Matt Yglesias

The Limits of Service

A friend Twitters:

Service is great! But MLK’s life and work wasn’t about volunteering: it was about altering the distribution of power.

Quite so. I mean, it was about volunteering. But it was about volunteering for the cause of social justice—for a new, fairer, and more equal distribution of political and economic power. It wasn’t about doing charity work. More on this later.

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.

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.