Category: Philosophy
From the comments (Walpurgis Nacht)
Tyler Cowen November 17, 2011 at 4:39 pm
Piggy wants mood affiliation!
- G.L. Piggy November 17, 2011 at 4:44 pm
- Peter Schaeffer November 17, 2011 at 4:51 pm
-
I don’t care about mood affiliation. However, Felix’s first chart is simply wrong. CP is “Corporate Profits After Tax”. FCTAX is “Tax Receipts on Corporate Income”. Felix thinks his chart shows “corporate income tax as a percentage of total corporate profits”.
It doesn’t.
- G.L. Piggy November 17, 2011 at 4:58 pm
-
But just to be a little pedantic here, the frustrating thing – the part which spurred my need for mood affiliation – is that your position on corporate tax rates was brought up out of nowhere and then quickly qualified.
Laserlight November 17, 2011 at 4:45 pm
“Can we ever get a straight critique out of you”
Ah, you’re looking for Tyler the Ethnic Foods Critic. He’s down the hall to the left.
“The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically”
The Nature.com summary is here, the new paper is here (pdf), abstract:
Quantum states are the key mathematical objects in quantum theory. It is therefore surprising that physicists have been unable to agree on what a quantum state represents. There are at least two opposing schools of thought, each almost as old as quantum theory itself. One is that a pure state is a physical property of system, much like position and momentum in classical mechanics. Another is that even a pure state has only a statistical significance, akin to a probability distribution in statistical mechanics. Here we show that, given only very mild assumptions, the statistical interpretation of the quantum state is inconsistent with the predictions of quantum theory. This result holds even in the presence of small amounts of experimental noise, and is therefore amenable to experimental test using present or near-future technology. If the predictions of quantum theory are confirmed, such a test would show that distinct quantum states must correspond to physically distinct states of reality.
I have no ability to judge this, but it seems serious people are taking it seriously. Hat tip goes to Kevin Drum.
Western Australian de gustibus, on multiple fronts
Mr. Dinnison, who has mined copper, tin, nickel and gold, drills holes that are then packed with explosives to extract ore. He wears a $5,000 gold chain crucifix. “I’m not religious, but I am conscious that what I do is serious,” he said. “But then you come home and you have all that cash.”
Despite having earned roughly US$1 million since he started, he has no savings and doesn’t apologize. “The mines are so dull, that when you get back here, everything is stimulation and excitement,” he said. “The money I spend supports other businesses because of the [stuff] I blow it on.”
There is more of interest here.
Who gets what wrong?
My colleague Daniel Klein reports from the front:
…under the right circumstances, conservatives and libertarians were as likely as anyone on the left to give wrong answers to economic questions. The proper inference from our work is not that one group is more enlightened, or less. It’s that “myside bias”—the tendency to judge a statement according to how conveniently it fits with one’s settled position—is pervasive among all of America’s political groups. The bias is seen in the data, and in my actions.
And what do the “right-wing” thinkers get wrong?
More than 30 percent of my libertarian compatriots (and more than 40 percent of conservatives), for instance, disagreed with the statement “A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person”—c’mon, people!—versus just 4 percent among progressives. Seventy-eight percent of libertarians believed gun-control laws fail to reduce people’s access to guns. Overall, on the nine new items, the respondents on the left did much better than the conservatives and libertarians. Some of the new questions challenge (or falsely reassure) conservative and not libertarian positions, and vice versa. Consistently, the more a statement challenged a group’s position, the worse the group did.
A college education, by the way, doesn’t help much. Here is another statement of the conclusion:
A full tabulation of all 17 questions showed that no group clearly out-stupids the others. They appear about equally stupid when faced with proper challenges to their position.
That’s a lesson David Hume would have appreciated.
Who is against individual responsibility?
I agree with most of Matt’s recent post, but one sentence struck me as noteworthy. Matt writes:
I suppose I agree with Will Wilkinson about the importance of “an ethos of initiative, hard work, and individual responsibility” though I have no real idea why he thinks most progressives are against such an ethos.
I could write that sentence without the “I suppose”! The final clause of the sentence I see as showing just how broad the perceptual gulf between progressives and conservatives/libertarians can be.
I would not quite say that progressives are “against such an ethos,” but where does it stand in their pecking order? Look at fiction, such as famous left-wing or progressive novels, or for that matter famous left-wing and progressive movies. How many of them celebrate “an ethos of initiative, hard work, and individual responsibility”? Is there one? Maybe as part of a broader struggle against a corrupt system or against “The Man,” but that tripartite of values is not celebrated in its own right. Do any of these novels and films have business heroes? To be sure, hard work from labor is celebrated, provided the workers are tough, exploited, but nonetheless hearty and worthy of respect.
I have no problem with praising these novels and movies for their celebrations of social justice, solidarity, or for their unveiling of corruption, but still it is a stretch to those values cited above. Wanting to blame George Bush, or try Dick Cheney for war crimes, is a kind of individual responsibility, but in a very particular political context. How often will a progressive stress that the poor should develop greater conscientiousness rather than looking to government support? Many progressives are genuinely unaware of how unusual a moral code they often are communicating and celebrating, if only implicitly. Matt in fact is one of the least guilty in this regard, and you can see this when you examine his writings on the Nordic countries.
*The Price of Civilization*
That is the new Jeffrey Sachs book, with the subtitle Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity. Here is one excerpt:
Though I can’t prove that America’s mass-media culture, ubiquitous advertising, and long hours of daily TV watching are the fundamental causes of its tendency to let markets run rampant over social values, I can show that America represents the unhappy extreme of commercialism among the leading economies. To do this, I have created a Commercialization Index (CI) that aims to measure the degree to which each national economy is oriented toward private consumption and impatience rather than collective (public) consumption and regard for the future. My assumption is that the United States and other heavy-TV-watching societies will score high on the CI and that a high CI score will be associated with several of the adverse conditions plaguing American society.
Here is Sachs writing further on TV; here is Steve Johnson on TV.
Capitalist Kibbutz or from Marx to Rawls
The Israeli kibbutzim are surprisingly successful examples of voluntary socialism. Even today about 2% of the Israeli population lives on a kibbutz and they account for a significant share of output; about 4% overall (using data from 2004 from here and here) and much higher in some industries such as agriculture where the kibbutzim account for some 40% of Israeli output.
Nevertheless, the kibbutzim aren’t growing and, under economic and social pressure, many are privatizing in various ways. Most notably, beginning in 1998 many kibbutzim lowered the marginal tax rate from 100% (!) to about the same level as in the rest of Israel, 20-50%. The reduction in taxes meant that for the first time there were large wage differences for members of a kibbutz and, most importantly, there were large potential wage differences for those who increased their productivity.
In How Responsive is Investment in Schooling to Changes in Redistribution Policies and in Returns (free here) Ran Abramitzky and Victor Lavy look at the acquisition of human capital for high school students living on kibbutzim before and after the reduction in taxes (using a dif and dif strategy on early and late adopters). The authors find (from an NBER summary):
…The effects of the reforms were relatively small for students from highly educated families, in contrast to relatively large effects for students from families with lower parental education who had been covered by the pay reform for all of their years in high school. This group’s high school completion rates increased by 4.4 percent, their mean exam score went up by 8.3 points, their qualification rate for the Bagrut diploma increased by 19.6 percent, and the fraction of students with university qualifying scores increased by 16.8 percent….boys were most strongly influenced by the change.
The pay reform produced larger increases in educational outcomes than monetary bonuses for Bagrut diploma qualifying scores, a school choice program that allowed students to choose their high school in seventh grade, or a teacher bonus program that paid teachers of math, English, and Hebrew bonuses when their students did well on the Bagrut.
The authors argue that there are general lessons to be learnt:
Our findings have important implications beyond the Israeli context. First, they shed light on the educational responses that could result from a decrease in the income tax rate, thus are informative on the long-run labor supply responses to tax changes. Second, they shed light on the educational responses expected when the return to education increases. For example, such changes might be occurring in many countries as technology-oriented growth increases the return to skills.
I am less confident that the numerical results can be generalized, although of course the general point that incentives matter is well-taken.
The results, however, raise another issue. The original kibbutz were inspired by a combination of Marxism, socialism and Zionism. In the capitalist kibbutz, there is an opportunity for a new principle. Taxes can be set not according to Marx but according to Rawls and his second principle of justice: inequalities are to be allowed so long as they benefit the least-advantaged members of the society/kibbutz.
Thus, it would be interesting to know if any of the kibbutz have tried to adjust taxes so as to implement a Rawlsian approach to inequality (if not, perhaps Israeli taxes are already above Rawlsian levels.)
Cyclical and countercyclical assets
…recent data show diaper sales are slowing and sales of diaper-rash ointment are rising.
Here is more, and I thank Peter Metrinko for the pointer.
The perspective of the statesman and the perspective of the blogger (or scholar)
Some of you have asked me what I think of the concerted central bank effort to flood European banks with dollars. Ed Harrison noted the Fed is playing it down (no press release, perhaps a fear of treason charges), I believe Roubini viewed it as a hidden forex move.
I find it a striking dilemma and here is why. The blogger in me thinks: “This just postpones all the major decisions. Once the loans are up the banks still will be strapped, and the longer you wait to resolve financial crises, the more they will cost. There is no eurobond and no rapid economic growth at the end of that tunnel.”
If I were Trichet, or some other involved statesman, I would have done what was done, albeit sooner. The statesman in me would think: “This just postpones all the major decisions. But I can’t send everyone to their doom just yet. Maybe there is some way I am wrong and a month or two from now things will look different and we can make another decision then.”
I am never sure how to reconcile these two perspectives. Of course, in real life I am a blogger and not a statesman, for good reasons I might add.
In the meantime, the banks are lobbying the BRICS.
Very good sentences
He was an ironic rationalist who, like all rationalists, had an irrational personal history.
That is from Adam Phillips, on Byron, in a review entitled Stag at Bay, in the latest LRB. From elsewhere, here is an article on how to die a greener death.
Why philosophers should care about computational complexity
In a new paper, Scott Aaronson reports:
One might think that, once we know something is computable, how efficiently it can be computed is a practical question with little further philosophical importance. In this essay, I offer a detailed case that one would be wrong. In particular, I argue that computational complexity theory—the field that studies the resources (such as time, space, and randomness) needed to solve computational problems—leads to new perspectives on the nature of mathematical knowledge, the strong AI debate, computationalism, the problem of logical omniscience, Hume’s problem of induction, Goodman’s grue riddle, the foundations of quantum mechanics, economic rationality, closed timelike curves, and several other topics of philosophical interest. I end by discussing aspects of complexity theory itself that could benefit from philosophical analysis.
Here is some comment on the paper, and whether waterfalls play chess.
Animal rights nationalism
I guess they don’t care about the Turkish animals, a funny position for a group with trans-species (but not trans-national?) concerns:
Animal rights activists in Australia have alleged that Australian sheep and cattle are being mistreated in Turkey and stated they will voice their claims at a Senate hearing on Wednesday, an Australian newspaper said on Wednesday.
According to The Australian, animal rights investigators will present fresh claims of sheep and cattle being mistreated in Turkey to Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig on Wednesday ahead of a Senate hearing into the live export industry.
The daily said Animals Australia, a federation of civil society groups that deals with animal welfare and animal rights issues, has new video footage of livestock being handled and slaughtered in ways that breach international animal welfare standards.
The footage was reportedly taken recently after the group went to Turkey to investigate the treatment of Australian animals for the Senate inquiry into the issue and the independent investigation of the trade being carried out by former diplomat Bill Farmer.
According to the report, investigators said they were unable to confirm that animals documented in the footage were Australian, only that Australian livestock was slaughtered at the Turkish facilities.
The Australians who shipped these animals to Turkey seem oddly exempt from criticism, or did the Turks come, sneak across the border, and capture the sheep and cattle with nets?
Imagine further applications of the principle of animal rights nationalism. Should the nations of the South put “(im)migration restrictions” on the birds coming down from the North each wintertime? Some ideas are too silly to contemplate.
For the pointer I thank Ashok Hariharan.
Very good sentences
…in the wake of the weekend’s downgrade, we need them to govern as though that final victory might never quite arrive.
That is from Ross Douthat, here is more.
Jack Goldstone is now blogging
*The* Jack Goldstone, who by the way is a colleague at GMU. Find his posts here.
Data from Match.com
“Conservatives are far more open to reaching out to someone with a different point of view than a liberal is.” That is, when it comes to looking for love, conservatives are more open-minded than liberals.
The full article is here, interesting throughout.
Addendum: Reihan comments.
Yes, I do. Just once!
Reply