Category: Philosophy
Why a coach should be ambiguous
Remember how Mr. Miyagi taught The Karate Kid how to fight? Wax on/Wax off. Paint the fence. Don’t forget to breathe. A coach is the coach because he knows what the student needs to do to advance. A big problem for coaches is that the most precocious students also (naturally) think they know what they need to learn.
If Mr. Miyagi told Daniel that he needed endless repetition of certain specific hand movements to learn karate, Daniel would have rebelled and demanded to learn more and advance more quickly. Mr. Miyagi used ambiguity to evade conflict.
An artist with natural gift for expression needs to learn convention. But she may disagree with the teacher about how much time should be spent learning convention. If the teacher simply gives her exercises to do without explanation her decision to comply will be on the basis of an overall judgment of whether this teacher, on average, knows best. To instead say “You must learn conventions, here are some exercises for that” runs the risk that the student moderates the exercises in line with her own judgment about the importance of convention.
The cosmopolitan and civil libertarian core of economics
Here is my latest New York Times column, more philosophical than usual, excerpt:
Economic analysis is itself value-free, but in practice it encourages a cosmopolitan interest in natural equality. Many economic models, of course, assume that all individuals are motivated by rational self-interest or some variant thereof; even the so-called behavioral theories tweak only the fringes of a basically common, rational understanding of people. The crucial implication is this: If you treat all individuals as fundamentally the same in your theoretical constructs, it would be odd to insist that the law should suddenly start treating them differently.
At least since the 19th century, the interest of economists in personal liberty can be easily documented. In 1829, all 15 economists who held seats in the British Parliament voted to allow Roman Catholics as members. In 1858, the 13 economists in Parliament voted unanimously to extend full civil rights to Jews. (While both measures were approved, they were controversial among many non-economist members.) For many years leading up to the various abolitions of slavery, economists were generally critics of slavery and advocates of people’s natural equality, as documented by David M. Levy, professor of economics at George Mason University, and Sandra J. Peart, dean of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond, in “The ‘Vanity of the Philosopher’: From Equality to Hierarchy in Post-Classical Economics.”
Professors Levy and Peart coined the phrase “analytical egalitarianism” to describe the underpinnings of this tradition. For example, Adam Smith cited birth and fortune, as opposed to intrinsically different capabilities, as the primary reasons for differences in social rank. And the classical economists Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill promoted equal legal and institutional rights for women long before such views were fashionable. Their utilitarian moral theories placed individuals on a par in the social calculus by asking about the greatest good for the greatest number.
There is more at the link of course, such as:
Often, economists spend their energies squabbling with one another, but arguably the more important contrast is between our broadly liberal economic worldview and the various alternatives — common around the globe — that postulate natural hierarchies of religion, ethnicity, caste and gender, often enforced by law and strict custom. Economists too often forget that we are part of this broader battle of ideas, and that we are winning some enduring victories.
I did not have the space to cover some additional questions of interest. These include:
1. Will the move away from rational choice models, and toward a broader and larger empirical social science, including behavioral and neuro elements, nudge economics away from this heritage?
2. How much of the civil libertarian core, common among many economists, stems from the socioeconomic background of (many) current economists rather than from the economic method?
3. How do Indian economists poll on the caste system, relative to their socioeconomic peers?
4. How much will the extreme influx of non-Westerners into American and British graduate programs in economics affect the discipline in the years to come?
J. Coetzee writes to Paul Auster
From a letter:
Finally, a remark by Christopher Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: that one goes to bed with a woman in order to be able to talk to her. Implication: that turning a woman into a mistress is only a first step; the second step, turning her into a friend, is the one that matters; but being friends with a woman you haven’t slept with is in practice impossible because there is too much unspoken in the air.
That is from Here and Now Letters 2008-2011, by Auster and Coetzee. That excerpt is from the first letter, and I will keep reading.
Questions that are rarely asked
So, my libertarian devotees of evolutionary psychology, you can’t have it both ways. If feminism is wrong to think we can and/or should resist the dispositions that evolution has given us, then why is it wrong for defenders of the classical liberal order to think we can and/or should resist those dispositions when it comes to our evolved instincts toward the morality of socialism? Or put the other way around: if resisting our evolved moral instincts and obeying the rules of just conduct work to generate a civilized, cooperative economic order, why should gender issues be any different?
That is from Steve Horwitz.
Very good sentences
People punish other people when they don’t know what else to do with them.
That is from the excellent Adam Phillips, from the latest issue of the LRB (my favorite periodical these days), gated link here.
What Republicans are thinking on the sequester (one man’s guess)
Ezra on Twitter asks for a Republican version of this Jonathan Chait column, which basically suggests the Republicans don’t know what they are doing with their policies on sequestration. Ezra has himself raised similar questions. I am not a Republican, but I do like a challenge, so here is a brief attempt.
Correctly or not, many Republicans believe some mix of these propositions:
1. Much of government spending is massively wasteful.
2. Deep historical pessimism is justified, as the United States is sliding into a morass of ever greater statism on the economic, government spending, and taxation fronts, if not right now over the next ten to fifteen years. Currently a majority of the public does not agree with the conservative Republicans and that is where the pessimism comes from.
3. All recent Republican strategies to stop this slide have been failing (this is evident to the Republicans, although not always admitted publicly so gladly, for obvious reasons). Furthermore, short-term deal-making and policy trade-offs, even if they represent moderate improvements, will not reverse or even much slow down this slide.
4. There is a long-term dynamic whereby the rich will get taxed more and more in an unstable dynamic, ending in the Frenchification of the American economy or worse.
OK, now let’s go to the sequester. The upfront costs are not viewed as so high, even on the defense side (see #1). Furthermore something must be tried (see #2). Given #1, there is some chance the public might see that government spending can be cut without causing disaster and this gives some chance the public might then support yet further cuts in government spending. Maybe this chance isn’t so high, but all other approaches have been failing (#3). Ideally, a big budget deal might be better on paper, but a line must be drawn in the sand on taxing higher earners (#4), especially given recent tax hikes, so right now a big budget deal is out of the question; this isn’t 1986 any more.
Draw up the Venn diagrams, or do the expected utility calculations, and you are left with sticking to the sequester. Furthermore it allows some Republicans to take a “victory” back to supporters, and that gives a “practical” reason to support the “intellectual” ones. Keep also in mind that a despairing group is a skeptical group, so how would Republican voters really know or trust that they got a good bargain with the Democrats, especially given the Democrats would have to sell it as a good bargain to their voters? Who understands baselines anyway?
Here is a related Justin Green piece.
I’m not seeking to debate the points in this post, but rather consider this anthropology. But if you ask about my views, I largely agree with #1, have mixed feelings about #2 (lately there is evidence of the health care cost curve bending; we will see), agree with the first sentence of #3 (though with a different normative slant), and don’t much agree with #4. In my view the ranks and influence of the rich are growing, some factions of the Democrats will become more like the old anti-tax Republicans, and I don’t see U.S. tax rates on the rich as having a big chance of reaching unsustainable or catastrophic levels. (If anything I worry much more about regulation stultifying the economy.) So I would myself definitely prefer a “grand bargain” to the sequester. The grand bargain would of course raise taxes further, but I don’t see this as a “slippery-slope-beginning-of-the-end.”
That I said, I have an affinity with #1, over fifty percent of the sequester cuts are obviously good ideas, and we could reverse the worst aspects of the sequester rather easily. So while the sequester is far from my first choice, I also don’t think it is the end of the world. I am distressed by the number of blogs posts emphasizing the “seen” costs of the spending cuts rather than the “unseen” benefits. I am distressed by the notion of agencies which might play the “Washington Monument” strategy. And I am distressed by the unwillingness of both sides — and possibly Obama will end up as the greater villain here — to make the cuts more flexible. (It is funny by the way how much Republicans distrust Obama, and yet want to give him that discretion so that he will own the costs of the spending cuts to a greater degree.) Given all that behavior, is a total shock to think that the public — or at the very least the Republican public in the partially gerrymandered House districts — might not want to trust so much of its money with those institutions?
Would Hayek have favored Obamacare?
In this video Nick Gillespie interviews Erik Angner and Erik is (with qualifications) positively inclined. A few points:
1. When Hayek wrote, health care costs were quite low as a percentage of gdp. The same can be said of early Friedman writings (it is startling how little attention Capitalism and Freedom, dating from 1962, pays to “the problems of old people”). It is not clear how views formed in that era should be extrapolated to the current day.
2. Angner-interpreting-Hayek draws a distinction between mandates — which are allowed — and price controls — which are verboten. Yet it is hard to have major government involvement in health care without price controls, or should I write “price controls,” in some manner or another. Third party payments cannot be made at any prices that suppliers might like. Single payer systems have to bargain over price. For that matter mandates have to put some limits on what suppliers can charge for the mandated good, including quality limits. The results may not literally be the same as legally mandated price maximums but a) it is hard for a health care-subsidizing government to avoid interfering with the price mechanism, and b) when viewed in these terms, it is not obvious why interfering with the price mechanism is worse per se than mandates or redistribution. Mandates and redistribution also interfere with the price mechanism, the former as shown by economic theorems about quantity-price duality and the latter once you think of an income as a price or the result of a set of prices.
3. To make it quite speculative, I believe Hayek — if fast-forwarded into the present — might favor a mix of forced savings into health savings accounts, cash transfers to the poor, and direct government provision of basic health care services for the very needy. Whether or not I am right, Hayek is far from laissez-faire on health care. But I doubt Hayek would have come close to supporting ACA. Most of all, I think he would have been horrified by the lack of legal generality and universality in the different categories of treatment, coverage, prices, subsidies, reimbursement rates, and so on. I think he would have seen this as a sign of our legal and philosophic barbarism, noting that I am not trying to put the predominance of blame on Obama here.
“Is wealth a value?”
Ronald Dworkin has passed away at age 81
Here is one brief account. There is more here (an excellent obituary). His works are worthy of close study.
The Browser Book of Quotations
You will find it here (pdf). There are numerous good bits, here is one of them:
To admire an artist for his own sake, although certainly a compliment, can also be a way of suggesting that he has no place in the larger scheme of things
Jed Perl
They chose a quotation from me:
Effective political ideas are those that can still do good in half-baked form
Tyler Cowen
I enjoyed every page, recommended. Here is an iPad link, here is a Kindle link.
The culture that is Britain
Please don’t come to Britain – it rains and the jobs are scarce and low-paid. Ministers are considering launching a negative advertising campaign in Bulgaria and Romania to persuade potential immigrants to stay away from the UK.
The plan, which would focus on the downsides of British life, is one of a range of potential measures to stem immigration to Britain next year when curbs imposed on both country’s citizens living and working in the UK will expire.
Here is more, via Paolo Abarcar. What would you put in such an ad? As for precedents:
In 2007, Eurostar ran adverts in Belgium for its trains to London depicting a tattooed skinhead urinating into a china teacup.
On the other hand:
…the Home Office launched a guide to Britishness for foreigners who would be citizens which opens with the words: “Britain is a fantastic place to live: a modern thriving society”.
Rob Wiblin asks about historical contingency
- What could a very clever person in 1500 (not a monarch) have done if they wanted to make the future better and help people living today?
- Which avoidable/contingent event in history did the greatest harm? (e.g. the burning of the library of Alexandria)
- If you wanted to push history in a positive direction, which contingent event from the past would be best to be a participant in, and what could you have done? (e.g. support Deng Xiaoping inside the Chinese Communist Party in the 70s)
It’s tough to have an impact from 1500, but better monetary policy in the 1930s — across the world — would be one place to start for the second part of the question. Yet I worry that any pre-Manhattan Project intervention could end up upsetting the order in which various countries come to obtain nuclear weapons. What if a non-Hitlerized Germany built them first? How does that turn out relative to the status quo? Does avoiding 9/11 mean we are victimized by a larger and more serious attack later on? Safe bets in this game are hard to find.
Surely Harvard faculty would never say anything like this
SPIEGEL: How do we have to imagine this: You raise Neanderthals in a lab, ask them to solve problems and thereby study how they think?
Church: No, you would certainly have to create a cohort, so they would have some sense of identity. They could maybe even create a new neo-Neanderthal culture and become a political force.
SPIEGEL: Wouldn’t it be ethically problematic to create a Neanderthal just for the sake of scientific curiosity?
Church: Well, curiosity may be part of it, but it’s not the most important driving force. The main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. This is true for culture or evolution, for species and also for whole societies. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. Therefore the recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance.
I find this a pretty outrageous and indefensible set of sentiments, and I am one who would like to see the United States target a higher population of 500 million through increased immigration.
It must be a misquotation. And please note that “Church” is not in fact “The Church” responding, but rather Professor George Church of Harvard University.
Here is more, with numerous hat tips to those in my Twitter feed.
The Army of Economists
In a wide-ranging and interesting conversation Daniel Dennett reflects on hypocrisy and whether it may sometimes be optimal:
Suppose that we face some horrific, terrible enemy, another Hitler or something really, really bad, and here’s two different armies that we could use to defend ourselves. I’ll call them the Gold Army and the Silver Army; same numbers, same training, same weaponry. They’re all armored and armed as well as we can do. The difference is that the Gold Army has been convinced that God is on their side and this is the cause of righteousness, and it’s as simple as that. The Silver Army is entirely composed of economists. They’re all making side insurance bets and calculating the odds of everything.
Which army do you want on the front lines? It’s very hard to say you want the economists, but think of what that means. What you’re saying is we’ll just have to hoodwink all these young people into some false beliefs for their own protection and for ours. It’s extremely hypocritical. It is a message that I recoil from, the idea that we should indoctrinate our soldiers. In the same way that we inoculate them against diseases, we should inoculate them against the economists’—or philosophers’—sort of thinking, since it might lead to them to think: am I so sure this cause is just? Am I really prepared to risk my life to protect? Do I have enough faith in my commanders that they’re doing the right thing? What if I’m clever enough and thoughtful enough to figure out a better battle plan, and I realize that this is futile? Am I still going to throw myself into the trenches? It’s a dilemma that I don’t know what to do about, although I think we should confront it at least.
It would be astounding if there were never a situation in which a lie was effective in producing a good result, i.e. a noble lie. But is a rule of noble lies effective? In a long sequence of calls to war, how many have been just and wise and how many have been driven by vainglorious leaders and foolish pride–so which army do you want? I prefer the silver.
Note also that Dennett mixes narrow self interest and rationality in his description of “economists.” But one can be fully rational without being narrowly self-interested. Dennett, for example, cheats a bit with his puzzle. The premise is some “horrific, terrible enemy” but then later the economists ask “am I so sure this cause is just”, to which the answer should be, given the premise, yes. In which case fighting is a rational response.
Hat tip: Brian Donohue.
I basically agree with Ross Douthat here
The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.
His link is here, and I willingly admit that I am in some ways part of the problem.