Month: July 2006

Here is the list, from notes taken by Bettina Greaves.  Most of these still have not been written, yet should be.

…I regularly hear Europeans complain that American stores are too cold in the summer.  Again, the conflict lies in the cultural schemes.  Americans like to be cool, even extremely cool.  Research has shown that the coldest stores in America tend to be the most expensive.  Since air conditioning is a necessity, we need extreme air conditioning to convey a sense of luxury.

That is from Clotaire Rapaille’s The Culture Code, a fun romp through national cultures, how the French think about seduction, why the Americans invaded Iraq, why monetary incentives work better in some cultures than others, why autistic children have trouble learning, and what makes foreigners so hard to understand.

OK, he is making all this stuff up.  Publishers Weekly referred to its:

"preposterous generalizations and overstatements, e.g., Japanese men "seem utterly incapable of courtship or wooing a woman.""

It is one of the few non-fiction books I have read this year which will stick with me.  Here is the book’s home page.

The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, by Deirdre McCloskey.  Here is a related article.  Here is the book’s home page.

That is Deepak Lal’s new book, the subtitle is The Case for Classical Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century.  I rarely call myself a classical liberal, for fear the title has become musty and for realization that the feasible set today is quite different from that faced by Cobden and Bright.  That aside, here is what I think classical liberalism should become for the 21st century.

1. The welfare state is not going away.  But it is imperative that we avoid Western  European levels of taxation through the explosion of Medicare liabilities.  Don’t forget that the United States is a — should I say the — generator of global public goods par excellence.  Going down the path of France or Sweden would mean disaster.

2. What recipes lead to both strong markets and decent governance?  The not-yet-developed countries of the world all face this problem.  Simply deregulating does not itself solve the governance problem, as we have discovered many times in the last fifteen years.  Our understanding here is backward but much is at stake.

3. We face a variety of critical issues involving decentralization: how to deal with pandemics, natural disasters, or terrorists with nuclear weapons, to name but a few.  None of these are areas for laissez-faire.  Yet for all the squawking about the need for government, most of the real solutions "on the ground" will emphasize voluntary action and the private sector.  When faced with these problems, how can we do better rather than worse?  Note the close connection between this problem and #2; for instance in Indonesia the government won’t allow transparent communication about the nature of the avian flu problem.

Overrated classical liberal ideas are privatization (sometimes useful, but it often replicates old problems in a new regulatory guise) and abolishing foreign aid.

Your take, Alex?  Other classical liberal bloggers?

For Lal’s vision, well…you have to read his book.  You can start with the book’s web page and sample chapter here.