From the monthly archives:

February 2006

Are We Desperate Yet?

February 27, 2006

Yglesias provides the best argument yet for Canada-style socialized medicine: socialized medicine makes it easier for young folk to make music popular with wealthy American white kids! Sounds good to me. But is it even true?
A very quick glance at the Pitchfork best recent list reveals (without actual counting) something like 10% Canadianness. Is that [...]

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Growth and Economic Folk Morality

February 27, 2006

I recently wrote a review of Friedman’s Moral Consequences of Economic Growth for the forthcoming edition of the Cato Journal, and I wrote a lot of notes that I didn’t use. And what good are blogs if not for publishing your discarded book review notes!
A main weakness of the Friedman book is that he becomes [...]

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Positive Externalities of Positional Preferences

February 17, 2006

Most of the literature on positional preferences emphasizes the downside. But what if the upside is bigger?
Becker and Murphy in Social Economics argue that without a taste for status, there would be too little entreprenuerial activity, because the expected monetary payoff of an entrepeneurial gamble would often be too small. However, if you add the [...]

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Hey Will! What’s Going on at Cato Unbound?

February 16, 2006

Glad you asked! If you have yet to check out the February issue of Cato Unbound, which asks, “Is ‘Old Europe’ Doomed?” then now’s a great time to catch up. All the formal replies to Theodore Dalyrmple’s lead essay are in, and the informal conversation has just begun with a response by Dalrymple. (Choice line: [...]

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Commuting and Consuming

February 16, 2006

If there’s one thing that happiness research makes clear it is that commuting makes us miserable. This story in the Washington Post makes the “affective ignorance” literature plausible. Check this:
Ockershausen reported the conditions from the scene last night and said he wasn’t moving. “It’s gridlocked all the way across the bridge,” he said, speaking on [...]

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Model Argument Against Benjamin Friedman

February 15, 2006

Not against the idea that growth is good (heaven forbid), but against what Friedman says is good about it.
(Cogency warning: this is a sketch, and only sketch. Blog as dialectical scratchpad.)
Friedman argues that economic growth “fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy,” and that these are moral [...]

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The Undercover Economist on Happiness

February 14, 2006

Tim Harford, writing in the new Forbes, tackles the money and happiness question in an entertaining article. Especially quotable:
So, money does not buy happiness. Or does it? “In every society, at any point in time, richer people are happier,” points out Will Wilkinson, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C., who runs [...]

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Solidarity: More Than a Feeling

February 14, 2006

My meditation on solidarity as a social ideal is up today at TCSDaily. Here’s a bit:
Solidarity is tricky. There is a feeling of solidarity, fraternity, and belonging that can pervade the gut and bring a tear to the eye. There is also a system of solidarity in which we can be embedded and enmeshed. As [...]

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Republicans are Happier

February 14, 2006

The Pew poll mentioned below confirms a longstanding trend: Republicans say they are happier than Democrats. This year, 45% of Republicans said they were “very” happy as opposed to 29% of Democrats. That’s a big gap! Here’s the the 30+ year trendline from Pew:

This stability is interesting in part because, I take it, that the [...]

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Pew Happiness Survey

February 13, 2006

The Pew Research Center released a big report today on happiness in the U.S., “Are We Happy Yet.” I’m just now digging in, but I’ll have a lot to say about it tomorrow, I’m sure. For now, let me just leave you with this:

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Reason Review of Layard’s Happiness

February 12, 2006

I’ve just noticed that my review of Richard Layard’s Happiness,  “Happiness Is…Higher Taxes,” is now online. Check it out, and please tell me what you think.

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Sunday Snow Picture Blogging

February 12, 2006

So, just the other day, I discovered that we have a view of the Washington Monument! It’s not amazing, but you can see it. (The graininess is due to the electronic zoom.)

More pictures below the fold.

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The Nation as Unit of Analysis

February 11, 2006

Don Boudreaux in the course of a nice post on Jane Jacobs’ anti-nationalism quotes her thusly:
Nations are political and military entities, and so are blocs of nations. But it doesn’t necessarily follow from this that they are also the basic, salient entities of economic life or that they are particularly useful for probing the mysteries [...]

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Zombie Reforms, Zombie Arguments

February 9, 2006

In the Washington Post’s account of the resuscitation of Social Security reform in the president’s budget proposal, Allan Sloan writes, of progressive indexing:
This means that although progressive indexing is an attractive idea from a social-justice point of view, it would reduce Social Security’s political support by making it seem more like welfare than an earned [...]

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Happiness and Liberal Institutions: Why I’m Doing What I’m Doing

February 4, 2006

Another truly useful thing about Haybron’s paper is the totally stunning clarity with which he commits the Fallacy of Asymmetric Idealization. The Fallacy of Asymmetric Idealization is the fallacy of unfavorably contrasting a realistically (or pessimistically) described process or institution with an idealizistically desicribed process or institution. The fallacy was first made explicit to me [...]

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Paper of the Day: Do We Know How Happy We Are?

February 4, 2006

Another great thing about chatting with Carl the other day is the pointer he gave me to the work of Dan Haybron, a philosopher at St. Louis University. Dan has written a couple of the papers that I’ve been trying in vain to find. His web page is a treasure trove. His paper Do We [...]

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What Are Philosophers Good For?

February 4, 2006

Here are a few thoughts about what I’ve learned from interdisciplinary research.
The more interdisciplinary investigation I do, the clearer it becomes that different disciplines have quite different standards for evidence and argument. Some very traditional analytical philosophy papers on happiness (or whatever) are next to useless, so thoughtless are they, despite their impressive dialectical [...]

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How to Objectively Measure Subjective Feelings

February 1, 2006

I just got off the phone with Carl Craver, a smart philosopher of neuroscience (yes, redundant) at Wash U in St. Louis. I had some vague ideas about brains and happiness and I wanted to talk to somebody who not only understands brains, but philosophy of science, and so forth. In trying to formulate one [...]

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