From the monthly archives:

June 2008

Shrinking

June 30, 2008

Most of this week’s NYT Magazine cover piece on Europe’s fertility decline is old news to me,  thanks to my household demographics specialist, but I did find the bits at the end about the efforts to shrink Dessau, Germany pretty fascinating.
The plan, therefore, calls for demolishing underused sections of the city and weaving the nature [...]

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New on Free Will: Award-Winning Journalist Kerry Howley!

June 30, 2008

On Saturday, after several disastrous attempts, Kerry and I suceeded (sort of) in recording a new diavlog. We talk mainly about her latest Reason cover on fertility panics, but also about the tyranny of old people, and scrapbooking. Botched ending makes it special!
I’m insanely recording three this week. They are: Robin Hanson on Hansonism, Bruce [...]

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“If the World Cooperates…” Jeffrey Sachs’ Esoteric Doctrine of Impending Doom

June 30, 2008

If we continue on our current course – leaving fate to the markets, and leaving governments to compete with each other over scarce oil and food – global growth will slow under the pressures of resource constraints. But if the world cooperates on the research, development, demonstration, and diffusion of resource-saving technologies and renewable energy [...]

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Feedback Loops and the Matthew Effect

June 29, 2008

From the Boston Globe:
WHILE DIFFERENCES IN talent explain at least some of the gap between haves and have-nots, two economists at MIT and Harvard think another factor is also at work. They theorize that the ability to dedicate yourself to work – and not worry about problems at home – has an amplified effect on [...]

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Raising Kids in Cages

June 28, 2008

In response to my claim that:
It is tyrannical for parents to attempt to reproduce their ideologies and prejudices in their children, especially when this requires social isolation and emotional coercion.
Robin Hanson replies:
So is the principle here that parents should go beyond their simple judgment when choosing to what to expose our kids?  For example, should [...]

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Americans Hate Redistribution

June 28, 2008

This is the sort of thing that makes the vein in Krugman’s forehead throb:
When given a choice about how government should address the numerous economic difficulties facing today’s consumer, Americans overwhelmingly — by 84% to 13% — prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States [...]

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Silence No More!

June 27, 2008

Sorry for the silence. I was off giving a couple talks (one on happiness, one on inequality) at the IHS Social Change Workshop at Brown. I had the pleasure of hanging with Mike Munger, John Tomasi, Jason Brennan, John Nye, a number of other excellent faculty and about 125 really smart grad students. But now [...]

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Betsey Stevenson on Happiness on Nightline

June 20, 2008

Watch, listen, learn.

Link via Justin Wolfers, who asks a tangential question I would very much like to know the answer to:
(An aside: You will note that I referred to Betsey as my co-author, which she is, but that is only a partial description, as she is also my Wharton colleague, and also my longtime significant [...]

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I Am a Howleyite, or Osama bin Laden Is Right

June 19, 2008

Why reply to McArdle, Douthat, and Poulos’ replies to my post about Kerry’s demography article when Kerry does it better than I could have? I think she’s exactly right that cultural change occurs on many margins at once and that individuals are not Zombie-like hosts of static, monolithic culture. And I especially like the conclusion:
Part [...]

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The Douthat-Carter Continuum

June 19, 2008

Whoa:
Is there any similarity between “having an actual affair” and having sex with a prostitute while you’re married? I think most people would answer yes. Then consider: Is there any similarity between having sex with a prostitute while you’re married and paying to watch a prostitute perform sexual acts for your voyeuristic gratification? Again, I [...]

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CEO Pay and the Mechanisms of Inequality

June 19, 2008

Like a broken record, I repeat myself: A high level of income inequality means nothing in itself. If you think there is some unfairness or injustice involved then show the mechanism that produced the pattern, and then let’s consider whether there is something unjust or unfair about it. Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon’s new [...]

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Is Blog Traffic Inequality Evidence of Unfairness?

June 18, 2008

Tim Lee continues to preach it over at TPMCafe
For reasons that aren’t clear to me, a lot of people seem to have a very different intuition when we’re talking about the distribution of dollars rather than eyeballs or Wikipedia edits. The mere existence of growing income inequality is treated as a prima facie evidence of [...]

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Stranger-Reported Economist Happiness

June 17, 2008

This paper from the May 2008 edition of Kyklos [ungated] just may be the best paper ever written. It investigates the happiness of economics Nobel Prize winners, non-Nobel superstar economists, and prominent happiness researchers by showing their website photographs to people on the street in Melbourne Brisbane, Australia. Thus it contains winning lines such as:
[T]he [...]

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Strategic Opinions

June 17, 2008

Robin Hanson sez:
Our opinions are part of this dominance/submission signaling system.  The higher we feel in status the more we feel free to express distinctive opinions and expect others to agree, or at least not greatly disagree.  Which is why we are so reluctant to agree with others we compete with, even when they make [...]

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Contingency + Love = No Regrets?

June 17, 2008

Bryan Caplan’s argument in his post on “Parenthood as the Trump of All Past Regret” proves both too much and too little. The general form of the argument has nothing to do with children, but applies to anything contingent one has come to value highly. Bryan’s argument has the same form as this: “If I [...]

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Technology and the Status Game

June 17, 2008

Over at TPMCafe Book Club, Internet guru Clay Shirky and tech policy wizard Tim Lee are discussing the old debate between Henry Farrell and me about the proliferation of status dimensions enabled by wealth and the development of new technology, and whether or not there is some kind of meta-ranking of status dimensions.
To Henry’s attempt [...]

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More Tiny Humans for the Glory of Our Kind!

June 16, 2008

The inestimable Kerry Howley’s outstanding Reason cover piece on fertility panics is now online. Like the typical Howley production, this is a super-readable combo of fascinating facts and trenchant analysis. Kerry’s great on why talk about “desired fertility” is silly, but I think she’s most insightful on the cultural aspects of fertility policy:
For those [...]

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We’re Animals, I Tell You!

June 16, 2008

This week on Free WIll, metaethicist par excellence Geoffrey Sayre-McCord returns to discuss the implications of Darwinian thinking for moral philosophy. As always, an excellent discussion ensues in the Bloggingheads TV forum.

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Return Migration

June 15, 2008

Until my recent upsurge in interest in migration issues, thanks to Kerry, I had assumed that relocation was something people did for good and that people came to America to become Americans. I wasn’t aware of the large masses of Poles, Italians, Irish, etc., who came to the U.S. to work for a while, and [...]

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Clark on Polanyi (the Bad One)

June 12, 2008

Greg Clark’s NY Sun takedown of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is ripping good fun. This response, by a sociologist, is entertaining for other reasons. For example, I like how it starts out strong by pointing out that Sun is a neocon rag. The commenters at Mark Thoma’s, from whence comes the link, are [...]

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Lost Canadians

June 11, 2008

Speaking of citizenships, I just learned that had Canadian law been what it is now when my father immigrated, I would now also be a Canadian citizen, which would be awesome. But, as it was prior to 1977, my father lost his Canadian citizenship when he became a naturalized American citizen, and so I was [...]

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Why Is Switzerland the World’s Most Immigrant-Friendly Country?

June 11, 2008

I have to say I was pretty surprised the first time I saw this OECD graph, which shows the foreign-born as a percentage of total population [Click for full size]:

Why was I surprised? Because it’s relatively hard to become a citizen of Switzerland. But that was me thinking a path to citizenship and residency and [...]

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Welfare Magnetism

June 11, 2008

Poking around looking for stuff about immigration and welfare, I found this 1997 Dallas Fed paper by Madeline Zavodny. Here’s her conclusion:
Much of the motivation for eliminating most immigrants’ access to federally funded public assistance benefits was concern that persons migrate to the United States because of the availability of welfare benefits. The 1996 welfare [...]

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Unfair in the Abstract, Fair in the Concrete

June 11, 2008

Over at Psychology Today, Josh Knobe reports on a new experiment by Shaun Nichols (see me diavlog with Nichols here) and Chris Freiman (an IHS friend of mine and David Schmidtz advisee):
Subjects who had been assigned to receive an abstract question were asked:
Suppose that some people make more money than others solely because they have [...]

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Milton Friedman’s Argument for Illegal Immigration

June 11, 2008

Yesterday at Hit & Run, Kerry Howley put up a brilliant post on Milton Friedman’s most misused utterance (riffing off Bryan Caplan’s also outstanding post) which I thought was more or less dispositive.
But in the comments, MikeP (this man needs his own blog, if he doesn’t have one) points to this immensely useful post [...]

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