From the monthly archives:

June 2005

Habituation, Loneliness & Consumerism

June 30, 2005

If you want to be happpy, marriage, family, & friendship matter way more than money. In The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, Robert Lane’s argument is that market societies induce people to spend their time and energy acquiring greater material wealth at the expense of companionship, and, as a consequence, happiness suffers.
But if companionship [...]

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Obamalamadindong

June 29, 2005

I have a new piece up at the American Spectator criticizing Barack Obama for smearing the ideals of the Ownership Society as “Social Darwinism.” Includes a riff on social solidarity and cooperative market order from my Cato paper.

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New Cato Social Security Choice Paper

June 28, 2005

I have a new paper out today in Cato Social Security Choice series. It’s called “Noble Lies, Liberal Purposes, and Personal Retirement Accounts.” If you’ve been following the Social Security posts on the blog, lots of the paper will seem familiar to you, but there’s a lot of new stuff in the paper that I [...]

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Why Oh Why Can’t DeLong Think Clearly, Like Sanchez?

June 27, 2005

Julian has an excellent discussion of what DeLong might mean when he says I don’t know how to speak English.

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Spellbound

June 26, 2005

Spelling bees are awesome. (Watching now on ESPN.) I’m pulling for the spastic kid with the mustache from North Carolina. Or the chill blond girl from Jersey who jams her hands in her pockets.
The kids who “spell” the word with their fingers on the back of their name placards are a nice example that [...]

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Scanlon Comments Watch

June 24, 2005

I just want to point out that Scanlon has posted [scroll down] in the comments of DeLong’s post conceding Weatherson’s point about Delong’s reply to one of my posts about utilitarianism.
The question of how “well being” should be understood is really several different questions. As a result, there is a tendency for people debating [...]

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Keloathing

June 23, 2005

Julian has nailed the upshot of Kelo:
Now that the “liberal” justices on the court have sided with the drug warriors against cancer patients, and with a plan to rob people of their homes for the benefit of wealthy developers, will some court-watchers on the left begin to question the wisdom of having let economic freedom [...]

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DeLong Shot

June 23, 2005

Brad DeLong takes issue with my recent attacks no utilitarianism. In reply to my claim, against Layard, that if happiness is self-evidently good, then so are lots of other things, such as freedom, DeLong writes:
The response–against which Wilkinson has no defense except to issue squidlike clouds of obfuscating ink–would be that Wilkinson believes that if [...]

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Social Change Workshop

June 20, 2005

I’ve been at the University of Virginia the last few days helping out with the IHS Social Change Workshop for Grad Students. It’s quite nice to not be running the show, and to enjoy it more from the consumer side. As usual, great people, great conversations.
Here are some illustrations of typical phases of the day, [...]

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Shermer, Volokh, Evolution, & God

June 16, 2005

Eugene Volokh comments on this passage from a Michael Shermer post:
In March of 2001 the Gallup News Service reported the results of their survey that found 45 percent of Americans agree with the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” while [...]

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Value Monism & Public Reason: More Layard Flogging

June 16, 2005

I think I need to stop arguing with Layard about utilitarianism because he’s really just too philosophically inept to take all that seriously. The chapter at the middle of Happiness defending the principle of utility as the sole standard for judging right action and public policy is just laughably dumb.
If I was still TA-ing ethical [...]

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Hitch in the House

June 14, 2005

Hitchens is now testifying to the DC City Council against the proposed smoking ban, and given how, um, sobriety compromised he seems to be, he did a quite fine job of working the sainted Carol Schwartz up into a good freedom of choice lather.
Oh, now repartee with the demonic Jim Graham. Something about Iraq-Kurdistan [...]

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Dorm-ant Republicans

June 14, 2005

Jason DeParle of the NYT discovers the Heritage dorm in this not-so-bad “conservatives in the mist” bit of political ethnography.
Hey Times, if you’re interested in exotic budding ideologues why not go out to the Falls Church Oakwood and check out the IHS Koch Fellows. They’re smarter than the Heritage kids, and twice as dangerous!

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If You Like Social Insurance So Much, Then How Come You’re Against It?

June 13, 2005

This is from a now very old Barry Schwartz column about why people are too stupid to manage their own finances, especially if their finances involve a Social Security personal retirement account, in the NYT. Old, but so bad I can’t help talking about it.
This brings me to the final defense of privatization: the [...]

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Jim Graham: We Don’t Like You Anymore

June 10, 2005

See Brooke Oberwetter’s account at Ban the Ban of Jim Graham’s disgraceful faux “town meeting.”
Come next election cycle, this Ward One voter is going to do his utmost to unseat Graham, who has shown himself an enemy of the right of business owners to govern their own establishments.

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Non-sequiturs in Layard’s Happiness

June 9, 2005

This book is just a philosophical/methodological disaster.
Layard cites a study by Carol Ryff that purports to show that “purpose in life, autonomy, positive relationships, personal growth and self-acceptance” are highly correlated with self-reported SWB. OK. No suprise. What does Layard think this shows? That Mill was wrong about the existence of qualitatively “higher” pleasures.
Thus Mill [...]

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Fafnir Breaks Down the Logic of the Commerce Clause

June 9, 2005

Sweet.

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Sign Up To Testify at Smoking Ban Hearing

June 9, 2005

This message comes to you from Ban the Ban:
Sign Up to Testify on June 14
Tomorrow is the last day to sign up to testify at the June 14 public hearing at the John Wilson Building. Be sure to sign up know!
If you don’t want to speak, you can submit written testimony, or just drop in [...]

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Plague of Spam

June 9, 2005

I’ve been getting drowned in comment spam. So, until I get a better spam solution, I’ve disabled comments for unregistered folk. For the time being, you’ll need to login with TypeKey. (Go here to register, if you haven’t. It’s free). I like to keep my comments as open as possible, so sorry about this. But [...]

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Happiness? Equality? What?

June 8, 2005

Looking through the literature on happiness (those in the know say “subjective well-being,” or just SWB), it seems clear that a good number of those involved have egalitarian or welfare liberal politics. A lot of these folks profess to being utilitarians of some sort. And there seems to be a push for more redistribution, less [...]

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Bentham on the Brain

June 7, 2005

Right now, I’m looking at Richard Layard’s Happiness. He’s an unreconstructed Benthamite, and his view seems to be that evidence on the neurological reward system provides an account of objective utility. And because there’s a neurological correlate to utility, we should think of utilitarianism as the most scientifically respectable of all moral theories, and use [...]

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You’re So Vain-ology

June 3, 2005

Glen shows us again why he is an economist and not a poet in this post on “You’re So Vain,” inspired by Tyler’s exhumation of the perennial mystery. (This page is entertainingly un-useful for the “who is it about” question.)
On my intepretation, which is, of course, the natural and correct interpretation, “You’re so vain, you [...]

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Wealth is Weird

June 3, 2005

I’ve got a blog post-length comment on this post by Jonathan Wilde over at Catallarchy. This is what you get today.
I’ve got all sorts of interesting things stored up to report on & ruminate about. Gruter Institute conference on the values of the free enterprise system. AEI conference on neuro-morality. Drinks with Pinker. Hannah & [...]

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You’re Invited

June 2, 2005

I’ve helped to put together a little theatrical field trip tonight for the America’s Future Foundation’s newly recussitated AFF Underground cultural series. There’s a couple spots left for discount tickets, and you should email me if you want to come.
We’ll be going to theater J at the DC Jewish Community Center to see the award-winning [...]

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