From the monthly archives:

March 2008

Money and Happiness on Marketplace

March 12, 2008

This morning’s commentary says, in a nutshell, that money does matter to happiness, so if we’re going to slow growth, it damn well better be worth it. But listen!

Read the full article →

If You Own It, You Can Sell It

March 12, 2008

Kerry’s brilliant take on the post-Client 9 discussion of prostitution is spot on. Apparently a number of people think the basic libertarian view of prostitution is facile. Well, the view that the basic libertarian view is facile is facile. The idea of self-ownership is profound. Every form of labor involves “selling your body,” one [...]

Read the full article →

Happiness and Personality: Indviduality Matters

March 11, 2008

A recent study by psychologists at the University of Edinburgh tracking 973 pairs of twins shows that the heritable differences in self-reported happiness are entirely accounted for by the genes that determine the Big Five personality traits. That is to say, differences of personality account for all the heritable difference in happiness. In particular, low [...]

Read the full article →

Robert Frank on Happiness and GDP

March 11, 2008

The fussy, hedged, inconclusive complexity of Robert Frank’s latest NYT column about income and happiness shows just how hard it is for an intellectually honest guy to make a strong case against the income-happiness link, given the complexion of the evidence. In order to get as far as he does, which is not very far, [...]

Read the full article →

George Kateb vs. Patriotism

March 10, 2008

I’ve recently become a big fan of the eminent political theorist George Kateb (I’m actually pretty baffled about how it could be that I didn’t know of him until late last year), so I’m pretty thrilled he agreed to write the lead essay for this month’s Cato Unbound on the value of patriotism. A thoroughgoing [...]

Read the full article →

If the U.S. Is So Rich, Why Isn’t It Happier?

March 7, 2008

My guess: Because it is very big and very diverse. America almost certainly does better than the average of the EU. Does anyone know of a source of state-by-state happiness data? Because I figure Minnesota, were it a country, would rank right near ethnically similar but even more homogeneous Norditopian countries. (New state slogan: [...]

Read the full article →

Some Thoughts About Happiness and Travel

March 7, 2008

Yesterday I answered a few email questions from Aaron Hotfelder of Gadling, Weblogs Inc.’s travel blog. The results are here. Here’s what I had to say about his parents’ upcoming anniversary:
1. My parents have a wedding anniversary coming up. Why should I buy them, say, a trip to Hawaii or an Alaskan cruise rather than [...]

Read the full article →

Better to Be Richer

March 7, 2008

I just ran across Angus Deaton’s latest summary of his happiness findings at the Gallup website:
As the graph indicates, life satisfaction is higher in countries with higher GDP per head. The slope is steepest among the poorest countries, where income gains are associated with the largest increases in life satisfaction, but it remains positive [...]

Read the full article →

Your Democracy in Action

March 6, 2008

On NPR this morning I was listening to some Congressmen bloviating about the terrible injustice inherent in the Air Force’s decision to give a contract to build re-fueling tankers to EADS, a French company the Air Force says promises the most high-quality aircraft. The level of caterwauling over the Air Force not abusing the contracting [...]

Read the full article →

A Hypothetical Contract with People You Cannot Escape

March 4, 2008

If you’re looking for reasons to not be a Rawlsian, please read my colleague Tom Palmer’s terrific new paper “No Exit: Framing the Problem of Justice” [pdf] for a profoundly illuminating discussion of why Rawls’s theory justice makes sense only within his illiberal and fantastically unrealistic zero-mobility assumption.
There are a lot of good libertarian criticisms [...]

Read the full article →

Education, Inequality, and Complementarities

March 4, 2008

Discussing Brink Lindsey’s outstanding New Republic piece on why the education premium isn’t drawing more people into higher education (about which more later), Yglesias says:
… nothing is going to change policywise unless people think that reconciling ourselves to ever-growing inequality is wrong and, therefore, we ought to be interested in ways to reverse the trend. [...]

Read the full article →

Trade, Inequality, and Perspective

March 4, 2008

Matt Yglesias writes:
I’ve been eagerly awaiting my opportunity to say something about Paul Krugman’s Brookings paper on trade and inequality but it turns out to be the case that real economics involves a lot of math I can’t follow. My best understanding is that his conclusion is that it’s . . . complicated. Trade with [...]

Read the full article →

Fact of the Day

March 3, 2008

From Tyler Cowen:
When a Pole moves to London he can buy many more goods and services.  It’s a big move up in real income plus lots of new goods are introduced to the consumption basket.  So when there is lots of voluntary movement from poorer to richer regions, changes in measured income will understate some [...]

Read the full article →

This Week on Free Will: Stephen Marglin

March 3, 2008

In today’s Free Will at Bloggingheads TV, I talk with Stephen Marglin, the Walter S. Barker Professor of Economics at Harvard University, about his new book The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community.
I expected to hate this book, but I didn’t. Instead I found it thoughtful and stimulating, if ultimately flawed. I [...]

Read the full article →

Next Entries →