Category: Philosophy
“Our principles”
There is another reason why the Republican Party could not contain Trump, a perhaps deeper reason. Michael Oakeshott, an under-read political thinker in the mid-20th century, remarked in his exquisite essay, “Rationalism in Politics,” that one of the more pathological notions of our age is that political life can be understood in terms of “principles” that must be applied to circumstances. Politics-as-engineering, if you will. Republicans themselves succumbed to this notion, and members of the rank and file have noticed. Republicans stood for “the principles of the constitution,” for “the principles of the free market,” etc. The problem with standing for principles is that it allows you to remain unsullied by the political fray, to stand back and wait until yet another presidential election cycle when “our principles” can perhaps be applied. And if we lose, it’s OK, because we still have “our principles.” What Trump has been able to seize upon is growing dissatisfaction with this endless deferral, the sociological arrangement for which looks like comfortable Inside-the-Beltway Republicans defending “principles” and rank-and-file Republicans far from Washington-Babylon watching in horror and disgust.
That is from a very interesting Politico piece by Joshua Mitchell of Georgetown. As for me, let’s just say I am a big fan of what Mitchell calls “book club”!
Voting Paradoxes
Here’s an excellent video on voting paradoxes from the San Francisco Exploratorium and here is my older post on Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.
VotingParadoxes from Paul stepahin on Vimeo.
My Conversation with Steven Pinker
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Steven of course was in top form. We started with irregular verbs, and then moved on to Chomsky, theories of language, the mind and Jon Haidt’s modules, reason, what unifies the thought and work of Steven Pinker, rap music, William Shatner (underrated, “although maybe not his singing”), Sontag on photography, the future of world peace, and the Ed Sullivan show.
Here is one bit:
COWEN: Let me now put on my economist’s hat and ask you about this. As you know, in George Orwell’s 1984, the Party bans all irregular verbs. It’s a kind of excess regulation. But from a social point of view, are there too many or too few irregular verbs in English?
PINKER: [laughs] I like the irregular verbs. I’d like to see more of them.
…One distinction that is vanishing that I think is sad is the three-way distinction in verbs like sink, sank, sunk; stink, stank, stunk; shrink, shrank, shrunk; where the shrank and the stank are giving way to their participle forms shrunkand stunk.
COWEN: No shrank and stank.
PINKER: No shrank and stank. Admittedly it would have been hard to have a movie called Honey, I Shrank the Kids instead of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. In my style manual, The Sense of Style, I recommend hanging on to them. I think they’re nice.
And on Chomsky:
PINKER: It’s a moving target. Also, as you say, it was neither specified in a precise way nor field‑tested against a dataset of language variation, which I think is unfortunate in terms of ordinary scientific practice.
On peace:
COWEN: Let me ask you a general question. Let’s say it were possible by spending $10,000 and devoting a few months of your life to it that any person on earth could blow up a significant part of a major city.
They could buy something, some kind of explosive. It would cost them $10,000. How long would it take before someone actually did this?
…PINKER: I don’t know. My optimism doesn’t consist of prophecy in that sense. That is, my optimism consists of looking at what has happened and noting that, first of all, the pessimistic view is factually incorrect. Namely, people believe that we’re living in unusually violent times and we’re not.
How to project that into the future is a separate set of questions. There are many unknowns that I’m not arrogant enough to know the answer to. It’s something that we could debate. We could explore them. I am not an optimist in the sense of saying, “Well, let’s just extrapolate the curves in the future without asking questions like that.”
Self-recommending, to be sure…
*Walk Through Walls*
That’s the new and very direct and frank memoir by Marina Abramović. It is a narrative of how a very smart and insightful person can choose (almost) never to think like an economist, and how she might evolve from a naive Serbian virgin to one of the world’s most worldly, serene, and profound performers. Here is one part:
My parents’ marriage was like a war — I never saw them hug or kiss or express any affection toward each other. Maybe it was just an old habit from partisan days, but they both slept with loaded pistols on their bedside tables! I remember once, during a rare period when they were speaking to each other, my father came home for lunch and my mother said, “Do you want soup?” And when he said yes, she came up behind him and dumped the hot soup on his head. He screamed, pushed the table away, broke every dish in the room, and walked out.
As for her famed lover, the unreliable Ulay, the cause of her broken heart:
A small crowd was there to watch our meeting [on China’s Great Wall]. I wept as he embraced me. It was the embrace of a comrade, not a lover: the warmth had drained out of him. I would soon learn that he had impregnated his translator: Ding Xiao Song. They would marry in Beijing in December.
This book passed the core test that I wanted it to be much longer than it was. Here is a good Carl Swanson profile of the artist and the book, maybe the best piece I have read this week.
What should I ask Mark Miller?
I’ll be interviewing Mark soon, at a private venue, no public event, but for eventual release in the Conversations with Tyler series. Here is a short bio of Mark. He is credited as being the founder of modern Southwestern cuisine, and he was the driving force behind Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe and Red Sage in Washington, D.C. He has written numerous books on food, including the very best books on chilies. He is a supertaster, and more generally one of the world’s great food minds and a truly curious and generous soul. He also has a background in anthropology, cooked for Chez Panisse in its early days, and is one of the best-traveled people I know. Do you want to know what is/was special about chiles in Syria, or how many varieties of soy sauce you can find in one part of Hokkaido? Mark is the guy to ask.
So what should I ask him?
From The Adam Smith Institute
So it’s official. As of today we are no longer a libertarian think tank. We’re neoliberals. And maybe you are too.
Here is the link. Here Sam Bowman, the Executive Director, explains:
And I think to most people in Britain the word libertarian connotes a sort of unflexible extremeness – a preoccupation with hard-and-fast rules over policies that actually make people’s lives better. It was this misconception that allowed the Prime Minister get away with equating the libertarian right with the socialist left, as if the two were somehow comparable…
So in embracing the term neoliberal, we’re hoping that we’re being a little clearer about what we already believe in and do. We fight for free markets, property rights, globalisation and an open society, all based on real-world evidence. Those are what have given us the rich, peaceful, prosperous world we live in, and with more of them we can help to make things even better. It’s time for us neoliberals to start going on the offensive and fight for the world we have helped to create.
I do not have sufficient background on the situation to parse this, but perhaps it is also one way of signaling that they are anti-Brexit, and the word libertarian would not do that, and might even suggest they favored Brexit as a means for arriving at a more libertarian society (which by the way is not how things are running). A neoliberal one would think favors arrangements for free trade and migration.
Addendum: Here is their home page.
What should I ask Steven Pinker?
That is the next Conversation with Tyler, October 24th, at George Mason in Arlington, you can register here.
What should I ask him? I thank you all in advance.
My Conversation with Ezra Klein
The very beginning is a little slow, but I thought Ezra was one of the very best guests. The topics include the nature and future of media, including virtual reality, the nature of leadership (including Ezra’s own), how running a project shapes your political views, a wee bit on health care, what he thinks are the Obama and Clinton models of the world, Robert Putnam’s research on the costs of diversity, the proper role of shame in society, animal welfare, and of course Ezra’s underrated and overrated, with takes on Bob Dylan, The Matrix, William F. Buckley, Joe Biden, and more. There is no video but here is the podcast and transcript. Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: …Now Putman, let me ask you about Putnam, and how Putnam relates to Donald Trump. As you know, Robert Putnam at Harvard, he has some work showing that when ethnic diversity goes up that there’s less trust, less cooperation, less social capital.
If you think of yourself in the role of an editor, so you have an American society, diversity has gone up, and a lot of people have reacted to this I would say rather badly — and I think you would agree with me they’ve reacted rather badly — but there’s still a way in which the issue could be framed that while diversity is actually a problem, we can’t handle diversity.
Putnam almost says as such, and do you think there’s currently a language in the media where you have readers who are themselves diverse, where it’s possible not to just be blaming the bigots, but to actually present the positive view, “Look, people are imperfect. A society can only handle so much diversity, and we need to learn this.” What’s your take on that?
KLEIN: I strongly agree. We do not have a language for demographic anxiety that is not a language that is about racism. And we need one. I really believe this, and I believe it’s been a problem, particularly this year. It is clear, the evidence is clear. Donald Trump is not about “economic anxiety.”
COWEN: A bit, but not mainly, I agree.
KLEIN: That said, I think that the way it’s presented is a choice between economic anxiety and racism. And one I don’t think that’s quite right, and two I don’t think that’s a productive way of having that conversation.
COWEN: Why don’t we have that language? Where did it go, or did we ever have it?
And:
COWEN: You see this with Medicaid. A lot of people don’t sign up. They don’t have addresses. You can’t even get them, whatever.
KLEIN: They don’t like doctors. They’re afraid of doctors.
COWEN: This is me.
KLEIN: You’re afraid of doctors?
COWEN: “Afraid” isn’t the word.
KLEIN: Averse. [laughs]
COWEN: Maybe dislike. Averse. [laughs] They should be afraid of me, perhaps.
Definitely recommended. The same dialogue, with a different introduction, is included in The Ezra Klein Show podcast.
Today is Tim Harford day
And these days, that means today is a Messy day:
Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives celebrates the benefits that messiness has in our lives: why it’s important, why we resist it, and why we should embrace it instead. Using research from neuroscience, psychology, social science, as well as tales of inspiring people doing extraordinary things, I explain that the human qualities we value – creativity, responsiveness, resilience – are integral to the disorder, confusion, and disarray that produce them.
As I wrote the book, I grappled with the way Martin Luther King’s speechmaking style evolved from careful preparation to impromptu genius. I tried to tease out the connections between the brilliant panzer commander Erwin Rommel, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, and the primary campaign of Donald Trump. I interviewed Stewart Brand about the world’s most creative messy building – and Brian Eno about the way David Bowie would reject perfection in favour of something flawed and interesting every time.
I loved writing this book.
As I’ve already written, it is Tim’s best and deepest book. Here is the book’s home page. You can order the book here, it is out today a messy day it must be.
The hygge culture that is Denmark
Jeppe Trolle Linnet, an anthropologist at the University of Southern Denmark, argues that hygge is not the great social leveller it appears. Danes dislike acknowledging class differences, but his research finds that the habits of hygge vary by income and social status. For some, hygge is a bottle of burgundy with soft jazz on the hi-fi; for others it is a can of beer while watching football on telly. Worse, different groups are uncomfortable with others’ interpretations of hygge. Mr Linnet calls it a “vehicle of social control”, involving “a negative stereotyping of social groups who are perceived as unable to create hygge”.
…A recent report on the quality of life for expatriates in 67 countries, compiled by an organisation called InterNations, bears this out. Denmark’s own natives may rank it top for happiness, but the immigrants in the survey ranked it 60th in terms of friendliness, 64th for being made to feel welcome, and 67th for the ease of finding friends. Finishing just ahead of Denmark on the finding-friends measure was Norway, the country from which the Danes imported the word hygge. If cultures are obsessed with the joys of relaxing with old friends, perhaps it is because they find it stressful to make new ones.
That is from The Economist.
Why do people play chess again?
According to Donner: “The whole point of the game [is] to prevent an artistic performance.” The former world champion Garry Kasparov makes the same point. “The highest art of the chess player,” he says, “lies in not allowing your opponent to show you what he can do.” Always the other player is there trying to wreck your masterpiece. Chess, Donner insists, is a struggle, a fight to the death. “When one of the two players has imposed his will on the other and can at last begin to be freely creative, the game is over. That is the moment when, among masters, the opponent resigns. That is why chess is not art. No, chess cannot be compared with anything. Many things can be compared with chess, but chess is only chess.”
That is Stephen Moss at The Guardian. Along related lines, I very much enjoyed Daniel Gormally’s Insanity, Passion, and Addiction: A Year Inside the Chess World. It’s one of my favorite books of the year so far, but it’s so miserable I can’t recommend it to anyone. It’s a book about chess, and it doesn’t even focus on the great players. It’s about the players who are good enough to make a living — ever so barely — but not do any better. It serves up sentences such as:
Surely the money in chess is so bad that this can’t be all you do for a living? But in fact in my experience, the majority of chess players rated over 2400 tend to just do chess. If not playing, then something related to it, like coaching or DVDs. That’s because we’re lazy, so making the monumental effort of a complete change in career is just too frightening a prospect. So we stick with chess, even though the pay tends to be lousy, because most of our friends and contacts are chess players. Our life is chess. As a rough estimate, I would say there are as many 2600 players making less than £20,000 a year.
And:
Stability. I had this conversation with German number one Arkadij Naidisch at a blitz tournament in Scotland about a year ago. (there I go, name-dropping again.) He suggested that a lot of people don’t achieve their goals because they just aren’t stable enough. They’ll have a fantastic result somewhere, but then that’ll be let down by a terrible tournament somewhere else.
…The problem is it’s hard to break out of the habits of a lifetime. Many times at home I’ve said to myself while sitting around depressed about my future and where my chess is going, “tomorrow will be different. I’ll get up and study six-eight hours studying chess.” But it never happens.
Overall biography and autobiography are far too specialized in the lives of the famous and successful.
Egalitarianism versus Online Education
The Department of Justice has sent a letter to UC Berkeley threatening a lawsuit unless the university modifies all of its free online educational materials to meet conditions of accessibility. In response the Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education writes:
…we have attempted to maximize the accessibility of free, online content that we have made available to the public. Nevertheless, the Department of Justice has recently asserted that the University is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act because, in its view, not all of the free course and lecture content UC Berkeley makes available on certain online platforms is fully accessible to individuals with hearing, visual or manual disabilities.
…We look forward to continued dialog with the Department of Justice regarding the requirements of the ADA and options for compliance. Yet we do so with the realization that, due to our current financial constraints, we might not be able to continue to provide free public content under the conditions laid out by the Department of Justice to the extent we have in the past.
In many cases the requirements proposed by the department would require the university to implement extremely expensive measures to continue to make these resources available to the public for free. We believe that in a time of substantial budget deficits and shrinking state financial support, our first obligation is to use our limited resources to support our enrolled students. Therefore, we must strongly consider the unenviable option of whether to remove content from public access.
In short, the DOJ is saying that unless all have access, none can and UC Berkeley is replying that none will. I sympathize with UC Berkeley’s position. The cost of making materials accessible can be high and the cost is extremely high per disabled student. It would likely be much cheaper to help each disabled student on an individual basis than requiring all the material to be rewritten, re-formatted and reprogrammed (ala one famous example).
An even greater absurdity is that online materials are typically much easier to access than classroom materials even when they do not fully meet accessibility rules. How many teachers, for example, come with captions? (And in multiple languages?) How about volume control? How easy is it for the blind to get to campus? In theory, in-class materials are also subject to the ADA but in practice everyone knows that that is basically unworkable. I guarantee, for example, that professors throughout the UC-system routinely show videos or use powerpoints that do not meet accessibility guidelines. Thus, by raising the costs of online education, the most accessible educational format, the ADA may have the unintended consequence of slowing access. Put simply, raising the costs of online education makes it more difficult for anyone to access educational materials including the disabled.
Addendum: By the way, if you are wondering, all of MRU’s videos for our Principles of Microeconomics and Principles of Macroeconomics courses are captioned in English and most are also professionally captioned in Spanish, Arabic and Chinese.
Why do people hate the media so much?
Haven’t you noticed this?
I have a simple hypothesis. No matter what the media tells you their job is, the feature of media that actually draws viewer interest is how media stories either raise or lower particular individuals in status. (It’s a bit like “politics isn’t about policy.”) That’s even true for this blog, though of course that is never my direct intention.
But now you can see why people get so teed off at the media. The status ranking of individuals implied by a particular media source is never the same as yours, and often not even close. You hold more of a grudge from the status slights than you get a positive and memorable charge from the status agreements.
In essence, (some) media is insulting your own personal status rankings all the time. You might even say the media is insulting you. Indeed that is why other people enjoy those media sources, because they take pleasure in your status, and the status of your allies, being lowered. It’s like they get to throw a media pie in your face.
In return you resent the media.
A good rule of thumb is that if you resent the media “lots,” you are probably making a number of other emotional mistakes in your political thought.
Hail GMU’s visionary, Dan Klein
I will second Bryan Caplan’s post:
Last week, my colleague Dan Klein kicked off the Public Choice Seminar series. During the introduction, I recalled some of his early work. But only after did I realize how visionary he’s been.
In 1999, when internet commerce was still in its infancy, Klein published Reputation: Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good Conduct. Seventeen years later, e-commerce towers before us, resting on a foundation of reputational incentives – everything from old-fashioned repeat business to two-sided smartphone reviews.
In 2003, long before Uber, Airbnb, or serious talk of driverless cars, Klein published The Half-Life of Policy Rationales: How New Technology Affects Old Policy Issues. This remarkable work explores how technological change keeps making old markets failures – and the regulations that arguably address them – obsolete. (Here’s the intro, co-authored with Fred Foldvary). Fourteen years later, the relevance of Klein’s thesis is all around us. Transactions costs no longer preclude peakload pricing for roads, decentralized taxis and home rentals, or full-blown caveat emptor for consumer goods. So why not?
I’m not going to say that Klein caused these amazing 21st-century developments. But he did foresee them more clearly than almost anyone. Hail Dan Klein!
Some of Dan’s work, and later work (much of which is covered at MR), you will find here and here. For instance, his later work on academic bias also was well ahead of its time and prefigured subsequent events, so this is actually a running streak.
Is happiness inequality falling?
It seems so, at least subject to the usual caveats about happiness studies:
In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has fallen in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern growth has reduced the share of both the “very unhappy” and the “perfectly happy”. Lower happiness inequality is found both between and within countries, and between and within individuals. Our cross-country regression results argue that the extension of various public goods helps to explain this greater happiness homogeneity. This new stylised fact arguably comes as a bonus to the Easterlin paradox, offering a somewhat brighter perspective for developing countries.
That is from a new paper by Clark AE1, Flèche S2, Senik C3. via Neuroskeptic. In other words, for the variable that really matters for welfarism, inequality is down not up. Shout it from the rooftops…