DISQUS

Will, this study might be interesting to you--it is especially interesting because it uses a discontinuity design (more sound than your usual regressions):

http://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/qjecon/v119y2004i4...

The bottom line:

"Our simulations show that if the free movement of workers between East and West is allowed, as much as
27% of the Eastern European population would migrate to the West, with most of them being highly educated
workers. This would benefit Europe as a whole by increasing the gross national product of Western Europe
by almost 1% and that of Eastern Europe by 16% thanks to the fact that the highly educated workers are
much more productive in the West and free trade spreads the benefits from their extra productivity."

Will, take a look at this new NBER paper:

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w13631

the idea of obligations to distantly future generations strikes me as incoherent. These are people that do not actually exist, and the people who do eventually exist is a function of what we do and don’t do now, which is surely a serious complication.

I don't see anything incoherent about such duties. It just means that you likely can't ground them in a person-affecting moral theory. If you, on other hand, think there are some impersonal values or principles, then there are such duties. This is of course standard fare since Reasons and Persons. But it seems that you are antecedently committed to skepticism about impersonal values. That needs to be justified. It seems, at any rate, that commonsense morality endorses some impersonal values, such as desert, among others.

I've spent some time thinking about this too. If coercion is to have some special normative salience, I think it will probably have something to do with the Kantian injunction never to treat persons as mere means but rather as ends in themselves. Typically, coercion will treat a person as mere means unless it is somehow justified to the person who is being coerced. But this doesn't necessarily single out coercion as special: manipulation and perhaps certain kinds of exploitation are also problematic in this regard.

At first glance at least, all of these are intentional forms of disrespect for persons as ends in themselves. The same kind of wrong is not involved when we don't work to provide someone with a larger range of choice than she would have had otherwise.

For a treatment of this issue from the Kantian perspective, I would recommend Korsgaard's "The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing With Evil" and Robert Taylor's "A Kantian Defense of Self-Ownership."

You've probably already saw this, but there's an article in the January edition of Philosophy and Public Affairs which you might find interesting. It deals with many of the problems you've been writing about here. And, on top of that, it's free.

Consider Sweden. Sweden’s education system is set up as a pure voucher system. Its labor market is relatively free, unlike, say, France.

I would disagree here. Yes, Sweden isn't as bad as France with respect to labor market regulation, but it's still pretty bad. The OECD has a weighted average of indicators for employment protection legislation, rated 0 to 6, with higher values representing stricter legislation. Sweden comes in at 2.5, while France is 2.8 or so. The United States in contrast is about 0.7. And the voucher system in Sweden is admirable in many ways, but private schools are also heavily regulated there.

Wayne, I don't believe that Feser is arguing that we--those of us who pay income taxes--are slaves. Rather, he's arguing that a certain amount of our labor is coerced labor. And, generally speaking, it is better to have less rather than more coercion in the world. Thus it is better to have fewer rather than more taxation.

I reiterate that I don't know if this argument is correct, but I find it particularly challenging.

There is no natural rights beef against transfers per se

I'm curious what you think of Nozick's argument against taxation. I'm certain you're familiar with it, but I think Edward Feser makes it sound particularly forceful:

"When you are forced to pay in taxes a percentage of what you earn from laboring, you are in effect forced to labor for someone else because the fruit of part of your labor is taken from you against your will and used for someone else’s purposes. Of course, the taxpayer is not forced to perform a specific kind of labor and, in fact, is more or less allowed to perform any kind of labor he likes, but that is not relevant: despite the fact that you may love pumping gas, if you pump gas for three hours for someone else’s purposes and do so involuntarily, your labor has been forced. A slave told by his master that he can choose between chopping wood, breaking rocks, painting the house, or even painting a picture, but that he must do one or the other of these chores, would not be any less a slave."

I'm still uncertain about this argument. But do you think these kinds of considerations at least establish a moral presumption against taxation, although perhaps not a categorical right against it? Also, I’m not sure whether Nozick’s argument applies to all forms of taxation...

Some fantastic ideas. I agree with Austen that maybe one day this should be your area.

Also, I'm reminded of when Robert Kuttner said "The hardest job for a liberal is to defend the D.C. public school system. The hardest job for a conservative is to defend free-market health care." To which Tyler Cowen responded: "Yes, but the D.C. public school system actually exists."

The "controlling for" bit should read "leveling out initially unequal social and natural endowments"

Equality of opportunity as the premier or central principle of distributive justice. And I mean equality of opportunity in the "fair" sense: everyone needs an equal starting chance, controlling for unequal social and natural endowments.

Great post. In a stylistic sense too.

Allow me to ramble for a moment.

Suppose my identity is constituted around "an unflinching commitment to authenticity and truth." Then isn't it possible to retain a kind of "meta-identity" even if one's beliefs and commitments change relatively quickly? That is, because of my conception of myself as a truth-seeker, I revise my beliefs regularly in light of new evidence. In this sense, my identity changes. But in a broader sense, this constant revision is simply the outgrowth of my meta-identity--my conception of myself as a tireless truth-seeker.

I'm not sure how this fits in with your post, but I thought I would just throw it out there.

Another point, which you may be suggesting. When we're talking about the self, then false beliefs about oneself in some sense become true. For example, suppose I'm very shy and unconfident person. And then I begin to believe certain falsehoods about myself--that I really am confident and outgoing. As a consequence of these false beliefs, I am now confident and outgoing. In other words, these beliefs are now true. Thus there is a pragmatic justification to certain beliefs about ourselves because these beliefs are true or false depending on whether we hold them. I should, from a pragmatic perspective, believe that I'm confident and outgoing so that these beliefs become true.

Similarily, maybe I should encourage false beliefs in others so that their character/happiness/whatever improves in response to holding these false beliefs. But perhaps these beliefs are now true once they hold them? What should I do?!

I have to say, CATO Unbound is turning out to be extremely interesting. I was initially a bit skeptical, but it's working out great.

An interesting report:

In the mid-1990s, the United States' declining share of world science output was intersected by that of the ascending European Union. Today, the EU has reached almost five percent more than the United States' share. The Asia Pacific region enjoys the most dramatic increase in share percentage, up by approximately 12 percent. If current trends continue, the Asia Pacific region will likely outstrip the United States by 2011.

Scientific output is measured here as follows: "The study was conducted using citation data from the more than 8,700 prestigious, high-impact journals archived in the National Science Indicators(R) database."

Of course, world scientific output is expanding rapidly even if the US is experiencing modest relative decline.

I still can’t figure out how a liberal could possibly prefer the status quo over a cushy retirement safety net plus mandatory accounts.

Hmm...one can favor making Social Security into more of a means-tested system and yet reasonably oppose personal retirement accounts. Why? Well, for the reasons Tyler Cowen outlines here. In fact, there may be good libertarianish reasons for doing so, as Cowen suggests.

Good question. The only thing that comes to mind aside from Sen's work is The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, which is cowritten by Robert Goodwin, an excellent political theorist.

But in general, the lack of attention to economic growth seems like another example of how normative political theory is divorced from the real world.

One thing that wasn't entirely clear in Klein's article was why we should value freedom if we don't effectively pursue our own interests. Klein lists some possible reasons such as "liberty accords people ownership of their story, including their errors and vices, and thereby allows them to learn the contours of action, experience, and consequence." I admit these considerations have some weight. Yet if it's truly the case that individuals are poor at securing their own interests, doesn't the case for paternalism look much better? The studies that S&T; cite are evidence along these lines. So why shouldn't we deny people some liberty in order to better advance their interests?

What I would like to know is whether this boils down to an empirical question or not. That is, does the case against paternalism depend on empirical issues such as whether people are good at pursuing their interests, whether politicians and bureaucrats are in fact better at pursuing other people's interests than they are themselves, etc?

"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"

Not to keep beating on this, but if what you say were the case, then why don't much richer countries have a comparable life expectancy? For example, Brazil is about 5 times richer than Kerala and yet has about an 8 year lower life expectancy. The straightforward explanation is that Kerala's institutions and policies are much more effective at promoting a high life expectancy than Brazil's. I agree with you that growth matters a great deal--especially in the long run--but so do alot of other things.

I’m trying to figure out what you mean by this: “The fact that so few poor people did this is in no small part due to the fact that they got psychologically tangled in the safety net meant to keep them from falling too far, but which, in reality, keeps many from going anywhere.”

I’m also going to have take issue with: “Almost every bit of progress--socially, morally, in terms of happiness and longevity, aesthetically, WHATEVER YOU LIKE--is a direct or indirect product of economic growth.”

This is a little extreme, don’t you think? Let’s take life expectancy. If economic growth is the foundation of all goodness, how are we to explain the large disparities in life expectancy between equally rich countries? How do we explain how a place like Kerala, an Indian province with a per capita GDP of about $1000, has a life expectancy nearly as high as the United States? Kerala has certainly benefited from technological and scientific advances pioneered in rich countries, but to explain Kerala’s high life expectancy entirely in terms of those benefits strikes me as implausible.

Now, I also think economic growth is great, good, and wonderful with cherries on top. But my point is that what matters most isn’t growth simpliciter, but the policy and institutional environment in which growth occurs. That’s where these progressive come in. While they may be horribly wrong in the particulars, they want to change our institutional and policy environment in order to make growth more just or beneficial or whatever. That strikes me as a coherent and non-redundant enterprise. Whether the specific policies they advance are desirable is another question.

Woops, sorry for the doublepost of the same study. Anyway, here's some evidence on the other side. The conclusion of this study found that

The substantive implication is, of course, that the more socialist the provision of social welfare, or, similarly, the greater the decommodification accomplished by state policy, the more satisfied are people with their lives. The magnitude of this effect is pronounced.

Admitted, but as of now there is scant evidence that more income equality and fewer formal work hours translates into greater happiness for society.

Also, note that fewer formal work hours at one's paid employment doesn't necessarily translate into more leisure time. European countries have reduced formal work hours faster than the United States, but it seems that they have approximately the same amount of leisure time when you factor in unpaid work in the household. If anything, the United States seems to have a slight advantage here. Here's a comparison between Sweden and the US and here's a comparsion between Germany and the US.

If leisure time makes people happier, then it's a mystery to me how we should encourage people to work less, since high taxes and mandatory hour limits don't seem to do the trick. As for income inequality, this is all that I could find (I believe Will also brought this up at one point):

Using a total of 128,106 answers to a survey question about happiness,' we find that there is a large, negative and significant effect of inequality on happiness in Europe but not in the US. There are two potential explanations. First, Europeans prefer more equal societies (inequality belongs in the utility function for Europeans but not for Americans). Second, social mobility is (or is perceived to be) higher in the US so being poor is not seen as affecting future income.

I would be curious to know what other research is out there.

My conjecture is that most people would like to get happier (and could) by doing other things. But we are encouraged (by mighty economists among others) to do whatever we want to do by getting more wealth. And, in addition, wealth inequality and the norm in favor of increasing individual wealth have effects that prevent us from doing many things that we would truly like to do.

Is there any evidence at all that policies which encourage more leisure and less wealth accumulation make people happier? Both France and Germany have less inequality and people work less in those countries, but they apparently have lower rates of life satisfaction than the United States. Some data here. This is of course a crude comparison, but I don't know if any serious research on this topic exists.

Ah, you already pointed that out. Well then.

Interesting information, I just skimmed the paper.

Easterlin's conclusion is still that happiness is very stable throughout people's lives on average. Even past 80, it appears that most people respond that their lives are "very happy" or "pretty happy." So the people that make it into their late old age seem to be enjoying additional years of happiness.

An interesting corrolary. Suppose we are just looking at the average happiness level. If the proportion of elderly in the population grows, it might seem that happiness levels are trending down. But again, this method overlooks what is fundamentally a good thing: people are enjoying more years of happiness.