From the monthly archives:

June 2007

Immigration Effects of Mexican Birth Dearth

June 29, 2007

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 [...]

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Claim of the Day

June 29, 2007

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 [...]

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Fourth Way to Do What, Exactly?

June 28, 2007

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 [...]

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Trammeling Capitalism to Keep the Reds Out

June 28, 2007

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 [...]

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Rizzo on Inequality

June 28, 2007

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, [...]

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I Think I Like This Book

June 27, 2007

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 [...]

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Social Cohesion Bleg

June 27, 2007

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

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The Conservative Radical

June 27, 2007

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 [...]

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Awesome

June 27, 2007

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

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Moral Senseless!

June 27, 2007

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 [...]

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Tyler vs. Tyrone on Immigration

June 26, 2007

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 [...]

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Was the Marquis de Chastellux the First Growth Fetishist?

June 26, 2007

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, [...]

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Bloggingheads with Rosa Brooks, Part Deux

June 25, 2007

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!

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Is a Guest Worker Program Like Slavery?

June 22, 2007

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. [...]

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Arbeit Macht Glück?

June 20, 2007

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 [...]

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Ross on the Moral Baseline

June 20, 2007

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 [...]

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Why is the U.S. Falling Behind in Immigration?

June 19, 2007

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, [...]

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Does Ross Want a Less Mexican America?

June 18, 2007

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 [...]

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Kaplan: Morality a Threat to National Security

June 18, 2007

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” [...]

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Douthat’s Populist Nationalism

June 18, 2007

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 [...]

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Krugman on Trade and Inequality

June 15, 2007

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, [...]

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Furman on Inequality

June 14, 2007

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 [...]

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Holbo on Rorty

June 13, 2007

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, [...]

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Thoughts on Rorty

June 13, 2007

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 [...]

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John Schumaker on Happiness

June 12, 2007

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 [...]

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