DISQUS

Sig's point is important -- there are enzyme and receptor polymorphisms out there that predispose their bearers toward abuse of certain kinds of psychoactives. But the solution to that kind of problem is still better information, not enforced ignorance.

One thing I don't see discussed is that the IPCC estimates assume more fossil fuels will be burned than we actually appear to have based on current best estimates. Dave Rutledge from Caltech has a pretty info-dense post on this (link below) with some nice graphs -- re-running the simulations he came up with a figure at the extreme low end of the IPCC estimates, with a CO2 peak of 460 ppm around 2070 resulting in a global temperature increase peaking at only 1.8 degrees around 2150.

So far as I know he's the first to stop and take an empirical approach to this parameter in the models. If he's even close to being right then the climate change threat is being overstated significantly and the "peak oil" problem understated correspondingly.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2697

Why the heck are you guys acting like it has to be either/or rather than both?

Caldwell will tell you that most of what's in TFC is suspect -- Uncle Fritz was going senile by that point in his life and it was very heavily edited by WW Bartley, to the point where it's more of a Bartley-Hayek hybrid than a genuine Hayek book.

Ask Caldwell about Wittgenstein's influence on Hayek. I can see it peeking out whenever he talks about language and the embodiment & transmission of knowledge in the form of rules, but it's never explicit (so far as I know -- I haven't read Hayek's essay on his cousin) and I'm curious to know if Caldwell can shed any light on this, in terms of how much influence there actually was and the differences between the two.

Also, I've had the vague notion for a while that Hayek meshes very well with much of Quine, but never sat and thought too much about it. If you and Caldwell could explore this at all, that'd be super-neat.

This sounds strangely familiar to my ears.

This paper by James Heckman might be of interest:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/104/33...

What Ken said.

Of course Will is going to just parrot whatever Kerry says on this one, for obvious reasons.

See what I did there? It was rude, blatant, unwarranted ad hominem and completely failed to address your substantive and respectable argument. So why is it okay for you to dismiss DDF just as glibly?

Neither. Based on the facts you guys both raise I conclude that the optimal strategy is to have more kids but hire a nanny to take care of them. That went out of style at some point, but even middle class families could afford a Mexican one if we had a sane immigration policy in place.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/071006...

You should ask him what he thinks of cloning yourself instead of having children and watch the smoke pour out of his ears.

I should also add that my meta-policy instincts are to eliminate as many of these non-market factors as possible from the equation, hence why I'm happy to raise the citizenship bar if it makes it politically easier to increase labor mobility.

Will,

At first it sounds like you're talking about disagreements over the degree of phenotypic canalization, which is something nice and empirical that I can get along with. But I suspect you may have an inadequate appreciation for how even small but consistent genetic biases at the individual level can make a big difference at the level of groups, for things like social organization and economic performance.

Say you've got two populations, A and B. Say that A has a slight genetic bias that results in its average IQ being 5 points higher than B's (or makes them just slightly more hardworking, or more conscientious, or whatever other trait you take to be a big contributor to prosperity). If you picked two individuals at random from the respective populations and compared their productivity you wouldn't expect them to perform all that differently. But at the population level A could end up vastly outperforming B because these small biases accumulate over many trials to result in a significant effect on total productivity.

So let's say that, holding these (small but not insignificant) genetic biases constant, you start transplanting people from population B to A. This will tend to cause the rate of increase in prosperity for A to decrease. On average this will be a large win for the transplants, a small loss for the older As, and presumably neutral for the remaining Bs. Maybe this is a change worth making and maybe it isn't, but it seems clear that there's a tradeoff in this kind of situation between inclusiveness and rate of economic growth.

The same sort of reasoning applies to social organization too (I'm thinking of your old essay about ethical infrastructure). All you need to presume are relatively small biases in relevant traits that persist across environments and this becomes an issue. I think this is what Moldbug was clumsily getting at when he talked about the US becoming more like Mexico. Maybe it'll turn out that the tradeoff is morally worth it up to some inflection point, but it's still a tradeoff.

It's very hard to get a reliable idea of where the magic balance point of ethical optimality is here because there are so many variables at play. So predictably it turns into a game of "pick your favorite moral intuition and hammer it which as much rhetorical force as you can, and under no circumstances examine your own assumptions as closely as you scrutinize the other guy's". Which is pretty much where I lose interest. My policy instincts are to lower transaction costs and let the market sort it out, but unfortunately there's a lot of non-market factors that keep it from being this simple.

BTW, if you're looking for a small cudgel with which to beat back Vdare types, check this out.

Ugh. s/shibboleth/epithet

Will, I've suddenly forgotten what a "genetic determinist" is. Please explain it to me. I know it can't possibly mean "someone who thinks that the genetically-mediated phenotypic differences between individuals (and between racial clusters) have considerable practical relevance both on an individual and sociological level", because that would just be using a weird shibboleth for someone who acknowledges the obvious. So what, above and beyond that, do you have in mind here?

(NB, I am pretty much where I've been for a while now on the immigration issue: Labor mobility needs to be separated from citizenship and all that entails. Coming into any country to work should be easy; becoming a citizen should be hard.)

OT, but if Will is willing to take posting requests I have one for him: Bryan Caplan is having a lively exchange with Greg Clark over at EconLog, and they seem to be bumping up against Parfitesque issues. To my the best of my recollection I don't think Will has ever commented on the mere addition paradox or non-identity problem, but I'd like to see what he thinks!

I know, I know. :)

Really, I think a guest worker program would probably be the way out of such a bind. I think it's the best sort of compromise we can hope for, so I really don't understand why it's resisted so strongly by some people . . .

Steve, what isn't serious is that you automatically consider that an argument against immigration rather than against the welfare state.

Will, would it be churlish of me to stomp my foot and demand some kind of response to my earlier comment? I think this isn't something that can just be ignored.

"There is no such thing as cheap labor."

Uh . . . right . . . which is why we never see workers with low wages. WTF?

I was making a ceteris paribus claim about immigration per se, not illegal immigration. Guys like Will want immigration to be above-board, so trying to shift the focus to illegals specifically confuses the issue.

BJK, "Mexico" does not suffer from poverty; Mexicans do. When those Mexicans move to America, they get lifted out of poverty. You can make an argument that there'd be more good done in the long run by encouraging them to be more productive *in Mexico*, but on the short-term level it makes no difference from the POV of division of labor and improvement of welfare whether you move the widget (trade) or move the person (immigration).

Will, you're right on the moral principles but glib on the practicalities. I'm going to pose you a serious question and expect a serious answer. Here's the scenario:

Let's say first generation immigrants from Mexico are generally productive and decent people, and that there's no compelling reason not to let them come here. But let's say that their kids and grandkids tend not to be so productive and decent -- that they tend to be lazier and commit crimes at a much higher rate than the first-geners and the population average of the US. So a downstream effect of more open immigration is a higher rate of crime in 20-40 years. As you know, there are costs to this -- not merely the cost of law enforcement, but the intangible erosion of the moral glue that helps make our society such a great place to live. It makes people trust eachother less, with all that implies.

Here we have a situation where the effect of more liberal policies is downstream erosion of liberal society, broadly defined. This scenario is manifestly a problem for people like you and I who want a more liberal world, forcing us to make some kind of hard choice either way. I haven't fully worked out my answer to this, though I have some ideas. What's yours, Will?

Though I should hope you care about his support for nationalizing health care the Kyoto protocol. Though to be fair he's surprisingly good on most other things.

I thought the central fallacy of incompatibilism was actually the fallacy of composition. By the same logic you can say "if the universe is made of atoms and energy then humans are invisible".

Gene: AI. Machines make choices all the time.

Also wasn't talking specifically about SSA, and neither was anyone else. The overall *worldwide* trend is toward convergence.