From the monthly archives:

May 2008

Shaun Nichols on Free Will (Among Other Things) on Free Will

May 31, 2008

They keep changing the day on me, but Free Will’s up at Bloggingheads TV. This week I talk to University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols about his book Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment, psychopaths, our intuitions about free will, and other interesting thing. There is also a book giveaway, which [...]

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Liberaltarianism: Back the Future

May 30, 2008

Here are the sort of political/economic thinkers whose substantive views I find most congenial: Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James M. Buchanan. If I tell most highly-educated people that these are the thinkers whose views of desirable institutions are most like mine, they might infer that I am some kind of rabid libertarian ideologue. But when [...]

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Please Discuss

May 30, 2008

1) Libertarians and many conservatives often talk about lower taxes as a matter of liberty. But a higher tax isn’t more coercive than a lower one. You’re either being coerced or you’re not. A guy who mugs five people with thin wallets is no less guilty of coercion than a guy who mugs five people [...]

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Positively Heretical?

May 30, 2008

Skepticlawyer reports on a Tyler Cowen talk in which he divulges several “libertarian heresies,” one of which Skepticlawyer records as follows:
Next, he argued for a form of positive liberty. This is not the positive liberty of Isaiah Berlin, with its totalitarian tendencies and desire to tell others how to live – something that has plagued [...]

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Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

May 29, 2008

Crispin Sartwell writes:
do me a favor?: cut and paste this everywhere. it’s a…marketing ploy. but it’s sincere.

A Philosophical Challenge
My irritating yet astounding new book Against the State argues that
(1) The political state or government rests on force and coercion.
(2) Force and coercion are always wrong if they can’t be morally justified. (That is, the use [...]

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Collectivism and Meaning

May 28, 2008

Great stuff in today’s WSJ from Cato executive veep David Boaz on the collectivist blowhards running for president.
Messrs. Obama and McCain are telling us Americans that our normal lives are not good enough, that pursuing our own happiness is “self-indulgence,” that building a business is “chasing after our money culture,” that working to provide a [...]

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Aaron Swartz on Free Will

May 27, 2008

I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather, so have fallen behind in my Bloggingheads TV self-promotion duties, but if you haven’t already, please check out this week’s chat featuring wunderkind Aaron Swartz, inventor of RSS and co-founder of Reddit.

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“Irrational” Choice and the Persistence of Lives Well-Lived

May 26, 2008

Say you think the falsehood of the homo economicus model provides some kind of special basis for a new kind of paternalism. Does that mean you think people up to now have been making a hash out of their lives? Maybe you do, which is why you think people continue to smoke or get really, [...]

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Barr – Root

May 25, 2008

I am not excited. Nor would I have been excited had Mary Ruwart taken. Mike Gravel? Now that would have excited me. I just like that guy, and I think he has a much better claim to being libertarian that Bob Barr, who voted for the PATRIOT Act oh so many years ago. And Wayne [...]

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John Cassidy on Libertarian Paternalism: Way Too Libertarian!

May 23, 2008

John Cassidy’s philosophically half-baked exploration of neuroeconomics a couple years back in the New Yorker inspired me to write an essay-length reply. I suspected then that he really liked what he erroneously saw as the paternalistic upshot of behavioral and neuro- economics, and was deliberately reading the results in a way that would seem to [...]

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All Hail Carbon-Eating Trees!

May 23, 2008

Freeman Dyson’s excellent review of William Nordhaus’ excellent A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies in the New York Review of Books is a must-read. Here’s the nut of Nordhaus’ analysis:
The main conclusion of the Nordhaus analysis is that the ambitious proposals, “Stern” and “Gore,” are disastrously expensive, the “low-cost backstop” [...]

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Inequality of Capability?

May 21, 2008

Lane Kenworthy kindly responds:
We should care about inequality of income not simply because it contributes to inequality of well-being, but also because it contributes to inequality of capability.
Even if consumption inequality has increased only a little, the rise in income inequality has produced a noteworthy increase in inequality of capability. The rich aren’t forced to [...]

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All Disaster, Only Part Natural

May 21, 2008

In this morning’s Marketplace commentary, I argued nature needed a helping hand to wreak as much human damage as it did recently in Burma and China. The upshot:
Economic growth creates roofs that don’t blow away, walls that don’t crumble, hospitals to tend the sick, and generators to keep to the ventilators on. The self-dealing thugs [...]

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One True Price Index?

May 20, 2008

Lane Kenworthy writes:
I’m not sure why Broda and Romalis, or Levitt and Wilkinson, think this should alter our assessment of the trend in inequality. Do they mean to suggest that the revealed preference of the poor for cheap goods is exogenous to their income? In other words, people with low incomes simply like buying inexpensive [...]

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Capitalism to Egalitarians: You’re Welcome!

May 19, 2008

I’ve posted on this paper once already, but it really, really, really deserves more attention. And people pay attention to Steven Levitt, so listen to him:
According to two of my University of Chicago colleagues, Christian Broda and John Romalis, everyone is wrong.
Inequality has not grown over the last decade — at least not very much. [...]

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Jeff Sharlet on Free Will

May 19, 2008

In this week’s Free Will, I chat with Jeff Sharlet, author of the shocking new book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. I’m prone to skepticism about shadowy cabals, but I found this book both believable and upsetting. Jeff (a contributing editor to Harpers and Rolling Stone) was apparently a [...]

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The Politics of Human Capital

May 18, 2008

At Club Troppo, Don Arthur has an excellent long post on the politics of the human capital approach to poverty and inequality. An excerpt:
These research findings on early childhood [which show the importance of the development of cognitive and emotional/self-regulatory capacities for later economic achievement] create a dilemma for egalitarians. On the one hand, the [...]

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Arthur Brooks on Religion and Happiness

May 17, 2008

In Arthur Brooks’ Gross National Happiness, he makes a great deal of the effect of religiosity on happiness. And there is no disputing the data: in the United States, religious participation is positively correlated with higher levels of self-reported happiness. But he makes rather too much of it, I think, largely because he has decided [...]

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Equality or Priority, Again

May 14, 2008

In a post titled “Inequality and Death,” Ezra Klein writes:
I guess this goes into the unsurprising category, but a new study shows that the risk of premature death plummets as you wander up the educational ladder. To make a meta-point, I post on these sorts of socio-health studies frequently for a reason: We tend to [...]

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Gross National Happiness

May 14, 2008

For those of you in the greater Washington, DC metropolitan statistical area, I’ll be on a panel devoted to the discussion of Arthur Brooks’ new book Gross National Happiness. UVA’s Jonathan Haidt and AEI’s Sally Satel will also comment. You can register here.

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Procrastination Is Not Laziness

May 14, 2008

I’m sympathetic to but ultimately must disagree with Seth Stevenson’s take on procrastination, a topic I sadly know a great deal about.
Why did I subject myself to so much stress, instead of starting my work earlier like “normal” people do? Well, you’ve no doubt heard all manner of theories regarding the root cause of procrastination. [...]

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Nudge Forum

May 13, 2008

If you’re interested, you can watch or listen to the Cato Forum on Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s Nudge here. My comments are last, after Sunstein and Chorvat’s.

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Haggling

May 13, 2008

I hate it. I am terrible at it. As a consequence, I bought nothing in Turkey other than tickets to various things, room, food, and a poster of Ataturk. And I overpaid for all of these things, I’m sure, which has left me a bit bitter about the place. Surely this is inefficient overall, no? [...]

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Back from Turkey

May 13, 2008

We got back yesterday afternoon, after a layover in Vienna. Austrian efficiency turned out to be a refreshing contrast to the customary Turkish goat rodeo. I’ll have a few posts this week inspired by thoughts about Turkey.

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Selimiye

May 7, 2008

Yesterday Kerry and I rented a ridiculously large boat with a crew of two in the little fishing village of Selimiye, near the point where the Aegean meets the Mediterranean. They took us around to little islands off the coast and to good swimming spots. The water, as you can see, is astonishingly clear and, [...]

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