From the monthly archives:

July 2008

Drezner on Alan Wolfe’s Incomptence

July 9, 2008

Alan Wolfe’s prolix review essay of Bruno Frey and Dan Ariely’s recent books had a few nice insights, but my overwhelming judgment was that he simply doesn’t know enough about the subject to write a competent review. Dan Drezner picks up on a couple of Wolfe’s forehead-slappers. In a nuthsell, Wolfe thinks Milton Friedman and [...]

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How Obama Will “Save Social Security” (Please!?)

July 8, 2008

Yglesias splits hairs:
[A]s the headline writers put it on the front page of The Washington Post “Candidates Diverge on How to Save Social Security”. Because in headlineland, saving a program and destroying a program under pretext of saving it are just two different ways of saving it.
I think Matt should simmer down. And the point [...]

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Norberg on Klein on Friedman

July 7, 2008

Here’s my colleague Johan Norberg setting the record straight on Milton Friedman’s view on the role of crisis in social change.

I always thought Friedman’s view was plainly true. In a complex system with countervailing interest groups, the status quo is generally a kind of relatively stable equilibrium. So more than super-marginal policy change [...]

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Tim Lee on Patriotism

July 7, 2008

Tim Lee’s response to Tim Sandefur (and therefore to Ilya Shapiro) is spot on. Do read the whole thing.
I especially liked this:
Loving your country because it embodies specific political ideals isn’t patriotism, it’s called having a political philosophy. Patriotism is loving your country because it’s your country, regardless of what political ideals it may or [...]

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Regrettable Prudence

July 7, 2008

Yes, you can be too tight-fisted. From  Anat Keinan and Ran Kivetz in the Harvard Business Review:
One of our studies—published in the Journal of Consumer Research—explored the regret felt by college students over their conduct on recent winter breaks and by alumni remembering winter breaks of 40 years ago. Regret about not having spent or [...]

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Dancin’ with Hanson

July 7, 2008

In this week’s Free Will, Robin Hanson and I talk about bias, disagreement, status-seeking, and the romance of cryonics.
I talked too much, and didn’t touch on some of Robin’s best topics, so I hope to do a follow-up at some time.

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Happy Independence Day!

July 4, 2008

This is excellent:

Of course, Yglesias is correct and it’s not easy to see how the American Revolution was legitimate. I suspect it wasn’t. But if you think it was, then you’re pretty clearly committed to the proposition that a violent overthrow of the American government this afternoon would be legitimate. Go for it!
Just [...]

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Two Views on Luck and Redistribution

July 2, 2008

This one’s mainly for political philosophy nerds. Here are some schematic thoughts…
Luck egalitarians argue that the essence of distributive justice is that the lucky compensate the unlucky. This has been an extremely popular view in academic political philosophy and it is also completely ridiculous. To me, at least. Luck egalitarianism strikes me as a kind [...]

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World Getting Happier

July 2, 2008

The new World Values Survey is out and these dismal United States comes in 16th in the world in the WVS happiness rankings, just between such Scandinavian hellholes as Sweden and Norway. You’ll see the usual Latin American bonus in the data, with Puerto Rico, Colombia, and El Salvador populating the upper reaches of the [...]

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Hey Kids: Frugality Is for Chumps

July 1, 2008

Steven Levitt’s favorite personal financial advice:
When I was a first-year assistant professor at the University of Chicago, my friend and department chair, Jose Scheinkman, relayed the advice Milton Friedman had given him 20 years earlier, “Don’t save too much.”
The logic was simple: An academic’s salary rises steadily over time, as do outside opportunities — like [...]

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Governments of Men Governed by Laws

July 1, 2008

Arnold Kling reminds me of this Woodrow Wilson stunner:
I am not repeating the famous sentence of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights, “to the end that this may be a government of laws and not of men.” There never was such a government. Constitute them how you will, governments are always governments of men, and no [...]

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