Category: Philosophy
Why economic mobility measures are overrated
By mobility I mean whether people are crossing into different income quintiles or deciles than the ones they were born into, or the ones they enjoyed at an earlier period of life.
1. If the general standard of living is rising (and I am more than willing to admit problems in this area for the United States), mobility takes care of itself over time. I find it more useful to focus on slow growth, if indeed that is the case. Just look at income growth for non-wealthy families and that is more useful than all the mobility measures put together.
2. Measured mobility in the United States does not seem to be falling, or at least not falling much, as shown by Scott Winship.
3. For a given level of income, if some are moving up others are moving down. Do you take theories of wage rigidity seriously? If so, you might favor less relative mobility, other things remaining equal. More upward — and thus downward — relative mobility probably means less aggregate happiness, due to habit formation and frame of reference effects.
4. Why do many European nations have higher mobility? Putting ethnic and demographic issues aside, here is one mechanism. Lots of smart Europeans decide to be not so ambitious, to enjoy their public goods, to work for the government, to avoid high marginal tax rates, to travel a lot, and so on. That approach makes more sense in a lot of Europe than here. Some of the children of those families have comparable smarts but higher ambition and so they rise quite a bit in income relative to their peers. (The opposite may occur as well, with the children choosing more leisure.) That is a less likely scenario for the United States, where smart people realize this is a country geared toward higher earners and so fewer smart parents play the “tend the garden” strategy. Maybe the U.S. doesn’t have a “first best” set-up in this regard, but the comparison between U.S. and Europe is less sinister than it seems at first. “High intergenerational mobility” is sometimes a synonym for “lots of parental underachievers.”
5. How much of immobility is due to “inherited talent plus diminishing role for random circumstance”? Is not this cause of immobility very different — both practically and morally — from such factors as discrimination, bad schools, occupational licensing, etc.? What are you supposed to get when you combine genetics with meritocracy? I do not know how much of current American (or other) immobility is due to this factor, but I find it discomforting that complaints about mobility are so infrequently accompanied by an analysis of this topic.
6. I am more than willing to hear arguments than a less mobile society is a less stable society, or otherwise a society which makes worse political decisions. But I haven’t seen serious arguments here. By “serious arguments” I mean those which take endogeneity into account and go beyond noting that Denmark is a better polity than Brazil, and so on.
7. I would like all measurements in this area to take into account the pre-migration incomes of incoming entrants. Denmark, which doesn’t let many people in, is a much less upwardly mobile society once you take this into account. Sweden deserves more praise, and in general this factor will make the Anglo countries look much, much more supportive of mobility.
Addendum: Here is more from Scott Winship.
Do economists understand the concept of opportunity cost?
Remember those old debates on MR as to what opportunity cost is exactly supposed to mean? Joel Potter and Shane Sanders have an interesting follow-up paper:
Abstract: Ferraro and Taylor (2005) asked 199 professional economists a multiple-choice question about opportunity cost. Given that only 21.6 percent answered “correctly,” they conclude that professional understanding of the concept is “dismal.” We challenge this critique of the profession. Specifically, we allow for alternative opportunity cost accounting methodologies—one of which is derived from the term’s definition as found in Ferraro and Taylor— and rely on the conventional relationship between willingness to pay and substitute goods to demonstrate that every answer to the multiple-choice question is defensible. The Ferraro and Taylor survey question suggests difficulties in framing an opportunity cost accounting question, as well as a lack of coordination in opportunity cost accounting methodology. In scope and logic, we conclude that the survey question does not, however, succeed in measuring professional understanding of opportunity cost. A discussion follows as to the concept’s appropriate role in the classroom.
Fred Smalkin has two questions
This is great. I have two requests (for Tyler or anyone who may have some answers):
1. Could you address the idea of preference preferences? It strikes me that psychoactive drugs alter one’s utility function. Can that be modeled, or does that put you in non-linear-dynamical-system territory that doesn’t admit functions as we know them?
2. Am I being overly simplistic in this stripped-down political model? It seems to me that ideal welfare would measure your lifetime productivity at birth and then compensate you to the extent that it falls below $X. Obviously this comes at some cost, but it seems to me that a consequence of Arrow’s impossibility theorem is that there’s no political solution to choosing X (and how the cost of X would be distributed).
Thanks to Tyler and all who can shed some light!
When it comes to meta-preferences, it is usually acceptable to assume convergence through a fixed point theorem. So whether I have a preference for a preference for a preference, etc. comes to a coherent finish and we can speak meaningfully of meta-preferences. That said, I don’t see why we should always favor the meta-preference over the (“baser”) preference. “Wanting to listen to Top 40” is not obviously a worse preference than “wishing I enjoyed opera more.”
The second question refers to a longstanding debate in optimum taxation theory. There are a few reasons why we don’t grant transfers contingent on ability alone. First, we may find the outcomes of privately accepted gambles unacceptable and wish to grant aid to the losers. Second, there is sometimes a higher social rate of return from investing more money in the skilled. A final question is why we make so many transfers near or at the end of life and so few, relatively speaking, at the beginning of life. Obviously the elderly vote at a high rate but I don’t think it is just that. There is a more general intuition that the elderly deserve the aid and the young do not to an equal extent. That intuition is a big obstacle to fiscal balance.
*Rethinking the Good*, by Larry Temkin
The subtitle is Moral Ideals and the Nature of Practical Reasoning. Without hesitation I paid full price for this book, in this case $74 though since then the price is falling. While not an easy read, it is the most important work in choice theory and social choice in some time.
Why does the transitivity debate matter? If you believe in transitivity, you will see lots of piecemeal improvements as adding up to something desirable. If you do not believe in transitivity, useful normative inquiries have to be much more global. You will put less weight on the Pareto principle, and less weight on partial equilibrium cost-benefit analyses. You will focus on what constitutes a good society, and you will trust some very gross macro comparisons (“America is better than Albania”) more than micro comparisons (“the best system of taxation is X”).
If you are skeptical of transitivity as a postulate, you probably are less inclined to see individuals with intransitive preferences as irrational. This may affect your views on paternalism and time inconsistency.
Many economists of course view the rejection of transitivity as simply unthinkable. Perhaps without transitivity we cannot even speak of the notion of a coherent preference. Temkin is skeptical of transitivity. There are a few versions of anti-transitivity arguments:
1. A version of Arrow’s theorem will apply to plausible versions of pluralistic moral reasoning, just as it applies to decathlon scoring. Temkin does not pursue this route, though he notes in the introduction it may be possible. It is the route I would have preferred, as it makes the investigation more economical.
2. The Sorites paradox, or how many stones make a pile. Temkin insists his argument does not boil down to the Sorites paradox, though one may add this to the pile of arguments against transitivity.
3. The “roughness” relation: maybe Mozart is roughly as good as Beethoven, but this need not be transitive. Possibly Haydn is roughly as good as Mozart, but it does not follow that Haydn is necessarily “roughly as good” as Beethoven. Often judgments about the good are rough by their nature.
4. Various pairwise comparisons lead the transitivity advocate to unacceptable conclusions. For instance you can start with the view that adding a pain to the world is a bad, and (with intermediate steps), end up having to believe that adding a very very slight pain for a trillion lives is worse than brutally torturing ten people. Or perhaps you are familiar with Derek Parfit’s Mere Addition Principle. If you endorse some pairwise comparisons which increase both utility and equality, you can again be led to apparently unpalatable conclusions by some multi-stage comparisons (pdf, it would take a long time to explain here). Temkin stresses this kind of argument and works through the possible responses in great detail.
The main contribution of this book is to show you that the transitivity postulate is far less intuitively appealing than it seems at first. Twenty-two years ago I disagreed with Temkin but now I accept much of his critique. Here is one very good Temkin piece from JSTOR.
These days, I see the good is more holistic than additive-aggregative. This defuses Temkin’s arguments, though at a high cost. (You will find Temkin’s criticisms of holism and related ideas at around p.355, though I find them unusually lacking in force. One of his worries boils down to how a multiplicative view will handle negative numbers but I see the scale as sufficiently arbitrary that they need not pop up to begin with.) We can make some gross comparisons of better and worse at the macro level, with partial rankings at best, but for many individualized normative comparisons there simply isn’t a right answer. I view “ranking” as a luxury, occasionally available, rather than an axiomatic postulate which can be used to generate normative comparisons, and thus normative paradoxes, at will. I see that response as different than allowing or embracing intransitivity across multiple alternatives and in that regard my final position differs from Temkin’s. Furthermore, in a holistic approach, the “pure micro welfare numbers’ used to generate the paradoxical comparisons aren’t necessarily there in the first place but rather they have to be derived from our intuitions about the whole.
These thoughts provide one reason — though by no means the only reason — why I think so many policy comparisons are not very clear cut, not even in principle, not even if we had better empirics.
My main objection to this book is how it was written. It is too long and too branching, much like Parfit’s recent volumes. Temkin notes that Shelley Kagan, a very smart guy, gave him 117 pages of single-spaced comments on a prior manuscript draft. Temkin took that as an invitation to lengthen the presentation rather than shorten it.
Addendum: If you are interested in these issues, you also should read Leo Katz’s new and fascinating book, more applied than Temkin’s, also rejecting transitivity as a universal principle of reasoning but focused on explaining the content of the law and its apparent paradoxes.
Further response from Krugman
You can read it here, and keep in mind that not leaving a comment is very often a good option!
Krugman’s response to Alex
You’ll read it here, see also various (mostly weak) responses in the comments to Alex’s original post. Most of you, including Krugman, are missing Alex’s point. The issue is not that Krugman changed his mind (I’ve done that plenty, Alex too). The issue is that Krugman a) regularly demonizes his opponents, including those who hold Krugman’s old positions, and b) doesn’t work very hard to produce the strongest possible case against his arguments.
Krugman’s response shows that he has changed his mind on debt, and explained why, but Heritage has not. It’s an “I am better than they are” response. That is beside the point, which is about elevating the views of others not oneself. The need to show all the time that one is better or more right than the others is itself harmful to depth, and responding with “but I really am better than them” is just falling into the trap again.
Krugman calls himself a Humean but has he studied and internalized the lessons from Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion? Is it easy to imagine the current Krugman writing rich multi-voiced dialogues which extend both his points and those of his intellectual opponents? Can you imagine the current Krugman writing something sufficiently multi-faceted that you might come away thinking — because of the piece itself — that the opposing point of view was the better one?
Krugman has shown a remarkable and impressive capacity to reinvent himself, more than once. He could reinvent himself again — in a truly Humean direction — and become the most important American public intellectual — and perhaps intellectual — of his time. Or he could keep his current status as a sharp and brilliant someone who has an enormous number of followers but relatively little influence over actual events, and perhaps, like most of us, won’t be read much fifty years from now.
The reality is that neither the early nor the more recent Krugman is especially convincing on debt, and if anything the conjunction between the two shows that switching sides isn’t quite the same thing as changing your mind. The odds are that government spending cuts are not literally budget balance destroyers on net. How about writing a NYRB essay that lays out the short-run negative output gradient to austerity, presents why austerity is considered a serious option nonetheless, discusses catch-up and bounce back effects and their relevant time horizons, analyzes what kinds of policies are actually possible in a 17 (27) nation collective, engages with the best public choice arguments (including Buchanan and Wagner) on a serious level, ponders the merits and demerits of worst case thinking, and ruminates on the nature of leadership in a way which shows some tussling with Thucydides and Churchill? Surely that is within Krugman’s capabilities and if it still comes out Keynesian or left-wing, great, at least someone will have seen those arguments through. Such an essay would stand a far greater chance of influencing me, or other serious readers, or for that matter President Obama. We should hold Krugman to the very high standard of actually expecting that he produce such work. Not many others are capable of it.
There is a kind of hallelujah chorus for Krugman on some of the left-wing economics blogs. The funny thing is, it’s hurting Krugman most of all.
Addendum: Here is a response from Krugman; note he has turned my description of “regularly demonize” to “always demonize.”
They have transcribed my TEDx talk on stories
The link and pointer come from Ben Casnocha, here is one excerpt (emphasis is from Ben):
…as a general rule, we’re too inclined to tell the good vs. evil story. As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine every time you’re telling a good vs. evil story, you’re basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more. If you just adopt that as a kind of inner mental habit, it’s, in my view, one way to get a lot smarter pretty quickly. You don’t have to read any books. Just imagine yourself pressing a button every time you tell the good vs. evil story, and by pressing that button you’re lowering your IQ by ten points or more.
One interesting thing about cognitive biases – they’re the subject of so many books these days. There’s the Nudge book, the Sway book, the Blink book, like the one-title book, all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and that is, we tell ourselves too many stories, or we are too easily seduced by stories. And why don’t these books tell us that? It’s because the books themselves are all about stories. The more of these books you read, you’re learning about some of your biases, but you’re making some of your other biases essentially worse. So the books themselves are part of your cognitive bias. Often, people buy them as a kind of talisman, like “I bought this book. I won’t be Predictably Irrational.” It’s like people want to hear the worst, so psychologically, they can prepare for it or defend against it. It’s why there’s such a market for pessimism. But to think that buying the book gets you somewhere, that’s maybe the bigger fallacy. It’s just like the evidence that shows the most dangerous people are those that have been taught some financial literacy. They’re the ones who go out and make the worst mistakes. It’s the people that realize, “I don’t know anything at all,” that end up doing pretty well.
The talk itself is here on video.
Modigliani-Miller markets in everything the culture that is China
They only look like baby pandas.
These little bundles of joy are actually chow chow dogs that have been dyed black-and-white to look like pandas.
Dyeing pets has been a trend in pet pampering for quite some time. At last summer’s Pets Show Taipei, there was a fierce dog-dyeing competition. Check out photos.
But dyeing your pets to look like other wild animals is a more recent development.
The full story is here and for the pointer I thank this guy. Don’t miss the other photos at the link, for instance:
And:
Claims about Germany and Europe which I disagree with
I’ll put a few of these under the fold…Karl Smith writes:
…the worse case endgame for a Euro failure is collapse of the global capitalist system, the political collapse of the West and the end of the Enlightenment. That’s fairly bad as things go and it could indeed happen.
I can imagine parts of eastern Europe or the Balkans going Fascist, but not Western Europe. The consequences of a euro collapse would be dire, but not nearly that dire. A few nice countries have nuclear weapons and battles over territory are no longer going to happen in that part of Europe. A cynic would add that fascism was also a part of the Enlightenment.
Ezra Klein writes:
…it [the morality play] only works if you think of the European debt crisis as a crisis of Greece, where the governance really was terrible, the economic institutions weak and the labor market coddled. It doesn’t work for Ireland. Or for Spain, which was running a budget surplus as recently as 2005. And is anyone in this conversation really pretending to have deep knowledge of the character of Portugal?
Germans will perceive a moral issue in guaranteeing the solvency of these countries, whether or not they think those countries have “done anything wrong.” My moral view is not exactly theirs (if I may generalize about various German views), but I hardly think such a German response is beyond the pale. You can believe “we are not obliged to bail out a country that won’t pay us back, and with whom we wrote a no bail-out agreement,” without believing “they are morally culpable.”
Matt Yglesias tweets:
If there’s a “reasonable probability” euro crisis will “crush the german economy” that’s a sufficient case for action
Not necessarily, not if the action raises risk and raises the badness of a bad outcome, which indeed it does. Have any of us actually done the decision analysis here? I don’t see it. Note also that Matt has been critical of Merkel in the past; now he is asking her to undertake a course of action which a bad politician would be incapable of seeing through. We will need maestros, and maestras, to get this one right.
Ryan Avent writes:
Sometimes a bank run is just a bank run, and a moralising approach that fails to stop it does nothing but harm millions of innocent bystanders. The desire to stick with the moralising approach may nonetheless prove attractive in Germany and elsewhere.
I think solvency problems are very much on the line here, and a perpetual guarantee of the debts of other economies is not a trivial no-brainer, morally or otherwise. It is doing much more than stopping a bank run, and once the guarantees are issued, through what credible mechanism can the plug ever be pulled on a country such as Italy, given the economic carnage which would result?
Reflecting on these responses in toto, I view these writers are wanting to make it a moral issue: “why can’t the mighty Germany simply solve this problem? What is wrong with them and their moral views?” I view these writers as reacting to my original post — written in multiple voices and with parentheses in the title I should stress — with a bit of mood affiliation. I view myself as trying to explain why moralizing perspectives miss the real difficulties in crafting a solution.
“The moral superiority of the Germans”
Ryan Avent tweeted:
Dear
@tylercowen, Germany and the periphery ARE morally equivalent.
How might a response go? Not an argument that German citizens are morally superior to other Europeans; that would be false and indeed repugnant. I mean the kind of “system-wide” moral judgments that progressives offer up when they judge the institutions of Denmark to be superior to the institutions of Mexico, of course without ever judging the residing individuals per se. Let’s play at intellectual Turing test — with no commitment to endorsing these views — and draw up a short list of, dare I so label them, (ostensible) German moral superiorities:
1. When it comes to default, there is no moral equivalence of debtor and creditor. The debtor is the one breaking the agreement and breaking his word.
2. When it comes to debt, the periphery countries simply don’t want to pay up. Their national wealth is many times their gdp and thus much much greater than their debts, even for Greece. It’s amazing how many people won’t come out and utter or recognize this simple truth. Italy for instance doesn’t have to make a huge fiscal adjustment.
3. It is a privilege for a poorer country to be in an economic union with Germany, France, the Netherlands, and other wealthy EU countries, just as you might feel privileged to co-author a piece with a great scholar. If the poorer countries have to engage in some economic sacrifice to stay on good terms in such a union, so be it. There is also such a thing as catch-up growth, and it is robust in the broader world today, at least if a country is willing, like the East Asian countries have been, or for that matter Turkey and Brazil these days. The sacrifices being asked from the periphery countries are quite small in comparison.
4. We did a deal with East Germany, and the terms of that deal violated a lot of precepts of economic theory. It even included an overvalued currency for the poorer region and a long period of adjustment. Yet we insisted up front that all dealings be done on the terms of the more successful region and culture, with very little compromise. This transition, for all of its short-term flaws, will go down in the history books as a great long-run success. In part it succeeded because it was all done on the terms of the values of the successful nations of northwestern Europe. (I am surprised that this angle is not discussed more in the press, given Merkel’s own story.)
5. Economic unions do not succeed by lowering all members to the standards of the economically less successful and less responsible members.
6. If it wasn’t for us, would Greece, Spain, and Italy (plus Ireland and Belgium) all currently have technocratic, reform-oriented governments as they do?
7. If you are trying to estimate the future economic fate of a country, shouldn’t you put aside a bit gdp drops and the like, and instead look at what do people in that country esteem and which values are transmitted by their system of education? Do read the Estonia story at the previous link.
8. The German emphasis on rules, and the attachment to the idea of an abstract order, worthy of loyalty in its own right, above and beyond any immediate personal connection or loyalty, is exactly what makes them able to run such a successful economy and successful social welfare state. When it says “Don’t Walk,” they don’t cross the street, even if no cars are coming. An economic union should be set up to support those principles, not tear them down, and social democrats should value this most of all.
Even if you disagree with these perspectives, they shape real world behavior. And might you still bet on a country which stuck to them? Be honest now. Let’s go back into intellectual Turing test mode:
9. One clear warning sign of trouble is when you see “trade imbalances” put at the center of the argument, as if “being very productive” and “not being productive enough” were somehow the same kind of disease.
10. There is a view something like “Germany has benefited from the eurozone, and therefore it is obliged to…”, as if those arguments were stronger than the nine principles outlined above. By the way, might left-wing American intellectuals occasionally engage in a bit of transference and view Germany as a stand-in for the American top earners, the American financial system, and so on? It isn’t.
11. Another doozy is to think the problem is due to some weird German obsession with Weimar-era inflation, as if there is a need to apologize for an elderly uncle who went bonkers. I would instead start with the simpler point that Germany does not want to transfer resources to countries which do not wish to pay back their creditors, and which will not commit to good economic policy in the future.
Let’s move out of Turing mode and back to Tyler. I believe that the Germans have approached this crisis with some bad economic theories, a lack of understanding of how government spending cuts can be self-defeating in the short run, and a good deal of more or less deliberate self-deception about its partners in the union, not to mention Germany’s own ability and willingness to act “fully European.” I’m also not sure that Germany has a path out of this which leaves their own financial system intact. You can rack up the moral and practical minus points there in considerable number. That said, I see a lot of intellectuals dismissing the perspective outlined above, rather than figuring out why it makes so much sense to so many people, not just in Germany. I think the financial elites in the periphery countries themselves actually see it quite clearly.
The result is significant misunderstandings about what can happen and will happen in the eurozone. Germany cannot and will not drop its moral perspective, even if there is some theory — and yes theory is the right word here, because no one knows these broad guarantees will work — of how a broader and far more costly commitment can set things right.
In reading American discussions of the eurozone, I am frequently reminded of earlier discussions of the Soviet Union. Most outsiders simply didn’t realize how little social capital was left in the system, though some of the Soviet insiders did. Might the same be true of the eurozone? I’m not calling these countries corrupt, rather there may be remarkably little cross-national cultural capital, and remarkably little deep public support for a costly EU bargain, so little that many German (and other) insiders know that no grand bargain can be sustained or even seriously attempted.
I believe we need to be exposed to this moral perspective, and this intellectual Turing test, as a bracing slap in the face, as a wake-up call, and I see our unwillingness to do anything with this perspective, other than summarily dismiss it as a kind of tragic juvenile moralizing, as a sign of our own decline, right here in the USofA.
Addendum: This piece is actually pretty good.
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.
Yes, I do. Just once!
Reply