Disqus - Latest Comments for Will Wilkinson

Re: Do You Deserve Your Income?

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 08:42:14 -0000

Anderson:

The claim "I deserve my income," as applied to an individual's pretax income in free market economies, has considerable intuitive force. If true, it suggests a powerful moral claim against taxation for redistributive purposes, on the intuitively plausible supposition that a just economic order ought to ensure that people get what they morally deserve.

And then she's arguing: not true, right?

I'm not arguing that there "I deserve it" is a sufficient argument against taxation. I'm arguing that Anderson fails to undermine the "I deserve it" argument on the terms she sets for herself and thus fails with this argument to undermine the intuitive "powerful moral claim against taxation for redistributive purposes."

Re: Distributed Wealth-Enabling Conditions and Collective Entitlement

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 16:33:41 -0000

Dominic, He makes the Bonapartist argument, too. And you're right, he waffles between legitimacy and the perception of legitimacy in a way common to lawyers & political scientists that drive political philosophers crazy.

In any case, I find it hard to see him as making an argument about what people happen to believe, namely, that a lot of national wealth is a social product because there are diffuse social enabling conditions. That's not what regular people believe. That's what liberal law professors and political philosophers believe. So this can't feed into a popular perception of legitimacy or illegitimacy. He's got to be making a point about what actually does make a system legitimate.

Re: Coming to Boston

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 11:13:31 -0000

Huh?

Re: You Should Buy Explaining Postmodernism

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 19:47:40 -0000

Gareth, Don Lavoie was an Austrian who pretty nearly made that argument. See his Economics and Hermeneutics.

Re: I’m as Free as a Bird Now

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 01 May 2005 11:15:09 -0000

asg, Mike's argument doesn't go through without his question-begging construction of "can."

http://www.niu.edu/phil/~kapitan/power.shtml

Re: Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 06 May 2005 21:46:18 -0000

Kidding, of course. Voegli seems like a smart guy.

Re: My Socks are Cold Feet Insurance!

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 07 May 2005 09:27:27 -0000

PJ, Agreed. You can bet about anything. Of course, the point of social insurance isn't to insure against anything that could in principle be insurable. I was talking about events that incur losses, cause suffering, etc. Birthdays aren't that kind of thing.

Re: Ain’t Nothin’ Like the Real Thing, Baby

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 08 May 2005 09:18:40 -0000

Gareth, You can be mistaken about whether you have a headache!

I agree that property rights are social facts. But it is very easy for a society to be mistaken about social facts. Some facts depend on other social facts. If someone who does not have legal authority to marry you and your partner, but does it anyway, and everyone without exception believes it, it is still not true that you are legally married. The social fact of marriage piggybacks on the social fact of legal authority to marry, which piggybacks on the social fact of a body of laws, etc., etc.

Re: Self-Ruled or Rule-Ruled?

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 08 May 2005 11:21:19 -0000

Thanks, Javier. I'll take a look. My guess is that Mackie's definition of "reasonable voting method" must be pretty tendentious.

Re: Self-Ruled or Rule-Ruled?

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 08 May 2005 12:00:38 -0000

Yeah. I'm thinking of alternative democratic structures beyond different voting methods. All the methods you mention are ways of voting for representatives, for example. But also I'm interested in schemes, like Roberty Cooter's, that, instead of having a system where a single representative votes on a wide variety of issues, voters vote for single-issue representatives in overlapping single-issue jurisdictions. Or systems of direct referendum voting, etc. Or systems where voters can trade votes. Or even a system where there is lower threshold for constitutional amendment. These different democratic institutional structures can be combined with various different voting procedures like the ones you mention. I think you end up with wildly different outcomes. And that leads to the question of justification. It's simply not good enough to say that a system is legitimate because it is democratic. One has to justify the choice of one democratic system, which will bias the system in favor of certain kinds of outcomes, over another, which will bias the system in a different direction.

Re: Self-Ruled or Rule-Ruled?

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 08 May 2005 20:46:20 -0000

Public Choice III, by Dennis Mueller.

Re: You’re So Vain-ology

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 11:31:50 -0000

So maybe he's real flaw is his faithlessness.

Re: Behind the Veils

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 10:30:05 -0000

The test is whether your best descriptive theories of human nature and social order rule it out as a possibility. For instance, large-scale communism is pejoratively utopian because of both the calculation problem, and the incentive problem. Our best theories tell us that a large society without a price system, and which relies primarily on other-regarding motivation, will not be stable. So the way to tell is just to read social science and psychology.

Re: Is Game Theory Worth a Damn?

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 13:18:09 -0000

Why do you suppose that Schelling's course would not leave you wiser, as well as cleverer?

Schelling has brought a kind of lucid rigor to thinking about profound issues like nuclear deterrence, punishment, our relationships at the end of life, global warming, segregation, and more. If you actually read Schelling, it is awfully difficult to not admire his combination of analytic acuity and humane sensitivy as "wise."

Re: Who Am I? Why Am I Here?: Admiral Stockdale on the Anxiety of Choice (Guest-Starring Victor Frankl)

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 13:32:58 -0000

I think part of what I was trying to say is that an excellent person is likely to NOT struggle with choice, since the will find it easy to choose what is appropriate for them, and to not be distracted by the proliferation of irrelevant alternatives. But part of gaining this kind of self-knowledge is the discovery of what is appropriate for us, and that requires experimentation, and sometimes choosing badly.

Re: Utility Does Not Mean Utility

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 05:21:46 -0000

Glen, I know that most economists really think that preferences are like desires, and that satisfying desires leads to subjective well-being.

Obviously, economics isn't predictive unless one posits some regularities in preference orderings. The trouble is, economists would like two incompatible things: (1) for economics to be a priori and (2) for economics to be predictive. But you can have one or the other. Yet economists try to split the difference by substituting their folk psychological theory for a proper psychological theory, and just hope no one calls bullshit, so they don't have to leave the armchair.

Also, I didn't say preference wasn't in some sense a psychological notion. Preferences, like beliefs, are mental states. What I said was that preference satisfaction wasn't a psychological state. If a mouse walks into Krugman's kitchen and thereby fufills the satisfaction conditions of my preference for a mouse there, my global mental state won't have changed a bit. If utility is what you get when the world matches a preferences, then the utility I get from Krugman's mouse also fails to alter my overall mental state.

Re: Utility Does Not Mean Utility

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 05:57:21 -0000

Austen, I didn't mean to say that preference satisfaction couldn't feel good, or otherwise affects one's life, just that, on the official economist's theory of preference and utility, the connection between preference satisfaction and pleasure, well-being, or anything subjective, is decidedly contingent.

I do sort of think desire satisfaction theories of well-being are crazy. Counterfactual or full-information desire satisfaction theories aren't crazy, but then they're really not desire satisfaction theories at all, especially if what it turns out that a rational person ought to desire is the good. Tyler Cowen has pointed out a number of difficulties here in his excellent preference sovereignty paper... um... here:

http://www.gmu.edu/jbc/Tyler/preferencesovereignty.PDF

Re: Utility Does Not Mean Utility

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 07:05:47 -0000

Tim, I was particularly annoyed at Frank because he's a very sophisticated economist and I know he knows better. I think there's a rhetorical impulse at work here. He's an economist. Economists know about utility in the technical sense. People care about utility in the Bentham-Mill experiential sense, and about SWB, so Frank says that they're all the same thing, so that he can claim expertise in something that people actually care about.

Re: The Fake Paradox of Prosperity

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 05:59:44 -0000

Javier, Good point. But the happiness studies are not tracking a quantity of happiness, but the average of how happy folks say they are. Longer lifespans should, in fact, depress the average. Easterlin's study on happiness in the life cycle shows that self-reported happiness peaks at about 45 and declines slowly thereafter. So, each additional year in average lifespan ought to bring down average self-reported happiness. Check out this graph:
http://static.flickr.com/25/54022653_947adb6765_o.jpg

Re: The Fake Paradox of Prosperity

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 09:21:12 -0000

Yeah, that has to do with the lack of good panel data. Read this Easterlin paper, which is the most recent work on happiness accross the lifespan. As folks age, they become much less sastisfied with their health, family life (children move away; siblings dies, etc), and work (retirement). This is largely offset by rising satisfaction with finances (compound interest!), but not completely.

Here is the paper [doc]:
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~easterl/Lifecyhapsour.doc

Here is a useful summary power point presentation [ppt]:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct;=res&cd;=6&url;=http%3A//www.usc.edu/dept/socialwork/SFCCC/pdf/happiness.ppt&ei;=E4BWQ5vZA6ji-AGdsISiBw&sig2;=dsnoZn_NFrUzf1Ckw2AsNw

Re: Utility Does Not Mean Utility

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 09:26:36 -0000

That's why "get" is in scarequotes. You don't really get utility. Utility is just a way of representing your preference ordering. It's not mental state.

I elaborate on the ambiguity of "satisfaction" in the update at the end of the post.

Re: The Fake Paradox of Prosperity

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 16:16:43 -0000

Bill, I don't quite know what you're going on about. I think you must be misintepreting what I was saying, or the context in which I brought up the recent Easterlin study. I wasn't saying that there's any problem in particular with Easterlin's work. I think it's good and useful (although I question some of the implications some people see in it.) In the first mention of Easterlin, the '74 paper, I was saying that there is nothing paradoxical about his finding (I believe that one was comparing avg self-reported happiness with avg income). In the mention of Easterlin in the comments, I was pointing to his recent work on self-reported happiness accross the life cycle, to give evidence to Javier that folks tend to get less happy as they get older.

The evidence showing a slow rise is in other studies. Veenhoven's database shows a small increase over the last few decades in most wealthy market societies.

Whatever the case may be, whoa.

Re: The Fake Paradox of Prosperity

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 12:28:57 -0000

Brig, The studies show that self-reported happiness correlates strongly with income until around 10-15K (because below this range, more money has profound effects on health, diet, quality of shelter, etc.), and then quickly levels off, so that more income comes to have only a surpassingly small average positive effect. Because the there are fewer in our society below the critical income threshold than ever before, and we are richer on average then ever before, it is not unreasonable, on empirical grounds, to conjecture that a person picked at random in the US (or any of the wealthy liberal democracies) is more likely to report higher life satisfaction than a person picked at random from any society in almost any earlier time. That's what the data should lead us to believe. That is perfectly consistent with the idea that correlation betwen income and self-reported happiness grows weaker and weaker the wealthier we become.

I'm happy my to hear that my ideology is wrapped in an appealing package!

Re: The Fake Paradox of Prosperity

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 17:06:37 -0000

Bill, Cool. I get what you're saying now, and you're right. I haven't said anything that rules out the possibility that people are in general better off in a low-inequality system, because I haven't been talking about inequality.

Re: The Fake Paradox of Prosperity

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 09:45:28 -0000

Bill, The thing I like about Easterlin's life-cycle work is that it's moving beyond simple money-happiness correlations. Looking at his data, it seems fairly clear to me that increasing wealth correlates with increasing satsifaction with one's finances, and that has a continuing positive effect. It's just that the positive effect of wealth is offset by declining satisfaction with health, declining satisfaction family, etc. That is, the overall trend is for people to become less happy after middle age, but wealth mitigates that trend.

Re: The Fake Paradox of Prosperity

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 13:01:59 -0000

On the anti-hedonic effects of inequality, check out this paper:

http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/alesina/papers/HappIneqREVApril3.pdf

Most interesting:

"In Europe, the happiness of the poor is strongly negatively affected by inequality, while the effect on the rich is smaller in size and statistically insignificant. In the US one finds the opposite pattern, namely that the group whose happiness seems to be most adversely affected by inequality is the rich. A striking result is that the US poor seem totally unaffected by inequality. Any significance of the inequality coefficient in the US population is mainly driven by the rich."

Re: Leiter on the Morally Reprehensible

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 11:53:22 -0000

Some asberger's cases I've encountered are obsessed with social form, the rules of appropriate conduct, because on-the-fly wink-nudge social cues are so hard for them to pick up on. It's fascinating to observe the punctilious application of rules in wholly inappropriate contexts, illustrating that the hard thing isn't knowing the rules, but knowing which rules apply in which circumstances, something for which there can be no rule (lest regress drive us to madness).

Re: Is Game Theory Worth a Damn?

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 10:18:06 -0000

Robert, There's just no conflict between game theory & the ascription of responsibility. The point is just that in social settings, what it is to prudent to do depends on what others will do, and vice versa It strikes me that the phronimos will be be highly refined in his ability to think through strategy in interdependent context.

Re: The Myth of Public Interest and the Flourishing of Political Predation

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 08:31:16 -0000

Odograph, The recent propaganda war against Wal-Mart is precisely the sort of thing I'm talking about. It's based on flat out ignorance about the economics of labor markets. And the media just laps it up, being quite inclined to believe the worst about any company that makes a lot of money. That's why Wal-Mart is actually a great example of what I'm saying. Wal-Mart, by revolutionizing bulk purchasing, logistics and inventory, and thereby enabling lower prices on a huge array of goods, which pushed everyone else to follow their lead, has probably done more to improve the standard of living for Americans over the last several decade than any other institution. That is to say, Wal-Mart has directly and indirectly contributed to an increase in real wages for almost all consumers. The media is almost totally blind to this fact. All they see is that, yes, it is in fact pretty shitty to work in low-end retailing. They don't understand that Wal-Mart's profits are a consequence of extremely small margins. And so they just assume that there is no conflict between the entire world enjoying the benefits of Wal-Mart's low prices and Wal-Mart paying their employees more. I mean, look at those profits!

Re: The Myth of Public Interest and the Flourishing of Political Predation

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 08:36:42 -0000

Kent, You're kidding me, right?

Re: The Myth of Public Interest and the Flourishing of Political Predation

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 21:02:08 -0000

Bill, I was hazily recalling what I heard on the radio, and I remember them telling me that no laws had been broken. I wasn't commenting on this particular case, which I know nothing about, just the annoying basic assumptions framing the segment.

Re: The Myth of Public Interest and the Flourishing of Political Predation

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 18:38:16 -0000

I was more annoyed by the usual naive assumed conception of government as defender of an uncontroversially shared idea of the public interest. Like I said, that's that kind of fog of misrepresentation behind which corruption and crony-capitalism lurks. The anti-business thing is really secondary.

Re: Freedom in the Meaningful Sense

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 11:30:50 -0000

I meant that dependency can be crippling.

It's not implausible at all to attribute life expectancy in Kerala in terms of growth. There is no other plausible explanation. The explanation is technological, and the technology is a result (and cause) of growth elsewhere.

The most beneficialgrowth is the fastest growth. If we slow down growth in the west, then people in lower growth countries die. It's as simple as that.

Re: Freedom in the Meaningful Sense

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 13:17:43 -0000

bp, It's breathtaking to deny that fully developed human beings have the capacity to walk five miles. That human beings have the power of self-locomotion is no part of libertarian dogma. Are you seriously claiming that most of these people COULDN'T have taken a walk? Also, I wasn't giving a monocausal explanation. There are many reasons why one might stay. But to deny that the welfare policy in poor cities like New Orleans has not been psychologically crippling is just willfully evasive, and strikes me as symptomatic of the kind of dogmatism of which you're wrongly accusing me.

My point about growth is that about all the enhancements in terms of medical technology are a function of growth. Difference in distributional structure in health outcomes is massively swamped by differences in GDP per head. I'm sure you can see the pattern in this:

http://www.nationmaster.com/plot/eco_gdp_cap/hea_lif_exp_at_bir_tot_pop/all

Anyway, take any system of health distribution you like, and compare life expectancy now vs twenty years ago, and I think you'll see that the effect of wealth and technology thanks to growth within the same system over time is a lot bigger than the difference between different systems of distribution at the same time. You'll totally blow me away if you show me otherwise.

Within any society, if you have more money, you'll tend to live longer. And growth raises world income/wealth. So there is a very very clear linear relationship between world average wealth and world average life expectancy. Read Fogel's The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death to get a feel for the hugeness of the effect.

If you're going to be dogmatic about anything, be dogmatic about the goodness of economic growth. There is not even a close runner up in terms of human well-being, except maybe for things like the scientific method, which are so good largely because they helped deliver growth.

Re: Freedom in the Meaningful Sense

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 13:24:13 -0000

Javier, I think we're talking past each other. We're agreed on the facts. I wasn't saying that wealth is the only determinant of lifespan, because obviously it's not. Institutions matter a lot. All I'm saying is that there is no single factor nearly as important to lifespan as wealth, and there is no one thing you can do to ensure that people live even longer more important than making them wealthier.

Re: More Pro-Growth Progessivism

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 16:43:35 -0000

I AM arguing for policies to encourage more work in the West. Down with France's maximimum hour laws! Down with minimum wage laws that price workers out of the labor market! Down with America's 12% payroll tax!

Re: Freedom in the Meaningful Sense

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 06:33:23 -0000

Rob, But Chartres Cathedral is a product of economic growth!

Re: Is Childbirth National Service?

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 17:33:49 -0000

Steve, No, I haven't. I'll give it a shot.

Re: Libertarian Paternalism Redux

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 04:07:05 -0000

Javier, None of the cases S&T; spoke of involved a denial of liberty.

Also, S&T; seem to assume that your interest = what a fully informed rational being would choose. But they need to be careful. What is best for a counterfactual being may not be best for a real one. See Tyler Cowen's preference sovereignty paper on this.

Your question is important. Bureaucrats and politicians are not cognitive psychologists. Even if you established that people were systematically undermining their interests, and that a set of authentically paternalistic rules would help advance them, you need to show that actual political processes, enacted by the same people vulnerable to the the very errors in choice you are trying to correct, would actually implement the corrective rules.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 19:06:09 -0000

KV, By my understanding, a priorism and naturalism are mutually exclusive, epistemological naturalism being the view that the only way of knowing is the empirical way, that is, that there is no a priori knowledge.

My understanding is almost exactly that of my first advisor at Maryland, Michael Devitt (now at CUNY):

Try his "Naturalism and the A Priori":

http://web.gc.cuny.edu/Philosophy/devitt/NATURA2.pdf

And "There is No A Priori":

http://web.gc.cuny.edu/Philosophy/Devitt/noaprior.pdf

I have a few small differences with Devitt, but thet are trivial.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 04:17:47 -0000

Gabriel, If you check out the Devitt citations, you'll see that there is no especially strong reason to think that even logic and mathematics are a priori, much less principles of practical rationality.

What's wrong with robust regularities observed in one's own and others behavior.

One of the worst things about Kant's influence is that Kantians like to take whatever it is they really care about and try to show how the structure of Reason itself demands whatever it is they like. Kantian welfare-statists seem to want to show that paying taxes is a command of Reason itself. Kantian libertarian economists seem to want to show that bad economics isn't just bad theory, but a violation of the transcendental conditions of the very possibility for practical rationality. Anyway, it's a silly game.

Re: Freedom in the Meaningful Sense

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 08:47:58 -0000

I'm saying: No economic growth, no Chartres, i.e., Chartres only if economic growth. Not, If growth, then Chartres, obviously. But you can't make something large, majestic, intricate and complex without money, and a fairly developed division of labor.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 09:13:19 -0000

Gabriel, I think you're using a priori in a non-standard way (non-standard in American analytical philosophy, anyway). Also, there is a vast literature on naturalistic accounts of meaning. I recommend Devitt's Designation and Coming to Our Senses, Millikan's new Language: A Biological Model and any of her older books (esp. Language, Thought, and other Biological Categories. Also highly recommended for a recent general naturalistic account of the mind, Kim Sterelny's Thought in a Hostile World.

I don't just understand the imagined difficulty in empirically forming the concept of "interest rate". Why would this have anything to do with watching clerks. If learn what it is to borrow something in exchange for something, then you're almost home. If you understand what money is, you're there.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 04:07:41 -0000

Gene, Since there is no a priori knowledge, it must be empirical!

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 11:04:05 -0000

But the ARE NO non-empirical methods. THE way of knowing is the empirical way.

In any case, there are no strict economic laws, only extremely hedged ceterus paribus laws. That is, regularities that obtain in wider or narrower contexts. We think of the "laws" as the widely obtaining regularities. But these aren't laws in the same way that physical laws are.

And by the way, if you're an apriorist, Hartry Field's Science Without Numbers: A Defense of Nominalism will blow your mind.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 15:58:43 -0000

I mean empirical in a broad, not positivistic, sense. Introspection, even knowledge of what we mean when we say something, is empirical.

There is a well-kknown model within which, by definition, ceilings below the market price cause shortages. It is a "law" of the model. But, as a matter of fact, there are lots of ways to avoid shortages with price ceilings. They are very unlikely, but do not contradict the nature of the elements in the system. For instance, the economy is very small, everyone is very public spirited, and they understand that scarcity (there was a hurricane) is driving up prices, and see the cap as a request from the government to demand less, and so they economize and consume less, driving the price down to equal to or less than the cap. So here's a perfectly intelligible case, fully consistent with human psychology, in which a price cap below the market price doesn't lead to a shortage, but just a reduction in demand and the market price. Unlikely? Absolutely. But ruled out by scientific "law"? No way.

Re: Kozinski!

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 17:54:36 -0000

Maybe you'll like Niskanen better.

Re: New Template

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 14:27:30 -0000

Luka, I will. It's coming along...

Re: Kozinski, Amar, Niskanen: Still Rockin’

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 00:10:25 -0000

Bill, I think Buchanan and Hayek actually had a couple debates over exactly the issue you raise. I'll see if I can dig up the cite of Buchanan's paper defending constructivist constitution-building.

Re: Status Frenzy

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 13:39:39 -0000

Rafal, You're right. I agree.

In the literature the collective action problem is actually "disarmament" in the status race. The race itself isn't the problem. If we assume that everyone would be better off if they reduced the intensity of status competition, but that none will slow down unless others do, then we have a collective action problem. Layard, amog others, promotes higher taxes on labor to lower the relative price of leisure, which he think will slow down the race. I don't actually see how this is supposed to work, myself.

Re: New Template

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 16:06:23 -0000

It's the glass of an amber colored bottle!

Re: Fight, Fight, Fight!

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 08:58:53 -0000

Weird, man.

Re: de Jasay and Smartification

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 09:23:28 -0000

I'm not sure exactly what de Jasay is saying here. Rawls WAS awful sloppy about the justfication of state power. Maybe you remember this post in which I accues Rawls of sliding back and forth between ideal theory as strict compliance theory, which implies no need for the state as a mechanism of assurance, threat and coordination, and an ad-hoc, just- enough-compliance theory. Perhaps de Jasay is criticizing Rawls's failure to really justify the implicit positive theory of the state that enters into Rawls's big device of imagination? Or pehaps he is highlighting the fact that the justification of the two principles through the OP doesn't actually imply anything about the state?

Re: de Jasay and Smartification

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 14:03:39 -0000

Tim, No, I never finished the paper. I quit working on my dissertation and started working at Cato! I do hope to get back to it, though.

Greg, I understand from inside sources that the Teaser is defunct.

Re: de Jasay and Smartification

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 14:08:36 -0000

Tim, The argument was just that Rawls is inconsistent about his idea of ideal theory. Within the context of my larger project, I wanted to show that Rawls himself doesn't take ideal theory as strict compliance theory seriously, which indicates that ideal theory can't be that useful unless it is somewhat less idealized. In which case empirical questions about psychology and institutions become more important than Rawls makes them out to be. And a more empirically robust model conceptions of the person and the well ordered society will lead us to reject out of hand, as de Jasay says,

Rawls's bland view of the redistributive process as painless and costless, and of the state as an automatic machine which dispenses "social decisions" when we feed our wishes into it.

Re: de Jasay and Smartification

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 22:31:33 -0000

Great! I declare it smart-ass-ifying.

Re: Status Frenzy

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 10:54:12 -0000

R.J., Your geekery is blinding!

Re: Boy Trouble

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 00:13:30 -0000

A year you remember well, I'm sure.

Re: Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 20:43:37 -0000

All the enslaved and oppressed women in the world aren't a country. My point was that the denial of basic rights to a large portion of the earth's population is of an entirely different order of moral significance than a large benefit to a society where most basic rights are already well-protected. Free a slave or give an already free person a billion dollars? Same kind of thing.

Re: Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 14:59:08 -0000

See why thought experiments like this are always less useful than you think they'll be!

Luka, I'm not sure there is such a thing as the correct moral theory. There is, I believe, correct moral behavior, but it is not well-described by a theory, any more than a "theory of wines" will describe, in advance of experience, which wines will be the best. The more contextualistic one's moral non-theory becomes, the less useful abstractly specified thought experiments are bound to be, because almost all the relevant information is in the "omitted measurements." Even if we have identical moral sensibilities, our response to an abstractly characterized situation will differ depending on how our minds (probably subconsciously) have filled in some of the details.

How's that for not actually answering your question.

OK. . . If I have a theory, it is something like Schmidtz's moral dualism. There is an egoistic, self-centered component to morality. But then there is also a social, coordinative component, which requires limiting self-interest locally in some ways to enable an overall pattern of cooperative interaction that tends to advance each person's global self-interest. Some dispositions, practices, and virtues, are more geared toward optimizing the mutually advantageous cooperative pattern. When these become internalized into one's identity, the tension between "self-interest" and "morality" are reduced, since "altruistic" dispositions will have been brought inside the agent's conception of the "self" and it's "interest."

Re: NIM, PUB and Cognitive Paternalism

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 00:50:35 -0000

Great point. I take it that much of public choice theory describes how government can be relatively stable, yet inefficient or harmful. The concentrated benefits/diffuse costs logic shows us how special interests will often succeed in engineering wealth-destroying transfers, for example, but, in the short-to-medium term, this won't bring a wealthy system down. I'm not so sure about unstable-yet-beneficial institutions, since it's hard to be beneficial without stability. Let me think about it.

Re: NIM, PUB and Cognitive Paternalism

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 09:26:14 -0000

Michael, Great point. I think sort of and sort of not. The internalization of norms doesn't change cognitive structure, so much as changing the representational framework atop the common cognitive structure. An internalized norm affects the way alternatives are represented, and the prices associated with them. We can't actually represent the entire set of opportunities, so something has to prune the feasible set. Norms can do that, such that some possibilities don't even occur to you, which ensures that you don't do them. Or if a possibility action does occur to you, norms help you pin a price on it.

So, yes, people who have internalized different norms may behave differently in otherwise identical external circumstances. Different possibilities will occur to them, and they will order the possibilities differently, because different norms will assign different prices to them.

Re: NIM, PUB and Cognitive Paternalism

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 13:34:47 -0000

Michael, Pithlord,

You're both right. Which is why it's so nice to think aloud in front of really smart people! And which shows just how hard NIM makes to think in useful generalities.

Michael, You're right that the competencies to enforce contracts and to actively run a market are different. What I hazily had in mind by "implement a market" was something like setting in place the legal/regulatory framework for the definition of property rights and contract enforcement. My sense is that the cattle futures market, say, depends on the willingness of government to acknowledge and enforce certain kinds of contractual arrangements. Innovations in new forms of contracts won't have teeth unless the government will recognize them as valid. So maybe it's better to say "facilitate" rather than "implement" a market. One of the things that makes good governments good is that they do a good job of facilitating markets, and know that they'll do a bad job of managing them, and so don't try.

Pith, I agree that an ameliorative policy about coercing people into savings might work well. What I'm interested in is what government institutions need to look like such that policymakers accurately identify what has been sussed out by trial and error, and implement an effective policy without, at the same time, using the same power and discretion to implement excarbating or harmful policies. Are there aspects of the current policy climate that, say, exacerbate the tendency to "excessively" discount? Perhaps government assurances that people will not be allowed to fall into poverty in old age leads to present overconsumption.

I think lurking in the background here is a fuller NIM story about the institutions of expertise. You need economists, political scientists, psychologists, etc., to identify nonideal cognition, the problems that arise from it, and potential solutions. But these experts don't exist without institutions of expertise, like universities, think tanks, etc. A society with high-quality institutions of expertise will have a leg up on setting effecive ameliorative policy.

But you also need a way to integrate institutions of expertise into government institutions, while avoiding problems of confirmation bias in choosing which experts to listen to, appointing them, etc. The US Fed I think is an interesting case of a political institution that does a decent job of applying policy on the basis of expert opinion without suffering from too much political capture.

I should say that I think the coercive/non-coercive distinction IS very morally salient. Other things equal, less coercive policy is morally better. So if there is some less coercive means of raising the cost of undersaving, then we ought to prefer it. But, as Michael's comment implies, state coercion, in the form of the commitment to enforce contracts, is often the assurance at bottom of a well-functioning market. The decision to enforce some contracts, but not others, is a decision about how to bring coercion to bear. Some markets, such as, say, dynamic auction markets for landing spots at airports, are coercively forbidden (as far as I understand). "Letting the market work" in this kind of case involves removing a policy of coercion, and, at the same time, committing to enforcing new forms of contracts, which is an new policy about the deployment of coercion. So.. there's a bigger point in there somewhere ...

Thanks guys, this is really helping.

Re: NIM, PUB and Cognitive Paternalism

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 21:42:33 -0000

James, Of course enforcing property rights is coercive. You're just saying that you think it is legitimate coercion. If I fail to complete my end of a contract, I can be arrested, my property appropriated, etc. That's coercion, right?

Re: Rawls on Interdependent Preferences

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 18:39:28 -0000

Blar, A few quick responses. First, I think status is fantastically multi-dimensional and contextual, and don't think status-seeking, in general, is a zero sum game at all. Second, it is by no means clear that, even if status-seeking was zero sum, that it would be inefficient. Becker and Mulligan argue that absent the highly valued prospect of a big upward move in status, people would take too few entrepeneurial gambles, slowing growth, hurting everyone, but mostly the poor. Third: there is actually no evidence that I can find that shows that a Frank/Layard tax-truce in the income status race will actually have a positve welfare effect, in hedonic terms. There is no evidence that people who work more are therefore less happy than people who work less. And there is no good reason to believe that status races don't just jump to a new dimension of comparison when comparison on the old dimension is de-incentivized. Fourth, Chet: Both Chet and his neighbor have the option to care less, or not at all, about the size of each other's yachts. It is not clear how their failure to care less gives their preferences normative salience. Closely related, Coase: it takes two to externality tango. The neighbor's yacht can't be an neg. externality for Chet but for Chet's preference. Since Chet can change his preferences, that might be the "least cost" stategy of harm mitigation. And it probably would be, since he'll gain other big benefits from becoming less fixated on social comparison. The entire back of Layard's own book is full of solid individual strategies for reducing one's disposition to social comparison. He shadily argues that policy must take preferences about relative position into account, because that's just human nature, and then tells us how to get rid of or constructively rechannel our preferences for relative position. WTF!?

Re: Rawls on Interdependent Preferences

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:02:11 -0000

Well, then you ought to have your head on straight!

Re: Rawls on Interdependent Preferences

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 14:24:22 -0000

Blar, Your point doesn't make any sense to me. From the perspective of justice, Chet's motivation in buying a boat means nothing. If the boat, or the status, is a value to him, then it is a value. And, of course, Chet's buying the boat can be quite valuable overall, regardless of his motivation -- to the people who made the boat, and made the bits that made the boat, and shipped that bits that made the boat, etc. The broken windows analogy is bad because a broken window is a loss of wealth. A yacht is a form of wealth. (Blowing up your yacht just show that you can would be more like it.) Becker's argument that absent status races people would take too few social-welfare enhancing entrepreneurial gambles is precisely the kind of argument that would lead parties behind the veil to endorse status races.

But, more generally, action in general, and consumption in particular, is permissible as long as it does not constitute a harm. Chet's buying a boat may not actually make him better off, but justice doesn't demand maximal prudence. It simply prohibits injustice. My Rawlsian point was that your sense of having your relative position harmed by Chet's yacht does not amount to real injustice on Chets part, so does not demand rectification or correction.

Re: Moral Philosophy and Economic Growth

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 17:24:01 -0000

See, for the life of me, I can't see why this should be weird. But the fact that the idea only recently occurred to me might indicate that it is kind of weird. (I guess I only recently REALLY got my head around growth.) But I don't think sustaining a decent level of economic growth is quasi-utopian. It is, in fact, one of the de facto aims of most decent governments. If it turns out that this is so despite the fact that no philosopher ever argued that it should be would be stunning. It might be that political-economic dynamics of liberal democracy push strongly toward treating growth as a goal. If it slows, you'll lose power, etc. Slows a lot, you get instability. I just think it would help to make it a little more explicit as a required aim of any liberal regime, and to actually offer some arguments in favor of it. There are, indeed, very powerful arguments in favor of it. Maybe they are so powerful that the world makes them even if philosophers don't.

Re: Moral Philosophy and Economic Growth

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 17:28:45 -0000

And by the way, don't most libertarians say a good government should always protect individual negative rights, or prohibit all initiatory coercion, or keep market regulation to a minimum, or restrict itself to a small set of core taks, etc. etc.? I think they do. James Buchanan makes a lot of "all good governments ought to x" claims on the basis of public choice considerations.

Re: Moral Philosophy and Economic Growth

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 18:18:33 -0000

Tyler, Awesome! I happily promise to give you comments. Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Ave NW 20001.

Re: Moral Philosophy and Economic Growth

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 09:15:39 -0000

Brent, Friedman's book is as close as it gets. And that's what I find shocking. Its a very good book, and it's nice to have an argument to the effect that growth promotes democracy, openness, and tolerance. But I guess I'm looking for an argument that growth is good for its more immediate consequences, e.g., individual people have more money, more freedom, more life-options, better health, longer lives, etc. That would seem pretty great to me even if growth was neutral for tolerance, etc.

Re: Moral Philosophy and Economic Growth

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 09:53:42 -0000

Brent, Let me reclarify. The Friedman book is good. But it is very simple in the way it posits the values that are served by growth. Friedman just stipulates that some things are good, and then tries to show that growth helps us get them, such that if you care about those things, you should care about growth. That's a fine way to argue. But he doesn't explain why the values he highlights are values. He doesn't address the normative conditions for a just or morally legitimate government. And, again, that's fine. I don't expect economists to double as moral philosophers. What I'm looking for is more sophisticated, integrated, normative work on growth. There are hundreds of normative works in political philosophy on the morally mandatory character of some kind of equality of material holdings and life options. I am shocked because there does not appear to be a single major work on the morally mandatory character of improving the quantity and quality of holdings and life options, which, on its face, strikes me as a lot more important.

Re: Moral Philosophy and Economic Growth

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 16:48:34 -0000

Matt, Yes and no. Rawls:

Eventually, once just institutions are firmly established and all the basic liberties effectively realized, the net accumulation [of savings] asked for falls to zero. At this point a society meets its duty of justice by maintaining just institutions and preserving their material base. The just savings principles applies to what a society is to save as a matter of justice. If its members wish to save for other purposes, that is another matter.

[ToJ, 2nd Ed., p 255]

It sounds to me that Rawls is saying that a fully just society requires NO GROWTH. Justice, at certain historical-economic stages, requires growth instrumentally. If we are still at a level of relatve deprivation, justice demands we leave the next generation a little better off than we were. But growth, per se, is not an element of justice.

Actually, Rawls never thinks systematically about growth as far as I can tell. Growth is implicit in a lot of what he says. For example, the idea that the tax rate is limited by the incentive to productivity. But he takes a barely dynamic perspective. If taxes are too high in period one, there will be less to distribute in period to. The end. He's not really thinking about the overall size of the economy. Similarly, when talking about just savings, he seems to be more concerned with the idea that we don't consume all the resources and leave future generations with less rather than the idea that what future generations will have is compounded by the rate of growth.

Also, this gets me thinking about the argument for the difference principle. Rawls labors hard to make the argument more than instrumental. But his only really good arguments are instrumental. If the poor are getting a raw deal, they'll destabilize everything, and that's no good for anyone. B. Friedman's argument about growth is just like that. If growth is too slow, we'll get nasty and illiberal.

Re: Moral Philosophy and Economic Growth

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 13:51:11 -0000

Tim, Thanks! Great stuff. Thanks especially for reminding me of the passage in Justice as Fairness. That's a clearer statement of what he's basically saying in the just savings part of ToJ.

About growth as an element of justice. Well, really, I think justice is the wrong word. I mean an element of the kind of society we have most reason to affirm, endorse, want, etc. I agree with both your points. I'm talking fast and loose. Sen is no better, unless he thinks that there is no limit on the development of human capabilities, which is what I think, and why I don't think there is a point of absolute development at which it is permissible to allow growth to stall.

Re: Moral Philosophy and Economic Growth

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 14:01:30 -0000

Clearly David Miller is right! Did Brian Barry at the late date of 1998 really think that growth is in conflict with environmental stability?

A more interesting argument about future generations turns on Parfit's insight that the big deal about what we do now policy-wise is not how it will affect future people, as if there are a bunch of people with determinate identities, who already exist at a future time in the way that other people co-exist with us at a different place, but how it will determine whether or which people will exist in the future.

Growth correlates with lower rates of reproduction. Are the possible beings not made actual because of high growth harmed by it?!

Re: Moral Philosophy and Economic Growth

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:13:48 -0000

Tim, Awesome. Thanks. This book came out last year?

When someone says "the only alternative" the red flags go up. How's this for an alternative: "over the next fifty years resources will be superabundant, population will peak then begin to contract, and global warming will have some undetermined adverse and positive effects." I am willing to bet Brian Barry about this. Then again, he'll be dead in fifty years, and thanks to nanotech cell-repair, I'll be an eternal 45.

Re: Moral Philosophy and Economic Growth

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 11:47:13 -0000

Tim, The nanotech part was a joke. But I'll put five bucks on it against catastrophic global warming!

Re: What Are Philosophers Good For?

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 12:27:58 -0000

Luka, I definitely think that philosophers are better at conceptual analysis than most folk. The problem is, I think, that a good analysis of what the "linguistic community" means by most terms gets you almost nowhere. For instance, an analysis of the basic meaning of "justice" is going to tell you that it has something to do with people getting what they have coming to them. But it is not going to tell you much else. Beyond that, you've got to try to persuade people that there is some benefit in seeing it your way--that you have a conception that fleshes out the basic concept in a way that meshes with the way we have reason to want to think and live. The pure "I've examined my concept and this is what I came up with" method is pretty much useles.

Check out, for instance, Bishop and Trout's paper on the Pathologies of Standard Analytic Epistemology for a good critique of the pointlessness of just ruminating on the meaning of "justification" or what have you.

Re: Happiness and Liberal Institutions: Why I’m Doing What I’m Doing

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 12:32:08 -0000

Blar,

That's simply not what he's saying. He's saying that people don't know what's good for them, so the argument for paternalism is strengthened. Notice that he doesn't even consider that the means-ends unreliability of government might be a problem. As you note, he says there are reasons based in the value of autonomy for still resisting paternalism. Which is not to say that he doesn't think paternalism wouldn't work.

I was approving of Haybron's arguments that we don't necessarily know what makes us happy. Not his contention that the government may have a comparative epistemic and practical advantage.

Re: Happiness and Liberal Institutions: Why I’m Doing What I’m Doing

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 12:41:59 -0000

Bill, I'm sure you know I'm not endorsing (2). I'm in favor of a minimal welfare state. But the minimalism is largely motivated by (1)-like considerations. You need a regime of individual rights because you really can't aggregate and so need to devolve moral authority to individuals in order to satisfy constraints of public justification in the face of the fact of reasonable pluralism.

Re: Happiness and Liberal Institutions: Why I’m Doing What I’m Doing

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 18:28:20 -0000

Blar, You're right. He is careful not to claim that he has as an a drop-dead argument against liberal anti-paternalism. Nevertheless, I do think he is not at all careful to subject government to a level of scrutiny even roughly equivalent to that with which he examines individual psychology. That's the fallacy. Like I said, I really, really like this paper. I just thought this section of it was striking and telling. If he had said,

If it could be shown that a realistically feasible government meeting widely accepted conditions for legitimacy could successfully implement policies that would significantly improve the rate at which individuals successfully fitted their actions to their ends, THEN the liberal presumption against paternalism would be weakened.

I would have been quite happy. But he did not say that. He said, people make systematic errors in prudential reasoning. And therefore the presumption against paternalism is weakenend. But---and this was my point---that conclusion is a non-sequitur absent any consideration of the reliability of government action in this kind of domain.

Re: The Nation as Unit of Analysis

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 01:38:28 -0000

Robert, I agree about the importance of institutions, and that institutions are often a state level phenomena. But it doesn't make sense to stop there. Because good institutions at the state level are precisely those that facilitate integration into international markets, taking advantage of the broadest system of specialization and exchange. And so, as I was saying, the better you do at the state level, the better positioned you are to take advantage of institutions that transcend the state.

Re: The Nation as Unit of Analysis

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 14:36:54 -0000

You're right, no doubt. So what we need to know how to think about are polycentric systems of overlapping jurisdictions.

Re: The Nation as Unit of Analysis

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 10:26:03 -0000

Really? Parts made in Korea, assembled in Mexico, sold in the US, governed by WTO and NAFTA rules?

Re: The Nation as Unit of Analysis

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 10:51:57 -0000

Not THE unit of analysis, but A unit.

Re: Reason Review of Layard’s Happiness

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 13:08:30 -0000

Jason, Yes! And here's what I said about it:

---

If one has aspirations for the totalizing rule of one’s comprehensive moral conception, it seems that one should accept a fair burden of persuasion. But Layard treats classic objections to utilitarianism as annoyances, or bad manners, and brushes them off with incompetent “argumentation.” Here’s what he says about Nozick’s famous experience machine:

If offered the chance, asks Nozick, would you plug in? Of course, many people would not, for all sorts of reasons. They would not trust the machine to deliver what it promised, so they would prefer to keep their real autonomy. Or they might have obligations to others that they could not perform if they were inert. And so on. Thus this is a weak test case, especially because it describes a situation so far from our reality that we have almost become a different animal.

That the machine perfectly delivers as promised is stipulated. Inability to entertain the counterfactual–to actually conduct the thought esperiment–is not an argument against it. And “obligations to others they could not perform”? Well, yes. This is precisely the sort of thing people might worry about because people generally think they ought to meet their obligations, regardless of the hedonic payoff. That’s part of Nozick’s point, dipshit. If Layard was honest, he would bite the bullet and say, yes, plug in. And if there was an experience machine for each of us that would maximize the hedonic quality of our experience, then we would be obligated individually and collectively to forgo a real life of actual action and actual engagement, and instead climb into our pods on the Matrix pod farm, and dream sweet virtual dreams until we die. If Layard will not deign to explain to us why, despite our deep sense of revulsion, we ought to see this scenario as the happiest of all possible circumstance, he cannot expect us to acquiesce to his Benthamite Philosopher Technocrat fantasy.

----

From this post.

Re: Republicans are Happier

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 12:06:03 -0000

Look at the trend chart! There is no patterned relationship between partisan happiness and who is in power.

Re: Republicans are Happier

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 13:55:01 -0000

Chris, Yeah. The funny thing is, the poll is picking up a n effect of party affiliation, not just ideology. So conservatives who happen to vote Democrat are less happy than Republicans at the same point on the liberal-conservative continuum. Similarly, liberal Repubs are happier than equally liberal Democrats. That's weird and interesting!

As an aside, I give an openness to experience questionnaire during a talk about persuasion, to bring home the point that what people are likely to accept is a function of their personality (so don't think your dazzling arguments will have much of an effect on most people). I've only done this in libertarian audiences, and it's interesting to find that most libertarians come out pretty hard on the openness side, predicting Democratic voting patterns. But most in those group who vote vote Republican. So we libertarians are a little weird.

Re: Republicans are Happier

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 14:30:21 -0000

Chris, Yeah. I'd like to know that, too. I wouldn't be surprised, either. I know my own openness to experience (I score on the extreme of the oppeness scale--I'm sloppy, I don't keep a schedule, I don't make lists, I was an art major, etc...) can cause a lot of uncertainty and confusion. I'm happiest precisely when I pull my shit together and start acting from my Mormon bourgeois values.

Actually here's a fun one. I'd like to see credit scores v. openness to experience v. political affiliation v. self-reported happiness.

Re: Model Argument Against Benjamin Friedman

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 10:38:19 -0000

Brad, Great point. I think that's a real third option.

One of my problems with my argument is that I need to address the egalitarian critique. If the market surplus is divided unfairly, it may be that it enables people at the top to live ever more meaningful lives, but the externalities of the exchange network fall most heavily on those at the bottom, impeding their ability to put their share of the surplus to meaningful use. So growth could be both facilitating and impeding meaningful lives all at once.

If this was true, then it's a classic recipe for instability. To my mind, a big part of the point of the Rawlsian difference principle is to guard against this kind of destabilizing inequity. If the less well off revolt against the system, out of a sense of unfairness, then that is withdrawal of cooperation, and the size of the surpluses will contract.

This is in fact what is brilliant about Friedman's argument. His argument is the answer to the ealitarian critique. He is saying, in effect, that growth tends to self-correction. That it endogenously creates demand for the resolution of destabilizing inequity. What he leaves out is that the good thing about this is that by serving fairness growth enables yet more growth.

Re: Commuting and Consuming

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 18:11:26 -0000

Sweet!

Re: Commuting and Consuming

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 22:39:33 -0000

Nicholas, That's definitely an understandable tradeoff.

More stories!

Re: Hey Will! What’s Going on at Cato Unbound?

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 13:55:56 -0000

Sweet, indeed.

Re: Happiness and Liberal Institutions: Why I’m Doing What I’m Doing

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 17:20:40 -0000

Dan,

I'm glad you found my blog! Like I said in the comments, and a previous post, I really like this paper. It is far and away the best thing I've found regarding the problems of self-reports. Do you know J.D. Trout at Loyola Chicago? He's working on a book on happiness, and as far as I can tell, he's not very skeptical of self-reports. I'd love to see the two duke it out on this score.

I realize (especially after this comments discussion) you were making a pretty modest claim about paternalism. I've got a larger project in the works on what a good consequentialist argument for paternalism based on cognitive limitation would have to look like, and the core of it, as you can see, is an empirical comparison of the means-ends reliability of government institutions against individual decision making. I can't blame you (or anyone) for not stepping carefully around one of my intellectual pet peeves.(But on my blog, I fixate on them!) The whole point of the project is to help people see that cognitive limitations have no particular implications for paternalism absent actual evidence for the reliability of paternalistic policy. I think it really is fair to expect symmetrical treatment of minds and institutions, and fair to point it out if there is an undefended assumption about the relative merits of one over the other.

Here's something I would love to talk to you about: I think the survery instruments fail to track a very likely increase in real happiness. You seem to think the reverse. In this post, I argue that we'll have to get good and reductive, measuring the physical correlates of good and bad feelings, in order to know for sure.

Re: Growth and Economic Folk Morality

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 13:20:14 -0000

I made a special effort to say "orthodox neoclassical"!

Re: Institutions, Boundaries, and Useless Statistics

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 15:14:01 -0000

Hmm. Then the picture is definitely misleading!

We could break it down. Physics citiations, chemistry citations, biology, etc. Some ares will have more economic relevance than others. It is probably hard to pin producitivy gains on particular discoveries, but I wonder where the most efficieny-enhancing primary disoveries come from?

Thanks!

Re: Institutions, Boundaries, and Useless Statistics

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 15:18:59 -0000

It may be worth pointing out that taking the EU, as a unit is interesting, the EU not being a state, but a confederation, and there being very few EU-wide institutions.

Also, the U.S. population is less than 2/3 of the EU's. So we've still got a higher per capita citation rate. Take that!

Re: Self-Deception and Self-Construction

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 09:27:33 -0000

Jeff, Yup.

Re: Opposite Day

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 14:19:37 -0000

Jake, You'll have to phrase that more narrowly, since I don't disagree, unless you mean "all negative externalities..."

Re: Putting More on the Table Brings People With More to the Table

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 15:47:49 -0000

Dallas, Palmer, Schmidtz, and I are all libertarian egalitarians. As Schmidtz points out, there are lots of dimensions of equality. And it's just part of what it means to be a liberal to be egalitarian with respect to power. There are no natural rulers. People ought to be equal with respect to the distribution of legal rights, and those who would give some people special legal rights, such as the right to coerce via the state, carry a very heavy justificatory burden. This is the egalitarian doctrine par excellence. Part of the libertarian argument is that redistributive egalitarianism is an illiberal doctrine, inconsistent with the fundamental liberal equality in power among citizens.

Re: Opposite Day

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 15:50:43 -0000

We're getting close, folks. Do I hear a third for equality of opportunity?

Re: Health Care Fantasia

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 12:02:49 -0000

Keep believing it Josh! How long did it take you to learn that, Josh? You think Manny is stupid. He's not! He's Manny! He's the best! Manny's seen it all. Putting a routine cast on a forearm with a persisting median artery is the last thing Manny would do. He knows when a case goes beyond his abilities, and refers his patients to the appropriate provider. That's one of the reasons Manny's customer satisfaction is so high.

Tell me, seriously, how much time in medical school is spent on setting bones and the possible complications? Not much, right, unless it has something to do with your specialization? As far as explicit knowledge goes, knowing everything you could possibly need to know about setting broken bones would take what, a week? Two weeks? A month? Six months? There simply can't be that much to know. And the knowledge imparted in medical school about practical medicine is not esoteric or especially complicated. I could look it up myself, right now. So why not a University of Phoenix certificate in bone-setting?

I saw a show last night in which a doctor replaced a guy's thumb bone (which had rotted out due to a bone infection) with a segment of his fibula (along with accompanying artery). It was incredibly delicate work, and just isn't the sort of thing you could do without a lot of advanced training.

Then I watched one of those shows where guys build amazing (and beautiful) customized motorcycles from scratch. This is also incredibly delicate work, and is also not the sort of thing you can do without a lot of advanced training. Of course, if you screw up, your motorcycle won't DIE. Important difference! But the point is, guys with high school degrees are capable of not only functional but beautiful works of creative practical engineering with nothing but on-the-job training.

Re: Health Care Fantasia

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 12:08:15 -0000

I'm reminded of a fantastic story I read last year about a black South African guy who was a prodigy and innovator in certain transplant surgeries. But he could not get licensed in apartheid SA. So, officially, he was a "janitor," but he would do liver transplants (or something like that) on the sly, because he was better than anybody at the hospital. I recall that he had no formal medical training.

Re: More on Transparency & Generality

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 10:27:26 -0000

Jacob, I went to AEI to see Murray speak on Friday, and bought the book, and I see no mention whatever of the UBI debate. What is interesting is that Murray is pushes his Plan as a specifically libertarian idea. The conservatives at the AEI talk (Irving Kristol especially, who said, basically, incredulously "Surely you don't want a government with this little power!") seemed to be dismayed at the prospect of banning social policy as carrot and stick social control.

Re: Are Transparency and Generality in Conflict

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 13:11:22 -0000

I didn't explain myself well enough! I was trying to say precisely that generality per se doesn't help. I agree entirely with your point about logical form. What I was trying to get across is that the intention of the generality idea is not simply to be technically general, which is pointless, but to prevent transfers to people who inhabit categories that ought to be invisible to the state qua legitimate. Transfers to 6'2" folks can be guided by a general principle; but that category ought not be one the state may discern. The restiction on which classes the state may see will have to do with some other substantive condition for legitimate power.

Re: Beards

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 15:30:50 -0000

OMG! Thanks Rob for introducing me to my new role model!

Re: Wanting vs. Liking in Welfare Economics

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 15:12:25 -0000

Bill, I don't think what Sen & Arrow are on about differs in any important way from other neoclassical types. By assumption, we have ordered preferences over everything we can have preferences over. But the elements in my choice set are actions that I can peform. If there was a button I could push that would move the entire world from the status quo to a more preferred compresensive state of the world, then it would be in a my choice set, and I would push it. Ineed, in the consumer choice case, you can represent consumers as choosing the most preferred comprehensive state of the world that they individually have the power to bring about (e.g., exactly like it was before, but now with me having a Ho Ho in mouth.) The notion of preference for Sen, Arrow, and people doing consumer choice micro is exactly the same.

Re: If You Would Like to Fund an Interesting Study, Call Me!

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 09:00:00 -0000

I don't understand!

Re: Brainstorm on Positional Domination

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 14:48:16 -0000

L,

It's not odd. Revealed preference reveals an ordinal ranking. It shows us how things stack up. But there is no way to attach comparable cardinal values to an ordinal rank ordering.

Willingness to pay gives us a sort of cardinal measure for ordinal preferences, but not really. It is really just an ordinal ordering of money/decision pairs. It tells us nothing about how the individual values money, so there is still no valid interpersonal comparison.

One of the main reasons folks like value hedonism is that it seems to provide a medium for interpersonal comparisons. But I don't think so. Different people value pain and pleasure differently, so a subjective states with the same amount/intensity of pleasure/pain may not be equally valuable. So while you can directly measure hedons, you can't directly measure the value of hedons. That's my view. In the post I was just toying with different efficiency standards without defending one.

Re: If You Would Like to Fund an Interesting Study, Call Me!

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 14:51:06 -0000

Farsam, Are you going by a single name now, like Cher? Madonna?

I'm squinting at the truth. It's blinding.

Re: Egalitarianism, the Entry

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 17:35:37 -0000

PH, Good idea! Yeah. The talk tab has nothing much to do with what I wrote. Libertarian socialism! Like the Hutterites, I guess.

Re: New Stuff on the Happiness Blog

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 00:35:10 -0000

Javier, I hadn't seen it. Thanks! At a glance it looks great.

Re: New Stuff on the Happiness Blog

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 01:23:03 -0000

It's good. He makes one of my favorite points: the value of hedonic quality depends on its role in the context of one's meaning-giving ends.

Re: Class, Education, and Meaning Manufacture

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 09:54:54 -0000

Brent, Exactly. Thank you. My problem is with the curriculum in even great schools, not with the skills of teachers. I believe in the principle of comparative advantage, and if I could afford to do it, I will hire tutors for my kids that can teach a subject better than I, or my partner, can.

Anyway, this is all speculative. I don't have any kids yet.

Re: Class, Education, and Meaning Manufacture

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 16:54:40 -0000

Use your hands!

Re: Class, Education, and Meaning Manufacture

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 00:13:08 -0000

PJ, By indispensibility, I don't mean that the economy can't do without me. I mean that I have little to no competition from robots and chinamen.

And that was all sheer conjecture! I'm certainly not telling anybody what to do with their kids. Just thinkin' out loud, man.

Re: Class, Education, and Meaning Manufacture

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 10:07:59 -0000

RJ, It's a stretch. Tax-deductibility is surely important for us. But I think you're underestimateing the extent to which most of our money comes from smaller individual donors who give out of a sense of shared values and ideological solidarity.

Re: Class, Education, and Meaning Manufacture

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 23:45:09 -0000

What creativity is is a great question, and so is how you teach it. I'm not sure you do teach it, exactly. I suppose I've always been relatively creative. That's one reason I became an art major. I've always liked to make stuff up, and express it in some form or other. But I think I did learn a lot about how to be creative as an art student, mainly by watching how my especially creative teachers operated. I think part of is developing what my friend Clark calls (I think) negative capability, a kind of suspension of judgment, willingness to let ideas just happen, and a willingness to live inside a kind of radical uncertainty as an idea or an image or a song unfolds or works itself out, instead of working too hard to make something happen. Something nothing does happen, and you have to be ok with that. (It happens a lot on this here blog.) When it does the big trick seems to be noticing when something has happened recentering on it, and then letting it open up further. This is hard, I don't know how to describe what it is have the capacity to say, "Aha! that's good, that works, that's a keeper," but that's the crucial step. At some point, you start putting it on paper or canvas or whatever, and then you have to open to the process of creation, without pushing it or guiding it too much. When I was an art student I had some friends who were maybe not extremely creative when it came to having a good idea right off the cuff (they were not cleverly creative), and some of them were pretty derivative at first, but as they got better at craft, and started to trust the process of just making---confident that the clay would not collapse, that paint would not become muddy, that they could get the nose right---some of them got very excited to find out that they were very creative after all---that the things they made turned out unusual, engaging, and unexpectedly fine. That's something I think you can teach kids, just by teaching them craft---how to draw, how to play an instrument, write a poem, etc.---an encouraging them to develop negative capability or openness and letting things emerge in the process of making. I think the same skill carries over to conjuring entrepreneurial ideas, writing a business plan, seeing how a task inside a firm can be better coordinated or executed, how to solve a puzzle in a programming language, etc. When I went to grad school in philosophy, I think my training as a painter helped me, not because arguing is like painting, but because opening your mind to the dialectical space, having confidence that a solution or a path will emerge in the process of thinking something through is a lot like opening your imagination to the problem of how to see or envision a picture, to find a way to convey a mood in form and light. Its the same kind of associative, imaginative, synthetic openness. And I guess what I was saying is that this is precisely what is hard to routinize or mechanize, whatever it is applied to, and so people who can do it will be valuable long after robot designed robots can take out your cancer for a quarter. Not everyone is equally creative, but I think everyone can become more creative with the right training and opportunity, and that kind of training should become increasingy valuable over time.

Re: Cato Blog Domination

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 03 May 2006 00:46:38 -0000

Well, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, take that!

Re: New Stuff at New Cato Blog

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 08 May 2006 20:22:56 -0000

Comment here!

Re: More Cato Blogging

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 26 May 2006 09:27:05 -0000

By dynamic I mean that the market value of different skills is constantly changing.

Re: The Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 12:42:50 -0000

Of course they do. And when they take them seriously enough, they stop being utilitarians.

Re: Guns, Materialism, and Tim Kasser

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 18:12:41 -0000

I agree with Chris. Kasser is a scientist, and genuinely aims to get at the truth. My complaint is that he seems to be a man with strong political opinions, and it looks like that may sometimes interfere with his doing genuinely illuminating science. I bet Tim Kasser thinks PoMo is completely ridiculous.

Re: A Declaration of Cognitive Independence?

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 00:07:57 -0000

I suppose there was a reason I said, "Not that libertarians aren’t guilty of confirmation bias—everyone is." The reason was I meant it. Which is why, maybe, I was telling my largely libertarian audience to lighten up and read a book they disagree with.

And, naturally, the next time a libertarian sends an eighteen year old to death in an unjust war, approves a multi-billion dollar govenrment contract, or signs into law a trillion dollar entitlement program, you'll be sure to let me know.

Re: I’m Baffled by Taxes as Truces in Positional Races

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 15:48:20 -0000

You guys are awesome. Thanks. Yeah: duh. It looks like the relative strength of our preference for relative and absolute income is going to do a lot of work. I think part of what I'm groping at is that these arguments have the most force when the preference for relative income is extremely strong--which makes the zero-sum aspects of the game seem irremediable. But when the relative preferences are strongest, willingness to pay in effort is going to be pretty insensitive to price. That just might mean that the tax needs to be high. But in that case, in which relative preference is very strong, the tax isn't exactly calling a truce so much as pushing the fight to another battle field--displacing the status race to another dimension of competition. The relevant question then is really whether the net externalities from the substitute positional race are more or less than the income or consumption race.

Layard seems to argue that (1) people have an extremely strong taste for relative position and (2) if you push them off the income/consumption race, the competition won't just pop up on another, possibly more harmful, dimension. He implies the only alternative to income/consumption-oriented labor is leisure, and argues that people don't race on the leisure dimension. Maybe. But that's not the only relevant dimension. (1) implies that people won't stop competing just because competition on one dimension has become too expensive. All the tax will have done is lower the relative cost of competing on another dimension. So, an argument for tax-as-truce that involves (1), requires an additional argument identifying the most likely substitute dimension, and showing that competition on this dimension will be more benign. An argument without (1) will have a hard time sustaining itself against "you can always just choose not to care about relative material position" least-cost avoider arguments.

Re: The Happiest Zombies

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 12:56:16 -0000

Sam, I noticed that, and wondered why he didn't just use the staright WDH data without your estimations. I thought maybe because when you're making a map, it's nice to minimize black spots.

Re: Real Men of Genius

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 18:03:28 -0000

Yes. But at least this hanger-on is cool!

Re: Open Wide!

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 12:13:01 -0000

Yeah. My point was that there is no IR Theory. There is just better or worse psychology about the particular guys in charge of particular governments and armies. Things would be a lot less confusing if we just accepted that.

Re: I’m Terrified of Going Home Tonight

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 19:21:21 -0000

It's hopeless!

Re: On the Libertarian Vice

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 17:51:44 -0000

You should have doused yourself in gasoline and lit a match!

Re: What’s Going On?

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 18:16:29 -0000

Agreed!

Re: On the Libertarian Vice

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 18:20:02 -0000

John,

I was thinking about supporting policies more than politicians.

Yeah, I mentioned at the beginning that the deontic theory of rights has a good claim as being THE libertarian theory, and doesn't care about cosequences at all. And that I don't believe in it.

Re: Should Objectivists Become Mormons?

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 13:10:10 -0000

Matt, Right. The ban on alcohol and tobacco is doctrine.

Chad, No minimum. I don't actually plan to survey Objectivists. I would count people who call themselves Objectivists Objectivists. I would, however, be careful to break them up into sub-groups by ID-ing how much of Rand they disagree with, who they consider the best living authorities on Objectivism to be, etc. All of them will score lower than Mormons.

I don't think it's irrelevant if a disproportionate number of O'ists are angsty teens. One of my suspicions is that the O'ist are less happy than Mormons because of negative self-selection. Angsty people, socially isolated people are more likely to become O'ists than sanguine extroverts. Anyway, it's just a thought experiment unless somebody comes up with the money to do a proper survey of Objectivists, which would truly be a weird way to spend money.

Re: Should Objectivists Become Mormons?

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 15:17:17 -0000

I had this in mind:

5 That inasmuch as any man drinketh wine or strong drink among you, behold it is not good, neither meet in the sight of your Father, only in assembling yourselves together to offer up your sacraments before him.

6 And, behold, this should be wine, yea, pure wine of the grape of the vine, of your own make.

7 And, again, strong drinks are not for the belly, but for the washing of your bodies.

8 And again, tobacco is not for the body, neither for the belly, and is not good for man, but is an herb for bruises and all sick cattle, to be used with judgment and skill.

How is that not doctine?

Re: Why Doing is Better Than Having

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 16:58:18 -0000

Matt, Right. Dining is an experience, not a commodity. The point was that there is no cheap substitute for that kind of sublime experience. IHOP, which is for EATING, not dining, was a joke.

You're right that as you get into the expensive range of experiences, the marginal improvement in quality with added cost diminishes sharply. Really super expensive stuff is usually positional dickwaving.

Thanks for bringing up suits! I have a decent eye, and can often spot a genuine bespoke saville row-quality suit. But once you get to off-the-rack, quality differences really are almost indiscernible, until you get to truly cheap cheap cheap in terms of materials and construction. I bought my favorite suit for $180 off overstock.com. If I told you I paid $800, no non-fashionista would know the difference. (I think it retailed at $600 before getting remaindered to overstock.) There is a whole Style channel genre about creating an astronomically expensive designer "look" for a budget of $100. Sometimes it can't be done. But sometimes they nail it. That this is possible is an egalitarian triumph.

Re: Why Doing is Better Than Having

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 14:12:53 -0000

Jon, Two things. First, that you're a gearhead in part means that you place a great deal of emphasis on relatively trivial differences in performance. But you need to put things into context. 150 years ago, the high-end low-end distinction was a coach-and-four versus slogging barefoot through the mud. Now it is a used economy car vs a luxury car, almost totally erasing the consumption gap between the rich and poor. This is what I mean by market egalitarianism.

Second, you provide a great example of my point. I happen to drive a 1996 Civic, which I bought for $6000 several years ago. It is functionally identical to a Porsche in the sense that it conveys me to any location to which I wish to go at a speed within the boundaries of law in comfort. I have driven for more than 10 hours in a day in it, without any particular discomfort. It has air conditioning, a good stereo, is extremely reliable, and costs almost nothing to service. Etc. etc. A low-end Porsche costs about 10X as much, and does almost nothing that a Civic doesn't do. I understand that the difference between the two are important for those who have a special interest in automotive performance and luxury, or in signaling social status. But without a concern for those, the Civic and the Porsche are essentially the same machine sold for vastly different prices.

Re: On the Libertarian Vice

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 14:26:42 -0000

Tim, I agree with Glen, too. That has nothing to do with seeming as though you are protesting too much, now does it? It is also true that I AM NOT GAY! Really. I'm not. I have had lots of girlfriends. I mean, this is really true, and I can give you more proof if you want it.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty clear that I was attempting to be cleverly semi-ironic with the bit about the strategic utility of "visibly aggravating your libertarian comrades," which I anticipated would forestall visible aggravation, but apparently not. Thank you all, and I look forward to your further aggravation.

Re: On the Libertarian Vice

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 17:06:42 -0000

So subtle that even I cannot always fathom its subtle subtleness. But then, I can't actually read.

Re: Why Do Economists Care About Inequality?

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 23:41:08 -0000

Glen, Yeah, in the narrow sense. Why do they worry about it, is what I meant. It's clearly something worth understanding.

Re: Why Doing is Better Than Having

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 14:08:07 -0000

Grrr... Man, I must be doing a really bad job here. See... it used to be that there was NO motorized transportation. When there was none, the qualitative gap between the upper (coach) and the lower (walking) segments of the market was huge. Now there is motorized transportation that does pretty much the same thing (drives you around) at vastly different prices, and the difference between the good at the lower (Kia) and upper (Mercedes) segment of the market is much smaller than the difference between walking around and being driven in a coach. This is just true. It's apparently not as obvious as I think it is, and I apologize if I'm not communicating the point effectively.

In terms of nutrition IHOP and the best restaurant in France are practically identical. This is another egalitarian triumph of the market. I was talking about the overall experience (including ambience, service, etc.), as opposed to just a source of calories.

Scott, If you used to have a 50" and move back to a 19", you'll be briefly annoyed, but 19" will quickly seem normal and perfectly satisfactory again. Adaptation need not be a one-way upward ratchet.

Re: Why Do Economists Care About Inequality?

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 14:19:33 -0000

Dirk, Really? Why fixate on money? Why not people who are better looking, more athletic, or something?

I think some people just wrongly assume that wealth is a pie of fized size, and if some people have a bigger slice, then that's just unfair. But if you understand that there's no pie, and that economic activity is a positive sum and not a zero-sum game, inequality just stops bothering you. If somebody has a bigger share than me, chances are they have made me better off, not worse off.

Re: Why Do Economists Care About Inequality?

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 12:19:10 -0000

Kyle, You recognize the distinction. Imagaine you have more in the bank than me. Will you sympathize with my plight? No, because I have had sufficient material resources to develop my basic capacities, and I have enough to enact my plans. The fact that you or anyone else may have more than me is external and irrelevant to my chane of having a good life.

I think "enough" is somewhat relative, but mostly absolute.

Re: Equally Wrong

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 09:26:00 -0000

Should have seen that one coming! Well, Krugman's sometimes an economist, sometimes a polemicist. I think he knows better.

Re: Mismeasuring Progress

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 09:28:46 -0000

Milliramones!

Re: Mismeasuring Progress

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 12:24:43 -0000

Curtis, I don't think the idea of measuring progress on any given dimension of value is absurd. Misean arguments on this score strike me as willfully obscurantist and ideologically anti-empirical. What exactly is "ridiculous" about putting a number to how much better in terms of picture quality this year's HDTV is than last years? It is fairly easy to think of a study in which you could do exactly that. And then you can say how much extra you have to pay for how much extra picture quality.

I'm a pluralist, so I don't think there is a single dimension of progress. But it is pretty easy to determine what it is that people do in fact value in certain kinds of products. And it surely in principle possible to measure that, and say how much it costs per unit.

In any case, the government IS going to continue trying to measure inflation. It is better to get them to improve their methods than to snark off about how it can't be done.

I'm still totally psyched by the idea of a milliramone. It think that could definitely be put into practice!

Re: Mismeasuring Progress

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 18:23:00 -0000

Curtis, You're genuinely funny! But you're mostly wrong. What is the problem with aggregating subjective judgments? Suppose 94 was the average subjective wine-rating of 1000 randomly selected people (or sommoliers). Then there is a high probability that a person picked at random will like that wine better than one that rated an 84 average.

Better yet, the science of the future may be able to tell us what it is chemically about a wine, and what it is about the brain of an expert judge, that leads them to prefer that wine over another.

"The fundamental problem with central planning is that its performance cannot be measured."

You mean the fundamental practical problem? I agree with Bryan Caplan that the the fundamental problem is incentive-compatibility, not calculation.

You could bother to defend Mises. His a priorism is simply gibberish. I think Mises was an incandescently brilliant economic thinker, and I have his books spine out. But his philosophy and psychology was just second-rate. Hayek on the other hand was also a great psychological theorist, and an empiricist with a thoroughgoing scientific sensibility, which prevented him from endorsing some of Mises's armchair philosophy-cum economics. Their differences were substantively and honestly intellectual, and it happens that Hayek was generally correct. It's bogus ad hominem, and speaks ill of your indoctrinators, to attribute Hayek's differences from Mises to a betrayal of principle.

If you think Cato or anyone could have liquidated the government simply by putting more Misean dogma in the air (and we've done plenty of that, too, I'm afraid) , then you're in the grip a utopian fantasy. In any case, I think liquidating the government is an awful idea, and the real problem is in fact making it better.

You do see, I'm sure, that the conviction that one could in principle empirically measure punk is totally logically independent of anything whatsoever having to do with government. Don't you?

So, is the neo-Misean line that good psychology leads to statism? Sort of like evangelicals who think that good biology leads to immorality? If so, that's extremely silly.

Re: Mismeasuring Progress

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 22:38:15 -0000

Curtis, Good stuff. I was waiting for the "scientism" charge! Our first real, deep difference is over a priori knowledge. I don't think even the laws of logic are knowable a priori. They're the broadest, most secure, generalizations. I was wholly persuaded of this by my teacher Michael Devitt, and his teacher, Quine. I wish I could be more original, but my view is almost exactly the same as Devitt's here. To my ears, then, the claim that "a system of replicators, heritable variation and selective competition result in descent with modification," is not an empirical conjecture sounds bizarre.

I agree that the state should not be managing the minds of its citizens. I am in fact writing something about why the state should not manage the minds of its citizens. I think we probably think about the same thing, though probably for different reasons.

We do disagree about incrementalism. I do not see the constructive alternative. I am not an anarchist, nor a jacobin; my goal is to find the best path starting from here through the space of feasible alternatives to a better system.

I've actually got a very high tolerance for kookiness. I grew up in a minority sect of Mormonism, and spent much of my twenties an Ayn Rand devotee. And I love Nietzsche. And spinning out logically valid implications from empirically false first principles can be an illuminating and worthwhile excercise. But it is not the height of intellectual achievement.

Re: Mismeasuring Progress

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:27:16 -0000

Curtis, I think your reflexive anti-statism causes a serious failure of perspective. The GDR and USSR analogues are just atrociously inept. Despite it's problems, the USA circa now is one of the greatest successes of human civilization. Our democracy is indeed part of that, but only a small part. You really do need to recalibrate your evilometer.

I really don't think Quine was Derrida without the beret. In fact, Quine wore a beret.
http://www.lawrence.edu/fast/ryckmant/Quine.gif

Funny how the century that "rejected logic" saw more advances in logic than all previous centuries combined.

In any case, it is curious to accuse one of the last centuries greatest deductive logicians with a failure to appreciate deductive logic. Though, true, Quine's semantic indeterminacy ideas are rather "postmodern". But that's what's wrong about Quine. Get rid of his behaviorism and his description theory of reference, and we're A-OK. Positivism is dead. Long live positivism!

I submit that fixation on deductive reasoning from allegedly apodictic truths is a way of avoiding the much more difficult work of developing reliable methods of inductive inference, and developing the corresponding virtues of mind. Axiom-and-grind is a recipe for table-pounding intellectual stagnation.

Sorry about the .doc!

Re: Moral Minds

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 09:56:18 -0000

Rhadamanthus,

1) Everything is in space and time.
2) Because the best theories of the world quantify over nothint not in space and time. As the poet Quine said, "Nothing happens in the world, not the flutter of an eyelid, not the flicker of a thought without some redistribution of microphysical states."
3) It is spooky to be outside space and time.

Re: Moral Minds

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 10:05:42 -0000

Luka, You know, I'm confused about whether I have an error theory or not. My view is starting to become a bit like Gilbert Harman's, which is relativistic. I guess I think that people's moral conceptions, as they understand them, are usually false, but that false conceptions can roughly track real, non-queer rightness and wrongness...

Re: Moral Minds

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 14:34:09 -0000

Rhad,

Well, that covers a lot of philosophy, so I'm hesitant to reply in detail. But, briefly.

About what I think, you did pretty well:

1) Not sure what you have in mind, but probably.
2) A kind of of non-essentialist Wittgensteinian/Kripkean combinatorialism will do.
3) There are no non-natural properties, so yes.
4) Yes.
5) No. Naturalizaing epistemology does remove norms, if you think of them as transcendental or immanent. Epistemic norms, like other norms, are either objective in an instrumental sense (if you're aiming at truth, then think this way) or conventional.
6) What needs to be reduced?
7) Some kind of complicated story about causal chains of designation.
8) I have a weird naturalized trope theory of laws.
9) Or the buddhists are right.

Re: Happiness and Economic Growth

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 10:22:05 -0000

Sam, Because the faster you pedal, the cleaner the bike gets!

Re: Piling on Lakoff

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 14:31:43 -0000

Chris came down on me pretty hard for my Cato piece on evolutionary psychology and politics, but I think we get on rather well. Chris often leaves insightful and helpful comments here, and I almost always agree with him. I'm sure are politics differ (my politics are basically Pinker's), but I have no reason whatsoever to think he hates me. How about it, Chris?

Re: Piling on Lakoff

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 15:57:47 -0000

Is that what Pinker says he is? I'm a free-market liberal (which could be construed as a moderate democrat, I guess) which is what I took Pinker to be.

Re: Piling on Lakoff

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 16:15:11 -0000

Well, had I not lived about anywhere other than DC, which trends so heavily Democratic that election results are a foregone conclusion, I would have voted for Kerry. Since voting for Kerry in DC wouldn't help Bush lose, I voted for Badnarik instead, with a sense of ironic protest. I had always been under the impression that Pinker is fairly libertarian. So please do ask your Pinker connections. I'm interested in what they say.

Re: The Status of the Politics of Status

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:42:59 -0000

Sam, You say: "If for some reason I had to take a banal and repetitive job, becoming better at playing the pipes would not compensate the decline in relative status I would feel from being just another member of the rat race." Well maybe it would and maybe it wouldn't. It's up to you. There's nothing written into your system that requires you to be more proud about your job than your skill on the pipes. I've known many folks with banal jobs, which to them are simply a way to finance their status-conferring hobby. They don't notice that the job is low-status, since status, to their mind, isn't what the job is FOR.

I think it's just weird to think that it's hard to opt out of the money game. Back where I'm from, people seemed interested in living comfortably, but the money game was hardly important to most. The few to which it evidently was important were pitied by everyone else. And I probably could manage to get work as a consultant for over twice my salary, but I don't do that. Why is that?

Re: The Status of the Politics of Status

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 10:14:39 -0000

Thanks Jen! I think you're brave for moving to Idaho. (Just kidding.)

Thanks Matt. No kidding. I've followed A&L; Daily for years, so I'm psyched.

Re: The Status of the Politics of Status

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 18:12:02 -0000

Steve, If you read the article, you'll notice that I address the schooling issue. That's not an unavoidable status game. You can home school your children. You can move to an area where houses are cheap and public schools are excellent (like in Iowa, where I'm from). You can choose to let your kid finance their own college education. Personally, when I have kids, I would like to educate them at home, and let them know early on that if they want to go to college, they'll either need to get scholarships or self-finance. And that's not sacrificing the kids' prospetcs. My prediction is that they would actually have a big advantage over most kids of their generation.

Re: What is “Economic Insecurity” and Why Should We Care?

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 09:34:11 -0000

Ed & Conchis, I'm not saying the feeling doesn't matter. I'm saying it's a distortion of the idea of economic security to transform it into a psychological notion, and that managing our feelings is our own responsibility. There's a good case to be made that the state should do what it can to keep us secure. Beyond that, how we feel is up to us.

Re: Illusions of Risk

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 14:59:09 -0000

Cold.

Re: Can You Be Wrong Aboout How Happy You Are?

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 15:04:50 -0000

pal, Things can be BOTH historically conditioned AND objective. There may be, at any time, something that it really is to be happy, such that there's a fact of the matter about whether someone is or not. At the same time, your belief about happiness may not correspond to your actual condition.

It's an interesting question whether some of the beliefs that are partly constitutive of a historically happiness must be true or not. It seems perfectly possible that perhaps some of the beliefs that generally make up happiness must be false, or based in self-deception. In that case, part of what it is to be happy is to be self-deceived about certain things.

Re: Happiness Quote of the Day

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 09:50:35 -0000

Glen, Well, Spencer is a utilitarian! But he is a scientist! What is happiness, really? Until we know, the utilitarian precept is empty.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 12:18:43 -0000

Jane, Best explanation = highest probability of being right relative to the standards of the most reliable practices of belief formation, i.e., science. Hypotheses for religious experience making reference to mechanisms and kinds already in the catalog of scientific explanation are ipso facto better than ones that introduce fundamentally new, otherwise unecessary, ad hoc ontological kinds. And God isn't even what you want if you're going for the best completely arbitrary ad hoc explanation. Rather, you'd want to posit something much simpler, such as "spiritrons," defined as the entity that causes spiritual experience.

To be an atheist is simply not to be ontologically committed to God in your conception of the world. You aren't. You are an atheist. It's OK. You can still hate Dennett.

Re: Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 17:02:35 -0000

John, I am saying that believing something exists just is for that thing to play some role in one's operative conception of the causal structure of the world. One can reject that this is what it is to believe something exists, but then one would be wrong. It is true that people's self-conscious attitude may be one of the suspension of judgment. But existence is not a property things either have or not, about which you can wait around to find out whether something has it or not. If one actually uses a concept that represents a putative something in prediction, explanation, inference, intention, etc., that's all there is to believing in it. If you fail do so, you don't believe in it. Now, lots of people THINK they believe in God who don't. The fact that you consciously avow an ontological commitment is not sufficient for having one. You either believe in God or you don't. The law of excluded middle is unavoidable.

Re: Well-Being as Nature-Fulfillment? WTF?!

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 10:01:46 -0000

Jeff, That can't be it, because what I'm saying is deep.

Re: Bounded vs. Unbounded

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 12:37:34 -0000

Sam, Yes. Layards' team needs to think harder about whether the possible log relationship reflects a shift in reporting biases along the income scale. The issue may be that, up to a certain threshold, reporting improves as a function of income, since income up to that threshold, affects more immediately salient and available dimensions of affect. After the income threshold, income continues to be converted into improvements in the quality of various dimensions of affect, but levels and changes in these dimensions are less available to consciousness. It could also be simpler than that, and people simply have a ceiling aversion, so once they've got enough money to say "pretty happy," things flatten out, even as people feel better. I don't know how big these effects are, but I'd put good money on their existence. I suspect the effect is large. However, we know in advance that Layard will clumsily interpret the curve in verbal self-reports as a function of incomme in a simplistic methodological manner, unless of course it is ideologically convenient to be careful. Maybe he can try to say something fancy about the Weber-Fechner law, but that probably describes attentional adaptation as well actual hedonic adaptation.

Re: New Bloggingheads TV

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 14:40:33 -0000

Thanks Jason!

Re: Do We Have a Duty to Breed?

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:52:00 -0000

I think Virginia's point was that Catholics don't think of their celibates as guilty of "deplorable solipsism." And, if not, then why think any worse of non-catholics who believe they are called to things other/higher than breeding?

The point has bite since monks and nuns may be the most solipsistic people in the world. Maybe it's not the deplorable kind, though. Who knows?

Re: Why Americans Breed

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 11:57:09 -0000

Steve, More generous old-age pensions do predict lower birthrates. But so do higher incomes, which increase the ability of people to self-insure. So it's probably good that you don't really buy it. We could probably increase birthrates with ruinously high tax rates and abolition of govt. old-age pensions. We'd need kids as insurance. But I don't think we'd want to do it that way.

Re: Do We Have a Duty to Breed?

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:18:54 -0000

It strikes me that Ross was in fact saying that you are harming the children you don't have. We have a duty not to harm. So we have a duty to have those children.

Re: Rodrik on Procedural Fairness and Trade

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 15:49:00 -0000

Bill, I think it's likely that you get a close to pareto-improved life-cycle from free-trade.

Yeah, obviously technologies create competing out-groups. But just not very salient ones carved out along national lines.

Re: A Sensible Natalist Proposal

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 12:14:45 -0000

I thought it would be clear enough that the post was authored by my frenemy, Liam James, but I guess not.

Re: Everything’s Swimmy in Gay Paree?

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 12:24:03 -0000

The appeal to authority is not fallacious if the listener/reader is given sufficient reason to see the authority as a bona fide expert on the matter at hand. Phelps' Nobel is surely certification of expertise, as is Eichengreen's book. Of course, I don't just say, "Phelps and Eichengreen disagree," I excerpt and link to their own arguments, which the reader is free to evaluate independently.

Re: Everything’s Swimmy in Gay Paree?

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 03 May 2007 18:55:35 -0000

Definitely the U.S.

Re: Dear Sirs,

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 08 May 2007 17:18:30 -0000

Andy, I'd prefer not to discuss the incident in public. I'll just say that I can't sleep. Call me.

Re: Justifying the System of States

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 18:57:31 -0000

How exactly is a giant chunk of the globe hosting 300,000,000 people like a family? The resemblance completely eludes me, other than the fact that collections of people are involved.

And we don't simply "acknowledge" the family. We codify a particular cultural construction of the family into law and use that to exclude others from forming families that fail to fit the model.

Re: Justifying the System of States

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 19:48:59 -0000

Right. And it is a bad metaphor. So we shouldn't use it. And as Lakoff's critics point out, mostly we don't. So we don't already use it, and we'd understand the world less if we did.

Re: Happiness and the Ideological Mediation of Adaptation

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 10:39:37 -0000

Zubon: good point! I guess I was thinking of studies that show a correlation between personality traits and ideological stance and other studies showing a correlation between these same traits and happiness.

Re: John Schumaker on Happiness

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 13:27:28 -0000

mk,

Actually, in the U.S. the richer people are, the more they work. See Steven Landsburg's recent Slate piece. But I didn't primarily mean to be talking about "leisure time." Rather, I had in mind the discretion to make a living doing things you enjoy. I really meant to say that the wealthier a society is, the more discretion people living in it have... You can live a very nice life in the U.S. making pottery or arranging flowers or whatever you like for $15,000 a year, if you choose to live in the right place. A context of abundance makes work less like work for more and more people.

Re: Thoughts on Rorty

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 15:55:18 -0000

Yes. And the best explanation for "accurate prediction" (or postdiction, for that matter) is the existence of the elements in the most successful model.

There are plenty of clear criteria for success in areas that are relevant to most conceptions to morality. Wealthier, happier, longer-living people, with greater opportunity, etc., are desirable according to most major moral theories. These are things we can and should try to measure scientifically. What's the problem? And what's the advantage of obscurantism?

Re: Thoughts on Rorty

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 12:48:38 -0000

Larry, I've find your point weird. If the realist/pragmatist dispute makes no difference in practice, then the pragmatist should just concede the realist assumptions embodied in successful scientific practice. What is the point of arguing, for the pragmatist, that photons and curved space-time aren't REALLY real. If it doesn't matter, like you say, then why bother to argue as if it does? We have discovered that there are photons. Do you disagree?

Also, we have not, as a matter of scientific fact, discovered that the world's structure is dependent on human classificatory activity. Do you disagree?

I don't think I implied Rorty is again moral deliberation. But the rhetorical upshot of much of his writings is to discourage us from trying to settle things on rational grounds. I'm going to spend my time trying to understand what really does make people healthier, happier, wealthier, etc. Since there is a fact of the matter about all this stuff, arguing about it simply is not the same thing as trying to seduce agreement with disguised poetry.

Re: Holbo on Rorty

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 10:31:12 -0000

So you don't think Pritchett's plan would help end suffering? Or you do, and this bothers you?

Re: Furman on Inequality

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 10:32:50 -0000

Wiliam, I assumed that was just a mistake, and that he was talking about "shares" in both cases.

Re: Douthat’s Populist Nationalism

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 20:55:16 -0000

Steve, Ross was talking specifically about Mexican immigration, which, you may have noticed, is the focus of the recent immigration debate that we are now having in the United States. Naturally, the same reasoning applies to other people as well, and I have no special preference for Mexicans. However, the reality of specifically Mexican partipation in the U.S. labor market does call for policy that addresses this issue in particular. That is one reason I am in favor of a common American labor market.

Re: Douthat’s Populist Nationalism

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 21:56:16 -0000

Steve, I'm arguing about the moral baseline from which deviations need to be justified. I think it is fully possible to justify limitations on entry and labor market participation on the grounds that this is necessary to preserve the institutional structure immigrants are so keen to join. We have an obligation, however, to limit liberty as little as possible, and to expand the scope of cooperation as that becomes feasible. Labor market integration with Mexico is a good first step. As there is convergence in development over time, ever-widening multinational labor markets will not only be consistent with American liberty and well-being, but will enhance it.

Re: Douthat’s Populist Nationalism

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 23:12:28 -0000

Arguments against the liberal baseline? Anyone? Anyone?

Re: Kaplan: Morality a Threat to National Security

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 00:13:03 -0000

Matt, Thanks, I meant, "unjustifiably".

Re: Douthat’s Populist Nationalism

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 13:32:26 -0000

Citizens of White and Hispanic origin serve at about the same rates. Non-citizen workers, by lowering prices for many kinds of goods, make us wealthier, freeing up capital to build bombs, if that's what you really want. The U.S. is powerful because it has a dynamic economy, not because it has citizens infatuated with the romance of dying for the state. On your odious terms, Mexican workers still make us stronger.

Re: Holbo on Rorty

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 11:22:55 -0000

If it is inconvenient for you to answer my question, I understand.

Re: Ross on the Moral Baseline

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 18:21:45 -0000

MK, First, I do think we have a pre-instutional right to exchange, so, yes, I think it is an obligation to secure that right even if it is democratically opposed. Second, I think American sentiment toward immigration and open labor markets is actually rather positive. In the current debate, restrictionists are simply most salient; they aren't the necessarily the majority. Additionally, one important function of public arguments in democracies is to change public sentiment.

Also...

Yes, there is a lot to unpack. Short answer: I'm a pluralist about consequences, so there's no aggregation. I think there is a pretty broad overlap in various American conceptions of well-being, and I'm aiming for the overlap. Disagreements are obviously most salient, but data on health, the development of capacities, life-satisfaction, and other quality of life metrics are deeply persuasive to huge swathes of the population. There are, of course, elements of every conception that get left out of the overlap. For instance, I have very strong views about autonomy that are not widely shared in other conceptions of well-being. Some conservatives have strong views about the centrality to well-being of cultural stasis and "thick" identities, which are by their nature threatened by the sense of contingency bred by markets and cultural diversity. This is also outside the overlap. I think a lot of public argument is argument over what we're going to count as good or bad public reasons. We've stopped counting certain kinds of racist, sexist, and homophobic arguments as providing public reasons in quite a short period of time. That's probably partly why Reihan, Larison, etc., got so testy from what they wrongly took to be an intimation of racism: if you're guilty of racism, you're outside the pale. I would in fact like certain kinds of "national identity" considerations to be considered more like racism than they currently are. I think they know or sense that some of their main political themes are screwed if they are. So we fight elliptically about what does count as a good reason in a public argument, since there is no definitive objective metric by which to gain agreement on policy. A bit of tangent there....

Re: Ross on the Moral Baseline

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 18:48:46 -0000

bjkad: "most alien labor is probably unproductive makework." Wow. Bzzt! You're disqualified! American employers are clamoring for alien labor because unproductive make-work somehow enriches them? The largely migrant-built ten story condo building (real bricks and everything) going up next to my office sure LOOKS like it will be nice to live in.

Re: Arbeit Macht Glück?

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 14:51:11 -0000

Matt, I'm not vehemently opposed to well-regulated employment insurance. And I don't have evidence at hand about the correlation between risk-taking and unemployment insurance, though I would like to look into it.

Re: Bloggingheads with Rosa Brooks, Part Deux

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 13:05:40 -0000

It can't hurt!

Re: Krugman on Trade and Inequality

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:24:14 -0000

(1) Sure. US environmental preferences cost the US jobs. Is that really an argument for imposing our environmental preferences on others? (2) The international baseline for labor rights should be that workers can, if they like, bargain collectively, and, if they like, negotiate their own labor contracts. Also all workers should have right to exit to other labor markets. People who are worried about the labor conditions of workers in other countries ought to be in favor of letting them move to countries with better conditions.

Re: Tyler vs. Tyrone on Immigration

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 17:35:37 -0000

Ah, I get it now. Good joke!

Re: Is a Guest Worker Program Like Slavery?

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 09:55:45 -0000

Gene: Compatibilism

Re: Douthat’s Populist Nationalism

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 13:45:09 -0000

Ferris, Excellent! I think this is probably about as good as it gets. But I'm not sure this is an argument against the liberal baseline so much as a charge to be realistically prudent when attempting to take it seriously. The fact that we care more about people we see on TV than people we don't obviously doesn't embody a GOOD reason, but it is a constraint. And it is of course possible culturally to widen the circle of concern, so we should.

Re: Why is the U.S. Falling Behind in Immigration?

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 14:11:06 -0000

Marcus, Right. So given that these countries don't have a SOMEWHAT poor country on their border, it's even MORE of a shame that our overall rates of immigration are so stingy. No?

Re: Social Cohesion Bleg

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 16:42:01 -0000

Thanks, Will!

Re: Trammeling Capitalism to Keep the Reds Out

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 14:16:25 -0000

Be de doo bop scat? Or Romney's dog scat?

Re: Fourth Way to Do What, Exactly?

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 12:17:45 -0000

Noah, Thanks. Rings true about Reihan. But I don't think you can say our underlying theory of legitimacy (insofar as there is such a thing) is majoritarian just because the Constitution starts "We the people," since the whole thing embodies the very vision of an anti-majoritarian political system. It is carefully designed to keep majorities from getting their way, and we the people like it that way.

Re: Fourth Way to Do What, Exactly?

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 12:20:05 -0000

Also interesting: G. Morris got his way with the opening line, but there was a pretty heated debate over whether it should say "We the people of Massachusetts, Virginia, Delaware," etc....

Re: Immigration Effects of Mexican Birth Dearth

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 15:25:51 -0000

Stuart: Yes!

Re: iPhone Blogging

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 09:17:27 -0000

Two of them!

Re: Immigration Effects of Mexican Birth Dearth

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 13:07:45 -0000

Wittgenstein would say that statement is meaningless.

Re: Silver Foxes Dig the Green

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 14:39:33 -0000

AC, We're talking about averages. I think (I hope it's obvious) that creativity and intellectual engagement are profoundly satisfying, and that this is indeed something that can get better with age. But for better or worse, most people are not so engaged in this way, which is why you see many, many magazine and TV ads for golfing communities in Florida with lots of other planned activities, and none for philosophy academies for retirees. Could be a good niche idea, though!

Re: Against Patriotism

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 11:20:29 -0000

James, Obviously the Japanese have a very rich imaginary history. They are also some of the most egregiously racist people in the world, due to the story they tell themselves about themselves. Yes, genetic relatedness is real, and so are the dynamics of kin selection. But this scales up not very far at all. The Sailer article you link to attempting to extend the sentiments of family to something called a "race" is a typical use of imagination to forge fake solidarity.

Re: Relatively Awesome

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:39:56 -0000

Matt, Yeah. We're free-riders. In good societies, the cost of internalizing all the benefits from production are prohibitive, so everyone gets a ton of stuff for free. Free-rider is often used pejoratively, but I mean it here as a good thing.

Re: Relatively Awesome

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:46:17 -0000

Rick, See my reply to Ezra just posted. Nearly nihilist? That people are able to make choices about the kind of life they want and take responsibility for it? You're being silly.

Re: Against Patriotism

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 11:47:42 -0000

That truly may be the stupidest thing I've ever read. It implies, among other thing, that I could be indifferent between my sister and a sufficiently large number of chimpanzees. Just stop it.

Re: Relatively Awesome

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 16:07:03 -0000

You suppose a graduate of Wesleyan (#10 USNWR liberal arts college)is supposed to represent "the poor and powerless?" Or does my tin ear prevent me from grasping your subtle joke.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:34:07 -0000

Brock, "Matter" is one of the things the universe could be made of. I don't happen to know what the universe is made of, which is why I made the argument general. But I know that whetever it is made of, matter included, it is evidently compatible with free will.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:53:35 -0000

Listen to McNeel, people!

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 13:31:24 -0000

CG & Gil,

I think the question here is the relevant sense of "able". If this is supposed to mean, "defies the laws of nature," then of course we aren't ever able to do other than what we did do. But then it is mysterious what this has to do with agency as we notmally understand it.

The right idea of "able" (or "power" or "can") is the lack of certain relevant constraints, like coercion, brainwashing, intoxication, etc. These sorts of things can cripple the free exercise of agency. But that's rather different from the fundamental nature of the universe ruling it out.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:04:36 -0000

Either B & C or B or C. Either the whole issue of in/determinism is irrelvant, or whichever one is true of the world is a necessary condition for free will, and probably everything else.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:56:26 -0000

Don't anyone worry about overstaying your welcome. I love it!

Re: Kerry Howley

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:02:24 -0000

I am not outraged because I don't count as a journalist. Otherwise, I'd be completely unhinged with fury.

Re: Feed Busted

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 16:26:43 -0000

So what I mean is that I'm not very smart.

Re: Almost Nothing Rotten in Denmark

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 13:22:22 -0000

Kevin,

The general point about equality and happiness is that it has no independent effect. But, not surprisingly, if you happen to care a lot about equality, you'll find low inequality congenial. It turns out that Americans don't care a lot about inequality, and our relatively high levels have no effect either way on average happiness. The Danes, I bet, are generally really proud of being an egalitarian society, and so low inequality there probably has on average a positive effect.

This point seems to really aggravate egalitarians, since it's basically saying that if you like chocolate, more chocolate will make you happier, and if you don't it won't. Egalitarians would like us to care about equality because it has an independendt effect on well-being, rather than its having an effect (or not) just because we happen to care about it (or don't).

Re: Almost Nothing Rotten in Denmark

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 13:06:14 -0000

TGGP,

http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.20046/pub...

Re: Prebuttal on Immigration and Poverty

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:47:54 -0000

I'm sure your right. If we let women into Augusta it really will ruin the character of our club.

Re: Prebuttal on Immigration and Poverty

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 10:22:51 -0000

TGGP, It depends on the club, doesn't it? I think Augusta's men-only policy is disgusting. I certainly think they should be allowed to have it, but I don't think they should be allowed to feel comfortable about it.

Also, WHOSE right to exclude. The property-owner's or the state's? I like property rights very, very much. But, the point is, a national territory is a legal jurisdiction, not a huge piece of private property owned by the state or "the people". If you like the right to exclude, you must also like the right to include. So how come if I own a private factory, I can't include anyone I like on its premises?

A lot of anti-immigration types strike me as implicitly espousing the idea that I can't invite anyone I like because I don't really own my property, but just sort of lease it from the state (or from "the people"), which gets to make the ultimate decision about who I can let in. But if you have any libertarian sympathies whatsoever, the last thing you think is that individual's rights over their property are at the state's pleasure. If the state shouldn't be able to tell Augusta who they can exclude, they shouldn't be able to tell my factory who can work there, either.

Re: Prebuttal on Immigration and Poverty

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 10:48:54 -0000

Steve, Suppose

(1) the average gain to taxpayers from immigrant labor more than compensates for immigrant-related welfare spending.

Would you then be in favor of more immigrant labor?

Suppose

(2) it was possible to have a large guest worker program in which guest workers were explicitly ineligible for most forms of welfare.

Would you then support the guest worker program?

Re: Prebuttal on Immigration and Poverty

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 10:49:37 -0000

Matt,

I'm a busy man!

Re: The Big Confusion

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 18:48:15 -0000

Steve, Thanks! Yeah, the thread is not heartening. But, nope. Hillary or Obama will be less bad on most issues I care about than Giuliani or Romney.

Re: The Big Confusion

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 11:35:51 -0000

Consumatopia,

I didn't think it would be a very good use of my time to wade that very hostile comments section.

If Chait's point was that the tax structure should be more progressive, than I think he might have a decent point. (That's one reason I thought it was pretty shitty of him to stick the regressivity of Soc Sec on Bush when he's the one guy who has tried to change that in decades.) Chait gestures in the progressivity-is-more-important-than-rates direction in his "liberal triumph" point. We got a hugely lower average rate with a more progressive structure. But mostly the narrative pushes the idea that cutting taxes is just stupid and irresponsible. So do you think he would support, say, a 20% top rate as long as the structure became more progressive? I have my doubts.

Like Hayek, Buchanan, Friedman, Lomasky, and others, I am a minimal welfare statist, and am in favor of some redistribution. But this wouldn't even be very expensive, and could be accomplished with lower taxes and lower revenues. I am very wary of badly structured redistribution, but I am in favor of certain kinds of wage subsidies, etc.

Growing inequality doesn't necessarily say anything about the ability of redistribution to do anything. Most of the inequality problem is a growing gap in human capital. I think this could be partly ameliorated by privatizing the entire education system (the apartheid public school system is a chief cause of intergenerational wage immobility), and having the Feds give generous vouchers to those under an income threshold. And it could be partly ameliorated by better-structured wage subsidies (what the EITC is supposed to be) to increase the incentive to work (and therefore the incentive to acquire skills through experience.) And more. The issue isn't really how much we're spending, it's what we're spending it on. If we spent a lot less on a lot of stupid shit the government does, we could probably fund this kind of system of vouchers, wage subsidies, etc. at the optimal level, have an extremely low top marginal rate, higher growth rates, AND inequality that continues to widen. That would be good, not bad.

So, yes... I think the poor could be rather better off with a more progressive system. But the pertinent question is the structure of that system. We could have it with a much lower top rate.

Re: Relatively Minor?

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 15:59:39 -0000

Guys, Sorry for the imprecision. I meant the difference between two doublings versus three doublings in national income in a given period. The heuristic is you can tell how quickly GDP doubles at a particular growth rate by dividing that rate into 72. (See here: http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/Enc/EconomicGrow...). A 4% rate doubles the economy twice in 36 years. a 5% rate doubles three times in a bit more than 37. That's slightly longer than the range I was talking about in the post, but I meant to be making a general point about the size of the effect. Three doublings versus two leaves you with twice as much.

Re: What’s the Frequency Lakoff?

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 16:05:07 -0000

He is basically talking about libertarian types there, I think. In terms of Haidt's schema, many libertarians and "economic conservatives" are simply liberals who are economically literate.

Re: What’s the Frequency Lakoff?

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 16:42:35 -0000

8, Yeah, on average they do. I think one of the important lessons of Haidt's work is that we should expect all these dimensions to be doing SOME work in all people's worldviews. I think your very good point about environmentalist types is more a point about where to place people on a map of political views. I'd prefer simply to define "liberal" in terms of its distinctive moral sentiments. To the extent that environmentalists are purity obsessed, or labor unionists are all about ingroup solidarity, then to that extent they aren't liberal.

Re: Who Matters?

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 10:06:24 -0000

Will, A felt sense of affiliation isn't the issue. I get pretty damn excited if I meet someone else from Iowa. And I feel a special connection with my friends and family. But I don't think it would be right to let two strangers die in order to save my sister. If that was the choice, I know I'd want to save her, and I might even do it. But we are talking about doing the right thing here. It would be completely miraculous if our attachments and prejudices were a failsafe guide to right action, wouldn't it?

Anyway, what does wanting to feel connected have to do with prohibiting people from seeking opportunities to help themselves through voluntary cooperation?

Re: Who Matters?

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 11:01:34 -0000

Dave, Part of what I am insisting is that a nation-state is not more than a jurisdiction for government. Of course, when a governing body writes rules, it writes them with the interests of those who fall within its jurisdiction in mind. But again, the rules I'm interested in are rules about who is and is not allowed in the jurisdiction. It is perverse to ignore or discount the interests of those who would greatly benefit were they to be allowed in.

I certainly tend to feel more of a "connection" to other Americans than I do to Ethiopians, just as I tend to feel more of a connection to people who attended my High School than those who didn't. But I just don't think this sense of connection has much if any bearing on the weight we give to people's interests in distinctively moral deliberation.

I fully understand the fact of the expanding circle of affinities, and there is of course nothing wrong with putting your own kids first, etc. But I strongly resist the idea that the construct of national citizenship defines a strong set of exclusive mutual obligations. It is true that we are heavily conditioned to identify with our nationalities, but I don't think our conditioning has much by way of normative teeth.

Americans weighing the interests of Americans more heavily than that of Canadians makes about as much sense as Iowans weighing the interests of Iowans more heavily than that of Minnesotans. There is no principled reason why moving up to the nation-level jurisdiction should leave us with profound exclusive obligations. This is especially clear when we realize that it is a completely open option to define a larger jurisdiction. Texas wasn't always a part of the United States. And the U.S., Canada, and Mexico weren't always a part of a North American Union. But they could be. And we could reconstruct our sense of the bounds of attachment, just as many Germans and Danes now see themselves as Europeans. To think today's system of political organization somehow maps on to a deeper moral reality strikes me as pretty naive.

Re: Who Matters?

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 11:49:29 -0000

Will, Excellent comments. That's the sort of consideration that really means something. If local affiliation helps enable extended cooperation, then that's a good reason to reinforce local affiliation. If local affiliation is used to cut off the possibility of extended cooperation, then not so much.

Re: Our Duty Is to Do No Harm

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:45:00 -0000

John, I'm talking about the global system of border and migration control, not just America's, which is just a part of the overall system. Massively improved institutions and growth in many poor countries would still leave them terribly relatively impoverished even after a century. There is a good case to be made that the reduced ability of autocrats to retain their subjects in a world where the better societies are willing to welcome poorer workers, together with the ability of natives to gain human capital and absorb liberal cultural norms abroad, would have a salutary effect on their home institutions.

Re: Our Duty Is to Do No Harm

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 17:35:01 -0000

Tom, Nation-states are a lot like clubs in many ways, but not in the respect of being voluntary associations. My citizenship was a fact of my birth, and I cannot avoid being taxed by the U.S. government. It is pretty complicated to renounce citizenship, and the government reserves the right to tax you or draft you anyway. It's not really a free choice to give up "membership," since without it, you can't travel internationally and your basic rights may not be protected unless you acquire a new membership to a different national club. And that is exceedingly hard to do. That it is far too hard is part of my point.

Re: Our Duty Is to Do No Harm

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 10:48:30 -0000

John, You're probably not going to get much of a response if you simply define peaceful migration, most of which is motivated by the prospect of mutually beneficial cooperation between natives and migrants as "aggression." I have a number of friends gainfully employed here in DC who are citizens of other countries. It is simply insulting and stupid to suggest that they are somehow aggressing against Americans when the obvious fact is that they are employed by Americans because they benefit them. Also, have you noticed that the men at the borders have guns? It is beyond doubt that border-control is coercive. The question is the conditions under which this is and is not legitimate coercion. You have the option of engaging that question constructively and not simply asserting manifest falsehoods as though they have helped your case.

Re: Belgium and the Global Polycentric Order

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:23:19 -0000

James, You think the Flemish and the Walloons are different RACES? Embarrassing.

Re: Yglesias Doesn’t Care about the Causes of Inequality Because He Doesn’t Care about Inequality

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 22:35:58 -0000

economist.com is updating its comments feature, so there's really no reposting it. Anyway, that's damn funny.

Re: Throwdown in Midtown

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:11:38 -0000

I'm pretty sure it will be. I'll post info on the blog as soon as I have it.

Re: Throwdown in Midtown

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 17:18:08 -0000

Oreg,

See here

Re: Americans Happy, but Think Country’s on Wrong Course

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 20:01:54 -0000

Gene, I don't understand what you're saying.

Anyway, I don't think the happiness of Americans is any more or less important than the happiness of anyone else.

Re: Designer Anchors

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:39:19 -0000

Glen, I don't follow this. The choices for the residents were already fixed: stay or go. The house subsidy, like the bus ticket tax, just rigs the relative prices of the alternatives in favor of staying. But I was also thinking of Pitt's choice: subsidize people to stay in New Orleans, or subsidize them to move elsewhere.

In any case, I think my main point was precisely that we suffer from biases that anchor us to familiar places at the expense of our long-term welfare.

Re: Kerry Has a Blog

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 14:15:12 -0000

She is.

Re: I Dated a Guest Worker

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 10:34:28 -0000

Megan, I certainly didn't mean to imply you have untoward motives. It's just that I write enough about this that I know that many, many opponents of guest worker programs, and immigration generally, do.

Re: Guest Workers and The Ultimate Liberal Aim

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 17:17:54 -0000

Mises does not think that there is no solution. He thinks that the solution is to undermine "the ideal of the interventionist state", which is why he bothered to write a book that we are still talking about. Do you think his work is pointless?

Re: Krugman on Trade and Inequality

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 18:40:48 -0000

billyblog,

I am a liberal, as is Krugman, and liberalism is generally founded on a kind of moral individualism. If Krugman wants to argue for a kind of communitarian nationalism, as he sometimes seems to want to do, then he should just go ahead and do that and we can argue about it then. Now, I agree that, as a matter of fact, people are conformist, their moral views are saturated with local cultural assumptions, and this is a constraint on policy, for better or worse. But I am replying to Krugman on his own liberal egalitarian terms, and my point is that liberal egalitarianism is at odds with economic nationalism, a point he seems unwilling to admit.

Your criticism of my "frictionless shoulds" seems to completely miss the point of the argument, which I no doubt could be clearer about. My argument is that egalitarian liberalism, which is incompatible with economic nationalism, demands that these frictions be removed. I don't deny that they exist. I am saying that if you care about what Krugman says he cares about, you should focus on enabling free trade and labor mobility -- things that will lessen global inequality.

I don't think I understand your point about the environment and China.

Re: Guest Workers and The Ultimate Liberal Aim

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 22:37:16 -0000

The common European labor market does exist, and even continues to grow, in case you missed that. Actuality strictly entails possibility, no?

Re: Guest Workers and The Ultimate Liberal Aim

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 14:12:51 -0000

Fred, The right to travel and contract freely may be limited if it conflicts with other rights. If Americans have a right to security against external aggressors, and that right cannot be secured if citizens are selling weapons to the enemy, then the right to do so may be limited.

Re: Guests in the Machine

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 14:16:45 -0000

"Who has the most to gain from blather about those poor migrant workers?"

Poor migrant workers and their families. Obviously.

I, for one, have not given up on attacking domestic ag subsidies. And, yes, migration restrictions are a domestic subsidy, as Micha points out.

Re: Guest Workers and The Ultimate Liberal Aim

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 10:52:59 -0000

Fred, The racism point invariably comes up in part because many immigration opponents remain completely unmoved by empirical evidence regarding things like crime, social cohesion, etc. favorable to higher rates of immigration. And notions like "cultural continuity" when unpacked very often contain racial elements. Immigration foes don't like the charge of racism, because it stings, but in my experience it often does apply, does motivate opposition to immigration, and in those cases, it is not at all a facile to point it out.

Re: The Shame of Ron Paul

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 12:10:06 -0000

Jeff, I'll clarify my ideas about constitutions and nationalism later. For the odiousness off Rockwell and associates, try Tom Palmer's "Fever Swamp" archive.

http://www.tomgpalmer.com/archives/cat_the_feve...

It is not a pleasant experience.

Re: Pinker on the Moral Sense

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 13:42:47 -0000

Self, If any aspect of the moral sense can be recruited to reinforce liberal morality, then I'm all for it. Using the sense of the sacred may be a savvy tactic. But I think in the end we need to keep it pretty well dampened. The fact that many of the world's most successfully liberal places are among the most secular is a good clue. The U.S. is a bit of an anomaly in this.

Re: Pinker on the Moral Sense

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 16:59:27 -0000

Take a look at this, for example:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_marapr_2004/...

Re: The Shame of Ron Paul

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 12:45:28 -0000

Good catch! Me neither. Now.

Re: Ron Paul: Good for “the Blacks”?

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 13:40:51 -0000

Jeff, For one thing, I don't think Paul is going to be able to spend all his money, and I'm worried some of it, in addition to mailing lists, will end up with Lew Rockwell at LvMI.

Re: Ron Paul: Good for “the Blacks”?

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:03:15 -0000

Gorak, This positive/negative stuff is confusing, I know. By positive liberty here, I mean the actual ability to do things--the range of real opportunity. That's what I think is ultimately important. My argument is that government attempt to give people things under the rubric of "positive rights" tends not to increase the range of real opportunity, in part for the very reason you mention.

Re: Green Line 4-Evah, or Cosmolifestyleorangebeltwaytarians Unite!

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 23:03:32 -0000

Ben, Thanks.

MM, Aren't you the one so enamored of calling it like one sees it (anonymously), the stifling pressure of decency be damned?

Re: Cultural Freedom

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:31:47 -0000

No, by shunning you beautiful women are acknowledging your obtuseness.

Re: Cultural Freedom

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:55:54 -0000

You're really stumped? OK. The point is about entrenched, socially reinforced structural limitations, not about one-off refusals to deal.

Suppose you are a lone black man in a white country. The norms there are so racist that it is almost inconceivable that any women would take you. But say there is someone who can transcend the usual bigotry and find it in themselves to love you. If she refused to shun you, she would be shunned herself, and could in fact lose the support of her family, could lose her job, her children would be socially rejected, etc. And that price is too high.

In this world, no one has physically coerced anyone, but there is a perfectly normal, morally crucial sense of "freedom" in which you are not free in this world to love or to realize the satisfactions of a family life.

Re: Cultural Freedom

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:03:44 -0000

TGGP, That's naive. People are conformist. The internalization of norms in early childhood are not individual decisions. Systems of norms have a tendency to self-reproduce. Sociology 101, you know. Individualism is itself a healthy norm that needs to be reinforced. Which is one reason racist norms are harmful.

Some systems of norms are net good. Some are net neutral, like women's mate preference norms probably are. Some are net bad. Racist norms are bad bad bad, which is why decent people work to establish countervailing norms of racial equality and tolerance.

Re: Cultural Freedom

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 18:04:44 -0000

Christopher, Good stuff, and fun to think through.

Do one-off refusals to deal limit freedom in the non-political sense? Yes. But trivially and not wrongfully.

Refusal to deal is one half of how we exercise our freedom of association. If I refuse to take you to the prom, that obviously closes off an option to you. In that sense, you are not free to go to prom with me. But being free to go to the prom with a particular person is not very important as compared to being free to go with someone or other.

Our reasons to refuse to deal are subject to moral evaluation. As are our reasons in our choices to associate, or to not refuse.

If no one will go to the prom with you just because you are black (and you are otherwise lovely in every way), that is likely wrongful exclusion, and we would be right to shame the group to exact a cost for their mutually reinforcing racist preferences.

If no one will go with you because you are just terribly unattractive, then I think we should all sympathize with your plight. But it's not clear there is much that CAN be done about basic preference for symmetrical faces, say, and we generally think it is fine (is it? I find this a hard case) to encourage people to match with the best looking date/mate they can get. But this is a kind of restriction on freedom. We just don't think it's wrongful. I guess there's a reason people on Extreme Makeover almost always say their plastic surgery, etc. was "liberating".

About Neo-Nazis... Yes. They are not free in this sense to both be a Neo-Nazi and enjoy a normal level of social esteem. They must either hide it, or bear the cost of accepting marginal status as despised outsiders. This denial of freedom to both believe what you like and enjoy normal status is morally crucial: it is very, very good.

I'm not sure I'm articulating this quite the way I'd like just yet, but this helps. Thanks for pushing on it.

Re: Must… Destroy… Milton Freedman

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 09:55:28 -0000

Ben,

That free markets allow individual excellence to flourish is an excellent reason to defend them. But it is completely obtuse to make it the main reason to defend them. The main reason is that the average person living under free markets can expect to live longer, more satisfying lives than they would otherwise, excellence or not.

There is no evidence that commitment to "a cause higher than yourself" is a necessary component to flourishing. I think a lot of people crave such a thing, but I also think this is very often an atavistic impulse that it is better to resist. Of course, when John McCain, scion of an elite military family, says it, the cause he is thinking of is the state. He really seems to think his life was enobled by having been tortured, just because it happened while he was doing the bidding of the state in a war. It wasn't ennobling. It was just awful. Which is one reason we ought to stay away from war, and John McCain.

Re: Yes, Mies van der Rohe is Antiseptic and Cold and Socialist

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:05:26 -0000

But you have to admit that to prefer Rothko to Bouguereau back in Bouguereau's day would have been AWESOME.

Re: The Idealism of Jackets and Ties

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:10:43 -0000

Clyde, Thanks. Fixed.

Kevin, I promise, I'll stop!

Re: The Idealism of Jackets and Ties

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:38:12 -0000

Trevor, Maybe. Data? If it's up from your generation, then that means it's up from mine, Gen X, not up from the Boomers. And I remember that 2000 Census study that showed Gen X was all into civic engagement, too.

And Brooks isn't talking about the level of involvement, but the style. The contrast is between chaotic gatherings of dirty hippies activists and orderly lines of nearly-identical young men with close-cropped hair and jackets and ties politely expressing their collective commitment to something "bigger" than themselves, preferably the interests of the local nation state.

Re: Yes, Mies van der Rohe is Antiseptic and Cold and Socialist

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:15:56 -0000

For Rothko-haters, I recommend the episode on him in Simon Schama's Power of Art series.

Re: I Am Making Art Too

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 22:40:52 -0000

Thanks, Steve. You're a gem.

Re: I Am Making Art Too

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 23:31:20 -0000

First, that Missy Ellot song is amazing, whatever you might think Mr Fancypants. Second, it's all really funny and clever if you get the backstory. Third, on a big-ish screen in a gallery, it is amusingly hypnotic. Do I think it's great art. No. Did I enjoy it? Hell yes. Unclench, my friend.

Re: The Wave of the Future : Not Not Very Good!

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 10:01:48 -0000

I dig tiny computers, but I really needed to spend less time reading backlit displays, which is one reason I really like the Kindle. I can email myself pdfs and whatnot, and then read them at my leisure, and eyestrain-free without having to remember to grab or find the printout.

How's the Asus? I think I probably want a tiny laptop eventually anyway.

Re: The Moral Claims of Non-Citizens

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 01:30:57 -0000

That doesn't mean you don't have them. I never agreed to any obligation to not take other people's wallets, but I don't think that has anything to do with whether I should recognize it.

Re: The Moral Claims of Non-Citizens

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 01:37:08 -0000

Aren't a whole lot of us the children and grandchildren of immigrants? Maybe my foreign-born Dad explains why I'm so much trouble.

Re: Nationalist Moral Chauvinism

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 22:23:36 -0000

"Mr. Wilkinson, maintain your present perspective. It is certainly the right way to make friends and influence people."

Right, right. People can't handle the truth. Which would be what? That black people and Mexicans are functionally retarded? That freedom and peace are in conflict with apartheid, and therefore so much the worse for freedom and peace? Yes, you're very brave, and proud of it, no doubt.

I do appreciate the fact that you recognize that stating your views clearly is rhetorically self-defeating. Keep it up.

Re: Nationalist Moral Chauvinism

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 22:25:52 -0000

"If the nation is a social contract, then why should it be any more concerned with the well-being of non-citizens than a corporation is concerned with the well-being of non-shareholders"

A nation is not a social contract.

Re: The Moral Claims of Non-Citizens

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 22:31:09 -0000

Thanks, Stuart.

Re: Nationalist Moral Chauvinism

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 12:21:42 -0000

MM, Yeah. I read Gene Expression. And I am more or less abreast of the latest genetic determinist arguments. I am also more or less abreast of the latest work on brain plasticity and cultural adaptation, which I find rather more powerful than genetic explanations for understanding human diversity.

I do sneer at people who I think cherry pick science to make themselves comfortable in their bigotry, and I think I'm right to do it. No doubt we are all to some extent self-deceived, but I REALLY DO think expanding the scope of cooperation by spreading liberal norms will tend to make people better off.

If my goal was popularity, do you really think I'd be a libertarian? No, I'd either wave a flag and curse the Islamofacists or write love poems to Barack Obama. If the Council of Foreign Relations has the same view as me on North American Integration, well, then good for them I say. But my brand of hyper-capitalist liberal individualist anti-nationalism is popular with almost no one. It seems that you want to fault me for doing my best to be effective in making my honest views somewhat less unpopular rather than just shooting myself in the foot and abiding in the glow of my epistemic virtue and strategic incompetence.I don't get that.

Re: The Moral Claims of Non-Citizens

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:17:47 -0000

"I’m not sure how you imagine these obligations to arise."

Certain constraints on behavior, when generally observed, tend to make most in the relevant social system better off over time. Insofar as people have an interest in their welfare, they ought to heed these constraints. Let's call them rights.

The relevant social system, it turns out, does not stop at borders. Cooperation is already globalized. The gains from cooperation increase as the scope of cooperation increases. Nationalist arguments are arguments for ensuring these gains are not realized.

Re: The Moral Claims of Non-Citizens

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:20:56 -0000

"I may be precluding a future political career here, but this is a polite — though useful — fiction."

If it's useful, how is it a fiction? In my book, rights are justified by the likely effects of respecting them. The argument JUST IS that respecting certain side-constraints on action is useful. The flipside is that failing to respect them is harmful.

Re: The Moral Claims of Non-Citizens

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:26:25 -0000

"The great disillusionments of human history all had one thing in common: the discovery that Man was not the center of the universe. Moral Truth as the last illusion is more ensconced, since morality itself is an instinct of human nature. But like the Ptolemaic system of cosmology, it too will be replaced by fact, and none too soon."

I can assure that you're not going to out-naturalize me. Maybe we have a different idea about what it means to be fully "disillusioned". There are empirical facts about the conditions for human flourishing. There are sets of norms, rules, conventions, institutions etc. that lead people acting within them to live wealthier, healthier, more satisfying, longer lives. That's what I'm after. It's pretty damn far from magical.

Re: Nationalist Moral Chauvinism

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:23:10 -0000

Matt, It's really a comparative claim about the relative importance of genetic and environmental factors in explaining variation in observed cognitive and behavioral traits. The genetic determinist believes genes should get a lot of weight while environmental factors should get little. One can be more or less of a genetic determinist about different traits, since genes really do explain most differences in some things but not so much in other others. I'm pretty determinist about eye color, say, and sort of determinist about personality, slightly less so about intelligence, and not at all about, say, what religion one belongs to (despite the fact that the correlation with parents' religion is impressive!) When it comes to explaining differences in economic performance and political organization, I find genetic explanations deeply unhelpful. I think all this is more like the practical effects of having different religions than it is the practical effects of having different lineages.

Re: Nationalist Moral Chauvinism

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:28:26 -0000

"Immediate crisis quite literally takes away the franchise. The flip side — diminishing uncertainty (entropy) in the local environment — restores it. An interesting fact, no?"

That is very interesting. Thanks! That's one reason I think wealth and technology enhance freedom. By reducing the need for evolved scripts, it makes space for greater self-creation.

Re: Seriously, Why Are You Freaking Out?

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:32:34 -0000

Look, if can't call people openly asserting European racial superiority and pining for the loss of apartheid racist, then who can I call a racist?

Larry, maybe you'd like to address the point of the post?

What I want is an argument about the point at which higher rates of immigration become counterproductive. Many of the commenters clearly think we are ALREADY past that point. I'm asking for evidence and providing a bit of my own.

Re: Seriously, Why Are You Freaking Out?

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:44:44 -0000

Fred, I think you're being a bit dense. I didn't pursue it because there is nothing much to pursue. Most of the world's least happy places are ethnically homogeneous. And a high level of toleration for pluralism is one of the strongest correlates of happiness.

p.s., see above... this post wasn't about the dream, it was about the point of diminishing returns from liberalizing immigration. I don't see a shred of evidence we're anywhere near that point. So there is no excuse for not liberalizing immigration. I prefer a large guest worker program that separates the right to live and work in the U.S. from other benefits of citizenship.

Re: Seriously, Why Are You Freaking Out?

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:16:58 -0000

Larry, A few posts down I said, "I am open to serious, empirically-minded arguments about the location of the point at which additional openness to migration leads to diminishing benefits. But, I’m afraid, one sees very little of this." I do think there is likely such a point. I think we are miles from it. Economic growth (or lack thereof) is I think the best and least tendentious measure of counterproductivity. Californians are quite happy, FYI. State borders are the boundaries of public goods jurisdictions. That means something pretty important, but something much, much less important than nationalist would have it.

For the racism, try this one out.

Re: Seriously, Why Are You Freaking Out?

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:21:28 -0000

KapKool, I am calling RACISTS racist, really. It is good to do this, I swear, and intellectually and morally dishonest not to do so. But it certainly hampers conversation, doesn't it? I think claims of ethnic inferiority and unassimilability are racist. How's that?

Can you explain your Tiebout sorting point? I'd think the reason there is so much clustering around the border comes from the violation of the cost-free movement assumption.

Re: Seriously, Why Are You Freaking Out?

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:19:21 -0000

Brad, So your point is that had I gone to Harvard, I would be more hospitable to racism? Must be a Yale man!

Re: Nationalist Moral Chauvinism

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:56:46 -0000

Let's say I'm a Humean contractualist, if that helps anyone. I think the aim is individual flourishing, very broadly and pluralistically construed. I don't think we're obligated to maximize anything. I think the bindingness of moral rules is a matter of convention, but some rules acquire a deontological flavor, which is to be encouraged, when they are good rules. Libertarian negative rights are like that.

Re: Limited Government and Morality as a Fill-in-the-Blanks Slate

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 09:19:30 -0000

Gil, Indeed, I think literature and pop culture are really important to sensitizing and desensitizing various aspects of people's moral sense. South Park, I think, has probably done more to ridicule the moralizing disgust response than anything ever, which may make Parker and Stone great benefactors of humanity.

Re: Limited Government and Morality as a Fill-in-the-Blanks Slate

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:15:43 -0000

The fact that individuals are composed or smaller constituents and are not indivisible atomic ultimates strikes me as having zero to do with the point about artificiality. I don't think institutions are unreal. But they are social constructions and biological individuals aren't. I don't doubt that the Cato Institute or the Washington Redskins or the United States of America exist. But the point is that United States of America is pretty far from anything that exists in nature, and far, too, from the socially constructed institutions of the human ancestral past. Also, nations are nothing like a sum of anything.

I'm VERY interested in the question of the granularity of personhood. My pet theory is that continuity in subjective personal identity is a solution to a intrapersonal coordination game that helps solve interpersonal coordination games in small, face-to-face, reputation-based communities. I don't think this makes persons a "fiction", since I don't buy any essentialist metaphysics of persons that I would accept as a contrast. But the sense of stable ongoing identity has a function, and that function is served partly by having an unfounded horror of disintegration.

Re: Seriously, Why Are You Freaking Out?

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:27:11 -0000

Arminius, Great comment. Thanks.

I think the Milton Friedman slogan is a canard. It is possible to separate the right to live and work from the welfare entitlements and political rights of citizens. So you can have a welfare state for citizens, and free-ish immigration for everyone else.

On the issue of how immigrants are faring, I defer to Douglas Massey who knows the data far better than anyone else I know of.

http://sociology.princeton.edu/Faculty/Massey/
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/08/20/douglas-...

Re: Too Much Consumption? Let Me Decide.

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:29:03 -0000

Brian, Please check out the link to the Bailey article.

Re: David Brooks and the Infrastructure of Technocratic Control

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:07:20 -0000

Hey Kip, FYI, I wrote about that here.

Re: The Laissez Faire Welfare State

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:20:58 -0000

Of course, there is always the fact that Iceland has about the population of Des Moines.

Re: Moral Duties in Contexts of Partial Compliance

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 11:27:36 -0000

"If I do not serve a chicken at tonight’s dinner, one less chicken would be killed."

Sorry. This is just incorrect. At the time of your choice, all of the relevant chickens have already been killed. And your choice not to eat one tonight will have no detectable effect on demand (won't depress the price of chicken meat) and so will not induce lower future chicken meat production.

Re: Happiness in the Sun Papers

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 14:50:39 -0000

Virgule, That's one of those pieces of conventional wisdom that fails to reflect the data. Angus Deaton:

Average happiness is strongly related to per capita national income, with each doubling of income associated with a near one point increase in life satisfaction on a scale from 0 to 10. Unlike previous findings, the effect holds across the range of international incomes; if anything, it is slightly stronger among rich countries.

The data are now quite clear. Other things equal, it's better to be richer.

Re: Moral Duties in Contexts of Partial Compliance

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 14:59:14 -0000

conchis,

About (a), if the market is big enough, I'm completely sure of it. A single individual's choice in isolation will be completely lost in the noise of normal fluctuations in demand (caused by a sale in a close substitute, e.g.).

About (b), yes. But be careful not to beg the question. If the reason to do it is to signal to others in a way that may help shift a consumption norm over time, then exactly the same reason applies to a voluntary tax. It may make no sense to do it in isolation, but if doing might inspire others to do it, then you should. And so Henry is wrong.

Re: More Fun with Collective Action

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:19:05 -0000

Julian, I thought about this. The chicken case isn't a harmless torturers-type case. It's binary: either your individual choice in isolation saves a chicken or it doesn't. I claim it doesn't, given the present extent of the market for chicken. The carbon case has more of a harmless torturers sorites-like structure. But this isn't about *pain*. Parfit's whole argument is based on a philosophical claim that pains can get imperceptibly better or imperceptibly worse, such that an action that cannot be noticed counts as having caused pain. But I can't see how emitting a little carbon is much like having caused an imperceptible pain. [Added: And the instant case is in fact binary: either your choice affects the number of planes flying to New Zealand or it doesn't.]

Also, I'm largely having fun here. The contractarian compliance problem, which this is an instance of, is one of my fortes. As you know, I think the point of moral conventions is precisely to overcome the myopia of rational self-interest. If carbon emissions really are harmful, and new consumption norms that limit emissions would really make people better off, then I'm all for them. But my point, RE: Henry, is that the same reasoning then applies to paying tithes to the government -- if you really happen to think a bigger government budget would improve society. If you think moral conventions are insufficient, you might want coercion as a backup, but it doesn't make sense to discourage the development of the moral norm.

Re: Meditations on Collective Action and Moral Norms

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:39:34 -0000

Q, Robots! I'm stealing that!

Re: Too Much Consumption? Let Me Decide.

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:29:03 -0000

Of course.

Re: Meditations on Collective Action and Moral Norms

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:21:16 -0000

Pithlord, I'm definitely making the descriptive claim. But I'm not setting out any necessary and sufficient conditions for individual action. The question is whether or not some moral convention or norm tends to actually make the people who follow it better off. There are lots of conventions that do nothing much at all, and I have no problem with them. And obviously a worthwhile new convention can't do any good if some people don't adopt it first, and early on it won't be solving any problem. But whether or not it makes sense to be an early adopter, or to be an evangelist for a new norm, does have to do with whether or not the norm, if broadly established, would be generally beneficial. No?

Re: Meditations on Collective Action and Moral Norms

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:55:31 -0000

Matt, Sure. But I'm talking about the conventional conception of rational choice in which the effect on the individual's welfare determines the preferences ordering.

Re: This Week on Free Will: Stephen Marglin

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:14:46 -0000

brooksfoe,

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing. I feel your nostalgia. But let me be an ass and wonder what was there before the Jenness House. Perhaps the 6500 sq ft monstrosity will be the site of EVEN MORE warm memories that are also inexpressible in monetary terms. Of course, we can't ever know that, so we have to have some other way of adjudicating the dispute, and strikes me that this dispute is proceeding in about the right way, however it turns out.

Re: A Hypothetical Contract with People You Cannot Escape

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:57:57 -0000

Rue,

I know Pogge's work well, and I think it is also ridiculous. How about a theory of justice that recognizes (1) a variety of jurisdictions and (2) the humanitarian advantages that comes from (3) the competition among jurisdictions to attract (4) more or less freely-moving people and capital.

Wouldn't THAT be something !?

Re: A Hypothetical Contract with People You Cannot Escape

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:04:27 -0000

Matt, I look forward to reading Freeman's books. Until then, can you expand on how the "closed society" assumption models the strains of commitment? When the strains of commitment are too much, people can and do leave, and that is a real constraint on redistribution, in very much the same way the declining supply of labor under increasing tax rates is a constraint. Why should Rawls's theory bend over backwards to accommodate the latter constraint, but assume away the first?

In any case, I think Tom does a good job of showing how assuming away exit in fact structures the nature of the problem Rawls' argument is intended to address. Certainly that's not what Rawls MEANT for it do, but it looks to me that Tom is right that that it does. Anyway, I look forward to hearing your thoughts after reading the paper.

Re: A Hypothetical Contract with People You Cannot Escape

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 08:48:53 -0000

JA, I think there's much more of importance in Rawls than just that. I think the resuscitation of contractualist political thought it represents is huge, and I think Rawls' account of the compliance and stability is pretty profound and remains pregnant with untapped possibilities, if only it can wrested from the uselessly over-Kantian clutches of his students.

Re: A Hypothetical Contract with People You Cannot Escape

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:09:15 -0000

Matt, That fits my sense of what the closed society assumption is for. But then that pretty obviously runs us into G.A. Cohen land, doesn't it? The thought experiment is constructed to rule out "to each according to his threat potential" by ruling out exit, but for some reason we allow the possibility that talented people will withdraw their labor at high levels of taxation as a consideration in formulating our principle of justice. Why? What's the difference? It seems that if Rawls is consistent, he faces a dilemma: either Cohen-esque egalitarianism or free markets with large bargaining asymmetries. Which is exactly Tom's point. Settling on justice as fairness depends essentially on permitting economic exit but disallowing political exit, but there is no non-arbitrary reason to treat the two differently.

Re: If the U.S. Is So Rich, Why Isn’t It Happier?

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:52:58 -0000

Christopher, Sadly no. I had three different people cancel on me this week and I ended up with nothing.

Re: Happiness and Personality: Indviduality Matters

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 22:41:14 -0000

Kevin, That's what the test says! I was raised in a hyper-conscientious culture, and I am unusual in a number of useful ways, which helps a lot. Otherwise, I might be screwed. A high school girlfriend once told me I'd end up the smartest guy working the Quik-Trip. This has always haunted me, because it's never been hard for me to imagine how that could happen. But yes, I am extremely conscientious for a person so low on native conscientiousness. Current and future employers please take note.

Re: Happiness and Personality: Indviduality Matters

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:00:36 -0000

April, Great points. In fact, I'm really attracted to meditation because it's the only thing that really seems to make a deep difference. Better than Ritalin, anyway.

Winston, Yeah, I should have mentioned that.

Re: If You Own It, You Can Sell It

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:08:45 -0000

Alisa,

This line of thought begs the question. How is the sale of sexual services any more like slavery than the sale of any other kind of service?

My guess is that you think sex is different. But that is because sex is treated like it is different, not because it ought to be.

A non-commercial sexual life is indeed a natural right, as is a commercial sexual life.

Re: Money and Happiness on Marketplace

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:32:10 -0000

Gil, Good point. (Did you mean above $100,000) The challenge of these things is to do an accurate cartoon of the facts, since it's too short to be extremely precise.

Re: If You Own It, You Can Sell It

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:12:48 -0000

FXKLM, I'd add that a significant number men and women go through a phase in which they have sex with a lot of different partners for a several years. This is almost always in a much more out of control and emotionally volatile context -- lots of alcohol, maybe some drugs, etc -- than a lot of prostitution. Yet very few people think a man our woman who had a lot of partners in his or her party days in their early twenties can never have a normal sex life.

Re: If You Own It, You Can Sell It

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:08:20 -0000

Patrick,

Could the relevant difference between male and female sexuality be (1) women are supposed to be pure and (2) we think they are more fragile than men and too weak to look after themselves?

Of course, there are circumstances in which it would be wrong to buy or sell sexual services, but there are circumstances in which it would be wrong to buy or sell a television.

The "sex is different" line is almost complete bluster. It is different mostly because even otherwise rational people are fiercely determined to treat it differently. But we know that people can behave very promiscuously FOR FREE and come out the other side glad they did it. Why is sex for money categorically different? What's the evidence? Our intuitions, conditioned by the social stigma, simply beg the question. So tell me exactly how and why selling sex is more damaging than giving it away. What are these "psychological and physiological reasons"?

Re: If You Own It, You Can Sell It

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:01:34 -0000

Patrick,

I do not deny that there are differences in tendency between men and women. But you do realize, don't you, that the argument based on difference has historically been deployed to justify almost every restriction of women's liberty. It is not "trite" to be skeptical of the force of these arguments, which constantly evolve as social attitudes evolve. Rather, such skepticism is a large part of what it means to take women's freedom seriously.

I honestly don't know, and I don't think you do either, that sexuality is more intimately linked to a sense of identity than many other aspects of a human life. I am sure that the centrality of sexuality to our personhood is a part of modern ideology, but I don't know that this is a biological fact about us.

I don't think prostitution is nice. I think it is work -- often hard, emotionally exhausting work that is usually undesirable when there are other equally well-paying options. But I don't think this is special, or unusual.

I once worked at a telemarketing place, and I left after a week because the sense I was violating people's privacy and manipulating them in various ways was very hard for me to take. Other people seemed to thrive on badgering grandmothers into signing up for credit cards.

Prostitution is not an especially attractive profession, but it is not especially terrible either, and the people who choose to stay in it are probably the people for whom it seems like the best deal. I don't see the point of making that choice more fraught or emotionally loaded than other similar labor market choices.

Re: Selling Sex Is OK and Child Abuse Isn’t

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 04:22:39 -0000

Fred, Start with the simpler question: Should it be legal for a 19 y/o to have sex with one of his or her parents? Yes. Should it be legal to do it for money? Yes. Would doing either be effed up? Yes. Would a law banning this likely prevent anyone tempted to do this from doing it. No.

Re: Selling Sex Is OK and Child Abuse Isn’t

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 14:46:31 -0000

Rain, There are a lot of very real facts about development that really do distinguish adults from children and it's fanciful to think otherwise. I agree that given developmental variety, line-drawing exercises are bound to be somewhat arbitrary, but it is possible to do it in a way that respects regularities about development while minimizing unnecessary and damaging paternalism.

Do you really have empirical evidence of the effects of prostitution, controlling for the influence of the status quo illegality and stigma? Where may I look at it?

Re: How Sex Is (and Isn’t) Different, Part II

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:20:23 -0000

push,

Well, it depends on the extent to which the harm is a function of the standing paternalism.

If what you post were true, then yes, that would be as good as a case for paternalism gets. Of course, it's nowhere near being true. Conceding obviously false empirical premises is a whole other kind of charity.

Re: How Sex Is Different, Part I

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:30:04 -0000

Steve, Don't be a jackass. I completely agree with the point that women have a strong strategic incentive to promote slutshaming norms as well. I thought about this, and would have said something about it, but needed to get on the plane. I don't think that changes things much other than reinforce the point that the peculiar evolutionary psychology of sex helps explain why we will be inclined to conspire against women's sexual autonomy.

Yes, I am a moralizer. I think it is both right and useful to denounce immoral people. Often they are moralizers, too. Many people are wrong about morals!

Re: Positive-Sum Within, Zero-Sum Without

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:45:57 -0000

Dan, He wasn't critizing Bush's policies in particular, but individually prefunded health and retirement accounts, which are well-tested and proven to work. My argument was and is that if he took his own rhetoric and avowed values seriously, these are the kinds of policies he'd want to enact.

Re: Viciously Darwinian Totalitarian Fascism in One Lesson

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 10:57:45 -0000

MDM,

If you're using redistribution to solve a collective action problem, then it could be positive sum. If it's just an income transfer from one class to another, then that's pretty much the definition of zero sum, and its almost certainly negative sum in reality.

You can make an argument about transfers being positive sum in utility terms, due to considerations of declining marginal utility, but usually this ignores the distinction between the value over time of wealth invested and wealth consumed.

A dollar increase in the average surely doesn't go wholly or even mostly to the bottom quintile. The bottom quintile may get the least of it. But if trade leaves the bottom quintile no less well off in real terms, which it does (free trade pushes prices down), then the trade game is broadly positive sum. There are always short-term distributional winners and losers in a dynamic system, but as long as the system leaves most everyone a winner in the long-term, relative to the relevant alternative systems, there is no reasonable ground for discontent.

I can imagine an scenario in which a BIG would have long-term positive externalities FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE TRANSFER SYSTEM (maybe we see this in Scandinavia? Again, I don't see this as broadly generalizable.) But then one creates a problem in policing membership in the system. You create a clear in-group and a clear out-group in the way trade does not.

Re: Patriotism and Monogamy

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:35:55 -0000

Robin, Lots of reasons! One is an ethos of prudence. Loving a particular woman does not contribute to a norm that enables her to wreak terrible violence. Another reason is that we need special particularistic attachments and attachments to individual people are much more satisfying, and less likely to leave you with dirty hands, than attachments to countries. Another is that countries aren't really real in the same way women are, but are figments of collective imagination, and you should reserve your meaningful particularistic attachments to real things. Or, to get more metaphysical, what we love in individuals is a complex interrelation of properties. The higher-order property that is this specific combination of complementary traits is in principle repeatable, but is in fact completely singular, which encourages us to see it as a sort of quiddity or individual essence, which we take to have special value over and above the constitutive properties. Of course, you are unlikely to be loved unless you can commit to loving more or less unconditionally, and loving a quiddity helps solve the assurance problem at the heart of the reciprocal love game. Countries won't love you back.

Re: Climate Debate Daily

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:42:24 -0000

Yes, A sophisticated, non-predetermined discussion about the methodology, findings, and implications of climate science is almost too sad to bear. Couldn't agree more.

Re: It’s How You Spend It

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 15:30:20 -0000

That's not a very nice thing to say. I am "preoccupied" with money because others have an ideological axe to grind against money, which leads them to systematically misinterpret otherwise perfectly clear data showing it's huge importance to well-being. Perhaps you are one of those people.

Re: Capitalism: It’s Nice!

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:09:18 -0000

Matt, Thanks. I bet personality has an effect on disposition to cooperate.

Re: Framing the World Away

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:50:39 -0000

Pithlord,

"On the environmentalist account, most of the costs of carbon emissions will occur in the future. Your argument that the places with high carbon emissions are also the wealthiest, including environmental goods within the concept of wealth, is totally non-responsive."

Indeed, the incidence of the costs is so far in the future that people who will have to pay them now will be be dead. That can't make THOSE people wealthier, can it?

And given steady growth, future people will be much wealthier, materially, than we are. It of course depends on the exact extent of the harm of carbon emissions, but there is more than a passing possibility that we have figured out a good way to transfer wealth from wealthier future people to ourselves. But, again, Brewer wants to rule out considering things in this way.

Re: Framing the World Away

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:02:14 -0000

Pithlord, About Cato... In my experience, Cato folks have the usual views about the role of property regimes and pricing mechanisms in solving commons problems. It's kind of libertarian conventional wisdom.

Re: Analytical Nationalism vs. What Actually Happens

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:58:11 -0000

"What can be achieved by immigration that can’t be achieved by trade?"

(1) Poverty and inequality are more quickly reduced. That's what this post was about. Are you in favor of poverty and inequality?
(2) Productivity of low-skilled labor is higher in the U.S., due to a number of factors (better management, better institutions, etc), which helps explain the higher wages.

Re: Analytical Nationalism vs. What Actually Happens

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 10:50:42 -0000

bjk,

You help Mexicans faster and more reliably by allowing them in. It's just true!

And how is this moral blackmail? Immigration JUST IS the best means to reduce poverty. Please check out Lant Pritchett's Let Their People Come. You are either for doing what works or you are against it. If you will the end, then you will the means. Etc.

The direction of the subsidy depends on the moral baseline. I think the baseline is non-coercion, in which case free movement of labor is where we start from. Restriction needs a special justification. In that case, the natural way to look at it is that immigration restrictions subsidize citizens who benefit from the artificially reduced labor supply. To see immigration as a subsidy to business is backwards.

FYI, My hometown in Iowa has a lot of Mexican immigration, and for the most part this is quite welcome, since the meat-packing plant might not survive without it. Productive taxpaying immigrants tend to pay for themselves. Not to say there aren't strains on the public schools, etc., but the natives tend to realize they need the newcomers.

Re: Grandpa’s Little Helper

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:08:43 -0000

push, Because he evidently fails to inhabit the perspective of the ordinary 16 y/o pregnant girl. Many of them do become grandmothers at, say, 35. Which, judging from the large body of evidence about teen mothers, tends to be good for no one involved.

Re: Comical Conservative Conditionals

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:28:14 -0000

Indeed! Do Jihadis care about conceptions of the objective moral order different from theirs?

Re: Comical Conservative Conditionals

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:31:35 -0000

MDM, I do value liberty for its own sake, and I'd be happy trade a bit of some other things I value for more liberty, if it came down to it. But I don't hold much stock in "it's just good, dammit" as an argumentative strategy, so I find it pretty useful to point out what it's good for, as well. Since it's good for so many things that so many people value, that's a pretty great way of arguing.

Re: Children Make Us Miserable

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:05:32 -0000

Just to be clear, I argue often that happiness isn't the only thing worth caring about. And I'd like to have children in a decade or so myself. (Kerry and I would like to adopt). But given the costs of kids, especially to women, I think that natalist propaganda that encourages the sense that life without children is lacking or incomplete in some way is harmful and implicitly sexist.

Anyway, no doubt the challenges of childrearing are rewarding at many levels. The thing is, the challenges of the things you could be doing if you didn't have kids can be rewarding at many levels, too. I think a lot of people simply assume that a life without kids cannot be just as fulfilling and meaningful as a life without kids, but as far as I can see, that's just false.

Re: Children Make Us Miserable

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:25:54 -0000

Jen, I don't get it! 45 year-old men sire children ALL THE TIME. I believe Michael Douglas was about 60 when his last was born. What's the difference in adopting one? Given changes in technology, health, medical care, and lifespans, 45 really is the new 35. And part of the point of waiting until you're in your peak earning years is so you can outsource as much of the annoying stuff as possible.

Re: Comical Conservative Conditionals

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:47:31 -0000

Gene, Like I said, if by MORAL ORDER you just mean CAUSALITY than that's fine. There is in fact a natural order that determines what means will achieve what ends. How is this "sophistry"? I suspect you know full well that most uses of "objective moral order" refer to superstitious nonsense. "Homosexuality defies the objective moral order" ... that kind of thing. Do you think creationist essentialism is what "objective moral order" is about? Because I'm afraid that what most conservative mean by it.

Re: Children Make Us Miserable

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 13:52:07 -0000

Eric, Humans have little or no biological capacity for detecting genetic closeness. (Even giving birth to a child doesn't guarantee the women that it's her offspring these days.) If it matters a lot to you, then it's because you THINK it does. The actual human emotional attachment and bonding mechanisms are based in body contact, proximity, food-sharing, etc., and is incredibly labile. (Have you noticed how attached people are able to get to blankets, stuffed animals, pets, etc.) If you're fixated on seeing yourself in a half-clone, or have accepted some kind of silly ideology of genetic perpetuation, then yes you will feel you are missing something if you adopt. Of course, people who don't adopt are missing something entirely different.

Re: ABJ!

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 18:05:00 -0000

Hamilton was a better political theorist, a better economist, was against slavery, and for trade, technological progress and rapid economic growth. He was right about more that was deeply important than Jefferson was. If you think central banks are a bigger issue for liberty than human enslavement, trade, or the growth of capitalism then your priorities are screwed. Advantage: Hamilton!

Re: ABJ!

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 18:06:18 -0000

However, Jefferson was, one must admit, an excellent architect.

Re: ABJ!

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:15:45 -0000

Kevin, The Louisiana Purchase was unconstitutional, too, and set the young U.S. on the path of imperialist expansion and violence against native peoples. It turns out that few of the Founders had much interest in strict adherence to the constitution. Basically, I think Jefferson was indeed an incredibly brilliant person, but in the end a rather loathesome character. All of Hamilton's flaws are trivial in comparison to Jefferson's failing to free his slaves basically because he bought to much French furniture and couldn't afford to.

Re: Difference Makes No Difference in the Difference Principle

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:49:37 -0000

Rue, I think a strict interpretation of the difference principle is silly. Indeed, I think the difference principle is silly, since difference is not what matters. But I think a non-rigid version of the intuition behind is is really sensible: a just social system will do well for the poor. Also, as a matter of fact, the wealthy don't need to take much of a hit in order for the system to do well for the poor, so cases in which we take almost everything from the rich in the attempt to give the poor an extra penny just don't come up. When you try that, you end up with Zimbabwe, which does not in fact benefit the poor in the end.

Re: Children Make Us Miserable

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:58:05 -0000

Eric, Maybe you want to believe that you can smell kin, but there is no evidence of it.

The issue with stepchildren is that often they are accepted as part of the price of the new spouse, but are really unwanted. But I was talking about adopting children one does want.

How many adopted children don't look for biological parents? In the absence of the comparison, a few anecdotes establish nothing at all. And why are people looking for their bioparents doing this? Because they can smell them out there or because people like you insist that similar DNA is a source of meaning?

Re: Difference Makes No Difference in the Difference Principle

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:04:11 -0000

Both great papers. I am very close to Frankfurt's view. He knows bullshit when he sees it.

Re: ABJ!

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:40:54 -0000

Or, if that's too stoutly principled, what does it take to move down in an ordering of men, some of whom did at least as much in establishing American liberty, never owned other humans and were powerfully articulate critics of the practice?

Do some people REALLY think central banks are worse than human enslavement?

Re: ABJ!

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:20:58 -0000

Alberto wins!

Re: ABJ!

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:25:19 -0000

OK, I'm convinced Hamilton was horrible, too, which does nothing to improve my regard for Jefferson.

Re: Philosophy Is Sexy

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:41:08 -0000

wph, Rutgers is one of the best philosophy departments in the world. It is not a very historically-focused department, but probably the best example of a department where philosophy well-integrated with science at a very high level. A lack of rigor is unlikely to be the problem there.

Re: Police Corruption Is Structural

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:24:32 -0000

Matt, Moskos is clear that there is actually very little petty corruption ... shakedowns, cops on the take, that sort of thing. The clip is about how cops have a strong above the board incentive to make overtime pay for court appearances by collaring petty drug dealers. (They get two hours over time no matter what, and usually the guy arrested is in and out of court in just a few minutes -- adding to his record and likelihood of longer santences later.) My point was that the corruption is in the structure of legit incentives to ruin young black men's lives, not in the character of cops.

Re: Nudge

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:32:18 -0000

The difference is you think buying health insurance is a good idea. And lot of people think we're all good an truly fucked unless we fight and win this war.

Re: Choice Architecture and Paternalism

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 18:36:40 -0000

push,

Excellent. I read a piece the other day that said that "financial literacy" is dangerous because people might decide they know something but then make a mistake. So they should NOT learn about markets and leave it to the experts to make investment decisions for them. It occurred to me this was basically the classical priestly Catholic argument against people being able to read the Bible in their own languages.

Re: Nudge

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:47:06 -0000

Lu, Yes. Sarcasm.

Re: Choice Architecture and Paternalism

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:43:28 -0000

What S&T; mean by "libertarian paternalism" is, in normal English, "choice-preserving helpfulness". Normally we don't think of choice-eliminating helpfulness as a kind of helpfulness, so really they just mean helpfulness, taking into account new results in psychology. It's pretty vacuous.

Re: The Quotable Cowen

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:43:49 -0000

conchis,

Here you go...

Re: A Corny Story

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:28:20 -0000

That's right John. I was waiting for this, but I was starting to think it would never come, so thank you.

Re: Accounting for Children

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:55:22 -0000

Right. No one ever uses birth control and everyone has 10 children because it's just too creepy to think about the costs and benefits.

Re: Accounting for Children

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:35:44 -0000

I see you have taken what I call below, "the route of the sentimental moralist." Which is fine, I guess, if you're not interested in actually knowing things. I have no interest in the population of humanity. We're talking about the self-interest of parents. You seem to say that kids are both obviously not in the parents' self-interest and yet the self-interested benefits are incalculable. Which is it?

And still... How many do you have, and why don't you have one more than that?

Re: Nussbaum on Sex Work

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 15:50:17 -0000

Alex, I can't actually figure out why my feed is showing summaries, since it's set to show full text. Looking into it, thanks.

Re: Optimal Carbon Tax

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 18:41:07 -0000

I don't think it's true that the majority of climate scientists believe warming has "a large probability of being catastrophic". But I think you've just captured my worry. There is a bias, largely generated by moralized panic and herd behavior, toward estimating a very large harm from human activity. If that's how we come up with the tax rate, it's very likely to be way too high and that really would be catastrophic to many of the world's poor. Since I think compliance problems here are insurmountable, I'm not THAT worried about it. But as a matter of basic intellectual standards, it's crucial.

Re: Nussbaum on Sex Work

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 21:30:40 -0000

He means Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law.

Re: Geoffrey Sayre-McCord on Free Will

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:03:05 -0000

TGGP, I said nothing at all about "good of the species" which I think is silliness. I was talking about institutions, conventions, systems of norms, etc. that facilitate the flourishing of the individuals who abide by them.

Re: Optimal Carbon Tax

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:57:01 -0000

Everybody, I agree that what matters is the marginal harm from carbon emission. I also agree that an effective, too-high carbon tax is pretty much politically impossible. But I think the main intellectual issue -- figuring out the net externality -- stands. For which, see Jim.

For those who like to frame mitigation as a public good that needs to be subsidized, I think I can reframe my point in those terms, too. Growth is an underprovided public good that needs to be subsidized. But it also contributes to warming. If growth is a tax on mitigation, and mitigation is a tax on growth, then what do we end up with? Again, see Jim.

Re: Down on the Compound

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:14:33 -0000

TGGP, Of course this sort of thing freaks DFR out, because, as Steve points out, the possibility of insular authoritarian brainwashing communities structured around child rape is a pretty drop-dead objection to the desirability of anarcho-capitalism.

I don't know much about the procedural details of the case. Like I said, the state's case may be screwed relative to the law. But I know enough about the practices of the community to think if they're out of the reach of the law, well-applied, then that might well be a problem with the law failing to function with respect to the protection of children's rights. They fall on the wrong side of the line, IMO. The argument ought to be where to put it, not whether to have one.

Re: Down on the Compound

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:03:43 -0000

Steve, Good point. I think the state plays a perverse double role in this. First, the state bans polygamy, pushing it into the margins of society, isolating the children in insular enclaves, largely gutting their ability to eventually exercise their right to exit. Next, the state SUBSIDIZES THE WHOLE THING with welfare checks! Then, the state notices the kids are mistreated and takes them away. I suspect the state wouldn't need to step in if it hadn't done so much to facilitate the existence of this community.

Re: Down on the Compound

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:08:17 -0000

TGGP, Don't call it brainwashing if you don't want. Thought experiment: Suppose I find an infant girl one day on my doorstep. I raise her in total social isolation in my basement where I feed her well, teach her to read, etc., and tell her about how I am God, and she must never leave the basement because the world is evil and only I can protect her. When she reaches the legal age of consent, I tell her she must let me have sex with her. She says OK. Is that informed consent? Or a very elaborate form of rape?

Re: Down on the Compound

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:44:55 -0000

Matt, Fair enough. But parroting Kerry is in fact a reliable epistemic strategy, because she is never wrong, which is easily verifiable through intuition.

Reading Friedman, I don't actually find see any substantive defense of this FLDS community's practice other than his pointing out that other religions also involve distributing teen girls to older men. So the point is: that aspect of those religions ought to be illegal too? OK!

He's probably right that the case is bunk, legally, that the state is making some stuff up, etc. But I'm interested in the idea that kids have a right to develop their moral capacities, are denied them in these kinds of conditions, and so they really are not giving meaningful consent to participate in this way of life. It's bad for all of them, but girls in particular are turned into baby-making machines without their ever becoming able to seriously considering an alternative life.

Re: Down on the Compound

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:52:47 -0000

TGGP,

The correct answer: An elaborate form of rape.

So if a teen is, say, nutritionally stunted, illiterate, and incapable performing rudimentary tasks, is that just a different way of developing capacities, or a way of not developing capacities?

You cannot prevent someone from denying something. But you can show that they are wrong to deny it by saying something intelligible about the conditions for meaningful consent and showing that they are met. I don't even think it takes that much. If any of those teen brides had lived with "not weird" folks for a year and then come back, that would be evidence of meaningful consent. Having had an education that created the possibility for contextualizing and evaluating the decision, that would be evidence consent was meaningful. Etc. Why are you interested in making the obvious intelligibility of the idea of meaningful or informed consent less than obvious?

Re: False Consciousness, Psychological Freedom, and Pluralism

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:10:27 -0000

TGGP, Popper was wrong. Marxist theories of false consciousness are falsifiable. And they are false. It is possible to find out how the mind works and to develop intelligible conceptions of normative cognitive functioning.

I think you're being a bit obtuse in your selective moral skepticism. You seem to endorse some normative conception of freedom but then pretend you don't even know what other conceptions might even mean. It's just not interesting or useful.

Re: False Consciousness, Psychological Freedom, and Pluralism

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:36:19 -0000

"Normative cognitive functioning? As in the way ones mind ought to work? Forgive me if I believe this oversteps bounds. I myself wouldn’t like someone telling me that some of my particular habits - including the one that afflicts most Americans, too much TV time - run afoul of proper normative cognitive functioning."

So you don't think that kids ought to be able to read by a certain age?

Re: False Consciousness, Psychological Freedom, and Pluralism

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:46:25 -0000

I think that's neat, too, as long as they can read some language.

Re: False Consciousness, Psychological Freedom, and Pluralism

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:07:06 -0000

TGGP, There are facts of the matter about what leads to longevity, happiness, pleasure, wealth, the realization of certain human potentials, etc. And it is a fact that, other things equal, more life is better than less, less pain is better than more, more happiness is better than less, wealth is better than poverty, etc. etc. Certain systems of institutions and norms facilitate the realization of these aims better than others, and we ought to have a system that makes people better off rather than worse off in all these ways. There is of course no way to prevent you from disagreeing with all this, just as there is no way from preventing people from being criminals, parasites, or sadists, if they are really determined.

If the way you want to put it is that decent people "prefer" that men not rape their nieces, but you think nothing of it, then you can put it that way, but it puzzles me why you would want to.

Re: The Value of the Marginal Kid

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:09:18 -0000

Likewise, it is depressing to realize that almost all of the people who are too slow to actually understand the debate, and the merit in having it, will attempt to reproduce themselves.

Re: False Consciousness, Psychological Freedom, and Pluralism

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:35:50 -0000

K.Larson, Excellent, as was your comment in the last previous thread. Thanks!

Re: False Consciousness, Psychological Freedom, and Pluralism

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:38:40 -0000

Rue, Don't have time for research right now. In terms of cognitive and emotional maturity, and given the nature of the choice, I suspect the marriage age ought to be around 35.

Re: Arthur Brooks on Religion and Happiness

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 18 May 2008 21:13:12 -0000

John, That may explain why Europe is secularizing faster than the U.S. But it remains that many European countries have become happier while becoming less religious. It's not clear to me why the mechanism matters.

Re: Arthur Brooks on Religion and Happiness

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 20 May 2008 10:57:51 -0000

Brooks strongly implies that an increase in secularization will harm American happiness. That's a causal claim. If you think that, other things equal, p causally implies q, then showing a number of instances of p (secularization) that not only do not coincide with q (decreasing average happiness), but coincide with not-q (increasing average happiness) STRONGLY UNDERMINES the causal claim. That's all I'm saying.

Yes, Jason raises a logical possibility, but so what? Go ahead and look at the multivariate regression.

Re: One True Price Index?

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 21 May 2008 10:38:06 -0000

Luis, The proportion of the population in the top and bottom decile cannot cannot change. That's the sort of thing we're talking about. And the issue is about WHETHER inequality has increased, not whether to be concerned about it. That prices may rise slower or that quality may increase faster for the goods typically purchased by the poor doesn't neutralize concerns about growing inequality, it may actually stop the inequality -- the kind that matters -- from growing.

Re: John Cassidy on Libertarian Paternalism: Way Too Libertarian!

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 23 May 2008 15:26:37 -0000

mk,

Sorry, I don't think I understand what you're asking. When modeling behavior, you should use the best model. And there is nothing morally illegitimate about a cost-benefit analysis. Legitimacy pertains to policy, and the legitimacy of policy is a matter of justice, among other things, and the question of justice is not exhausted by determining a policy's net benefit.

Re: “Irrational” Choice and the Persistence of Lives Well-Lived

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:44:49 -0000

My point was just that behavioral economics leaves the debate about paternalism more or less untouched. If the arguments for paternalism before it came along were good, then they're still good -- but not extra-special good -- and if they were bad, they're still bad.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 29 May 2008 17:28:57 -0000

Matt, Except what you say is a lot clearer!

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:34:54 -0000

Crispin, No one doubts people can fare poorly under states. But some of states seem pretty good! Does Switzerland regularly dip from the well of utilitarian disaster? Don't people there do really well? Is there really a feasible alternative anarchist scheme that the Swiss could get to from here that would leave them better off?

Are you a George Kateb fan? Me too!

Re: Please Discuss

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:15:58 -0000

Pith,

So, suppose the just functions of the state require a 10% tax rate. The rate goes down from 45% to 30%. That's no change in freedom, right?

Re: Please Discuss

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:56:14 -0000

Jason, Suppose you are taxed once a year. Some people pay a higher rate, some people a lower rate. There is ONE instance of coercion per taxpayer. Just like there is one mugging per victim, regardless of the thickness of their wallet. You really want to say that people with the lower rate are coerced less?

Anyway, you are threatened with jail even if your pay 0%, as many millions of Americans do. You still have to file. So you may be coerced even if you pay nothing. But I maintain that these people are a lot better off than the people who have to pay, freedom-wise. Don't you?

Micha, Good point. The intrapersonal utility comparison is do-able. And so they SHOULD be talking about higher taxes as more harmful, not as liberty-reducing. But they don't. They talk like normal people do and say it is a matter of freedom.

To reiterate... My point -- ill-made, I'm afraid -- is that even ideological rights libertarians, when they are speaking unreflectively, use "liberty" just like other English speakers, and think that paying less in taxes is a gain in freedom just because it is a reduction in the loss of opportunity. They don't talk about harm because they really do think of it as a question of liberty, even though their theory says they shouldn't.

Re: Please Discuss

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:11:19 -0000

Jason, I find your intuition to be exactly parallel to "The guy with the thicker wallet got mugged more," which doesn't make sense. Why do you think you're not saying that?

And your example flatly fails. Suppose at the 90% rate, there is perfect compliance. Or low compliance but the government does little about it. But at the 1% rate, a ton of people resist, and the government constantly comes with guns and throws people in jail until they pay up. Evidently the place with the lower rate has the more coercive government.

Re: Please Discuss

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:47:10 -0000

Jason, So, basically you are accepting my distinction between an instance of coercion and the harm from coercion. But you say I'm playing a language game. Yes. It's called "English". I think you're just table-pounding, insisting that instances of coercion that are more harmful are ipso facto more coercive, but this seems to me just obviously wrong. I agree that some coercive acts are more coercive than others, but the degree of coerciveness seems more or less independent of the degree of harm.

(a) I threaten to kick your shin unless you give me your $10 million van Gogh painting. You capitulate.

(b) I grab you by the throat and, angry eyes blazing, credibly threaten you with violent death unless you give me everything in you pockets. You give me everything you have: $.45.

In what universe is (b) not more coercive? The harm is probably rather greater in (a) but that doesn't make it more coercive, does it?

Coercion is the use of force or the threat of force to gain compliance. If I stipulate that the same amount of force is used steal $100 and $1000, you can't just reply that, no, really more force was deployed in the $1000 case, since that's more money. Or maybe you're playing language games?

Re: Sausage, Anyone?

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:08:50 -0000

Pithlord, "Baptists and Bootleggers" just is part of "crude" public choice lore. Morally-motivated regulation can be one of the most powerful sources of cover for those who profit from them.

If public choice theory is the theory that no one is morally motivated, then not even the inventors of public choice theory believe in it.