I say, again and again, that it is an embarrassing non-sequitur to argue that people are “irrational” and then leap to the conclusion that they need benevolent paternal guidance from the state. After all, if people are irrational then voters are irrational, politicians are irrational, bureaucrats are irrational, etc. To this, Ezra Klein responds:

I’m not sure what exactly it is that Will finds so inexplicable here. Behavioral research often finds that consumers act irrationally in certain situations. So given a specific set of constraints, they may underestimate future risk, prove oversensitive to loss, exhibit significant status quo bias, and so on and so forth. All problems.

Now, the government may be made up of people, but it is not made up of people carrying out transactions under these conditions.

Perhaps Ezra is right, but only because people acting inside government institutions are much less likely to themselves bear the cost of their mistakes, and will therefore likely make more of them. There is no way to wriggle out of the fact that people who win elections are just like the rest of us.

I really wish people would pay more attention to Vernon Smith, who invented experimental economics, won the Nobel Prize for it, and remains by far the most philosophically rigorous theorist of the relationship between individual rationality and institutional performance. (Ted Bergstrom’s paper here [pdf] is a good overview.) What Smith’s work shows is that, yes, individuals in isolation don’t act according to canonical postulates of rationality, but that well-structured market institutions will nevertheless tend to converge on the efficient outcome, as if the agents were behaving with full “rationality”, even though they are in fact limited, confused, and ignorant. The “rationality” of the outcome is more a function of the structure of the institution than of the “rationality” of those acting inside it.

Responsible social science therefore compares the way real people perform when embedded in different real-world institutional settings. What you surely don’t do is perform selective empirical work to discover an “anomaly” in decision making, and then deploy a priori high theory to infer that one set of institutions (markets) won’t work, because, in fact, the performance market institution might turn out to be indifferent to the anomaly or limitation. That’s what Smith has proved. If you’re going to be an empiricist, then be an empiricist, and actually test the effect of the anomaly in the performance of the relevant institutions. Until you do this, it’s either arbitrary, naive, or willfully ideological to posit another set of institutions (government) as a fix. Because there may be nothing to fix. And, even if there is, government may be the wrong kind of institution to fix it. You’ve got to run the experiment.

There is a great deal of carelessness in generalizing the results of anomaly-focused behavioral economics. As Steven Levitt and John List write in their short article on behavioral economics in Science ($$$) this month:

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing behavioral economics is demonstrating its applicability in the real world. In nearly every instance, the strongest empirical evidence in favor of behavioral anomalies emerges from the lab. Yet, there are many reasons to suspect that these laboratory findings might fail to generalize to real markets. We have recently discussed several factors, ranging from properties of the situation — such as the nature and extent of scrutiny — to individual expectations and the type of actor involved. For example, the competitive nature of markets encourages individualistic behavior and selects for participants with those tendencies. Compared to lab behavior, therefore, the combination of market forces and experience might lessen the importance of these qualities in everyday markets.

List has run a number of field experiments that show that this is the case. Smith has run a number of lab experiments that show that the frequency of a “mistake” goes down as the cost of making it goes up.

Ezra continues:

An easy example is the research on opt-out 401(k)s. We know, from the economists, that investing in 401(k)s is generally a wise idea. We know, from the statisticians, that far fewer people do it than should. We know, from the behavioralists, that far more people would do it if the default setting put you in the 401(k), rather than forced you to wander down to HR and specifically ask for it. And so folks in the government, acting with more information and in a different context than folks in an office, think up a policy to “recognize the power of inertia in human behavior and enlist it to promote, rather than hinder, saving.”

At exactly which point in this process does Will fear that the same irrationality that keeps someone from creating a retirement account will foul up a regulator’s efforts to ease their way into a retirement account?

As I said to Dan Ariely in our chat, I think behavioral work is really valuable, especially when it suggests to us how people might better structure their affairs to get more of what they want. I think the evidence shows that 401(k) opt-out defaults are often a good idea, and that businesses ought to make that part of their standard labor contract, if that is something that they think would be appealing to their prospective employees.

I also think that this minor fact about the general distaste for filling out complicated forms can hardly be used to justify further encroachments on the right of individuals to negotiate the terms of their contracts with employers. I think Ezra’s argument here is both strangely narrow and ungenerously extreme. I don’t doubt that non-terrible policies are sometimes successfully enacted. To doubt that would be a bit like a market skeptic doubting that anyone ever succeeds in buying a candy bar. That would be terrifically dense. What I doubt, very strongly, is that the discovery of “irrationalities” undermines the authority of market institutions more than it undermines the authority of government institutions. Are people more or likely to behave irrationally when voting for their congressman or when buying a sandwich? Do buyers for private organizations sign contracts for $76 screws? Etc.

So, no. I don’t fear the mandatory opt out 401(k) plans in particular will be a giant debacle. But I do fear that half-baked behavioral economics is being used to undermine support for market institutions in general, way ahead of the evidence. And I fear that a fundamentally confused assault on “rationality” is being used successfully to promote paternalistic control by elites and, necessarily, to encourage the docility of those who are to be controlled.

[Added: If you have not read Ed Glaeser's "Paternalism and Psychology" [pdf], then you probably should.]

I have unforgivably neglected to link to yesterday’s episode of Free Will featuring a discussion with Dan Ariely, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics, about his new book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. I really enjoyed talking to Dan, who is incredibly creative in experimental design. It is good fun reading about the experiments, but I found Dan frustratingly naive about the implications of many of his findings, as I vented here.

I’m pretty sure Dan is guilty of the the fallacy of asymmetrical idealization, and I think he falls victim to a number of confusions common among behavioral economists that are inevitable when you completely destroy the formal neoclassical economic model of rationality but insist on using it as a benchmark of rationality anyway. (I discuss this at greater length here.) But like I told Dan in the diavlog, I’m totally on board with the project of finding out how we actually do make decisions, which is obviously of the first importance. His extremely valuable work is clearly at the cutting edge of that effort, and Predictably Irrational is well worth reading, if only to get a good sense of some important (and perplexing) recent findings.

All this collective action problem debate is delightful. Here are some not-very-structured musings….

The topic of my unwritten dissertation was how solutions to “the contractarian compliance problem” (the fact that an individual can often do better for herself by ignoring moral constraints on self-interest that, if generally heeded, more than compensate for the short-term sacrifices moral constraints require), and the boundary between ideal and non-ideal political theory, turn on assumptions about human motivation that are open to empirical investigation. My position was (and is) that both pure rational choice (as represented by James Buchanan) and modified rational choice (as represented by David Gauthier) are less satisfactory as a matter of empirical psychology than a more deeply-moralized conception of motivation (as represented by John Rawls), but that rationalist accounts of the “moral capacity” or “sense of justice,” like Rawls’s, are also inadequate (in part because of the failure of the Universal Grammar analogy and in part because of naivete about the power of the moral sense to regulate self-interest in many contexts, especially politics).

Anyway, the point is that I don’t accept strict rational choice reasoning about collective action problems. Indeed, I think the fact that we do successfully solve so many of them basically refutes strict rational choice assumptions. (Even if coercion needs to come in to solve a coordination problem, you’ve got to ask why the guys with the guns are doing what they are supposed to, and not just using their powers to plunder, etc.) But if we’re talking about whether or not a certain constraint on self-interest ought to be normatively binding, I think you have to ask: Why? Because I’m a soulless, reductive, naturalist, I think there’s a good answer to that: because heeding the constraint will tend to make the person who heeds it better off, conditional on others heeding it, too. This is where a lot of people will part ways from me. They feel uncomfortable seating normativity in individual flourishing. However, I find all the relevant alternatives to be basically religious.

I am entertained by the examples at hand — gifts to the U.S. Treasury, meat avoidance, and carbon minimization — largely because I see people fighting over whether or not to try to establish or reinforce a moral norm, and that is really interesting. I found Henry’s rational choice-style answer to the question of gifts to the government amusing, because it suggests that he is not interested in reinforcing a moral norm that would motivate us to give money voluntarily to the Treasury. But if he wants the government to have more money, why not? Perhaps such a norm of voluntary giving might undermine a sense of the necessity and/or moral legitimacy of coercive taxation, which he believes it is important to maintain. Perhaps he thinks that this is an area where we cannot realistically expect the moral sense to sufficiently regulate self-interest, and so appealing to morality to do a job only coercion can do will be self-defeating. A new set of moral norms might crowd out a more effective coercive solution.

Well, I can buy that as a real possibility. But then I become very interested in how to apply this kind of reasoning to other similar cases. A lot of people seem to want to pursue a joint moral-coercive strategy to carbon emissions. Might that be self-defeating? Or is it supposed that an optimal carbon tax is politically infeasible without some moral ground-softening? Ethical vegetarians can be very evangelical but don’t seem to be very interested in banning or taxing meat at all. Why not? Maybe all these subjects are more dissimilar than I’m assuming. Then how so?

My philosophy leaves me very skeptical that norms about any of these things (much less coercively-enforced rules) would have any justified normative force — would be rationally binding. I don’t think higher taxes in the U.S. will leave the average person better off over time, much less the person who pays them. I have no idea how to tote up the net externality of carbon emissions (I don’t even know if the sign is positive or negative) and neither does anybody else. And since I think morality is for enabling human flourishing, I care about animals only insofar as our attitudes toward them affect patterns of interaction that bear on human well-being.

“Culture wars” are largely ongoing fights about what the governing norms are going to be. Certain kinds of arguments are useful in discouraging people from adopting or internalizing a new norm. I think a lot of rational choice arguments are like that. Because I think a lot of fledgling moral norms are likely to be harmful if they go viral, I like to encourage people to think like an economist, both to help them understand why the norm may not do any good as a matter of fact, but also to promote a generally inhospitable psychological climate for faddish moral memes.

Did you really read this far?

Here’s a question and answer from AskPhilosophers that bears on the question of individual moral obligation in matters where only coordinated collective action can make any meaningful difference.

If I don’t fly from London to my sister’s wedding in New Zealand she will be upset, I will cause her pain and so that’s morally bad.If I do fly to my sister’s wedding in New Zealand I will put about four tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which will contribute to climate change, which, according to the World Health Organisation, already causes about 150,000 deaths every year. Clearly that’s also morally bad.Which is the morally correct thing to do?

December 4, 2007

Response from Thomas Pogge on December 7, 2007

In dilemmas of this kind, always start by thinking about whether they are really inescapable. One escape in this case it to speak with your sister. If she likes New Zealand, she is unlikely to be indifferent to the environmental degradation that is already so much in evidence elsewhere. Plus you can offer to donate the flight cost to a good cause of her choice, in honor of her wedding. In any case, it is much easier for her to understand and accept the decision if she was herself involved in making it or at least in thinking it through.

BTW, I checked your numbers because 4 tonnes seemed like a lot. But you are basically right. A Boeing 747-8 takes a bit over 200 tonnes of fuel (over half its take-off weight), roughly 137 gallons of fuel per passenger. Each gallon produces 20 lbs of carbon dioxide. So that’s about 1.3 tonnes per person. But then one tank does not get you there, plus you’ll have to fly back as well. So 4 tonnes is a very good estimate. Way too much, indeed.

Well, I sure wouldn’t have given Thomas Pogge’s answer, which I think is really quite silly. Even granting what I’d guess are the underlying extreme AGW assumptions, surely the correct answer is this:

Your choice is very unlikely to determine whether or not a airplane leaves London for New Zealand. So, chances are extremely high that the same amount of carbon will be emitted whether or not you choose to go. Staying or going will make no difference at all to the condition of the atmosphere. But even if your choice quite improbably keeps that plane in the hangar, the effect of that flight is infinitesimally small in the overall scheme of things. Your choice is also likely to do nothing whatsoever to improve the probability of enacting some kind of future global climate treaty or some kind of scheme for incorporating the cost of the environmental externality into the cost of plane tickets. So, if not being a horrible selfish brat of a brother matters to you at all, then you should go. In fact, you sound suspiciously like a shit trying to find a bogus, holier-than-thou excuse to wriggle out of ponying up for a flight to your sister’s wedding. If you’re broke or cheap you’ve got to tell her the truth about why you won’t go. You are emphatically not allowed to hide behind Al Gore.

Thomas Pogge is an eminent moral and political philosopher, and not a complete idiot, so what’s going on here?

The Sunday edition of the Baltimore Sun has a feature on happiness by Joe Burris, which contains a number of quotes from your resident happiness wonk. I’m especially delighted to have received the last word:

Those rankings raise the age-old question: Does money buy happiness?

“All the evidence points to the fact that people who have more money are more likely to say that they’re happy on these surveys,” said Wilkinson. “People who say that money doesn’t matter are misleading you. Within just about any country, as you go up the income scale, the people higher up the income scale are happier.”

The last sentence in the quotation is a casual gloss of the first where “are happier” = “are more likely to say they are happy.” I was thinking of this chart:

Maybe one of these days, the conventional wisdom will actually reflect the data.

Megan’s debate with Henry Farrell over voluntary taxation is fun to watch. Megan says if you think you are not paying your fair share in taxes, then you can always write a check to the government. She is correct. Henry says that when people say that they want to pay higher taxes, generally they mean that they want to pay conditional on other people also paying higher taxes. It may be well worth $x to me to increase government revenue by $10,000,000x, e.g., but not to increase it just by $x. He is correct.

I accept Henry’s reasoning. But a lot of folks with roughly his politics don’t. I’ve heard any number of ethical vegetarians reject the claim that the irrelevance of any individual’s choice to the aggregate demand for meat renders the individual’s obligation not to consume meat moot. Likewise, there is no change in my behavior that could possibly have a causally appreciable affect on the aggregate output of carbon. But there are evidently many many people who think I am under a strong moral obligation to bicycle, buy local produce, etc. whether or not a credible scheme of global carbon regulation is ever implemented. And aren’t a lot of the people who think they should not eat meat whether or not other people do, and a lot of the people who think that they should reduce their carbon footprint whether or not other people do, the same people who think tax rates ought to be higher as a matter of distributive justice? If so, then it seems like those people are logically committed to sending big checks to the government, or directly to poor people, whether or not other people are forced to. And so it does seem that many people who should think they ought to are avoiding sending checks to the government.

Maybe if there was a special “tax patriot” armband you got to wear around for paying extra taxes that allowed people to signal, and take public credit for, an otherwise invisible act — a Prius of taxation — we’d see more of it.

Responding to my colleague Dan Mitchell, Matt Yglesias writes:

“Iceland is known as the Nordic Tiger because of rapid economic growth,” writes Cato’s Daniel Mitchell, “much of the nation’s prosperity is the result of free-market policies.” When I visited Iceland it struck me as more a Scandinavian social democracy than a free market paradise. And indeed the OECD stats back me up.

Matt then shows a chart of taxes as a percentage of GDP. Taxes in Iceland are high.

Can’t they both be right? Iceland, much like Denmark, is more or less Hong Kong with a huge welfare state. High personal tax rates and redistributive policies certainly do affect incentives to work, save, etc. And certain state-provided services do tend to crowd out private alternatives. That said, it is possible to have high tax rates, lots of redistribution, and no other policies regulating the operation of the market. Neither Iceland nor Denmark leave their markets that unfettered, but it is simply undeniable that they are extremely wealthy, free-market capitalist countries. Indeed, the relative success of countries like Denmark and Iceland is outstanding evidence that the best way to ensure high levels of welfare spending (in tiny, ethnically homogeneous countries) is to let the capitalism rip.

According to Heritage, Iceland ranks 14th in the world in terms of economic freedom. It has no minimum wage. Denmark, which comes in 11th, has one of the world’s least regulated labor markets and is one of the world’s easiest places to start a business. If you consider that both take a huge penalty in these rankings for their high personal tax rates (but check out the super-low corporate and capital gains tax rates!), you can get a sense of just how unregulated and conducive to business these economies really are.

Perhaps the greatest unheralded discovery of the late 20th/early 21st century is that relatively unfettered capitalism is a much better complement to the comprehensive welfare state than is dirigisme. I for one plan to herald this.

This morning’s Marketplace commentary takes on the idea that we’re consuming tons of crap we don’t need.

Update: For those skeptical of the claim that people tend to be happier, healthier, better-educated and longer-lived in countries that consume the most, please see the UN Human Development Index. The top of the list is basically the group of wealthy, liberal, capitalist societies. The Nordic countries, please note, are extremely wealthy market societies with very high levels of consumption. Also note that an ethos of consumerism is different from the level of consumption, although there is no good evidence that consumerism is in any sense harmful. Look at gadget-obsessed Japan at #8 or the arch-capitalist U.S. at #12. And bear in mind that the difference among the top 20 are so small as to be nearly meaningless. Also, see Ruut Veenhoven’s overview of his recent work, which finds no decline in happiness in rich countries and a steady increase in years of life lived happily. There is also Angus Deaton’s recent paper [pdf], which finds the positive relationship between happiness and per capita income to be very robust. And there is also my paper on the policy implications of happiness research. For those especially worried about sustainable development, Ron Bailey’s article from a few days ago is a great briefer.

Update 2: Maybe a picture will help. The black line at the top represents the OECD countries — i.e., the countries where people consume the most:

OECD Central and eastern Europe, and the CIS Latin America and the Caribbean East Asia Arab States South Asia Sub-Saharan Africa

You will also notice that this is not a zero-sum game.

Tim Lee and I talk tech this week on Free Will, only at Bloggingheads TV.

In the comments below, Newburn reminds me of Rhys Southan’s spot-on short from a few years back:

From a Banksy show.

He focuses on the absence of negative feelings. He’s almost Eastern. And I think this is in fact the largest part of the subjective sense of well-being. The importance of the absence of anxiety and worry is why it is plausible that money has a fairly strong non-relative effect well up the income scale. There is always some worry that having a bit more helps alleviate.

By the way, Big Think has a lot of interesting stuff. I think of it as mono-vlogging. 

One thing I wish decent liberals would get a handle on is this: the idea of the state as a benevolent scientific administrator of all aspects of the lives of its citizens is not a liberal idea. There is nothing about this conception of state power that tends, in principle, to promote liberal values. The values it will promote will be the values of the people who control it. Moreover, science isn’t partisan. Once we have created a infrastructure of technocratic control, if the science happens to say the economy will do marginally better if, say, more women spend more time in the kitchen, pregnant, rather than competing for social esteem on an equal footing with men, then the state is ready with its managerial tools to reshape our incentives, our lives, and our social structure. We need only wait for a faction to come to power that finds that this or that bit of science (or “science”) conveniently reinforces their prior impulses, and then those tools will be deployed.

These are the thoughts I had reading David Brooks’ play at writing John McCain’s domestic policy in his latest column. I don’t have time to pick through the trainwreck, but let me just note that Brooks is in favor of mandatory national service, no doubt to help shape young people’s conception of who they really belong to, and what their lives are really for. And he wants to send government agents into “chaotic” homes, so that the children there “have some authority in their lives.” Brooks is very keen to ensure that we all have a great deal of authority in our lives, it seems, and I’m afraid that John McCain is too.

This may be the most ridiculous thing that has ever happened.

So far I have found this month’s Cato Unbound extremely stimulating. It sure helps when you get to invite the discussants, but the problem of how exactly limited-government types think government can realistically be limited really is of the first importance.

I think Anthony de Jasay is right that incentive-compatibility problems plague attempts to keep government lean and limited. That said, I think a certain kind of anarchist, like de Jasay, tend to somewhat oversell the impossibility of limited government. As Gordon Tullock likes to emphasize, given the vast amount that could be extracted by political predation, the puzzle for the political scientist is to explain why so little is invested in rent-seeking. Part of the answer lies in the structural constraints de Jasay mentions in his essay. The prospect that financial and human capital may flee a grabbing hand, or the fear that the electorate will rise up in anger and panic when the thicket of opportunistic regulation has begun to strangle prosperity, may rein in government. But these are constraints implicit in the nature of things, not ones imposed by law as limits on lawmakers. So it is interesting that he also mentions the campaign-finance rule as a constraint on the size of government, since that seems open to choice, to design, in a way that the other constraints are not. This seems like an admission that certain rules can successfully bind.

I think I’m almost entirely in agreement with the main thrust of Jerry Gaus’s reply. The problem isn’t so much the weakness of formal, paper constraints, but the weakness of formal constraints that are not reinforced by our moral sentiments. If a formal rule is seen as merely conventional, and therefore revisable by the relevant authority, and not as moral, there may be little resistance to overriding it in order to meet the demands of weightier moral rules. I found this passage especially illuminating:

[I]f the basic normative commitments of classical liberals were widely conceived of as moral rules, then there would be much deeper resistance to government-made rules that seek to cancel or override them. The problem is that the opposite seems nearer the truth: for many citizens, their understanding of the moral norms related to fairness endorses government-made rules overriding the conventional rules of property. The welfare state reigns supreme not because the state and it allies have tricked the rest of us in a power grab; it reigns supreme because in the eyes of most citizens it conforms to the egalitarian fairness norms that have evolved with humans (Fong, Bowles, and Gintis, 2005). Classical liberals who convince themselves that the New Deal is best explained as a power grab by Roosevelt and his allies are manifestly deluded: it was (and still is) very widely seen as demanded by our sense of fairness.

I think this is on the right track. But I think it’s worth emphasizing that the power grab explanation is not at all inconsistent with the “mandate of fairness” explanation. Power-seeking politicians can create the perception that their role and their power is legitimate by appealing to deep-seated moral sentiments. Second, I’m not so sure that our egalitarian sentiments are all that close to a pure expression of egalitarian sharing norms. First, there is the artificiality of nationalism, and the modern welfare state is nothing if not an expression of economic and moral nationalism. To see co-nationals in a vast pluralistic territory as part of a common tribe in which even an attenuated form of ancient sharing norms apply requires an incredible, imaginative, “unnatural” expansion of the circle of affinity.

But I think the general point stands. Moral rules are processed differently than conventional rules. If limited government is going to have a chance, it must be in sync with our moral sentiments and dispositions to moral judgments. I don’t think this is impossible. I’m pretty well sold on something like Jonathan Haidt’s multidimensional conception of the moral sense. And there may be something like a classical liberal calibration of the moral sentiments, such that certain rules limiting the domain of political power and collective choice may come to be experienced as distinctively moral, and therefore non-optional.

Now, I don’t know that there is such a thing, but there might be. I do think there is a broadly liberal calibration of the moral sense, I think that it is prevalent in liberal societies, and that is what makes them stably liberal. That means, in no small part, that the government is effectively limited in what it may do to people. Limited government is evidently possible because it is actual.

The idea that the there are various dimensions of the moral sense each with its own parameters implies that morality is a fill-in-the-blanks slate. The moral sense then isn’t an exogenous variable acting as a hard constraint on feasible social coordination. Nor is it infinitely malleable. There are only so many combinatorial possibilities, and the feasible cultural/developmental paths from one combination of settings to another may be quite limited.

But this kind of view does I think put ideas about pluralism and liberal neutrality that both Jerry and I are very fond of in a tight spot. The multidimensional moral sense view makes it pretty clear that liberal society requires that a certain kind of moral personality become common in the population. A specifically classical liberal society, in which the certain further limits on the scope of politics are felt strongly to be moral, may require an even more tightly-focused and even more-broadly shared, fine-tuning of the moral sense. But I’m not certain I’d even want that.

My one climate post in forever reminds me that I should link to Climate Debate Daily, the new-ish site edited by Denis Dutton (overseer of the famed Arts & Letter’s Daily) and Douglas Campbell.

Here’s the site’s statement of what Denis is up to:

At the University of Canterbury he has recently introduced a new course on the distinction between science and pseudoscience. Dr. Dutton is skeptical about the degree to which human activity has contributed to the general warming trend that began in the 1880s. He adds, however: “Working at the university where Karl Popper taught in the 1930s and 40s, I am more than a little aware of the way that good scientific hypotheses must always be open to falsification. The best way for science and public policy to proceed is to keep assessing evidence pro and con for anthropogenic global warming. That is the idea behind Climate Debate Daily.”

Good idea. Campbell looks to be a bit more convinced of AGW and thinks action is warranted. But he wants to hash it out. Good man.

Has anyone seen an extended argument for doing nothing at all about global warming other than offering huge prizes for technological fixes?

Update:

Also… from Warren Meyer I see this: “[Some climate scientists] claim now that man-made sulfate aerosols and black carbon are cooling the earth, and when some day these pollutants are reduced, we will see huge catch-up warming.”

Has anyone in the Pigou Club advanced the argument for subsidizing sulfate aerosols and black carbon (and whatever else has cooling effects)?

I’m sincerely asking. Such subsidies are only logical, right?

My comments are teeming with racists good people who believe in the racial and cultural superiority of Americans of European descent clearly terrified by the prospect of the breakdown of Anglo-European cultural hegemony in America. The worry seems to be that with a slightly liberalized immigration regime the U.S. will swiftly devolve into some kind of squalid hell.

Like California?

[Click for bigger image.]

Presently, whites are well less than half the Calfornian population. Hispanics make up just more than a third. Asians at 12 percent are nearly double the black population. I’d guess it won’t be long before Hispanics pass whites to become a plurality.

Now, if my fearful commenters aren’t simply making things up in their paranoid dreams, wouldn’t California be a complete disaster already? Of course, we all know that, were it a country, California would be the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world. The median household income in California, $54,385, ranks 11th in the U.S., and would put California right near the top of the world rankings.

No doubt the browning of California has become unpleasant for some white natives. But according to the 2007 United Van Lines internal migration study, California just had another year of decline in out-bound intra-U.S. migration rates, leaving net migration about a wash. And the out-migration that exists is probably more a result of price pressure than white flight, given that California is the most expensive state in the country in which to live. Indeed, the fact that more people don’t leave due to such high costs is an indication of how desirable life in California must be. Arizona, a border state whose population is almost a third Hispanic (and that percentage is swiftly growing), is one of the favorite destinations for internal American migration, and in some recent years has been the favorite. So Arizona, which boasts a median family income right around the national median, is either doing just fine or the many thousands of Americans who move there each year are stupid.

So what gives my xenophobic friends? If the idea is that the U.S. will inevitably slide toward second-world status if the whole place comes to look a lot more like California and Arizona demographically, wouldn’t you expect California and Arizona to be much poorer and much less popular? I mean, given the claims I’m getting from some of you, these places ought to be nightmares. But instead they are … really nice places to live!

Anyway, I can’t say I’m looking forward to the explanation of how it is that, if suddenly cut loose from the Union, an independent California and its half-wit citizens would swiftly vote its way into conditions resembling the slums of Calcutta. But I’m pretty sure it’s coming…

Hey, political theory geeks! This month’s Cato Unbound should be pretty sweet. Here’s the editorial summary of Anthony de Jasay’s lead essay, “Government, Bound or Unbound?“:

Reprising the topic of his 1989 essay, “Is Limited Government Possible?” political theorist Anthony de Jasay continues to express limited skepticism. According to de Jasay, the incentive of political actors is to gain power by putting together winning coalitions, and to stay in power by rewarding their supporters at the expense of their opponents. If constitutional limits stand in their way, they will eventually be reinterpreted, undermined, or otherwise worked around. Governments are more delayed than limited by constitutional rules, like a lady with the key to her own chastity belt. If governments are effectively limited, de Jasay argues, then it is by means of the structure of campaign finance, the practical limits on tax rates, and public panic at the prospect of economic ruin. De Jasay admits conventional cultural and moral norms may limit government, but doubts these are strong enough to fully check the interests that drive politics.

It’s long, but very worthwhile. Stay tuned for University of Arizona political philosopher Gerald Gaus, author of On Philosophy, Politics and Economics; Michael Munger, chair of the Duke University political science department; and Randy Barnett, professor of law at Georgetown University and author of Restoring the Lost Constitution.

This week on Free Will, I chat with Eric Weiner, author of NewYork Times bestseller, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World. I didn’t always agree with Eric’s interpretation of some of the happiness data, but I found this a really fun, though-provoking hybrid of travel and science writing. As it happens, I met Eric when he called to interview me for this article on why Republicans are happier than Democrats, which appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post. Here’s my appearance:

Nowadays, politicians are hesitant to explicitly utter the H-word, choosing instead to dance around the subject. It’s only a matter of time, though, before Republicans begin to crow about their happiness. “They can say, ‘Look, I’m not being a stuffy, old-fashioned conservative,’ ” says Will Wilkinson, a policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute. “There is real science that shows that if you go to church, if you don’t get divorced, you’ll be happier. That’s tempting to any politician.”

Eric had asked whether using happiness research for political purposes was mostly just a left-wing thing, or if it might appeal to conservatives too. I said that if there are findings congenial to conservatives, and there are, then you can bet it won’t go unmentioned, especially if it gives a scientific patina to what they believed in anyway. David Cameron was first out of the blocks on this, but I bet we’ll see plenty of conservative references to happiness findings in the future.

The argument between the moral chauvinist and the moral universalist is an argument over the standard for moral justification. For the chauvinist, if a rule or policy benefits the group to which the chauvinist happens to be a member, then it is justified. One of the chauvinist’s many problems, besides getting morality fundamentally wrong, is that she is a member of many groups. She may be a Catholic, of Chinese origin, and an American citizen. She may be a loyal Michigander, a stalwart of the local community, and a member in good standing of clubs and associations. The chauvinist who prioritizes the nation needs to provide some justification for choosing this membership as especially salient.

I don’t find communitarian conservatives confusing, but I do find communitarian nationalist conservatives confusing, especially when the nation in question is something so sprawling, diverse, and abstract as the United States of America. The USA is already more like, say, a North American Union than it is like the kind of tightly-knit gemeinschaft traditionalists crave. The massive, pluralistic, modern state is already so far down the anti-communitarian slippery slope that communitarian moral chauvinism asserted at the level of the state seems patently ridiculous, like a steam-powered laptop.

What I really think nationalist, anti-immigration conservatives would like is to establish some kind of strong right of cultural preservation without at the same time getting caught in a morass of relativistic identity politics. Well, good luck. At bottom of that desire, I think, is the conviction that cultural and moral chauvinism are necessary conditions for a rich and deeply meaningful life. But if you, like me, have actually been persuaded by the great thinkers of the Enlightenment about the universal nature of morality and rights, then this basically amounts to the claim that meaning in life requires immorality. Of course, it won’t do to baldly assert that the good life requires systematically harming outsiders and violating their rights as human beings, so the chauvinist generally answers the “Why be moral?” question be redefining morality as group partiality, or denying that it is even intelligible to recognize moral obligations simply in virtue of our shared humanity rather than in our shared sectarian identities.

I think low-brow, right-wing pop ideologues are rather more up front than most would-be right-wing intellectuals. They see the world as a place of irreconcilable conflict. Our culture is the best one. Our people are the best people. We are at war to preserve our culture and people against the interlopers, which requires keeping them away. The very presence of people speaking other languages in public threatens our culture, the best culture. And mixture of cultures and genes threatens to lead our people, the best people, to extinction. We may impose almost any cost on outsiders to preserve our culture and our people, because our culture and people are best, and those people are not us. Liberty, free association, dynamism, cosmopolitanism: these are code words for our destruction and those moralizers who rely on them are traitors.

So…, James Poulos had said:

The big problem with Gerson’s ‘moral internationalism’ is not that it has a big heart or a goofy smile. The big problem is that it’s inimical to citizenship. Gerson and his ilk long for the day that Americans don’t get a better shake in life just because they’re Americans.

I was a bit confused by the possibility of a decent person denying the fundamental moral equality of human beings, so I asked in comments:

Just to be clear, you think Americans ought to get a better shake in life just because they’re Americans?

In the comments, James ends up endorsing this view, from J.A.:

Whether you subscribe to the notion that America’s prosperity and stability are undeserved accidents of a less-than-honorable history, or, alternatively, happy results of the Constitution and better than average leadership — or, in fact, if you believe neither or a combination of these — do other peoples, less fortunate in their circumstances, have legitimate moral claims on us for access to them? If you take as a given that America is, comparatively speaking, a really good place to live, work, and raise a family — which I think is obviously a true statement — then the question is not whether Americans should get a better shake in life; they do get a better shake in life by virtue of being citizens in a “really good place to live, work and raise a family.” The question isn’t even one of just deserts. The question is, what moral claims can non-citizens make on American citizens given the fact of American prosperity and stability?

Yes, Americans get a better shake in life than most people in the world in virtue of having had the good sense to get born in the United States, which does have relatively excellent institutions. Yes, those institutions are a main reason so many people come to live and work here. But I cannot make sense of the concluding question. Does J.A. think that the fact Americans are so rich weakens the obligations of Americans to non-citizens? I guess that would be an… interesting thing to think.

There is no need for confusion about the question at hand, which is clear enough: What justifies state-imposed limits on the human rights to movement and free association?

A country is not a big plot of land owned by its citizens. It is a jurisdiction of government within which there are many free people and many pieces of privately-owned property — at least if the government is decent. But suppose one is simple and thinks citizens own countries in much the way a family can own a farm. What then?

First, back up to the question of the justification of a system of private property. The division of the commons into parcels, and the use of government coercion to enforce private claims over these parcels — which include the right to exclude — requires a justification. Dave Schmidtz provides that justification here [doc]. In short, dividing the commons leaves each with more than had it remained open. The right to exclude enables general prosperity.

So, think of the Earth as a big commons, and imagine borders as fences. Can we justify the system of nation-states and its migration controls in the same way? Evidently not. The welfare gains that would come from even a mild decrease in coercive limits on travel and free association are awesomely huge, which of course implies that the status quo system of limits does not leave most people better off than they would be in a feasible alternative system. And this suggests that the global-level system of division and exclusion lacks moral justification.

Citizens may have stronger claims on one another than they have on non-citizens. And they may have stronger claims one another than non-citizens have on them, because they share the burdens and benefits of a set of common institutions. But everyone, no matter who printed their passport, has equal claim to the respect of their basic rights. Citizens are under a strict obligation not to harm or violate the rights of non-citizens. The status quo system, which limits the freedom to travel and cooperation without benefiting most of those whose freedom is limited, amounts to both a substantive and moral harm; it denies some basic conditions for human flourishing and a thereby constitutes a violation of basic rights. What non-citizens have coming to them, is the recognition of their rights, moral respect as persons.

Limiting basic rights to travel and associate may be justified if it is necessary to maintain the integrity and stability of instutitions that tend to make people better off overall. The United States economy and its supporting institutions are hugely beneficial not only to those who live and work within them, but more broadly. I am open to serious, empirically-minded arguments about the location of the point at which additional openness to migration leads to diminishing benefits. But, I’m afraid, one sees very little of this.

I am not alone:

… I know and do not regret the major role that aesthetic considerations play in human life, even apart from erotic desire, and even though in an often unrecognized manner, it is certainly possible to distinguish between kinds of aestheticism. As Emerson suggests in “The Poet,” bad poetry (so to speak) is part of the fabric of ordinary—that is unreflective—life. In every society, ordinary life is full of bad displacements and condensations, of unintentional metaphorization and shadowy symbolism. Worse, some kinds of socially exaggerated aestheticism are hideous in their perverse beauty. I find that communitarianism is often an encouragement to bad poetry, to a heightened conventional aestheticism that in modern circumstances can be satisfied only with mischievous or even pernicious results.

– George Kateb, “Individualism, Communitarianism, and Docility” in The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture

This is a great essay. Speaking of which, here is Emerson:

The inwardness, and mystery, of this attachment, drive men of every class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets, and philosophers, are not more intoxicated with their symbols, than the populace with theirs. In our political parties, compute the power of badges and emblems. See the huge wooden ball rolled by successive ardent crowds from Baltimore to Bunker hill! In the political processions, Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship.’ Witness the cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all the cognizances of party. See the power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure, which came into credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest, or the most conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics!

I do not trust that tingle. And I would like to know more about this “huge wooden ball”!

In this morning’s Marketplace commentary, I explain why recessions retard moral progress.

Well, here we are at Reason’s Super Tuesday party. Yes, the bartender is serving cosmotarians.

Here are Reason big chiefs Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie jawbonin’…

Taken from a cell-phone, if you can’t tell.