From the monthly archives:

August 2004

Speak the Truth, as Long as You Don’t Think It’s Persuasive

August 11, 2004

Three groups are filing an FEC complaint against the folks putting out the SwiftVets ad. I think the ad is extremely effective. I have no way of independently verifying any of the claims therein, but it hits the right buttons and made me pretty willing to believe that Kerry plays with his war record to [...]

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McCain/Feingold as Argument Against Democracy

August 11, 2004

Let me follow up on the above with a couple thoughts. Isn’t the dim, manipulable nature of the voter a premise of McCain/Feingold-like legislation? It strikes me that it must be. One can only “buy” an election by running a ton of ads if the ads really work. But is this a problem that can [...]

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Question for Economists: Calculating Real Wages

August 10, 2004

Can someone point me to the state of the art on methods for calculating real wages, especially how changes in technology are accounted for in changes in purchasing power. How, for example, is the availability of a drug or labor-saving appliance or new source of entertainment that was not available 20 years ago included in [...]

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The Avant Garde: Kiling Themselves, so You Don’t Have To

August 9, 2004

Grant McCracken’s interesting post on “Cultural Innovation: The Benefits and Costs” reminds me a great deal of this post of mine from a couple years ago. Grant links to the weird and disturbing Memorial List of alumae of Franconia College, an experimental college from the 60s & 70s. But check out Grant’s post first to [...]

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Trade not Aid

August 9, 2004

M’Town homegirl Melinda Ammann has a good piece in the Washington Times on the benefits to Africa of ending agricultural subsidies and tariffs.

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Partay

August 6, 2004

I’m absolutely terrible at remembering to invite people to parties. If you should have been invited to our shindig Saturday, then you’re invited. You know who you are.

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Rational Ignorance

August 6, 2004

Canadian young adults show signs of having their priorities straight.

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Too Rich for Our Own Good

August 5, 2004

There’s lots of good stuff today on the extremely pressing problem of being too rich. Julian notes the lousy Barry Schwartz essay at TNR. Arnold Kling takes on Robert Frank at TCS.
The arguments basically come down to something like, “The value of the marginal dollar declines, but people irrationally keep working to get dollars, which [...]

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Snippet Contra Feser 1

August 4, 2004

I don’t have the time right now to reply to all of Feser’s reply all at once. So I’ll post snippets about various points as I get to them. Let’s start here:
But there are two problems with this characterization that reflect Wilkinson’s failure seriously to address my argument. First, his definition doesn’t say anything that [...]

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Yet More Political Libertarianism

August 3, 2004

For TCS readers arriving from Ed Feser’s rejoinder to my rejoinder, you can find further discussion of political libertarianism here and in the comments, here.
I expect to have a reply to Feser’s latest up later today or tomorrow.

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