From the monthly archives:

October 2007

What We Do at Cato

October 31, 2007

Once again, The Onion has the scoop…

Political Scientists Discover New Form Of Government
October 30, 2007 | Issue 43•44
WASHINGTON, DC—Political scientists at the Cato Institute announced Monday that they have inadvertently synthesized a previously theoretical form of government known as [...]

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Pluralism and Political Entailments

October 30, 2007

In the newish Public Reason blog, Robert Talisse writes:
I’ve been working on Berlin-style value pluralism lately. I’m particularly concerned with the attempt (made by Galston and Crowder, among others) to derive liberal political commitments from value pluralism. My sense is that value pluralism has no entailments regarding politics. But that’s a topic for another day.
Nope. [...]

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Bloggingheads with Bob

October 25, 2007

Don’t miss my appearance with Mr. Bloggingheads himself, Robert Wright. We talk about ugly Philadelphians, why I don’t like Ron Paul, Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, and positional competition, and the Kissinger-like man-musk of Greenspan.

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Is the Welfare State Justified? by Daniel Shapiro, Comments from Jason Furman

October 22, 2007

Are you in or around D.C.? Well, you’re invited!
POLICY FORUM
Monday, October 29, 2007
12:00 PM (Luncheon to Follow)
Featuring Daniel Shapiro, Associate Professor of Philosophy, West Virginia University, with comments by Jason Furman, Senior Fellow and Director of the Hamilton Project, Brookings Institute and Will Wilkinson, Policy Analyst and Managing Editor of Cato Unbound, Cato Institute.
In his [...]

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Marketplace Commentary

October 22, 2007

I was on Marketplace Morning Edition this morning, providing a commentary on America’s dismal attitude toward trade.
If you’re reading this, you know my blog is not in fact theflybottle.com. And I really need to get my Cato picture updated.
This was my first shot at this sort of thing. Please tell me what you think…

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What Up Herb?

October 21, 2007

I talk with intellectual historian Mark Francis about his book Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life at Bloggingheads TV. Enjoy

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Pre-Tax Inequality and Distributive Versus Allocative Justice

October 18, 2007

Thanks to Tyler for linking the pre-tax inequality post below. Not unusually, Tyler’s comments are cryptic but suggestive:
This is all well worth knowing, and it does help counter the view that growing inequality of income is a poliical [sic] conspiracy. But oddly both the critics and the defenders here are missing one major inequality-related difference [...]

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The Economist Debates

October 16, 2007

As Tyler announced last week, The Economist newspaper is importing its series of debates, already a big success in London, to these United States, and in the inaugural U.S. event, Tyler and I will be debating on the negative  side of the proposition “That America is failing at the pursuit of happiness” against economist-to-the-stars Jeffrey [...]

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Yglesias Doesn’t Care about the Causes of Inequality Because He Doesn’t Care about Inequality

October 12, 2007

I’ve posted a reply to Yglesia’s inequality post over at Cato@Liberty. Also, FYI, this very smart Free Exchange post on exactly the same thing is by my sage colleague, not me.

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Belgium and the Global Polycentric Order

October 10, 2007

I highly recommend Alex Massie’s reply to Jonah Goldberg’s column on how the EU has enabled the fragmentation of states like Belgium.
Goldberg seems to think that the EU has failed since it wanted to destroy national identity but that’s not really true: it wanted to change the way we think of nationality and, in the [...]

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Housework as Hobby

October 8, 2007

Shorter Rena Corey:
I have a quaint, artisanal interest in housekeeping. I suspect this is no longer a good way to maintain social status as a woman, so I will defend it by essentializing gender differences and calling it “a vocation.”
You know, some people like cleaning bathtubs. Some people like carving duck decoys. These are [...]

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America: As Egalitarian as Germany, Sort of

October 3, 2007

I was surprised to discover that U.S. market income (i.e., pre-tax) inequality is lower than the U.K.’s, the same as Germany’s, and only slightly higher than Sweden’s, as can be seen in this chart (click for full size):

This is from Brandolini and Smeeding’s 2007 “Inequality Patterns in Western-Type Democracies: Cross-Country Differences and Time Changes” [pdf]. [...]

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Our Duty Is to Do No Harm

October 2, 2007

Steve Burton helpfully lays out his version of the exchange between Daniel Larison and me. Isolated posts tackling complex issues are sure to lack the context of a broader set of assumption laid out across many different posts, no one reads every blog post, and anyway many of my posts are dashed off, unclear, [...]

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An Observation

October 1, 2007

While watching her interview with a fawning Jon Cusack, I realized that Naomi Klein is to Milton Friedman, a great humanitarian and intellectual she repeatedly slanders, something rather less than what Michael Behe is to Ronald Fisher. The difference is that Behe actually understands a good deal of biology while Klein is brazenly and outrageously [...]

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