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 the intuitionist view of moral judgment is, in what ways moral psychology and moral philosophy should interact, and who, if anyone, might be a moral expert. There are a bunch of other issues that I’ll try to touch on as well. Is morality a natural kind in the brain, or to use a stranger label, a cognitive kind? How much influence does conscious reasoning have on our moral judgments and behavior? How does communication affect moral judgment?

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 people (which those people dislike). This is an “external disbenefit” imposed on others, a form of physical pollution. [p. 152]

So Layard prescribes a tax on income to provide a disincentive to work:

Thus a tax on noxious emissions will reduce this emissions, and a tax on income from work will reduce work. [p. 153]

But, hey!, the analogy fails entirely. Work is not the “pollution.” Income is not the “pollution.” Moving up in relative income is the “pollution.” So, if the proposed Pigovian tax was going to be analogous to a tax on noxious emmissions, it would have to be a tax on upward income mobility, not on income from work, per se.

When Layard goes on to explain why these taxes are “corrective” rather than “distorting,” he claims that they are “performing a useful function that we were unaware of,” which is to “preserve our work-life balance.” [p. 153]

But hold on! Work-life balance is a totally different subject from the negative external effects of upward moves in relative income. This is easy to see. Imagine a world where everybody works 120 hours a week, never gaining ground in terms of relative income, but never losing it, either. This is a world with zero “pollution” from relative income gains, because there aren’t any, but a terrible work-life balance.

The “arms race” argument, that everybody would be better off if we mulilaterally agreed to work less and read more Proust, is about work-life balance. To argue that a tax on labor income would increase utility for arms race reasons is fine. But it has nothing to do with relative income gain “pollution.” In order for the negative externalites argument to go through, Layard has to show that a tax on income increases utility by decreasing income mobility, not by creating a better work-life balance. These are separate issues, but be illegitimately conflates them. He pulls a conceptual bait and switch. So, besides failing for all the more technical reasons about the reciprocal nature of externalites, Layard’s pollution argument fails at a more fundamental level, because he provides no evidence that his prescribed tax is even relevant to the “problem” it is supposed to solve.

And just consider that every time someone retires and begins to live primarily off savings, someone else’s relative income goes up. Here we have relative income gain (and attendant “pollution”) brought about by a choice to work less. Because change in relative income is largely a life-cycle thing, most people move up and move down through the distribution in a similar pattern. If people move up, creating supposed negative externalities, then they later move down, creating offsetting positive externalities.

So, it looks like the “arms race” argument really is the only one worth taking seriously. And it, unlike the pollution argument, it isn’t really an argument involving meddlesome preferences. It’s a regular old collective action problem. So the post below is confused, starting with a discussion of meddlesome preferences, and ending with a discussion of coordinating on utility maximizing general rules. But this just reflects the fact that Lord Layard is confused, too. Or trying to pull a fast one. Anyway, the “pollution” argument in Happiness is, as stated, not just wrong, but nonsensical.

And it annoys me that it took so long to see this. And that Layard argues that it is an argument that demands a “revolution in what is called ‘public economics’,” and “provides an important new element in the case for progressive politics as such.”

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 with “meddlesome preferences,” that is, preferences about other people’s behavior, like the preference that other people sleep on their belly, or that other people not read Lady Chatterly’s Lover. As Buchanan pointed out, Sen’s paper seemed to equivocate between the idea of liberalism as having to do with deciseveness over entire states of the world, and elements of those states. But

. . .the rule of liberalism does not, and, indeed, cannot assign rights to choose among complete social states to anyone. Persons are assigned rights to control defined elements which, when combined with the exercise of mutually-compatible rights of others, will generate a social state as an outcome of an interaction process, not of a ‘choice’, as such, by either one or many persons.

Liberalism, as it is normally understood, has to do with protected spheres of personal authority in which one’s own preferences are decisive. The question of how those spheres of authority, those rights, are initially assigned is not itself a matter of pareto-efficiency. But once those rights are assigned, meddlesome preferences do not throw us into a quandary. If you prefer that I am bearded, and I prefer that I am clean shaven, the question is already solved if, at the negotiation stage over the initial assignment of rights, it is agreed that we are each decisive over the state of our own face. You can’t object to having been harmed because my shaving caused your preference to become unsatisfied, because you’ve already bought into a regime of rights according to which you waive any say about what I do with my face. If you still have a problem, it’s because you never thought that how my face looks is properly up to me. Your problem is really with the assignment of rights, not the fact that my walking around unshaven (on the semantic interpretation) screws up the fit between your preference and the world, or (on the psychological interpretation) pains you.

Buchanan, again:

Once individual rights have been assigned or partitioned, the Pareto criterion does offer a means of evaluating potential transfers of rights among individuals. At this point, ‘meddlesome preferences’ may reenter. If a person is assigned the right to determine his own reading matter, he can guarantee the enforcement of this right as a part of the observed social outcome. If, however, someone else places a higher value on this person’s reading habits than he does himself, the Pareto norm would suggest the mutuality of gains from a transfer. In the end, the ‘meddlesome preferences’ may prevail, but only if those who hold them are willing to pay for their exercise.

How does this relate to the idea of economic success as pollution? Recall that Layard interprets upward moves in the income distribution as creating hedonic “pollution” for people below. Clearly, Buchanan’s suggestion in the second quoted passage isn’t going to apply. Obviously, if I tried to pay someone ahead of me to move down the distribtion, I would achieve the opposite effect, causing even more “pollution.”

I think the key point is in the first Buchanan quote above. The “income distribution” is the emergent outcome of the interactive exercise of rights, not anybody’s decision. It’s a pattern created by lots of individual decisions. Now, what should we say if people have preferences over the pattern, but that the pattern is created by interdependent rights-governed individual action? What should we say if most people are disappointed by the pattern?

I say: So what?! If the initial rights are just, that is. If every man prefers to be clean shaven, but prefers that everyone else by bearded, i.e., prefers a pattern of shaven-ness in which he is the only clean-shaven man, everyone is going to be disappointed with the pattern. But the pattern is the outcome of the exercise of rights we all endorse (every man agrees that he should have final say over his face). Similarly, if we agreed that we ought to be decisive over the alocation of our time to labor and its alternatives, then the pattern is the pattern, and there is no ground for complaint.

But you’re a utilitarian and you see that people are wasting time maintaining position in the distribution for no average hedonic gain. If there was a multilateral decision to work less and vacation more (or whatever), the distribution would still be the distribution (some higher, some lower) but everybody would be hedon-happier because it would take less work just to maintain position.

What kind of argument is this? This is, I think, an argument appropriate to the rights negotiation phase. At the imaginary contractarian constitutional convention, you might submit this argument as a reason why everybody ought not to be decisive over their allocation of time and energy. Or at least, that everybody’s decisions ought to biased toward leisure, or whatever, by putting the public thumb on the scale.

I have a number of things to say about this, few of them good. But I’m tired. So, what do you make of Layard’s argument as a bit of contractualist reasoning? What would Buchananite rational choice conventioneers make of it? Veiled Rawlsians? Scanlon’s reasonable rejecters? Would each person have to accept util maximization as her overriding personal goal?

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!

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.

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.

Overall, however, the biggest status game in town is not big spending but acquiring power over other people. In short, politics. So a likely consequence of sumptuary legislation would be more and more intense contests over the perennial question, “Who shall be king?” As usual, Adam Smith said it best, in The Wealth of Nations: “It is of the highest impertinence and presumption…in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.”

Earlier on, Hirshleifer makes the excellent point that advocates of higher taxes and bigger government, who are appalled by economic inequality, are well-nigh blind to the rather more objectionable inqequalities in political power that are a necessary part of their schemes. If the objection is that consumers have irrational preferences, so that they are lead into self-defeating, utility minimizing status competitions, then the objection applies equally to the political class:

In fact, one could well argue–Adam Smith certainly did–that those charged with public spending are likely to be even more interested in conspicuous spending than private persons. Think of the tax-financed white-elephant ballparks, the ornate federal office buildings that have sprung up not only in Washington, D.C., but just about everywhere, the hypertrophied public transit systems lacking nothing but riders, the Agriculture Department’s wildly wasteful irrigation schemes. Simple corruption is very likely the major explanation, true, but politicians’ desires for “monuments” (Hoover Dam, J.F. Kennedy Airport, the Sam Rayburn Office Building) are a big part of the story behind such travesties.

Arguments for new or bigger government initiatives driven by a charge of irrational or self-defeating preferences almost always make an implicit, arbitrary, exception for the ruling class. There’s no good justification for invidious comparisons between ideal coercion and non-ideal agency, and vice versa. If you think the pattern of voluntary interaction “fails” according to some standard due to some psychological foible, you’ve taken on a burden to demonstrate that the same foible does not imply that state action will lead to an even more serious failure. This is the burden the Frank/Layard-style statist rarely carries, explaining why their conclusion is so often a destination that can be reached only by a leap of faith.

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 lead to pleasure or avoid pain. For example, my love for my wife does not seem to become less valuable when I get less pleasure from her because she gets some horrible disease. Similarly, freedom seems valuable even when it creates anxiety, and even when it is freedom to do something (such as leave one’s country) that one does not want to do. Again, many people value knowledge of other galaxies regardless of whether this knowledge will create pleasure or avoid pain.

I find all of these objections totally persuasive. Is there any reason for resisting them other than a prior commitment to hedonism?

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 satisfaction in the feeling of responsibility for our choices, in knowing that we have shaped a life that is ours even when we have chosen badly.” It is the libertarian version of the old communist story:

Speaker: After the revolution we will all eat strawberries and cream.

Worker: But I don’t like strawberries and cream!

Speaker: After the revolution you will eat strawberries and cream–and like it!

Is DeLong hearing Julian say something like “we should take satisfaction in our dissatisfaction”? Is that why his mind explodes? But that’s not what Julian is saying.

What’s going on!?

Maybe it would be helpful for DeLong if he were not to think like this:

(1) X is valuable iff X is a pleasurable mental state. (Axiom!)
(2) Someone just said A is valuable.
(3) But A isn’t a pleasurable mental state!
Therefore, (4) Head explodes. Aghh!

Not thinking/exploding like this might be helpful because sometimes people are just trying to say, more or less directly, that (1) isn’t true. And this is OK. This is allowed. For it is not the case that (1) is obviously true, self-evidently true, axiomatic, apodeictic, incontrovertble–cannot, like the law contradiction, be denied without affirming what is denied–, etc. It really might not be true. Really.

And so when somebody comes along and says something that implies that it isn’t ture, it’s not that they are therefore trying to say that it is true (because it just obviously, axiomatically is) and, on the other hand, it isn’t. Because that really would be stupid. The principle of charity indicates that we should assume that they are not stupid, but are trying to offer some reason not to believe (1). After all, there are reasons not to believe (1). And so it may not be especially helpful to address an argument that implies the falsity of (1) by forcefully repeating (1), or having one’s head explode (and then living to tell the tale).

Julian, I take it, thinks that something like autonomy or self-governance, or maybe existential self-creation, is valuable for its own sake. At least I think something like that.

Our lives are good lives just in case they are fully ours, constituted by our choices, even if they aren’t fully happy lives. Other things equal, happy lives are better than unhappy ones. But some happy lives are bad ones. And some unhappy ones are good, because they realize other values, like autonomy.

Now, it is rational to take satisfaction in what is valuable, and so we ought to take satisfaction in our autonomy, because our autonomy is valuable. But autonomy is not valuable because we take satisfaction in it. Autonomy is not like strawberries and cream. It may be that you have a taste for it or that you don’t. But if you don’t, you should. Because autonomy is a necessary requirement of a fully good human life, and you ought to take satisfaction in what will make your life go best, even if you don’t.

I trust no one will confuse this for an argument in favor of utilitarianism.

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. This makes you happier, but makes everyone with a diminished relative position less happy, even though their absolute income has not changed, or may even have increased, but less than yours.

Layard interprets your gain in relative position as a straightforward negative externality — in the book he actually calls it “pollution” — and prescribes a straightforward Pigovian tax to minimize its harm. It is supposed that such a tax is not distorting, does not cause a loss of efficiency or create deadweight losses, because the externality was, in this case, caused by an oversupply of labor stimulated by the race for relative position. That is, the race for position causes an inefficiency, relative to the Benthamite standard, and the tax is merely corrective, bringing us to the amount of work that will create the greatest happiness. The loss of economic wealth is irrelevant, insofar as the excess wealth produced by the surplus in labor was not having a positive net hedonic effect.

Layard’s argument entirely turns on whether it is correct to conceive of the your decline in reported subjective well-being as solely the result of my perceived “polluting” act of upward income mobility — whether your feeling bad when I do better is a true, normatively relevant negative externality. This is how he blithely dismisses an imagined libertarian challenge to his understanding of the issue:

Libertarians object to this whole line of argument on the grounds that it panders to envy. They do not apparently mind pandering to greed. We should of course try to educate people away from both envy and greed, since neither is conducive to happiness. But at the same time we should set our other policy instruments at whatever level is optimal for the state of mind which currently prevails.

Layard’s argument here provides some evidence that Layard is not entirely ignorant of the revolution in thinking about externalities brought about by Ronald Coase’s paradigm shattering “The Problem of Social Cost.” [pdf] Let’s back into Coase by thinking about Layard’s flip rebuttal to his imagined libertarian critic.

Layard recognizes the possibility of preference change — that people could become less envious or greedy — and this points to some kind of understanding of the essentially relational nature of an external effect. If you cared less about where you stood with respect to other people, then how much money I make would have less of an effect on how you feel about how much you make. This is Coase’s central insight about externalities: it takes (at least) two to tango. My relative success has no “polluting” effect whatsoever if you don’t care about it. (You’re a good Buddhist, say.) The “pollution” is a joint product of my move up and your preference to not move down. The correct approach to the problem, if there is a problem at all, depends on what the lowest cost solution happens to be. If you changing your preference is cheaper than taxing me, then you ought to change your preference.

To which Layard replies, “. . .we should set our other policy instruments at whatever level is optimal for the state of mind which currently prevails.” This has to be incorrect, because the least cost solution to the putative externality problem may be a transition to a different prevailing state of mind. Furthermore, it seems clear that it may be morally obligatory to refuse to optimize relative the current state of mind, even if it expensive to move away from it.

Consider the Jim Crow American South, or apartheid South Africa. Suppose it was the case that any increase in income among blacks leads to a reduction in self-reported subjective well-being among whites, a reduction that totally swamps the utility gain to blacks. Suppose further that a reduction in income among blacks causes a increase in “happiness” among whites that totally swamps the utility loss to blacks. If “we should set our other policy instruments at whatever level is optimal for the state of mind which currently prevails,” then it is pretty obvious that an immiserating tax on blacks is optimal for the state of mind that prevails. Racist oppression is obligatory.

The Benthamite has two possible replies. (1) Yes, an immiserating racist tax is in fact optimal. This will produce the greatest amount of net happiness relative to the prevailing state of mind. (2) No, an immiserating racist tax is not optimal, because there is (a) an alternative (non-racist) set of preference profiles for members of the community which, if satisfied, would create a greater amount of net utility than the current set of (racist) profiles, (b) there is a feasible path from here to there, and (c) the utility gain of having arrived there will offset the utility loss of getting there.

If (1) is the reply, then we must reject Layard’s Benthamism. Racist opression is wrong, i.e., morally impermissible. If a candidate normative standard implies that racist oppression is morally obligatory, is it clearly disqualified.

If (2) is the reply, then it is false that “we should set our other policy instruments at whatever level is optimal for the state of mind which currently prevails.”

Clearly (2) is the better answer for the Benthamite, because it at least preserves the possibility of remaining a Benthamite. But then Layard will be forced to take the Coasian least cost avoider principle seriously. As it happens, one of Layard’s main points elsewhere is that preferences must not simply be treated as given, but must be understood as endogenously determined. Culture, media, the general structure of economic and social incentives, can shape our tastes or preferences, and these are subject to evaluation as well as our actions and policies. Layard argues that “good tastes are those which increase happiness, and vice versa,” and argues at length that many tastes, such as those that are induced by advertising, performance related pay, and general individualist cultural milieu, are not good tastes. So, clearly, Layard doesn’t really think that we should optimize relative to prevailing preferences, because we may have bad ones. And this more or less guts the rejoinder to the libertarian. Why cater to relative preferences about income?

In the case of the immiserating racist tax, I would argue that the other-regarding preference that blacks be made worse off is morally impermissible simply as matter of justice and independent of hedonic consequences. Not only should it not be given weight when tallying up what is or is not an efficient policy, we morally must not give it weight. I would argue the same thing about the other-regarding preference about one’s relative position in the income distribution. But, it turns out, it’s unecessary to argue this, for the happiness data itself suggests that Layard’s case for higher taxes might be pretty weak if he acknowledges Coase.

According to this fascinating paper by Alesina, Di Tella, and MacCulloch the negative effects of income inequality on happiness is far from written into the stars:

We find some intriguing results. First, Europeans and Americans report themselves less happy when inequality is high; however the effect of inequality on happiness is more precisely estimated for Europe. Second, aversion to inequality is concentrated amongst different ideological and income groups across the two regions. There is no clear ideological divide in the US concerning the effect of inequality on happiness. In contrast, those who define themselves leftist show a strong distaste for inequality in Europe, while those who define themselves rightists are unaffected by it. The breakdown of rich versus poor also shows some differences between Europe and the US. In Europe, the happiness of the poor is strongly negatively affected by inequality, while the effect on the rich is smaller in size and statistically insignificant. In the US one finds the opposite pattern, namely that the group whose happiness seems to be most adversely affected by inequality is the rich. A striking result is that the US poor seem totally unaffected by inequality. Any significance of the inequality coefficient in the US population is mainly driven by the rich.

Now, Alesina, et al. are measuring objective inequality (via state by state Gini coefficient) rather than perceived place in the distribution. But I think they at least establish that the relevant class of preference is highly contingent and likely quite malleable. For instance, they show that right-wingers care more about relative position than left-wingers. If more right-wingers became left-wingers, presumably the “pollution” of upward status moves would diminish. The authors conjecture that inequality has no significant negative effect on the American poor because they believe they can move up, while inequality has a significant negative effect on the rich because they believe they might move down. (So, when the NYT and WSJ and LAT are trying to convince us that there is less mobility than we think, they are contributing to the unhappiness of the poor, and the happiness of the rich.) Presumably, a change in belief about the importance of relative position would mitigate the effects of relative position (as well as mitigating the effects of inequality).

What the Benthamite need to know is whether on average one is more likely to be happier if one cares less about relative position. If so (and it seems plausible), then caring less about relative position may well be the least cost “solution” to the relative income externality “problem.” And that’s even if we treat preferences about relative position as having normative weight, which we shouldn’t. Also, insofar as the current rate and progressivity of taxation is politically driven by preferences about relative position, it may be that people who care too much about relative position are the ones imposing negative externalities — showering “pollution” — on people in the highest tax brackets. The rich therefore may be entitled to a preference shift that will result in tax cuts.

Richard Layard, meet Ronald Coase.

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 to practical, personal matters. It is not that they inherently lack a talent or aptitude for philosophy or higher mathematics, but rather that they are more unwilling than men to devote their lives to a frigid space from which the natural and the human have been eliminated.

OK. There may be something to this. But she goes deeper.

Today’s lack of major female philosophers is not due to lack of talent but to the collapse of philosophy. Philosophy as traditionally practised may be a dead genre. This is the age of the internet in which we are constantly flooded by information in fragments. Each person at the computer is embarked on a quest for and fabrication of his or her identity. The web mimics human neurology, and it is fundmentally altering young people’s brains. The web, for good or ill, is instantaneous. Philosophy belongs to a vanished age of much slower and rhetorically formal inquiry. Today’s philosophers are now antiquarians.

Fascinating. But as far as I can tell, philosophy as traditionally practiced is at its high water mark. If I had to bet, I would put money on the claim that more books of philosophy were published in the last ten years than in any other ten year period of history. There are, without a doubt, more people well-trained in rigorous methods of philosophical inquiry than ever before. And as travellers to this little piece of the information superhighway may be aware, philosophical conversations and debates can be conducted over the internet, and they are. It’s probably a good bet that there were more words written last year in online discussions of philosophy than were written about philosophy in any other year of human history.

Now, Paglia wants to say that philosophy is no longer as culturally central as it once was. I think she’s right. But then again, nothing that used to be culturally central is as culturally central as it once was because we’ve got a more polyglot decentralized culture. At her AEI talk a few months ago, Paglia seemed panicked by the breakdown of institutions of cultural hegemony. Hollywwod films aren’t what they once were (and nobody cares about the Oscars). Elite universities have become so so. You can’t get classical music over the radio in Buffalo. Etc. She was agitated because, apparently, she passed into old-cooterism some time around 1994 and evidently doesn’t grasp that the age of centralization and hegemony is definitely over, doesn’t understand the new institutions and mechanisms of cultural transmission (other than the fact that this mysterious revolutionary thing, the internet, exists, and matters), and so sees the decline of HOLLYWOOD, and THE IVY LEAGUE, and NETWORK TELEVISION, and BROADWAY — the old familiar institutions of centralized cultural hegemony — as symptoms of general decline. The fact that philosophers aren’t being interviewed by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News means that philosophy is more or less invisible to Camille Paglia, despite the fact that it is flourishing by any historical standard, and despite the fact that women, such as Martha Nussbaum and Christine Korsgaard, are at the absolute top of the game.

Now, I agree that academic philosophy is insufficiently engaged with the public, and could hold a more priveleged place is the fragmented popular consciousness. And I think this is due to straightforward institutional reasons. Academia as it is presently constituted does reward a kind of bloodless scholasticism. One reason I decided to drop out of academia was that I thought direct engagement with current policy debates and cultural concerns would make me a better philosopher. Greats like Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill, Marx were not academics, but men involved in thinking through the practical political matters of their day. Our political philosophy would be more publicly engaging if more philosphers were directly involved in politics. We would be more likely to produce American BHL’s and latter day de Beauvoirs and Rands. But that is a long, long way from the claim that philosophy is a dead genre.

[Link from Chris Sciabbara, who brings out the Paglia's comments on Rand.]

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

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 other side” of freedom, as though it were the spinach that had to be cleared away before getting to desert. But is that really so? When we make trivial choices—what to have for dinner, what movie to see, which CD to buy—what we most value is the freedom to select without constraint from many options. Yet when it comes to our most central choices—what kind of person am I to be, what work will I find rewarding?—we may take as least as much satisfaction in the feeling of responsibility for our choices, in knowing that we have shaped a life that is ours even when we have chosen badly.

Own it, people. Own it.

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 to reward cooperation in pursuit of a common good, make work life more compatible with family life, help the poor, reduce rates of mental illness, subsidize activities that promote “community life”, reduce commuting time, eliminate high unemployment, prohibit commercial advertising to children (as Sweden does) . . . . If the thermostat theory is right, none of this will raise the overall happiness level of the population, and some temperamentally grouchy people will complain that they miss the traffic, but who cares? Sign me up. [emphasis added]

Got that? Even if the entire justification offered for all this state action is completely and totally undermined by the empirical evidence, Tavris wants to sign up for it anyway. Why? No doubt because Layard’s interpretation of happiness “science” coveniently, nay miraculously, maps onto her existing political commitments, and it’s nice to have another arrow in the rhetorical quiver.

Worse, because Tavris thinks all this is worth doing even if no one is made any happier, she presumably thinks that all this frighteningly anti-liberal social engineering would work, thereby providing real benefits according to some other evaluative standard, leaving only the terminally grouchy to complain about the lack of things to complain about. This is precisely the kind of fantastically ignorant faith in technocracy that makes the sunny pseudoscientific authoritarianism of the neo-Benthamites so dangerous.

Does anyone know the weapon brandished by Simon Bolivar’s failed assassins in September of 1828?

Email or leave a comment…

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… whoops.

Russ also mentions that for some classes of workers, there is more leisure at work these days, which further undermines the “we’re working ourselves to death” meme.

This raises the further point that it is just not the case that labor is labor is labor and that leisure is leisure is leisure. Lots of offices, for example, are nice places to go with many amenities, a satisfying set of social relations, and a sense of productive efficacy. This sort of “labor” simply isn’t a disutility that is offset by the utility of wages. More of this kind of work can be quite good for us. Conversely, lots of “leisure” is spent accomplishing tedious tasks such as laundry or home maintenenance that one can’t afford to outsource. And the so-called “leisure” enjoyed by the unemployed can be downright psychologically toxic.

I would like more “leisure” not so much to get away from work, but to pursue creative pursuits that are not as well economically rewarded as my official work (which is incredibly satisfying in its own right, and worlds away from the salt mine, and everyone should be so lucky). That is, while I would like to travel more, say, or to sleep in more often, what I would really use more “leisure” time for is a different kind of intrinsically satisfying “labor.” I doubt I’m alone in this. So folks need to be more careful when writing articles in the Times about how terrible all this work is.

In particular, McGrath needs to think twice when he writes, “And far from complaining, we have adopted a superior, moralizing attitude that sees work not as a necessary evil, a means to an end, but as an end in itself,” as if it somehow clear that work is not an end in itself, and that it is somehow clear that we should not adopt a superior attitude toward this approach to work.

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.

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” hike in payroll taxes — constitutes the basic case for “carve-out” personal accounts. How come? If “add-on” accounts to pay for benefits that are promised but unpayable under present law effectively increases saving and investment and preserves work incentives, the (lower) level of payable benefits under a “status quo” payroll tax hike could be financed with a less than 12.4 percent payroll tax rate under the “add-on” policy. That implies room for a “carve out” — that is, for diverting a part of present law payroll taxes into personal accounts.

How large would be the size of a feasible carve out? Would it ultimately completely do away with the need for “add-on” contributions? These are difficult questions to answer. Two considerations suggest, however, that the scope for carve-outs could be large. First, several studies report that payroll taxes add significantly to marginal tax rates — especially for households’ secondary earners — and that labor supply is quite sensitive to higher taxes. Noteworthy here is a recent study by economics Nobel laureate Edward Prescott that attributes the significant decline in European labor supply relative to the United States since the 1970s to higher European social insurance taxes.

Second, loss in annual output because of the savings-reducing impact of the current Social Security system’s pay-as-you-go financing structure is estimated to be of the same size as total current outlays on Social Security. That is, were the existing system based entirely on “add-on” personal accounts, the gain in annual output due to higher saving and capital formation would have been about as large as total current outlays on Social Security.

It’s a complicated argument, but nobody ever said getting it right is easy.

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!]

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 thing to say! $7 is a hell of a lot to spend each day for lunch. Not considering taxes that’s $35 a week, $140 a month, $1680 a year. Is it a baseline of justice that the daily $7 lunch be within reach of each and every one of us. $140 a month is a reasonable monthly food budget including breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My guess is that you can easily make a better than Au Bon Pain quality combo at home for way less than $3 a day. Should you be able to do it on $1.50? $.25? Where (oh where!) can one purchase an Easterbrook economic rightness-o-meter?

What else? A person working full-time at the median wage would have to spend an entire week’s wages eating every work day at the Outback Steakhouse, and that’s simply not right? Could be? But how do you tell!?

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.

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 also facing much more dramatic swings in their income, as I have argued before in these pages (”False Positive,” August 16, 2004). Over the past decade, moreover, insecurity has moved up the economic ladder. Increasingly, educated middle-class Americans are riding the economic roller coaster once reserved for the working poor.

I’ve been trying to find someone to tell me that people like Hacker are saying something that is more significant than, say, the risk of being hurt in a car accident went way up after most everyone got car. It’s just totally trivial that you can’t face the “risk” of your income dropping from $80 to $60K a year if you never made $80K. But why exactly is it that the “risk” of losing a quarter of your income is a risk anyone ought to care about if you’ll still be pretty damn rich when you hit the downside. I understand what’s going on when people want the state to guarantee a minimum, but I am totally mystified by the normative sensibility behind Hackeresque worries about increasing volatility for the upper and middle classes.

We are richer because of the possibility of swings in income. The efficiency of the economic order, and the overall rate of growth, depends on the ability of the system to dynamically allocate resources to their most valuable use. This entails a fair amount of turbulence inside the general upward trend. Our economic security requires that we be exposed to some income volatility.

If the system isn’t routinely plunging lots of folks below the threshold of sufficiency, then there is simply nothing for a sane liberal to worry about. The implied idea that people have some kind of positive entitlement to a certain level of income once they’ve achieved it, such that other citizens are on the tax-hook to keep them there, is just stupefying. Needing to trade in your Mercedes for a Honda, moving to a smaller McMansion, is not an injustice that demands compensation, nor a loss that may justly be reimbursed by “society.” (This is, it appears, the kind of idea that the left proudly holds up as a stinging retort to the charge that they don’t have any. Amazing.)

Hacker is exploiting the fact that we are subject to a tendency to loss aversion (endowment effects, status quo biases, etc.) to give credibility to the idea that income volatility entails a kind of economic “insecurity” and to thereby move the goalposts of a humane liberal social policy. And volatility certainly is a source of psychological insecurity. But so is girlfriend volatility, Nationals winning streak volatility, etc. Economic security in the good old objective New Deal CES sense meant security against the threat of economic deprivation, which is the kind of security we should care most about. And it is the dynamism of a high-growth economic system that provides it.

If people want wage insurance, then what we need the state to do is to allow the market to provide it. Then, the people who want it can get it by buying it. It’s that easy!

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 the Chait piece because there’s something pretty bitter and depressed about it. To the incontrovertible datum that Democratic ideas are not winning over voters, Chait complains, at length, that voters are stupid and ideas don’t matter anyway. This does not sound like a man of ideas at peace.

He’s right: if “ideas” mean novel projects for the technocracy, then liberals are chock ful of them. I think the real complaint here is that there is nothing to be found that is not a specification of “use state power to make things better, according to our peculiar standards of better.” The problem for liberals is that if that if they give that up, then they’ll stop being who they are. But that’s what the voters, the stupid, stupid voters, aren’t resonating to. So what we’ve really got here is a crisis of identity — the threat that integrity is equivalent to obsolescence.

So how to respond to New Deal/Great Society liberalism’s mid-senescence crisis? Attack! Maybe Chait’s right, and Democrats just need prettier, taller candidates, better attack ads, and soaring rhetoric that taps into the reptilian part of the voters’ brains so that the governing philosophy that we are too stupid to understand and endorse can be imposed upon us, for which we will be grateful, I’m sure.

As Matt says in another post “the lodestar of liberal thinking has to be regaining political power through elections,” which is, I think we can all admit, really something to stir the soul.

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 conflicts of individual interest.

The last sentence is correct. But the reconciliation of conflict in Lockean-American terms doesn’t entail service of fellow citizens, working for the public good, etc. Virtue in Locke, Hume, Smith, etc., etc., is for the most part about the restraint of self interest to enable social cooperation. But it is self interest, operating within the bounds of virtue, that brings the blessings of society. This is the central liberal insight.

Order need not be teleological, based in the shared pursuit of a common goal. Nor need it be authoritarian, imposed from above by force. Order requires the coordination of individual’s acting for diverse ends, and virtue is of first importance because it enables coordination at the lowest cost, ensuring the greatest mutual benefit. Conscience does not eat into the surplus of cooperation. Cops do.

To think that civil peace or social order requires concerted efforts aimed at its maintenance is to totally misunderstand the idea of liberal order and the idea of liberal virtue. Virtue makes us happy because it enables the largest cooperative surplus and therefore allows us each to do better in self-interested terms. McMahon seems to think virtue makes us happy because our souls glow or something when we pitch in for the public welfare. But that’s not the liberal or the ur-American view.

The common good does require that some of us devote our energies to the maintanence of public institutions, of civil society and government. But the decision to work within public institutions is a personal decision about the kind of life one wants to lead, and is not especially meritorious or virtuous. There is no praise we owe to the bureaucrat that we do not owe to the cosmetologist. The wisdom of market liberalism is that it recognizes that the virtues of market exchange do serve one’s fellow citizens, the public welfare, and the common good, even when it is not aimed at these things.

Happy Independence Day!

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, it’s a good time, folks. I’m sorry I couldn’t stay the whole week this year.

[Update: More here from Jose Castellano.]