DISQUS

If the changed practices that generate bigger economic pies DO, as you acknowledge, "often generate large income transfers", then those changes that do so DO ALSO create new winners and new losers.

Are you saying that, as long as the economic pie grows, then the resulting state is ipso facto a Pareto improvement over the previous state. Clearly not so! Perhaps its a Kaldor-Hicks improvement if we think that those made worse off can actually be compensated, for example with money. But we should only think that after we consider any given case.

And there is a "competing out-group" with any technological change. You could ask, for example, typewriter manufacturers and repair persons.

The kitty guillotine is a stroke of genius.

That's great rhetoric, sincerely!

I also have to sincerely compliment Will on his choice of several interesting issues in that piece ... and the equally interesting way in which he conjoined them.

Let me just choose one issue, the attempt to define "state" and "civil society" in relation to one another. Instead of writing an essay on that, I just refer you to an excellent book.

Anthony Black "Guild and Civil Society: From the Middle Ages to the Present"

This book, which is now called:

"Guild and State: European Political Thought From the Twelth Century to the Present"

(I have not read this new version.)

was recommended to me through the Institute For Humane Studies by way of I don't know whom.

I guarantee, you'll be happy you read it if you havn't already.

As someone who deals in ideas for a living, Will, I'm sure you really do believe that libertarian ideas are at least as influential as men in positions of power.

I don't doubt your sincerity in admitting that libertairnas suffer confirmation bias too. My point goes to your suggestion that libertarians (since they are not a party in power) don't have as much REASON FOR, CAUSE FOR bias as power seeking Republicans and Democrats do.

My point did NOT go to your admission that libertarians (like everyone) are guilty of confirmation bias to the (lesser) extent that they have reason to fear it.

>>It’s just that less is at stake for libertarians; we >>don’t have any power to lose.

Libertarians DO have something to lose! Just because its not seats in Congress is irrelevant.

For example,

(1) Any evidence tending to show that bureaucratic government regulation is (in spite of regulatory capture) benefitting the public undermines the libertarian ideology.

(2) Any evidence tending to show that market participants are colluding, unconsciously paralleling, or otherwise undermining the supposed free market is detrimental to the same ideology

(3) Evidence that capital markets are not efficient (e.g. that stock prices don't reflect profitability) makes libertarian rhetoric less persuasive.

(4) Indeed, any and all evidence that the government is subject to capture in various ways by disporportionately endowed private interests and, therefore, would promote social welfare more if wealth were not so disproportionately in the hands of said interests contributes to the refutation of libertarian ideology.

What on Earth do you mean that libertarians are not committed partisans? Of course they are.

Oh, you're talking about the Democrats and the Republicans. Those parties... Oh right.

K was pointing out that people without savings can't take unpaid internships unless they can borrow to do so and, therefore, that candidates for our various internships will not be representative of the vast majority of Americans.

Totally valid worry! Most students can't budget three months of loan money for a quarter internship. I couldn't have if CATO were not a paid internship when I was there. (My absence, I must point out, would have been a grave loss to the mission of the CATO institute.)

K's worry is analytically different from the complaint that Northern Iowa State is underrepresented at The Limo Liberal Institute compared to Harwich University. It so happens that more Harwich undergrads have the resources to take an unpaid internship. But the Limo Liberals don't prefer Harwich students for their internships BECAUSE they can afford to take those internships. You may think that Harwich students really are more meritorious than the Northern Iowa State ones. But a 100% meritorious Harwich applicant might be unable to afford to accept the internship that a rich 10% meritorious NIS applicant could. So K can have a point even if you do believe that Ivy Schools take the most meritorious applicants.

Why would gratitude ever be appropriate for an employee to feel simply in virtue of having been given a job? Supposedly, employers hire exactly the person that's most to their advantage not as a benefit to the employee. That's exactly what the economists' moral norms of the labor market tells them they should do. Gratitude, by contrast, is appropriate where someone extends a benefit beyond what was required by the relevant norms, especially when the benefiting action shows conscientious care for the plight of the beneficiary.

It's not appropriate for me to feel grateful to the employer who pays me a prevailing wage of $5/hr when they could afford to pay me $100/hr (if not for the demands of shareholders) and I would be willing to stave off starvation for $3/hr.

So now we must ask: Is ingratitude just the absense of gratitude? My view is that there is not really such an emotion as ingratitude. There is only gratitude and its absence. The actions that seem to manifest ingratitude really just exhibit a certain kind of anger and envy that come from feeling that one is being taken advantage of.

Any comments from the peanut gallery on the emotional psychology... as opposed to its ideological implications?

Will: The difference IS important, maybe not in terms of what you refer to as the "formal theory", but surely in terms of its rhetoric and the normative considerations inherent in its application.

An example of rhetorical importance:

Economists talk a lot about prefernces and what actions reveal about them. But they do not offer any ways of evaluating what is within (what you call) individuals' choice sets and how much individuals know about that. So, when they (or you) say such things as:

"If something else had been more preferred it would have been chosen instead..."

this framework tells us nothing about what could have been chosen/what the agent knew could have been chosen (i.e. how to bring about). Strictly speaking, they should say:

"If SOME OTHER WORLD STATE had been more preferred, could have been chosen, and the agent knew that, then it would have been chosen instead."

There is a rhetorically significant ambiguity here, trading on the difference between (a) ability to choose different world state and (b) ability to choose different consumer goods for your money... the some total of which choices influences only a miniscule aspect of one's well-being

An example of normative methodological importance:

Sen and Arrow are cautiously and rigorously making points about the relationship between individual and social preferences/choices. On the other hand, the majority of libertarian neoclassical economists (and, less relevantly, libertarian non-neoclassical economists) dogmatically eschew any discussion of this relationship. Rather they predicate all inquiries on the assumption that seemingly trivial individual choices sum to the only acceptable concept of social choices and, often, that there is not even any such thing as social preference/choice.

CORRECTION TO LAST PARAGRAPH:

strike "and, furthermore" after the words "would prefer to the actual one" in the first sentence.

This post reveals the complete lack of rigor in the definition of preference.

In standard economics, the paradigm for preferences is "agent a would prefer to have good x than good y". So buying x instead of y demonstrates a conclusive preference.

Supposedly, if something else had been more preferred than it would have been chosen.

The kind of preference that can be revealed in a decision to buy x instead of y is not even remotely like the concept of preference at work in (A) Arrowian voting theory and (B) Sen's argument re: paretian liberalism.

This is important, because Sen and Aarow are discussing comprehensive and, therefore, important preferences while most economics is discussing trivial preferences that range over only tiny aspects of total states of affairs.

Who really cares if we can be certain that agent a would rather have good x than good y? If the only difference between state x and state y is that agent a has x in state x and y in state y then, then why should we give a hoot about these two states at all. Even if a certain action were to demonstrate conclusively a preference for state x over state y, that would not mean that state x is valued at all by the agent. x may be the second most DISfavored outcome, after every other possible outcome besides y.
Maybe having x makes agent a only SLIGHTLY LESS MISERABLE than having y.

If, on the other hand, preferences range over (completely described) states of the world then it is obvious that preferred states CANNOT be CHOSEN.

People may ardently wish that the world were a given way even though none of their actions could even come close to bringing about such a world. Therefore, all of their actions may be virtually irrelevant to determining which states of the world are really high in their preference ordering.

Furthermore, it is possible that there are loads of states of the world that every individual (or 99% of individuals) would prefer to the actual one and, furthermore. Still, you could never notice this by looking at the kinds of choices that economists talk about when they discuss revealed preference. Much more importantly, we want to know if such world states if they exist are the kind of things that we could actually achieve (or not) and nothing about knowing whether agent a would rather have good x or good y can help us find that out.

I was once party to a Harvard graduate seminar on Marx that discussed his views on nineteenth century nationalist movements. The professor argued that Marx was actually quite cautious in his appraisal of which nationalist movements were based on genuine historical conditions that could give rise to a nation. For example, Marx was sympathetic with Polish nationalist movements (he seemed to think that they had somewhat more historical justification than German nationalism), but he ridiculed the notion that residents of the Isle of Man could claim an authentic nationalist movement.

Of course, its silly for the left to look to a particular political thinker as a source for its views on nationalism. But the point may be worth making that IF the left were to look to Marx it would NOT reach the conclusion that nationality was the key aspiration for political movements in, say, the range of third world situations.

So, why indeed should the left emphasize nationalism (much less ethnic nationalism) instead of focusing on the goal of creating a political-economic middle class in whatever state systems happen to exist?

I'm not in fact convinced that the left in general is excessively focused on nationalism. Yet there is an uncomfortable tendancy on the left to disdain (for lack of a better term) middle-class values.

It seems to me that if we on the left are going to argue that (1) increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority of individuals and (2) domination of the global economy by centrally managed, highly capitalized corporations are dangerous trends, then we need to extol the virtues of societies that have/had large middle classes that controlled the vast majority of resources and set up the political and economic conditions for free markets and democracy. It seems to me that neither the right nor the left is particularly cognizant of what exactly we are losing as inequality waxes.

The libertarian critique of central planning has come to baffle me. I mean, the twentieth century did, admittedly, see some regimes that claimed to be responsible for everything in society. But the libertarian critique of these regimes is not only that they failed spectacularly, but also that there claims to omnipotence were totally bogus.

So, once we're all on the same page about the impossibility of central planning, why can't we outline a framework for what goals our country should persue (e.g. equal cultivation of individual capacities) without assuming that bringing this about is uniquely the province of governmental institutions.

This doesn't mean that libertarians are right when they say that government should not be involved AT ALL in helping us reach our goals. Much less does it mean that, as many comments suggest, we should refrain from even discussing our goals out of fear of what government might do if it tried to help us prsue them.

The idea that all liberals (and at least some non-liberals) are egalitarian is not original to Schmidtz or any of the Cato bloggers. One of the more comprehensive recent works that explores that idea is Amartya Sen's "Inequality Reexamined". Did anybody cite that?

There's more than a grain of truth to Will's point here. Congress may hold hearings on oil industry profits being too high, but they are not going to take back the 14 billion dollars in subsidies they gave out last year. Attempts by the SEC to regulate CEO pay were part of what led to the excesses of stock option compensation that further increased CEO salaries. Etc.

But the underlying premise of the argument is:

The institutions of government could not do anything else but foster inequality. It is impossible for the people to control government and make it work toward their interest in less economic inequality... with all that implies for the strength of democracy.

This capitulation, if you can call it that coming from a libertarian, is unwarranted. If our system were not biased in favor of protecting the wealthy, it would be possible for us to elect a Congress that would (for example)

(1)give payroll taxes a progressive rate structure,

(2)enforce tax laws against business and investors instead of juts against wage/salary employers, and

(3)institute a federal voucher that would fund all public school students equally.

Partially there is a failure of political will that explains why we don't adopt such policies even though they would pretty straightforwardly benefit a majority of the population. But, more than that, the reason is that the resigned electorate rightly assumes these changes to be impossible in the face of the current system in which candidates supporting these ideas could not get funded or otherwise supported.

Actually, supposing that action or political commitment requires committment to very general propositions like:

(e) capital markets allocate resources efficiently,
(f) marriage is the natural way to organize human families, or
(g) people are naturally egocentric (or benevolent)

is IN ITSELF a common form of self-deception.

Happily, I think that we can act and reflect quite well without affirming or denying these kind of propositions. Indeed, the idea that we need to adhere to them (or their negations) in order to construct our selves is a very destructive myth. Trying to get people to come around to your views on these kinds of propositions sows discord, produces factions, and distracts people from the real practical problems at hand.

Not that I don't think ideologies are interesting, but
we have to see them for what they are.

Sigivald: Sure its not primarily a policy issue. And I wouldn't presume to tell people what they should want, just what might be worth considering.

I think that those norms are quite amenable to change through reflection and discussion, as well as resulting from changes in circumstances of which policy is a part. For example, policy has played and/or could have played some role in determinning the extent to which a certain standard of living is attainable on one income. The norms under discussion are effected by the labor market and costs of living, as well as by such things as the women's movement, norms regarding consumption, and the myriad factors that have led to increases in divorce.

I don't think that the distinction between what is influenced by policy and what not is simple or straightforward at all.

Speaking of bad marriages, how about the linkage between:

(1) pair bond for household making, child raising, etc.
(2) pair bond for sex having

??

Not that this linkage doesn't work for some, it does. But a person in my circles would have to be blind to ignore that there are lots of successful relationships that sever this linkage. And I think everyone can think of cases where the linkage has produced manifestly bad results. Of course their are downsides of severing the linkage too, but that is also probably true of any linkage you could think to criticize.

Peter Singer is going to write for Cato? Sweet!

Hank: Those Latin Americans will come around. Just yesterday my (approximately 4 year old Latin American neighbor) told me that he would let me photograph his snowman for $1. I encouraged his enterprise of course, you'll be happy to know.

I meant: "And would THAT CORRELATION not be to the benefit of all?"

With enough blogging about the possible correlation between money and happiness just maybe these number will prove even more robust in the future. And would not be to the benefit of all!?

Will and Blar: Systematic errors could justify other kinds of "paternalism" than "state paternalism". We're paternalistic w/r/t each other in all kinds of ways that don't involve the state. Some of them can be just as illiberal. That's part of the point I'm making.

As for presumptions, I cannot see the point in attempting to establish them one way or the other in general. Political philosophy, even informed by psychological and institutional research probably can't give us useful generalizations in this regard. (That's my opinion.) The intricacies of particular policy questions are so complex that focusing on given cases seems much more productive. I have not posted on your "What is Philosophy Good For?" thread but that is an intersting topic and I'm trying to get to it through this discussion and the one on the moral significance of growing wealth.

Also, I think I put (2) badly before.

Simple rights-protecting machines could conceivably promote individual and collective well-being better than anything else. I guess I meant (2) to deny that participation in goverment was a good in itself, part of -- though not the whole of -- cooperation with one's society.

Will: Cool. I myself happen to believe in general wills, but do not think that the state is the unique vehicle through which it is formed (thus, I reject (1)). That's an essential analytical distinction. Probably in modern societies states are necessary conditions but not sufficient and, in any case, do not themselves represent a general will. I'm not sure (can't remember) if Rousseau would agree, i.e. maybe his sovereign has to be read as identical with republican institutions. After all, Rousseau was considerably less sympathetic than me toward modern societies.

Also, unlike Rousseau, I think that you can have a defective general will in which lots of individuals and/or groups get the shaft. For R that would be the "will of all", the honorary title general will just going to a good union of wills. I'd say the question of (a) whether you have a unity of individual interests that is different from the aggregation of those interests is analytically distinct from (b) whether you've got one where each "remains as free as before".

Arrow pretty well showed that you can't get a unique social choice from aggregating individual interest but, importantly, did not show that there can be no general will where each "remains as free as before" (or, for that matter, where each does not but perhaps thinks he does). In fact, Aarow was I'm told something of a Rousseauian.

Yes, Hirsch is indispensible as I think Friedman agrees.

One reason philosophers have not emphasized the importance of economic growth is that its importance is too uncontroversial.

A better question, I think, is why philosophers have not taken more part in analyzing economic theories of what economic growth is and what's so good about it. This is where the rubber really hits the road in deciding how growth figures into a social welfare function. And I think that philosophers have something to contribute to understanding the nature of such a function and the relation between its role in welfare economics and social policy making.