From the monthly archives:

July 2005

Minds and Morals

July 28, 2005

Chris of Mixing Memory has initiated a series of posts on cognitive science and moral psychology. The first post, which asks, “where is morality in the brain,” is good. I’m looking forward to the rest, which, Chris says, will address all this stuff:
Hopefully, by the time I’m done, you will have some idea of what [...]

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Layard Bait and Switch

July 26, 2005

OK. I’m still tired. But thinking about things in a more contracualist mode made me realize that I was confused. But it’s not my fault. It’s Layard’s. His “pollution” tax argument turns on a deceptive change of subject.
Layard:
Every time [people] raise their relative income (which they like), they lower the relative income of other [...]

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Meddlesome Preferences

July 25, 2005

I think it has been clear at least since Sen’s Paradox of Paretian Liberalism that there is at least some tension between Pareto criteria of efficiency, according to which preferences have unrestricted scope, and the idea that individuals should have a certain kind of sovereignty or decisiveness over their own actions. Sen’s original paper dealt [...]

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Too Hot for the UAE

July 25, 2005

Tyler notes that I’m banned in Dubai. I would like to say it’s because of my dangerous liberatory political ideas. More likely, though, it’s because of the pornographic trackback spam that has infested my archives. No, I like the first idea. UAE: You can’t handle the truth!

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M-Town Represent!

July 18, 2005

Marshalltown homegirl Melinda Ammann has a smart review of Robert Guest’s The Shackled Continent at Reason. Melinda was in Botswana last summer with Mercatus’s Global Prosperity Initiative. Check out her field dispatches.

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Status Competition & the Political Class

July 18, 2005

In his 1999 review of Robert Frank’s Luxury Fever, a book that worries itself to death about competitition for status and relative position, Jack Hirshleifer, quoting Adam Smith to good effect, aptly points out that taxes meant to supress competition over income level is probably just a case of pushing the lump around the rug. [...]

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Objections to Hedonism

July 17, 2005

From Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “consequentialism“:
Some critics argue that not all pleasures are valuable, since, for example, there is no value in the pleasures of a sadist while whipping a victim. Other opponents object that not only pleasures are intrinsically valuable, because other things are valuable independently of whether they [...]

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Hey Rocky, Watch Me Pull Utilitarianism Out of This (and Every) Hat!

July 17, 2005

Brad DeLong writes, rather mysteriously, that Julian’s parentalism piece “confirms his utilitarianism. convinces me that I would be insane were I to prioritize liberty over utility: that I am right to be a utilitarian.” He quotes Julian at length and then says:
My mind explodes when I read Julian’s command to “take as least as much [...]

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Success as Pollution: Layard Meets Coase

July 15, 2005

In his book and in this paper [pdf], Richard Layard points out that one’s perceived position in the income distribution is a better predictor of self-reported well-being than one’s absolute income level, given that a certain minimum income threshold has been reached. So, every time you move up in relative income, someone else moves down. [...]

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Paglia v. Philosophy

July 14, 2005

Camille Paglia attempts to explain the absence of women in the BBC’s ridiculous philosopher popularity contest.
I feel women in general are less comfortable than men in inhabiting a highly austere, cold, analytical space, such as the one which philosophy involves. Women as a whole – and there are obvious exceptions – are more drawn [...]

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Now I Dialed 911 a Long Time Ago

July 14, 2005

Grant McCracken conjectures that the sudden 1990’s decrease in violent crime is due to . . . abortion?
No.
Chuck D! The effect of the mainstreaming of rap on the “esteem economy,” that is.
If Grant is correct, Flava Flav deserves beatification

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Save Me From Myself!

July 13, 2005

Julian’s brilliant Reason essay on “parentalism” is a must read.
I like this:
But perhaps a more important problem with parentalism is that it licenses what Sartre called “bad faith,” the attempt to avoid the burdens of responsibility by denying our own freedom. Classical liberals may even inadvertently encourage this by speaking of responsibility as “the [...]

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A Total Failure According to Its Own Standards? Give Me a Dozen!

July 12, 2005

In an astoundingly shallow review of several books on happiness, Carol Tavris drops this humdinger in her discussion of Layard’s statist impulses:
Professor Layard takes [active government promotion of happiness] further, proposing that government should make the happiness of its citizens a primary goal, the heart of its public and economic policy, using laws and taxes [...]

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Del Libertador

July 12, 2005

Does anyone know the weapon brandished by Simon Bolivar’s failed assassins in September of 1828?
Email or leave a comment…

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Working Hours Declining

July 7, 2005

Russ Roberts fact checks Charles McGrath’s rumpus and points out these BLS statistics that inconveniently contradict the whole point of McGrath’s article.
Hours worked per week (for private production and non-supervisory workers):
1970 37.0
1975 36.0
1980 35.2
1985 34.9
1990 34.3
1995 34.3
2000 34.3
2003 33.7
So… [...]

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Supersized Smackdown

July 7, 2005

If you haven’t seen it already, check out the Morgan Spurlock Watch, by my intrepid colleague Radley Balko. Who we should all thank, by the way, for doing the Lord’s work.

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The Case for Carve Outs

July 6, 2005

My brilliant colleague Jagadeesh Gokhale explains why the notion that personal accounts and Social Security solvency are unrelated is a canard.
Here’s the core of the argument:
The difference between the two projections of future benefit levels funded out of present law payroll taxes — higher ones under “add-on” personal accounts versus lower ones under a “status-quo” [...]

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Comments Open

July 6, 2005

Something about TypeKey ain’t working right, and has been suppressing comment turnout, so I’ve re-opened non-registered comments. Speak! Speak!!!
[UPDATE: Bad idea. Spam deluge. Non-registration un-re-opened. Freedom revoked!]

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The Mysterious Easterbrook Justice Detector

July 5, 2005

From Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox:
Considering taxes, a person working full-time at the federal minimum would have to spend and entire days wages to buy a $7 Au Bon Pain sandwich combo for lunch each business week. This simply is not right.
I assume he means “each day of the business week.” Anyway, what a weird [...]

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Buller in Sci-Am

July 5, 2005

There’s a nice interview with my old prof David Buller in Scientific American about his new book on evolutionary psycvhology, which serves a good short introduction to the themes of his work.

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The Unnerving Risk of Being Wealthy: Becoming Slightly Less Wealthy!

July 2, 2005

So, here’s Jacob Hacker:
The big economic trends of the past 30 years–deregulation, deindustrialization, increased foreign competition, the decline of unions, the transformation of the family from single breadwinners into two-earners balancing work and kids–have all created powerful new forces pushing toward increased insecurity. Americans are richer than they were a generation ago. But they are [...]

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Magic Chaitball: Outlook Not So Good

July 2, 2005

Yglesias thinks Chait’s sermon on the irrelevance of ideas is “the definitive rebuttal of the notion that Republicans are ascendant because they have all the ideas, that Democrats need new ideas to win, that idea-quality or idea-novelty have anything to do with winning, and all such related theses.”
Now, I felt sort of uncomfortable reading [...]

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Liberal Virtue and the Common Good

July 2, 2005

Here’s Darrin McMahon in the WSJ, in a piece subtitled, “‘The pursuit of happiness’ is about more than private pleasures”:
For in Christian, classical or Lockean terms, virtue at its highest meant serving one’s fellow citizens, working for the public welfare, furthering the public good. It followed that virtue was the indispensable means to reconcile the [...]

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Social Change Shots

July 1, 2005

Pictures of this summer’s IHS Social Change Workshop are popping up all over the internets.
Victor Muniz-Fraticelli has a few here, which link to yet more pictures on his Flickr page.
Matt Mullins has pictures here and here, where I can be seen dominating Alina in thumbwrestling and gesturing rudely.
If you can’t tell by looking, [...]

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