Category: Philosophy
Academic boycotts of Israel
One of them is gathering steam (and more detail here):
The National Council of the American Studies Association announced Wednesday that it has unanimously endorsed a boycott of Israeli universities and other Israeli institutions — and urged its members to vote to make the boycott official policy of the association.
The move by the council, even if awaiting approval by the membership, is seen as a major victory for the movement for an academic boycott of Israel.
And yet I have a better idea. If one is going to boycott institutions of Israel, should one not also boycott strong, powerful nations which have supported much of what Israel has done, especially strong, powerful nations which stole a lot of land from the original inhabitants, refuse to give it back, and have recently practiced torture, aggressive military intervention, and the murder of innocent civilians, and which spy upon much of the world, mostly without apology?
That’s right, they might consider boycotting the United States, starting with their very own name, which now would read “Council of the Studies Association.” Cynical advocates of “self-deportation” (I am not one of them) might suggest a more general boycott of the nation as it relates to their choices of residence and employment, but I will settle for the group boycotting academic conferences in America.
I am in in Tel Aviv — albeit briefly — and happy to be here. I am reminded of David Brooks’s recent column on the creeping politicization of life. That is one trend we all ought to oppose.
Addendum: Here is a good dissent from the boycott.
Why I didn’t do 23andMe
I had a free voucher from the summer, but decided not to go ahead with a saliva test. Here are my reasons:
1. I thought there is option value and I can always do a test later, for a better and more accurate service. (I hadn’t thought of the FDA shutting the whole thing down, but still I expect the service will return in some manner, if only under another corporate banner or from overseas.)
2. I thought the “worry cost” of negative information would exceed the benefit of whatever specific preventive measures I might take. Most useful ex ante preventive measures, such as diet and exercise, are fairly general in their application and I didn’t think there was likely much to be learned about specific measures for specific potential maladies. And here is an interesting short piece on the likelihood of false negatives.
3. One might take more preventive measures with one’s ex ante and more uncertain knowledge than with one’s ex post and more certain knowledge. For instance an absence of negative information might have encouraged me to slack on exercise, to the detriment of my eventual health outcomes.
4. I wouldn’t describe privacy concerns as my major worry, but at the margin still they counted for something. I felt eventually this service would prove equivalent to making my genome public information, via something called GenomeLeaks or the like. Why do that without having a better sense of its longer-run implications?
I’m glad I didn’t do it, glad I had the choice to decline to do it, and I am still feeling no temptation to do it in the future. I do feel a slight amount of guilt for not contributing to a future “Big Data” project, but so be it. I also am glad I am not contributing to some of the inevitably unethical uses to which eugenics will be put, and that is more than a counterbalance, given that I expect no practical benefit from reading my own test results.
But is he on time for low status people?
Being 50 minutes late for his first meeting with Pope Francis was nothing unusual for Russian President Vladimir Putin. That’s just the way he is — a character trait that provides some insight into his attitude toward power.
When Putin arrived on time to an audience with Pope John Paul II in 2003, the punctuality was considered a newsworthy aberration: “The President Was Not Even a Second Late,” read the headline in the newspaper Izvestia. He had been 15 minutes late for a similar audience in 2000.
The waits other leaders have had to endure in order to see Putin range from 14 minutes for the Queen of England to three hours for Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Ukrainian prime minister. Few people are as important in terms of protocol as the queen or the pope, and there is no country Putin likes to humiliate as much as Ukraine.
The typical delay seems to be about 30 minutes. Half an hour is enough in some cultures to make people mad. Koreans saw Putin’s 30-minute lateness for a meeting with their President Park Geun Hye as a sign of disrespect.
Everybody endures the wait, though.
There is more here, hat tip to Elizabeth Dickinson.
The culture that was Singapore (Haw Par Villa)
It has its gruesome side, as illustrated by this look at a traditional site for visits, Haw Par Villa:
Thousands used to throng the park, and it once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with attractions like Singapore Zoo and Jurong Bird Park. “Every Singaporean over the age of 35 probably has a picture of themselves at Haw Par,” said Desmond Sim, a local playwright. Those pictures would probably include the following statues, each made from plastered cement paste and wire mesh: a human head on the body of a crab, a frog in a baseball cap riding an ostrich, and a grandmother suckling at the breast of another woman.
But the highlight of this bizarre park are the Ten Courts. A tableau of severe disciplines are shown in painstaking detail, along with a placard stating the sin that warranted it. Tax dodgers are pounded by a stone mallet, spikes driven into a skeletal chest cavity like a bloodthirsty pestle in mortar. Spot the tiny tongue as it is pulled out of a screaming man, watch the demon flinging a young girl into a hill of knives. Ungratefulness results in a blunt metal rod cutting a very large, fleshly heart out of a woman. Perhaps the most gruesome depiction is an executioner pulling tiny intestines out from a man tied to a pole. The colons were visible and brown. The crime? Cheating during exams.
The park may be closing down, with few remaining attendees, though from the article it seems you still can go. Hurry up.
You can read TripAdvisor reviews of the park here. Here is Wikipedia on the park. Here are Flickr images. There are further sources here.
Are these the cultural preconditions of capitalism and good governance? I know which of my colleagues will be most happy to read about this.
Cosmos and Taxis
Cosmos and Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization is a new journal that looks to be of interest. The editor, David Emanuel Andersson, writes in the introduction:
It is our belief that Hayek and Polanyi’s contributions constitute the foundation for a new research program in the social sciences. Spontaneous-order theory has the potential for clearing up a great deal of confusion about the workings of market, democracies and the global scientific community….But spontaneous orders are only a subset of a wider class of emergent orders. As diZerega explains, emergent orders are unplanned and exhibit orderly development trajectories, but only some of them are spontaneous orders in the sense of providing easily interpreted feedback to order participants. Examples of emergent orders that are not spontaneous in the sense of Hayek or Polanyi are civil society, the ecosystem, and human cultures. Thus emergent orders in this more general sense are relevant not only to [economics, political science and the philosophy of science] but also to sociology and biology. It is our intent that Cosmos+Taxis will become an arena for multidisciplinary conversations that engage scholars across all five disciplines.
The first issue can be found here (pdf) and it contains the following pieces:
- Introduction – David Emanuel Andersson
- Outlining a New Paradigm – Gus diZerega
- Spontaneous Orders and the Emergence of Economically Powerful Cities – Johanna Palmberg
- Rules of Spontaneous Order – Jason Potts
- Computable Cosmos – Eric M. Scheffel
- Comments on Palmberg, Potts, and Scheffel – Gus diZerega
IBM’s Watson will be made available in a more powerful form on the internet
Companies, academics and individual software developers will be able to use it at a small fraction of the previous cost, drawing on IBM’s specialists in fields like computational linguistics to build machines that can interpret complex data and better interact with humans.
That is a big deal, obviously. The story is here.
Sentences to ponder
Medical professionals were in effect told that their ethical mantra “first do no harm” did not apply, because they were not treating people who were ill.
That concerns doctor involvement in the U.S. torture of prisoners. The pointer is from Ted Gioia.
A modern list of things to do before you are 30
From the desk of Eva Vivalt, who is not yet 30, here is part of the list:
1. Code
2. Be unemployed (unless you do 1)
3. Have a meme go viral
4. Try an app relating to “the quantified self”. (Whether to track spending, sleep, etc.)
5. Make a mistake publicly on the internet where it will live on forever
Travel is prominent as well. These two items remind me of Ben Casnocha:
8. Learn about behavioural economics and the mistakes you might make, such as how you may be affected by projection bias. You can easily waste a lot of time being upset about things that won’t matter in time or going the wrong direction because of mistaken beliefs
9. Remember that xkcd comic strip about the value of becoming more efficient at a task? When you’re young, you stand to benefit for a lot longer from any positive improvements you can make. So figure out how to eat well, what kind of things make you happy, etc. Invest a lot of time in learning, not necessarily formally
She sums it up like this:
I feel that with increasing inequality, using your youth well is all the more important, something I bet Tyler Cowen would agree with.
What would you add to the list?
Hayek’s liberaltarian essay “”Free” Enterprise and Competitive Order”
I’ve been preparing a class on Hayek for MRUniversity.com, and I was struck by my reread of this essay, which was presented at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting of 1947 (it was later published in Individualism and Economic Order, pdf of the book here).
In this piece Hayek argues the following:
1. It is not enough for classical liberals to seek to limit the state, they also must outline what governments could and should do better.
2. Monetary policy should be used to limit unemployment, albeit in a rules-based framework.
3. Eminent domain is an essential function of government, especially in urban cities, and it needs to be thought through more carefully.
4. Many of the biggest dangers of monopoly stem from patent law and intellectual property protection, rather than from monopoly of the traditional “sole seller” sort. On this issue Hayek sounds like Alex or Larry Lessig.
5. It is not enough to defend “freedom of contract” in the abstract, rather the details of the law really matter.
6. Hayek questions whether limited liability for corporations is always the right way to proceed.
7. Finally, although inheritance taxes have in the past sometimes been abused, “…inheritance taxes could, of course, be made an instrument toward greater social mobility and greater dispersion of property and, consequently, may have to be regarded as important tools of a truly liberal policy…”
You will recall that in other settings Hayek endorsed the idea of a social welfare state and also the taxation of pollution.
What is the most philosophical thing that you have ever heard a child under the age of 5 say?
That is a new Reddit thread (apologies, I have forgotten who directed my attention to it). My favorite answer was this Stigler-Becker approach to the matter:
My little sister handed me a juice box as I was packing to move out and said “No one is really a grown up. They just act old because they have to”
The full thread is here.
The Ideological Migration of the Economics Laureates
That work fills up the latest issue of Econ Journal Watch.
This issue of Econ Journal Watch (download, .pdf) is given over to a special project that considers such changes as may have occurred among the 71 individuals who, through 2012, won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
Ideological profiles of all 71 laureates make up the bulk of the issue. The 71 profiles are bundled in a single large document that is equipped with handy links for internal navigation.
Ideological change is interpreted in terms of either growing more classical liberal or growing less classical liberal. Daniel Klein leads the project. In his overview essay he explains the investigation, its many limitations, and the findings.
…David Colander served as overseeing referee, and he reports on the project.
Twelve of the laureates replied to a questionnaire requesting that they discuss their ideological outlooks at different times in their lives. The twelve who replied are Kenneth Arrow, Ronald Coase, Peter Diamond, Eric Maskin, James Mirrlees, Roger Myerson, Edward Prescott, Thomas Schelling, William Sharpe, Vernon Smith, Robert Solow, and Michael Spence. Their responses are included in their profiles, and they are also collected in a standalone appendix.
This is path-breaking work in intellectual history, the best contribution to the history of modern economics in recent memory, fascinating as intellectual biography and autobiography, and it should be snapped up immediately by some enterprising publisher.
Behavioral biases in charitable giving, installment #1637
People pay more attention to the number of people killed in a natural disaster than to the number of survivors when deciding how much money to donate to disaster relief efforts, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
…Their model estimated that about $9,300 was donated per person killed in a given disaster. The number of people affected in the disasters, on the other hand, appeared to have no influence on the amount donated to relief efforts.
The summary article is here, and the gated published version is here. I do not see an ungated copy. Here is a related paper (pdf) on how disasters drive aid decisions.
For the pointer I thank Bill Benzon.
Russian shot in quarrel over Kant’s philosophy
An argument in southern Russia over philosopher Immanuel Kant, the author of “Critique of Pure Reason,” devolved into pure mayhem when one debater shot the other.
A police spokeswoman in Rostov-on Don, Viktoria Safarova, said two men in their 20s were discussing Kant as they stood in line to buy beer at a small store on Sunday. The discussion deteriorated into a fistfight and one participant pulled out a small nonlethal pistol and fired repeatedly.
The victim was hospitalized with injuries that were not life-threatening. Neither person was identified.
It was not clear which of Kant’s ideas may have triggered the violence.
The link is here, and for the pointer I thank Michael Rosenwald.
The etymology of “serendipity”
The first noted use of “serendipity” in the English language was by Horace Walpole (1717–1797). In a letter to Horace Mann (dated 28 January 1754) he said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of”. The name stems from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon), from Arabic Sarandib. Parts of Sri Lanka were under the rule of South Indian kings for extended periods of time in history. Kings of Kerala, India (Cheranadu)were called Chera Kings and dheep means island, the island belonging to Chera King was called Cherandeep, hence called Sarandib by Arab traders.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Vivian.
I am sorry, but this is absurd
Charles Manski, a well-known professor of economics at Northwestern, writes:
The anti-tax rhetoric evident in much lay discussion of public policy draws considerable support from the prevalent negative language of professional economic discourse. Economists regularly write about the ‘inefficiency’, ‘deadweight loss’, and ‘distortion’ of income taxation.
In fact he wishes to abolish those concepts for their anti-governmental implications and work only with social welfare functions directly.
That’s one easy way to limit deadweight loss from policies, namely take it out of your analytical framework. The reality is that it is still the simplest and best way to explain why very high rates of taxation — as noted say by George Harrison or Bjorn Borg — are not such a good idea.
Manski also ignores that a belief in deadweight loss is fully compatible with the view that government spending may bring economic benefits. In fact you often cannot understand the benefits of (some) government spending without first grasping the deadweight loss concept.
And even if you think Arrow’s theorem is overrated in its importance, as I do, working with social welfare functions isn’t exactly a recipe for wringing normative preconceptions out of your economics. And any plausible social welfare function is going to pick up some concept of deadweight loss and stick it back into the calculations. How about a social welfare function which says “minimize deadweight loss”, which is what you often find in Mirrlees?
It’s called microeconomics. Yet Manski complains that “…prominent applied public economists continue to take the theory quite seriously.” You’ll even find the notion of deadweight loss in some Principles books, believe it or not. Must we derive a new social welfare function every time we wish to do partial equilibrium analysis, say of a tax on a single (small) commodity?
And get this example of mood affiliation:
The Feldstein article and similar research on deadweight loss appear predestined to make income taxation look bad. The research aims to measure the social cost of the income tax relative to the utterly implausible alternative of a lump-sum tax. It focuses attention entirely on the social cost of financing government spending, with no regard to the potential social benefits.
Contra Manski, I say it is fine to study the tax side of the equation while leaving the benefits (and costs) of expenditures to other researchers. (By the way, Manski’s supposed culprit, Martin Feldstein, first made his name studying how to measure the benefits of public expenditure.) All his point really boils down to is to note that in a second best comparison, optimum deadweight loss generally will be positive, as noted by Lipsey and Lancaster long ago in their 1955-56 ReStud piece, not to mention Frank Ramsey.
Manski wishes to cite the work of James Mirrlees for inspiration, but in fact Mirrlees has been a firm believer in the deadweight loss of taxation concept, and in comparing economies to hypothetical first best situations, as illustrated by for instance by these pieces.
I can thank Manski for reminding me that Tyrone, my evil twin, has been begging me for a chance to blog again at Marginal Revolution…