Category: Philosophy
John Roemer changes his mind on a bunch of things, including socialism
He has a new published paper, in Analyse & Kritik, entitled “Thoughts on Arrangements of Property Rights in Productive Assets,” here is the abstract:
State ownership, worker ownership, and household ownership are the three main forms in which productive assets (firms) can be held. I argue that worker ownership is not wise in economies with high capital-labor rations, for it forces the worker to concentrate all her assets in one firm. I review the coupon economy that I proposed in 1994, and express reservations that it could work: greedy people would be able to circumvent its purpose of preventing the concentration of corporate wealth. Although extremely high corporate salaries are the norm today, I argue these are competitive and market determined, a consequence of the gargantuan size of firms. It would, however, be possible to tax such salaries at high rates, because the labor-supply response would be small. The social-democratic model remains the best one, to date, for producing a relatively egalitarian outcome, and it relies on solidarity, redistribution, and private ownership of firms. Whether such a solidaristic social ethos can develop without a conflagration, such as the second world war, which not only united populations in the war effort, but also wiped out substantial middle-class wealth in Europe — thus engendering the post-war movement toward social insurance — is an open question.
There are some probably gated versions here. He also explains later in the paper that socialism cannot work because a generally solidaristic social ethos will be undermined by a selfish minority, driven by greed, which will turn social institutions to their favor and evolve into a new ruling class. In other words, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is not yet obsolete and still holds the power to sway men’s minds.
For the pointer I thank Kevin Vallier.
One salvo in the fight against driverless cars
The group that stalked Anthony Levandowski, an engineer at Google X, the company’s clandestine research laboratory, calls itself the Counterforce, after a Thomas Pynchon novel. About a dozen members, all dressed in black, gathered outside the Berkeley house where Mr. Levandowski lives with his partner and two young children.
They unfurled a banner and handed out fliers detailing the engineer’s work on Google’s driverless car technology, Street View and Google Maps. The flier read: “Anthony Levandowski is building an unconscionable world of surveillance, control and automation. He is also your neighbor.”
This is still just a small and fragmented movement, as the article makes clear. I predict it will vanish, but I wouldn’t have predicted its existence in the first place.
Thoughts about children
“All Joy and No Fun” inspired me to think differently about my own experience as a parent. Over and over again, I find myself bored by what I’m doing with my children: How many times can we read “Angelina Ballerina,” or watch a “Bob the Builder” video? And yet I remind myself that such intimate shared moments, snuggling close, provide the ultimate meaning of life. I have never quite sorted out the conundrum of how I could be distracted into thinking about something as tiresome as email when I was with my beloved kids. If I lost all my emails, I’d manage, and if I lost my children, I’d never recover; yet still I sometimes find it hard to stay in the moment with them. Senior demonstrates that there is no contradiction in this seeming paradox; she understands that tolerating our children is the cornerstone of loving them.
That is from Andrew Solomon.
Please explain this new white rock to me, #Mars, #SmallSteps
The link is here, and for the pointer I thank Gordon. At least it’s not a watch.
Markets in everything
For only 23,500 euros (who says you can’t take it with you?):
Sweden’s Catacombo Sound System is a funeral casket that eternally plays the deceased’s choice of tracks while they’re six feet under.
Created by Pause Ljud & Bild, the system consists of three different parts. Firstly, users create an account through the online CataPlay platform, which connects to Spotify and enables customers to curate a playlist for their own coffin or get friends and family to choose the tracks when they’re gone. The CataTomb is a 4G-enabled gravestone that receives the music from CataPlay and display the current track — along with details and tributes to the deceased — through a 7-inch LCD Display. Finally, the CataCoffin is where the parted will themselves enjoy two-way front speakers, 4-inch midbass drivers and an 8-inch sub-bass element that deliver dimensional high-fidelity audio tailored to the acoustics of the casket. The video below explains more about the concept…
Of course I want Brahms’s German Requiem, the Rudolf Kempe recording. I am afraid, however, that I (in some form) will last longer than Spotify does.
For the pointer I thank Michael Rosenwald.
*Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War*
That is the new Robert M. Gates book, which of course has been widely reviewed. I was very impressed with this work. I read it as a meditation on the question of what kinds of martial virtue (or lack thereof) are possible in our contemporary age, updating Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plutarch through the medium of the reigns and rules of the two Bushes, Cheney, Rice, Obama (most of all), Hillary, Biden, and of course Gates himself with a bit of Petraeus tossed in.
Here is one excerpt:
I was put off by the way the president closed the meeting. To his very closest advisers, he said, “For the record, and for those of you writing your memoirs, I am not making any decisions about Israel or Iran, Joe [Biden], you be my witness.” I was offended by his suspicion that any of us would ever write about such sensitive matters.
And this:
As is usual when the president makes a momentous decision, the White House wanted key cabinet members blanketing the Sunday talk shows…As I was flying back to Washington on March 25, the White House communications gurus proposed I go on all three network shows the next Sunday to defend the president’s decision on Libya. Exhausted by the trip, I agreed to do two of the three. then I took a call from Bill Daley, who pushed me hard to do the third show. I told Daley I’d make him a deal — I would do the third show if he’s agree to get funding for the Libya operation included in the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) appropriation (the war supplemental). I said, “I’ll do Jake Tapper if you’ll do OMB.” Daley whined, “I thought it would cost me a bottle of vodka.” I shot back, “Bullshit. It’s going to cost you $1 billion.” Daley had the last laugh. The president and OMB director Jack Lew refused to approve moving the Libya funding into the OCO. The Defense Department had to eat the entire cost of the Libya operation.
And finally, this:
As I had told President Bush and Condi Rice early in 2007, the challenge of the early twenty-first century is that crises don’t come and go — they seem to come and stay.
The book has come under a good deal of criticism for its revelations about a sitting president and commander-in-chief and for its communication of inside discussions, which presumably at the time were considered to be confidential. I am not sufficiently informed about the appropriate norms to make a final judgment here, but I can readily imagine that Gates is in this regard quite in the wrong. Good books are not always based on good behavior. Furthermore, the overall portrait of Obama is, in my view, quite a favorable one and indeed I would say a profound one (the same cannot be said for Biden or for Congress).
Will Wilkinson, we miss ye
Here is part of Will’s new post:
…the fact is, mundane liberalism is flatly incompatible with the security state, as we know it. That anyone spurred to action against the illiberal security state by the democratic jusificatory ethos of mundane liberalism has come to seem a little “libertarian,” and may even therefore confess some personal “libertarian” sympathies, suggests to me a problem with “liberalism” as it is embodied in actual political discourse and practice. It suggests that liberalism is effectively a corrupt form of statist institutional conservatism, and that the democratic justificatory ethos of mundane liberalism has somehow survived within the ethos of “libertarianism,” even if, as an explicit doctrinal matter, libertarians are generally hostile to the ideas of democracy and the legitimate liberal state. It’s nice that libertarians have kept liberalism alive, but it would be even nicer if it were possible for liberals to espouse liberalism without therefore being confused for libertarians.
We all hope for more.
F.A. Hayek, *The Market and Other Orders*
That is the new University of Chicago Press volume of Hayek’s collected works, this time volume 15. It is the best single-volume introduction to Hayek’s thought, if you are going to buy or read only one. It has the best of the early essays, as you might find in Individualism and Economic Order, and then the best later essays which build upon those earlier insights.
Here is Bruce Caldwell’s introduction to the volume, for e-purchase. The book’s table of contents is here. Here is our MRU course on Friedrich Hayek.
The “devalue and dismiss” fallacy, methodological pluralism, and DSGE models
One of the most common fallacies in the economics blogosphere — and elsewhere — is what I call “devalue and dismiss.” That is, a writer will come up with some critique of another argument, let us call that argument X, and then dismiss that argument altogether. Afterwards, the thought processes of the dismisser run unencumbered by any consideration of X, which after all is what dismissal means. Sometimes “X” will be a person or a source rather than an argument, of course.
The “devalue” part of this chain may well be justified. But it should lead to “devalue and downgrade,” rather than “devalue and dismiss.”
“Devalue and dismiss” is much easier of course, because there then will be fewer constraints on what one can believe and with what level of certainty. “Devalue and downgrade” keeps a lot of balls in the air and that can be tiresome and also unsatisfying, especially for those of us trained to look for neat, intuitive explanations.
Enter DSGE models. There are plenty of good arguments against them. Still, they provide a useful discipline and they pinpoint rather ruthlessly what it is they we still do not understand. We can and should devalue them in a variety of ways, and for a variety of reasons, but still we should not dismiss them. Better yet than “devalue and downgrade” might be “devalue, downgrade, and…yet…de-dogmatize,” because these models usually point out the limits of our understanding. Those models defeat us, and thus it is odd when we attempt to portray the situation as us defeating them.
Note that very smart people are often good at “devalue and dismiss” because they can come up with a lot of good reasons to devalue the arguments or frameworks of others. But still they should not leap so quickly to the “dismiss.”
I would mention that Alex, while he did criticize DSGE models yesterday, also appreciates their uses.
Addendum: Here is Chris House, defending DSGE models.
*F.A. Hayek and the Modern Economy*
That is a new volume edited by Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy.
More than just the usual blah blah blah about Hayek, this book is full of original material. The book’s home page, with table of contents, is here.
And here is our recent MRUniversity class on Friedrich A. Hayek, and his Individualism and Economic Order.
I find this moderately sad (do not share)
One study of 7,000 New York Times articles by two professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that sad stories were the least shared because sadness is a low-arousal, negative state. People were more likely to share positive stories because it was a way to show generosity and boost their reputations. Sharing pleasant things in public made them appear nice themselves.
That is from a gated piece by John Gapper. To paraphrase Robin Hanson, “sharing isn’t about sharing.”
Where are people respected the most?
Following up on Noah Smith’s earlier blog post, we discussed this question at lunch. Noah cites Japan as a country where there is a high degree of respect granted, and a relatively high equality of respect, and very likely that is true for artisans, manufacturing workers, foreign dignitaries, and foxes. But is it true more generally if we take into the position of women, who are often locked out of good jobs? How about the position of the young “lost generation,” namely all those guys with virtual girlfriends, who have given up on real sex and won’t leave their apartments? How about various minorities in Japanese society, such as the ethnic Koreans? Does Japan lose out on the forms of respect that come from large, extended families, as you might find say in Sicily?
Those judgments have some subjective elements, but I do think they bring Japan down a few notches when it comes to respect and equality of respect.
Oddly I think of the United States as a country with a fair degree of both respect and equality of respect. The diversity of niches and the diverse geography create many pathways for being thought highly of, or for thinking highly of oneself, and there are many insulations from the overweening standards of elites. And we have plenty of indifference, which is a kind of equality of respect, albeit not to be confused with respect per se.
Arguably the most powerful and influential men find plenty of respect in just about any society. A lot of the cross-national variation in respect might come on the female side of the ledger. That would likely favor the Nordic countries and Iceland in a ranking of respect.
Cowen’s Third Law says there is a literature on everything, but the most obvious Google searches did not yield concrete results. (There is however Richard Sennett’s Respect in a World of Inequality.) Can any MR readers speak to the empirical knowledge on this question? We all know the literature on happiness across nations, but here we are interested specifically in respect, where people are respected the most, and where equality of respect is most robust.
How would one go about measuring respect?
Addendum: Justin Wolfers suggest this link, and some Gallup World Poll data, showing respect is positively correlated with wealth:
Request from MR commentator “Is disaggregate the word I want?”
A short while ago, he asked this:
taking requests? I doubt if, but here goes anyway – charisma half-life of Taylor Swift, Jorge Bergoglio, and James Levine as seen fifty years from now; when will the unquestionably converging IQs of point guards, quarterbacks, and chess champions meet up; what would life be like for a tenured economics professor who decides to spend a year studying midAtlantic Lepidoptera in the wild and learning Norwegian; Peter Hitchens versus Christopher Hitchens – who was or is less deceptive and deceived, assuming an ability to consider them as intellectual equals; how old was TC when he read “all of Harold Bloom’s canon” leaving out some of the Icelandic sagas. Not that any of these topics will be taken up, but if TC or Alex takes one of them seriously how about the Hitchens one, which has the whole Pascalian eternal potential return thing going for it.
Happy New Year’s Eve! And yes, I think disaggregate is indeed the word you want.
Note that Alex’s answers may differ from these.
Any more reader requests?
Lucian Freud on gambling
Gambling is only exciting if you don’t have any money.
That is from the excellent Breakfast with Lucian: The Astounding Life and Outrageous Times of Britain’s Great Modern Painter, by Geordie Greig.
Upon which day of the week should Christmas fall?
I say the goal is to minimize non-convexities, which in this context means avoiding the possibility of no mail or UPS deliveries for two days running. That makes Saturday and Monday especially bad days to have Christmas.
When Christmas is on Wednesday, as it was this year, on that Wednesday you still can be reading the books which arrived on Tuesday and then a new lot comes on Thursday. The public libraries also close for only one day, not two or three in a row.
Christmas on Wednesday also means that the roads are deserted for all the other weekdays, since many people end up leaving town for the entire week. Then you can visit all those ethnic restaurants you wanted to get to in Gaithersburg or Mount Vernon without hassle.
And if you are taking a vacation abroad, and trying to use a limited number of vacation days, you certainly don’t want Christmas to fall on either a Saturday or a Sunday, which in essence wastes a granted day off.
You know what is also good about Christmas on Wednesday? It means New Year’s Day will be on Wednesday too, double your pleasure double your fun.