- Mark gives a political speech about the roots of Americanism. I am not convinced by the history, but I am convinced by the sentiment.
- Robin Hanson slaughters a libertarian sacred cow using ONLY the intuition that it's better to exist than not to exist. Can we then let creatures pay to exist somehow? By slavery?
- Robert Reich, while normally very thoughtful, is reflexively leftist in this piece, saying: We need more government spending. My understanding was that in the great depression, this didn't work. Also, more commentary on what does work from me yesterday. I'm still willing to take bets that a payroll tax holiday, if it happens, results in a real recovery in short order (before November 2012).
- Arnold Kling uses the word Technocratic Fundamentalism, a companion to Caplan's Democratic Fundamentalism, in this essay:
If Eichengreen and others of who share his political outlook wish to make any headway with people like me, they will have to show that they have some indication that technocrats can make honest mistakes. Instead, if you blame all of the mistakes on free-market ideology, you come across to me as a technocratic fundamentalist, and you are only writing for people who share your ideological bubble.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Morning links
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
6 comments:
I'm still willing to take bets that a payroll tax holiday, if it happens, results in a real recovery in short order
I disagree, depending on how it is structured. A temporary payroll tax holiday would cause a net increase in Keynesian style stimulus (i.e. velocity of money nonsense) but that's about it.
What we need is structural reform that increases capitalisation.
Eiminating the tax on dividends would be my first priority as that would encourage investing, so would a permanant lowering of the payroll tax, or partial privitization.
Of course, if you allowed folks to opt-out entirely and invest that money into privately owned accounts...
"For example, some libertarians tell me it is a basic ethical fact that no person should be born with debt, stock, or physical restraints."
It's a moral thing.
Debt requires a contract, and creatures that don't exist can't sign.
Stock is simply a complicated form of debt.
Physical restraints are immoral because they're not necessary if the creature will consent to being restrained. The only purpose of restraints at birth is to deprive another creature of their values for the elevation of your own.
And so on. We discover again that simplified markets are immoral. I personally think the immorality would cause contract insurers to refuse to insure/ensure such things, mainly because it offends customers. I don't know though, I think we should try it on a limited scale and see what happens.
Notably, Hanson assumes the conditions of the Malthusian trap, which means pretty much everyone is screwed anyway.
Hansons's thing that I figured out only a year or two ago, is that the super-prosperity of now is semi-guaranteed to end eventually. Eventually, we run out of discoveries, AND we run out of new stuff. May be a billion years from now, but there's eventually a resource cap.
OTOH, I didn't see that in this article of his.
But it's an interesting question. What we have, then, is market failure. Bobby jr. would prefer being born and living to not living, but Robert has insufficient incentive to settle down and have kids. If we can't make deals between Robert and Bobby Jr., then folks are net worse off.
"Most new creatures would [...] own little surplus relative to their cost."
Subsistence agriculture, or rather high tech subsistence.
"Residual control rights (e.g., “are they slaves?”) would rest in the hands of whomever could squeeze the most market value from them."
Stating almost outright they'd be serfs. Supply and demand ensures that it would flow to near all of us, and the labour market would be dominated by serfs.
So I ask you to keep in mind this implies G. Clark's full list of Malthusian 'virtues.'
"If we can't make deals between Robert and Bobby Jr., then folks are net worse off."
You're assuming things about the feelings of a being that does not exist. Only Robert's feelings matter until Bobby can be validly assigned properties.
The thing about morality is that if it is the only barrier to making Bobby Jr. a net plus for Robert, then if the moral system has any right to be labelled 'moral' we are assured that having Bobby, even if Robert was pleased at the outcome, would be a net loss.
In my system, by applying immoral coercion to Bobby Jr, Robert loses any right to have his preferences taken into account, because his preferences have been proven to include running around abrogating other people's preferences. (Imagine a society where such preferences are considered broadly legitimate.) And so Bobby Jr. is greeted by being wronged, and Robert effectively no longer exists. Sounds like a net loss to me.
Alrenous,
AFAICT, your approach, which is awfully close to my natural approach, results in no Bobby Jr.
Robin seems to be intelligently positing that said hypothetical Bobby Jr.'s existence could be net a positive for Robert given the ability for Bobby to make side-payments.
However, no ability to make side payments results in the non-existence of Bobby Jr. Is that the state you prefer? I thought I did, but now I have to reconsider.
Might it be better for Bobby Jr. to exist in a diminshed state of liberty than to never have existed at all. I suppose there's an argument to be made that a moral system that results in no Bobby is better than the system which does...but I don't think it's a slam dunk.
Yes, it results in no Bobby Jr. in this case. My point is exactly that it shouldn't result in one.
"Might it be better for Bobby Jr. to exist in a diminished state of liberty than to never have existed at all."
If Bobby Jr. doesn't exist, it can't be better for him to have existed. The nonexistent have no emotions with which to object to their state.
It's just that once he does exist it's immoral to murder him or unilaterally impose contracts on him.
"I suppose there's an argument to be made that a moral system that results in no Bobby is better than the system which does...but I don't think it's a slam dunk."
The question is, do you value morality? Does Robert? Does 'society'?
Before Bobby Jr, I consider Robert's material gain, minus the loss of Robert having done something immoral.
In my experience immorality is inefficient. I object to taxes on moral grounds, but it just so happens that it is (theoretically) more efficient to not tax, for example.
I therefore suspect that on average, Robert's material gain will be outweighed by the moral loss.
I also suspect there would be some devious unintended economic costs, but that's an empirical question.
Post a Comment