In the latest issue of the American Conservative, David Gordon has written a smart and lucid essay on John Rawls and his use by libertarians, like me. I agree entirely with Gordon’s concluding suggestion that Rawls will be the Herbert Spencer of the 20th Century, though I wonder how we’re supposed to take this? That Rawls will simply fall out of fashion? No doubt. That Rawls will be dishonestly maligned and fall into underserved disrepute? Perhaps. Anyway, I have a few quibbles with Gordon’s piece.

For the most part, I think Gordon gives a fair account of Rawls’ view, but it seemed to me that at one point his account was inconsistent with itself. (The emphasis below is mine.)

Indeed, Rawls’s greatest critic was a libertarian, his Harvard philosophy department colleague Robert Nozick, who raises a key objection to Rawls in his classic 1974 work Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick notes that Rawls does not include property rights among the liberties protected by his first principle. To the contrary, Rawls starts off by assuming that the people in the original position have the task of distributing all the property in society. If one denies this, and, like Nozick, thinks that people start off with property rights, then there will be little or no scope for the difference principle to operate.

Then, later, while discussing what Hayek liked about Rawls — the generality of his proceduralism — Gordon notes:

In Rawls’s system, people in the original position do not assign shares of wealth to particular people: they set up general institutions for society. This fitted in with Hayek’s emphasis on the rule of law. When Hayek opposed “social justice,” what he had in mind was a system that gives orders to particular persons, ungoverned by general law.

The latter claim is correct. Principles of justice apply to the “basic structure” of society — the general institutional “rules of the game” — and do not identify patterns of property holdings. Hayek notes, correctly, that Rawls makes precisely his own point: that questions of justice apply to the rules that govern social cooperation, not to the patterns of holdings that interactions in accordance with those rules produce. If the rules are okay, then so is the pattern. But how do we know the rules are okay? Rawls says, correctly, that the basic rules of the game, including property law, have broad distributive consequences, and must be shown generally to benefit the least well-off class. Why? Because everyone needs to have reason to comply with the rules of interaction if those rules are going to define a social order that is stable in right way. The question whether the rules are okay is not independent of the kind of pattern it will tend to produce. My sense is that Hayek agrees with this.

It’s a common misinterpretation of Rawls (helped along by Nozick, I’m afraid) that the task of selecting principles of justice in Rawls’ system is “distributing all the property in society.” The task, part of it, is indeed to evaluate the basic rules in terms of their distributive consequences. If we “start off” with property rights for men, or property rights for white people,  we will find that the subsequent patterns of holdings will have something to do with how we’ve agreed to assign and enforce those rights. The fact that, under an order governed by such rules, women or blacks will tend either to be dependent or impoverished is grounds enough for those people to reject those rules, and grounds enough for any of us to reject those rules. If whole classes of people have reason to reject a basic rule of social interaction, that rule can’t be a principle of justice.  Counterfactual choice in the “original position” is an unwieldy and unnecessarily extravagant way of generating the incontestably desirable impartiality of the rule of law. But Rawls is not wrong to see that the basic institutional rules have distributive consequences, and that these consequences may provide reasons to reject some candidate principles of social cooperation.

I should say that by no means do I take my Rawls neat. Like Rawls, I am a kind of contractarian who thinks the justification of basic institutions involves their being generally to the benefit of everyone, especially the least well-off.  Like I said, I don’t think the original position/veil of ignorance business is all that illuminating in the end, if used as anything more than an intuition pump. Scanlon ends up distilling it down to what rules are and are not “reasonably rejectible” for a good reason. I think a strict interpretation of maximin (e.g., not okay for everyone else to to gain a million if the working class loses a dollar.) is crazy, and that talk of “justifying inequalities” in Rawls’ Second Principle is based on a mistake. I deplore Rawls’ completely unjustified analytic nationalism. And Rawls’ discussion of luck and desert has always struck me as flat-out confused, and I think has had a terrible influence in political philosophy. Rawls is a neo-Kantian, I am a neo-sentimentalist. I also disagree with Rawls at a profound level about the relationship between democracy and liberty. Let me say a bit more about that.

Rawls is genuinely a liberal thinker. Liberty has categorical priority in his system. Political equality via democracy, he thinks, is the best means for achieving and maintaining liberty. Rawls worries a lot that self-reproducing and/or widening economic inequalities threaten the conditions for democracy and therefore the conditions for liberty. I think Rawls is not really very careful here and is pretty poor on the political economy of democracy. I am a James Buchananite here, and I think a great deal more of the necessity of constitutional constraints on the scope of democratic government than does Rawls. But it is worth nothing that Buchanan, too, more or less buys in to Rawls’ general analytical framework. Richard Epstein is thinking much the same thing is his obituary of Rawls when he argues that adding “institutional realism” to Rawls “ironically” renders libertarian conclusions.

I’ve drifted away from Gordon’s essay, haven’t I? Gordon’s real beef with Rawls seems to be his later ideas about “public reason,” ideas that I like a lot. I’ll tackle that in another post. For now let me point you here.

If you’re local, please come by and say “see ya later” to me and Kerry tonight. Details here.

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 and find it very difficult to do anything else. What I need is to identify my best ideas, pull myself out of the infinite pool of combinatorial possibility, dry myself off, take a seat and buckle down on embodying my best ideas in some medium intelligble to someone other than me. Which is why I would be screwed without stimulants. Or blogs. If uppers keep me from going off on creative tangents while I’m trying to work, that’s a feature, not a bug, because then I might possibly get something done.

When I was a teenager, I had a fanstasy that I could get paid or famous simply from having interesting ideas. It turns out people won’t pay you for interesting ideas unless you show up at a certain place and at a certain time to express them verbally in an entertaining format, or unless you write them down. It’s hard for me and not at all as nice as doing the backstroke through Platonic heaven.

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 one hierarchy, and, in so far as any one ranking system is dominant and generally accepted as constituting the social order, demanding that those who are deferred to should make manifest their respect and consideration for those who render them services.

The argument can, in part, be transposed to a lower key. Two inequalities are better than one. It is better to have a society in which there are a number of different pecking orders, so that a person who comes low according to one order can nevertheless rate highly according to another. One advantage that English society used to have over American was that whereas in America wealth was the only criterion, in England social standing was largely independent of wealth, and could, therefore, act as a corrective. More generally, it is good that there should be an athletic hierarchy besides the academic one, so that boys who are not blessed with brains may nevertheless be, and feel themselves to be, the stars of the football field. A man may not be a great success economically but still can be a big noise in the Boy Scout Association or the pigeon fanciers’ club. So long as we have plenty of different inequalities, nobody need be absolutely inferior. It is only if, in the name of equality, we set about eliminating them all, that we shall succeed in eliminating many of them and thereby make those that remain far more burdensome.

Egalitarians are angered when the argument from Universal Humanity is called in aid of inegalitarian conclusions, and produce vehement counter-arguments against it. They will not accept that the college servant is really better off than the prosperous proletarian, however much happier he may subjectively suppose himself to be, because the mere fact that the society recognises a difference in status between the college servant and, say, the fellows is itself an affront to human dignity. If we differentiate at all between one man and another on account of the social functions they fulfil, then we are no longer regarding them as men but merely as performers of certain roles. The bathroom attendant may think that he is valued for himself alone, but he is wrong; he is valued merely as a cleaner of baths and lavatories, merely as a pair of hands, merely as a useful automaton and not at all as a person, a child of God, a human being, an immortal soul, the bearer of an eternal destiny. This argument has powerful emotional appeal, but it is confused. It confuses the minimal and the maximal respect we may pay to a human being. Whatever a man does, whatever contribution he makes to our well-being, whatever his achievements, he is more than merely a doer, a contributor, an achiever, and I do not respect him properly, if I respect him merely as a doer, a contributor, or an achiever. If I am to respect him fully, I must respect him for himself, rather than merely as someone who satisfies certain specifications, just as a girl feels that she is not really loved unless she is loved for herself alone, and not her yellow hair. But only God can do that. In an imperfect world limited mortals have only limited respect for most other people. The respect which affords a basis for political argument is not a maximal respect we can aspire to but seldom achieve; rather, it is a minimal respect which we all ought to pay to everybody else. It does not exhaust the whole of political argument, but simply provides an incontrovertible starting point. I respect another man’s humanity by observing a certain set of minimum conditions towards him—by not killing him, by not torturing him, by not leaving him to starve by not depriving him of civil rights—and it is important to see these conditions as minimum conditions which must be fulfilled rather than as maximum conditions to which we should aim but which we cannot be blamed if we fail to achieve. If we set our sights too high, we shall secure nothing.

Yup. The multiplication of inequalities through the multiplication of status dimensions is perhaps the chief way in which liberal market societies achieve rough equality of status. It’s counterintuitive but true: more ways of being unequal in status increases the chance of enjoying high status and reduces the chance of being humiliated by inescapably low status. That many egalitarians are so eager to sniff at this is, to my mind, an indication that many of them aren’t so much concerned with the inequalities that matter most to most people. The motivated thinking seems to go something like this: If the best means of bringing everyone up to a minimum of status or a minimum sense of self-respect needn’t involve a lot economic leveling, then pride in being the president of the local PTA must be self-deluded crap. But where’s the respect in that?

Of course, most egalitarians see the minimum equality of respect implied by an equality of rights as too little. I guess I do too. I demand a somewhat more substantive equality in the sense that each has the necessary means to exercise her rights in a worthwhile way. We don’t respect others in this minimal sense if we don’t care whether it seems pointless to them to dream up some relatively long-term plans, because they doubt whether they will be able to act effectively to enact them. But we don’t give people that respect by politically “guaranteeing” them these means, either, because there is nothing in the nature or history of government to cause us to believe it is specially competent to make good on them. We give people their due portion of respect by attempting to maximize the probability that they will have these means. That’s likely to require both private and public assistance, but there’s no way to honestly guarantee that people need it will get it. We can say anything we want. What matters is what people get. The closest we can get to a guarantee is by cultivating a system of institutions that maximizes the production of wealth.

And it happens that this kind of system is one of mind-boggling task specialization and spatial distribution–a system that gives almost everyone a way to make things better for others, a system that implicates almost everyone in the process of wealth-creation that is as close as we come to a guarantee. In a market system, when we do our jobs, we help to provide for others–we help make available to others the means for building a life–in the way that respect requires, and this in turn gives us reason to respect people who do their jobs. Respecting someone as “a doer, a contributor, or an achiever” is no small thing.

In addition to supplying meaningful work that allows each of us to contribute in some real way to the welfare of others, successful market cultures create a climate for proliferating communities of affinity, much like the Great Barrier Reef creates a climate for a teeming proliferation of exotic sea life. On the job and in our “scenes” is where most of us get our quota of status. Our jobs and our standing in our multiple elective communities provide us grounds to respect ourselves and grounds for others to respect us. When we pretend not to see a beggar making an appeal, we do not treat her as an equal in even this small way, perhaps because we suspect she has done too little to merit even a quantum of respect. It is not really so hard to look someone squarely in the eyes, in the way a person acknowledges another’s personhood, but it is easier when we are all part of a joint enterprise of cooperation, improving life infinitesimally but actually for one another. And it is easier to confidently to hold another’s gaze, to feel an equal, when you are in your own small community, in your own small way, somebody. Because it doesn’t seem small to you.

But that’s all sort of beside the point. Because our government’s actual respect for its subject’s “merely formal” political rights is so sorry that it seems that Lucas’ “minimal respect” is fairly demanding after all, and there’s really nothing morally unambitious in aiming at this kind of liberal equality.

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 on red lights when it is marked, not double parking, even if you’re just going to be one minute while you fetch your latte.  And so on. When’s the last time you jaywalked? Lunch? People are more or less rational and tend to respond to incentives, and therefore the roads are a zone of patterned lawlessness. We all know what infractions the cops care about—how much over the speed limit is too much over, etc.— and we tend to respond accordingly. We even tend to internalize and moralize the rules whose expected cost of violation is relatively high. It’s more efficient that way. And thus our huffing indignation is easily riled by those who face different incentives and so flout different rules than the ones we flout without reflection.

This morning on my ride to work I coasted through a stop sign in front of a police cruiser that was approaching from the road to my right. I gave a little embarrassed smile and a little wave. She made a little disapproving face and waved back. It’s anarchy I tell you. Anarchy! I got to work in four minutes.

Special thanks to commenter theomobiud who officially wins the thread with this dramatic illustration of justice:

Sometimes people just get what’s comin’ to ‘em, I guess. Now, that guy on the shoulder’s getting off scott free, but he’s pretty obviously a menace to people with engine trouble who might need to pull over. He’ll get his.

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., really are the most efficient way to do things, all things considered, then sure. But I never get a clear sense from many libertarians that they grasp the extent of the subsidies, or the very significant crowding-out effects of our massively expensive state-supported auto-based transportation infrastucture.

Also, bikes. People complain about bikers breaking traffic laws. Well, I’m guilty, and I’m damn well going to keep doing it. A lot of traffic regulations make sense for cars, but just don’t for bikes. For example, I ride home almost every day the wrong way up a one way street, and nobody coming the other way gives a damn. Why should they? I honestly don’t give a fig about my carbon footprint (and anyway, since I’m not a breeder, I really should get carbon carte blanche). But I like biking because it’s faster than driving — because I blow through stop signs, go the wrong way on one-ways, etc. Were I suddenly to become fastidious about heeding traffic laws intended to regulate cars, one of the main advantages of biking over driving would evaporate. So I think people who do give figs about carbon really ought to encourage bikers to break traffic laws, or at least promote EXTRA traffic laws for drivers, in order to increase the relative benefit of biking. How about intersections where four-way purple means you’ve got to stop unless you’re on a bike? That would be pretty sweet.

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 so you’re tempted to get too swept up in idolotrous Americanism, here’s Herbert Spencer and George Kateb on patriotism. Also, Muppets, which are irrefutable evidence of the superiority of distinctively American culture.

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 I’m back. With a vengeance!

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 think a lot of people would say yes: There’s a distinction, obviously, but I don’t think all that many spouses would be inclined to forgive their husbands (or wives) if they explained that they only liked to watch the prostitute they’d hired. And hard-core porn, in turn, is nothing more than an indirect way of paying someone to fulfill the same sort of voyeuristic fantasies: It’s prostitution in all but name, filtered through middlemen, magazine editors, and high-speed internet connections. Is it as grave a betrayal as cheating on your spouse with a co-worker? Not at all. But is it on a moral continuum with adultery? I don’t think it’s insane to say yes.

That’s Ross Douthat. I think this only makes sense from the perspective of a once almost universal, now simply common, and in any case very silly assumption that sex with a spouse is the one permissible form of sex. So, any deviation from that one case of good sex is some grade of bad sex. This reminds me of Jimmy Carter’s admission that he had “committed adultery in his heart many times.” Simply thinking about touching yourself while thinking of someone not your wife is somewhere on the Douthat-Carter moral continuum. However, for most people whose minds have not been addled by religious dogma, the distinction between touching yourself and touching someone not your spouse or committed monogamous partner is well nigh categorical. One’s just wrong, one’s just not.

Also, pause to consider that similarity is not a transitive relationship. I am similar to a kitten in that we are both mammals. Kittens are similar to cotton balls in that they are both fluffy. I am not therefore similar to, or on some continuum with, a cotton ball.

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 who, with good reason, worry about the solvency of transfer programs in an age of population decline, replacement immigration looks like a partial solution, and therefore xenophobia is part of the problem. But for many if not most of the people preoccupied by fertility rates, immigration is no solution at all. The question isn’t about whether the United States, Singapore, or France will be without people in 2100; it’s about what kind of people will populate those countries: what they will look like, what they will teach in their schools, what God they will bow before. Mark Steyn’s America Alone warns that within a few generations Europe will be a Muslim continent. When Pat Buchanan discusses depopulation in The Death of the West, he does not proceed to suggest we replace children of European descent with Mexican laborers. Pro-natalist policies in Quebec, Singapore, and until recently Israel implicitly target a preferred ethnic group, attempting to fill the future with the demographics desired by the current political class.

[...]

At the heart of any fertility incentive lies an attempt to encourage a particular group of women to orient their bodies in a traditional way. Every pro-fertility policy is an effort to slow cultural transformation, to stabilize a society’s ethnic composition, to ossify a current conception of a national culture by freezing the genetic makeup of a nation. From Poland to Singapore, swollen wombs are a bulwark against change.

There is a reason we speak of “Mother Russia” and “Mother India.” Feminist sociologists such as Nira Yuval-Davis refer to women as the “boundary markers” of a state or society. While men may leave, fight, and be compromised, women represent purity and continuity. Yuval-Davis points out in her book Gender and Nation that the Hitler Youth Movement had different mottos for girls and boys. The boys’ motto was: “Live faithfully; fight bravely; die laughing.” For girls: “Be faithful; be pure; be German.” Girls simply had to be. They were the collective.

In times of great social anxiety, we see new calls for women to return to home and hearth—calls alternately cast as a return to tradition and as a progressive leap forward, but efforts, nonetheless, to enlist women in a national project while defining the boundaries of national inclusion. Depopulation is not a given, but ideologically fraught and scientifically questionable debates about gender, race, and culture will be with us no matter which way the population swings. “To know what demography is, we need to know what a population is,” the French social scientist Herve Le Bras wrote in The Invention of Populations. “That is where the trouble begins.”

Spot on! The way I see it, those obsessed with fertility are people who think the culture they desire cannot possibly win the argument against competing cultures. So, they conclude, it’s down to brute baby-making force: the culture that wins the fertility war wins the culture war. In contrast, I think liberal market culture has such immense, salient rewards (wealth, longevity, happiness, etc.) that it is not only possible to win the argument, but that we are in fact winning it. Of course, part of the winning is dynamist cultural synthesis. So if you’ve got a conservative, zoological view of cultural preservation which fixes on the importance of high-fidelity copying of inessential aspects of a culture’s history (costumes, holidays, rites, cuisine, skin colors etc.), you’re going to have a hard time of it. But if you care about the essential core of liberal modernity, you should be delighted with how things are going. You’ll eat your szechuan taco pizza and you’ll love it.

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 genetic advantages. Please tell us whether you agree with the following statement:

- It is fair that those genetically-advantaged people make more money than others.

Meanwhile, subjects who had been assigned to receive a concrete question were asked:

Suppose that Amy and Beth both want to be professional jazz singers. They both practice singing equally hard. Although jazz singing is the greatest natural talent of both Amy and Beth, Beth’s vocal range and articulation is naturally better than Amy’s because of differences in their genetics. Solely as a result of this genetic advantage, Beth’s singing is much more impressive. As a result, Beth attracts bigger audiences and hence gets more money than Amy. Please tell us whether you agree with the following statement:

- It is fair that Beth makes more money than Amy.

Surprisingly, subjects who were given the abstract question said that it was not fair, but subjects who were given the concrete question said that it actually was fair! In other words, it seems that each individual person is torn between left and right. People seem to have a kind of leftist intuition in the abstract but to move to the right when they turn to more concrete cases. Perhaps the differences we observe between the views of different individuals are due in part to the degree to which they hold on to this abstract principle.

I don’t actually think this is very surprising. Of course, the actual explanation of any pattern of holdings is always concrete. So repeat the Beth and Amy case a million times over, and you should still get “fair”. I’d guess this is why people with left-leaning ideologies tend not to unreflectively think that the relative success of friends and family is unfair. If pushed, they might retreat to higher level of abstraction and say they do think it’s unfair, but their revealed day-to-day talk and behavior tends not to reveal any serious suspicion of injustice in their own case.

I’m trying out the Disqus comment system. Please try it and tell me what you think of it. Perhaps some of you can start fighting with each other, so we can see how the threading works…

There is an interesting discussion at Public Reason about coming from both the discussion of David Estlund’s new book and a post by Nicole Hassoun about the role of the social scientific (using that term very broadly) evidence in political philosophy. I’ve got a lot of thoughts about that. Here’s one largely ad hominem thought.

There is (what should be) an unsurprisingly large amount of motivated cognition among philosophers when they think about this issue. This is of course the natural human reluctance (philosophers are people, too!) to diminish the importance, authority, or relevance of one’s own expertise. When it is suggested you might need to know, say, a good deal of economics or the literatures that actually compare the performance or real institutions, in order to be able to know confidently whether your argument for the welfare state or whatever goes through or not, one sees a tendency to either deny that you do need to avail yourself of the relevant bodies of knowledge (these people tend to defend strongly utopian political theorizing), to really let motivated cognition run wild and pretty crudely cherry-pick your way through a bit of the relevant literature, or some combination of quasi-a priorist soft utopianism and limited cherry-picking.

But shouldn’t it be impossible to take seriously an argument to the effect that, say this or that policy is required in order to secure the conditions for the development of some capacity, in the absence of (a) a well-empirically-grounded theory of the nature of that capacity and its development, and (b) some kind of actual evidence that this or that policy in fact has the kind of effect on it that one hypothesizes? I wouldn’t mind so much if political philosophy arguments were more often in the form of “Hey, here’s a conjecture! I suggest somebody competent to do so try to find out if it’s true.” I would be quite happy if I saw more “Hey, here’s a conjecture, and here’s a my attempt to honestly synthesize the relevant literature in a first pass at getting the answer.” That would be terrific. But usually, the argument aims to establish something substantive with an armchair, a Joe Stiglitz op-ed, and something remembered from the Tuesday Science Times.

Over just the past decade, moral philosophers have made huge strides in intelligently using, and even creating, findings in psychology. Political philosophers, I fear, have yet to catch up.

From the Post’s article about e-books:

“We don’t see people buying both versions,” one publishing executive told Wyatt. “I think there is almost a one-to-one cannibalization.”

Curious. Could it be that there exist people who will buy a $9.99 electronic version but would not have bought the $19.95 paper version? Yes! For I am one of those people. I’ve bought a good number of books on the Kindle, few of which I ever would have purchased otherwise. And most of the actual books I buy on Amazon are used anyway, and that’s got to be worse for the publisher.

I deal with a lot of books for research, reviewing, and Bloggingheads book chats. I don’t so much read these as use them. The Kindle is very bad for riffling, which I do a lot of. And it’s useless for the scholarly task of creating and looking up citations, since, through some gross oversight, the Kindle fails to relate e-book locations to the page number in the corresponding paper text. However, I find it wonderful for actual reading, and I have been on a kick of buying novels and other sorts of edifying literary entertainments for the Kindle. I don’t think I would have otherwise bought The Emperor’s Children, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, or Kafka on the Shore, for example. So the Kindle is making these publishers money they wouldn’t otherwise have made while improving my literary um… literacy.

Question: Is the fact that people often wait for the less-expensive paperback version of a book also comparable to eating the flesh of your own kind?

Also: The Emperor’s Children is overrated. It felt to me like an Ayn Rand novel with slightly less cardboard characters (or maybe the conversations of New York intellectuals really are that shallow), no really interesting ideas (despite the evident ambition to have ideas), and often overly precious prose. But it was really fun to read because I like Ayn Rand novels.

They keep changing the day on me, but Free Will’s up at Bloggingheads TV. This week I talk to University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols about his book Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment, psychopaths, our intuitions about free will, and other interesting thing. There is also a book giveaway, which you can still possibly win!

Lane Kenworthy writes:

I’m not sure why Broda and Romalis, or Levitt and Wilkinson, think this should alter our assessment of the trend in inequality. Do they mean to suggest that the revealed preference of the poor for cheap goods is exogenous to their income? In other words, people with low incomes simply like buying inexpensive lower-quality goods, and they would continue to do so even if they had the same income as the rich. Likewise, the rich simply have a taste for better-quality but pricier goods, and they would continue to purchase them even if they suddenly became income-poor. If this is the assumption, I guess the conclusion follows. But I can’t imagine the authors, or anyone else, really believe that.

Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems as though Kenworthy’s response might be based on some kind of conceptual misunderstanding. I’m not sure that this is it, but is the idea here that there is a single, standard, uniform price index, perhaps kept in a vault in Paris next to that famous platinum-iridium bar, the standard meter? But there is no standard index with which to determine the one true rate of inflation, or one true rate of change in real wages, because there is no one true standard consumption basket.

It seems that Kenworthy thinks there is something suspect about looking at the typical consumption basket of people at one part of the income distribution, looking at the typical consumption basket of people at another part of the income distribution, and then determining separately the change in rate of actually experienced inflation for people at those points in the distribution. I don’t see how this requires any weird assumptions about the exogeneity of preferences to income. All it requires is that we take seriously what different kinds of people tend to buy.

Think about it this way. Suppose you’ve got a country with only poor people and a country with only rich people. In each country, their version of the BLS creates something like the CPI. We find that price inflation is lower in the poor country. Then the rich country annexes the poor country. Does calculating separate CPIs suddenly become a kind of mistake?

As I noted in my first post on this paper, when I talked very, very briefly to Sachs about my paper on inequality, looking at the change in price of the typical consumption baskets of the rich and poor was the one thing he suggested one might try to do to get a better sense of what’s happening in terms of the trend in real consumption inequality. I said I didn’t have the technical wherewithal to do that. But Broda and Romalis do. I’m not convinced that they or Sachs or Levitt is confused.

In this week’s Free Will, I chat with Jeff Sharlet, author of the shocking new book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. I’m prone to skepticism about shadowy cabals, but I found this book both believable and upsetting. Jeff (a contributing editor to Harpers and Rolling Stone) was apparently a bit worried about talking to a Cato suit, but it seems to have turned out okay:

When Bloggingheads TV, the website that produces those video “diavlogs” you see these days in the fold of the online NYT, told me they’d given my new book, The Family, to Will Wilkinson of the conservative libertarian Cato Institute , I was a little concerned. The elite fundamentalists about whom I write are particularly passionate about what some call “biblical capitalism,” a literally religious devotion to free markets. Wilkinson, as you can imagine, is a big believer in free markets, too, and for that reason I thought he and I might have a very contentious conversation.

Oh me of little faith in the wisdom of Bloggingheads. Wilkinson turned out to be an ideal respondent — indeed, he may have understood aspects of the book better than I did when I wrote it. Most importantly, he recognized that biblical capitalism uses the veneer of free markets as a cover for the cronyism of the anointed. It’s dishonest libertarianism, “self-interest by proxy,” in Wilkinson’s brilliant phrase — the exact opposite of the responsible, transparent libertarianism championed by Wilkinson.

I’m glad that came across!

For those of you in the greater Washington, DC metropolitan statistical area, I’ll be on a panel devoted to the discussion of Arthur Brooks’ new book Gross National Happiness. UVA’s Jonathan Haidt and AEI’s Sally Satel will also comment. You can register here.

Yesterday Kerry and I rented a ridiculously large boat with a crew of two in the little fishing village of Selimiye, near the point where the Aegean meets the Mediterranean. They took us around to little islands off the coast and to good swimming spots. The water, as you can see, is astonishingly clear and, in the shallows, is the color they paint the bottom swimming pools, I guess to make them look like the Aegean. The highlight of the trip was our time exploring a small island containing the ruins of a Greek Christian monastary, now inhabited only by a herd of goats and a lonely donkey.

Today, we’re in Pammukale, which is weird and awesome. Kerry’s got a pic.

Kusadasi, Turkey

After the Nudge forum tomorrow afternoon, Kerry and I are off to Turkey for about a week and a half. The deafening silence you will hear is me on a beach worrying about work. Anyway, we’ve made absolutely no plans, other than arranging a rental car in Istanbul. For all I know we’ll be sleeping in it. If you’ve been to Turkey and know of awesome stuff to do and see, please report below. If you can (in)validate guidebook stuff, that’s terrific, but if you know anything weird, out of the way, or word-of-mouthy, even better.

Tyler and Alex’s son give their impressions of the party at Robin Hanson’s lovely home yesterday afternoon. It’s a special kind of relief to be able to spend a few hours with a whole house full of people with whom one does not have to be defensive about thinking rationally (i.e. “reductively”, “autistically”, “soullessly”) about tough questions. This is a party where you’re the weird one if you don’t think it’s appropriate to apply cost-benefit analysis to the choice to have kids, or if you don’t think it’s more or less obvious that open immigration is welfare-enhancing, or that robots are awesome. Good times. Here’s some pics.

Let me emphasize that I’m not trying to discourage anyone from having kids, or another kid. I’m just really genuinely interested in the real net cost of kids to their parents in terms of lifetime happiness, consumption, status, etc. I think people should make hugely significant choices, like how many kids to have, with accurate information about those costs. If people want a bunch of kids anyway, despite the costs, then that’s just evidence other considerations matter to them. And I’m a pluralist, so that’s cool. But if people are rushing into these kinds of choices on the basis of bad or incomplete folk information, and they end up worse off than they might have been, by their own lights, then that’s not good at all.

Bryan Caplan and I continue our intra-libertarian cage-match about the benefits of birthing. Am I crazy? Or is Bryan?