http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle The Sweet Release of Reason Tue, 13 May 2008 14:54:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en If you're interested, you can watch or listen to the Cato Forum on Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler's Nudge here. My comments are last, after Sunstein and Chorvat's. http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/05/13/nudge-forum/ I hate it. I am terrible at it. As a consequence, I bought nothing in Turkey other than tickets to various things, room, food, and a poster of Ataturk. And I overpaid for all of these things, I'm sure, which has left me a bit bitter about the place. Surely ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/05/13/haggling/ We got back yesterday afternoon, after a layover in Vienna. Austrian efficiency turned out to be a refreshing contrast to the customary Turkish goat rodeo. I'll have a few posts this week inspired by thoughts about Turkey. http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/05/13/back-from-turkey/ 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 ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/05/07/selimiye/ Kusadasi, Turkey http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/05/05/the-view-from-our-window/ 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 ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/04/30/off-to-turkey/ Jim Manzi graciously answers Josh Patashnik's reply at the TNR Environment and Energy blog to my optimal carbon tax post. I find Jim extremely convincing. Is he missing something? http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/04/30/the-optimal-carbon-tax-a-fatal-conceit/ The Economist Intelligence Unit ranks Denmark the best place in the world to do business. The actual Hong Kong is ranked 7th. These United States finish just under Sweden. If only we could adopt the Nordic model and have a less fettered capitalism! [Via Nordophile Justin Fox] http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/04/30/the-hong-kong-of-scandinavia/ Some thoughts relevant to general issues about kids raised on isolated compounds by religious fanatics... There's nothing wrong with false consciousness explanations, as long as they are actually explanatory. You've just got to specify actual mechanisms. Political freedom loses much of its point in the absence of psychological freedom. Rationality and ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/04/29/false-consciousness-psychological-freedom-and-pluralism/ I agree with Kerry in being a bit perplexed by what seems to me unreflective anti-gubmint reactions of libertarians to the FLDS imbroglio. It seems clear enough to me that these kids are basically brainwashed, isolated, and made dependent in a way that makes it all-but-impossible for them to freely ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/04/28/down-on-the-compound/ I've been complaining for a while now about Robert Frank's insistence on using the contingent house-school link to make his positional externalities argument. Tim Lee catches the latest instance in Frank's recent WaPo piece. Tim nails it: This is an eloquent indictment of our perverse system of linking schools to real ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/04/27/robert-frank-missing-the-story-on-schools-and-positional-competition-again/ 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 ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/04/27/geoffrey-sayre-mccord-on-free-will/ Carbon emissions aren't a negative externality of energy consumption. Global warming isn't a negative externality, either. Warming will have some positive effects, too. It's the damage or harm from global warming that's the negative external effect of energy consumption. But that's not quite right, either. Because it's not clear ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/04/27/optimal-carbon-tax/ 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 ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/04/27/econonerd-shindig/ When Tyler says to shout something from the rooftops, I comply. From Zubin Jelvah's summary of a new paper from Christian Broda and John Romalis [pdf]: Instead of focusing purely on what's produced outside of the country, Broda and Romalis turn their attention to an interesting but obvious relationship between imports ... http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/04/27/non-uniform-inflation-and-nominal-income-inequality/