Results for “writing”
1374 found

Kamil Kovar on the German debt brake (from my email)

I was wondering if you would consider writing a post about the German debt brake in light of recent developments? Personally, I am not a huge fan of discussions about fiscal policy (or even worse, austerity…), as I feel they are mostly Rorschach test without much deep thinking. But I did find the recent developments intriguing because they challenge my priors so I am wondering what whether your thinking has changed as well.

My prior was that some form of constitutional debt break is a reasonable mechanism to deal with the pro-debt bias resulting from democratic political process. Of course, some of the recent German experience has challenged that. For example, debt break legislation lead to a lot of “bad” legislating, which was exposed by the court recently. Similarly, the debt break is leading Germany to cut spending and increase taxes relative to what the government would want; given the weakness in German economy this does not seem like optimal fiscal policy (but might be – monetary policy by choice restrictive, and many have called on fiscal to be too). And more broadly, there is a fair argument to be made that it has constrained government investment during last decade, which was an optimal time to do government investment given the negative interest rates.

Part of this I think is a question of imperfect design/implementation. The deficit threshold of -0.35% is higher than I would imagine. Absence of any relationship to current interest rates or effect on future debt levels ala CBO analysis is probably not what finance theory would suggest. And the cyclical adjustment seems suspicious: my understanding is that currently the cyclical adjustment allows for 0.1% of GDP of extra deficit, corresponding to 1% output gap and 1/10 elasticity, see here.[1] But I suspect imperfect design/implementation will always be a feature of these kind of legalistic rules, so should not be waved away.

At the same time, I find lot of the commentary rather subpar. I have in mind for example arguments in this article. While I can see that investment would likely be higher last decade in absence of debt break, saying that debt break results in “Germany that doesn’t invest and massively falls behind in economic terms” is just shocking, as it implies that investment can be only done through higher deficits. Moreover, arguing that debt break has to be abolished so that Germany can invest to deal with geopolitics and green transition is simply ignoring that Germany already found a legally-sound solution to such kind of problems when it constitutionally created its 100 billion euro defense spending fund. Together with the wise use of debt break suspensions during last 4 years this shows that there is sufficient flexibility built into this, despite what the commentators would suggest (“but in practice it’s too inflexible”), as long as there is consensus on such actions. But maybe this points towards the actual problem: maybe in current society building political consensus has become too hard, so that mechanisms which rely too much on such consensus are doomed to create more problems than their benefit. The US debt ceiling comes to mind. Similarly, I think CDU secretly agrees with some of the governments desires, but will not act on them either because it wishes for the government to collapse or is afraid of voters’ reaction.

Very curious what is your thinking and how it has changed.

Kamil

P.S.: Relatedly, I often see left-of-center economists citing IMF research that austerity does not yield decrease in government debts relative to GDP. While I understand the value of such research, I am not sure what are the people suggesting. If austerity cannot lower debt to GDP, what can? I don’t think that most economists would suggest that large scale government investment is going to lower debt to GDP. So it the conclusion that we can never lower debt to GDP?

Kamil expands on these points in a blog post, concluding:

So maybe this is the main critique of the constitutional debt break: In the older world it might have been an good tool, but given the general unravelling of political process around the world, it adds too much of a constraint leading to worse outcomes. It simply is not fit for the current times. It might not be. As for me, I am currently in state of “not sure”.

We need more talk of progress

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Here is the underlying John-Burn Murdoch FT piece, pointer here.  And a text excerpt:

Ruxandra Teslo, one of a growing community of progress-focused writers at the nexus of science, economics and policy, argues that the growing scepticism around technology and the rise in zero-sum thinking in modern society is one of the defining ideological challenges of our time.

I am pleased that Ruxandra is now also an Emergent Ventures winner.

*You Will Not Stampede Me: Essays on Non-Conformism*

That is the new book by my colleague Bryan Caplan, collected largely from his previous blog writings.  Bryan emails to me:

I just released a new book of essays on Amazon, entitled *You Will Not Stampede Me: Essays on Non-Conformism*.  Emerson and Thoreau were right: Excessive conformity is a major impediment to living a full life in the modern world, and you really can improve a lot with modest effort.For details, see my recent Substack.…Like my other books of essays, You Will Not Stampede Me is divided into four parts.

  • The first, echoing Milgram, is “Disobedience to Authority.” These pieces dissect the psychology and economics of being normal.
  • The next section, “The World Is Wrong,” explores big, specific issues where the popular opinion sucks. Covid, of course, but also bioethics, trolling, the right of revenge, and more.
  • I follow with “The Weird Is Right,” most notably with the essay, “A Non-Conformist’s Guide to Success in a Conformist World.” Yes, the world does punish non-conformists, but so sporadically and thoughtlessly than the crafty can usually defy the world with impunity.
  • I close the book with “Non-Conformist Candor,” where I call a litany of hand-picked controversies just like I see them.

As usual with my books of essays, you can read them all for free in the Bet On It Archives. What you get for your $12 is curation, convenience, and coolness.

As you might expect, I like to troll Bryan by telling him he is a deeply conformist suburban Dad, in the good sense of course.  Read this book and find out if I am right or not.

What I’ve been reading

1. Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers, The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create.  Could the be the best book on NFTs?  I think we should be genuinely uncertain as to whether NFTs have a future.  In the meantime, I consider NFTs a good Rorschach test for whether an individual’s mind is capable of moving out of “the dismissive mode.”  Do you pass or fail this test?  The “snide, sniping” mode is so hard for many commentators to resist…

2. Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art, edited by Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans.  Excellent text and also color plates, including paintings and sketches of her, a very good introduction to her work.  Here is a good bit: “Rarely, if ever, has a major poet grown up so deeply embedded in an avant-garde visual culture.  Yet she seems actively to have resisted the lure of the world of images, preferring to live and write, as Bell liked to think she did spontaneously, out of her own mind.”  A wonderful chronicle of a very particular time, artistic and otherwise.

3. Peter Cowie, God and the Devil: The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman.  The author knew Bergman, and early on, so this is a useful biography in several regards, most of all for some background information and TV and theatre projects that never came to fruition.  But it is not useful for converting the unconverted, nor does it have much more interpretative meat for the in-the-know obsessives.

4. Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis.  One of my favorite books on the British Enlightenment.  For instance, the author captures the tenor of 18th century British debates about liberty very well.  Very good chapters on Hume, Shelburne, and Macaulay.  Whatmore somehow writes as if he is actually trying to explain things to you!  If you read a lot of history books, you will know that is oddly rare.  Recommended, for all those who care.

5. Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium. So far I’ve read only 22 pp. of this one, and it clocks in at 900 pp. plus.  It is obviously excellent and I wanted to tell you about it right away.  I expect it to make the top few picks of the best non-fiction of 2024.  The author’s main theme is that Byzantium built a “New Roman Empire,” and he details how that happened.  The writing is also clear and transparent, for a time period that is not always easy to understand.

William Magnuson, For Profit: A History of Corporations is not a book for me, but it is a good and sane introduction for those seeking that.

How Were So Many Economists So Wrong About the Recession?

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, I thought it was time to call out all the Orwellian rewriting of intellectual history going on, so here goes:

As Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said last week: “So many economists were saying there’s no way for inflation to get back to normal without it entailing a period of high unemployment, [or] a recession. And a year ago, I think many economists were saying a recession was inevitable. I’ve never felt there was a solid intellectual basis for making such a prediction.”

Many of those economists may have been relying on the work of … Janet Yellen. Her own (highly regarded) macro research focuses on nominal price and wage stickiness and output-inflation trade-offs, predicting that if there is a significant fall in aggregate demand, employment should also fall, giving rise to a recession. She is also co-author (with many distinguished colleagues) of a well-known paper arguing that there is an output/inflation trade-off even at high rates of inflation.

Economist Christina Romer (often with co-authors) has provided some of the most persuasive evidence that negative monetary policy shocks induce recessions in output and employment. Her work has been especially influential — worthy of a Nobel Prize, in my opinion — because it does not rely on a complicated mathematical model of the economy, and it had been accepted on a bipartisan basis. Paul Krugman has been predicting for most of this year that the recent disinflation would not cause a recession, and he deserves credit for getting this right. Yet he is less keen to tell us that for many years he trumpeted the predictive virtues of old-style Keynesian macroeconomics, using models that predict disinflation will lead to a loss in output and employment.

Krugman has lately further explained his position — complete with unironic headline — suggesting that the untangling of broken supply chains had helped lower the rate of inflation. That point, too, is correct. He didn’t mention that there also has been a massive negative shock to aggregate demand: High rates of M2 growth became slightly negative rates of M2 growth. Fiscal policy peaked and then retreated. The Fed raised interest rates from near-zero levels to the range of 5%, and fairly rapidly. It also sent every possible signal that it was going to be tight with monetary conditions.

…There is a reason that so many economists had been predicting a recession — and it is not because they are out of touch, or repeating talking points from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. They predicted a recession because that is what experts such as Yellen, Krugman, Romer and many others had been teaching for decades. I do not myself presume to have any immunity from the general confusion here, as all along I thought there was a reasonable chance of a recession.

Larry Summers was wrong about the recession, but at least he has been consistent in his application of model-based reasoning, and now somehow he is the whipping boy for having done this.  Let’s hope that some historical memory holds and this one does not get swept under the rug…

*Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative*

That is the new memoir from Glenn C. Loury, and I cracked it open right away, here is one excerpt:

But now Harvard is looking to retool its ailing Afro-American Studies department, and Tom [Schelling] serves on the committee whose job it is to recruit new faculty worthy of the institution.  The chair of that committee is the distinguished black historian Nathan Huggins, who has recently taken the helm in Afro Studies at Harvard.  Apparently my Econometrica paper on intergenerational transfers had gotten their attention, and my writing on the dynamics of racial income differences has piqued their interest.  I’m just six years past my PhD and they’re offering a joint appointment as full professor of economics and of Afro-American Studies.  The appointment would make me the first black tenured professor in the history of Harvard’s economics department.  I like the sound of that.  In the past, the timing hadn’t quite felt right for Harvard.  But now it does feel right, and I have the sense that if I say no a third time, they won’t be calling again.

You can pre-order the book here, it is self-recommending of course.  And here is my earlier Conversation with Glenn Loury.

The Piketty-Saez-Zucman response to Auten and Splinter

A number of you have asked me what I think of their response.  The first thing I noticed is that Auten and Splinter make several major criticisms of PSZ, and yet PSZ respond to only one of them.  On the others they are mysteriously silent.

The second thing I noticed is that PSZ have been trying to deploy the slur of “inequality deniers” against Auten and Splinter.  I take that as a bad epistemic sign.

I was in the midst of writing a longer post, but then I received the following from Splinter, and I cannot come close to his efforts or authority:

Here is a short response to yesterday’s comments by Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (PSZ) on Auten and Splinter (forthcoming in JPE). These are variations on prior comments that Jerry and I addressed in 2019 and 2020. 

First, PSZ say audit data suggest adding underreported income implies little change in top 1% shares. We agree. But their approach increases recent top 1% shares about 1.5 percentage points, with about 50% of underreported business income going to the top 1% by reported income. However, Johns and Slemrod (2012) found only 5% of underreporting went to the top 1% by reported income. This discrepancy is because PSZ allocate underreported income proportional to reported positive income, which ignores that a substantial share of business underreporting (about 40%) goes to individuals with reported negative total income, where misreporting rates are the highest (Table B3 here). The concentration of underreporting at the bottom of the reported distribution causes substantial upward re-ranking when adding underreported income, but that’s mostly ignored in the PSZ approach. The PSZ approach also implies that someone who decreases their underreporting rate by increasing their reported income is allocated more underreporting. That’s backwards. 

In contrast, our approach fits prior estimates from audit data, makes use of many years of audit data, and improves upon prior approaches. We find that underreported income slightly lowers top 1% pre-tax income shares and slightly increases after-tax income shares (Figure B6 here), which is consistent with the audit data. For example, 16% of underreporting is in our top 1% ranked by true income, far less than PSZ’s near 50%-allocation and a bit under the 27% in Johns and Slemrod because we improve upon prior approaches that misallocate undetected underreporting (discussion here). Contrary to the assertions and approach of PSZ, our Figure B5 (bottom panel, here) shows­ that re-ranking between reported and true (reported plus underreported) income matters substantially. PSZ appear confused about the difference between ranking by reported versus true income. Our underreporting allocations (as are theirs) must be based on reported income because that is all one observes with the primary tax data we both use. But, unlike their method, our allocations are done such that we match the re-ranking implied by audit data. Therefore, we match both the distributions by reported and true income after re-ranking (top two panels of Figure B5, here). 

Second, income missing from individual tax returns has shifted from the top to outside the top. The shift from the top was from movements out of closely-held C corporations, whose income is missing from individual tax returns, to passthrough businesses, whose income is on individual tax returns. This created growth in the top share of taxed business income. The growth in PSZ’s top share of untaxed business income, however, is due to their skewed allocation of underreported income that re-allocates underreported income to the top of the distribution. Outside the top, the growth of missing income is from increasing tax-exempt employee compensation, especially from health insurance (see Figure B16 here).

Third, PSZ suggest that top wealth and capital income shares should run parallel over the long run. This is a problematic assumption. Economic changes can push down capital income shares relative to wealth shares. For example, interest rates fell dramatically between 1989 and 2019—the federal funds effective rate fell from 9 to 2 percent. This tends to decrease the ratio of interest-income to bond-wealth and therefore falling interest rates likely increased the gap between top income and wealth shares. Also, much of top wealth patterns are driven by passthrough business, but this is fully or two-thirds excluded from PSZ’s definition of “capital” income here. When fully including passthrough business, the Auten–Splinter top 1% non-housing “capital” income share increased by 5 percentage points between 1989 to 2019, about two-thirds the Federal Reserve’s estimated increase in top 1% wealth shares. Therefore, the Auten-Splinter estimates are broadly consistent with increasing top wealth shares.

 The Auten–Splinter approach is fundamentally a data-driven approach (Table B2 here). Based on Saez and Zucman’s (2020) suggestions and conversations, our more recent work adds new uses of data to account for high-income non-filers, flexible spending accounts, and depreciation issues from expensing. Where we rely on assumptions, alternative ones suggest top 1% shares change little, see Table 5. Our headline finding of relatively flat long-run top 1% after-tax income shares is robust.

Auten and Splinter had presented versions of those points previously, as they note.  Yet PSZ present them as naive fools who somehow forgot to think about these issues at all, and PSZ do not, in their reply, consider these more detailed presentations of the point and defenses of the  Auten-Splinter estimates.  So I don’t think of the PSZ response as especially strong.

Here are relevant Auten and Splinter points from back in 2020.  Phil Magness offers commentary.

My Conversation with Fuchsia Dunlop

Here is the audio, video, and transcript, conducted over a long meal at Mama Chang restaurant in Fairfax.  Here is the episode summary:

As they dined, the group discussed why the diversity in Chinese cuisine is still only just being appreciated in the West, how far back our understanding of it goes, how it’s represented in the Caribbean and Ireland, whether technique trumps quality of ingredients, why certain cuisines can spread internationally with higher fidelity, what we can learn from the different styles in Indian and Chinese cooking, why several dishes on the table featured Amish ingredients, the most likely mistake people will make when making a stir fry, what Lydia has learned managing an empire of Chinese restaurants, Fuchsia’s trick for getting unstuck while writing, and more.

Joining Tyler, Fuchsia, and Lydia around the table were Dan WangRasheed GriffithFergus McCullough, and Sam Enright.

Here is one excerpt:

WANG: Yes, that’s right. If I can ask a follow-up question on this comparison between India and China. Maybe this is half a question also for Tyler. Why do we associate Indian cuisine so much more with long simmers, whereas Chinese cuisine — of course, it is a little bit of everything, as Fuchsia knows so well, but it is often a little bit more associated with quick fries. What is the factor endowment here of these two very big countries, very big civilizations having somewhat divergent paths, as we imagine, with culinary traditions?

DUNLOP: That’s a really interesting question. It’s hard to answer because I don’t really know anything about Indian food. I did have a really interesting conversation with an Indian who came on my tour to Yunnan earlier this year because I was speculating that one of the reasons that Chinese food is so diverse is that the Chinese are really open-minded, with very few taboos. Apart from Muslims eating halal food and some Buddhists not eating meat, there’s a great adventurous open-mindedness to eating.

Whereas in India, you have lots of taboos and religious and ritual restrictions. That’s one reason that you would think it would be a constraint on the creativity of Indian food. But this Indian I was talking to, who’s a food specialist — he reckoned that the restrictions actually forced people to be more creative. He was arguing that Indian food had all the conditions for diversity that Chinese does.

In terms of cooking methods, it’s hard to say. Again, I don’t know about Indian food, but the thing about China is that there’s been this intense thoughtfulness about food, really, for a very long time. You see it in descriptions of food from 2,000 years ago and more.

In the Song Dynasty, this incredible restaurant industry in places like Hangzhou, and innovation and creativity. I suppose that when you are thoroughly interested in food like the Chinese and thinking about it creatively all the time, you end up having a whole plethora of different cooking methods. That’s one of the striking things about Chinese cuisine, that you have slow-cooked stews and simmered things and steamed things and also stir-frying. That might explain why several different methods have achieved prominence.

COWEN: Before I comment on that, Lydia, on the new dish, please tell us.

The dishes are explained as they were consumed, the meal was excellent, of course the company too.  A very good episode, highly rated for all lovers of Chinese food.  And here is Fuchsia’s new book, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, self-recommending.  And here are previous MR mentions of Fuchsia, including links to my two earlier CWTs with her.

Emergent Ventures, 30th cohort

Mike Ferguson and Natasha Asmi, Bay Area and University of Michigan, growing blood vessels in the lab.

Klara Feenstra, London, to write a novel about the tensions between Catholicism and modern life.

Snigdha Roy, UCLA, for a conference trip and trip to India, math and computation and biology.

Nikol Savova, Oxford, and Sofia, Bulgaria, podcast on Continental philosophy, mathematics.

Seán O’Neill McPartlin, Dublin, policy studies and YIMBY interests.

Olivia Li, NYC, geo-engineering, undergraduate dropout.

Suraj M. Reddy, High school, Newark, Delaware, 3-D printing and earthquakes.

Zhengdong Wang, USA and London, DeepMind, to advance his skills in thinking and writing.

Andrés Acevedo, Medellin, podcast about Colombia.

Luke Farritor, University of Nebraska, deciphering ancient scrolls, travel grant.

Hudhayfa Nazoordeen, Sri Lanka and Waterloo, hydroponics for affordable food. 

Thomas Des Garets Geddes, London, Sinification, China newsletter.

Chang Che, book project on the return of state socialism in China, USA/Shanghai.

Alexander Yevchenko, Toronto, ag tech for farmers.

There are more winners to be listed, please do not worry if you didn’t fit into this cohort.  And here is a list of previous winners.

Pomona facts of the day

The president now has nine vice presidents (up from four in 1990). The Dean of Students Office has gone from six persons in 1990 to sixty-five persons in 2016 (not counting administrative assistants). Academic Computing has gone from six persons in 1990 to thirty-six persons in 2016. The Office of Admissions has jumped from six to fifteen (again, none of these figures includes administrative assistants). The Office of Development (which formerly included Alumni Affairs) counted sixteen persons; now those renamed offices tally forty-seven persons all told. A few years ago Pomona created a new position, Chief Communications Officer; there are twenty-two persons (not counting administrative assistants) working for the CCO (yes, we have twenty-three persons working for Pomona’s PR!). There are all sorts of offices that have popped up in 2016 that never existed back in 1990 (all the following numbers denote administrators and directors and don’t include the administrative assistants for the office): Archives (2 persons); Asian American Resource Center (3); Career Development (11); Draper Center for Community Partnerships (6); Graduate Fellowships (1); Institutional Research (2); International Initiatives (1); Ombuds (1); Outdoor Education Center (2); Pacific Basin Institute (2); Quantitative Skills Center (1); Queer Resources Center (3); Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity (6); Sustainability Office (2); Writing Center (2).

Those are from 2017, perhaps it has gotten much much better since.  Here is the full piece by John E. Seery, recommended.

No Child Left Behind: Accelerate Malaria Vaccine Distribution!

My post What is an Emergency? The Case for Rapid Malaria Vaccination, galvanized the great team at 1DaySooner. Here is Zacharia Kafuko writing at Foreign Policy:

Right now, enough material to make 20 million doses of a lifesaving malaria vaccine is sitting on a shelf in India, expected to go unused until mid-2024. Extrapolating from estimates by researchers at Imperial College London, these doses—enough for 5 million children—could save more than 31,000 lives, at a cost of a little more than $3,000 per life. But current plans by the World Health Organization to distribute the vaccine are unclear and have been criticized as lacking urgency.

…Vaccine deployment and licensure is an incredibly complex scientific, legal, and logistical process involving numerous parties across international borders. Roughly speaking, after the WHO recommends vaccines (such as R21), it must also undertake a prequalification process and receive recommendations from its Strategic Advisory Group of Experts before UNICEF is allowed to purchase vaccines. Then Gavi—a public-private global health alliance—can facilitate delivery by national governments, which must propose their anticipated demand to Gavi and make plans to distribute the vaccines.

Prequalification can take as long as 270 days after approval. However, the COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out within weeks of WHO’s approval, using the separate EUL process rather than the more standard prequalification process that R21 is now undergoing.

For COVID-19 vaccines, EUL was available because the pandemic was undeniably an emergency. Given the staggering scale of deaths of children in sub-Saharan Africa every year, shouldn’t we also be treating malaria vaccine deployment as an emergency?

The R21 malaria vaccine does not legally qualify for EUL because malaria already has a preventive and curative toolkit available. My concern is that this normalizes the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children each year in Africa.

We can move more quickly and save more lives, if we have the will.

Space Tourism Revisited, Again

One of the advantages of writing a blog for 20 years is that you get a feel for what is new and for what seems new but is actually old. Space tourism falls into the latter category. I wrote my first piece on space tourism in 2004 when Burt Rutan was predicting 100,000 space tourists annually in 10 years. In contrast, I argued that rockets were far too unsafe a technology on which to build a tourism industry:

The problem is safety. Simply put, rockets remain among the least safe means of transportation ever invented. Since 1980 the United States has launched some 440 orbital launch rockets (not including the Space Shuttle). Nearly five percent of those rockets have experienced total failure, either blowing up or wandering so far from course as to be useless. The space shuttle has a slightly better record of safety — it was destroyed in two of 113 flights. There are lots of millionaires willing to spend one or two million dollars for a flight into space but how many will risk a two to five percent chance of death?

Ten years later there weren’t 100,000 space tourists but Richard Branson was predicting a more modest (!) 10,000 space tourists by 2022. Well, 2022 came and went and space tourism has yet to get off the ground. Overall, rockets still look very unsafe. Is anyone surprised? Blue Origin, for example has had 1 total failure in 22 flights, 4.5%. SpaceX has by far the best record with–generously not including test flights–1 total failure in 289 Falcon flights, .34%. That’s great and especially impressive given that Falcon flies much higher than other rockets! But wingsuit flying, no one’s ideas of a safe sport, is still safer than a SpaceX flight! (.2%) and commercial airlines are running at many orders of magnitude safer at .00034%.

Thus, after 20 years, I don’t see much reason to update. Like climbing Mount Everest or wingsuit flying, we might see a few flights a year catering to the rich and foolhardy but we have a long way to get before we get fat guys with cameras in space.

Saturday assorted links

1. A piece on Magill and free speech, written before the recent brouhaha.

2. “Today, Future House is announcing WikiCrow, our first automated system for synthesizing scientific knowledge.

3. Erik Hoel on the marginal value of intelligence, and AI.  And with a clever restatement: “call it the supply paradox of AI: the easier it is to train an AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is”

4. And was some version of democratized AGI technology released yesterday?

5. Modeling “Assorted links.”

6. Apply for an ACX grant from Scott Alexander.

7. The extremely large telescope.

8. Google’s NotebookLM aims to be the ultimate writing assistant.

John Stuart Mill and character development

Written by me, here is a passage from GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of All Time, and Why Should We Care?

Mill’s central contribution was having produced a tripartite defense of a free society, based on the ideas of character development and also consilience, the latter meaning that alternative perspectives brought together may point in a broadly similar normative direction and thus legitimize that direction. Mill was a believer in liberty, as outlined in his classic On Liberty; Mill was a believer in utilitarianism, as outlined in his Utilitarianism; finally, Mill was what I call a “civilizationist,” as reflected in his corpus of writings generally but presented most specifically in his 1836 essay “Civilization.” A civilizationist, quite simply, is one who believes that the carrying on and extension of civilization is a fundamental value.

Mill understood well that the perspectives of liberty, utility, and civilization do not always coincide, and there is a large academic “cottage industry” finding supposed contradictions and tensions in Mill’s work. For instance, why are there so many exceptions to the liberty principle in On Liberty? How should we proceed when liberty and utility clash? The tensions are real, but Mill had a means of resolving them. Insofar as individuals engage in sufficiently sophisticated character development, these differing perspectives all would tend to converge. Character development would make the case for liberty stronger as progress continued, and it would make utilitarian standards more coincident with the general elevation of mankind, as what people wanted, and what made them happy, would coincide more directly with beneficial and virtuous outcomes. Finally, character development would make civilization more sustainable and also more beneficial.

Recommended.

Bill Conerly at Forbes reviews GOAT

GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? is an intriguing book by the well-known economist Tyler Cowen in which he tries to determine who is the greatest economist of all time. This book will be enjoyed not only by economists but also those interested in understanding the world of people and their interactions. Importantly, the book emphasizes the non-financial implications of economic analysis in areas such as friendship, community and aesthetics…

In a startling advance for book publishing, GOAT comes with a chatbot in which a user can ask the AI to answer questions related to the book. In writing this review, I used the chatbot to refresh my memory about Tyler’s criteria for greatness and for examples of non-financial concerns. The chatbot uses the same technology that enables AI to answer specialized questions for customer service by accessing a company’s owners’ manuals, returns policy and troubleshooting guides.

Here is the full review.