Mexican birthrates are plummeting, according to GW economist Robert Dunn in The American:

Some politicians fear that we are being “Mexicanized.” In fact the opposite may be underway. NAFTA, our mass media, the more widespread use of English, and the large number of people going back and forth (legally or otherwise) mean that Mexicans are increasingly influenced by our culture, and that implies fewer babies. The United States also has a fertility rate of 2.1, but that is the same as it was in 1990. Mexico is becoming more similar to the United States, which must frustrate their nationalists.

The main point for the United States is that we have only a temporary problem with illegal immigration from Mexico. For another decade or a bit more we must attempt to limit such entry, but then the problem will fade like the smile on the Cheshire Cat. Lou Dobbs, Rep. Tancredo and their nationalistic friends can calm down and relax.

Then we expand NAFTA to include a common labor market and bring in low-wage labor from even poorer countries.

Over the long run income is more powerful than any ideology or religion in shaping lives. No God has commanded worshippers to their pious duties more forcefully than income as it subtly directs the fabric of our lives.

I agree, which is why Virginia’s right, and the main debate really is between dynamists, who want growth and the transformations is inevitably creates, and stasist, who don’t. The quotation, by the way, is from Gregory Clark’s forthcoming book Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. This a profoundly insightful work sure to raise ire and inspire further progress. Key claim: labor quality is the difference between rich and poor. Depressing claim: Sub-Saharan Africa has largely Malthusian conditions, so success in increasing health and life-spans has decreased the average material standard of living below hunter-gatherer levels. Biggest disappointment: seems evasive on the question of the cause of variations in labor quality. Why not culture? 

Well, in Clark’s contribution to the Cato Unbound discussion of the relative importance of policy, culture, and institutions in economic development, he wrote:  

… attempts to introduce culture into economic discussions so far have been generally either ad hoc, vacuous, blatantly false, or void of testability. If culture is a key to growth, the fear is that economists will be reduced to rooting about in the intellectual undergrowth with people we hold in low esteem: qualitative sociologists and cultural anthropologists. Since we have no idea of how cultures develop, or how to change cultures, to admit the primacy of culture may be to admit the defeat of the entire economics project.

It is not surprising, then, that he does not admit the primacy of culture. I’m with my old Mercatus colleague Pete Boettke on this one.

Since I asked for it, I intend to reply to Reihan’s long immigration post. I’m totally not stalling! It’s just so long. In the mean time, let me ask a question about Reihan’s ideas on the “Fourth Way.”

I do actually have broader thoughts on the Fourth Way, but I need time to organize them. Let me just say that the Fourth Way won’t be just a phenomenon of the center-right. It is a reaction to the Third Way that will take Soho and Easterhouse forms, liberal and dirigiste forms. Broadly speaking, it will emphasize authority and security over cultural laissez-faire. It will be market-friendly, but in the sense that the market is strenuous, serious, and growth-enhancing, not emancipatory. It will be an awkward and problematic mix, but effective. 

Naturally, I think this sounds lousy—even slightly fascist. The obvious question: Effective for what? Who wants this?

And what’s this?

… merely declaring this or that violation of economic or even civic freedom unconstitutional can’t stop a determined democratic majority — our shared conception of political legitimacy, for better or for worse, is rooted in this majoritarian understanding. Movement towards juristocracy hasn’t altered this fundamental dynamic. This represents a serious problem for the partisans of limited government — they must keep most of the public with them most of the time to achieve their objectives.

This is smudging the line between a fact and a seemingely related non-fact. True: there’s no stopping the mob when it gets up a head of steam. False: our shared conception of political legitimacy is not majoritarian, as far as I can see. All but a few Americans just shrug and accept it when courts overturn popular laws as unconstitutional. And there is a firm sense that certain ideals—especially those embodied in the Constitution—rightly trump majoritarian will. So I don’t buy this description of the broadly shared American sense of political legitimacy. Moreover, just about every American is a partisan of limited government; we just differ on what we’d like limited. Liberals don’t need majorities hyped on the whole package of limitations on political threats to liberty. We need some group of people or other to be very jealous of each form of liberty, and the rest of the population to be not very strongly motivated to undermine them.

When I try to figure out what’s going on with Reihan, my first guess is that he thinks he’s doing a kind of non-ideal theory that takes the constraints of status quo public opinion seriously. He’s trying to formulate an ideological position that can bring together standing constituencies in American politics to effect real political change to best approximate his (obscure to me) set of ideals. But then his comments on democratic legitimacy and the alleged related problems for defenders of liberty make me think this isn’t exactly what he’s doing. Maybe I don’t grasp what it is that Reihan really wants politically — what he thinks a “fourth way” would be effective for — just because he changes his mind a lot. But I sort of suspect that his first-best ideal theory is obscure not because he doesn’t really have one, but because it wouldn’t actually be very attractive to Americans if described plainly, and what he’s doing is looking for marketing angles to get the package of policies (each one of which may indeed be attractive to some group of Americans or other) that together are supposed to roughly add up to his ideal  to 51 percent. At which point, I guess, we just have to accept it, even it turns out to be a gross violation of core American ideals of substantive liberty, since our shared sense of political legitimacy is allegedly majoritarian?

Maybe that’s not right. Let’s see… I guess I keep getting stuck on this: Does Reihan really think that an awkward and problematic politics of authority, security and cultural control aligned with strenuous, serious, growth-enhancing but not liberating markets (I swear that’s what I just read!) is actually in high in demand among real American voters? Because if he does, then that’s just plain weird. Or does Reihan think that given the right leader with the right rhetoric behind the right policies, it would be possible to get Americans behind that kind of politics? That might be true, but if so, it’s sort of terrifying. Which raises the question: Why would you want to do this? Which leads to the deeper question: what reasons do we have to favor the values such a politics would serve. But I’m not clear on what those values are, much less the reasons we might have to favor them.   

No doubt I’m getting Reihan’s intentions and opinions all wrong here, and I welcome his correction and illumination. But I do puzzle over why it’s so hard to get a good bead on what he really thinks about what a good society looks like. Maybe it’s all in the book!

Also, the new, less editorially coherent American Scene looks great and is a lot of fun to read. Congrats!

The hysterical Harold Meyerson:

None of us have thought sufficiently about how the belief in untrammeled capitalism could lead to foreign governments, whatever their agendas, controlling more and more of the American economy.

God forbid foreign governments have a stake in the success of the American economy, aligning their incentives with ours. But if this becomes a serious problem, patriots can always band together and finance hostile takeovers! Perhaps the fine Americans who patrol our southern border between FoxNews segments can entice Michael Milken out of retirement to lead the charge against the dark overlords of Red China.

James Poulos comments on the same passage with this perplexity:

If John Gray is right, the last refuge of libertarians may be our culture (what’s left of it). But, as Rorty could never quite admit, cultural libertarianism means publicizing our ironies and privatizing our truths. And the staggering volume of transactions that take place in an open identities market is the most untrammeled of capital markets yet.

 (1) John Gray is wrong.

(2) It is a publicly accesible truth that “publicizing our ironies and privatizing our truths” doesn’t actually mean anything.

(3) “After a brief mid-afternoon surge, ‘postmodern conservatism‘ ends the day down 12 points on the untrammeled identity markets.” WTF?!

Nonsensically delicious!

Mario Rizzo has an excellent letter in the Financial Times:

Sir, Lawrence Summers’ article “Harness market forces to share prosperity” (June 25), on reducing income inequality, leaves several critical questions unanswered.

First, why should we care that income inequality is increasing? Was the previous distribution of income more just, simply because it was more nearly equal? Second, neither Professor Summers nor anyone else has a comprehensive understanding of the causes of recent trends in income distribution. In general, it is a bad idea to look for solutions to a “problem” whose causes we do not understand. Third, the whole idea of “sharing prosperity” seems to imply that prosperity is some kind of aggregate to which we all have some claim, much like members of a family. What justifies looking at society as a family? If it is, Prof Summers can just send me a monthly cheque without the need for legislation.

Finally, Prof Summers uses a shameful rhetorical trick. By suggesting a “solution” that steers a middle ground between excessive regulation and doing nothing (as if we do not redistribute income now), he appears to be very reasonable. Perhaps it is even more reasonable, however, to think through the rhetoric of increased redistribution before inventing new policies.

Mario J. Rizzo,
Department of Economics,
New York University

I’ve only just begun, but I think I’m ready to recommend The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong by Jennifer Michael Hecht.

Hecht has a fine pluralistic sensibility and a knack for getting distance from otherwise invisible cultural assumptions by relating them to historical precedent. She’s already convinced me that contemporary body obsessions aren’t superior to corseting. Of course, I liked this bit:

It is a modern myth that money cannot make you happy. We all say that it can’t, but, given one wish, a lot of us would go for cash. We certainly opt for money over many other pleasures in structuring our real lives. Part of the reason is that what you can buy with money today you used to be able to get for free—social contact and play that can fit neatly into your life. Shopping, television, shows, and sports are not deep, but neither were the common social contact and play that kept people happy in the past.

Good stuff.

What are the best critical discussions of Putnam’s “bowling alone” thesis out there? Thank you.

Excellent advice from Robin Hanson on how to be an effective radical:

This freethinker strategy of being radical on every possible dimension pretty much guarantees that something will go very wrong with at least one of these dimensions. 

To have the best chance of succeeding in a radical project, you should instead choose just a few related dimensions on which to make radical choices, and then make conservative conventional choices on all the other dimensions.  This strategy minimizes the chance that some other project dimension will go badly wrong and take down your central radical idea with it.

This is is basically why we have to wear jackets and ties at the Cato Institute.

Via Julian. That Cato card is, of course, completely outrageous!

My reaction to this online “Moral Sense Test” (take it now if you don’t want ”science” to be tainted by prior knowledge of the experiment) was basically the same as Munger’s (who freaks out about the fact that Drezner assigned any fines at all):

THE PREMISE OF THE TEST IS THAT GOVERNMENT SHOULD FINE PEOPLE FOR ACCIDENTS, AND TAKE THE MONEY AT GUN POINT FOR USE IN THE GENERAL FUND!

These are TORTS, not criminal offenses. It is important that the victims do not receive the payment. An average of $129? GOTT IN HIMMEL! I had an “average payment of $0.00! I thought that several of the scenarios (like the peanuts in the allergist’s office) were clear negligence, and that there was a cause of action for a law suit. Any allergy sufferer knows, or should know, that peanuts can be deadly, and in an allergist’s office one expects to encounter people with…..ALLERGIES!

But not a fine! Why put government in charge of collecting fines when one private person harms another accidentally? You are in favor of criminalizing private mistakes, when there is a private remedy. There is no deterrent effect here, and no pretense of making the damaged party whole.

(Sorry for the yelling. Mike is, well, special, and can’t help it.)

I really, really hope that this is one of the experiments that pretends to be one thing while really studying another. For example, I hope they are really studying how many people are so morally stunted that they are willing to have the government fine people for causing pain through mostly unforeseeable, mostly non-negligent accidents, and not even as compensation to the persons pained! Or maybe they’re studying how people’s ordinary good moral sense can be railroaded into sharing some set of idiotic assumptions by embedding them in the instructions of an “experiment” run by “scientists” at a trusted brand-name institution like “Harvard.” Let’s hope! (I would like to hear from Mixing Memory Chris on this one. Chris?)

Random thought about online experiments. I bet “Harvard” has a moralized aura for many people, it being the bastion of “right-thinking East Coast haute bourgeousie liberalism.” Do volunteers, seeing “Harvard” seek to please the moral arbiters therein? Seek to screw them over? Would you get the same results if the test was hosted at Bowling Green State? At Oral Roberts? 

I am unimpressed by Tyler’s reply to Tyrone. I don’t relish the gimmicky nature of Tyrone’s proposals, and my commitment to the rule of law excludes setting forth the intentional disregard for the law as a positive reform. That said, Tyrone is in important ways both a better liberal and a better utilitarian than Tyler, at least in this case. And Tyler’s reply, “Poor Tyrone has no idea of the cultural foundations of democracy,” sounds like a glib piece of reactionary agitprop in the absence of evidence that Tyrone’s proposals would indeed erode the cultural foundations of the institutions that make the U.S. such an attractive target of migration.

I am the last person to deny that “moral infrastructure” is of fundamental importance. But opponents of liberal migration and labor policies too often confuse dynamic cultural change for cultural erosion. I more afraid that fat, tenured Americans will become too risk averse and insurance-minded than that hungry, entrepreneurial new entrants will undermine the very institutions they came to benefit from. Why not think that, on the one hand, our institutions  transform newcomers culturally more than they transform our institutions, while, on the other hand, newcomers keep our institutions vital and growth-minded, rather than moribund and insurance-mided? I wonder if Anthony de Jasay’s reply to a very different argument doesn’t apply here, too:

It so happens that under the hypothesis of an accumulated pool of agreeable externalities, the very processes of production and exchange that are enriched by people helping themselves to the pool, and by so doing depleting it so that less is left for latecomers, must be agreed by the same token to be replenishing the pool by the agreeable externalities they generate. For if past social cooperation has left over externalities that enrich the present, why should we not assume that present social cooperation will likewise enrich the future?–though room may always be left for the second-order question about the present doing enough for the future.

[Update: In the comments Tyler clarifies, "Sometimes Tyler is simply too obscure. I meant the line about cultural foundations to be poking fun at others, namely that a nation can be too stupid to embrace certain bright ideas…and that, sadly, that is part of democracy too." I think I see! So... Then Tyler agrees with the upshot of Tyrone's ideas after all, but just thinks they are too infeasible to take seriously, given democractic stupidity?

 You should of course pre-order Tyler's book and get access to his super-secret blog hideout. I got my hands on a review copy and have read most of it. It's good. Short review forthcoming.]

From the weird and fascinating An Essay on Public Happiness, published in 1774.

If, on the contrary, there should exist a nation which, without being very numerous, possesses a great quantity of well-cultivated lands; which daily increases its agriculture, and its commerce, whilst its population doth not increase in a similar proportion; and which, in short, raises a much greater measure of subsistence, without maintaining a greater number of inhabitants, I affirm that this nation must consume specifically more than other nations; and that, here the tariff of human life is higher than elsewhere. This, then, is the surest sign of the felicity of mankind.

Chastellux was third in command of the French troops at Yorktown, corresponded with Jefferson, Adams, Washington, etc., was a protege of Voltaire, and member of the Academie Francaise. Chastellux, who was also the first volunteer to be vaccinated for smallpox (there was of course a tremendous controversy over whether we should be “playing God” by curing people of horrible diseases) may have been more of a scientific materialist than his somewhat more pious yet still very science-besotted American correspondants.

Here is my favorite passage from Chastellux’s Essay: 

Anatomy hath lifted up the veil of humanity; it hath discovered an innumerable quantity of machines, which give motion to these frivolous decorations of life, and proved to us that Moses made use of extremely bold hyperbole, when he asserted that God created man after his own image. This science, at once terrible and useful, hath taught those destructive weapons, which were accustomed to deprive us of our being, the new art of preserving it, and tracing out for them, even in our very entrails, a dark, but certin road, hath enabled the artist to remedy those disorders which he could not see.

That is, when we get over Moses’ flattering lie and realize that we are meat-machines, we can transform the knife to the scalpel and actually improve human life. Chastellux plumped for a science of politics that would increase human happiness, by which he clearly meant: consumption per capita. 

Bonus: If you’d like to know what the Enlightenment French scientific elite thought of Benjamin Franklin, here you go:

A great, and magnificent discovery was reserved for these times; and this is Electricity, the terrible effects of which have placed mankind on an equality with the gods of antiquity, whilst Franklin, like another Prometheus, acquired the art of stealing the celestial fire, and rendering it docile to his laws.

That’s a good review.     

Rosa and I banter about horse-race politics, the imperial presidency, and the birth order/IQ relationship on the newest episode of Bloggingheads TV. Special bonus: Rick James!

Like the editors of the New Republic seem to think? The Center for Global Development’s Michael Clemens cooly annihilates the vile comparison.

I take a breath and count to ten. First, and emphatically, we must set the brutal, coercive slave trade completely and irrevocably apart from Chinese and Mexican immigration, which has been almost universally voluntary. Forcing Africans to come to this country and work for nothing was indeed far beyond unsavory and it did reflect, in its time, the worst instincts of this country. A colossal difference lies between this and the braceros’ decision to come here and work for pay. Slaves were indeed “imported” as subhuman commodities. Mexicans and Chinese chose to come. And allowing people to voluntarily pursue their dreams is not something for which we should hang our heads in shame.

Now: What is the alternative to admitting Chinese and Mexicans to do “difficult” work here in a “shadowy” underclass? The alternative was not mass admission of unskilled labor with full citizenship, which would have been politically impossible and continues to be. For most of them, the alternative was not to come at all, and the temporary worker provision of the Immigration Act embodies a sophisticated understanding of this fact. If the US had not admitted Chinese and Mexicans in the past, those people would have remained where they were: doing far more difficult work in a sub-sub-underclass in the places they came from — not just shadowy, but completely invisible to Americans. How do we know it was that bad where they were before? Because despite the enormous hardships of coming here, both groups kept on choosing to come, for many decades. Immigrants, bluntly, are not stupid; they know what makes them better off, and they act on it.

The failure of the Immigration Reform Act means no temporary worker program, so fewer people will have that chance for a better life. The way the editors of the New Republic excoriate that provision of the bill, you’d think the bill’s collapse is a victory in the fight against poverty.

Michael is an incredibly smart guy who really knows what he’s talking about. Please read the rest.

Arthur Brooks (via Mankiw) in the WSJ writes:

For most Americans, work is a rock-solid source of life happiness. Happy people work more hours each week than unhappy people, and work more in their free time as well. Even more tellingly, people with more hours per day to relax outside their jobs are not any happier than those who have less non-work time. In short, the idea that our heavy workloads are lowering our happiness is twaddle.

Obviously, there is a point beyond which work is excessive and lowers life quality. But within reasonable bounds, if happiness is our goal, the American formula of hard work appears to function pretty well.

This may be one reason why Americans tend to score better than Europeans on most happiness surveys. For example, according to the 2002 International Social Survey Programme across 35 countries, 56% of Americans are “completely happy” or “very happy” with their lives, versus 44% of Danes (often cited in surveys as the happiest Europeans), 35% of the French and 31% of Germans. Those sweet five-week vacations and 35-hour workweeks don’t seem to be stimulating all that much félicité. A good old-fashioned 50-hour week might be a better option.

I think the wealthier societies become, the more work is likely to be a source of satisfaction, since the more likely it is that people will have the opportunity to work at jobs they find individually satisfying. This is even more likely to be the case when labor markets are relatively unregulated, making it easier for people to test the waters of lots of different kinds of careers, or to make big mid-career changes, without too much fear of of getting (semi-)permanently locked out of the market.

Whether or not work makes you happy depends on what kind of work it is; whether or not leisure time makes you happy depends on how you use it; whether or not money makes you happy depends on how you spend it. Work, leisure, and money are all good for happiness. What we need to understand is how different kinds of people can best match up with different patterns of working, relaxing, and spending.

I am glad to see Ross explicitly lay out in his gracious rejoinder what he takes the alternative to the liberal moral baseline to be:

I suppose I prefer to think that constitutionalism and Judeo-Christian ethics are the moral baseline where government action is concerned. That is, I believe that the government of the United States should strive to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” and do so without trampling on any of the liberties enumerated in the Constitution; at the same time, I would prefer that America’s leaders pursue policies that are broadly consonant with the Judeo-Christian tradition. (No wars of aggression, for instance.) And I’m pretty sure that “unrestricted voluntary cooperation between human beings” isn’t a liberty that the Constitution protects, since the Congress is explicitly granted the power to regulate both interstate and international commerce.

Fair enough, though I don’t think specifically Judeo-Christian ethics are an acceptable baseline in a pluralistic society with tens of millions of citizens who do not accept the authority of that ethical tradition. That said, observing the principle of equal liberty (i.e., “that every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberty to every other man”) with regard to trade in labor is also perfectly consonant with both the Judeo-Christian tradition and the U.S. Constitution. So Ross’s baseline seems to me largely irrelevant to his restrictionism, other than not obviously ruling it out. And, as a moral matter, it does nothing to establish what I see as his nationalism: the preference for the well-being of co-citizens over non-citizens, or the preference for reductions in inequality among citizens over even larger reductions of inequality between citizens and non-citizens.

The ultimate reason to endorse liberal principles is that adherence to them produces conditions under which human beings are most likely to thrive (according to the broadest variety of different conceptions of thriving). Even from a nationalist point of view, it is necessary to justify deviations from the principles that are most likely to improve the welfare of the nation’s citizens. The argument Ross had offered seemed to be based on the idea that, although de facto not-completely-restricted trade in labor with Mexican workers likely produces net benefits for the nation, these benefits come at the expense of some of the least well-off citizens. The unarticulated argument, I take it, is that certain patterns of material holdings are, for one reason or another, in the interest of the nation, and so that it may be morally legitimate to restrict the liberties of all citizens, and reduce the average national material well-being, so that less well-off citizens may be made better off (or not worse off).

Even if we hold fixed nationalist assumptions, this line of thinking is unconvincing. If we’re worried about patterns of material holdings, then we could, alternatively, not further restrict the freedom of citizens to trade in labor with migrant workers, go ahead and realize the economic surplus, and then reallocate some portion of the surplus to achieve the desired pattern of holdings. This produces a gain all around – even if we don’t take the welfare of migrant workers into account — and without restricting the liberty of citizens to cooperate with others to mutual advantage. So it is hard to see how what I called a “Rawlsian nationalist” worried about the national pattern of income and holdings could rationally use this worry as a lever for restrictions on the inflow of foreign workers.

I appreciate Ross’s meditation on the relationship between Christianity and immigration policy (I think Christianity, which sees all souls as having equal value under the eyes of God, is pretty flatly incompatible with all but the most tepid nationalisms, but nobody’s going to take my heathen word for it) which I think identifies one of the chief issue of contention between us.

There are all sorts of variables that the government of a Christian society should weigh when deciding how many migrants to admit, chief among them the effect of migration on civil peace and political stability, both of which are taken somewhat for granted in contemporary America but which have historically been rather fragile things. How to weigh these variables is a point on which intelligent people, Christian and otherwise, can disagree. 

I would say we are a society containing a large majority of Christians, not a Christian society, but I agree that “civil peace and political stability” are at the heart of the issue. Statist liberals often worry about the destabilizing effects of income inequality. Statist conservatives often worry about the destabilizing effects of cultural change. Ross evidently worries about both, which puts him at odds with cosmopolitan dynamism on two separate fronts. In this sense, I think Ross’s concerns about eroding American national identity and nation-level economic inequality are of a piece. But I think the actual evidence of destabilization, either from national economic inequality or from immigrant-led social change, is very scant. I, for one, think we are in a period of both rapidly evolving American cultural identity and increasing social, political, and economic stability. Ross is right that this is an argument worth having, and I think we’re starting to have it, which is good. Let the data soar!

But, I’ve got to insist, the arguments over (a) whether the existence of political boundaries and co-citizenship is a conversation-stopper when it comes to matters of justice, and (b) over the amount of moral consideration to give to the well-being of non-citizens when it comes to assessing the costs and benefits of trade, are also worth having (i.e., worth not avoiding.)

Reihan has also written a long, meaty rejoinder (and who doesn’t take pleasure in Reihan’s long, meaty rejoinder?). I’ll get to that a bit later when I get a chance.       

George Borjas writes:

We always tend to think of the U.S. as a “nation of immigrants.” About 12% of the U.S. population today is foreign-born. It is eye-opening to put this number in perspective. Just look at some of the data collected by the U.N.:

Ireland, 14.1% foreign-born
Sweden, 12.4%
United Kingdom, 9.1%
Greece, 8.8%
Spain, 11.1%
Austria, 15.1%
France, 10.7%
Germany, 12.3%
Netherlands, 10.1%
Switzerland, 22.9%

That’s percentage of the population foreign-born. The U.S. is even more of a laggard in inflows of foreign nationals as a percentage of population. Here is a graph from the OECD factbook:

Inflow of Foreign Nationals as a Percentage of Total Population among OECD Countries, 2004

[Click for full graph]

I’ve been poring over national quality of life statistics for the past two years now, and I can tell you for sure that Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada are much better places to live for the average person, in terms of QoL indicators, than the countries at the bottom the list. Part of it is that immigrants know what they’re doing: they go where the opportunity is. Part of it is that high immigrant in-flows are a vital part of a thriving economy and society.

Both Reihan and Daniel Larison seem to think I’m cheaply accusing Ross of some kind of nasty Mexiphobia. No. What I said is that I think Ross  is “appealing to populist class sentiments to help achieve a goal he wants anyway: a less Mexican America.” 

I had thought that Ross does want a less Mexican America. For instance, I read Ross’s review of Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity as buying in to the main thesis that America’s national identity is Anglo-Protestant, that it underpins much of what is good about America, and that Mexican migration threatens it. Ross’s sensible attitude is both less alarmed and more resigned than Huntington’s; he thinks erosion of national identity is too bad, but not that bad, and that there’s not a lot we can do about it. But, yes, a less Mexican America would be good for American national identity, which would be good for America. Things aren’t as bad as Huntington thinks, but, Ross writes, ”What decay there is lies within, in ‘the challenges to America’s national identity’ that Huntington so ably describes.” The challenges Huntington so ably describe have a lot to do with an imagined invasion of Mexicans.

When I googled The American Scene, seeking confirmation of my sense of Ross’s views, I did turn this up, which seems a clearer endorsement of Huntington’s thesis than the review itself:

If we’re concerned about the collapse of a common culture, and the eclipse of our national identity, we need to recognize that this eclipse is as much as result of free trade (and our present free-market approach to immigration) as of declining patriotism and left-wing identity politics.

Now, Ross’s conditional formulation is characteristically circumspect, so if he really doesn’t think Mexican immigration — independent of its effects on patterns of income — is a problem for American national identity, he can say so, and I’ll try to believe him. But I don’t think I’m being unfair.

Robert D. Kaplan, well, sort of disgusts me:  

Never-say-die faith, accompanied by old-fashioned nationalism, is alive in America. It is a match for the most fanatical suicide bombers anywhere, but with few exceptions, that faith is confined to our finest combat infantry units—and to specific sections of the country and socio-economic strata from which these “warriors” (as they like to call themselves) hail. They are not characteristic of a country in many ways hurtling rapidly in the opposite direction. This is not the 1950s, when Americans felt a certain relief in possessing “the bomb.” Fifty years later, most Americans feel a certain relief in never having to even hear about “the bomb.”

Faith is about struggle, about having confidence precisely when the odds are the worst. Faith is the capacity to believe in what is simultaneously necessary but improbable. That kind of faith is receding in America among a social and economic class increasingly motivated by universal values: caring, for example, about the suffering of famine victims abroad as much as for hurricane victims at home. Universal values are a good in and of themselves, and they are not the opposite of faith. But they should never be confused with it. You may care to the point of tears about suffering humankind without having the will to actually fight (let alone inconvenience yourself) for those concerns. Thus, universal values may pose an existential challenge to national security when accompanied by a loss of faith in one’s own political values and projects.

In other words, if you care about the well-being of poor people in other countries more than restoring ROTC to Princeton, you’re flirting with treason. You would think that if “our political values and projects” are in competition with universal values, then that’s a problem with our political values and projects. Perhaps we may wish to reconsider projects like unjustly invading and occupying foreign lands, since it does not seem that this kind of thing makes us less likely to be a target of foreign aggression. Yet Kaplan genuinely seems to believe that truculent fanatic nationalism makes us safer. I fear this kind of mad emotive commitment to America uber alles, this “faith” of which he speaks, almost certainly makes us worse as a people and a culture, and therefore less worth believing in, and fighting for. And more worth hating. 

Are Robert Kaplan essays an existential threat to national security?      

Grinding his Christian universalism under his nationalist heel, Ross Douthat breezily sets forth a multiply fallacious argument on the premise that there is no intellectual or moral difference between confiscatory redistribution and voluntary exchange when citizens of other countries are involved:

A slightly better way of putting what Matt is driving at, I think, is this: Large-scale immigration from Mexico to the United States is a form of de facto humanitarianism, and since Americans are generally leery of humanitarian spending (primarily because we overestimate the size of our existing foreign aid budget), liberal humanitarians have a vested interest in preserving the existing immigration system. It’s a rare issue where business interests line up on the side of raising the living standards of Third World peasants, and why mess with a good thing? Better, as Matt suggests, to go after the global elite in other arenas – like tax policy, say – where the business class’s preferred policies don’t have humanitarian externalities.

To which one might respond that there’s something slightly perverse about pursuing humanitarian ends through policies that lower the incomes of your poorest citizens and raise the incomes of your richest citizens. If I proposed a new AIDS-in-Africa initiative and advocated funding it through a regressive tax that included a tax credit for families making over $75,000, I doubt that many liberals would line up behind the proposal.

I’ll muster some charity and assume that Ross is simply confused here. But he really is badly confused.

It’s a rather profound error to characterize voluntary trade between American employers and Mexicans workers as equivalent to ”humanitarian spending,” as if money tax revenue had been withdrawn from the Treasury and sent to Mexicans. There is indeed a pecuniary externality of Mexican workers in the American labor market – downward price pressure from competition — and this can indeed have an effect on the pattern of American incomes. But it is a pretty basic and embarrassing mistake to confuse (1) coercive state confiscation and reallocation of income with (2) changing patterns of income from voluntary exchange.

Perhaps Ross really does think that the U.S. government has taken money from the pockets of the producers of Oceans 13 by refusing to ban Pirates of the Carribean, but I think he’s smarter than that. Government tax policy requires justification. Distribution of tax revenue require justification. Exercising our rights doesn’t.

That Ross is liable see the issue in this weird, mistaken way does indicate that he thinks some sort of nationalism is the legitimate moral baseline. The liberal (in the broad sense) presumption of freedom, on the other hand, has it that unrestricted voluntary cooperation between human beings is the moral baseline. Deviations from this require special justification. Given the liberal baseline, labor market restrictions (that’s what we’re talking about here – whether to further restrict American labor markets), besides standing as a violation of the rights of both Americans and Mexicans to freely associate and trade with one another, amount to a transfer of income from Mexican workers and American consumers to some low-skilled American workers. In addition to the basic violation of liberty, this is a monstrously regressive transfer, harming Mexican workers much more than it helps low-skilled American workers.

But Ross seems to understand the situation in a way that, as far as I can tell, completely discounts the welfare gain to Mexicans, and conceives of the effects of millions of people exercising their human rights as requiring some kind of special justification. This makes sense only relative to a nationalist worldview where ”humanitarian spending” is something benighted “liberal humanitarians” want to do and the actual welfare effects of this “spending” on foreigners is simply irrelevant to the moral calculus; all that matters is the effect of the policy on persons with valid U.S. passports. If the policy turns out to (on average) reduce the incomes of low-skilled U.S. workers and raise the incomes of  higher-skilled U.S. workers, then it’s evidently “perverse.” So if we have to placate uppity U.S. humanitarian liberals by throwing money at poor people somewhere, surely this isn’t the way we want to do it.

But what about Mexican workers and their families? Who cares! Wrong passport! What about the lost liberty of Americans to trade with Mexican workers on the labor market? Well, I guess we decide what liberties Americans have based on some undermotivated nation-level idea of just distribution. Why? Who knows!? (And who cares if it keeps Mexicans out?!) I don’t think Ross denies the fact that Mexican immigration on average makes Americans better off. So a merely utilitarian nationalism would have us accept even more immigrants. You could try to dress Ross’s view up as Rawlsian nationalism, demanding that a policy improve the lot of the least well-off Americans. But I think Ross’s argument really amounts to populist nationalism, appealing to populist class sentiments to help achieve a goal he wants anyway: a less Mexican America.  

Well, I understand that a certain kind of nationalism may well be the default baseline for a broad swathe of American public opinion, but that makes it no less repugnant from the perspective of both human liberty and human welfare. Democrats and then Republicans in the American South long succeeded in winning elections by drumming up racist majorities. (Integrating blacks fully into the labor market no doubt put downward pressure on low-skilled white wages, and I don’t doubt successful politicians brought this up.) But I don’t think this speaks well of our democracy.

This whole issue really turns on what we take to be the relevant moral baseline. I would very much like to see Ross defend what I see as his form of nationalism. From where I sit, there’s something more than “slightly perverse” about denying our human rights to freely cooperate and locking very poor people out of our labor markets so that relatively wealthy people whose grandparents got here first don’t have to take a paycut.

Paul Krugman has published an interesting article on trade and inequality at VoxEu that nicely illustrates the morally puzzling nationalist assumptions of standard welfare economics.

After economists looked hard at the numbers, however, the consensus was that the effect of trade on inequality was probably modest. Recently, Ben Bernanke cited these results – but he recognised a problem: “Unfortunately, much of the available empirical research on the influence of trade on earnings inequality dates from the 1980s and 1990s and thus does not address later developments. Whether studies of the more recent period will reveal effects of trade on the distribution of earnings that differ from those observed earlier is to some degree an open question.”

But the question isn’t really that open. It’s clear that applying the same models to current data that, for example, led William Cline of the Peterson Institute to conclude in 1997 that trade was responsible for a 6% widening in the college-high school gap would lead to a much larger estimate today. Furthermore, some of the considerations that once seemed to set limits on the possible inequality-promoting effects of trade now seem much less constraining.

There are really two key points here: the rise of

China, and the growing fragmentation of production.

Conclusion:

What all this comes down to is that it’s no longer safe to assert, as we could a dozen years ago, that the effects of trade on income distribution in wealthy countries are fairly minor. There’s now a good case that they are quite big, and getting bigger.

This doesn’t mean that I’m endorsing protectionism. It does mean that free-traders need better answers to the anxieties of those who are likely to end up on the losing side from globalisation.

I’m just going to assume that Krugman is right about everything. Maybe he is. If a large part of Krugman’s argument is that we increasingly buy stuff from China (and other such countries), since they can produce it more cheaply, then it is a large part of Krugman’s argument that ”the economy” in which Americans participate is increasingly one in which parties to complex forms of exchange work and reside in different nation-states. Krugman, as far as I can tell, thinks the increasingly globalized network of exchange creates a larger overall surplus than would exist in a more highly protectionist world, and Americans on average are better off for it. But, the argument seems to be, the share of that larger surplus going specifically to low-skilled American workers is smaller than it would be in a more heavily protected economy. These folks are on ”the losing side.” The policy upshot, I’m sure, is that “winners” might need to compensate “losers.”

I think there are lots of conceptual problems here that flow from knee-jerk economic nationalism. Let’s imagine just U.S. - Chinese trade, to make things simpler.

First, it is not clear why the scenario of a continued, less-globalized status quo ante, in which low-skilled American workers earn higher wages, counts as the relevant baseline. That is a world in which, I guess, we are supposed to imagine that the Chinese economy has not been liberalized, and so there is less competition from Chinese workers. Implicit in this idea is that unreformed Chinese communism — which keeps its workers off the world labor market – is a subsidy to low-skilled American workers. But now the subsidy has been withdrawn, making low-skilled workers “losers.” There is clearly a kind of perspective relativity going on here. We could just as well say that the prior generation of low-skilled workers were winners, receiving a bonus from Chinese economic illiberalism. I think the normative baseline should be competitive world labor markets — a world in which individuals’ passports have no effect on their freedom to trade with one another. And so the opening of Chinese labor markets is a reversion toward the baseline, and a withdrawal (from other low-skilled workers) of a positive externality of injustice.

Second, it seems to me that American low-skilled workers are suffering from a classic pecuniary externality (that is, the withdrawal of a positive pecuniary externality). If you and I are both in the hot dog biz, and I sell my hot dogs for a lower price, a reduction in your profits may be (to you) a negative external effect of my offering a lower price. But this is not the kind of thing you can claim as a “harm” or a basis for compensation. Pecuniary externalities are essential to competitive markets: we want them. Nobody is doing anything to low-skilled domestic laborers. It is simply that their segment of the labor market has become more competitive, bidding down wages. It’s just as if you had to cut the price of your hot dogs to stay in business, resulting in lower profits. Now imagine that our friend Larry is now buying hot dogs from me rather than you, since my hot dogs are cheaper. There are gains from our trade, which he and I divide. Larry comes to me not you, because he gets a relatively bigger bit of the surplus than he did with you. At the end of the year, Larry has more cash in his pocket than he would have had if he had been trading with you. And you have less in your pocket than you would have had if he had been trading with you. So the inequality between you and Larry has increased, all because I’ve been offering a cheaper hot dog. But I had next to nothing before I was selling cheap hot dogs. So the inequality between me and Larry has decreased.       

That’s what it’s like, isn’t it? Many Americans get a boost in real wages from the relative decline in prices due to cheaper stuff made in China. But that boost isn’t enough to fully compensate workers who would have been doing the work the Chinese are doing (if the ChiComs hadn’t opened their markets.) Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of Chinese edge ever slightly closer to American wages. Which change in inequality matters morally? It simply isn’t obvious that it’s the gap among fellow Americans.    

Now, it may be the case that if the class of citizens who suffer a pecuniary externality is large enough, they may drum up effective political demand for restrictions on trade (for reinstating their previous subsidy, by other means), which would make most other citizens worse off in the short term, and everyone worse off in the long term. So we might want to enact direct wage subsidies, or an increase in the EITC, retraining programs, or whatever, to get those on the ”losing side” of globalization from trying to use the political process to make themselves “winners” again. But, if that’s the real argument, we should be clear that the point of this is not to ameliorate the injustice of increasing national income inequality caused by global trade, because there is probably no such injustice. Increasing national inequality may be a side-effect of a straightforward improvement in justice globally.

It may also be that Krugman is not right about everything. 

Following in my illustrious footsteps as an Economist.com guest blogger, Brookings senior fellow Jason Furman writes thusly of rising income inequality: 

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s income inequality data, the top 1 percent of households have seen their incomes go up by 7 percent and the bottom 80 percent have seen their income shares go down by 7 percent.  In total that is a $664 billion increase in inequality, representing $7,000 for each household in the bottom 80 percent and nearly $600,000 for each household in the top 1 percent.

That number motivates a Hamilton Project tax strategy paper co-authored by Larry Summers, Jason Bordoff and myself that is being released today.

It is far from obvious what has caused the change; in just the last month alone the National Bureau of Economic Research has released three working papers with divergent explanations:  a reduction in the bargaining power of workers, an increased reward for skills and worker productivity, and the destruction of good jobs by trade.

Regardless of the cause of rising inequality, lefties, utilitarians, Rawlsians and anyone with a deep-seated reverence for markets and the capitalist system should all be concerned.  As Alan Greenspan memorably stated, “income inequality is where the capitalist system is most vulnerable.  You can’t have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.”

Well, I consider myself a sort of Rawlsian (a Rawlsekian!) with a deep-seated reverence for markets and the capitalist system. Should I be concerned? I agree with the sainted Greenspan that capitalism cannot survive a widespread conviction that it is unjust. And I agree that income inequality is one of those things that some thinkers like wheel out to try to convince us that capitalism is unjust, at least around the edges, in order to build popular support for such things as more steeply “progressive taxes combined with expanded benefits like health insurance,” like Furman wants. But I’m not so worried by rising income inequality as I am by Furman’s facile slide from income inequality numbers, which are meaningless by themselves, to the possibility of a crisis of legitimacy.

It is worth repeatedly and forcefully emphasizing that income inequality may or may not be symptomatic of injustice. The three hypotheses for rising inequality Furman mentions are perfectly consistent with advances in justice. And if they are generating income inequality, then it may vindicate capitalism. For example, the loss of jobs, a decrease in wages, or a decrease in bargaining power for some workers may be a consequence of lifting coercive restrictions on voluntary exchange across borders — restrictions that are themselves a form of injustice. Furman himself notes that protectionist policies could decrease inequality, though he advises against them, and rightly so, since they are unjust. But if protectionist policies are lifted, and inequality increases, that uptick in inequality is a side-effect of justice, not a symptom of injustice.

Inequality may reflect real injustice in our culture and institutions, and some portion of it probably does. But then our focus ought to be on rooting out those injustices, not papering them over with confiscatory redistribution which, in the absence of a reason to do it other than arbitrarily reducing measured inequality, is straightforwardly immoral.

Let’s set aside the matter of the intelligibility of “shares” of “national income” as a subject of justice for another time.

[Cross-posted from Cato@Liberty.]  

John Holbo’s brilliant post explains exactly why I always found Rorty puzzling.

His reformist reach exceeds his justificatory good conscience. He really thinks he’s right, but doesn’t think he can give his opponents rational grounds that they are compelled to accept. The one point he’s got is that, if the sort of change he wants comes, it will come as a sort of ‘conversion’ to a new way of thinking (cultural shift, call it what you will). This is true, but – again – not exactly a reason to convert. But what else can he say? Rorty ends up more or less boxed into a narrow hortatory row: not even straight preaching to the unconverted. Instead, preaching the meta-possibility of conversion to the unconverted.

Which seems to me to be a way of saying that Rorty was a dismally bad pragmatist. If he really cared about reducing cruelty, he would have availed himself of the most muscular and effective modes of persuasion — i.e., empirical argument about and vivid demonstration of what actually reduces suffering – rather than “preaching the meta-possibility of conversion to the unconverted.” Rorty seems to have knee-capped himself with his undermotivated epistemic convictions, which is indeed ironic, since those very convictions say he shouldn’t take them seriously. But he does; he evidently takes them more seriously than his professed moral aims. I was amused reading Achieving Our Country when Rorty says, quite explicitly, there is no fact of the matter about the past, and now I am going to try to convince you of a story about our history that I think it would be good for us all to believe! If you thought it was so important for people to believe it, why would you start out by telling them that you yourself don’t, actually? Here’s one completely conjectural suspicion: Rorty was in love with the idea of social democratic justice, but did not think that he had any warrant for the belief that it actually would make people better off. A child of committed communists, he saw that passionately loved moral ideals can be completely disastrous. But he believed what he believed, damn it. Knowing it might be false, and even harmful, he was ironic about it. And he effectively reduced suffering by arguing for his political ideals in such a painfully narcissistic and completely ineffectual fashion that they never actually affected the world. For this, he deserves our thanks.

By way of contrast, if Lant Pritchett succeeds in even slightly opening up wealthy labor markets to workers who lost the passport lottery, he will have done more to end needless cruelty than a million Rortys. But then, Lant Pritchett believes that the effectiveness of his favored means to that end of reducing suffering is a fact of the external world. And it is. That’s powerful.     

There is no better way to memorialize a philosopher than argue with him. So here’s a bit from one of the only things I ever wrote about Rorty, from a 1999 Institute for Objectivist Studies online seminar. This, I think, would have been my first year in the PhD program at Maryland, so please keep that it mind. 

Richard Rorty’s “Objectivity or Solidarity” is a case study in the use of false alternatives for rhetorical gain. The essay begins by presenting us with an awfully weird and unappealing choice. Rorty claims that there are just two main ways to “give sense” to our lives. Either one can make up a story about oneself in which one’s life figures in the life of a bigger community, or one can think about standing in a certain direct relationship to the mind-independent world. If you go in for the first, then you like solidarity. If you go in for the second, you like objectivity. Now, reader, pick sides!

It really is a weird choice. First, we might not care that much about being embedded in a tradition or community. And so fitting into one might not be central to some people’s sense of meaning in life. But these people don’t thereby have any overriding interest in eyeball to eyeball contact with the world-out-there. I’m sure you can give meaning to your life without questing primarily for either truth-for-its-own-sake or my-place-in-something-bigger-than-me. How about giving meaning to your life by trying to do something that makes you, the individual, happy?

It is important for Rorty to cast his argument against objectivity in terms of the meaningfulness of our lives, because Rorty’s “pragmatism” will forbid him from saying that the ideal of objectivity is objectively unworthy of belief, because false. He will be required to say merely that objectivity is not so good for us to care about, that we’ll be better off if we don’t care about it and care about solidarity instead. His way of setting up the question in terms of what “gives sense” to our lives allows him to plump for solidarity by saying that seeking solidarity (without trying to ground solidarity in objectivity) lends itself better to a meaningful life. As we shall see, he really can’t coherently claim that either. But first things first.

And I think this bit is relevant to the Yglesias/Linker debate:

As it turns out, it does not look like Rorty is articulating the commitments of liberal, western intellectuals, such that when he speaks to that audience, they are bound by those commitments to endorse what Rorty says. Rather, it looks like he is trying to dictate those commitments, to cause us to revise them. It looks as though he is pretending to be a member of our community, but that in reality he is standing outside of it, looking in, and suggesting we change our commitments in rather radical ways to suit his ideals. Rorty himself refuses solidarity with the Western Enlightenment ideals and the community centered in those ideals. So he makes up a story that will disintegrate that community and its ideals by persuading its members that it has been committed to Rorty’s ideals all along.

When Rorty says, “There is, in short, nothing wrong with the hopes of the Enlightenment” he means that there is nothing wrong except for the entire picture of man’s relationship to reality through reason upon which the Enlightenment was based. He is saying that there is nothing wrong with the hopes of the Enlightenment, except for those hopes and ideals at odds with his own. Clearly, some notion of objectivity is essential to the Enlightenment vision. Rorty’s attack on objectivity just is an attack on the Enlightenment ideals based on its conception of objectivity. But he cannot put the debate in those terms, lest he show himself too clearly as a dissenter to our ideals. Rather, he must put the debate in terms that permit him to characterize himself as someone who is articulating Enlightenment ideals and making them coherent from within. But he is, in fact, merely a wolf in Enlightenment clothing.

I have since come some way in Rorty’s direction in seeing the contingency of the Enlightenment ideals of rationality and objectivity. (In my Objectivist period, I would have seen them as something like self-evident, or immanent in the very idea of thinking. I don’t now see it this way at all.) But I’ve hardly come to be ironic about them. Grasping a thing’s contingency can be the same as grasping its rarity and preciousness — can be a reason for treating it very seriously, without irony. The ideals of rationality and objectivity in practice actually are our means of discovering what the world is like, and actually do explain a large part of the enormous moral progress humankind has made in the last few hundred years. Because I now see these ideals as more contingent and fragile than ever, I now think Rorty’s assault on objectivity is even more discreditible than I did before, and even more a violation of solidarity with those who hold fast to the norms of reason, progress, and social hope. 

Matthew Pianalto has written a useful review of John F. Schumaker’s In Search of Happiness. It looks to me like Shumaker is one of those guys who insists on making happiness coextensive with their conception of a good life, and then argues that we’re can’t be happy, even though we think we are, since our lives don’t measure up to his substantive theory of the good.

Schumaker argues that those who conceive of happiness as “subjective well-being” — comprised of the satisfaction of individual desires and the presence of high levels of positive affect (and minimal negative affect) — have failed to recognize that genuine happiness likely consists of more than satisfaction and pleasure. At the very minimum, we must recognize that the quality of a person’s happiness necessarily depends upon the kinds of values which inform a person’s understanding of happiness and thus set the parameters for how one pursues the happy life. On Schumaker’s view, the values of individualist, materialist cultures are far too shallow, amoral, and non-sustainable for their realization to lead to a genuinely happy life. Because of this, Schumaker declares that, “in reality I believe that a heart-felt happiness is beyond the reach of most people who regard consumer culture to be their psychological home” (287).

This strikes me as just stupid. Why not simply say that if individidualist, materialist cultures lead to happiness in the “subjective well-being” sense, which they do (much more so than poor, collectivist cultures), then some forms of happiness are shallow, amoral, and unsustainable. The book might be more honestly titled Against What Brainwashed People Like You Think Happiness Is. I really can’t see the intellectual virtue of such a tendentiously moralized conception of happiness. From Pianalto’s review, it seems pretty clear Shumaker believes that material and cultural progress is immoral, and wants us to live more like hunter-gatherers. This bit is interesting:

In Schumaker’s reconstruction of the development of modern civilization, happiness emerges as a powerful ideal as people settle down into permanent communities which, surprisingly, leads to distancing of happiness from everyday life. Schumaker suggests that the development of agriculture, which allowed cities of specialized laborers to emerge (leaving farmers in the countryside to provide food), gave rise to the concept of work, as something that one must begrudgingly labor at during the day so that one can be happy (or just eat) at night. Work, for most people most of the time, is not fun, and so the concept of work distances those who must work from the happiness that they are working toward.

Ruut Veenhoven has toyed with similar ideas. But, funnily enough, he has argued this is one of the reasons that individualistic, materialistic cultures have greater measured happiness because they are more like hunter-gatherer societies in important respects than are the very hierarchical, immobile, agricultural societies of yore. That is, the environment-psychology mismatch between traditional agricultural societies and nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, is larger than the mismatch between contemporary consumer cultures and nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s provocative. In any case, as I argued against Veenhoven in our Cato Unbound exchange, I don’t think happiness is exactly a “natural” state, and the environmental mismatch views don’t take human cultural malleability seriously enough. Anyway, I think Shumaker might be right about work. Which is why it is imperative that we maximize rates of economic growth: the wealthier people are, the more discretion they have in how they use their time. The division of labor is the solution to the problems it creates.

[Follwup: Speaking of nomads, by packing their entire moral philosophy into their conception of happiness, thinkers like Shumaker are left having to deal with findings like this as embarassments:

The effect of modernization on the well-being of Bedouin women (n = 150) was investigated. Results show that the more modern the objective circumstances of the women's lives, and/or the more modern the husbands' attitudes (as perceived by their wives), the greater their subjective well-being(SWB). The women's own attitudes affected their SWB only via interaction with their husbands' attitudes and/or life circumstances. If the husbands' attitudes were modern, their wives' attitudes were not significantly related to SWB. However, if the husbands' attitudes were traditional, then the more modern the wive