From the monthly archives:

October 2006

Sailer on Status

October 31, 2006

Steve Sailer also pipes up on status with a Saileresque argument:
Men can invent all the status hierarchies they want, like World of Warcraft (as noted by Half Sigma), but women don’t have to be impressed by them. Ultimately, some status hierarchies (e.g., the Forbes 400) are higher status than others (e.g., nerd competitions like World [...]

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The Great Chain of Status?

October 31, 2006

Last week Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber objected to the key point of my recent article in Policy (related Cato podcast here), which is that status-seeking need not be a zero-sum game, because there are indefinite dimensions of status competition. (And therefore, the government need do nothing to mitigate the alleged harm of status [...]

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Fallacy Nomination: The United Nations Fallacy

October 26, 2006

I like pie, gargling, the first of May, and naming fallacies. Today’s fallacy nominee is “the United Nations Fallacy,” which is the error of assuming that supericially similar activities that take place inside two or more political jurisdictions may be usefully compared simply because those jurisdictions are each recognized as “nation states” by the United [...]

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Illusions of Risk

October 25, 2006

Despite my digs at Jacob Hacker’s new book, I don’t find it implausible that middle-class Americans do feel that their lives are economically precarious, even when they are, in objective terms, immensely economically secure. The question is whether attempting to ameliorate that feeling is a worthwhile aim for liberal policy. Let’s start with a comment [...]

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What is “Economic Insecurity” and Why Should We Care?

October 23, 2006

In his new book, The Great Risk Shift, and on the Political Animal blog at The Washington Monthly website a couple weeks back, Yale political science Jacob Hacker has been selling his line that “economic insecurity” is on the rise, and the state needs to do something about it.
Hacker seems to me to get a [...]

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The Status of the Politics of Status

October 18, 2006

Here’s what happens when you wait a day to publicize your new article in the Australian Centre for Independent Studies’ magazine Policy, “Out of Position: Against the Politics of Relative Standing“: David Friedman goes and writes an excellent blog post about the same subject:
It seems obvious that, if one’s concern is status rather than real [...]

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Linguistic False Consciousness and the Myth of Modern Liberalism

October 8, 2006

I have an allegedly forthcoming essay in Reason that started out as a joint review of George Lakoff and Geoffrey Nunberg’s new books. It transmuted into an account of the political upshot of Jonathan Haidt’s work in moral psychology as an alternative to the semi-useless framing and narrative stuff. So, while I’m talking about Lakoff, [...]

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Piling on Lakoff

October 8, 2006

Stephen Pinker heaps much-deserved scorn on armchair theorist par excellence George Lakoff in TNR.
There is much to admire in Lakoff’s work in linguistics, but Whose Freedom?, and more generally his thinking about politics, is a train wreck. Though it contains messianic claims about everything from epistemology to political tactics, the book has no footnotes or [...]

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Happiness and Economic Growth

October 3, 2006

My piece on happiness and economic growth in this month’s non-American Prospect has escaped from behind the paywall and is now available for your cost-free reading pleasure. I have to say I’m pretty psyched that my kitten-strapped-to-a-guillotine-connected-to-a-bicycle analogy came through intact:
The fact that average self-reported happiness has not risen with average incomes does not imply [...]

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