DISQUS

So what Robin seems to be saying is that economists are good at determining one giant category called "results". It is then up to anyone to categorize such results, or place them along some spectrum of negative to positive, based on their own preferences. I see what economists do as very useful, and it is only when they conflate calculations of various outcomes with preferences for particular outcomes when they run into trouble.

I don't want to impose a particular treatment decision on any of my future patients. But I'd like to do as good a job as possible presenting the probability of certain outcomes. I can always say "I don't know, because, how can we predict anything in life, after all?" But that doesn't help people considering aggressive chemotherapy or radiation, who want to know these interventions would barely improve their chance of survival (as in most types of pancreatic cancer) or bring their survival rate to more like 90% (as in certain types of leukemia). Of course, I would make the caveat that not everyone responds in the same way, and that my calculations are not based on complete information. But my (or some health wonk's) best calculations are much better than no information.
Then, of course, I allow the patient to make his or her own decision. How do I know how many months of life is worth the experience of nausea hell for a particular person?

Saying that economists can and should attempt particular calculations is not the same thing as saying economists are subsequently uniquely qualified to prioritize certain costs and benefits. No one could do that, unless we all had the same preferences. But making our best possible predictions is better than going in blind, so long as those who rely on economists' work realize that human predictions are not prophecies.

What is an "extreme gay"? Someone who throws up when catching a glimpse of the opposite sex?

Steve, I am saying that many important issues cannot be neatly quantified. I am not saying that if an issue can't be quantified, then it isn't important. Gay rights and immigration are both important issues.

Steve, I'm pretty pissed off about Prop 8.
I'm not sure if guessing how every issue gauges on the libertarian "pissed-off-o-meter" is exceedingly valuable. But let's say we knew there was excessive anger asymmetry. Perhaps one of the reasons why libertarians seem to holler more about Kelo than Prop 8 has to do with efficient division of labor. Liberals are already fighting the good fight for gay marriage, and infusing a smattering of libertarians doesn't add much activist value. We libertarians are better off scouring the protest market to identify issues that no one else seems sufficiently pissed off about- such as the fact that a drug company (my future bread and butter) dismantled an entire community, kicking out numerous sick and elderly neighbors from their homes. When conservatives begin protesting eminent domain abuse with a bit more vigor (though the conservative justices upheld it, perhaps out of some misperceived transitive relationship among markets,goodness, and big business), libertarians will have already moved on to the next seemingly inconsequential niche cause of the month.

How does one calculate the relative "worth" of gay marriage versus civil unions? To evaluate the social environment regarding personal freedoms, how would (or should) we tally peoples' varied opinions on every controversial social matter ("Guest worker programs!," "Open borders!," "Massive immigration quota increases, yet with some screening!" ) These indices are somewhat arbitrary when evaluating economic freedom, and downright impossible when evaluating non-numerical data. US News and World Report would jump on it, though.

Please clone yourself and represent my district in California!

Hi Webgyrrl,
I actually think that this might actually very tough to debate. When someone's premises are so absurd and ridiculous, it is truly hard to know where to begin, or how to avoid showing bewilderment and contempt.

Zvi, did you do a senior thesis on Nigerian music or something? I remember meeting a Mowshowitz at Columbia shabbat dinners, but I'm not sure if it was you.

I agree with you that "cutting economic growth" has a seen vs. unseen bias.

I'm most angry about his lazy journalism. He disparages Greg Mankiw for failing to reply to Matt Yglesias' criticism of Mankiw's stimulus proposal, and reads into all these reasons why Mankiw did not or could not reply. Turns out Mankiw indeed gave a (brief) reply to Yglesias in a Feb. 10 blog post. Chait is a lazy journalist, and didn't bother to check before making accusations.

a pyramid scheme

I('m sure you 're aware that this is a leading questiion, and and a non-random sample of libertarians...)
I went for welfare minus drug prohibition. HOWEVER, that is solely under the condition that the welfare is doled out as cash to the poor, and not spent by congressmen for their educational programs, bailouts, farm subsidies, and eponymous institutes.

What of the normative repercussions? We can't maintain any property rights, because all properties were once obtained by someone illegitimately? We cannot undo wrongs, but we can try to compensate identifiable victims with calculable losses, and then try to avoid such behavior in the future.

Personally, I don't care which workers come into our country. However, because our state isn't entirely comprised of private property (which I wouldn't find desirable), people must contribute to their share of the costs of the streets that others paid for (and we cannot just write it off by saying that "they are probably owed something, due to something someone in our family might have done to one of their ancestors"- Unless we can accept such obscurity in every other government policy that is meant to apportion things fairly, and then expect positive results).
I am not saying that unbalanced "taking" is common for any immigrant group on the whole, but do you feel that it is fair for an individual immigrant to enter the country, and then contribute less money in taxes than he might receive from taxpayers, many of whom didn't want him to arrive in the first place?
I would support an immigration law, where we would let most people in, yet require they buy health insurance for catastrophic events, and pay a reasonable portion of the costs and negative externalities of immigration (immigration officials and forms, pollution costs, etc).
Absolutely no solution will represent an absolute harmony of "just deserts" (to borrow a phrase from your book review). Someone can always demand that we consider an injustice that we had not considered (does the descendent of Incas deserve priority over the descendent of the Spanish Conquistadors, because the former's family was exploited by some Americans' ancestors). Because our variables include all events in human history, there is no Holy Grail of Equity. We can poke holes in every person's desired appropriation of justice, or we can look for a solution that is "just enough."

Ignore that guy's ad hominem attacks. It is absurd to suggest that, because someone has decided to pay your salary, without expecting profits in return, this is somehow not 'free market." Free markets just means that money is exchanged voluntarily. That money can go to investments, grants, charities, or whatever the hell the owner of the money wants. You could have gotten a different job, but somebody saw value in employing you to do what you do, and was willing to pay you to do it, even though it doesn't help his bottom line.

And the complaint that many libertarians are academics is also unsound. Should I not be allowed to become a doctor, simply because government has already pervaded every single aspect of medical care? According to his argument, libertarians just can't have jobs, because there is no job that has been untainted by government. So is the solution for libertarians to remain unemployed altogether, as some kind of giant protest?

i give them a bit of credit for being well-organized enough to actually put a file together about her and id her . If only they could use such resourcefulness to, instead, prevent starvation and disease among their people.

Doesn't Palin's kid have down syndrome, not autism? I don't think that autism can be an issue "she knows so much about." Figuring out it's cause is a non-sequitor, considering that little Trig doesn't have it.

You missed Naomi Klein on KPFK radio this morning. She spoke about how dangerous the free marketers are because of their suggestions for privatising Fannie and Freddie, which were both apparently fabulous organizations that was on the road to providing everyone a home, all until we disasterously "mostly privatised" them in 1968. If you want another chance to hear her, KPFK having a big fund drive! ! When you use your tax-deductible donation to support the anti-capitalist mission for social justice , you are automatically entered to win a free imac or ipod!

The only way Friedman could have shaped the policies of everyone from to Deng Xiaoping to Yeltsin to Paul Bremer is if he were some Nutty Professor character, who managed change costumes, personalities, and ideologies in a snap. Here is Friedman in a larger than life , mythic incarnation, filled with confilcting and tall tales of multiple perceived beliefs (no matter if they run counter to what he actually wrote). Catch him if you can!

The internet increases the polarizing effect. In the real world, just going through our day forces us to associate with people with all kinds of opinions. When I was on a medical internship, by the time I found out that a friend was a Marxist, I had already known that I enjoyed his company, so his politics didn't phase me at all. Meanwhile, I tend to ignore most Marxists on the internet.
People on the internet (and especially people who don't leave their apartments enough) become very angry, because they only see politics of enemies and politics of friends, but don't see who can make good impressions or who is fun to go hiking with or who has some cool collection of whatnot.

The problem is the positive feedback loop. The more the Democrats convince ill-informed people to vote, the greater the collective power of such voters in every subsequent election. Encourage the ill-informed to vote. Expand government power. Increase the significance of the elections. Repeat.

That's the underlying problem in the vaccine debate. Because widespread vaccination is so effective at preventating certain pandemics, we in the U.S. (luckily) don't see anymore the horrors of polio, diphtheria, or other illnesses. The negative part of being spared from illness, is that people only see the so-called "negative" effects of vaccines, without considering their unseen benfits.

I like the redesign, but needs some sort of Header or other picture to make it splashy. I didn't like that indistinguishable brown thing from the last design, however.

Your critique is very well-thought out, but it seems that you are not addressing, what seems to me, the other commenter's central critique: sometimes there must be a "default": In those few cases, "choice architecture" is unavoidable, because it isn't a matter of something or nothing but always something or something else. Might Sunstein's and Thaler's arguments are convincing for those few cases?

Yikes! Now I must divorce my honest and loving husband, and he me. No one wants to be considered a cuckold!

Klein embarrasses herself by her own hypocrisies. For all her rants against commercialism and markets, she sells her book on amazon.com. Wouldn't she be better off forming a collective community, in which anyone who desires a copy of her book can receive one for free, so long as he does something according to his ability? Or why not team up with Jong Il or Castro to mass distribute it for free, thus demonstrating to the rest of us how the state can elevate the masses out of woeful ignorance?