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

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

This entry was posted on Monday, June 27th, 2005 at 10:05 am and is filed under Whatever. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “Why Oh Why Can’t DeLong Think Clearly, Like Sanchez?”

  1. Bernard
    June 27th, 2005 12:47
    1

    Scanning over the various extracts it seems to me that the dispute stems from Layard’s incoherence in the first place (which supports your position re: Happiness, but i’m not sure your rebuttal of the ‘Happiness… is self-evidently good’ paragraph is right).

    If we assume that Layard is making a rather clumsy attempt at using a utilitarian definition of happiness wherein happiness is caused by the satisfaction of preferences then happiness, rather than being a good thing itself, is the tool we use to measure what is good.

    Treating it both as the way we measure good things and a self-evidently good thing creates one of those awkward logical loops whereby we seek happiness because we know that it’s good, and we know that it’s good because it makes us happy.

  2. monkyboy
    June 27th, 2005 15:22
    2

    I’m not Schmoopie, you’re Schmoopie.

    It took TV news 50 years to slide into irrelevance by beginning the practice of having one reporter interview another and calling it news.

    Bloggers seem to have reached a similar point of irrelevance in just a few years.

    *Yawn* Wake me up when the next fad of “intelligent” discourse hits the web…this one is over.

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