From the monthly archives:

January 2006

Papers of the Day: Money and Methods

January 27, 2006

Money Does Matter! Evidence from Increasing Real Incomes and Life Satisfaction in East Germany Following Reunification by Paul Frijters, John P. Haisken-DeNew and Michael A. Shields, American Economic Review, Vol. 94, No. 3, June 2004
ABSTRACT. In this paper we investigate how life satisfaction (or happiness) is affected by a substantial increase in real income. Our [...]

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Mozart, Bah!

January 27, 2006

Today is my birthday!

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Moral Philosophy and Economic Growth

January 26, 2006

This is a bleg for my exceedingly well-informed readers.
Are you aware of any works in moral or political philosophy (or normative political theory) that argue that maintaining a relatively high rate of economic growth is morally mandatory for a good government (or is a necessary condition for justice, or legitimacy, or anything like that). [...]

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Andrew Oswald: Politician or Social Scientist?

January 22, 2006

I nominate Andrew Oswald of Warwick University as the new champion of the egregiously bad happiness policy op-ed. In this Financial Times piece (unfortunately behind paywall) Oswald touches on every worn trope of politics-masquerading-as-social-science happiness studies, and in the process reveals himself to be less than honest.
Oswald writes:
The hippies, the Greens, the road protesters, the [...]

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Rawls on Interdependent Preferences

January 18, 2006

While reading Randall Holcombe and Russ Sobel’s excellent paper “Consumption Externalities and Economic Welfare” (thanks to Michael Dennis, and about which more later), I ran across a cite to Rawls on interdependent preferences. It turns out that I’ve read this very important passage a bunch of times, but not since becoming obsessed with positional races, [...]

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The State as Parent

January 17, 2006

Evidence for Lakoff’s hypothesis from Liberia:
“I voted for George Weah, but I accept Ellen because she is our Ma and is going take care of us,” said Benedict Newon, 19, a former child soldier. He first hoisted a weapon for the warlord Charles Taylor when he was 10, though he later switched allegiance to another [...]

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Quick Thoughts About Mindless Economics

January 11, 2006

Glancing at the Gul & Pesendorfer paper, “The Case for Mindless Economics,” my first thought was that these guys good really use a good philosophy of science seminar. (Tyler discusses it, as does Bryan Caplan.) Now, I don’t really understand the drive to secure the autonomy of formal economics. Either economics seeks to decribe actual [...]

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NIM, PUB and Cognitive Paternalism

January 10, 2006

Please allow me to think aloud. Just don’t be disappointed if I don’t get anywhere . . .
A few posts ago I coined a term: Neutral Institutional Monism (NIM). NIM is the thesis that there are institutions and there are institutions. The primary explanatory distinction is not coercive vs. non-coercive, or state vs. market, [...]

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Cato Unbound: Internet Liberation: Alive or Dead

January 6, 2006

The January issue of Cato Unbound launches Monday. Jaron Lanier’s lead essay is a trip. Here’s the scoop:
As the Internet burgeoned and blossomed through the early to mid-nineties, visionary manifestos about its transformative social, political, and economic potential clogged VAX accounts the world over. After a solid decade of intense commercial development, much go-go nineties [...]

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Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism

January 6, 2006

Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s lovely essay on cosmopolitanism in the NYT Magazine is mandatory reading. It was very heartening, even a little exciting, to find that there was almost no point on which I disagreed with Appiah. He has lucidly articulated what I think grown-ups ought think about the complex pluralism of a globalized [...]

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Poverty in America and Happiness Talking Points

January 5, 2006

This article from the Christian Science Monitor explores new census data that shows that the poor in America own computers, dishwashers, and other appliances of convenience and amusement at historic rates. Naturally, the happiness question arises, and shows how journalists have been effectively propagandized into repeating a misleading, ideological happpiness talking point whenever good economic [...]

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Brangelina of the A.F.F. Set!

January 5, 2006

This is just too flattering to resist sharing. R.J. Lehmann, listing “the top five new persons, places or things I was introduced to in the last 12 months that combined to make 2005, all in all, a very good year,” puts Joanna & I, as a unit, at #2.
2. Willana — Or, if [...]

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The Strange Myth of Finite Status

January 2, 2006

I’ve always been a bit baffled by the common assumption in economic and social theory that the quantity of social status is fixed, such that games over the distribution of status are always zero-sum. The title of Frank’s Choosing the Right Pond seems to assume that it isn’t. Middling status in one pond can [...]

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