From the monthly archives:

July 2008

Update!

July 31, 2008

Sorry so quiet! I’ve been busy doing things. You know how it is. Here is the latest Free Will, in which I talk with Jesse Prinz, whose book The Emotional Construction of Morals is awesome. Here is today’s Marketplace commentary, in which I note that T. Boone Pickens is trying to use the public’s anti-foreign [...]

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Today in Backwardsville

July 24, 2008

Don Boudreaux once again displays his weirdly rare ability to describe things correctly:
The national minimum-wage rises today from $5.85 per hour to $6.55 per hour.  In other words, Uncle Sam today arbitrarily increases the cost of employing low-skilled workers by 12 percent.
If your labor is worth less the $6.55 per hour, life is probably not [...]

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Vitamin R

July 23, 2008

From this New Yorker article Tyler excerpts:

stimulants, like caffeine, Adderall, and Ritalin … may actually make insights less likely, by sharpening the spotlight of attention and discouraging mental rambles.  Concentration, it seems, comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity.

I agree with one of Tyler’s commenters. I am prone to near constant free associative reverie [...]

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Losing Faith in What?

July 23, 2008

In the Los Angeles Times, Peter Gosselin offers a “news analysis” on the theme that “Americans may be losing faith in free markets.”
For a generation, most people accepted the idea that the core of what makes America tick was an economy governed by free markets. And whatever combination of goods, services and jobs the market [...]

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Why Isn’t Everything Worse?

July 21, 2008

James Pethokoukis of US News has a plausible conjecture:
Here’s puzzled economist and blogger Brad DeLong:

I still do not understand why the real side of the economy is doing so well in relative terms. The worst financial distress since the Great Depression ought to trigger the worst downturn in demand, production, and employment since the Great [...]

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Joking with Jim Holt

July 21, 2008

In this week’s Free Will, I chat with Jim Holt about his new book Stop Me If You Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes. Jim’s book was a lot of fun, and so was our talk. Here’s the not exactly stellar review in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review, but I liked this [...]

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Motive, Opportunity, and Means-Testing

July 20, 2008

From Tyler Cowen’s outstanding NYT column on means testing Medicare, sweet, sweet music to my ears:
[T]he argument for comprehensive and universal transfer programs does not meet the ideal of democratic transparency. If taking care of the poor is the real value in welfare programs, those programs should be sold as such to the electorate. We [...]

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Happiness, Meaning, and Knowledge

July 19, 2008

The continued discussion about kids and happines brings into focus the questions about the priority of happiness over other values and the reliability of happiness measurement. One of the hazards of blogging is to imagine that your audience has been following you all along, and so knows your positions on central topics so that your [...]

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The “Annually Appropriated/Authorized Until Revised” Spending Distinction

July 18, 2008

My colleague John Samples, a distinguished political scientist and scholar of American politics, writes to me to pithily explain the discretionary/non-discretionary distinction:
Discretionary spending goes through the annual appropriations process. Such spending has to be approved each year, in form at least. Non-discretionary spending has permanent appropriations which are determined by demographics in tandem with specified [...]

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The Argument for Preemptive Redistribution

July 17, 2008

The author of the Economics of Contempt has published a thoughtful and stimulating post about some of my views about inequality. He concludes this:
Wilkinson seems to be of the opinion that unless U.S. income inequality is benign unless it was produced by some inefficient or unfair mechanism. He also seems to think that absent evidence [...]

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Morally Bogus Debates

July 17, 2008

Daniel Larison writes:
Wilkinson would prefer instead morally bogus debates about whether caring for the poor means abolishing borders and swamping our country with millions of immigrants.  For my part, I get really tired of Wilkinson’s lectures about things and people he identifies as ”nationalist,” when he has made it quite clear over the years that he makes no [...]

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GNP: Partisan and Meta-Partisan Critiques

July 17, 2008

So, when Sullivan says I “tear into GNP,” I was in fact tearing into the whole genre of partisan political books, which is obviously a banging-head-against-wall sort of thing to do. The bit he quotes was a coda to a post that defended Grand New Party against the charge that it is irrelevant because the [...]

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Oh, You Didn’t Want to Decrease Inequality That Way?

July 16, 2008

Judging from the comments, Marketplace listeners do not seem all that receptive to the standard explanation of growing wage inequality, nor to the idea that limits on H1-B visas constitute a subsidy to domestic skilled workers that exacerbates the wage gap. Anyway, that’s what I argued today. Here’s my conclusion:
These days, almost everybody but their [...]

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After Heller

July 16, 2008

A great debate on the future of gun rights and gun control after the Washington D.C. v. Heller decision is shaping up over at Cato Unbound. Cato’s Bob Levy, who was co-counsel for Heller, leads off with his take on the decision and its implications. And today Dennis Henigan of the Brady Center contributes a [...]

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Grandly Nugatory? Hardly

July 15, 2008

In the TPM Cafe Book Club discussion of Grand New Party the Nation’s Chris Hayes argues that Ross and Reihan are well-meaning guys, with well-meaning proposals for helping the working class, but their recommendations to Republicans are pointless since they forgot to notice that the guys in charge of the GOP are callous bastards who [...]

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J.R. Lucas on Equality and the Multidimensionality of Status

July 15, 2008

How Have I Never Read this Paper? J.R. Lucas, “Against Equality, Again,” Philosophy 52, 1977, pp.255-280:
We can object to strictly hierarchical societies on the grounds that those on the bottom of the hierarchy—the serfs, the villeins, or the prison-camp slaves—are accorded no respect at all. But we should remedy this by having more than [...]

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New on Free Will: Bruce Caldwell on Hayek

July 14, 2008

This week, I talk with Bruce Caldwell, author of Hayek’s Challenge, a wonderfully lucid, comprehensive, and penetrating account of the development of Hayek’s economic and methodological ideas. Hayek is one of my enthusiasms, so I had a great time talking to Bruce, who knows as much about Hayek as anyone.
Also, maybe some of my Austrian-leaning [...]

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The World Is Not a Zoo

July 13, 2008

This essay by Kenan Malik is so damn right it almost hurts. Choice bits:
Modern multiculturalism seeks self-consciously to yoke people to their identity for their own good, the good of that culture and the good of society. A clear example is the attempt by the Quebecois authorities to protect French culture. The Quebec government has [...]

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Bundles of Oy

July 13, 2008

Newsweek has an excellent feature by Lorraine Ali on kids and happiness.
The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term “bundle of joy” may not be the most accurate way to describe our offspring. “Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and [...]

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Non-Discretionary Spending

July 12, 2008

Tell me again why Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are labeled as “non-discretionary” spending. As I understand it, Congress could shut them all down tomorrow if they wanted to. Or they could cut benefits massively. Or change eligibility requirements any way they like. Which makes it discretionary, doesn’t it? Isn’t it basically just a lie [...]

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There Is Something Called “Behavioral Economics,” Can’t Tell You What It Is Just Now, but It May Be Important, Just So You Know

July 12, 2008

I can’t say what the point of this less than coherent video from Gallup was, other than to mention that Gallup is at the forefront of measuring things in interesting new ways, but I thought some of you might find it interesting anyway:

[Update... Oh, this one is a little better, sort of. They could use [...]

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The Goatee of the Overeager Left

July 11, 2008

From one of The Economist’s New York correspondents:
There seems to be a temptation lately to label anyone who even dares mention supply-side economics, without immediately deeming it the silliest idea born to a napkin, an economic heretic. That’s unfortunate. True, with the exception of very high marginal tax rates, a tax cut will generally not [...]

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Note About Rational Scofflaws

July 11, 2008

I wonder how many drivers exceed the speed limit basically whenever they judge that it won’t cause anybody any problems. I’d guess, approximately, all of them. Also, there are very clear laws about, say, using turn signals, or using turn signals when parallel parking (do you do this?), or not taking a right hand turn [...]

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Class War!

July 10, 2008

Time interviews Barbara Ehrenreich:
Some argue that today’s basic standards of living surpass anything the nation has enjoyed historically. What’s your response to that?
Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to live in the 18th century myself, or the 19th either, for that matter. I am operating on a slightly smaller time frame here and thinking that there [...]

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Bikes vs. Cars

July 9, 2008

Interesting discussions at Megan’s and Matt’s. I think Matt does an exceptionally good job of illustrating the arbitrariness of subsidies to car owners simply by outlining an alternative scheme. I’ve always been a bit baffled by a lot of libertarian’s generally pro-car-centric view of transportation matters. Now, if cars, highways, roads, big parking lots, etc., [...]

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