1. Jeffrey Sachs on libertarianism.
2. Art Carden’s philosophy of teaching.
3. Is Google giving up on search?
4. Profile on Donald Shoup on parking.
5. What kind of innovation is coming to cars and should we be impressed?
6. Is the open-plan office a good idea?
Google is a vertically integrated firm. Almost everyone I know who works there is involved in recreating something made already so that google can buy the internal product.
Everywhere this is justified by capturing the vendors return. More rationally, it isn’t successful and google is arrogance run amok. Trouble is about 40 people generate 4B in profit. The rest of the organization frets it away building internal products to support the large mass of people dedicated to producing internal products.
Google (and every other general purpose search engine) does not understand context. So when I attempt to search, my options are either to lay out keywords, or use key phrases. However, in the software industry context is near impossible to imply through keywords or phrases. No one will care about a new search engine until someone figures out how to imply context without the aid of the semantic web. This is where Watson will be a big win for humanity. And as long as Watson is unable to make decisions, there shouldn’t be any worry about Skynet. Though we may be closer than I feel comfortable.
In the interim, Google understands that gaming their search engine is a real thing. They have for a long time. That’s why they change their search engine every so often, much to the chagrin of those who pay for SEO. But they finally have something that is a much better approximation of searching the semantic web in Google+. It would be a shame not to include it and even eventually drop other search functionality. Of course, I generally err on the side of openness and sharing, rather than privacy and divisiveness.
Google has always known that gaming their search engine is a real thing because there is so much money in it. And they change it all the time, not just every so often. Those doing SEO (and hopefully those who pay for it if they do their research) know that it is a constant battle as well. The good thing for Google here is that its algorithm is secret so a lot of the gaming is a guessing game.
If Google continues to go the way of providing direct answers for what it can, that bit is like Watson in that it is internally held information (or internally pulled from a trusted source), but it does not mean search will be abandoned because everything can’t be answered internally and search is still better than nothing.
The whole +1 thing very well could be scrapped down the road or the effects on ranking basically made negligible as it is even easier to game than the SERPs. I think search will not disappear or even become negligible though and personal results based on a user’s past activity will continue to grow in importance as search evolves. For things like finding good websites, etc. search still makes a lot of sense.
#1) I think libertarianism clicks with kids who’ve just escaped the educational system. It is a philosophy to underpin new-found freedom. Of course, as Sachs describes, it might be an over-reaction. Upping tax a smidge is not the same as falling back under the control of your homeroom teacher.
Libertarians aren’t wrong about anything but many (not all) of it’s advocates have a childish view of the world where everything would be paradise if only everyone followed their prescriptions
I’d say libertarians are wrong about many things. And those many things are derived from their childish world view. Anarcho-capitalism is not what they think it would be.
No it would just be a new form of tyranny – although when you define tyranny as only deriving from government I guess that’s fine but it’s a strange definition.
Another childish point that never makes sense. I’ve attempted explaining the word tyranny to a libertarian colleague and how it is a meaningless term. Tyranny is either a value-laden and completely subjective stance or an objective term referring to ancient governance that has no analogue in a democratic society. He then pointed me to a revisionist definition which was still a completely subjective term that just meant he doesn’t like Obama. This is way I find it so difficult to talk to the average libertarian. I suspect I would feel the same about socialists if I lived in Europe.
There’s really a lot in common with contemporary libertarians and the sort of puritanical Marxists groups that existed in the 1960s/1970s.
Hey, I have an idea. Lets lump all libertarians together and then make up stuff about them.
Okay, why not?
Is it what you think it would be? Jus axin’
Funny, isn’t that the description for ALL kind of world views? If just everyone would follow my ideology than everything would work? I think libertarianism is still one of the saner views in that it accepts the human being as it is: selfish, sometimes greedy, sometimes not, and all in all different in its variation.
There are not many ideologies that are so tolerant to almost all kinds of lifestyles without trying to prescribe one for everyone…
Or perhaps you think of something else that is called libertarianism. Might very well be, since I am from the old world Europe, where libertarianism is still called classical liberalism.
But please, just continue to snark away and release your anger, that’s your right. I am neither a democrat who would stamp such opinions as hate-speech, nor am I a conservative who would find this culturally threatening…
Libertarianism clicks with anybody who notices that our Senate vote varies from 1 district per two Senators to 53 districts per two Senators.
Except for Ezra Klein, all the pundits who criticize Libertarians, all of them, accept that the lack of Senate democracy is the natural right of oligarchs (on their side) . Sachs believes this, for otherwise how does one write about liberty and not notice that it goes with democracy?
That’s an argument for reforming/abolishing the Senate – the fact that you would take the fact that a specific mechanism in one political system is broken implies ” libertarianism must be right” to you just shows how ridiculous many libertarians are and really proves Sachs right. Again it’s looking at the flaws in a system of government and then pretending a libertarian system would have no flaws.
You know, I have a problem with Ron Paul on the subject, he conveniently fails to mention the lack of democracy. But it is not a specific mechanism, it is 30% of the population not really having a vote in the Senate. Nor, really is it a constitutional issue (look it up), the US dealt managed and adjusted the Senate proportionality up until California entered the union.
Nor is it simply an issue of oligarchs hating libertarians, it is pundits who claim to understand liberty and failing to mention that we don’t have it.
I don’t see why the Senate even needs to exist – I don’t understand why States need to have a voice out of proportion with their population
You made me re-read the essay, for the third time. Still the problem:
A lot of people, maybe even especially libertarians (except Ron Paul) , believe in fair voting. I did not see Jeffry Sachs mention fair voting, no where. Seems to be a central point, no?
Nope, read it the fourth time, still no mention of real liberty I can read Reich, Sachs, even the NRO and Weekly Standard. No where, in the discussion of liberty is actual fair voting mentioned..
I’m confused. Libertarians are in favor of proportional voting? I have never even heard that issue raised before.
I don’t understand the issue here Matt Young. You’re upset about the way the US Senate is elected – I don’t see how this relates to Sach’s article.
I don’t see the connection here. Lots of people, like me for one, who are not libertarians nonetheless think that having two Senators per state is a terrible idea. On the other hand, at least some libertarians very much like the general idea of federalism, which has as one of its consequences the way the Senate works.
I’d much rather young people embrace the libertarian position as their solution to all that ails compared to the socialism they embraced back in the sixties. It’s a lot harder to reduce government than to add it.
I think on certain issues like civil liberties and foreign policy they are more libertarian – unfortunately many of the sort of mainstream libertarians don’t care much about those issues or don’t discuss them as much as say tax policy, or welfare programs.
#6) I liked open plan engineering because it allowed us to bat ideas around easily. Group-think? I was not a push-over.
As a libertarian, I support the right of Jeffrey Sachs and Matthew Yglesias, et al. to circle jerk all over a straw man.
It’s not really a straw man – many people who call themselves libertarians really do make arguments like Sachs says. This isn’t everyone but there’s a large cohort of “libertarians” who are essentially extremists and puritans without much thought behind their beliefs.
Funny, you can say the same thing about social democrats. They live in their own fantasy land in which the government gives out welfare checks and health care to everyone who doesn’t want to work and solve the social problems. Meanwhile, in the real world, Germany and France failed to catch up in GDP per capita with the United States after WWII. In fact, the catchup growth stalled after the social democrats took over in the 70s.
Well anyone who holds fast to some rigid belief system is going to have all sorts of strange views
Yeah, so do those who have no belief system, or don’t know they have one because they think they have none. That’s the funny thing about this world, it comes around and bites you in the …
Actually people with no strict belief system but a hotch-potch of different views often have big consistency problems and continuity errors, which makes them bad at arguing their point because somewhere it breaks down. Also, sometimes this free-floating belief system stuff is dependent on chance. The luck of choosing the right issues on the right side at the right time and as such not looking like a goofball.
I am still not sure why that would be better or worse than a hard-set belief system…
Although why is GDP/capita the only legitimate measurement of how good a society is? Seems like you start right off the bat with ideology.
What would be your metric for measurement? There are several others out there. Some are more economic, some are more social-oriented and some are just wishful thinking. I think before we can make any judgment we would have to define a metric and to do that we would have to agree on priorities and already here people will differ. Some will hold GDP as an important tool for measurement, others would say the number of people above a specific poverty line, others would say happiness (but how to measure that one? Is it time-dependent?) or perhaps just access to McDonald’s per square meter?
Yeah there’s many measures you can use – and what you’d probably want to look at is some weighting of several. Also GDP per Capita is a meaningless measure if the distribution of income is heavily skewed towards one end.
Indeed. Looking at GDP/Capita would indicate a country consisting of a dictator who makes a million a year and 100 people starving, is an improvement over a country consisting of 101 people all living on $10.000/year.
Growth is nice *if* atleast some reasonable fraction of it benefits large parts of society. Remind me again, what’s been the income-development for the poorest half of Americas population over the last 4 decades ?
It’s a good idea to frame your opponent’s argument correctly rather than working from well-known strawmen. Just as libertarians need to move their ilk away from advocating anarcho-capitalism, social democrats need to move their ilk away from the welfare state. Intelligentsia from both groups know better, but the average ideologue champions these extremist views. I’ve given up on being a social democrat because I’ve found the many political parties that declare themselves such are not parties I would support. Here in the US I don’t have such a party, so I was working from the writings of the intelligentsia. Now I’m just a straight heterodox, because pragmatism works.
You can find ‘extreme’ views in any significant group of people no matter whay criteria you use to classify them. The question is how many opinion leaders hold these views. (What an ‘opinion leader’ is can be debated.) For example, someone no one has ever heard of (descriptive of most blog posters) espousing taxing the ‘rich’ at 98 percent is very different from someone elected to national office or the editor of a major newspaper promoting the same.
I have to side with kebko…mainstream elites like Sachs should spend more time figuring out why Ron Paul, the Tea Party, and the OWS/%1 groups in general have become popular. You come up with theories for the “misguided” following of each movement OR you could recognize that mainstream politics is broken. As for his critique of libertarianism…I would not be so quick to push personal liberty aside. Many people (poor included) would rather be empowered to help themselves than be given helped. Libertarians seem more honest that they don’t know what’s best for other people. In homogenous societies this may not be such a big deal, but it may be in the US.
You come up with theories for the “misguided” following of each movement OR you could recognize that mainstream politics is broken
We recognize both. Ron Paul, the Tea Party, and OWS are generally accepted to be popular because of our broken political system. However, Ron Paul, the Tea Party, and OWS are just new problems. None of them have any idea how to fix the broken political system and by pretending that they do, they damage the conversation. Our broken political system is reaching critical mass with the populace, as evidenced by the new politics movements. We need to tear them down so that we don’t just trade one broken system for another.
Dan, I think I agree with you, but I am not sure. I find the Sachs piece pointless because it does not address the real problem. Supposing that young people are apt to follow Ron Paul, it seems to me more like a repulsion to mainstream politics than an attraction to his politics (which comes with some baggage). I want to know how to fix the middle not dabble on the fringes.
“As for his critique of libertarianism…I would not be so quick to push personal liberty aside. ”
Where did he do that? His argument is that libertarians make liberty the sole value to the exclusion of all others.
Sachs’ critique of libertarianism is spot-on: even if we could specify the level of generality upon which to define the meaning of “liberty” (an impossible task nonetheless), we still have to deal with the “conflict of values” problem by trading liberty off to achieve other important values (such as charity, equality, etc.). But, in fairness to the defenders of libertarianism, I would add that all moral philosophies suffer from this flaw and that (for purely instrumental reasons) liberty is a better “default” position than other moral values because (as a general rule) the use of coercion in support of liberty does less damage and harm than the use of coercion in support of other competing values
We can’t know liberty is the keystone to the other values, but he knows exactly which buttons to push. Because he says so. Got it.
Next. Any non-libertarian pundit who hasn’t written one of these should do so immediately.
Arguably, liberty has a leg up on other values in the race to be primary/base, to the extent that it specifically doesn’t preclude other values. If I force everyone to be charitable then I reduce liberty. If I simply permit liberty, charity can be expressed by any and all who possess it as a value/virtue. If one considers ‘forced charity’ to be an oxymoron, then liberty actually increases ‘actual charity’ at the expense of ‘phony/forced charity’. Same for other values (how can it be a personal value if its forced on you?).
It’s a great point, and probably in and of itself good enough to contradict Sachs’ main point. Liberty is not often zero-sum unless you are impatient and arrogant about your goals for the values you think liberty precludes, or those aren’t your real values in the first place but just plausible justifications for power, which liberty is zero-sum with.
“Arguably, liberty has a leg up on other values in the race to be primary/base, to the extent that it specifically doesn’t preclude other values. ”
You are incorrect! Folks like Sachs value the state being able to initiate proxy violence on their behalf to achieve ends they believe are just.
6. Any idea based on the premise that all personalities are the same is a theory about personalities without knowing they exist.
Jefferey Sachs doesn’t understand libertarians.
Ahh he actually DOES understand them, in all my time reading this blog I’ve seen little to nothing here that contradicts what he says
How do you know who is a libertarian?
I’m a know-it-all
I don’t consider myself a libertarian (more a ‘conservatarian’), but Sachs is full of it. My respect for Politico has taken a dive. It seems to be on the road to inconsequentiality.
Yet the error of libertarianism lies not in championing liberty, but in championing liberty to the exclusion of all other values.
My respect for Politico has taken a dive.
Respect for Politico? That must have been a REALLY shallow dive.
No this is accurate of many libertarians – individual choice trumps everything.
CB3 – You seem to be rather hot on this argument. Any response to enrique above, e.g., that libertarianism is the least bad of any moral philosophy?
I don’t think it is the least bad option in terms of practical policy – I think libertarians oversell their philosophy and pretend as if it doesn’t come with any problems or flaws while at the same time endlessly pointing out flaws with government – which of course there are many.
Libertarians don’t exclude all other values. I’m libertarian and have a multiplicity of values. Rather, liberty is a meta-value. It submits that given all this multiplicity of value the state shouldn’t use force to push people into values they may very well disagree with.
But anyone can push you into values you might not agree with – this is my point, Libertarians often argue that tyranny can only come from a state but it’s not at all inconceivable to me that under some libertarian system someone could exploit property and market power to coerce people around.
Then you don’t understand them either CBBB.
Sachs essay is horrible. I really don’t feel like picking apart the likes of Sachs line by line.
“But anyone can push you into values you might not agree with”
No, they really can’t. I know you’ll not believe that, then you’ll blow off my explanation of it. But I’m right and your assertion is wrong.
Yeah they can though – I mean it really depends on whatever safe guards are in place. I know libertarians generally argue for some level of government but not much beyond contract enforcement and basic policing. If human beings didn’t have to eat or sleep then libertarianism might work great but a large corporate that controls say the food supply – I don’t see a difference between that and having a government.
@Andrew’ – An adult can make a child do something they don’t want. Such an action is legally acceptable and culturally encourage. I’m curious how this obvious counter-example does not undermine your position.
Because implicit in your example, as obvious as it may be, is the exception you are looking for. We are obviously not children to the government parent.
Besides, when is the last time you ACTUALLY forced a child to do something?
I forced my kid to get a shot. It took 4 adults and we almost gave up.
Well in fact, in practice tend to be less forceful about believing certain things then would be the case in libertarianism. For example, having charities provide health-care, education, etc. would almost certainly mean that those people who have little choice but to use these charitable services would be forced to adopt the beliefs of their patrons – usually such charities are religious in nature.
Like I said before, if people didn’t have to eat libertarianism might be nice but the choice “I can accept the faith of this church or I can starve” is hardly a choice. Employers could also force employees to adopt certain beliefs – of course the employees could quit but libertarians often gloss over the high costs of this for most people.
I mean libertarianism is really freedom for the wealthy and powerful, the average person would find themselves much much more constrained.
That’s demonstrably not true, just as it is demonstrably true that we cannot provide everything to everyone and the government WILL force you to do stuff, and even it it isn’t always overt, it is way further along the force continuum than a church giving you money for food.
CBBB,
Do you think I think the government has something to do with the scale of agribusiness?
Not a trick question.
I believe the US Federal government provides large subsidies to agriculture so this probably means the US agricultural sector is larger then it would be without the subsidies.
I think you underestimate the power institutions or people can have over those in desperate circumstances, even without force. I can think up even more directly oppressive circumstances that could arise in a libertarian system.
Since the subject of his article was Ron Paul and his supporters, can you provide quotes from a primary source from Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell (Paul’s chief of staff), Robert Nozick (also mentioned in the article), or Murray Rothbard and show where this quote contradicts what Sachs said?
Theological discussions are like this, too: someone criticizes another school of thought and is then told with a dismissive assertion that he doesn’t understand that school of thought as if no further rebuttal were required.
3. There’s only so much you can do with search and Google needs to grow as a publicly traded company. Facebook will soon find itself in the same situation.
I view this companies as wide, but not deep.
I disagree. List of things search engines could do that they do not:
1. Learn my poor search behaviors and correct them for me.
2. Weigh more useful pages more than currently.
3. Search for keywords given a specific context.
4. Understand context given my search phrase.
5. Learn my poor ability to provide context and correct for me.
6. Interface directly into my thought processes so that I can gain knowledge purely by thinking about it.
Whether all of the above is desirable isn’t interesting. They are things that a search engine could do.
That’s a common programmer complaint about Google. Once the dominate a market (say directions) with their branding and good enough program, they never improve on it. So you’re correct, they could do more with search. But does that get them their stock valuation? I doubt it.
“Google, where the hell are my keys?”
Though Siri might beat them to that.
Boy am I getting tired of having libertarianism explained to me.
What’s the old stand-up comic line “I don’t come to your business and tell you how to suck ##@#s!”
I’m tired of libertarianism strawmen being attacked. It’s boring and juvenile.
Welcome to the internet. Before it, libertarianism and attacks on libertarianism were safely tucked away in very obscure dusty journals and books.
I often wonder if libertarianism and anti-libertarianism is the true killer app of the ‘net.
#2 – what’s the point of this link? And undergraduate Economics is not at all hard – without a doubt one of the easiest undergrad subjects out there.
Only in retrospect. For someone with no previous acquaintance with it, economics is full of wildly counterintuitive and emotionally unappealing ideas, such as that minimum wage laws do not help workers. It presents an understanding of the world that is the complete opposite of conventional wisdom. Many students have difficulties accepting the notion that they know nothing about something—the business of everyday life—that they assumed they already grasped fully.
No, not even in retrospect – all it is at the undergrad level is moving a bunch of lines up and down on a chart. I don’t believe half the bullshit models in econ but all you have to do is manipulate them around to your professor’s liking. Econs are always bird courses.
Oh, you mean BAD economics courses.
Yeah – all the ones taught in undergrad.
I even took a 4th year Game Theory course and that was laughably simple.
#1: Any attempt to PERSUADE others that liberty is not fundamental is self-contradictory. If you do not think I have a right not to be interfered with, why are you asking for my consent?
You honestly cannot perceive that a person values another’s views outside the notion of liberty? Children value the views of their parents long before they are able to comprehend liberty.
Is Jeffrey Sachs a child?
On Sachs: “Libertarians hold that individual liberty should never be sacrificed in the pursuit of…compassion, justice, civic responsibility, honesty, decency, humility, respect, and even survival of the poor, weak, and vulnerable…”
Leaving aside justice and arguably honesty, both of which are liberal (libertarian) values, what value system do these other virtues belong to? Who has compassion, civic responsibility, and decency? Why, aren’t these are the socially conservative values of the strong with respect to the weak? Are they not, in fact, top-down virtues?
True, humility is an act of subordination (either top-down or bottom-up, depending), but again it is a socially conservative notion–it implies an unequal power relationship. In Sach’s world, the strong are to act as agents for the weak (“respect…for the poor, weak”) because it’s the right thing to do. It’s internally motivated.
So Sachs is calling for (social) conservatism. All well and good. But what’s socially conservative ideology? For Sachs, it seems to boil down to paternalism. But he doesn’t seem to have any kind of mathematical notion in mind (no Greek letters in his vision of conservatism). And consequently, he doesn’t grasp that this same paternalism is that of Hungary’s proto-fascist Prime Minister, Viktor Orban. It is the same paternalism which, in virulent form, gives you a Hitler.
For the powerful, to push dependency is spiritually elevating. For the weak, to accept dependency is suicidal. History has time and again shown that the powerful show the greatest tolerance, decency and understanding for their own interests. Only a fool would permit themselves to become dependent on “the kindness of strangers”. Any liberal could tell you that.
On Sachs: “Libertarians hold that individual liberty should never be sacrificed in the pursuit of…compassion, justice, civic responsibility, honesty, decency, humility, respect, and even survival of the poor, weak, and vulnerable…”
Of course. Because given their choice, nobody would ever take care of anybody else.
Sarcasm aside, the problem people like Sachs have with libertarianism is that under libertarianism, it would be completely up to the net producers to determine whom they would take care of.
Right. So liberalism and conservatism are in some sense the flip sides of the same coin. Duty and desire. Freedom and Belonging (not coincidentally the name of my manuscript on this issue). Principal and agent. (Egalitarianism is the odd man out here–it recognizes no property rights.) So all the ideologies are hypocritical in some fashion. The pious have affairs. The socialists live in 12,000 sq ft houses. The property rights of the individual are protected by collective action. Indeed, hypocrisy is then defined as rhetorically belonging to one ideology, and behaviorally to another. (See, now we can combine the three ideology model with principal-agent theory to begin to describe things like hypocrisy in the language of economics…)
There is also the problem of theory and practice. In theory moral libertarians may be ready to take care of all the sick and homeless, but in practice contributions may be lumpy or infrequent. If you are really dedicated to a safety net, in practice, you kind of need a national system with ability to draw funds as needed. See also Newt Gingrich’s criticism of Obama as “the food stamp president.” Usage goes up with hunger. What a rotten system.
“See also Newt Gingrich’s criticism of Obama as “the food stamp president.” Usage goes up with hunger. What a rotten system.”
I’m pretty sure that Gingrich wasn’t speaking out against usage going up under Obama as much as he was speaking out against hunger going up under Obama. It seems you missed the nuance.
Yes. But let’s say there’s two producers. A and B. A choose to ensure the survival of the poor and weak, despite this being unprofitable to him. B choose not to. Let’s say they’re equally large and equally profitable producers, so profits from 50% of the production is (atleast partially) used to support the poor.
In the next step, B has more money left over, which he can use to invest, becoming a bigger and more profitable producer.
Next year, thus, profits from -less- than 50% of the production is used to support the poor.
Thus that system rewards non-contribution with increased influence and increased wealth. If we initially have producers both of the contributing and non-contributing sort, we’d expect that over time, the non-contributors would outgrow the contributors. (for the simple reason that giving away rather than investing a fraction of your profits, will tend to slow growth)
Social conservatism involves deference to tradition; I don’t see any of that in Sachs. Instead, I believe Sachs is a believer in virtue ethics. Conservatives don’t own Aristotle and Sachs is probably closer to Adam Smith than Ayn Rand was.
Funny how no one ever wants to argue against the utilitarian-style, public-choice informed variant of libertarianism. Rather, opponents argue against the libertarian variants that present very little challenge to or cause little reflection upon their own ideologies.
Because those are the libertarians that many of us encounter on a day-to-day basis. Talk to Ron Paul supporters and Tea Party types. Neither group tends towards mastery of the subjects they so boldly prescribe solutions.
Yet if someone argues against the legions of know-nothings on the left, they are accused of attacking straw men.
If there was a utilitarian-style, public-choice informed libertarian running for President, perhaps the value of such an article would increase. Instead, Ron Paul happens to be the lower-case “l” libertarian candidate for President so I don’t quite understand your complaint.
IMHO These general critiques of libertarianism/Leftism/progressivism/conservatism are useless. Better to debate one issue at a time.
I agree with this. The problem is you have extremists who want a pure system – this was a hallmark of Marxists and I would argue many libertarians.
Disagree. If your view is that ideology is itself the objective function (what you’re trying to maximize), then all policies will be judged by their suitability for one of three major ideologies. You’re trying to finesse the issue by piecemealing it out. But you still have to answer the question, “Why is this a good policy?” And to that, there are only three answers: i) because it increases prosperity, ii) because it increases equality, or iii) because it is our duty (Sachs) or because it supports the cohesion of the group (eg, prayer in school, closed borders, etc.).
Better to think about the portfolio of ideologies ex-ante, and know how you prioritize them.
I don’t mind global evaluation, I mind that that they unfailingly use weird idiosyncratic terminology for their criticisms that I’ve never heard before. Do you own yourself and the fruit of your labor or not, and if not, who does and why do they have a superior claim? I’ve been studying libertarianism long enough to reject it and haven’t, Sachs hasn’t and has.
Do you own the fruit of your labor? I certainly don’t. It goes into the bank account and my wife spends it. Could I theoretically reclaim it? Sure. There is a word for guys like that. But most responsible men accept the reality that their family depends on them. It’s not a matter of personal perference. It’s obligation, years at a time. And it doesn’t matter how you feel about it. Nor is it, I think, because of some promise. It is duty, pure and simple.
Further, would you genuinely countenance someone starving at your doorstep, and say, “Too bad.” Do you think society should? Don’t get me wrong: if you put my back to the wall, I’d chose liberalism (libertarianism). It is, all things considered, the least harmful and most associated with prosperity and genuine freedom. But it’s not everything. There’s a reason the other two ideologies have survived so many years.
Kids seems to be the issue of the day. Having kids is one way of disposing of the fruits of your labor. You also have a contract with your wife. The word you are thinking of is “divorced” and you only get to take away your portion of what is jointly owned in your voluntary arrangement. Neither of those examples contradict the point of my question. Equality and community are fine goals, that doesn’t automatically make them trump liberty, and there are plenty of ways to promote them without government intervention. In fact, most of the things I think about with equality and community require beating back government at this point.
On weekends, when I lived in Budapest, I used to walk around and wonder why the pre-war buildings were so beautiful and the post-war building so ugly. Why weren’t the pre-war buildings plain and ugly? It’s easier to make them ugly.
The liberal, because interactions are voluntary, is always courting the other person to induce them into a voluntary interaction. The liberal (libertarian) is thus compelled always to be “selling”. Over time, the liberal will become adept at meeting the other party’s needs as the route to eventual gratification. What do counter-parties desire? Pleasantness, politeness, reliability, deference in behavior, deferred gratification, public beauty and other forms of conventional attractiveness. (Public beauty–as opposed to private beauty–is defined in the eyes of the beholder. Private beauty occurs when the producer is allowed to define beauty in his own terms. Hence the reason the School of Architecture at Princeton University is hideous to behold.)
In any event, it seems to me that a highly competitive and liberal market will produce socially conservative forms of behavior. It is competition which leads to agency, to the subsuming of the indvidual self-interest to social obligations. A wide open, liberal market will produce–the Victorian era. And I think this is, in some sense, where society is headed.
I think that you’re right that marginal, philosophically unified movements like marxism or libertarianism tend to draw proportionately more people who advocate ultra-simple purist versions of their philosophy. For a wide variety of reasons.
However, in a pluralist democracy, there’s no chance that anybody will ever get to impose a radically simple, purist version of ANY philosophy on the government as a whole, much less a relatively unpopular philosophy like marxism or liberalism. As such, tilting endlessly at not just libertarians, but the less-informed, less-connected-with-even-the-tenuous-amount-of-political-power-than-usual libertarians, seems absurd.
Libertarianism’s practical import in contemporary politics is its critique of active policies and its marginal efforts in the face of much-more-popular strains of political belief. The idea that we seriously need to worry about what will happen if “a random internet adherent” of Libertarianism suddenly seized unitary control of the government is absurd.
+1 to this. Libertarianism has definite value in the marketplace of ideas and I respect Ron Paul a lot for being out there making his case knowing full well he will never be president.
Yes. It seems conservatives and progressives dislike having anyone asking them to justify their existence. They will always respond with strawmen and avoid answering.
I challenge anyone, left or right, to justify strip searching sick old people in the name of security.
I challenge anyone, left or right, to justify borrowing $1.3 trillion a year to pay pensions and hip replacements.
I challenge anyone, left or right, to justify the level of spending going towards the US military.
There may be answers, but if the answer is “Libertarians are evil”, I consider the argument lost.
The piece would be problematic no matter what the topic was.
It’s bigotry on display.
This isn’t an attempt to understand others more deeply;it’s an attempt to write others off before you have to understand them. If the subject of a piece like that was jews, women, black people, etc., we would immediately recognize the ugliness.
+1
i dont know about anyone else, but i dont like the new google…i really dont need to have Mark Thoma smiling at me every time i look something up…
#4. “After Seattle conducted its own study on performance-based parking, engineers noticed an oddity: When prices dropped on certain blocks, drivers actually parked less. No one can explain this.”
Does anyone here have an explanation?
Perhaps parking is a Veblen good, and parking-seekers are also seeking higher status by taking the premium spots first. After all, if nobody else is parking in the cheap spots, there must be something wrong with them!
I’ll go with, problem ‘needs more data’ before hazarding a guess. And honestly, judging by the quality of the writing and the way the author jumps all over the place often without truly making a coherent point, I wouldn’t even believe the statement is really true without some additional evidence.
There is nothing going on in the area at those times. Fewer people are attracked, and prices fall. I’m not going to run out and visit a street just because the parking is cheap.
The idea of liberty usually includes the idea of a fair vote. My complaint about Sachs is that if he talks about libertarian issues and liberty, he has to deal with the lack of fair voting, one way or the other. He can point out, say, that Ron Paul and the libertarians, have dumped the idea of fair voting, But he has to dispense with the concept, up front, otherwise the rest of the essay on the meaning and implementation of liberty is going to be bogus.
“Yet the error of libertarianism lies not in championing liberty, but in championing liberty to the exclusion of all other values.” Right here. Here is the problem. All others. Sachs has to define what he means by all others, because in any list of values, fair voting sits near the top three,
Example, Sachs must dispense with the notion that lack of fair voting leads to oligarchs. If he doesn’t, then there is a presumption that all parties believe in oligarchs, and the difference between libertarians and others gets buried, way deep in the muck, not worth talking about
#6 is worth reading. Its also unusually deep and well-argued for a New York Times opinion piece.
#5 would there be as much of a market for car sharing services if hackney licenses weren’t artificially limited?
no.
Would it really matter that much? I’m not sure.
When you take a cab you are paying for things besides the car. The biggest item is probably the driver’s time. But if you drive yourself it doesn’t take any longer, and you don’t have to pay someone. There’s not much cost to you unless you really are productive while riding in the back.
“Suppose a rich man has a surfeit of food and a poor man living next door is starving to death. The libertarian says that the government has no moral right or political claim to tax the rich person in order to save the poor person. Perhaps the rich person should be generous and give charity to the neighbor, the libertarian might say (or might not), but there is nothing that the government should do. The moral value of saving the poor person’s life simply does not register when compared with the liberty of the rich person.” – Sachs
Reminds me of this passage from David Mamet’s book:
‘The Left (as Thomas Sowell points out in “Intellectuals and Society”) believing in what it calls “social justice,” believes that wealth should be “shared,” but enters the discussion in its middle. For wealth may or may not be shared (in fact, it is shared, as efficiently as possible, through trade), but the a priori question, to the Left, is unasked and unanswered: Where did it come from?’
I don’t think this question is unasked at all. As for me, I don’t believe that’s as much of a correlation between effort, work, and production and wealth as those on the right believe. Certainly the wealthiest people in America are mostly corporate executives who owe their positions more to success at office politics then the fact that they’re really much more productive then others. Luck plays a large factor – maybe the wealthy man inherited his wealth, maybe he’s benefiting from some government regulation (an aspect of government intervention that libertarians rarely care about – how the wealthy exploit government for their benefit).
As for being shared as efficiently as possible – depends how you define efficiency and know that the left generally is more concerned with equality then efficiency.
Indeed. The idea that wealth, or income, is proportional to productivity doesn’t survive the laugh-test. Wealth and income are to some degree *influenced* by personal productivity, but it’s not the only factor that influense it, and infact not even the most important factor.
The simplest, and most common, way of becoming wealthy, is simply to be born wealthy. And anecdotal tales of great entrepeneurship not withstanding, this is still the norm. Rags-to-Riches stories exist, but aren’t the norm. If you take Americas (or any other nations) 1000 richest people, you’ll find that the parents of 950+ of them belonged to the wealthier-parts of society.
I’m wealthier than 99.4% of humanity. Most of that is explained by the fact that a person earning a average income in my country (Norway) earns more than 99.2% of humanity. The rest is explained by two university-educated parents.
That is, saying I’m more productive than 99.4% of all humans, would be entirely the wrong conclusion to draw about me. The correct one would be that I was lucky with my choice of parents, and do about average for someone with my background. As do most people. *especially* in USA where social mobility has been falling steadily for 3 decades now.
Boom. +1.
At least in my family, this doesn’t ring true if I look at the distribution of lifestyles among my cousins. Statistically, our common grandparents appear to be overwhelmed by other factors.
It’s not unasked and unanswered at all.
On the contrary, what leftists (especially those who know some anthropology) know is that the vast majority of human societies that have ever existed have never put such a strong emphasis on owning the fruits of one’s labor. Instead, the natural state of humans appears to be to live in groups or tribes and share goods that one has produced in hopes of gaining status and recognition. The idea of a natural right to the fruits of one’s labor comes from modern thinkers like John Locke.
This is a useful idea because it leads to organized production and markets which in turn lead to increasing wealth and living standards for everyone in the long-run. This is a utilitarian case for capitalism that most modern liberals embrace. However, this point of view allows other values like equality to enter the picture and denies that property rights are absolute or the primary value in society.
The sharing of fruits has probably never been equal. The strongest hunters and gatherers were always rewarded with disproportionate power and consumption – perhaps not in ratios similar to the best and worst performers of our day.
The ancient hunter-gatherer societies lived on the brink of starvation – body fat was their savings bank. But in our day we produce enormous quantities from small inputs. Natural rights of property ownership came hand in glove with the explosion of productivity.
We are not well-informed by looking to ancient models that were happily discarded. I believe we have made progress.
It’s not true that hunter-gatherers were on the brink of starvation. See Jared Diamond’s article on the subject comparing adult heights (generally a decent proxy for nutrition) between hunter-gatherers and people in poor agrarian societies or his comparison from anthropological field work of hours spent feeding oneself.
I don’t think we are served well by looking to ancient models, but I also don’t think incorrect claims about human nature are helpful either. The U.S. is one of the most individualistic countries in the world and even there, most people do not have strict libertarian intuitions: people believe in the importance of property rights but also believe that those who are wealthier should contribute more to public goods and help those who are less fortunate through a combination of the welfare state and charity. These ideas are anathema to libertarians but are shared by almost everyone else — understanding that libertarianism is the product of very recent ideas that are only taken seriously in a handful of societies helps us explain this disconnect.
The question is WHY is the man next door poor and starving to death, and how many more of him will there be if we start taxing others and subsidizing his condition.
If I have a surfeit of food and my neighbor is starving, I will gladly bring him some food. If I really sympathize for his unfortunate plight, I might voluntarily do this every day.
If government agents come to my door to take my food, I will introduce them to my Second Amendment rights. If they survive, I’ll remind them of my Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights.
It is mostly a myth that people in America are “hungry.” Obesity is a bigger problem among our poor than undernourishment. There are more people in want than I have to give, and the people who want are an increasing function of how much is given.
I am especially hesitant to give with joy since government already taxes away a good share of the excess income I could be saving to prevent myself from becoming like the guy next door. Oh, and I once was the guy next door. I thank God nobody gave me a handout or I might still be next door.
I would take hong kong over greece anyday
Those are the ONLY TWO OPTIONS. Also while Hong Kong’s an awesome place if you have no money it’s probably the worst.
Anyone who wants to live in a libertarian society may do so by next week. Emigrate to Somalia.
We’d fix up the place just in time for the socialists to want to ‘share’ everything.
You’re thinking of Calabria.
Or wait the X number of years before the US is forced to live within taxed revenues. Or Europe in a year or two.
Damn those Libertarians.
Dear Art:
Many students stay awake at night studying for exams because their teachers suck.
One of the popular myths of higher education is that professors are teachers who live to transfer the wealth of the ages to undergraduates. Professors at most universities are researchers first and teachers only as a means to justify their paychecks. Perhaps you believe that students get to pick their teachers and schedules in a perfect world of academic bliss. The older you get and the longer you do this, the more you lose touch with the people you are paid to teach. How does this work? Let’s clarify a few things.
First, we don’t absorb information by being in your presence and listening to your words. You must teach us. The difference is not merely rhetorical, nor is it trivial. In other words, you have to communicate ideas to us in a manner that is well organized, engaging, and meaningful. You teach in (say) Econ 100 by explaining new terms in the beginning as if we’ve never heard of them before. Maybe we did hear them before, but don’t assume the previous teacher was any better than you at making learning stick. You must recognize that unless you are teaching at an Ivy League school, the students you are teaching could not get into the school you did. This does not absolve you of your responsibility to teach. You must leave your perch and find where we are, not where you wish the Advanced Algebra teacher at East Little Rock High School has brought us.
You must build upon each concept slowly in a coherent manner, not haphazardly throwing material against the wall, seeing if it will stick, and determining that those on whom it fails to stick are subhuman and not worthy of a college degree. Your time spent preparing for class should exceed the time it takes to walk from your office to the lecture hall.
We do not believe that 100 is the default grade, but we expect your exams to adequately represent the concepts you actually taught in your class, and not the 20 years of knowledge swirling around inside your head that you told us in stories for eight weeks. Applying lessons learned in the course to unfamiliar scenarios on the exam might be a good way to separate the As from the Bs, but don’t expect us to do this for an entire exam after only a relatively few weeks of having words and charts thrown at us. The early stages of learning are often rote memorization that doesn’t solidify as knowledge until several years later. You’ve maligned many students and awarded unfair grades by confusing your own incompetence with your students. You’ve been here, so you should understand.
Second, this means that the burden is on you to teach. It is not on me to learn by myself, otherwise I would have read books in the public library or enrolled in the University of Phoenix. My assumption at the beginning of each course is that a professor knows something about the preparation and delivery of his subject matter, unless I am unlucky enough to get a graduate student who has never taught before or a professor who considers teaching a necessary chore that distracts him from his research. Otherwise, why are you here? You might say that the course is your job, preparing other people to do the things you did – perhaps people who do not have the foundation of education and sharpness of intellect that you had when you started.
In this light, consider this: the fact that you “don’t understand” why your teaching sucks doesn’t earn you the right to consider us stupid, lazy, or incompetent. Don’t take this personally or interpret it as a sneer. See it as a learning opportunity. If you understood how to teach–and do note that there is a large difference between really teaching and being able to speak and use visual aids –you would communicate flawlessly. I recommend (as I have recommended to many others) that you go back, take a good look at how much time, effort, and understanding you put into your teaching and see if you can find where you have gone wrong. Then come to class and apologize for not doing your job properly.
Finally, I’m here to be a taught as a student. This means that our relationship differs from the relationships that you have with your friends and family. I pay your wages. Please don’t infer from this that I don’t respect you, because I do. A lot. I want to learn what you know. I want to understand basic economics not merely because it is required as part of the core curriculum, but because I hope it will rock my world. The human consequences of lousy teaching are enormous. That said, you should never take student criticism personally. I don’t think you’re a moron because you failed to convey the enormous body of knowledge in your head in one class, or course, or even during all the coursework for my major area of study. Teaching is hard. A low teaching evaluation does not diminish your value in God’s eyes (or in mine) or indicate that teaching just isn’t for you. It probably means you need to prioritize your work better, and I’m here as your highest priority. I come before your research, before your committee work, before your journal editing, before your consulting work, and before writing on your self-promoting blog.
Dear teacher, you once thought as I do. You once carried about the same misconceptions, the same litany of cognitive biases, and the same adolescent desire to blame students for your errors. You are (and remain) very poorly served by your arrogance. As shocking as it may seem, you still cling to a lot of it, even after four years of being a teaching assistant, four years as an assistant professor, five years as an associate professor, and now five-and-a-half years as a full professor. Teaching is hard, but becoming a responsible professor at a place of higher education is very, very, very hard.
I am still learning. I hope you will do the same. Start now. The effort is daunting, but the rewards are substantial.
This article was inspired by periodic discussions among students that crop up in the student union, student apartments, and on Facebook. A former fellow student used to quote the verse above at the top of his Economics 101 exams. Needless to say the professor wasn’t as generous to him with partial credit.
Holy shit.
At my university most of the professors were fairly good at teaching – but there were some notable exceptions. Now some will argue the student should learn the material independently – but then what the hell is the student paying for?
Actually NPR had this good program a little while ago about a guy at Harvard who completely changed the way he taught physics after he discovered that many of the students, even by the end of the course, couldn’t solve basic conceptual physics problems. Now he has the students do specific reading before class and uses the class time to discuss concepts and conceptual problems in an open forum type manner. I think this is a good way to go, my physics professor was amongst the bad ones. Spent the majority of time deriving equations mathematically, which is an important part of physics to be sure but I think its much more important to focus on the core physical implications of the models you’re teaching not on derivations no one is going to remember any way.
Obviously I agree with Art for the most part. Many students are childish, lazy, whiners, but not all of them are.
And many professors are lazy, incompetent, arrogant and uncaring, but not all of them are.
Thus my point.
Excellent, though I agree with much of what Art said. I think that had this not been posted in a thread with a tonne of debates about libertarianism, your fine piece would have garnered a lot more attention, which it deserves.
Thank you tkehler.
I made some errors in turning the argument back on Art, but I’m sure you got my point. Having never seen Art’s teaching, I certainly don’t mean to disparage him personally notwithstanding addressing it to him. Rather, I address it to the many bad teachers who would use Art’s biting critique as intellectual armor for their own arrogance, indifference, and incompetence.
I have known students who fit Art’s description. They demand I explain why they are wrong, essentially shifting the burden of proof. While this is a common tactic of both misguided students and rogue regimes subject to arms inspections, it is not entirely without merit.
As the post on opportunity cost demonstrates, there is substantial disagreement within the profession on the simplest of concepts. When a student presents what he thinks is correct because it makes sense to him, we do have some duty to demonstrate why it is clearly wrong and not merely a deviation from the “book” answer. Many wrong answers come from questions that were carelessly imprecise – the fault of the teacher.
Teaching is hard, and writing good exams is arguably harder. Multiple choice questions are difficult to write and easy to grade. Essay questions are easy to write and hard to grade. Many teachers mistake inappropriate difficulty of exams as intellectual rigor. Exams should meet the Goldilocks standard: just right. If an exam has a median score of 52%, I can almost guarantee that either the teaching sucks, the exam sucked, or both.
When a student complains, they are a paying customer demanding due process. They have a right of notice and to a fair hearing. This does not mean a panel of economists must consider whether the grade was correct. It means the teacher must, in good faith consider the perceived grievance and attempt to achieve a satisfactory conclusion. A student whose answer is proven wrong or a disputed question which can be proven adequate is often sufficiently powerful to gain a student’s agreement.
I count myself among good teachers because I have the credentials to prove it. My students had superior results on objective tests and follow-on courses, and I’ve received great feedback on teaching evals. I’ve been subjected to many bad teachers as an undergrad and grad student, and I’ve seen bad teachers among my peers. Some of them take it as a deep blow to their psyche when students don’t like them. Others casually wisk away complaining students or put their grades at further risk in any review. The enlightened ones recognize they have a problem and seek out good teachers and advice of students to fill the gap.
I hope everyone, including Art, takes this with the spirit in which I intended it.
Sachs on Ayn Rand
“Libertarians defend their single-mindedness on three separate grounds: ethical, economic, and political. Ethical libertarians, exemplified by the late novelist Ayn Rand, hold that liberty is the only true virtue. Rand claimed when a rich man responds to a poor person’s plea for help (even by giving mere pennies), the rich man actually debases himself.”
Rand in her own words
“My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.”
Sachs messed up on this sentence but only slightly. He is correct that Rand considered altruism and a duty to help others to be debasing but goes a bit too far in saying that charity in general is debasing. He is certainly correct that Rand rejected Christian and Buddhist compassion. Sachs doesn’t mention it but it is also true that the younger Rand was a fan of Nietzsche’s “master morality” and the influence of Nietzsche’s ideas on her work has been very well-documented.
You know Ayn Rands thoughts are easily available on any number of subjects. A bit far is a bit of an understatement. Sure Rand was fan of Neitzsche but then came to believe this:
“Nietzsche’s rebellion against altruism consisted of replacing the sacrifice of oneself to others by the sacrifice of others to oneself. He proclaimed that the ideal man is moved, not by reason, but by his “blood,” by his innate instincts, feelings and will to power—that he is predestined by birth to rule others and sacrifice them to himself, while they are predestined by birth to be his victims and slaves—that reason, logic, principles are futile and debilitating, that morality is useless, that the “superman” is “beyond good and evil,” that he is a “beast of prey” whose ultimate standard is nothing but his own whim. Thus Nietzsche’s rejection of the Witch Doctor consisted of elevating Attila into a moral ideal—which meant: a double surrender of morality to the Witch Doctor.”
I just wish people would not be so lazy and actually deal with the stated beliefs of other thinkers. I am sure Sachs could have fairly represented Rand and still scored points with the same crowd he was trying to court?
Extreme ideology indeed! Whatever would the Founders think?
Most political philsophies are moral philosophies. Government is used as a stand in for God and forces this morality down upon people.
Liberterianism is not a philosphy. Its a governing method. A liberterian may or may not donate all, some, or none of his wealth to charity. Liberterianism provides no moral answer to the questions of how to treat your fellow man. It answers only the question of how government should function. No more, no less.
EXACTLY! BRAVO!
No, libertarians define the way government functions in one way, but that way does define how you treat your fellow man.
Your statement is internally inconsistent.
If government include no welfare function, than it defines that you do not take your fellow citizens welfare into consideration.
spencer,
Your statements are so logically false there is little value in refuting them.
6. No, of course not. But we do like keeping our underlings arrayed about us. It’s ego-stroking.
Comments on this entry are closed.