From the monthly archives:

April 2006

Deserving It

April 26, 2006

Bryan Caplan says he was the only libertarian at our recent Liberty Fund willing to defend the free market on grounds of desert. That’s not true! It’s too bad that Dave Schmidtz missed the first part of the desert discussion, since he has a whole (brilliant) section on desert in his new book Elements of [...]

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Liberty, Desert, and the Market

April 24, 2006

I had the good fortune this weekend to attend a Liberty Fund Socratic Seminar centered on Serena Olsaretti’s Liberty, Desert, and the Market, which is a first-rate example of scholastic analytic political philosophy that attempts to arrive at strong normative conclusions about the justice of political institutions by analyzing extremely abstract concepts in a psychological [...]

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Class, Education, and Meaning Manufacture

April 18, 2006

I was just talking to Brink about Annette Lareau’s book Unequal Childhoods about the differences between the rearing and education of middle class and working class kids. This got me thinking, naturally, about the transformation of labor markets. People raising their kids to be cheap labor are having and will continue to have problems. Clearly [...]

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Snap!

April 18, 2006

From Ed Glaeser’s review [pdf] of Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class:
Even Nobel laureates have achieved mass market success with embarrassing attacks on free trade which shamefully impugn the integrity of the discipline’s elder statesmen.
Who could he possibly be talking about?

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New Stuff on the Happiness Blog

April 11, 2006

I’m posting stuff again on the happiness blog that does not appear here. Just so you and your feed readers know.

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Egalitarianism, the Entry

April 10, 2006

I had forgotten, until just now, that I wrote the original Wikipedia entry for “egalitarianism” way back in 2001. How’s that for Internet philosophy geek cred?! It’s pretty interesting to see that though there have been about 500 edits, the conceptual framing of my original mostly remains, along with a good bit of the original [...]

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Prestige, Status, and Culture

April 7, 2006

A number of works I’ve seen on the importance of social comparison extrapolate in a fairly simple way from the existence of non-human dominance hierarchies to human status. (Frank, for instance, motivates his view of status by citing the general logic of competition for mates.)  Many go further and identify human status largely with position [...]

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Funny Typo of the Day

April 7, 2006

From Bart Schulz’s outstanding SEP entry on Henry Sidgwick:

Sidgwick’s versatile and many-sided intellect—not to mention his keen wit—are typically better displayed in his essays and letters than in his best-known academic books. He was in fact much loved for his gentle humor (or “Sidgwickedness”) and sympathetic conversation, and his philosophical students prized him for his [...]

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Brainstorm on Positional Domination

April 7, 2006

This is not an argument of any kind. I’m not trying to make a point. This is thinking out loud. And you are going to help me.
Anne and Betty each prefer to positionally dominate the other—they both like coming in first better than coming in second. However, each has a different hedonic payoff from positional [...]

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If You Would Like to Fund an Interesting Study, Call Me!

April 1, 2006

Thinking about the “fallacy of asymmetric idealization,” it occurred to me that it would be interesting to give personality, IQ, and heuristics and biases tests to high ranking U.S. bureaucrats and, better, Congresspersons. Would we discover that these are people who are especially good at decisions?
Well, no. We wouldn’t. But it would be nice to [...]

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