From the monthly archives:

April 2008

Hunger Exists to Destroy Itself

April 16, 2008

Alex Singleton makes a nice point:
We moan about modern Britain in a way that does not seem to scientifically correlate to how good – or bad – it is, empirically. Indeed, complaining is something of a national pastime and, ironically, something that people seem to enjoy.
Far from being a major problem, there is something virtuous [...]

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Maybe Money Does Buy Happiness After All

April 16, 2008

David Leonhardt reports in the NYT on the Stevenson and Wolfers paper I blogged last week. This gives me hope that the conventional wisdom is starting to shift with the evidence. It’s worth noting that although the new Gallup World Poll has been very useful, the evidence isn’t really new. Here’s Ruut Veenhoven in the [...]

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Dreams from My Grandfather

April 15, 2008

A while back, on a lark, I googled my maternal grandfather, Leo Draveling. Because sports archivists are weirdly thorough, I found more than I was expecting. Best of all, I found pictures. Folks, here’s the 1930 Michigan Wolverines:

He’s number 37, second row (seated in chairs), second from the left. (Click for a bigger pic.) They [...]

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Police Corruption Is Structural

April 15, 2008

Peter Moskos explains, in this 4 minute clip, how the structure of police compensation rigs the game against young, poor black men:

The relationship between the war on drugs, police incentives, and the deprivation of liberty and self-reinforcing destruction of opportunity for a whole class of Americans may well constitute the most egregious injustice in [...]

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Beating the Average (and Not Your Kids)

April 15, 2008

I think Bryan Caplan’s latest post on kids and happiness suggests a better angle for his project:
I looked at this question using the GSS, regressing happiness on marital status, job satisfaction, real income, a personality measure (“You sometimes can’t help wondering whether anything is worthwhile any more.”), and number of children. Children have the standard [...]

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Tales of the Morally Backward

April 15, 2008

Although I know some people really do think there is no moral distinction between central banking and chattel slavery, or that John C. Calhoun was superior to Milton Friedman as an advocate for human liberation, I cannot help feeling flabbergasted when they emerge in the light of day and actually unleash these opinions without a [...]

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Free Will: Cop in the Hood Edition

April 14, 2008

Today on Free Will, I chat with Peter Moskos about his book Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District. We talk about drugs, guns, foot patrols, screwed up police incentives, and of course The Wire.

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Jobs and Votes

April 11, 2008

Andrew Gelman posts these fascinating graphs showing the trend in Republican voting in several occupational categories compared to the national average.

Clearly, running a business makes you a Republican. What if everyone had to do quarterly estimated taxes? But Republicans have made big gains with both skilled and non-skilled wage-earners too. But nothing compares to the [...]

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Catallaxy: Frankly, It’s Unnatural

April 11, 2008

Here’s Yale psychologist Paul Bloom talking with UNC experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe about the evidence for our native bias toward theism. (Don’t worry! The clip’s just 3 minutes.) Everything he says could just as well be applied to folk ideas about planned economies versus spontaneous orders:

Knobe goes on to mention that people seem to revert [...]

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How Manufacturing and Immigration Creates Tolerance and Democrats

April 10, 2008

Googling around it looks to me that this paper by Ed Glaeser and Bryce Ward, “Myths and Realities of American Political Geography,” got only cursory attention on the blogs, which is really too bad, because it’s just terrifically illuminating. If you’ve been following this type of thing, you know interesting tidbits like: church attendance predicts [...]

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Bartels Manzi-handled

April 10, 2008

Jim Manzi’s post on the much-discussed Bartels correlation is extremely illuminating:
Bartels’s thesis is primarily the statistical artifact of the combination of two very simple observations: (A) there has been a higher proportion of Republican presidential years during the period 1980 – 2005 than the period 1948 – 1979 (64% vs. 48%), and (B) starting in [...]

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Philosophy Is Sexy

April 10, 2008

Commenter glory points me to this NYT piece from a few days ago on the vogue in studying philosophy:
Once scoffed at as a luxury major, philosophy is being embraced at Rutgers and other universities by a new generation of college students who are drawing modern-day lessons from the age-old discipline as they try to make [...]

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To the Slow and Steady and Smartest Goes the Race

April 9, 2008

So, this is going around:

I have to say this makes me feel pretty swell as an art major with a grad degree in philosophy. But money doesn’t make you happy, guys!
Of course, this is just starting salary. And it is well known among people who go to grad school in philosophy that would-be philosophers destroy [...]

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An Endless Sea of Perfect Shining Robots

April 9, 2008

George Borjas points us to this Reuters article that illustrates Japan’s preference for machines over migrants:
Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in graying Japan by 2025, a thinktank says, helping to avert worker shortages as the country’s population shrinks.
Japan faces a 16 percent slide in the size of its workforce by 2030 [...]

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Mankind in a Minute

April 9, 2008

This is pretty sweet:

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More Money, More Happy, Again

April 9, 2008

Here’s Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers’ new paper [pdf] on happiness and economic growth. The bottom line:
The accumulation of more recent data (and a re-analysis of earlier data) suggests that the case for a link between economic development and happiness is quite robust. Moreover, we establish that the relationship between happiness and income within a [...]

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More Reasons Jamie-Lynn Is a Bad Example

April 8, 2008

I had forgotten about this Steven Landsburg column reporting on an innovative paper by Amalia Miller that finds, as Landsburg reports:
On average, Miller has found in a new paper, a woman in her 20s will increase her lifetime earnings by 10 percent if she delays the birth of her first child by a year. Part [...]

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Difference Makes No Difference in the Difference Principle

April 8, 2008

To reinforce the point that even Rawls’ difference principle isn’t really concerned with inequality at all, look at this excerpt from Leif Wenar’s SEP entry.
The second part of the second principle is the difference principle. The difference principle requires that social institutions be arranged so that inequalities of wealth and income work to the advantage [...]

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Speaking of Rawls….

April 8, 2008

Leif Wenar’s new Stanford Encyclopedia entry is a terrific, lucid summary of the canonical interpretation of Rawls’ philosophy.

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The Rawls in Rawlsekianism

April 8, 2008

A few commenters looked at the post below and said, “Where’s the Rawls?” I was just making what I took to be a number of largely conceptual points about the economic patterns that emerge from social interaction — points mostly from Hayek and Nozick. That point is that the principles of social interaction are the [...]

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The Curious Irrelevance of Inequality

April 7, 2008

Here’s a fascinating post by Don Arthur at Club Troppo that asks how would a “progressive fusionist” answer the question “How much inequality is too much?” It turns out that my “Rawlsekianism” is an example of progressive fusionism. And Arthur rightly says:
From this perspective, it’s not possible to decide on a correct distribution in advance. [...]

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I Wouldn’t Say Incest Is Best…

April 7, 2008

This Australian couple is keeping it all in the family:
John Deaves, 61, appeared on the TV show 60 Minutes with daughter Jenny, 39, and nine-month-old Celeste – to whom he is both father and grandfather.
Last month a judge banned them from having sex with each other and revealed they had a child in 2001 who [...]

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ABJ!

April 7, 2008

Radley’s running a poll asking people to vote for their favorite Founding Father. Worse than the baleful fact that Gouverneur Morris is barely registering is Thomas Jefferson’s solid lead. Here is my controversial opinion of the Master of Monticello from an old post:
Thomas Jefferson. The more I read about the guy, the more I dislike [...]

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I Want a Blue Card

April 7, 2008

The estimable Shika Dalmia, in a WSJ piece in favor of scrapping the current cap on H1-B’s, informs me:
In response, most industrialized countries, facing their own skills crunch, are liberalizing their immigration policies to make themselves more attractive. England recently scrapped its Byzantine work permit program in favor of a Canadian-style point system that will [...]

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Please Don’t Stop!

April 6, 2008

It’s funny. When I posted the Arthur Brooks excerpts about kids, I thought to myself, “If anything is going to motivate people to trash happiness research, it’s the finding that kids don’t make us any happier.” For my part, I think the finding is completely intuitive, and is just a nice example of how happiness [...]

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