Category: Philosophy
Does the well-off law professor have cause to complain?
This guy is the blogging topic of the weekend; his family earns $455,000 a year (addendum: this number seems not to be true) and yet he worries about his taxes going up and the resulting diminution of real income. I think we cannot permanently extend the Bush tax cuts; nonetheless, being a contrarian, I would like to explore the question of when a wealthy person has cause to complain. I read about this guy and his pitchfork and it genuinely scared me, especially his description of Ben Stein and his intermingling of the political and the aesthetic.
Let's say you live in a country which has some rich people, some people in the lower middle class, and some very very poor people. Or let's say you are a non-nationalist cosmopolitan. Or let's say they discovered the indigenous people in Alaska and New Mexico were worse off than we had thought.
In such societies, do the "lower middle class but not very poor people" have cause to complain? After all, some large group of others has it much, much tougher. Doesn't everyone who might suffer a loss have a potential claim to complain? At what percentile of wealth does your claim to complain go away or diminish? Even if it's an exponential function, can't Henderson's complaint lie within the shaded area, small though that region may be? Can't a rich person point out that he has a higher MU of money than a non-rich person might think? Or must that necessarily offend others? What kind of genuflections must he package along with that information, so as to avoid being considered offensive?
Do you have more of a right to complain about taxes if you were going to spend the money, bringing about the treasured "stimulus," noting that right now the wealthy are more inclined to spend? Do spendthrift wealthy people have a stronger right to complain if the multiplier on their potential spending is 1.5 rather than 0.6? Should wealthy people simply acquiesce to any policy change that leaves them in the top two percent, and keep their mouths shut in the meantime?
If you are wealthy, and complain about a pending loss, must you each time note that some people — many people — are worse off than you are? If you read a bad complaint, and complain about it, must you note that other people are stuck reading far worse material? Or is it OK just to complain? What if some other country's rich people support political tyranny, or perhaps an oppressive caste system, or maybe they don't pay any taxes at all? Can you still complain about your rich people? Or must you put in a disclaimer that you don't really have it so bad, given that others, in other countries, are stuck with even worse rich people?
Beware of moral arguments which do not address "At which margin?" I see a lot of attempts to lower the status of Todd Henderson, but not much real moral engagement.
A lot of people just like to complain, and that includes complaining about the complaining of others.
Oddly — or perhaps not – it's the people who feel they deserve their money who are the most likely to give it away.
*On Balance*
That is the new book by Adam Phillips, which of course I bought on the spot. Reading it over lunch, I enjoyed this bit:
A person I was seeing in psychoanalysis once said to me, "Don't you think Fraud is rather overrated", he had of course meant to say "Freud", and he blushed.
*The Uses of Pessimism*
That is the new Roger Scruton book, which I finished with pleasure. Here is one good passage:
Optimism…is the other side of a kind of existential despair, a longing to retreat from the complexities of the great society to the primordial simplicity of the undifferentiated tribe. It expresses a kind of distrust of humanity, an inability to allow that we can actually move on from our original nature, and create a flexible, reasonable and charitable "we," which is not a collective "I" at all, but the by-product of individual freedom. But this distrust is unfounded. The world is, in fact, a much better place than the optimists allow: and that is why pessimism is needed.
Adam Phillips on happiness
For better and for worse, being able to feel our frustration is the precondition for becoming absorbed. When this is impossible the pursuit of happiness tends to take over. The right to pursue happiness may be, at its worst, the right not to feel frustrated. And if frustration is not allowed to take its course, to take its time, there is no absorption, only refuges from unhappiness. The child is fobbed off with happiness when what she really wants is to get her appetite back. The right to the pursuit of happiness can be a cover story for the wish to hide.
Here is much more, hat tip goes to The Browser,
Is being interesting more important than being happy?
Vimspot asks:
2 things I'd love you to elaborate on (though perhaps you left them as cliff hangers for a reason):
1. You once said being interesting and responsible are more important values than happiness. Could you elaborate on why you think that? http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/12/gretchen-rubins-the-happiness-project.html
It's more interesting if you get only one of the two queries, even if it makes you less happy.
There's also the value of being interested.
"Happiness" to me sounds boring, as if the person has a limited imagination when it comes to wants and an inability to be frustrated by the difficulty of creating new peak experiences.
"Responsible" is the right thing to do and it usually carries with it some sense of fulfillment.
"Interesting" helps other people expand the horizon of their wants, since you show them some new goodies on the table.
Viewed as a signaling problem, "happiness" fails when it comes to credibly demonstrating the possession of some extreme quality or another. The busier people are, and the higher wages are, the more important it should be to signal extreme qualities to command the attention of interesting others.
What does the word "important" mean anyway? It presupposes the value judgment in question.
Penelope Trunk has interesting posts on this topic:
People with interesting lives do not get offended that they cannot be happy. Happy people are offended that they cannot have interesting lives.
I’m feeling fortunate today
Seventeen days after the San Jose copper and gold mine collapsed, the news that all 33 men trapped inside are still alive was greeted with celebrations more than 2,000ft above them.
But their loved ones will probably have to wait until Christmas to see them again, because it will take that long to bore a new hole wide enough to pull them through.
Glucose, rehydration tablets, oxygen and medicine have made their way down from the surface through an 8cm lifeline and into the miners' refuge, which is thought to be about 50 square metres, although some reports say it could be larger.
More here.
David Brooks on Larry Summers
To use a fancy word, there’s a metacognition deficit. Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate. A few people I interview do this regularly (in fact, Larry Summers is one). But it is rare. The rigors of combat discourage it.
Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.
The full piece is here.
Further sentences to ponder, or my Arnold Kling imitation
I am aware that not everyone is happy with Rasmussen polls, still I think this result is striking, especially the difference in perspectives:
63% of the Political Class think the government has the consent of the governed, but only six percent (6%) of those with Mainstream views agree.
Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters now view the federal government as a special interest group, and 70% believe that the government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.
The link is here, with further information, and I thank Roger Congleton for the pointer.
Pecuniary externalities
Samson, a loyal MR reader, requests:
Tyler,
What do you think about pecuniary externalities? What would be a good definition of such externalities, if you find them to be plausible? Without the fiction of an infinite number of buyers and sellers, why isn't it the case that any transaction through the price system, through an impact on price, causes an externality, and might one call such an externality a pecuniary externality? I cannot find much on this subject.
Thanks!
Economists try to make a distinction between pecuniary externalities — changes in price which merely redistribute wealth — and non-pecuniary externalities, which involve a real good or service being provided or denied at the margin. If the price of wheat rises, wheat consumers suffer a pecuniary externality. If you dump garbage on my lawn, that's a non-pecuniary externality, although it may be accompanied by a pecuniary externality, namely a decline in the value of the house. In the meantime, the lawn stinks.
The distinction is often a tricky one, especially in the absence of perfect markets. A lot of the complaints about health care markets are actually complaints about pecuniary externalities, namely that some people get priced out of the market. Alternatively, the risk of facing high prices for cancer treatment may make people nervous and insecure. The notion of "risk" often bundles together pecuniary and non-pecuniary externalities in a not-too-easy-to-separate form.
Efficiency and distribution are not always possible to separate, no matter what the first and second welfare theorems seem to imply.
What about people near subsistence? Say you redistribute $500 from a poor Haitian to a somewhat less poor Mexican, and the Haitian dies and the Mexican buys a used motorbike. Is that "just a transfer"? Or is it "a real resource loss"? I say it's the latter, but then virtually any redistribution will destroy some complementary value from the portfolio of the individual losing the money. What is then left to count as a pure transfer?
There is also no such thing as a pure lump-sum transfer when population is endogenous, either through child-bearing decisions or through taking risks with one's life.
The distinction between pecuniary and non-pecuniary externalities is useful, and hard to do without, but its foundations are shaky. In practical terms the weakness of the foundations matters most when we are doing health care economics or analyzing food subsidies (or comparable forms of aid) in poor countries. The richer and healthier the people are, the more likely the distinction can be invoked without much trouble.
And Samson is correct to think that large numbers of transactions involve pecuniary externalities, at least whenever the particular actions of a buyer or seller influence market price.
The culture that is Bryan Caplan
A new paper finds that your philosophic beliefs matter for your real world performance, or at least they predict it:
Do philosophic views affect job performance? The authors found that possessing a belief in free will predicted better career attitudes and actual job performance. The effect of free will beliefs on job performance indicators were over and above well-established predictors such as conscientiousness, locus of control, and Protestant work ethic.
The pointer comes from Vaughn Bell on Twitter. One interpretation is that a "belief in free will" corresponds to private information about the likelihood of being successful, and wanting to take credit for that success. A second interpretation is that the belief itself makes you more successful, by encouraging you to take responsibility for your choices.
Who are the interesting collaborators?
Pensans, an MR reader of uncertain loyalty, requests:
How about a really systematic exploration of other contemporary collaborators with totalitarian regimes whose propaganda you would like to tout to unsettle readers? Or, would that disturb the shocking effect of your bold free thought on your readership?
The following names come to mind as "collaborators" worth reading or otherwise imbibing:
Martin Heidegger, Pablo Neruda, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Luc Godard, Susan Sontag, Ezra Pound, Eric Foner, Eric Hobsbawm, and I have lost track of who exactly apologized for Castro but it is many smart people.
H. Bruce Franklin, editor of "The Essential Stalin," was a splendid teacher and he had a notable influence on me.
There's a long list of Western intellectuals and Founding Fathers who apologized for slavery and violent imperialism. Although that does not fit the word "totalitarianism" exactly, it was often a form of totalitarianism — or worse – for those who suffered under it.
Sentences to ponder
Gabriel Josipovici, a research professor at the University of Sussex, is disenchanted with the absence of disenchantment with the world.
*Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea*
The author is C. Bradley Thompson and this new book is in broad terms an Objectivist ("Randian") critique of neoconservatism and Leo Strauss. Here is one summary bit:
Inevitably, the neocons are epistemological relativists (though of an anti-egalitarian nature), which is the source, as we shall see momentarily, of their moral relativism. Because the political good in their world is mutable and always changing, the neoconservatives do not want fixed principles to which they are hbeholden, nor do they strive to be morally or politically consistent. Their power and authority is generated and sustained by the illusion that the world is in a state of constant change and that it is governed by what Machiavelli called fortuna. The truth or falsity of an idea is, according to the neocons, determined by its usefulness in a particular situation and for particular people. What is true today, they argue, may not be true tomorrow if an idea or an action fails to work in new and different situations. In such a world, there can be no certainty, no absolutes, no fixed moral principles.
The author writes — correctly – "hoi polloi," instead of the redundant "the hoi polloi."
Thompson argues that Leo Strauss showed sympathies for the Italian fascism of Mussolini, at least relative to liberalism and religion.
At times the book sounds like Bryan Caplan criticizing me, though I take such ripostes to say more about Bryan than about me.
When I was young, I very much enjoyed reading John Robbins's Calvinist answer to Ayn Rand (revised here), even though I did not agree with much of it. I often learn more when ideas clash in relatively stark forms.
In my view, principles and politics don't always mix but the problem is neither epistemological nor moral. Ill-informed voters, especially in diverse societies, can only swallow so much in the form of principle. If one is committed to intellectual discourse, but within the range of the politically feasible, a lot of intellectual principle is difficult to sustain. I do believe in principles, but I don't see that any point of view has overcome this quite general problem. In that sense I do not blame neoconservatism per se. But am I a neoconservative? No, and Brad's book gives some of the reasons why not.
*Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography*
Gellner's general view of the world of advanced liberal capitalism is by now familiar: it is a relatively open world in which science prospers, bringing both affluence and diminished moral certainty — with Danegeld doing a good deal to secure social cohesion.
This splendid intellectual biography, by John A. Hall, should be read by all those interested in Hayek, Popper, Berlin, Oakeshott, and the foundations of a free society. You can order it here. I spent $33 on the book and it paid back every penny and then some. Here is Henry on the book.
Annualized interest rates of two hundred percent a year?
I read someone, somewhere arguing that Elizabeth Warren was the nominee to shut them down. I am curious about the modern liberal take on autonomy and credit. Let's say that two gay men, of unknown health status, want to have informed, consensual, unprotected sex. Should the law prohibit this? I believe the answer is no. Furthermore it is not just a matter of enforcement difficulty, it is a question of autonomy. If you don't think so, modify the example so that two heterosexual people want to have consensual but unprotected sex. And so on.
The unprotected sex is riskier and less prudent than borrowing money at an annualized rate of two hundred percent. Why prohibit one and not the other? Many of the borrowers are being fooled, but others have legitimate reasons to seek the money, such as wanting to buy a birthday present for a visit to one's child, living with a separated spouse.
Is it that sex is sacred but borrowing money is not? What if you're borrowing money to catch a plane to go have sex? Isn't sex a big reason why people might borrow money at high annualized rates? Aren't "sex decisions" some of the least rational we make and the most prone to error?
When I use the ATM, often I am outside the network and thus I am paying annualized interest rates of over two hundred percent a year. Should someone (other than Natasha) stop me? Should they only stop me when I am younger and poorer than is the current Tyler? What about equality before the law?
How many of you would support this same woman — with enthusiasm — if she wanted to ban risky but consensual sex?