Caesar’s Bath
OK. Here’s my long-delayed Caesar’s Bath contribution. I thought this was hard partly because all the easy stuff has been done (the bath water’s pretty dirty, by now), and partly because I like almost everything at least a little bit. But here you go.
Thomas Jefferson. The more I read about the guy, the more I dislike him. He was without doubt a man of incandescent brilliance. But he also seems to have been sly, creepy, and an insufferable snob, in addition to having been a racist, slaveholding, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-commercial, Jacobin utopian. When his visage appears on Cato promotional material, as it so often does, I try to stay positive.
Vegetables. I know they are healthy, and that I should eat more of them. But I sort of hate them. I try, I do.
Thinking that anti-anti-red statism is a bit of willful contarianism. I like red states. I do not like red states because liking red states aggravates my blue state friends, but because I like red states. And I am not anti-anti-red state because I like to buck the trends, but because I think it is genuinely retarded to be anti-red state.
Anti-Swedenism. Conservatives and libertarians seem to have an irrational disdain for Sweden, as if it could slide into full-on Juche flesh-eating collectivism at any moment. They crave and horde bad news about the Swedish economy or the travails of the Swedish welfare state. Why? Because Sweden is a fairly rich, happy, stable, and quite free nation with a gigantic welfare state. And we don’t want to be more like Sweden, and we resent the fact that it works as well as it does. But I think it is quite possible to make the argument that we shouldn’t be more like Sweden without feeling the need to argue that Sweden is a disaster.
Levittolotry. Yes. He’s smart and interesting, but his work isn’t that unusual, and he doesn’t walk on water. He’s a super-clever, McGyver-esque technician, able to conjure up a useful empirical study out of a paper clip, a length of string, and a stick of gum. It’s sweet, but not filling. I want theory.
April 30th, 2005 12:56
The thing about Sweden is that it actually has, among other things, a low tax on capital. People incorrectly like to think of Sweden and the other Nordic states as extremely socialist. They’re not. They tend to have a relatively small amount of serious socialist industrial policy, but coupled with a very high amount of redistribution and welfare state activities. For the most part, when and where the Nordic countries have been successful (let’s ignore their horrible track record on agriculture, what little there is is heavily subsidized), they’ve been content to let the market mostly work, and then just redistribute the profits. It’s a workeable solution if done well, even if it’s not to my taste.
April 30th, 2005 14:05
I understand your feelings on Levitt, but I think he has a valuable role to play. (Hopefully) people will start to think in more general equilibrium ways after reading him, seeing that a change in this one area can lead to large changes in other, seemingly disconnected, areas. Not exactly a new idea, but one that is forgotten most of the time.
April 30th, 2005 15:40
Naysayers
I am sad to see that Will Wilkinson thinks both Thomas Jefferson and Steven Levitt are overrated. Professor Levitt can of course defend himself (although “super-clever, McGyver-esque technician, able to conjure up a useful empirical study out of a pape…
April 30th, 2005 17:02
When [Jefferson's] visage appears on Cato’s promotional material, as it so often does, I try to stay positive.
Leaving Jefferson aside, what’s up with naming yourself after Cato? I mean, the Elder was an obsessive adovcate of genocide and the younger was a prig. Did one of them advocate deregulating the Antioch slave futures market or something?
April 30th, 2005 17:55
How many “Sweden is falling apart” articles have I seen in the Economist? It’s a perennial.
April 30th, 2005 19:06
I’m fairly certain - Cato refer’s to Cato’s letters, a series of letters sent to English newspapers in the early 18th century. As you might have guessed, they were about liberty.
I agree with the bit about Sweeden. Harping about their domestically popular policies, which do not really affect us here in the US, is the international equivalent of anti-smoking and anti-obesity crusaders criticizing what others do in their own homes
May 1st, 2005 01:26
If it will make you feel better about Jefferson, he didn’t write the Declaration of Independence, Tom Paine did. Read Paine, Read Jefferson, and it’s obvious.
May 1st, 2005 11:46
At the risk of responding to a comment surely not meant seriously, we have copies of Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence, with some pretty fascinating language taken out because the others thought that TJ was being a bit too impolitic. It’s available in just about any collection of Jefferson’s writings, and worth a read.
May 1st, 2005 12:43
There are techniques to attribute authorship to individuals by comparing vocabulary, etc. Some of these techniques can be embodied in computer programs, and have been. If Paine wrote the the first draft of the Declaration, it would differ from other writings by Jefferson and resemble his, and these programs would pick it out from the other Jefferson material.
May 2nd, 2005 09:05
JFEFFERSON’S CARTESIAN RATIONALITY
Lynne Kiesling Will Wilkinson has all sorts of good stuff going on right now, including an interesting post about free will and determinism. But I, like Tyler Cowen, will pick up on his mention of his increasing dislike of Thomas…
May 2nd, 2005 12:09
To get the low-down on Sweden, check out Johan Norberg’s blog, also his article Swede and Sour. It begins:
If Sweden left the European Union and joined the United States we would be the poorest state of America. Using fixed prices and purchasing power parity adjusted data, the median household income in Sweden in the late 1990s was the equivalent of $26,800 compared with a median of $39,400 for U.S. households - before taxes. And then we should remember that Sweden has the world´s highest taxes.
May 2nd, 2005 19:52
Econotarian, Sweden may be poor by American standards, but they seem to do better than the aggregate U.S. population on other measures of human development such as life expectancy and infant mortality. In fact, Sweden outranks the United States on the Human Development Index, for whatever that’s worth.
May 2nd, 2005 21:01
Mr. Jefferson
While I was collecting a couple of degrees from Mr. Jefferson’s University, I bought into the whole Jefferson mystique, prompted in no small part by reading all six volumes of Dumas Malone’s hagiographic biography. Once I got out of Charlottesville,
May 3rd, 2005 11:51
Bainbridge on Mr. Jefferson
It appears that Stephen Bainbridge has had a similar response to Thomas Jefferson as have I: that is, the more we read about him, the less impressed we are.
In the last year or so I have been reading a number of biographies on the Revolutionary per…
May 4th, 2005 23:51
What it’s worth is zero, more or less. The HDI uses the logarithm of personal income as a proxy for wealth–thus tightening the income spread between Western nations and allowing those with generous welfare states to pull ahead in the other categories. I wrote in a 2003 column that “for industrialized countries… an extra $2,000 a year in income is outweighed in the [HDI's] balance by the delicious raptures of an 80th year of life.” The exercise is skewed against income as a quality-of-life indicator, skewed against countries who welcome immigrants or possess ethnocultural sub-populations with pre-existing health problems, and openly subjective anyway (there’s no revealed-preference data to support the weightings of various QOL criteria). About what you expect from the UN, in other words–an annual excuse to trash the United States, and not much else.
May 9th, 2005 11:16
John Quincy Adams, man of mystery
It has recently come to my attention that John Quincy Adams was nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court in 1811. [No, this does not bear on the Land Use exam that I am assiduously studying for, but reading a…
September 29th, 2006 11:10
tut tut tut…typical Yanks, your fucking losers, honestly! you think your the best of the best - not the case. You mudering scum think capital punishment is ok? yeah cool =| eeewww you people make me sick.. sweden forever..woooooo
April 7th, 2008 15:25
[...] Jefferson’s solid lead. Here is my controversial opinion of the Master of Monticello from an old post: Thomas Jefferson. The more I read about the guy, the more I dislike him. He was without doubt a man [...]