From the monthly archives:

September 2007

Questions for Particularists

September 28, 2007

I am an American with two sisters. Suppose that, for whatever reason, one is a French citizen and one is an American citizen. Do I weigh my American sister’s interests more highly, in virtue of our shared citizenship? (Start from an egalitarian baseline, then give both a bonus for being my sister, and then give one a bonus [...]

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On the Brain Drain Refrain

September 27, 2007

Reason’s Kerry Howley (to whom I devote most of my energy for exclusive local attachment) introduced me to Lant Pritchett’s exciting and radical work on immigration, and knows way more about this stuff than I do, being a real journalist who covers this issue. So she’s got the goods on Larison’s ill-supported points about brain [...]

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Who Matters?

September 26, 2007

Daniel Larison kindly responds at length. There’s too much to discuss in one post. I’ll start here:
In any case, the two posts in question are expositions of the observation that conservatives do not hold his kind of libertarian assumptions about national identity and borders, because, among other things, they do not and cannot take liberty [...]

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The Happiness Gap?

September 26, 2007

Language Log’s Mark Liberman has an outstanding post on the NYT article on the gender gap in happiness that helps put it all in perspective.

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Illuminate This

September 26, 2007

This is not the first time Daniel Larison has replied to a post of mine with a thought like this:
Mr. Wilkinson has successfully shown once again that he hates boundary maintenance–both of the physical and the metaphorical kind–and that conservatives favour it, which is why he isn’t a conservative.  Very illuminating.
Apparently, Daniel thinks I spend a [...]

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Yuval Levin on Haidt

September 24, 2007

I have a lot of objections to Yuval Levin’s Haidt post at NRO. Both Ross and Andrew Sullivan seemed to have been impressed. So let’s look closer:
I think Haidt’s thesis and book are fascinating, but suffer from the general tendency of modern science to turn the study of the nature of something into a study [...]

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Ross on Haidt

September 24, 2007

I was Indianapolis this weekend at a conference on positive psychology and philanthropy. Serendipitously enough, Jonathan Haidt’s happiness book was one of our readings. I’ve come back to see a lot of follow-up on the NYT article and the yourmorals.org quiz, much of which I think is a bit confused.
In this post, I’ll tackle Ross [...]

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Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Psychology Applied to American Politics

September 19, 2007

The post below is a review essay I wrote for Reason in Fall 2006 loosely related to George Lakoff’s Whose Freedom and Geoffrey Nunberg’s Talking Right, both books that attempted to explain Republican political dominance as a linguistic and rhetorical phenomenon. The review essay submits psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s theory of moral emotion — specifically his [...]

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What’s the Frequency Lakoff?

September 19, 2007

This is a review essay I wrote for Reason in Fall 2006 loosely related to George Lakoff’s Whose Freedom and Geoffrey Nunberg’s Talking Right, both books that attempted to explain Republican political dominance as a linguistic and rhetorical phenomenon. The essay submits psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s theory of moral emotion — specifically his ideas about religious sentiments — as a better explanation of the Republicans electoral appeal. The 2006 midterm elections intervened, making the question of the psychological mechanisms behind GOP dominance seem pretty moot. I decided not to torture the piece into something less politically irrelevant. But I think there’s lots of interesting stuff in there that says a good deal about the difference between conservatives and liberals. And given yesterday’s big Times Science Tuesday profile of Haidt and his ideas, it seems like a good time to ride the wave of internet interest in Haidt’s truly illuminating work.

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The Supply-Side Consensus

September 19, 2007

Brett Swanson points us to today’s WSJ op-ed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas:
In the past 50 years, there have been two macroeconomic policy changes in the United States that have really mattered. One of these was the supply-side reduction in marginal tax rates, initiated after Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 and continued [...]

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Relatively Minor?

September 17, 2007

So, I continue to be annoyed with Jonathan Chait’s book. Here’s the sort of thing I have in mind. Page 19:
From 1947 to 1973, the U.S. economy grew at a rate of nearly 4 percent a year — a massive boom, fueling growth in living standards across the board. During most of that period, from [...]

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More Chait Action

September 14, 2007

Jonathan Chait replies to my criticisms. He basically seems to me to say:
(1) Like the author of The Party of Death, I am completely confused by why anyone would think this book is a partisan hatchet job.
(2) Low taxes are actually good. I just have a hard time saying that clearly.
(3) George W. Bush’s tax [...]

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The Big Confusion

September 12, 2007

My (long) first sally in the TPMCafe book club discussion of Jonathan Chait’s The Big Con is now online. Short version: I didn’t like the book.

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TPMCafe Book Club

September 10, 2007

I’ll be joining Stephen Moore, Megan McArdle, Ross Douthat, Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, and Jonathan Chait over at TPMCafe for a discussion of Chait’s new book, The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics. Chait’s first post is up, and, at a glance, he appears to me to make [...]

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Joe Sixpack on Taxes

September 7, 2007

Regarding the supply-side foofaraw, I loved this comment by “8″ on this Alex Tabarrok post:
How hard is this to understand? The taxpayer doesn’t care about maximizing government revenue.
Politician A: Mr. Joe Sixpack, we can maximize government revenue by raising taxes by 10%, because you see, we’ll only lose 9% to slower growth, so our revenue [...]

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Epistemic Public Service Announcement

September 5, 2007

Ezra notes, with apparently incredulity, that
there’s no outlet in the world that publishes as many economists — and good ones, too, Nobel Prize winners — as The Wall Street Journal editorial page. We know, and many of those economists know, that that editorial page is mendacious, extremist, and intellectually sloppy. But they nevertheless publish [...]

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Prebuttal on Immigration and Poverty

September 5, 2007

One of the Economist’s Free Exchange bloggers, with whom I mysteriously seldom disagree, last night presciently rebutted Robert Samuelson’s deplorable column today in the Post. Samuelson, like Robert Rector, who the Economist blogger was addressing, advises that we reduce the poverty rate by allowing fewer poor people to cross our borders—which is to say, [...]

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If Only It Were So Easy

September 4, 2007

How to Be a Professional Libertarian
I do like exclamation points, however.

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Who’s Afraid of Mexicans?

September 4, 2007

People who never encounter them.
Kerry reports at Reason that state and local tough-on-immigration laws come primarily from places next to no one immigrates to.
In a report to be published by the American Immigration Law Foundation (AILF) in September, [San Diego State sociologist Jill] Esbenshade finds that almost 80 percent of the localities where ordinances have [...]

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