Disqus - Latest Comments for mike_k

Re: Happiness and the Delicacy of Taste

mk — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:28:15 -0000

I like the idea: cultivate appetites that are more likely to be satisfied, and whose satisfaction you can control. I would also suggest favoring appetites that are "positive-sum" or good for the world. I.e., not 15" rims on a beamer, but (if you believe in AGW) a hybrid or small car. Insufferable example, I know.

E.g., if you have enough money, it's good to be a foodie, and/or a music omnivore.

(At a detailed level, I'm not sure I fully understand Hume's distinctions. He says that it is desirable to be a person who loves "polite conversation" but hates "rudeness" but it is undesirable to be someone who really likes "favors and good offices" but hates "injury." The difference is subtle, too subtle I think.)

But the general point is good: tune your sensitivities towards things you can change. Niebuhr put it: "God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change."

Re: Reverse Stone Soup Saves Lives!

mk — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 03:45:49 -0000

we’re eliminating the rationale for the role private insurance companies play in our system, but insisting that it continue to revolve around them and, even better, handing them an enormous subsidy.

Is this really so hard to understand?

Liberals want to kick private insurers out of the health care system.
But, private insurers have lots of money and own some senators.
So, liberals can't quite get what they want.
Instead they want to get there in stages. In this bill, they will make private insurance companies irrelevant via regulation.
Someday in the future they will want to take the next step of kicking private insurers out the door for good, on the pretext that "they serve no good purpose."
Private insurers know this is the liberals' plan, so they want to be bought out in order to agree to even a step in that direction.

Re: Some Game Theory of Innovation

mk — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:14:21 -0000

It is good to get a good ROI but it's also good to have industries that employ people. If your people don't have the expertise to innovate in a high-growth emerging industry, you may be neglecting the opportunity to have good sources of employment sitting in your country employing people.

If everybody in China or wherever designs all the cool new technologies it really is (probably) true that China or wherever will be more likely to employ a lot of people to design and build those cool new things. We'll buy them and be happy about it but Americans really do have to do something. There's lots of things that Americans can do other than building those particular gadgets, but the more industries that want to employ people in the US the better.

Now, how does a government know if an industry is going to be tomorrow's hot new employment-driver? It doesn't know. Maybe VC firms are better at that. But VC firms will tend to underprovide research funding because of the very free-riding, knowledge-spillover reason that you cite in your post.

Since government is not driven by profit, it can underwrite the ground-breaking research that can create tomorrow's employment providers. Since it is government, it will also do a lot of stupid useless crap and funnel money to cronies. The question is how much do you get of each. And, it depends on the situation.

At least that's how I see it.

Re: A Little More Mystic Nationalism

mk — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:15:48 -0000

(c) war is the health of the state

Yes. Gov't is the only institution that can solve a massive security problem, so war makes gov't power necessary.

The act of starting a war aggravates the security problem, which makes people more dependent on gov't.

Given this incentive, it is very believable that gov'ts will tend to sell war overly frequently and overly aggressively.

Re: Why Are There So few Women in Philosophy?

mk — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:02:14 -0000

I'm also wondering whether women may be more practical. Philosophy (as distinguished from good philosophy) is often a lot like kids building a fort in the backyard -- it's often about that consequential, and about that connected to real problems. I suspect that guys who are frustrated with the world are more inclined to seek escape in abstractions. Women, first of all, are less likely to be socially withdrawn (fewer women are "evil geniuses in a secret lair"), and even if they are, smart withdrawn girls may have different coping mechanisms than smart withdrawn boys.

I think ultimately this has to do with biology although this is all pure speculation.

And, yes, philosophy has lots of social value too, and plenty of perfectly levelheaded people become philosophers. But I think there is a correlation between philosophizing and a retreat from practical life. A retreat which women may be less inclined to engage in.

Re: The Permanent State vs. Democratic Government

mk — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:26:59 -0000

This is brilliant spam.

Re: Inequalities in Health Care

mk — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:13:57 -0000

If the level of inequality in health outcomes is not seen as a binary, black-and-white question (does inequality exist) but rather quantitatively (how much inequality exists), then we can begin to see increasing equality of outcome as one among many competing societal goals. This means that we don't have to deny people treatment, we just need to increase the level of treatment of the less-well-off. At a certain point enforcing equality becomes absurd and counter-productive. We stop before we get there, obviously.

This is a common problem with thinking philosophically. Real life is a practical compromise, not a black-and-white question.

Re: The Legitimacy of Border Policy

mk — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 04:37:28 -0000

I think what's going on here is that the moral, human rights language speaks to a world that is very unlike the one we live in. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to live in that world!

Take your Iraq bombing example. Yes, following the logic to its conclusion, we need to ask Iraq before we bomb them. But following logic even more to its conclusion, we just shouldn't bomb them! Killing other people is wrong.

We're not peaceniks, so we accept that wars are still necessary in our world. What's really going on here is that "universal human rights" only have legal purchase in a world where there is a global government with a monopoly on the use of force. (At least I don't immediate see another way to obtain enforced universal human rights).

In such a hypothetical world, the US and Iraq [under Saddam, say] are like two citizens (or organizations, or sub-states in a federal regime) that want to kill each other. Well, no, you can't do that! It's against the law!

If there isn't a sufficiently strong central government then it doesn't matter what's against the law or not. So what this all comes down to is that these human rights are real moral considerations but they have no effective force in a world without deep global political coordination.

Thus, the libertarian argument for world governance. Ta-da!

Re: The Legitimacy of Border Policy

mk — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:58:00 -0000

The willingness to fight and die for your public-goods provider is surely a pragmatic decision and not a morally required one.

The citizen/state relationship could be as simple as "I'll give you some money to provide public goods, you do that." Plus public deliberation.

As for who participates in decision-making, perhaps it depends on the issue. Why not make migration a regional issue, since it affects everyone at once? It doesn't mean people from Guatemala are going to start voting on US tax rates.

However the real problem with the argument is that everything affects everybody. Trade policy affects what people can bring over the border. War affects whether the country next to me is getting bombed.

So actually this argument doesn't seem too good. How do you draw the line between what your neighbors can vote on and what not?

Re: The Legitimacy of Border Policy

mk — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:02:22 -0000

You're, pushing-my conception of political sovereignty, over the bor-der-li... ok sorry

Re: The Legitimacy of Border Policy

mk — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:58:59 -0000

Or "Nationalism ≈ Xenophobia / 2"

Better would be square root of xenophobia but no way to write that in a comment

Re: The Legitimacy of Border Policy

mk — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:54:11 -0000

Will, I disagree with you about a lot of things, but I give you major props for pushing this issue. You've helped to change my mind on the subject and I have come to agree with you that popular opinion on this subject is trapped by a benighted tribalism and a tendency to think in old patterns.

Why don't you get Cato to print up some "Nationalism is myopic" bumper stickers? I'll buy one.

Re: Unholy Trinity

mk — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:38:06 -0000

Two reasons why this won't happen:

1) Cost control is the second step of this two-step reform of health care. Cost control won't happen for another 3-4 years, probably. (Sure there are some baby steps in this iteration of reform, but only baby steps). The system has to be about to break. Then, citizens will say "don't take my health care away!", politicians will say "we must fix this system" etc.

2) Liberals believe that subsidized preventative care is crucial to improving health outcomes. That is in tension with the notion that citizens should be exposed to non-catastrophic health costs.

The tension is not irresolvable. In particular, if "excessive" non-catastrophic care can be left up to the wallets of citizens, but things like physicals and other useful preventative care can be subsidized, liberals will probably be happy. But that is not your scenario, it is just a scenario describing a particular kind of permanent insurance coverage.

Re: Three health care questions

mk — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:13:39 -0000

(2) Why is the fact that “every other industrial nation provide universal health care coverage” considered evidence for its desirability?

I think that if:
(A) you find yourself a lone example of certain policy when everyone else has adopted a different policy,
and
(B) you assume that everyone (including yourself) are reasonably rational actors and none with absolute grasp of the truth,
then
(C) simple Bayesian statistics clearly justifies increasing one's prior estimate of the desirability of the policy everyone else is following.

Of course, we can't answer analytically how much it should increase one's prior estimate. But it seems uncontroversial that it should be increased.

Re: Is Medicaid Something I Dreamed?

mk — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:04:11 -0000

Part of the problem with simply guaranteeing a minimum income may be that health-care expenditures are very high variance. For every 10 families that are almost completely fine, there's 1 family that has to spend tens of thousands of dollars on cancer treatment.

Theoretically, one could say that the 1 unlucky family should have spent its money on health insurance (which would cover the cancer treatments). And if the family was stupid enough not to have insurance, the person should die.

This strikes many people as draconian. So, many people are willing to be taxed to pay for certain kinds of health care even for those who were stupid enough not to buy it for themselves.

So, people get some kinds of health care whether or not they pay for it. Is that really fair? Maybe everyone should just be forced to get health care.

This is the kind of logic that leads people to say "stuff should be bought for people" instead of "money should be given to people."

And it's not outlandish logic. Think how badly it would pain you to see a family suffering death of one of its members because it was stupid enough not to buy health insurance even though it could've afforded it. Can we as a society let that happen, or will we always step in to pay for care? That's one of the pertinent questions here.

Re: CEO Pay and the Mechanisms of Inequality

mk — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:57:11 -0000

Jonathan - Sort of! According to what I'm saying, these random results are all instances of unfairness. But they may not have "enough force" to compel us to significantly redistribute along these lines.

To take a different example, which makes the idea seem more natural: some children are unlucky to be born with bad diseases. We should redistribute money to them as a matter of justice, to help give them a shot at a somewhat normal life.

Re: CEO Pay and the Mechanisms of Inequality

mk — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:30:25 -0000

Will -- I'm just describing a mechanism that explains some income inequality. It's an argument from justice and not just from the "badness" of poverty.

In some cases, poor people would have been richer if they'd had better opportunities early in life. But young people (babies, small children) are not blameable for the presence or lack of opportunity in their lives. They are thrust into their situation. Their status later in life is partly determined by the "lottery" of being born into a rich or poor family. The lottery is not fair. We can't change this lottery, but we can ameliorate some of its unfairness by giving more opportunity to the lottery's "losers". One way to give them more opportunity is to give them more money. That's the justice-based argument for some redistribution.

Another way to give them more opportunity is to target the precise mechanisms of opportunity -- let's give poor kids vouchers for expensive schools, let's make sure they have the right nutrition to grow big brains, let's make sure they have good health care. Those are all good things but it's actually a more ambitious project because it assumes that planners understand and can quantify the mechanisms of opportunity.

The real point is deeper than this, though. The "lottery" will always be there, with its unfairness, and fully eliminating its unfairness is impossible because it requires placing every baby in the exact same situation. It is unwise to strive for this ideal, but we should appreciate the force of the unfairness, as we weigh remedying it against other worthy goals (like self-determination or total well-being).

In that sense, income inequality actually literally is an unfairness (in fact, to varying degrees, all human difference affecting baby-raising environments is an unfairness) but fixing it shouldn't trump all competing values.

Re: CEO Pay and the Mechanisms of Inequality

mk — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:33:51 -0000

I'll continue to maintain that being born into a rotten material situation is an unfairness of life (i.e. an example where advantages/disadvantages come fully undeserved to people) that merits some remediation via redistribution or a safety net.

Re: Strategic Opinions

mk — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:30:52 -0000

In other words, minimize risk by choosing a randomized blend of different strategies.

Re: Strategic Opinions

mk — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:29:03 -0000

Intellectual mirroring can serve useful purposes, such as increasing trust and enabling cooperation. The decision to mirror or not to mirror should be a pragmatic one, driven by considerations like the likelihood of future cooperation, the anticipated benefits of dominant behavior, the risk of being wrong, etc.

In most cases this is hard to figure out so I think a reasonable heuristic is simply to make a more or less random decision, and then compensate for earlier errors based on how you feel. If you regret being overly cooperative, be annoying about the next thing that comes along.

Re: Unfair in the Abstract, Fair in the Concrete

mk — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:27:35 -0000

Let's say "restitution" instead of "retribution" which sounds adversarial.

Re: Unfair in the Abstract, Fair in the Concrete

mk — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:36:50 -0000

I'm a bit surprised anyone said the abstract scenario is unfair. Liberals don't commonly believe in full equality of condition, not anymore.

It would be interesting to replace "genetic advantage" with other differences like: "works harder", "has better luck", "knows the right people".

It would also be interesting to ask direct policy questions -- e.g. "should we fully redistribute genetically-based income inequalities until everyone's equal?"

It's fascinating how belief seems to be such a complex and context-specific thing. Totally unlike logic.

I wonder if the difference between the two beliefs comes down to incentives (a la Bryan Caplan's analysis of political irrationality). That is, who cares if I have the wrong abstract belief? What does it matter to me? Then, people are free to have whatever belief makes them feel good.