From the monthly archives:

March 2006

Wanting vs. Liking in Welfare Economics

March 31, 2006

Tyler’s quick & dirty summary of the problems with orthodox welfare economics put me in mind of some further problems of economist folk morality.
So, in the formal theory, the highest ranked preference has the highest utility. And the highest ranked preference is revealed by the agent’s actual choice. (If something else had been more preferred, [...]

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Cosmopolitan Universalism vs. the Left

March 29, 2006

An important observation from Chris Bertram:

The fact is, of course, that far from being advocates of the kind of cosmopolitan universalism championed by Kant, most of the “decent” left are actually advocates of or apologists for some form of 19th-century ethnic nationalism. Of course, the case for and against such nationalism has to be argued [...]

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This is Your Brain on Stress. Any Questions?

March 28, 2006

I really enjoyed this Seed article on neurogenesis. Much of this points the way to the kind of thing a scientifically credible study of happiness would involve (i.e., not extrapolations from silly surveyrs, but things like the way stress impedes neural regeneration). Of course, even a bit of significant plasticity raises interesting social questions. Or, [...]

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Go Mason!

March 28, 2006

Peter Boettke and Alex Tabarrok have a cute piece in Slate on the connection between underdog Mason economics and underdog Mason basketball. I’m glad they took the chance to grab some attention while the world is paying attention to good ol’ GMU.
I still have a Mason email account from my days at IHS and [...]

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Money for Blogging and Kicks for Fee

March 28, 2006

For an ideological capitalist, I’m not extremely enterprising. But that’s about to change, my friends! A little. I’m going to try to hawk a few more books directly in blog posts. I may put in Google ads or Blogads somewhere in the sidebar. I will almost never insert an ugly ad like the one below [...]

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Beards

March 27, 2006

I’ve got to say, I was way ahead of the curve on this one. In my book, the beard’s played. I’ve been absolutely certain for several months now that the Burt Reynolds/Tom Selleck mustache is set for a raging return. I wish to be on the crest of that wave. But keeping the beard is [...]

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The Beauty Duty

March 27, 2006

One a rare personal note, let me say I’m glad that my gorgeous domestic partner endorses the apparently controversial proposition that she has a responsibility to stay that way.

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Income v. Control

March 27, 2006

This New Yorker article by John Cassidy plumping for a move to a “relative deprivation” standard for the poverty line (the author wants poverty to be defined as 1/2 the median) is not only simply preposterous on its face (if the median goes up to $100,000, which it will in the next several decades, then [...]

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Seligman’s Diagnosis: Monopoly Protection

March 27, 2006

From a good post by Michael Strong:
Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism, is the national leader of the positive psychology movement. I recently ran across Martin Seligman’s “Presidential Column,” when, in his capacity as president of the American Psychological Association, he describes a decision by the American Psychiatric Association as “shameful.” The context was [...]

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Are Transparency and Generality in Conflict

March 27, 2006

Tyler writes:
I am personally a bigger fan of transparency than generality, noting that the two often conflict.  What if only some people need helping?  The best policy response won’t be perfectly general, nor should we force it to be.
I don’t see the conflict. Both are limiting principles. So a principle of generality will rule out [...]

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Shew Fly, Shew

March 23, 2006

I came into my office this morning and discovered a fly trapped in my Nalgene. It can’t find its way out. What can this possibly mean?

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More on Transparency & Generality

March 22, 2006

I left the following thoughts in Megan McCardle’s comments, but I thought I would share them here, along with some additional thoughts about liberalism and libertarianism . . .
—
Governments use coercion to make things happen. Government coercion can be legitimate, but it has to meet certain conditions. One of the traditional conditions is that a [...]

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Hot Philosophy Action at Cato Unbound

March 21, 2006

The informal blog discussion has kicked off at Cato Unbound! In response to David Schmidtz’s blog reply to the formal reply essays, Peter Singer, evidently unimpressed by the whole point of Tom Palmer’s essay, writes
Why should we assume that sellers have the right to get as much as the market will bear? Two families acquire [...]

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Demographics and Democracy

March 20, 2006

Contemplating Longman’s latest baby bust thumbsucker, The Munger asks a good question:
What does this say about democracy? Does the will of the majority contain moral force? Or does it just reflect different rates of reproduction, rather than persuasion?
Good question!
If I’m the Netherland’s, or some other small liberal country, my immigration policy will have a lot [...]

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Paper of the Day: Economic Policy and the Level of Self-Perceived Well-Being

March 20, 2006

Economic Policy and the Level of Self-Perceived Well-Being: An International Comparison by Tomi Ovaska and Ryo Takashima, the Journal of Socio-Economics 35 (2006) 308-325. An excellent econometric paper. Best part:
Contrary to the findings on political freedom, economic freedom was found to be statistically significant in nearly all estimations, and of the positive sign. [...]

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Kinsley Gets It!

March 20, 2006

Kinsley is just a short step logical step away from endorsing the Will Wilkinson dualistic market rationing system.
Krugman and Wells note repeatedly that 20 percent of the population is responsible for 80 percent of health-care costs. But that doesn’t explain why health insurance should be different from other kinds. The small fraction of people involved [...]

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Health Care Fantasia

March 19, 2006

Megan McCardle has some sane thoughts about health care. This isn’t my area, but I’ve given it some thoughts. They are not necessarily sane or feasible. But I think it is interesting to compare your inuition of what would work well in a better world with the menu of policies that actually get offered. So [...]

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Equality of Opportunity is the Central Principle of Distributive Justice

March 17, 2006

I understand that I am supposed to be arguing the opposite from Will’s position. This is in some sense impossible, because Will is a sophist who refuses to acknowledge his sophistry, and who therefore claims to embrace propositions that he in fact rejects. In the present case, Will might say that he agrees with the [...]

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The Rawls Letter

March 17, 2006

Via Chris Bertram, I find this striking passage in a letter from John Rawls to Phillipe van Parijs:
It seems to me that much would be lost if the European union became a federal union like the United States. Here there is a common language of political discourse and a ready willingness to move from one [...]

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Hello from Liam James

March 16, 2006

Greetings. Thanks to Will for inviting me to comment on his blog. I believe this was an unwise choice on Will’s part, since open disputation is more often confusing than clarifying, and I can’t see his position looking better afterward. But that’s Will. A condition of my participation here is that I am assigned topics [...]

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Putting More on the Table Brings People With More to the Table

March 15, 2006

If you haven’t been following this month’s Cato Unbound discussion, then what are you waiting for?! You’ve got time to catch up now before the free-for-all blog discussion kicks off.
Jacob Hacker’s essay is very good, I thought. But it sharpened my longstanding bafflement about what exactly it is that (non-libertarian) egalitarians think they are up [...]

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Opposite Day

March 14, 2006

I really like Tyler’s Tyrone posts, and so in the spirit of unoriginality, I propose to do a few in the same vein. My friend Liam will happily defend any (non-offensive) position that I am known to reject. The first subject mentioned three times wins.
(By the way, if I recall, the literature does not show [...]

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Self-Deception and Self-Construction

March 12, 2006

A few years back, I had the opportunity to help organize a conference on self-deception with Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson at Mercatus. I’m now at a Liberty Fund conference in St. Louis on “Liberty, Responsibility, and Lying.” All our readings have been about prohibitions and justifications for lies, deception, etc. The idea that self-deception [...]

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Meet me in St. Louis!

March 8, 2006

If you’re in St. Louis this evening, I’ll be giving a talk sponsored by IHS and the Show-Me Institute (Show me the freedom! That’s what!) on “Identity and the Psychology of Persuasion,” a version of the talk I’ve delivered the last couple years for Cato University.
Here’s the deal:
Although armed with impressive logical and empirical arguments, [...]

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Bad Marriages

March 7, 2006

As I’ve been thinking through a number of different issues, I keep arriving at the utter stupidity of two contingent, harmful linkages in our social system. Both linkages should be dissolved immediately.
(1) The house-school linkage.
(2) The work-health care linkage.
Both of these connections are an accident of history, make almost no sense whatsoever, and make it [...]

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