I’m three pages into the first chapter of Larry Bartels’ forthcoming Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age and I have questions:

My examination of the partisan politics of economic in equality, in chapter 2, reveals that Democratic and Republican presidents over the past half-century have presided over dramatically different patterns of income growth. On average, the real incomes of middle- class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans. These substantial partisan differences persist even after allowing for differences in economic circumstances and historical trends beyond the control of individual presidents. They suggest that escalating inequality is not simply an inevitable economic trend— and that a great deal of economic inequality in the contemporary United States is specifically attributable to the policies and priorities of Republican presidents.

Fascinating if true! But, congress writes the laws, not the president. So why not look at the party tilt of congresses rather than presidents? Or the alignments between the party controlling congress and the part in the White House. What happens under divided government, I wonder.

This is not to say that presidents don’t have a lot of policymaking power, especially given the massive growth in the size and power of the bureaucracies under executive control. The cabinet agencies’ considerable discretion in creating and enforcing regulations and their ability to selectively apply and enforce legislated mandates should be troubling — in itself and independent of issues of partisan slant — to those, like Bartels, who start with Dahl’s “Who governs?” question.

Because growth effects, for good or ill, follow policy changes with a pretty long lag (in political time at least), I guess this effect is supposed to be largely a function of redistributive policy that can take effect within a president’s term?

I’m looking forward to reading pages 4 - n. The book looks to me like Krugman for serious people. I find that I’m completely convinced by the main premise of the Bartels/Krugman line, which is that a great deal of the increase in inequality has been an effect of Republican approaches to taxation and redistribution. I’m simply not convinced that this is pernicious. I do think economic stratification is pernicious, but that has more to do with the Democratic Party standing in the way of fundamental structural reform in education as it has to do with Republican tax cuts for rich people, doesn’t it? I have an inkling that Bartels thinks voters want more redistribution and less inequality, but aren’t getting it. I think this is half right. Many people increasingly do want less inequality, but they want that to happen primarily through increased access to decent educational opportunities. (I have seen data to this effect.) To really hit hard at nominal inequality through redistribution, we’ll need to raise taxes on the middle class a lot. But I don’t think there is unmet political demand for huge middle-class tax increases. We’ll see. Page 4, here I come!

From the always lovable Lew Rockwell:

Is everything evil along the DC subway’s Orange Line? Well, no, but they all work for the regime, or are the regime, as Former Beltway Wonk points out. Here’s his list: American Prospect; Andrew Sullivan; BATF, CATO, Homeland Security, Federal Reserve; FDA; IRS; IMF; Marginal Revolution; Matthew Yglesias; Megan McCardle; New Republic; OSHA; Pentagon (very close); Reason Magazine; State Department; Treasury Department; Volokh Conspiracy; White House; Will Wilkinson.

I am very flattered to be considered evil independent of the evil that is Cato, but, as I keep insisting, I live on the Green Line.

Anyway, the narcissism of small differences.

Today on Free Will on Bloggingheads TV, I chat with Richard Florida about his new book Who’s Your City: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where You Choose to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life.

This is a really fascinating book and I highly recommend it. First of all, it’s really important to help people realize that where you live is important, that it is a choice, and you are responsible for it. Second, the importance of agglomeration to innovation and growth is I think one of the most interesting issues there is, and Florida does a great job of covering this work. But what I found most fascinating is new work Florida reports on that shows the relationship between place and happiness and place and personality. Did you know that extraverts are more likely to live in the midwest? That New York City is the capital of neuroticism? (Of yeah, you did!) That big coastal cities are most likely to be home to people high on openness to experience? Does your personality really fit the place you live? Fascinating stuff.

I read an early version of Who’s Your City about two years ago and told Richard it would be really interesting to see if there is a relationship between place and personality. I was completely blown away reading the finished book to see that there is in fact some good data on this and also by how far Richard is pushing it. I hope the book does well, and I’m betting it does.

I agree with Jim Manzi’s position, as he lays it out in his smart reply to Jonathan Chait:

Carbon dioxide is greenhouse gas, and if you put more of it in the atmosphere, then all else equal the Earth will get warmer. The key unknown, because of the complexities of climate feedbacks, is how much warmer. The UN IPCC forecasts that Earth will get something less than 3C hotter within about a century, and further estimates that 4C of warming would cause the world to lose 1% – 5% of GDP; therefore the expected costs of global warming are on the order of 3% of GDP sometime well into the 22nd century. This is a huge amount of money, but not exactly consistent with Miami becoming an underwater theme park. Given that global consumption is projected to grow from about $6,600 per person per year today to about $40,000 per person per year over the next century, it’s pretty hard to justify massive sacrifice of wealth today for the purpose of preventing our descendants a hundred years from now being only 5.7 times, instead of 6 times, as rich as we are. The real risk is that science has radically understated the greenhouse effect. A carbon tax designed for the expected case can safely be avoided for decades, while a carbon tax high enough to ameliorate a low-odds disaster scenario would be insanely expensive. Relatively low-cost investments in specific technologies that would be useful if such a disaster scenario arose, on the other hand, are a smart insurance policy.

Why don’t more people believe something like this?

These findings have been rolling in over the last half-decade or so: democratic market cultures produce a tendency to cooperation.  Here’s more:

Researchers use economic games to investigate how people cooperate in real-life. Now a team led by Benedikt Herrmann, at the University of Nottingham, have identified striking differences in the way university students from different countries play one such game known as The Public Goods Game. Compared with students from developed Western nations, students from less democratic countries like Saudi Arabia, Oman and Belarus tended to punish not only free-loaders, but also cooperative players, with the result that cooperation in their groups plummeted.

[...]

In a commentary on the findings, published in the same journal, Herbert Gintis of the Sante Fe Institute, said the results challenge the way people have tended to view capitalist democracies. “The success of democratic market societies may depend critically upon moral virtues as well as material interests, so the depiction of civil society as the sphere of ‘naked self-interest’ is radically incorrect,” he wrote.

All this should not be surprising. People in places that got rich by doing more than finding useful stuff in the ground got that way by getting good at cooperating.

Please absorb this extremely important advance in economic methodology and basic intellectual rigor:

Income Per Natural: Measuring Development as if People Mattered More Than Places

by Michael Clemens and Lant Pritchett

It is easy to learn the average income of a resident of El Salvador or Albania. But there is no systematic source of information on the average income of a Salvadoran or Albanian. In this new working paper, research fellow Michael Clemens and non-resident fellow Lant Pritchett create a new statistic: income per natural — the mean annual income of persons born in a given country, regardless of where that person now resides. If income per capita has any interpretation as a welfare measure, exclusive focus on the nationally resident population can lead to substantial errors of the income of the natural population for countries where emigration is an important path to greater welfare. The estimates differ substantially from traditional measures of GDP or GNI per resident, and not just for a handful of tiny countries. Almost 43 million people live in a group of countries whose income per natural collectively is 50 percent higher than GDP per resident. For 1.1 billion people the difference exceeds 10 percent. The authors also show that poverty estimates are different for national residents and naturals; for example, 26 percent of Haitian naturals who are not poor by the two-dollar-a-day standard live in the United States. These estimates are simply descriptive statistics and do not depend on any assumptions about how much of observed income differences across naturals is selection and how much is a pure location effect. Our conservative, if rough, estimate is that three quarters of this difference represents the effect of international migration on income per natural.

The bottom line: migration is one of the most important sources of poverty reduction for a large portion of the developing world. If economic development is defined as rising human well being, then a residence-neutral measure of well-being emphasizes that crossing international borders is not an alternative to economic development, it is economic development.

The whole paper is here.

Note that this isn’t an argument open to some kind of refutation. It’s just a better way of measuring things — a way that makes the way the world works clearer. Seeing this alternative metric in action should help us realize just how much of profound moral importance is obscured by the economic nationalism at the foundations of conventional welfare economics. Soon enough, it simply won’t be an option for honest intellectuals to ignore the perspective Clemens and Pritchett encourage us to adopt. Paul Krugman: hello!

Because I want to be certain not to argue against a strawman in my inequality paper, I’m arguing against Paul Krugman, for the most part. So I’ve been reading The Conscience of a Liberal for the third time. This is not pleasant work. Reading a John Bates Clark Medal winner shouldn’t feel this much like reading Ann Coulter. But it does. Liberal Fascism is a more intellectually evenhanded book, which says more about Krugman than it does about Liberal Fascism, I’m afraid.

But I digress before I even start. When Krugman talks about immigration, he has two points to make. One is that Republicans can’t win by being racists forever, because that’s sure to backfire once the Latin American population becomes large enough. The other point is that lots of low-skilled immigration makes it hard to politically mobilize the working class, since so few immigrants can vote. In Krugman’s view, if the working class contains many members without the franchise, it is itself disenfranchised. So it is that Krugman pretty nearly celebrates one of the most shameful chapters in 20th century American politics: the progressive (read: “racist”) imposition of strict immigration controls to keep shifty Asians and dirty Italian anarchists off our shores.

Krugman says that “a more fully enfranchised population” was an “unintended consequence” of the Immigration Act, but the effect that Krugman celebrates was not at all unintended by Samuel Gompers and the AFL, perhaps the most powerful driving force behind the law. And it is an effect Krugman thinks we should consider intending: “The disenfranchisement effect is, however, something liberals need to think hard about when confronting questions about immigration reform,” he delicately puts it.

What Krugman never says about immigration is that it is the most powerful engine of economic mobility and equalization there is. This make it obvious that Paul Krugman is not especially concerned with poor people or with economic equality. He is evidently not even especially concerned with poor people in the United States if they can’t vote. He seems to think it is at least worth considering keeping some of those people out of the country — keeping them poorer — if that would help achieve the redistributive politics he prizes. What kind of egalitarian is that?

Imagine a choice between two policies. Policy A would leave the level of redistribution just as it is, but would allow a much larger volume of immigration. Policy B would leave immigration as it is, but would increase the level of redistribution from rich to poor citizens. Which policy should a humanitarian favor? There can be no doubt: policy A. Which policy should an egalitarian favor? Well, Policy A will increase nation-level inequality by increasing the proportion of the population near the bottom of the income distribution. But why is this of any moral significance? If we take the set of people in the U.S. at time 2, and follow them all back in time to t1, when everyone is in whatever country he or she was in then, and see whether inequality has increased or decreased among this group of people, we will see that it has decreased a great deal, and that almost all of this decrease will have come from the poor becoming richer in real terms, and not from the rich losing income to taxes. If it were necessary to limit redistribution in order to make a greater volume of immigration politically feasible, then egalitarians and humanitarians ought to be for it.

Paul Krugman wouldn’t be for it, which is not surprising, since he appears to be neither a thoroughgoing egalitarian nor a thoroughgoing humanitarian. He is a nationalist social democrat, largely indifferent to larger concerns about equality and welfare. At this late globalizing date, “20th century Western European nationalist social democracy in yet another country!” strikes me as both a useless and unmoving conception of America’s ideal future.

Oh no! I’ve fallen behind in self-promotional blogging! If you missed last week’s episode of Free Will, I talked with Jeremy Lott about his new book The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice-Presidency. This week, I chat with the estimable Kerry Howley about Obama, patriotism, and prostitution, among other things.

This morning on Marketplace, I argued that it’s misguided to blame the last Fed chief, or this one, for our woes:

The problem here isn’t that the guy in charge isn’t smart enough. The problem is that there’s a guy in charge at all. We’ve put a central planner at the beating heart of our market system, but we’ve known for decades that central planners rarely have the information they need, or the incentive to use it correctly.

If it all goes wrong for Bernanke, just remember: the problem isn’t the quarterback. It’s the rules of the game.

I’m off to the heart of the heartland for a few days, so blogging may or may not be light.

Richard Chappell says, “communitarianism creeps me out.” That makes two of us. More from his excellent post:

I’m so incredibly grateful to be where I am now, to have the opportunity to dedicate my life to the discipline of philosophy; I can’t even begin to imagine being nearly so happy doing anything else. The academic philosophical community is the first to which I’ve felt that I truly belong. But if I had been born a Maori, if my skin were a darker shade, then suddenly I would have been obliged to remain with my ethnic community instead? *shudder*

[...]

So, count me in favour of meritocracy and the upward-mobility (though not the crass materialism) of “middleclassness”. Count me in favour of “elitism”, understood as the claim that some ways of life are better than others, tempered by the cosmopolitan insistence that the best forms of life not be closed to anyone merely due to the circumstances of their birth. (Sadly, this demand is yet to be met. Much more still needs to be done to enable humanity. But entrenching class divisions in the name of “solidarity” is not the place to start. We should want as many people as possible to join the creative classes — to vacate the working class and its culture, not hold people there and reinforce it.) Count me in favour of liberalism.

Richard emphasizes that one need not be some kind of egoist or a pinched individualist unable to value a common enterprise to think this. It’s just generally better for people if they do not feel pushed to consider their parents’ culture a cage within which life must be lived.

One thing I’m constantly saying is that whether or not money helps make you feel better depends on what you do with it. This study says that it’s nice to spend money on other people, which is, believe it or not, a way of spending money. But would spending money on other people make us happier if we didn’t think it made them happier? Suppose we made a big circle with millions of people in it and everyone handed a $5 bill to the person on their left. Would we be happier?  Maybe that’s why we like Social Security so much! (That’s a joke. But how long before someone tries to use this study to argue that taxes make us happy?)

In the comments below, David Stearns asks:

Is there any room left in the concept of ‘patriotism’ for the deep appreciation of the freedoms and independence of thought that the states are at least supposed to embody, and that they do embody in their finer moments?

I don’t think so. Freedom and independence are general features of a place or people and are valuable wherever they occur. I may love America for it’s freedom, but then I should love Canada for its freedom, too. And I do! To love a place because of its general features implies that love may wane or disappear as the manifestation of those valued qualities change. But Patriotism, the love of country, is particularistic. It is a “monogamous” sentiment. If you claim to be an American, Canadian, Danish, and Japanese patriot all at the same time, because you love qualities all these societies excellently exemplify, people will look at you funny. Patriotism requires that you “pick one,” which implies that it is not about the general features of a place, but about special attachment. (Dual citizens may get away with picking two, but that’s just because there are two attachments, and even this is suspect.)

If you meet a women with all the attributes you claim to love about your wife, only better, and you run off with her because of their excellence, then you never really loved your wife. You loved her attributes. You can rightly claim never to have been unfaithful. Indeed, to stay would have made you untrue — to your values. But to fully love a woman, or a country, is to love some one particular thing. Now, it is surely better to love a woman than to love her qualities. But when it comes to countries, it is better by far to give your heart to freedom, and to love countries themselves incidentally and faithlessly.

Jeff of “A Banner Coward” cannot fathom while Obama’s anti-globalization rhetoric bothered Megan and me:

Let’s take, say, an assembly line worker who has just been laid off so the factory he worked in can open up shop in India. Is he expected to look upon the economic immolation of his family and community and say to himself, “Well, at least it’s raising the living standards of those poor sods in Bangladesh?” Given Wilkinson’s accusation that Obama is failing to extend a philosophy of mutuality beyond American borders, and that he ignores “the very real, yet non-American people who gain immensely from outsourcing,” it must be assumed that this is precisely what he means. But good God! What an impersonal — and, indeed, totalitarian — philosophy. What a gross subservience of the individual to the good of the collective. In case Wilkinson is curious, this is the kind of thing leftists are referring to when they (rather sloppily, I’ll admit) describe capitalism as “fascistic.”

The weirdest part is that, a while back, Wilkinson cast aspersions on the idea that a sense of community or sharing norms could be applied to something as big as the nation-state. Now here he is asserting not only that a sense of mutuality and interdependence can be applied to the entire globe (and yes, interdependence, mutuality, community and sharing norms are all basically the same thing), but that this application can be brought about by something as impersonal and viciously darwinian as the global marketplace of corporate-capitalism. You have to wonder exactly what planet the man is living on.

Except for “totalitarian,” “fascistic,” and “viciously Darwinian,” I’m afraid none of this makes any sense. It seems Jeff missed the point I made about having one’s job outsourced to another part of the U.S. or being replaced by a machine. The point was: from the point of view of the person out of a job, or the community out of a factory, the “economic immolation” is exactly the same. Suppose you thought the widget plant at which you were foreman got moved to India. Damn those corporate Bendict Arnold CEOs! But then you find it out got moved to South Dakota. What does it matter to you? (”Damn those South Dakotans and their tax incentives!”) The only reason to pick on shipping jobs “overseas” is to provoke anti-trade animus. That’s it. And that’s not unifying.

It also seems that Jeff does not understand that, as a rule, trade is a positive-sum game and redistributive politics is not. High levels of redistribution tend to require a good deal of solidarity to maintain because redistribution is negative-sum. Some people give (voluntarily or not), some people get, and some is lost on the way. Deadweight losses from taxation and transactions costs from administration reduce average wealth. Those who bear the costs of transfers therefore tend to require a solid sense of fellowship with those who receive them. That’s one reason why ethnically and culturally heterogeneous nation-states are a bit less inclined to support high levels of redistribution.

When speaking of Obama and positive-sum mutuality, I was not talking about the solidarity required to support really high levels of taxes and transfers. The ur-liberal ideal is global peace and prosperity through migration and trade, not Denmark with twenty-four time zones. The mutuality I had in mind was mutual benefit, which is what trade delivers, not a sense of mutual obligation. When you’re part of a system of exchange, you and the other participants are in it together, whether or not you have any positive or negative sentiments toward each other either way. That’s why I’ve elsewhere contrasted “the system of solidarity”– the market order of mutually advantageous cooperation — from the “sentiment of solidarity,” the feeling of commonality needed to induce altruistic cooperation.

Solidarity is tricky. There is a feeling of solidarity, fraternity, and belonging that can pervade the gut and bring a tear to the eye. There is also a system of solidarity in which we can be embedded and enmeshed. As joint participants in the market, relying constantly on far-flung partners in a mind-boggling network of specialization, vying to cooperate with one another on increasingly beneficial terms, we are, in fact, in it together. We are part of the system of solidarity, whether we know it or not. One of the paradoxes of modern life is that the system of solidarity does not necessarily produce or even encourage the feeling of solidarity. I need not feel warmth for, or even recognize the existence of, the Chinese laborers running the machine that made my socks (nor they for me) in order for us to be participants in a needful common enterprise — to be related parts of an interdependent whole.

One of the things that is so enticing about Obama is that, unlike most politicians, he shows glimmers of a fairly deep understanding of the possibility of mutual gain through the system of solidarity. That’s why I find it frustrating when he ruins it by appealing to the sentiment of solidarity in a way that threatens the already existing international system of market cooperation. I think I’ll just quote myself some more:

We should beware the temptations of the feeling, which so often serves to solidify the barriers against those outside the charmed circle of our sentiments, and reorient ourselves toward the system. The system of solidarity pushes us past our tribal commitments to class, creed, and nation into real relations of mutual advantage with our fellow human beings.

Perhaps in time we will become civilized and our feelings of solidarity, expanding to encompass all those embedded in the worldwide web of cooperation, will catch up to the reality.

Such is the rhetoric of global unity we viciously Darwinian, totalitarian fascists are so drawn to.

The kerfuffle over Barack Obama’s pastor is in large part about whether the man is patriotic enough. Other data: he doesn’t wear a Stars & Stripes lapel pin; his wife found herself proud of America for the first time a little too recently. This sort of thing may well be deadly to his candidacy. He may be obliterated by John “No Glory but Service to the State” McCain’s thorough and unimpeachable Americanism, a cult of fake history, hubristic exceptionalism, tacky iconography, and aggression. But Obama’s inferior patriotism makes me like him more rather than less because I agree with George Kateb that patriotism is hardly worth the blood it is designed to spill.

Kateb’s reply today in Cato Unbound to Walter Berns’ and Bill Galston’s sophisticated civics class apologies for patriotism is strong. He is completely dogged in his insistence that patriotism is good for little more than readying people to kill and die for the state. He implies something that I believe to be correct: the proud and enthusiastic patriotism of Americans bears a large measure of responsibility for the immoral and failed war in Iraq. This administration’s war would have been impossible had our mindless love of country not made the public rather too ready. As Kateb writes:

I am not writing from a pacifist basis. I believe in the right of self-defense, by violence if need be. The trouble is that most democratic wars are not fought to preserve the lives, liberties, and goods of the people, but are fought, instead, for grandiose and often insincere ideals and for limitless augmentation. If patriotism — devotion to the country and obedience to its state for the wrong reasons — has to exist, it should be defensive in temperament and parsimonious in the expenditure of life, including the lives of its enemies, and not mobilize the energies of self-defense and transmute them into the energies of expansion and imperialism. In truth, if strict self-defense were ever at stake, patriotism would be unnecessary: people would not require any inflated passion to defend what was not an inflated purpose.

Barack Obama should be proud that he is no great patriot. Of course, in America it is political suicide to appear to be anything less than besotted with the purple mountains’ majesty, so of course he gives his speech explaining the meaning of “god damn America” in front of a de rigeur rank of flags, which testify silently, garishly, to his devotion to true religion.

It’s not warming as expected. Story here. Outstanding Jeffrey Tucker comment:

Let’s give the ocean a government grant and see if it changes its mind.

I see that Megan’s first impression of the speech was very nearly my own, and she beat me to the punch about the fundamental contradiction at its moral core:

I understand the political logic that forces Barack Obama to spend a fair amount of time hating on trade. But I sort of feel–call me a starry-eyed idealist though you will–that a speech urging Americans not to hate and fear people who are different from them, should perhaps itself forgo urging Americans to hate and fear people who are different from them. You know, to set a good example for the children.

Sadly, this misguided and divisive habit of Obama’s isn’t new. The conclusion of Kerry’s column on Clinton and Obama on trade from June pretty well sums up the point:

It’s nice, I guess, that Obama wants to bring people together. Now perhaps his research team can find a social glue superior to a shared xenophobia.

Obama’s idea of unity through mutuality may be far from perfect, but he can always perfect it.

I was pretty impressed with Barack Obama’s speech. It struck me as unusually direct, realistic, intellectual, and mature. I’m not sure that will keep Fox News from showing Jeremiah Wright 24/7, as Obama himself more or less worried aloud, or that this won’t kill him in the general. (I’m inclined to think McCain would beat him in any case.) But it does make me think a bit more highly of him. I am extremely cynical about politics, but I do think rare, exemplary leadership can matter a great deal culturally. So, despite my cynicism, I think Obama did do something today to make the American discussion of race more frank and intelligent, which is pretty important, whether or not he goes on to the White House.

I was especially struck by Obama’s explicit use of the the idea of zero-sum games, and the way themes of positive- and zero-sumness were woven throughout the speech, always serving Obama’s rhetorical aim, but often undercutting his underlying moral message.

… in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

This could have come straight out of Benjamin Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. And Obama’s right. The key to social amity is the sense that neither individuals nor groups succeed at the expense of others. What I have always liked about Obama (and what Paul Krugman appears to hate) is that he sees the America not as a system of antagonisms defined along race or class lines, but as a fundamentally cooperative venture for mutual advantage. What I have never liked about Obama is his apparent failure to grasp how certain kinds of market institutions promote precisely the kind of positive-sumness he is rightly looking for — a point I articulated here nearly three years ago. And I have always been struck by his rhetorically resourceful but intellectually bankrupt failure to apply the same logic of mutuality beyond our borders. So it is that he ends up saying, after denouncing the politics of superficial divisiveness (i.e., playing clips of a ranting Jeremiah Wright on TV):

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag.

This is a tactic as old as time. Unify factions against a common threat. But it stinks.

Obama says the real problem is not that an American of a different ethnic background might take your job (that was the context), but that a non-American might. But let’s not dwell on that Mexican, Canadian, or Chinese guy who gets that job. Who cares about them? Well, if you think it for a second, you might care. So let’s try to remove from our thoughts the very real, yet non-American people who often gain immensely from outsourcing and pin it on all corporations. Well, Obama can’t have it both ways. It matters not to the individual American whether she has lost her job to someone in South Dakota, where it is cheaper to do business, or to someone in a whole different country. It matters not to the individual American whether he has lost his job to father of four in India or a new robot arm in North Carolina. In attacking offshore outsourcing Obama encourages in one breathe the zero-sum mentality he condemns in another. It may be possible to induce a spell of internal cooperation by framing it as part an external conflict, but it can’t last. By threatening growth, protectionism encourages internal conflict over the division of a smaller pie. As Obama evidently knows, that’s when racial lines are the most salient, when divisive zero-sum thinking prevails.

I’m convinced that Obama holds himself to a higher moral standard than the typical politician, and think that this speech was proof of that. But he guts his own aspirations when he stops short and preaches conflict at the point where preaching unity is no longer expedient.

Reihan Salam makes an excellent point:

As Ed Glaeser and Alberto Alesina have argued, it seems that ethnoracial fragmentation cuts against redistribution — taxpayers are reluctant to subsidize members of outgroups, a gut instinct that is easily characterized as racist. But perhaps this impulse is a useful corrective, and one of the virtues of diversity — i.e., perhaps greater homogeneity leads taxpayers to overinterpret a kind of nationalist sameness, thus leading to higher levels of redistribution than are in fact desirable. Now, I don’t think this is obviously true, but it’s no less plausible than the other story, namely that the interrelationship between extreme homogeneity and social democracy is an unambiguously good thing.

My take is that the kind of homogeneity and conformity necessary to generate the sense of solidarity that leads to popular, high levels of redistribution ought to be unattractive to liberals, who are either cosmopolitan pluralists or not really liberals at all. Add the fact that that there are superior feasible policy alternatives to lavish state-provided social services — deregulated labor markets, actual markets in insurance and health services, higher rates of growth, etc. — and American liberals really ought to stop trying to wish Nordic levels of solidarity and redistribution into existence, and instead just get with the program of promoting actually feasible market-based reforms.

“Customer” by Raheem DeVaughn may be the greatest song ever written as it is the first to fully grasp, and to deploy for the purposes of seduction, the immense romance of being catered to … like a customer (at an idealized, perfected, phantasmagorical Burger King, one is lead to imagine). The luxury of the commercial relationship lies in the simplicity of its mode of reciprocity. “You can have it your way; you’re the customer,” DeVaughn croons. Which is to say, commercial exchange allows for customization and undivided satiation, as it requires but a simple payment and not constant emotional negotiation and renegotiation to arrive at an only partially satisfying compromise. To be treated like a “customer” is to be treated precisely the way you want, not the way someone else wants to treat you. Though the “payment” implied in the song is nothing more or less than acquiescence to DeVaughns’ attentive, indulgent , and no doubt skillful ministrations, “Customer” works astonishingly well as an anthem for the legalization of sexual services.

This post by one “Deep Thought” is a brilliant example:

This isn’t rocket science; men with easy access to prostitution or to promiscuous women have little incentive to marry. Suddenly there is nothing to offset their legal and financial obligations as a husband – so why take on the obligation? Women who are promiscuous face disease, pregnancy, and emotional trauma – all of them reduce their ability to be a valuable wife.

This probably helps explain what’s going on with prostitution bans, but is it supposed to be a moral reason to endorse them? Dramatic reconstruction:

Sweetheart… Since I have no easy access to women who sell sex, will you share my life so I can use you for sex? I mean, even if there were a few more easy women around here, I’d have no use for you. Definitely no reason to make a commitment to you. But there aren’t. Oh well. So… I love you? And Oh! Here’s a diamond.

Maybe this tells us something about the great romance of being the mother of Deep Thought’s four children, but for my part, I share my life with Kerry because she is brilliant and exciting and we mesh in so many ways and I love her. As far as I can tell, the existence of Craiglist’s Casual Encounters has no bearing on this, my greatest source of happiness.

It gets even more obsessively biological. This is, sensibly enough I suppose, written by a Catholic guy with a theology degree who attends Latin mass and thinks “the Patriarchy, when controlled by Judeo-Christian morality, is a protector of and advocate for women.” [!!!]:

the future belongs to those who show up. If you don’t have kids, you have no stake in the future. If you have kids, you not only have a stake in the future, you can influence it in ways almost impossible to duplicate without kids.

[...]

bans on prostitution exist not just to avoid the exploitation of sex workers; they are in place not just because the majority of world religions declare them immoral; they were passed not solely to fight the spread of disease; they were written with more than the goal of reducing the numbers of poor, fatherless children. No, they are there to protect the future.

Again, I can see the explanatory power here. But to think that this has justificatory power is simply grotesque. This is to reduce individual human beings to tokens of a biological type, to reduce the purpose of an individual human life to a link in a biological chain there is no moral value in forging. Yes, the future belongs to those who show up. But the present belongs to each individual human being. We have lives because a lineage has been perpetuated. But our lives are not for perpetuating lineages. Our lives are for our living. Our duty is to treat one another as free and equal persons, as ends in themselves, which means we are duty-bound not to use people and their lives for purposes not their own. We treat people with the respect they deserve. Whoever shows up, shows up. If you’re interested in that, then breed away. But do leave the rest of us alone.

Everything is what it is. Sex work is different from carpentry and it is different from surgery. It is like carpentry and surgery in that it is a way of renting one’s body. It is like surgery in requiring some hardening and compartmentalization. It is not like surgery in that it involves a different set of skills and different emotional preparation. A distinctive thing about sex is that it involves taking pleasure in ourselves and others as physical things, as objects. Very often we enjoy being objectified. We like to feel sexy, to arouse others, to be wanted qua object. But the danger of objectification is de-subjectification: losing track of the fact that the other person is not only an object, to be used as a means to one’s sexual ends, but is a person — an end in themselves. Sex workers, like models, are paid to be de-subjectified to some degree, to be used as means, and this can come as a blow to dignity unless one has braced oneself against it.

I find it a bit insulting to feel pushed to have to say that children are not prepared to brace themselves in this way. Or to feel pushed to say that parents have deep, special obligations to attend to and protect their childrens’ subjectivity, to cultivate and protect their personhood as it develops, to cultivate and protect their burgeoning sense of dignity. For a parent, of all people, to de-subjectify a child, and to use him or her as an object — as a means for sexual gratification — is a special kind of betrayal and violence. I’m sure we can all agree to that. And from here on out, I’m sure we can all agree that we are not talking about children, but the activities of consenting adults. We are talking about whether paternalistic prohibition of these activities may be justified.

A large part of my point is that adults are not children. Laws that insist on treating women (in particular) as children do not benefit them. Again, it is important to point out the circularity in this perennial form of conservative reasoning. We cannot infantilize a class of people by denying them their full autonomy and then turn around and appeal to the fact that we have done so as justification for paternalism. (Read mid-19th century debates against the abolition of slavery to see the most egregious examples of this form.) We’ve come a long way (baby!) from when women were treated by the law like large children for almost all purposes, but we still have some way to go.

There is nothing unique about work that requires those who do it to cultivate distinctive emotional strategies that make it possible to do things that might otherwise be off-putting while leading a completely healthy, normal, happy life. Some people find cultivating certain attitudes easy, and others don’t, which is why not everybody is cut out for every kind of work. Personally, I think I would probably find it easier psychologically to sell sexual services (in a world in which this was legal and not despised) than to sell cars, since I find the kind of subtle manipulation one must practice in order to be a successful salesman completely intolerable, but I don’t particularly mind being treated as a piece of meat. I’m sure there are a lot of sex workers who aren’t particularly well cut out for it, and who find it really taxing, but who do it anyway because they don’t have better options. I feel terrible for those people, but I certainly don’t think we would be hurting them by making their profession legal and less despised.

Tyler Cowen’s take on Jeffrey Sachs’ new book:

Imagine a smart and diligent but not insightful or self-reflective person doing a “color by numbers” version of what a Jeffrey Sachs book should read like.

Shorter: Sachs has become a cartoon of himself.

I’ve got time to kill while waiting in LAX, so I might as well try to clarify my position on prostitution by saying how I think sex is different from other kinds of human activity. Obviously, sex is central to reproduction, and reproduction is central to natural selection, and natural selection is central to why we have the kind of minds and the kinds of sentiments we have. In particular, it looks like sex has an important attachment function for humans, helping to cement pair-bond relationships. Partly because of this function, sex turns out to be a lot of fun for humans, and we do it recreationally in a way that most primates don’t.

People fixated on discreditably vulgar versions of evolutionary psychology (in addition to making the naturalistic fallacy as if making the naturalistic fallacy is a path to riches) tend to miss the cultural variety in sexual norms within the uniformity of evolutionary logic. You don’t need Margaret Mead blank slate-ism to show that there is a fair amount of play in human sexual norms and sexual psychology. Even incest taboos are more variable than most are inclined to think. That said, it is true that there are regularities in male and female sexual psychology. Men will generally tend to be more indiscriminate in partner choice and women will tend be more concerned with screening. And it is also true that lack of paternity confidence will tend to make men extremely jealous and disposed to coordinate to control the sexual behavior of women. Concerted slut-shaming is a classic male strategy to raise the cost of female extra-pair coupling. Shaming norms and even articulate ideologies that reinforce the shared belief that women’s sexual liberty is hugely dangerous to the social order, and to women themselves, are very common and I think are largely explained by a mix of paternity confidence issues and male dominance of social and cultural institutions, which may also have a partly biological explanation.

To reify or essentialize this pattern, and to unthinkingly endorse it, is to compound mistake upon mistake. These kinds of patriarchal sexual mores have relaxed immensely in the West in the last half century and the result is that people–especially women–are doing much better, not worse, in the places where sexual liberalization has occurred. The specialness of sexual psychology mostly helps us to understand the panic about and strenuous resistance to liberalizing norms of female sexual autonomy. And the history of moral panic contrasted with the good results of actual recent sexual liberalization  gives us reason to be especially skeptical about the special damage that will come of deregulating women’s sexual behavior.

I want to say something more about what’s special about sexual experience itself, but I have to catch a plane.  

I wanted to reply to Ross’s post on the so-called Wilkinson-Howley worldview, but I had to go to L.A. for a little political theory conference at UCLA, where I am now. Let’s see if I can clarify a few things. Ross writes:

Given the premises of the pro-prostitution worldview, what’s so abusive and damaging about incest and molestation in the first place? If there’s no moral distinction between giving a handjob in exchange for twenty dollars and getting paid twenty bucks to wash dishes or mow lawns, then why is there a moral distinction between a father who teaches his daughter how to pound nails and one who teaches his daughter to do something more intimate and (to go all wisdom-of-repugnance on you) disgusting? I understand that the kids involved aren’t “consenting adults,” but if selling sex is just like selling labor, and adults force kids to perform all kinds of menial tasks as part of their education, why can’t adults force kids to have intercourse too – especially if they’re safe about it? If selling sex is no big deal because sex itself is no big deal, what’s the big deal about incest?

I found this comment … vexing, to say the least. I think Andrew’s reply to Ross’s previous post suggests the obvious response Simply reformulate Ross’s question to see how immensely tendentious and confused it is:

If there’s no moral distinction between one man giving a handjob to another man and a woman giving a handjob to a man, then why is there a moral distinction between a man giving a handjob to small boy?

I think we can all grasp that it possible to reject some moral distinctions and accept others. In this case, it would seem that Ross understands the answer perfectly well. Children are not consenting adults. So there you have it.

Since he had the answer, I do wonder why he asked the question. Ross’s subsequent chain of reasoning is a disaster that does very little to help him out. I think it is fair to reconstruct the argument like this.

(1) Selling sex is a form of work. (By stipulation)
(2) It is permissible for parents to make their children labor as part of their education. (By convention)

Therefore, (3) It is permissible for parents to make their children do sex work as part of there education. (By fallacious inference)

But (4) Obviously (3) is repulsively absurd.

So, (5) What?… Selling sex is not a form of work? (Reductio!)

Forgive me if I do not understand this argument. In order to derive (3), Ross would need (2) to say that parents may make their kids do any kind of work as part of their education, which is obviously false. We all know that there are many things it is not OK for kids to do, or for adults to do to kids, that it is OK for adults to do, and to do to each other. Sex is one of those things. This needn’t be difficult. And, since no one was previously talking about children, again I have to wonder why Ross brought it up. I mean, I don’t think he’d stoop so low as to insinuate that people who think adults are capable of making rational decisions about their own welfare, and should not be subject to paternalistic interference, cannot see what’s wrong with fucking their own children. So what was that about?

Sex work is work. It is not always pleasant work. It is very emotionally complicated and requires some degree of emotional compartmentalization and the selective hardening of certain natural human sentimental dispositions. Surgeons, hospice workers, police officers, lots of people, must learn how to cabin off certain sentiments and to develop a bit of a callous in order to do their jobs. This takes some degree of emotional maturity, which is one reason why we encourage kids to sell lemonade, but not to perform surgery on people gushing blood from a gunshot wound, or practice their sexual technique with Uncle Ralph.

Great stuff. Note to self: Get Gilbert for Bloggingheads TV.

I liked Ross Douthat’s first post on prostitution. He identifies the real question at issue, which is the truth or falsity of this claim:

[R]enting out your body to satisfy another person’s sexual needs is a form of self-inflicted violence serious enough to merit legal sanction …

The whole case for banning trade in sexual services stands or falls on the defense of this claim and the assumption behind it. Even granting the assumption that paternalistic efforts to protect adults from the consequences of their own choices are justified, which I certainly don’t, the claim that prostitution is, by its nature, a kind of self-harm is pretty clearly false.

Again, it bears emphasizing that absolutely every form of labor involves renting out your body. The language of “selling your body” is generally intended to elicit a “wisdom of repugnance” disgust response, but it just doesn’t when you consider that folks like Ross and me get paid for things we do with our bodies — thinking, typing. Surgeons rent out their brains, and steady hands, to meet people’s health needs. Construction workers rent out their arms, legs, backs, brains. Etc. I sell my body for a living. So do you.

I think the real claim is not about bodies, but about vaginas and penises in particular. These should not be rentable. (Do note, however, that it is legal to rent a uterus and vagina for the purposes of surrogate gestation and childbirth, but no one really enjoys that and a lot of conservatives don’t like it anyway. And there is always porn, which is nothing without genital rental.) But bracket your intuitions about the commercial use of genitalia for a moment and consider that a good volume of trade in sexual services involves renting an expert hand. Could using your hand to give another person an orgasm possibly be a form of self-inflicted violence? Delivering manual relief is a great kindness, a sweet thing to do … unless you do it for money! At this level, Ross’s claim is evidently ludicrous. Sweet charity cannot be transformed into self-inflicted violence by a twenty dollar bill.

Does Ross think that loaning out your body, for free, to satisfy another person’s sexual needs is a form of self-inflicted violence? Should all sex outside of marriage, or outside a serious relationship, be subject to legal sanctions? If not, then using your body to satisfy another person sexually is not the problem. It is renting it. Again, bringing sex inside the cash nexus is thought to work some kind of profound psychological alchemy, which is plain nonsense.

There is a huge amount of question-begging going on in this debate. The degree to which sex work may be reasonably seen as self-inflicted violence is mainly due to the immense legal and social stigma attached to it. An honest inquirer cannot take the humiliation and loss of esteem connected to the status quo legal and social sanctions as evidence of the necessity of those sanctions. That is the purest logical shenanigans.

Moreover, the effects of this paternalism, enacted specifically to protect women from making the “wrong” choices about how they will use their bodies, inevitably bleed into broader cultural attitudes toward women and women’s sexuality. I can’t possible do better than Kerry when she says:

Just as the drug war contributes to the broadly held assumption that young black men are inherently violent and must be restrained, the criminalization of sex work reinforces the idea that sexually active women are damaged and deranged. In both cases, the activities themselves are surrounded by all manner of tragedy, abuse, and violence. In neither case is the liberal humanitarian policy response: Ban it harder, further reinforcing our worst assumptions about entire classes of people.