That’s “appearing on” not “talking about”. This week on Free Will, I chat with philosopher Geoffrey Sayre-McCord about the nature of metaethics in general and moral realism in particular. Since metaethics was, at one point, my academic specialty (I went into the Ph.D. program at Maryland with a mind to work on the nature of moral concepts), I really, really enjoyed this chat. I hope to have Geoff back on to talk about issues of naturalism and evolutionary thinking in moral philosophy.

In this week’s Free Will, I chat with Clay Shirky about his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Clay’s a really interesting guy, and this was a lot of fun.

For text-based Shirky action, try Tim Lee’s smart review and interview at Ars Technica.

Today on Free Will, I chat with Peter Moskos about his book Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District. We talk about drugs, guns, foot patrols, screwed up police incentives, and of course The Wire.

Oh no! I’ve fallen behind in self-promotional blogging! If you missed last week’s episode of Free Will, I talked with Jeremy Lott about his new book The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice-Presidency. This week, I chat with the estimable Kerry Howley about Obama, patriotism, and prostitution, among other things.

This morning on Marketplace, I argued that it’s misguided to blame the last Fed chief, or this one, for our woes:

The problem here isn’t that the guy in charge isn’t smart enough. The problem is that there’s a guy in charge at all. We’ve put a central planner at the beating heart of our market system, but we’ve known for decades that central planners rarely have the information they need, or the incentive to use it correctly.

If it all goes wrong for Bernanke, just remember: the problem isn’t the quarterback. It’s the rules of the game.

I’m off to the heart of the heartland for a few days, so blogging may or may not be light.

In today’s Free Will at Bloggingheads TV, I talk with Stephen Marglin, the Walter S. Barker Professor of Economics at Harvard University, about his new book The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community.

I expected to hate this book, but I didn’t. Instead I found it thoughtful and stimulating, if ultimately flawed. I agreed with Marglin much more than I was expecting. It’s just that, unlike him, I don’t think the Amish are a very good moral model for anyone, and don’t think there is much worth lamenting when those kinds of communities are undermined by markets. I agree with Marglin that the transition from institutions of personal to impersonal exchange is radically transformative of community and personal identity. However, I’m willing to go to the mat for the idea that the gains in wealth, longevity, individual autonomy and creativity overwhelmingly swamps the loss of “thick” identities and tribal “meaning”. I think we’re “designed” to crave those things, however, so the cosmopolitan liberal utopia necessarily leaves us with a residue of regret. We will always be tempted to wreck Eden in a search of Eden. Thinking like an economist is inhuman and the bulwark against our ruin.

Also, Marglin’s left-communitarianism confused me. He was able to give no examples of the progressive, inclusive Gemeinschaft. I think there’s a good reason for that, and that’s reason enough not to try for it.

I have unforgivably neglected to link to yesterday’s episode of Free Will featuring a discussion with Dan Ariely, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics, about his new book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. I really enjoyed talking to Dan, who is incredibly creative in experimental design. It is good fun reading about the experiments, but I found Dan frustratingly naive about the implications of many of his findings, as I vented here.

I’m pretty sure Dan is guilty of the the fallacy of asymmetrical idealization, and I think he falls victim to a number of confusions common among behavioral economists that are inevitable when you completely destroy the formal neoclassical economic model of rationality but insist on using it as a benchmark of rationality anyway. (I discuss this at greater length here.) But like I told Dan in the diavlog, I’m totally on board with the project of finding out how we actually do make decisions, which is obviously of the first importance. His extremely valuable work is clearly at the cutting edge of that effort, and Predictably Irrational is well worth reading, if only to get a good sense of some important (and perplexing) recent findings.

Tim Lee and I talk tech this week on Free Will, only at Bloggingheads TV.

This may be the most ridiculous thing that has ever happened.

This week on Free Will, I chat with Eric Weiner, author of NewYork Times bestseller, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World. I didn’t always agree with Eric’s interpretation of some of the happiness data, but I found this a really fun, though-provoking hybrid of travel and science writing. As it happens, I met Eric when he called to interview me for this article on why Republicans are happier than Democrats, which appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post. Here’s my appearance:

Nowadays, politicians are hesitant to explicitly utter the H-word, choosing instead to dance around the subject. It’s only a matter of time, though, before Republicans begin to crow about their happiness. “They can say, ‘Look, I’m not being a stuffy, old-fashioned conservative,’ ” says Will Wilkinson, a policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute. “There is real science that shows that if you go to church, if you don’t get divorced, you’ll be happier. That’s tempting to any politician.”

Eric had asked whether using happiness research for political purposes was mostly just a left-wing thing, or if it might appeal to conservatives too. I said that if there are findings congenial to conservatives, and there are, then you can bet it won’t go unmentioned, especially if it gives a scientific patina to what they believed in anyway. David Cameron was first out of the blocks on this, but I bet we’ll see plenty of conservative references to happiness findings in the future.

The New York Times listens in on Welch and me chatting about it.

In this week’s episode of Free Will over at Bloggingheads TV, Reason chief Matt Welch and I discuss his rollicking, revealing book, McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, and the real man behind the myth. Sadly McCain’s looking like a GOP lock coming into Super Tuesday, and he polls strong nationally against both Clinton and Obama. The man could well become our next president, to the joy of arms manufacturers and the dismay of those of us who do not think a life not devoted to the service of the American state is devoid of purpose. Is that a triple negative? I guess that  goes to show how sour I am on John Sidney McCain III! 

Today on Free Will I chat with Tim Harford about his new book The Logic of Life.

Tim’s book isn’t just another foray into pop econ. It’s a fascinating and entertaining overview and synthesis of a good deal of the most important recent research in economics. I wasn’t expecting to discover work that would help me on my inequality project, but I did.

This morning on Marketplace, I argued that the politicians yammering on about fiscal stimulus ought to just shut up after the big Fed rate cut. Monday’s edition of Free Will on Bloggingheads TV was a chat with Jonah Goldberg about his much-hated bestseller Liberal Fascism.

Speaking of structural barriers to the exercise of liberty, here I am talking with Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey about his book Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System. If you think serious racial discrimination has dried up these days, try Chapter 3: “Reworking the Color Line.” It’s full of evidence of continuing labor market and housing discrimination, and is one of the the most depressing things I’ve read in a while.  I disagree with a good bit of what Massey takes to be the upshot of all this in his book, but I was glad we were able to find so much to agree about it in our chat.

On Monday, my new, weekly Bloggingheads TV show, Free Will, debuted with special guest Kerry Howley. On Tuesday, The New York Times excerpted a bit of our conversation on sex trafficking. Today, I argued for a common North American labor market in my commentary on Marketplace. I’ll be on every other Wednesday!

John Nye and I talk about his book War, Wine & Taxes: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade, 1689-1900, historical inequality, and chess cheaters.

I talk with intellectual historian Mark Francis about his book Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life at Bloggingheads TV. Enjoy