Disqus - Latest Comments for Javier

Re: Misunderstanding Social Security

Javier — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 12:40:09 -0000

Regardless of whether social security is a form of insurance, it is clear that the purpose of social security is to create a social minimum, a floor below which no one should be allowed to fall. Social security has significantly reduced poverty among the elderly and thus partially succeeded in this purpose.

All types of liberals can support a social minimum. As Samuel Freeman makes clear in his article "Illiberal Libertarianism" (which you've referenced on this blog), classical liberals (Hayek, Friedman, etc) and high liberals (Rawls, Dworkin, etc) support a social minimum.

So what's the problem? Does it really matter if social security is or isn't an insurance program? As long as social security accomplishes the goal of creating a social minimum for the elderly, I see nothing fundamentally wrong with it.

The classical liberal counter is, of course, that family and civic associations should provide for the social minimum rather than the state. I can only say that I think this counter is rather implausible on empirical grounds, although this point is to complex for me to substantiate here.

Re: Misunderstanding Social Security

Javier — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 19:54:08 -0000

This is not clear at all. It is false. If the purpose of social security were to create a social minimum, it would be means tested. Only poor old people would be able to collect. This is not the case. Instead, all of us are forced to save in order to pay for our own retirement, regardless of whether we are poor or not.

Social security does create a social minimum, although as you say it does other things besides this. And means tested programs are notoriously unviable from a political perspective, at least in American but I suspect in Europe as well. The reason that social security and other universal welfare programs survive is because they are in the interest of the middle class (or at least broad segments of the middle class percieve them to be in their interest). If social security were mean tested, it would probable lose massive political support and face severe budget constraints as the middle class would not longer have an interest in maintaining it. Thus is it necessary to make social security a univeral program in order to ensure that it maintains broad political support.

So my basic point is this: (1) social security has done a great deal to alleviate poverty among the elderly and has thus helped create a social minimum, (2) if social security were means tested, it would become much more politically insecure and probably a less effective program.

Re: Misunderstanding Social Security

Javier — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 08:21:31 -0000

Javier: you do realize you're making a "noble lie" argument of precisely the type Will is lambasting, right? Your argument boils down to the contention that, since the middle class wouldn't be convinced to support a social minimum on its own, they ought to be bribed with massive amounts of their own money to trick them into supporting one.

Maybe, but I'm not sure. This is a tricky issue. I happen to believe that social security actually does benefit broad segments of the middle class in addition to the poor and it is for that reason that the program has such powerful support. While it might be misleading to view social security as insurance, I believe social security nonethless benefits most of the people covered by it and also benefits society more generally. Thus most citizens have reason to support social security for reasons independent of the issue of a social minimum.

However, I think we need to realize how important the idea of a social minimum is to the justification for social security. Social security has played a major role in reducing the poverty rate among the elderly from 65% to 10%. If doing away with social security would bring the poverty rate among the elderly to anywhere near its old level, then it is the case that social security functions as a social minimum for the majority of old people. So it seems to be in the interest of most elderly people to support social security on the grounds that it provides them with a social minimum on top of any other reasons they have for doing so.

Re: Questioning Layard

Javier — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 22:15:42 -0000

My question is: if the theory of revealed preferences is true, how are we to judge when a person is behaving myopically or acting against his/her true interests?

Re: Jonathan Chait: Confirmation Bias in One Satirical Lesson

Javier — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 22:02:31 -0000

Will, I think Rawls's burdens of judgment could shed light on this Chait piece. As you know, Rawls says that people reasonably disagree about conceptions of justice as well as religious and moral doctrines due to the following (abridged) factors:

(1) The evidence--empirical and scientific--bearing on the case is conflicting and complex, and thus hard to assess and evaluate.
(2) Even where we agree fully about the kinds of considerations that are relevant, we may disagree about their weight and so arrive at different judgments.
(3) To some extent (how great we cannot tell) the way we assess evidence and weigh moral and political values is shaped by our total experience.
(4) Often there are different kinds of normative considerations of different force on both sides of an issue and it is difficult to make an overall assessment.

The burdens of judgment are sufficient to explain reasonable disagreement between libertarians, egalitarian liberals, and conservatives. Adherents of each of these traditions make reasonable yet incompatible judgments about justice, moral values, and the relevant evidence (within certain bounds). So against Chait, we don't need to explain disagreement between liberals and conservatives by appealing to the notion that liberals embrace empiricism while conservatives are ideological. We only need to point to the differing reasonable ways in which liberals and conservatives interpret evidence and endorse moral principles.

So this is basically to say what you said, but I thought I would sneek in some Rawls while we're at it.

Re: Caesar’s Bath

Javier — Mon, 02 May 2005 15:52:21 -0000

Econotarian, Sweden may be poor by American standards, but they seem to do better than the aggregate U.S. population on other measures of human development such as life expectancy and infant mortality. In fact, Sweden outranks the United States on the Human Development Index, for whatever that's worth.

Re: Self-Ruled or Rule-Ruled?

Javier — Sun, 08 May 2005 09:19:12 -0000

Will, I recommend chapter 3 of the book Democracy Defended by Gerry Mackie. After an extensive literature review of the existing evidence, Mackie concludes "Riker's conjecture is that it is not the case that most of the time most reasonable voting methods lead to mostly the same outcomes. The evidence at hand is overwhelmingly that the conjecture fails."

Worth a look.

Re: Self-Ruled or Rule-Ruled?

Javier — Sun, 08 May 2005 11:47:47 -0000

Mackie is refering to plurality, Borda, Condorcet, Bentham, Hare, Copeland, Coombs, and culminative methods of voting. There are others out there, but these are probably the mostly widely discussed methods. To be sure, there are some differences in outcomes when different voting methods are used. However, Mackie suggests that the differences are much smaller than Riker and other social choice theorists believed.

Re: Self-Ruled or Rule-Ruled?

Javier — Sun, 08 May 2005 12:11:21 -0000

Ah, now I understand what you're saying. The Athenian lot system is another radical example: a way of electing officials that is democratic, yet does away with elections altogether.

Re: Self-Ruled or Rule-Ruled?

Javier — Sun, 08 May 2005 12:12:55 -0000

That should read: a way of selecting officials that is democratic, yet does away with elections altogether.

Re: Self-Ruled or Rule-Ruled?

Javier — Sun, 08 May 2005 16:19:24 -0000

Nicholas, interesting--my memory is a bit patchy, but I think Aristotle regarded elections as inherently oligarchical practices because elections are won or lost on the basis of merit, wealth, etc. Selection by lot on other hand is premised on the assumption that citizens are equally competent.

I can't resist quoting Protagoras, in Plato's dialogue:

"when the question relates to carpentering or any other mechanical art, the Athenians allow but a few to share in their deliberations...But when they meet to deliberate about political virtue, which proceeds only by way of justice and wisdom, they are patient enough of any man who speaks of them, as is also natural, because they think that every man ought to share in this sort of virtue"

The lot system enshrined in practice the principle that all citizens were minimally competent to share in governance.

Re: Preferring the Peace

Javier — Tue, 10 May 2005 08:43:25 -0000

I always that the answer was that people, when not inflamed by propaganda, as they tend not to be in democratic nations with a free press, don't like war

This can't be quite right, because democracies go to war with non-democracies relatively frequently.

Re: Preferring the Peace

Javier — Tue, 10 May 2005 09:24:51 -0000

Will, I'm not familiar enough with the evidence to say for sure, but you're probably right. But there is a gap in the democratic peace literature that I've found somewhat puzzling: most studies of the democratic peace exclude United States interventions to overthrow democratic governments in South and Latin America. While these haven't been "wars" with battlefield casulties, overthrowing governments certainly is a violent act of aggression. I'm thinking here of Chile and maybe Nicaragua. Here we have cases where a democratic state intentionally overthrew the government of another democracy.

Re: Preferring the Peace

Javier — Wed, 11 May 2005 09:44:06 -0000

Rob, you're right that that's what democratic peace theorists would probably say. However, I don't think it works for Chile. Chile had a long history of representative institutions and 40 years of stable democratic rule. Chilean democracy was hardly perfect. But it would be absurd to claim that, from 1930-1973, Chile wasn't actually a democracy. If we tighten the standard for what counts as a democracy to exclude Chile, many countries which are commonly considered to be democratic today would no longer qualify (India, for instance).

Re: Questions About Income Mobility

Javier — Tue, 17 May 2005 09:12:13 -0000

Will, I found this piece to be an extremely honest and fair-minded assessment of inequality in the United States. It turns out that many of the bad things people associate with inequality (such as lower health outcomes, lower political participation, crime) apparently are only weakly correlated with inequality in the transnational comparisons.

The author also notes a possibility that John raises--a leading cause of inequality is immigration. One way to decrease inequality would simply be to let fewer people into the US.

There are also other relevant measures of inequality that the NYT article omits. Increasing income inequality is not parralleled by increasing consumption inequality. That is, incomes may have become more unequal, but not people's patterns of spending. Why this is so remains a mystery. It might be that the official statistics underestimate the income of the poor.

Also, another point that the NYT article only briefly touches upon: the driving cause of inequality is the high education premium in this country. The average income of a person with a college degree is more than double that of someone with a high school diploma, and this gap will probably keep rising.

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that many or most studies on income inequality look at pre-tax income inequality. What's more interesting is the income distribution after taxes and redistributions. On first glance, an after-tax distribution of income would probably look considerably more favorable to the poor.

Re: Questions About Income Mobility

Javier — Tue, 17 May 2005 09:40:49 -0000

I don't know the issues in detail, but Olaf Gersemann in Cowboy Capitalism provides a useful discussion. Gersemann shows that the pattern of redistribution is probably more equitable in the US than in Germany, France, and Italy. In the US, 41.4 percent of cash transfers go to the poorest 30 percent of the population. In Italy for instance, the poorest 30 percent recieve 20.5 percent of total cash transfers.

The poorest 30 percent in the US also probably pay fewer taxes relative to the rich than in many Western European countries. This is especially true when we look at consumption taxes, which are higher in Europe (think of the taxes on gas there) and have a greater impact on the poor.

Gersemann uses this study as his main source of evidence.

Re: Questions About Income Mobility

Javier — Tue, 17 May 2005 09:51:55 -0000

As a side note, does anyone know of any good philosophical work on the value of absolute incomes/resources versus the importance of fair equality of opportunity? For example, Rawls is very hard on inequality because, among other reasons, inequality may harm fair equality of opportunity. People might have less equal opportunities for achieving "desired social position." However, if everyone's prospects are absolutely increasing along the manner that Will suggests, should we care about equality of opportunity?

As far as I can tell, there is a huge gap in the philosophical literature on this topic.

Re: A Rare Triumph for Liberals

Javier — Fri, 20 May 2005 18:32:25 -0000

Monkeyboy, why don't you respond to Will's substantive arguments instead of engaging in pure ad-hominem?

Re: A Rare Triumph for Liberals

Javier — Fri, 20 May 2005 23:07:01 -0000

Monkeyboy, you've completely ignored the argument Will has repeatedly made: that social security is a deceptive government program, intentionally designed as a noble lie to trick people into supporting it as social insurance. This deception is inconsistent with a committment to public reason. Also, you ignore the point that a well-designed means-tested program might prevent poverty among the elderly just as well as social security does now. Moreover, I think social security's fiscal problems would still be present (although delayed) even if Bush's tax cuts were never implemented.

Will might be wrong about all of this, but please address his arguments and show why he is wrong instead of attacking him as a hack.

Re: Questions for Krugman

Javier — Mon, 23 May 2005 09:22:17 -0000

What's interesting is that workers in the United States more often believe their jobs are secure than do Western Europeans, who would seem to have much stronger job security at first glance (after all, unions are still powerful and labor market restrictions are tighter in W Europe). You can find the information at http://www.gallup-international.com/

In 2003, 80 percent of workers in the United States said their jobs were safe. Almost no Western European country matches this. And Western Europeans also believe that they will have more difficulty finding a new job than Americans. So are stronger labor market restrictions and union protection the answer to job insecurity? Perhaps not.

But this doesn't necessarily speak to income volatility or access to health care.

Re: The Fake Paradox of Prosperity

Javier — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 05:31:44 -0000

Will, an entertaining post--I got a laugh out of it. But perhaps you are conceding too much to the happiness critics. Let me run an argument by you to see what you think.

Happiness has increased significantly in the past few decades. The reason is simple: life-expectancy has, within the past half century, increased by about 10 years in the United States. If people are as happy now as they were then, then, ceteris paribus, they should now live even happier lives overall because they live longer lives. For example, suppose that I live 5 years and these are very happy years. If I live 5 more years in addition to the first 5, then overall I've lived a happier life: the total sum of happiness has gone up. Thus, people are getting happier by living longer.

Re: The Fake Paradox of Prosperity

Javier — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 09:12:04 -0000

I've heard the opposite actually: older people tend to be happier than the young. Here's a quote from this study:

Diener et al (1999) provide a summary of several studies on the age differences of life satisfaction. According to this summary, life satisfaction seems to stay the same, if not increase with age. This finding countered earlier conventional wisdom that older people were less satisfied because they were unhappy with their unfulfilled lives as they reached the uselessness of old age. The increase in life satisfaction with age may be attributed to a trend in greater involvement in satisfying areas of life among older cohorts. Nonetheless, there seems to be a slight increase in life satisfaction from age 20 to age 80 with negative affect held constant.

This is only referring to life satisfaction, it appears that "negative affect" increases slightly after the age of 60.

Anyways, to the extent that the happiness researchers only focus on how happy people are on average, they are missing out on something that makes happiness more valuable--namely, the additional years we now have to enjoy it. And it is precisely in this respect that society as a whole has been getting significantly better off.

Re: The Fake Paradox of Prosperity

Javier — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 09:58:20 -0000

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.

Re: The Fake Paradox of Prosperity

Javier — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 10:04:45 -0000

Ah, you already pointed that out. Well then.

Re: The Fake Paradox of Prosperity

Javier — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 07:09:46 -0000

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.

Re: The Fake Paradox of Prosperity

Javier — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 13:36:27 -0000

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.

Re: The Fake Paradox of Prosperity

Javier — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 13:59:07 -0000

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.

Re: Freedom in the Meaningful Sense

Javier — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 11:12:12 -0000

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.

Re: Freedom in the Meaningful Sense

Javier — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 13:05:08 -0000

"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.

Re: Libertarian Paternalism Redux

Javier — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 23:04:13 -0000

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?

Re: Moral Philosophy and Economic Growth

Javier — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 11:52:44 -0000

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.

Re: Zombie Reforms, Zombie Arguments

Javier — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 17:36:15 -0000

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.

Re: Institutions, Boundaries, and Useless Statistics

Javier — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 13:46:53 -0000

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.

Re: David Schmidtz on Inequality at Cato Unbound

Javier — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 04:24:45 -0000

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.

Re: Self-Deception and Self-Construction

Javier — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 07:25:05 -0000

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?!

Re: Opposite Day

Javier — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 05:16:04 -0000

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.

Re: Opposite Day

Javier — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 05:58:21 -0000

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

Re: Health Care Fantasia

Javier — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 14:42:53 -0000

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."

Re: More on Transparency & Generality

Javier — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 13:28:13 -0000

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...

Re: More on Transparency & Generality

Javier — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 16:38:36 -0000

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.

Re: More on Transparency & Generality

Javier — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:45:59 -0000

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.

Re: New Stuff on the Happiness Blog

Javier — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 18:14:34 -0000

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.

Re: On Positive Freedom: Is Society Metaphysical or Man Made?

Javier — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:34:06 -0000

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."

Re: The Moral Calculus of Climate Change

Javier — Wed, 16 May 2007 19:43:43 -0000

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.

Re: Fact of the Day

Javier — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:27:57 -0000

Will, take a look at this new NBER paper:

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

Re: Fact of the Day

Javier — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:30:14 -0000

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."

Re: Class War!

Javier — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:46:35 -0000

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...

Re: Here’s Why Not

Javier — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:37:15 -0000

I'm surprised that Gintis did not mention his own research that bears on this point:

"The market" says Cohen, "is intrinsically repugnant...Every market, even a socialist market, is a system of predation."

Some of the research is here. The finding is that:

"group-level differences in economic organization and the degree of market integration explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation, the greater the level of cooperation in experimental games."

That is, the dominance of markets may actually help make people more cooperative with strangers (and possibly more tolerant and fair-minded as well).

Re: Free Demonoid Invitation Code

Javier — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:45:15 -0000

If anyone has an invitation code and are feeling charitable, please send it to my email. Thanks!