From the monthly archives:

September 2008

The Segway of Social Science

September 29, 2008

My review of Nudge by Sunstein and Thaler, which appears in the October edition of Reason is finally online. Here’s how it starts:
At first blush, “libertarian paternalism” seems a linguistic miscarriage, a self-crippling idea condemned to limp aimlessly in eternal darkness on the island of misfit creeds alongside “humanitarian sadism” and “color-blind racism.” But that hasn’t stopped [...]

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Samples on the Bailout

September 29, 2008

Good Cato podcast on the politics of the bailout with my colleague John Samples.

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Financial Meltdown Explainer with Arnold Kling

September 29, 2008

In this week’s Free Will, I get Bernanke classmate and former Freddie Mac and Fed economist Arnold Kling to explain to me how the heck we got in this sorry situation. I learned a ton. Thanks to Arnold, I was able to sound like I knew what I was talking about at a party Saturday [...]

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Coasean Morality

September 29, 2008

via Frank Pasquale, I find this treat from Frank Tipler, the awesome weirdo physicist.
ABSTRACT: I show that in a true Coasean world – a world with no transaction costs – there would be no disagreement on moral questions. There would be no disagreement on what the appropriate distribution of income should be. There would be [...]

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Can You Hear Me Now?

September 29, 2008

I think a bunch of stuff is still broken. But at least I exist!

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Correct!

September 27, 2008

IOZ is a delight because his assessment of our presidential candidates is completely accurate:
Obama terrifies me: an intelligent, thoughtful, well-prepared, capably extemporaneous man ascribing a future holocaust to some sort of non-existent, fantastical, steroidal Iran; talking about unsanctioned cross-border incursions into Pakistan because we found bin Laden, or some such, and must “take him out”; [...]

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My Partner

September 27, 2008

This phrase presents something of a communication problem, especially with Kerry’s androgynous name. “My girlfriend” sounds relatively frivolous, failing to convey the fact of cohabitation and level of commitment. “My live-in lady,” as was suggested to me by one DC-area native, is inconsistent with other evident markers of socio-economic status, and therefore conveys irony and/or [...]

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Inerrant Conduit of the General Will

September 27, 2008

Well, the polls say Obama won pretty decisively. It looks like this is because women don’t cotton to McCain, which is reasonable enough. Walnuts! Anyway, once again it is demonstrated that cosmopolitan libertarian metrosexual econophilosopher bloggers may not be the most reliable barometers of the popular mood.
Winston was sleeping during the debate, but we left [...]

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Obama Is Disappointing

September 26, 2008

I cannot find any liveblogging that isn’t stupidly partisan. So here I go. My impression is that McCain is winning this debate. In my snarky piece today for Culture11 [scroll down], I said Obama needs to show his superior grasp of policy details, especially on economic policy. He seems to me to have completely muffed [...]

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Winston and Coolidge on the Bailout

September 25, 2008

“Please, no!”
And yes, that is ‘please’ not ‘plz’. Winston is vastly superior to an unlettered cat.
And Calvin Coolidge is vastly superior to any living American politician:

[HT: David Beito]

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Mormon

September 25, 2008

“So you’re Mormon, then?”
“Well, not exactly. I’m in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.”
Puzzled: “Oh.”
“You see, when Joseph Smith, the founder of both churches, was murdered…”
This exchange was an intermittent refrain of my wonder years. I was always having it — at six, ten, seventeen.  When the question was put to [...]

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Hanson’s Catechism

September 24, 2008

I love Robin Hanson’s pithy account of signal-centric Hansonism:
Food isn’t about Nutrition
Clothes aren’t about Comfort
Bedrooms aren’t about Sleep
Marriage isn’t about Romance
Talk isn’t about Info
Laughter isn’t about Jokes
Charity isn’t about Helping
Church isn’t about God
Art isn’t about Insight
Medicine isn’t about Health
Consulting isn’t about Advice
School isn’t about Learning
Research isn’t about Progress
Politics isn’t about Policy
And blogging isn’t about… what?

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More Canuckophilia

September 24, 2008

This morning on Marketplace, I praise Canada and lament the U.S.’s increasingly pathetic support for freedom.
I’ve become interested in writing a longer essay on the freest country in the world. That’s a deeply ideologically freighted question, and that’s part of what interests me. What would it mean for someplace to be freer than another overall? [...]

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Meet Winston

September 19, 2008

From Winston

We take him home next week.

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Roderick Long on the Myths of the Laissez Faire Golden Age and the Anti-Corporate State

September 19, 2008

Here’s how it starts:
There’s a popular historical legend that goes like this: Once upon a time (for this is how stories of this kind should begin), back in the 19th century, the United States economy was almost completely unregulated and laissez-faire. But then there arose a movement to subject business to regulatory restraint in the [...]

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You Got Government in My Markets! You Got Markets in My Government!

September 19, 2008

It seems some folks try to have it both ways when talking about “the market.” They are right to remind us that “the market,” so beloved of free-market types, does not simply exist in a state of nature. Much of the extended market order is enabled — even constituted — by rules that define property [...]

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What’s an Incrementalist Market Liberal to Think?

September 19, 2008

Suppose Bernanke and Co. skillfully steer the economy through the meltdown. They succeed in propping up confidence in the markets, lubricate financial markets by taking on toxic assets, and then carefully selling them off as valuations improve, etc. etc. Bernanke will be hailed as a genius, and the whole episode will be taken as vindication [...]

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The Benign Rule of Ben Bernanke and the Ideal of Democratic Equality

September 18, 2008

Tyler Cowen writes, “The economic fallout from these events [the crashes, the bailouts, the nationalizations] is dominating the headlines.  The intellectual and ideological fallout we are just beginning to contemplate.” Here’s what I’m beginning to contemplate.
If a high level of income inequality is a side-effect of voluntary exchange according to just rules, then what’s the [...]

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The True North Strong and Freer Than Ever

September 17, 2008

Check it out patriots. According to the newly-minted Cato/Fraser Economic Freedom of the World Report, the frosty land of toques and chesterfields has leap-frogged the U.S. to take 7th place, completely humiliating the tied-for-8th place land of the ever-less-free, home of the brave.
Is it now possible to even half-credibly make the case that the United [...]

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Pluralism and the Strains of Commitment

September 17, 2008

[Warning: This post assumes a lot of background, and may not be generally accessible.]
I’ve been re-reading bits of Justice as Fairness to try to nail down Rawls’ take on the relationship between the difference principle and the value of the basic liberties. But I got sidetracked.
The story on the development of the doctrine of “justice [...]

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Porn Is Adultery

September 17, 2008

Sigh. Moreover, a cigarette is suicide, the minimum wage is chattel slavery, and novels are full of lies, lies, lies!  Kerry points out the insulting, should-be-obvious implication of the Douthatian position:
It would follow that almost all of us have experienced monogamy as a series of small treacheries and degradations of which we are barely aware. [...]

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Naomi Klein

September 16, 2008

Is an angry fish, wondering where her water went. Naomi Klein is a Catholic without a Pope. Naomi Klein cannot believe it all turned out this way. Naomi Klein wants to sell you a better buggy whip. Naomi Klein is brought to you by the objects of her confused contempt. Naomi Klein “believes her own [...]

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Poor Live Better Now

September 16, 2008

Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore in the Journal:
When all sources of income are included — wages, salaries, realized capital gains, dividends, business income and government benefits — and taxes paid are deducted, households in the lowest income quintile saw a roughly 25% increase in their living standards from 1983 to 2005. (See chart nearby; the [...]

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Qualifications and Sarah Palin’s Crazy Politics

September 16, 2008

I’ve been watching people I don’t think are idiots flip out over the fact that Sarah Palin has the politics of a typical Republican governor. I completely understand not liking Republicans, but you’ve got to admit that it’s weird to accuse a Republican politician for having the views of a Republican politician. So I’m calling [...]

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Would It Matter If I Guaranteed You Would Enjoy This Post?

September 15, 2008

Maybe Yglesias tried to think of a more tendentious partisan angle to all this business about “bailouts,” but couldn’t come up with one, so instead of bothering to write a post, he just turned the crank on the PunditBot2008-D, which produced this for him while he was out getting a smoothie:
But conservatives don’t believe in [...]

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