics.

The point of left-wing politics, however, is not to secure polite treatment of maids as a matter of nobless oblige, it’s to secure justice and equality for the individuals whom fortune has not seen fit to reward with material wealthy. In a society with a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth and income, after all, there just aren’t going to be very many maids in the first place. What’s more, the people doing the maid jobs will have appealing other labor market opportunities. And even if they lose their job, their families will still have access to decent health care and education while they search for a new one. Consequently, a rudely-treated maid would have the chance to stand up for herself and most likely secure better treatment. Nordlinger’s idea seems to be that as long as most people are mostly treated nicely by those placed above them in the social hierarchy that the objective powerlessness of those at the bottom is irrelevant.

It recalls the notion of “compassion conservatism,” an appeal to the idea that the halves out to toss some scraps to the halve-nots, as opposed to a fight for real social and economic justice.

Physics and Metaphysics: Together at Last

Richard Alleyne reports on the intriguing theory that Hibbs Bosons from the future are preventing the Large Hadron Collidor from working:

The pair’s hypothesis centres around the Higgs Boson, a mysterious tiny particle and building block of life that it is hoped the LHC will discover.

They have come up with a theory that it will “ripple backward through time” and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said.

Aha, I hear you saying, isn’t the idea of events in the future causing events in the past incoherent? Fortunately, I’m here to tell you that the answer is no. Way back in the July 1964 issue of Philosophical Review, Michael Dummett published “Bringing About the Past” which persuasively argued that backwards causation is just as conceptually sound as the idea of forwards causation. That said, it remains an open question of empirical science whether any actual examples of backwards causation exist.

Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya think that we may have such a situation on our hands, and they argue in “Test of Effect from Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Effect of Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider” that the circumstances now exist to perform empirical tests to locate backward causation in action.

Costs, Benefits, and Distribiution

Whenever people say they’re “against” cost-benefit analysis as a method for evaluating policy initiatives or regulatory schemes, they appear to be talking in paradox. To say that you think something is a good idea more or less just means that you think the benefits of doing it would outweigh the costs of doing it. So pretty much any proposal for changing the way these things are evaluated amounts to a proposal to “mend but don’t end” the practice of cost-benefit analysis. That said, the current way of doing things has a number of very serious flaws. Mark Kleiman offers up three here but let me just site the most egregious one:

Formal benefit cost analysis counts everyone’s gains and losses equally. But common sense and the principle of diminishing marginal utility agree that a dollar’s worth of gain is more valuable to someone with few dollars than it is with someone with many. Obviously, taking $1 each from 900,000 poor people to give $1 million to a hedge-fund billionaire doesn’t reflect a social gain, but a formal benefit-cost analysis will show that it does: after all, the net benefit is $100,000. Thus gains and losses should be adjusted by (at least) dividing each gain or loss by the income or wealth of the person bearing it, so that a $20 gain to a family with an income of $20,000 weighs as a heavily as a $10,000 gain to a family with an income of $1 million.

This is a very common pathology of economic analysis. As Brad DeLong points out in this Socratic dialogue what passes for “value-neutral” positive economics in fact embeds some very strong and perverse ideas about value:

Agathon: “That means that the market system, in weighting utilities and adding them up, gives you a much lower utility than it gives Richard Cheney. In fact, if marginal utility of wealth is inversely proportional to the square of lifetime wealth, the market system gives Richard Cheney about 400 times as big a weight as it gives you.”

Glaukon: “That’s sick.”

Agathon: “And it gives Bill Gates a weight about 400,000,000 times as big a weight as it gives you.”

Glaukon: “That’s sicker.”

Agathon: “But it gives you about 40,000 times the weight it gives your average Bengali peasant, who thus has about 1/16,000,000,000,000 the amount of the market system’s concern as Bill Gates has. Will you teach that?”

And:

Glaukon: “We are value neutral economists! We don’t care about distribution! We care about efficiency!”

Agathon: “But claiming that you don’t care about distribution is implicitly saying 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.”

Glaukon: “You’re introducing politics into a value-neutral technocratic social science.”

Now as it happens it’s not 100 percent clear what alternative rule you should use. Which I think is one reason economists remain attracted to the “distribution doesn’t matter” point of view. It’s false to say that distribution doesn’t matter. But if you choose to believe that distribution doesn’t matter, that provides an unequivocal answer to how you ought to build distribution into your analysis. If you decide, accurately, that distribution does matter you’re left with the tough problem of specifying exactly how it matters. Much easier to just pretend it doesn’t matter, and then pretending that the fact that you’re pretending it doesn’t matter doesn’t matter either because it’s a “value-neutral” point-of-view. But it just isn’t/

Reason and Persuasion

John Holbo emails about his new book:

It’s out in paper – and what a great read it is: plus cartoons! – and I also negotiated to secure the e-rights and have used those to release it for free online. You can view the whole thing in a nice flash interface. And download it as a PDF (although that takes a simple sign in – still: free is good.) I know you’ve blogged before about textbook stupidities and about how more stuff should be available online. Well: put your money where your mouth is. Or your mouth where your mouth is, rather: gimme a link for having done this noble thing that more academics should be doing, and more publishers letting them do.

All true. Here it is on Amazon if you’re into paper books. But it’s definitely true that more academics should be doing this sort of thing—it makes sense for people who are paid to add to the stock of human knowledge to be doing as much as possible to disseminate said knowledge. The book itself “provides a new look at old issues through the lens of three classic dialogues by Plato: Euthyphro, Meno and Republic, Book I” and represents a collaboration between Holbo, a philosopher, and his classicist wife Belle Waring; two excellent people and excellent bloggers and I’m looking forward to their book.

“Intension” vs “Intention”

Emerson Hall, Harvard University (cc photo by Dan4th)

Back when I was in college I thought the philosopher’s distinction between “intensional” with an “s” and “intentional” with a “t” was a sick joke designed to confuse undergraduates and the typo-prone. So I’m heartened to see that in his paper “Against Darwinism” (via Tyler Cowen), Jerry Fodor has a footnote lambasting this nonsense:

It’s hard to imagine a less fortunate terminology than the philosopher’s ‘intention/intension’ distinction. But I suppose there’s nothing can be done at this late date. In what follows, an intensional context is one in which the substitution of coextensive expressions isn’t valid. Intentional states are just the familiar beliefs, desires, intentions and so forth that populate theories of cognition and of the integration of behavior.

I don’t really think the philosophical community should adopt this fatalistic “there’s nothing can be done” attitude. Surely this is what professional associations are for. This is a very, very confusing terminological choice and it helps nobody.

At any rate, haven’t read the paper beyond this footnote, but I have strong feelings on this issue.

Height Taxes and Utilitarianism

How should a height tax treat the super-duper tall? (wikimedia)

Contra Alex Tabarrok’s cute post here there’s nothing contradictory between pointing out that Greg Mankiw is wrong to imply that utilitarianism-based arguments are the only (or even the primary) arguments available for redistributive taxation and also to point out that considerations related to the declining marginal utility of money do, in fact, militate in favor of redistributive taxation.

For example “Allah forbids it” is not the only reason one might decline an offer of whiskey at breakfast. Indeed, “Allah forbids it” is, for most people, not going to be an important consideration. But of course many people are observant Muslims. And insofar as you are going to be an observant Muslim, Islam will count as a good reason to avoid whiskey at breakfast.

That said, Neil Sinhababu has persuaded me that in principle a modest “height tax” might be a good idea. As with any totally new tax there are a lot of practical questions around rates, enforcement, political feasibility, etc. standing in the way. Since in my experience there are relatively few utilitarians out there this idea probably isn’t going to take the nation by storm. Last, I continue to take the view that American liberals tend to overestimate the importance of achieving a high level of tax progressivity rather than simply acquiring a sufficient quantity of revenue to fund progressive social spending.

Marginal Utility in International Context

Mao, Chad (wikimedia)

It’s worth saying explicitly that the points I was making yesterday about the egalitarian implications of the declining marginal utility of money apply even more forcefully to the international context. An extra $1,000 a year in income for a developed world lawyer is doing a lot less to enhance human welfare than is an extra $1,000 a year in income for a person currently getting by on $1 a day. I think one has to be realistic about the level of concern for foreigners that it’s reasonable to expect a given government to manifest, but also important to try to expand the bounds of people’s consciousness with regard to these kind of things.

Foreign aid is normally what comes to people’s minds immediately when they think about the global poor. But it’s also worth considering the impact of our immigration policy (quite positive compared to most other developed nations), our trade policy (not so hot), and our approach to climate change. As I’ve observed before, the conventional way of doing cost-benefit analysis has the perverse effect of weighting harms to rich people more heavily than harms to poor people when if anything it should be done the other way ’round. If you ruin the livelihood of a professional political blogger living in the USA, he’ll probably find another job to do. Certainly he won’t starve to death. If you ruin the land of a third world farmer living near the margin of subsistence, the alternatives are incredibly bleak.

Legitimacy and Consent

Rasmussen finds:

Fifty-six percent (56%) agree with the view that governments derive their only just authority from the “consent of the governed.” Interestingly, one-in-four Americans (25%) disagree.

Isaac Chotiner seems a bit distressed that the 25 percent number is so high. But I don’t think people should embrace this consent of the governed notion, and my understanding is that most political theorists would reject it. How would you measure consent? And how much consent do you need? After all, there’s no set of rules for governing society that everyone is going to agree to. Legitimacy is better thought of as deriving from substantive criteria—legitimate regimes govern with a decent respect for human rights and political freedoms and afford people a reasonable chance to change policies from within the system. And the way the relationship between consent and legitimacy works, is that when you have a legitimate rights-respecting regime people tend to treat it as legitimate, which is to say consent to following the rules.

The Ethics of Congressional Action

Pragmatism and political savvy are always the order of the day in Washington in general, and on Capital Hill in particular. Still, it’s impossible for a concerned observer to miss an incredible lack of moral and ethical seriousness in the climate change debate. And congress is not, in general, actually a total ethics-free zone. If a congressman from a coal state or a farm state or what have you were to fly to Bangladesh, massacre a whole village, steal their stuff, then fly back home and redistribute the proceeds of his slaughter to his constituents nobody in the press corps would shrug and say “well, he’s just looking out for his district.”

It’s not the same, I know. But still, to make a somewhat serious point an awful lot of Derek Parfit’s errors in moral mathematics seem to be taking place when people think about the climate change.

The Metaphysics of Pseudonymity

I’m glad to see Ed Whelan apologize for having outed pseudonymous blogger “Publius,” though obviously the correct way to handle this kind of situation is to not do the outing in the first place. Once the deed is done, it’s hard to take back.

For some larger thoughts on the ethics of the issue, I’d recommend what Julian Sanchez has to say. But a separate point I would make is that the whole notion that you might want to “unmask” a pseudonymous internet persona with a longstanding and stable presence on the web strikes me as partaking of certain slightly odd presuppositions. The thinking seems to be that some almost magical power is held by knowing the real name of a blogger. This seems to me to be about on a par with the stories (are they even true?) you sometimes hear about tribes who think that you can steal someone’s soul by taking a photograph, or that if you learn the true names of animals you can command them to do your bidding.

I mean, it’s not as if the fact that my name is “Matthew Yglesias” is a particularly interesting or important fact about me (indeed, it’s not even on my birth certificate, though it is my real legal name since I was a few days old). Arguably, various biographical facts about me are relevant. I’ve written that I’m from New York City, that I went to Dalton and Harvard, that my dad’s a writer, etc. But I could be lying about that stuff consistent with using my accurate name. And plenty of people who do blog under their real names are not as forthcoming with biographical information. But the point is that if the idea is that someone is actively misrepresenting themselves on the Internet—blogging about climate change without ever mentioning that you work in the PR department for a coal company—that’s clearly a problem. But the problem is the misrepresentation rather than the pseudonym. And, indeed, this trick can be pulled off just as easily with full name and biographical details. After all, you know all about me, but you have no idea who CAPAF’s donors are, and the same applies to just about everyone you read who works at a DC-based non-profit.

And of course it’s a fallacy to assume a perfect identity between any Internet persona and its author(s). A whole bunch of different writers collaborate on producing Think Progress and they write in what I think is a pretty uniform voice. But like the writers behind The Economist, they’re actually all beautiful unique snowflakes who are often quite different from the TP persona. And by the same token, Matthew Yglesias “in real life” is not the same as the character I play on the Internet. On the other hand, I’m not sure it’s quite right to say that the in-the-flesh MY is “real” and the on-the-Internet one is somehow “fake.” This blog has existed for over seven years now, and it’s almost certainly the case that more people “know” the persona than know me. And I think that should hold all the more strongly for any prominent pseudonymous bloggers. The well-known, stable character is a person with integrity, influence, a personality, a reputation, social connections, etc., the same as anyone else. To be sure, they may be artifice in terms of the presentation of the character. But our various “in real life” self-presentations (to a boss, to a first date, to family, to friends, to people we run into at a high school reunion) involve artifice as well.

Who Needs Microfoundations?

I’m currently reading Justin Fox’s new book, The Myth of the Rational Market, which is recommended. Specifically, immediately before leaving for work I read a brief aside he wrote about the formation of a Kuhnian “paradigm” in economics in the second half of the twentieth century and economists’ pride in having achieved that kind of methodological consensus and thus elevated themselves above the ranks of mere sociologists or some such. That’s what sprung to mind as I read this paragraph from Steven Levitt:

You might think that macro forecasting would be an important part of what academic economists would do, but in practice there is almost nothing of that sort being done. That sort of thing is left for economists at places like the Federal Reserve or private banks to do. You might think that the models that most successfully explain economic patterns would rise to the top, but in the current regime, if they are not meticulously constructed from “micro foundations,” they aren’t allowed to be considered.

From an outside perspective, what seems to be going on is that economists have unearthed an extremely fruitful paradigm for investigation of micro issues. This has been good for them, and enhanced the prestige of the discipline. No such fruitful paradigm has actually emerged for investigation of macro issues. So the decision has been made to somewhat arbitrarily impose the view that macro models must be grounded in micro foundations. Thus, the productive progressive research program of microeconomics can “infect” the more troubled field of macro with its prestige.

Which, as a sociological matter, I think you’d have to say has worked.

But as a methodological matter, it seems deeply unsound. As a general principle for investigating the world, we normally deem it desirable, but not at all necessary, that researchers exploring a particular field of inquiry find ways to “reduce” what they’re doing to a lower level. To make that concrete, in the modern day we have achieved a decent understanding of how principles of chemistry are grounded in physics’ understanding of the behavior of atoms. But it’s just not the case that advances in chemistry were made by demanding that chemists ground all their models in subatomic physics. On the contrary, chemistry moved forward in the first instance by having chemists investigate issues in chemistry and see which models and theories held up. Similarly, though psychology is intertwined with the detailed study of the biology of the brain, it’s not deemed illegitimate to research psychological issues in the absence of a specific neurological theory. Nor, for that matter, do microeconomists generally deem it necessary to explore in detail the psychological foundations of their models. The models are, rather, judged by whether or not they produce fruitful insights about economics. Trying to enhance models with better information about psychology isn’t against the rules, but it’s not required either. What’s required is that the models do useful work.

So why should it be that “in the current regime, if [macro models] are not meticulously constructed from “micro foundations,” they aren’t allowed to be considered”?

Mankiw, Redistribution, Height Taxes, and Utilitiarianism

Via a distraught Conor Clarke, I see that not only did Greg Mankiw once write a cheeky paper arguing that maybe we should impose a height tax, he also goes in for some odd philosophical claims. To try to reconstruct his argument, he believes:

1. The main arguments in favor of redistributive taxation are grounded in utilitarianism.
2. Utilitarian theory supports taxing tall people more heavily than short people (this is the thesis of the paper).
3. Therefore, people should either sign on for the height tax or else abandon their support for redistribution.

He concludes with this:

A moral and political philosophy is not like a smorgasbord, where you get to pick and choose the offerings you like and leave the others behind without explanation. It is more like your mother telling you to clean everything on your plate. If you are a Utilitarian redistributionist, the height tax is like that awful tasting vegetable your mother served up because it is good for you. No matter how hard you might wish it wasn’t there sitting on your plate, it just won’t go away.

I think there are a ton of mistakes being made here. This goes back to a point I was making a while ago about how dangerous it is that the public discourse is so dominated by low-quality freelance philosophy done by people with PhDs in economics. I’m fairly certain that if Mankiw were to walk over to Emerson Hall he could find some folks (possibly T.M. Scanlon who I know sometimes reads this blog) who could explain to him that there’s little grounds for the belief that a commitment to utilitarianism is the main justification for redistributive taxation.

So point one is factually wrong.

But that aside, I think the “smorgasboard” argument is a confused way of thinking about moral reasoning. A great many crucially important questions in normative ethics are easy. Is it okay to murder Greg Mankiw to steal the money in his pocket? No, it isn’t. But a lot of foundational questions in ethical theory are hard. And a lot of meta-ethical questions are hard. Normal people don’t even understand what all of these questions are. And those of us who’ve thought a little bit about them, but decided not to go into the professional philosophy game may be aware that there are issues in these areas about which we’re uncertain. There’s a certain hyper-literal sense in which these questions all form a hierarchy. First I must decide where I stand on meta-ethics. Am I a reductive moral realist? A quasi-realist? A practical reasons theorist? An old-school “moral facts are facts too, damnit” moral realist? Are there theological issues in play? Then I need to decide if I’m a utilitarian (and if so, what kind of utilitarian!) or maybe some other kind of consequentialist or maybe I have a more Kantian view. So then depending on those answers, I can say “killing Greg Mankiw to steal the money in his pocket is wrong because…” and then lay the whole thing out.

I think what Mankiw is implying with the “smorgasboard” argument is that this is how people should actually engage in moral reasoning. So if I find myself uncertain about a broad question in ethical theory, this uncertainty must logically inflict my first-order moral judgments. Maybe killing Greg Mankiw really is okay? And if I’m not uncertain, if I say “the reason it’s wrong to kill Greg Mankiw and steal his money is that the murder would reduce net utility” then the murderer can counter with “well, if you believe in utilitarianism, you ought to believe in a height tax.” Then I say “well that sounds wrong!” And then, having debunked utilitarianism, Mankiw gets shot and everyone agrees that justice has been done.

Something’s gone wrong there. We don’t abandon considered convictions about normative issues that quickly. Murder is wrong. If forced to contemplate the alleged contradiction, there are a bunch of things we might want to consider. Maybe the analysis of the height issue has gotten something wrong, utility-wise. After all, though the paper is clever, it’s hardly a comprehensive review of all of the hedonic issues in play. Or maybe utilitarianism isn’t the best theoretical grounding for the conviction that murder is wrong. Or, maybe the height tax thing actually is a good idea, albeit an unrealistic one. But since this isn’t a “live” subject of political controversy, and since there seem to be a lot of other more clear-cut policy issues, we decide to spend our time and energy thinking about less outlandish policy suggestions.

Ideas Matter

I knew Neil Sinhababu slightly when we were both philosophy majors in college, and now he’s a full-blown philosophy professor who does a little political blogging on the side while I’m a full-time political blogger who still thinks about philosophical issues sometimes. So I read with interest his argument on how the anti-intellectual nature of American political debate makes it impossible for philosophical ideas to impact practical politics. It put me in the mind of perhaps Johm Maynard Keynes’ most famous quote:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

I think that’s exactly right. I think that the questions that political philosophers have taken to debating professionally in recent decades have a limited relevance to contemporary politics. But I think a number of fairly abstract misguided ideas in ethics, political philosophy, and economics have come to have extraordinary cultural and political power in the United States and to a lesser extent elsewhere in the English speaking world, all to incredibly pernicious effect. What’s more, though most of these ideas are propounded, originally, by people whose degrees are in economics most of them are really ideas of a philosophical character.

Which ideas?

Well I’d say one important set of ideas is the perverse notion that it’s wrong or inappropriate to subject people to moral criticism for making selfish decisions as long as the decisions don’t involve breaking the law. I’ve been writing a bit about this lately with respect to greedy financiers, but it’s a more general thing. If a person announced to his friends and family “I’m going to steal $17 billion from aspiring college students and give the money to banks” we would expect a degree of shock and ostracism to follow. Indeed, if a person said “I’m going to pick a student’s pocket at rob him of $17″ we would expect some shock and ostracism.

Such behavior is, socially speaking, considered not okay. But while it’s considered perfectly normal to expect one’s friends, peers, and colleagues to eschew stealing money from people, it’s considered hopeless naive to expect people to eschew the opportunity to go cash in by helping Sallie Mae hold on to money it doesn’t deserve. Along the same lines, I honestly don’t understand how the executives for the big fossil fuel firms sleep at night; but I know that part of the reason they sleep well at night is that in today’s America nobody really points out that their behavior is, on a personal level, more than a little shameful. People don’t discuss this issue by making explicit reference to Milton Friedman’s arguments about the social responsibility of business, but the shift in public discourse around these issues stems back to his work.

Another example is that, as 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.

A big part of changing America is much more practical interventions into specific elections, congressional debates, media controversies, etc. But ultimately I do think that these big ideas matter as well. 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.

Peter Singer Diavlogs With Tyler Cowen

A solid star match up. My feelings about Singer’s brand of utilitarianism are a bit too complicated to sum up in a blog post at the moment, but I think that where Singer tends to go wrong is in his policy analysis, where the issues are often less clear than I think he thinks, more than his ethical theory which, though very unpopular, strikes me as pretty compelling.

The Ontology of Transformers

There’s no denying that this is a pretty amusing poster. Still, it reminds me that I think the film engaged in a bit of revisionism when it portrayed the Autobots as humanoid-shaped robots capable of change into cars and trucks and so forth. My understanding from my childhood is that we should think of them as car-shaped robots capable of changing into humanoid-shaped ones. After all, they’re called autobots, like automobiles. Their essential property is their car-ishness.

On the other hand, they’re also called transformers which indicates that it’s the transforming itself that the essential fact. They’re neither humanoid nor car-shaped, but transformative. Or something.

Greed is Not a Defense

I found Ezra Klein’s defense of Politico to be pretty weak stuff.

Ezra’s main point is that coverage that’s utterly trivial and that poisons public understanding of crucial issues that effect the lives of billions of people is rewarded by the market, and that Politico does a good of delivering on coverage that’s utterly trivial and that poisons public understanding of crucial issues that effect the lives of billions of people. This is true, but it seems more like a rationalization for bad behavior than a reason to do it. These are hard times for the journalism business, but that doesn’t mean that people in the media should stop holding each other to any kind of reasonable standards of quality and responsibility. I don’t think the existence of a market economy should be seen as giving everyone ethical carte blanche to totally ignore the welfare of their fellow citizens when going about their business.

DeMint’s Remnant

Senator Jim DeMint is not so interested in bipartisan cooperation:

Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina is the kind of uncompromising conservative who can make the leaders’ life difficult. Mr. DeMint thinks, among other things, that some of his Republican colleagues are helping Democrats push America far to the left.

“We have to have a remnant of the Republican Party who are recognizable as freedom fighters,” Mr. DeMint said. “What I’m looking to do as a conservative leader in the Senate is to identify those Republicans, and even some Democrats, and put together a consensus of people who can help stop this slide toward socialism.”

This is an interesting turn of phrase regarding the need for “a remnant” of the GOP, since this is a well-known idea from the work of Albert Jay Nock who’s kind of a predecessor figure for the modern, Buckley-and-forward version of the conservative movement. Nock was writing in 1936, and his idea was that the mid-thirties opponents of the inevitable slide toward socialism were being insuperably hampered by the need to appeal to a mass audience:

One evening last autumn, I sat long hours with a European acquaintance while he expounded a political-economic doctrine which seemed sound as a nut and in which I could find no defect. At the end, he said with great earnestness: “I have a mission to the masses. I feel that I am called to get the ear of the people. I shall devote the rest of my life to spreading my doctrine far and wide among the population. What do you think?”

An embarrassing question in any case, and doubly so under the circumstances, because my acquaintance is a very learned man, one of the three or four really first-class minds that Europe produced in his generation; and naturally I, as one of the unlearned, was inclined to regard his lightest word with reverence amounting to awe. Still, I reflected, even the greatest mind can not possibly know everything, and I was pretty sure he had not had my opportunities for observing the masses of mankind, and that therefore I probably knew them better than he did. So I mustered courage to say that he had no such mission and would do well to get the idea out of his head at once; he would find that the masses would not care two pins for his doctrine, and still less for himself, since in such circumstances the popular favourite is generally some Barabbas. I even went so far as to say (he is a Jew) that his idea seemed to show that he was not very well up on his own native literature. He smiled at my jest, and asked what I meant by it; and I referred him to the story of the prophet Isaiah.

It occurred to me then that this story is much worth recalling just now when so many wise men and soothsayers appear to be burdened with a message to the masses. Dr. Townsend has a message, Father Coughlin has one, Mr. Upton Sinclair, Mr. Lippmann, Mr. Chase and the planned economy brethren, Mr. Tugwell and the New Dealers, Mr. Smith and Liberty Leaguers — the list is endless. I can not remember a time when so many energumens were so variously proclaiming the Word to the multitude and telling them what they must do to be saved.

Nock goes on to offer a reading of the story of the Prophet Isaiah in which the moral of the story turns out to be the need to spend less time focusing on the appeal to the masses on more time on preserving a pure “remnant” of conservatism that could return at some long-distant future point. At the time of Nock’s writing, of course, the country was near the high-tide of the New Deal after the unified Republican rule of the 1920s resulted in the Great Depression. Eventually, of course, the conservative movement did make a comeback—though I’d hardly say it eschewed efforts at appealing to the masses—and resulted in another giant economic crisis.

At any rate, “remnant” thinking is naturally seductive for any out-of-power political movement. But I do think it has a special kind of appeal to the right. Whether or not you think progressive economic works in practice, and whether or not progressive economic policy is popular in practice at any given time, the progressive idea is that we’re setting about to make sure that prosperity is more broadly shared—to improve the material condition of the broad mass of people. That’s something that ought to appeal to people. So progressives cling pretty dearly to the notion that our views can and should be made broadly popular. Conservative thinking doesn’t really have that element. It appeals, on both a theoretical and practical level, to the idea of the natural right of the wealthy to their wealth. At its most politically successful, conservatism in the voice of Ronald Reagan made the argument that libertarianish economic policy would in fact produce the results that progressive economic policy claimed for itself—broader and more robust prosperity. But conservatism isn’t committed to that objective as a matter of principle, so it needs to be open to “remnant”-style arguments about the need to just chill out in the woods for a few decades while the masses go off on a wild socialistic ride.

John Holbo’s classic post on Donner Party conservatism is also relevant here.

Counterexamples and Analogies

Highly trained philosopher Neil Sinhababu offers enlightening thoughts on the difference between an analogy and a counterexample. Take note!

By Request: The Graduates

I got an email yesterday from a reader concerned about the impact of the recession on people who graduated from college in 2008, and possibly in 2009 as well. He was mostly interested in the short-term effects, but it’s in some ways the long run effects that are more interesting. The short-term effects are bad—few places are hiring anyone and you’re competing in the job market with older, better-qualified, recently-laid-off people. But the long-run effects are surprisingly bad.

Indeed, the news is almost shockingly dismal. Research from Paul Oyer and Philip Oreopoulos, Till Von Wachter & Andrew Heisz suggests that the negative impact on earnings of first entering the labor force amidst a recession lasts anywhere from ten years to forever. And that’s research based on relatively mild recessions. Austan Goolsbee wrote this research up back in May 2006, and hopefully has some clever plans to whisper in Barack Obama’s ear.

So for my part, I think members of the class of 2009 ought to be looking seriously at applying to graduate programs. But even here there’s trouble. When I was a colllege freshman in 1999-2000, there were nutty dot-com firms handing out huge salaries to people for no reason. Consequently, it relatively easy to get into a prestigious law school’s class of 2003 and guarantee yourself a nice salary when you finished. But by my junior year, those kind of offers had vanished so more people wanted to apply to law school. And those applicants were competing with various 23, 24, and 25 year-olds who’d had a year or three of experience working in the bubble sector, so a lot of members of the class of 2002 wound up getting into less prestigious schools than comparable candidates scored in 2000. And, again, that kind of thing can have a life-long impact on your earnings.

Long story short, life is cruel and unfair, which is one of many reasons why we need economic and social justice and why talk about the infinite justice of market outcomes shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

Reading Rawls

From the thread about lying about books you’ve read comes a question about books I have read:

Also, any suggestions on books by or on Rawls?

In terms of book by Rawls, the trouble is that while A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism are both great books, neither is really what I’d call a good book. They’re not fun to read and they’re not short. But if you want to read Rawls, they’re the books you have to read. There’s also Justice as Fairness: A Restatement which is short and tries to synthesize the two works.

This kind of thing, incidentally, is one reason why I’m glad I majored in philosophy in college. Other things I’m interested in, like history, I find it’s pretty feasible to learn about on my own by trying to ask people for suggestions on good books to read and so forth. But a lot of key philosophical writings are things I would find it extremely difficult to get through without teachers. The good news on the Rawls front, though, is that these days people can check out Samuel Freeman’s Rawls which is a book-length explication and defense of Rawls’ work. It came highly recommended to me, and it’s definitely what the doctor ordered. It’s not an easy read by any means, but it’s a clear presentation of the ideas and the general consensus is that it’s the best introduction to the subject available.

Thoughts on Threats and Distribution

Megan McArdle writes:

If you need to support your preferred wealth distribution model with a threat that, unless we give them money, the beneficiaries will riot and kill the people you want to tax, you are not making a good case for the moral worthiness of the recipients, or the justice of your scheme. Just saying.

I’m not sure that follows. The people of Palestine have a legitimate moral claim to not be condemned perpetually to stateless existence under Israeli military jurisdiction. But if you’re trying to make that case to an Israeli or Diaspora audience, it might well make sense to link this claim to a pragmatic argument about Israel’s long-term security. The practical case doesn’t undermine the the moral one.

Somewhat similarly, loose talk of rioting and killing can serve as a shorthand for concerns about the legitimacy of a political and social system. As we’ve been seeing over the past several months, the political and social elite in the United States is extremely responsive to the idea that, when faced with emergency, the government needs to come to the rescue of financiers. And there are some good reasons for being responsive in this regard. But for a posture of such responsiveness to be stable over the long run, the system needs to be responsive — through social insurance and the like — to adverse circumstances in normal people’s lives. The legitimacy of the ethical claim is bound up with the concern about legitimacy and stability. The government’s role in guaranteeing the integrity of the financial system can be seen, among other things, as an illustration of Rawls’ principle that a liberal society is a cooperative scheme for mutual benefit. Or, at a minimum, such a concept of our society would help explain and justify the need to guarantee the integrity and functioning of the financial system but it would also make larger claims on general public and social responsibility.

Obviously, these are big issues that people write long books about so probably this post won’t convince anyone who feels otherwise. But that’s how I see it.

The Moral Sense Test

If you’ve ever taken a philosophy class, you know that a lot of reference gets made to our moral intuitions. This, of course, raises some empirical issues about what “our” intuitions are. The Moral Sense Test” is part of a project to address those issues. Check it out.