From the monthly archives:

April 2008

Off to Turkey

April 30, 2008

After the Nudge forum tomorrow afternoon, Kerry and I are off to Turkey for about a week and a half. The deafening silence you will hear is me on a beach worrying about work. Anyway, we’ve made absolutely no plans, other than arranging a rental car in Istanbul. For all I know we’ll be sleeping [...]

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The Optimal Carbon Tax: A Fatal Conceit?

April 30, 2008

Jim Manzi graciously answers Josh Patashnik’s reply at the TNR Environment and Energy blog to my optimal carbon tax post. I find Jim extremely convincing. Is he missing something?

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The Hong Kong of Scandinavia

April 30, 2008

The Economist Intelligence Unit ranks Denmark the best place in the world to do business. The actual Hong Kong is ranked 7th. These United States finish just under Sweden. If only we could adopt the Nordic model and have a less fettered capitalism!
[Via Nordophile Justin Fox]

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False Consciousness, Psychological Freedom, and Pluralism

April 29, 2008

Some thoughts relevant to general issues about kids raised on isolated compounds by religious fanatics…
There’s nothing wrong with false consciousness explanations, as long as they are actually explanatory. You’ve just got to specify actual mechanisms. Political freedom loses much of its point in the absence of psychological freedom. Rationality and the capacity for moral agency [...]

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Down on the Compound

April 28, 2008

I agree with Kerry in being a bit perplexed by what seems to me unreflective anti-gubmint reactions of libertarians to the FLDS imbroglio. It seems clear enough to me that these kids are basically brainwashed, isolated, and made dependent in a way that makes it all-but-impossible for them to freely choose this way of life [...]

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Robert Frank Missing the Story on Schools and Positional Competition Again

April 27, 2008

I’ve been complaining for a while now about Robert Frank’s insistence on using the contingent house-school link to make his positional externalities argument. Tim Lee catches the latest instance in Frank’s recent WaPo piece. Tim nails it:
This is an eloquent indictment of our perverse system of linking schools to real estate. We don’t generally limit [...]

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Geoffrey Sayre-McCord on Free Will

April 27, 2008

That’s “appearing on” not “talking about”. This week on Free Will, I chat with philosopher Geoffrey Sayre-McCord about the nature of metaethics in general and moral realism in particular. Since metaethics was, at one point, my academic specialty (I went into the Ph.D. program at Maryland with a mind to work on the nature of [...]

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Optimal Carbon Tax

April 27, 2008

Carbon emissions aren’t a negative externality of energy consumption. Global warming isn’t a negative externality, either. Warming will have some positive effects, too. It’s the damage or harm from global warming that’s the negative external effect of energy consumption. But that’s not quite right, either. Because it’s not clear that all the warming is [...]

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Econonerd Shindig

April 27, 2008

Tyler and Alex’s son give their impressions of the party at Robin Hanson’s lovely home yesterday afternoon. It’s a special kind of relief to be able to spend a few hours with a whole house full of people with whom one does not have to be defensive about thinking rationally (i.e. “reductively”, “autistically”, “soullessly”) about [...]

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Non-Uniform Inflation and Nominal Income Inequality

April 27, 2008

When Tyler says to shout something from the rooftops, I comply. From Zubin Jelvah’s summary of a new paper from Christian Broda and John Romalis [pdf]:
Instead of focusing purely on what’s produced outside of the country, Broda and Romalis turn their attention to an interesting but obvious relationship between imports and consumption within our border: [...]

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Nussbaum on Sex Work

April 26, 2008

In all the dust of last month’s prostitution debate, I somehow missed philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s excellent op-ed, in which she espouses a view almost identical to the Howley-Wilkinson line.
Why are there laws against prostitution? All of us, with the exception of the independently wealthy and the unemployed, take money for the use of our body. [...]

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Accounting for Children

April 25, 2008

Let me emphasize that I’m not trying to discourage anyone from having kids, or another kid. I’m just really genuinely interested in the real net cost of kids to their parents in terms of lifetime happiness, consumption, status, etc. I think people should make hugely significant choices, like how many kids to have, with accurate [...]

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The Value of the Marginal Kid

April 25, 2008

Let me expand on a comment I left on one of Bryan’s blog posts… I think I’m finally homing in on the argument between Bryan and me about kids. As far as I can tell, Bryan’s hypothesis is one of these two propositions:
(a) Given any (non-silly) number of children greater than zero, there IS on [...]

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A Corny Story

April 23, 2008

Today on Marketplace, a love letter to my home state, which was once the breadbasket of the world, but is now in the business of starving poor people. Oh, it’s not really about you, Iowa. It’s about how politics starves poor people. You just got caught in the middle, Iowa, and I’ll always love you.

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The Kost of Kidz

April 22, 2008

Bryan Caplan and I continue our intra-libertarian cage-match about the benefits of birthing. Am I crazy? Or is Bryan?

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America: Actually Quite Poor!

April 21, 2008

I read Kevin Phillips cover article [$$$] in this month’s Harper’s, and thought he was completely crazy. First of all, I was amazed that they printed an article largely about one of my pet interests, the methodology of the Consumer Price Index, which I thought was a bit too esoteric for a general readership. But [...]

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Here Comes Clay Shirky

April 21, 2008

In this week’s Free Will, I chat with Clay Shirky about his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Clay’s a really interesting guy, and this was a lot of fun.
For text-based Shirky action, try Tim Lee’s smart review and interview at Ars Technica.

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Choice Architecture and Paternalism

April 20, 2008

I’m trying to get clear on what Sunstein and Thaler mean, and it’s not easy, since they basically make up their own private language, and then act puzzled by the idea that some people might be a little confused by what they have in mind.
So a “choice architect” is basically anyone that organizes “the context [...]

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Nudge

April 20, 2008

The New York Times reports that a bunch of ex-military on-air “analysts” are in bed with both military contractors and the Bush administration:
Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument [...]

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The Contradiction of Expelled

April 19, 2008

Larry Arnhart states it well:
The folks at the Discovery Institute have made a big mistake in their production of this movie. The political rhetoric of the Discovery Institute’s “wedge strategy” depends upon hiding a fundamental contradiction. But this movie makes the contradiction so evident that any viewer can see it. On the one hand, the [...]

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It’s Better To Earn It

April 19, 2008

From WSJ’s Wealth Report:
PNC Wealth Management recently polled about 1,500 Americans with $500,000 or more in investible assets and found that 69% of respondents made most of their fortune through work, business ownership or investments. Only 6% made their wealth by inheriting it, while 25% made it through a combination of inheritence and earnings.
What’s most [...]

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“Not just the signature on a series of essays”

April 18, 2008

On the issue of Thomas Jefferson’s loathsomely anti-libertarian credentials, please read Charles Johnson. I agree with everything he says here, probably even the part about my making a series of interrelated mistakes, and definitely the titular imperative.

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Do People Have Weird, Abstract, Pareto-Damaging Preferences?

April 18, 2008

Lane Kenworthy shows some evidence that when asked to choose one of five pictures that best represents their preference for their country’s income distribution, people tended to pick one of two options — options D and E:
D and E are identical in their population shares at the bottom. The difference between them is that D [...]

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The Quotable Cowen

April 18, 2008

The general point remains that most discussions of global warming focus on prices and technologies alone, without incorporating realistic models of politics.
More here. The failure to incorporate realistic models of politics into one’s thinking is the reason many people are statist in the first place. When they are romantically statist, you know there is little [...]

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The Bitter Truth

April 16, 2008

David Park has data … data! on where bitter, god- and gun-clinging poor rural voters turn:

Park writes:

We can see a steady decline of Republican support among rural poor voters starting in 1972. Even with a big jump in 2000, support for the Republican presidential candidate was less than 50 percent. So, Obama, it looks like [...]

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