two weekend links

Super-economy, my favorite new econo-statistician provides numbers suggesting that the mulitiplier on the Bush tax cuts was ~5/3.  For every $0.60 not collected by the government, $1 was gained by private industry.   I think that's how you count multipliers, anyhow.  Incidentally, this matches not imperfectly with other data suggesting roughly the same thing...every $0.60-$0.80 collected by the government shrinks the economy by $1.  To the extent this is true, it becomes even more important to tack libertarian to handle the upcoming entitlement problem.

Don Boudreaux, my favorite uber-prolific "letter to the editor"-writer addresses also the myth that capitalists like free trade and competition.

The Facade of Democracy

Robin Hanson, says it as well as I've heard it said:

Today folks proudly bask in a glow of higher status by believing that they have more control over their government.  They believe democracy puts them in charge, and that a “rule of law” drastically discourages arbitrary applications of authority power.  They are deluded:

The example is forfeiture law, and he closes beautifully:

Articles about this stuff have appeared periodically for decades.  Clearly such news has not sparked an irate revolution of concerned citizens demanding the return of their supposed rule of law.  As long as we don’t hear about stuff being arbitrarily taken from someone we know, we can keep believing we are better than those ancients – we still live under a rule of law for those who really matter – people like us.

QoTDs

In response to an IP argument, Brutus says:

Yes, ideas, the very thoughts of man, are now scare resources like clean water or land. I guess I better keep this post short. I would hate to use up all my ideas tonight and have to run to the store to buy a fresh supply for the morning.

Elsewhere, Dennis Miller cited in an Althouse comment, linked by Instapundit:

Obama chose to call out the only 9 guys in the room that did their homework in law school. And the rest who ended up settling for politics stood and and cheer it.

Seth Roberts cites the book Green Metropolis as saying:

Sitting indoors playing video games is easier on the environment than any number of (formerly) popular outdoor recreational activities, including most of the ones that the most committed environmentalists tend to favor for themselves

Law + Ethics

Incidentally, if my stab at ethics is even close to on the mark, the contemporary liberal and libertarian criticism of too much ethics in the law is mostly wrong. 

Ethics is entirely about how to behave in society.
Law is entirely about how to behave in society. 

The overlap should be tremendous.

With 1 (Large) exception.

The distinction between required and permitted needs fleshed out.

ESR and WTF

Eric Raymond asks the question:

As usual, the answer is that things only make sense here if you ignore the words, and assume it's all monkey-politics of ingroup and outgroup.  Chris Matthews is ingroup, so gets away with stuff.  Libertarians and Republicans are not, and so get excoriated for saying stuff half as bad.

Book Reviews: Stanovich

Keith Stanovich in What Intelligence Tests Miss has written a book that's half brilliant and half boring.

At this point, I'm tired of Kahneman and Tversky.  I know they did important stuff, and I know that they have a Nobel prize attached to their ideas, and I know that the liberals want to use their ideas to justify new regulation.  However, on the 853rd book that discusses their ideas, one might get a little tired of the stuff.

Having said that, Stanovich has 3 sections of his book...beginning middle and end.  Only the middle section is overburdened with stuff that everyone else knows.  Both the beginning and end of the book are fantastic.  The most interesting poitn that Stanovich developed in another book (also with too much Kahneman and Tversky) is that the human mind is composed of 2 types of thinking:

Type 1 thinking -- Fast, efficient, automatic, subconscious.  Is that ball going to hit me?  Should I duck, or catch it?  What was she feeling when she said that?

Type 2 thinking -- slow, inefficient, deliberate, conscious.  What is the square root of 2401?  If bob looks at anne and anne looks at joe, and bob is married but joe isn't, is a married person looking at an unmarried person? 

Not only did he bring this up, he called it roughly beyond discussion in a dozen different fields.

In this book, he discusses the problem of why intelligent people are often not smart.  To do so, he distinguishes a third category of thinking.

Type 1 -- as before.(instinct)
Type 2 -- using logic correctly when asked to. (intelligence)
Type 3 -- deciding correctly when to use logic. (rationality)

Roughly, intelligence predicts whether you will do well when asked to use your brain...not whether you will opt to use your brain when you ought to.

This explains the 50-ish % of Mensa participants who believe in Astrology, UFOs, or Marx.


In a section near the end, he also categorizes the types of failures that simply type-2 thinking leads to.  Mostly it comes down to (a) insufficient statistical understanding, and (b) insufficient historical information, (c) justifying pre-existing prejudices, (d) insufficient plausibility checking (too much smart, not enough reality)

Finally, in the most interesting bit at the end, he suggests that studies have shown that rationality ... the business of thinking correctly, is teachable, in rather short order (20-40 hours of classroom time).  This is really good news for folks like me who are into teaching, and who care about rationality.

Overall, I really liked it, except that I'd have left out the middle half, as stuff everyone else writes about.

evolution and running

"Their study suggested that even going for a run in high heels was better for preventing joint injuries than tennis shoes" -- popular science on a study of barefoot running. (HT: Instapundit)

Ethical Intuitionism, a response

So...David Friedman once tried to convince me of ethical intuitionism. Bryan Caplan has also written strongly in favor.  I have a rather deep disagreement with the idea, and I'd like to try to respond.

Meta-ethics is the topic "before" ethics.  What is ethics about? 

Ethical intuitionism is the statement that there are moral truths that we have at least blurry semi-direct access to. 

Ethical naturalism, my position, says that the nature of reality gives us right and wrong answers about ethics, and our intuitions.

Other positions include emotivism (right and wrong are nothing but feelings...we can't say anything stronger than I don't like Hitler), and Divine Command theory (God makes it right/wrong).  There are others, but I haven't personally heard much argument for any of the other meta-ethics.

I am also nearly done reading David Schmidtz book The Elements of Justice and he began to lay out a theory of justice, (Imagine, with that title), in which he takes issue with many contemporary ideas of Justice, and which I read to be a broadside against the greater Rawlsian position.  Much of the book is brilliant, but I still need to take issue with it.

As I said yesterday, Schmidtz regards theory to be a map.  As such, he presents a theory of justice that says something like justice is a pastiche of several distinct elements.  The four elements that comprise justice are: desert, reciprocity, equality, and need.  Most interesting (read: hard) questions in the discussion of justice come when the four conceptions conflict.  What happens when desert and need conflict?  (You get Les Mis, and Hugo was a softie) How about reciprocity and equality or desert and equality.  The list goes on, but it's an interesting position.

It's even more interesting to hear a philosopher talking thusly when I'v also read Jon Haidt, and his dimensions of ethical responses.  Haidt's five are: loyalty/ingroup/outgroup, fairness/reciprocity, harm/care, purity, and authority (obedience).  Mapping...Loyalty + reciprocity are about reciprocity, even if it's pay-forward reciprocity.  Fairness is a tussle between desert and equality.  harm/care is about need.  Purity isn't a justice dimension talked about by Schmidtz..  And authority is a desert question.  Rather nice matchup.

However...this leads to the next question...if these are built-in feelings...why should one trust that they give right answers?  I contend that the feelings are (necessarily) evolved and semi-optimal responses for social top predator/omnivores in the Evolutionarily Stable Environment.  If what you want is group-advancing semi-rational tribal behavior from people...and you are living in smallish tribes, then relying on those intuitions makes a lot of sense. 

Assuming those evolved emotions mean much more than "this is what we evolved to feel", along with "evolution tends to solve specific problems well" is less wise.

Therefore...we need to figure out why one has ethics (in order to live in groups), and instead of blindly believing our feelings, we need to figure out the goal of ethics (smooth group functioning) and apply actual knowledge of the modern context to said goal.  Hence...my  approach to ethics starts halfway to Rand, but I continue to disagree with her that ethics is necessary to Robinson Crusoe.  Prudence is all that is required there.  Ethics only becomes necessary in social survival.  On the other hand, taking two steps forward, I find Schmidtz's prior work much more compelling than Rand.  For any goal X, you must first do Y, and for Y, do Z.  Follow the chain backwards just a little bit, and you find a rather aggressive self-interest mandated by ALL value-driven ethical systems.  Virtue driven ethics are even more so.  Only rule-centric non-value-centric systems can even consistently consider a core which does not start with self-interest.

Of course, being myself, I am compelled to give the best counterpoint I can think of, and it's certainly moderately compelling.  It is an essentially conservative position: 

Deriving ethics is a wonderful sounding goal.  But what is ethics for again?  Developing a smoothly functioning society, and allowing us to live together.  Is it not then better to go with ethics that have worked and allowed such a large-scale social arrangement, rather than tinkering about and hoping you haven't missed much?  Is it not excessive hubris to think you can do otherwise?

But then I have to take the liberal position (which starts sounding like the progressive one).  The costs of the historical ethic are too great to tolerate.  We need an ethic that allows not only us to live together but also our children and grandchildren, and happily.  And for that purpose, we need economic compound growth, and increasing wealth.  The richer you are, the fewer the hard questions in ethics.  When need disappears, much of the rationale for equality does too, and you are left with only desert and reciprocity, which I contend are the appropriate ethic for the society of traders that we have become. 

Coolest new Dinosaur info

Birds are dinosaurs...wait, that's old.  But more interesting, science tricks may have found what color they were.  HT: Slashdot.

Phrase oTD

My new favorite phrase:

messianic secular rationalism

From an odd post by Eric Raymond on Jewish intellectual history.

Citizens United, and the nature of government

Will Wilkinson puts his formidable thought process on display in attempting to (really) understand the progressive antipathy to Citizens United.  His close, while summarizing the liberal position:

Crucially, a state that maintains the power to exercise a meaningful countervailing influence against corporate power is less of a threat to liberty than are corporations when the state has tied its own hands.

His commenters are not as smart as he is.

Of course, neither I nor Will believes the argument he's making, and we both think we could seriously argue against it, but I think it captures very well the position, which as we all know is important to my view of the world.

Liberal Fascism

While I haven't read the book, and I hadn't been planning to, I saw a discussion of the book on HNN, and wanted to share an intriguing paragraph in Jonah Goldberg's work:

For those who don’t know:  I contend that in America (unlike Europe in important respects) “the right” is defined by two pillars:  religious and cultural traditionalism on the one side and classical liberalism or economic libertarianism on the other.  We can get hung up on the labels, but it is fair to say that people who are very culturally conservative are usually identified as “right-wing” and those who are very libertarian on economic matters are dubbed right-wing as well.  Modern conservatives, for the most part, adhere to the “fusionist” school which tries to marry both traditionalism and laissez-faire in one coherent vision.  Meanwhile, the Nazis – and, to a lesser extent, the Italian Fascists – rejected both of these worldviews while embracing statism.  In my book (literally and figuratively) that puts you on the left.  To date no one has successfully rebutted this argument.

While I, most of the rest of the libertarians I know, and ALL the historical libertarians argue for a tripartite view of politics (conservative, progressive, and liberal/libertarian), this is an interesting way to define the political right-wing that I hadn't paid attention to before.  American right-wing is cutural/religious conservative and/or economic libertarians.

On other news....I found Mr. Goldberg's very measured discussion quite impressive.  I am inclined to believe now that the book is well more worth reading than I had previously thought, due to the very careful, very measured way in which Mr. Goldberg responded to his critics. 

However, I'd like to know if the book has much new and relevant to teach me.

What I know with >90% certainty:

• National Socialism was a splinter off of socialism (hence the name), which argued for National focus, rather than the Socialist/Communist Internationalist perspective.  Italian Fascism was a distinct movement from German National Socialism, though they converged on most points, minus the German race issues.
• Between about 1920 and 1940, Progressives in particular, and the educated classes in general believed in basically the same eugenicist theories that Hitler did (superior + inferior races and individuals), if not his barbaric implementations. For what it's worth, the entire Orient also believed this at that time.  Chinese superior race, Japanese.  This was just part of the era, worldwide.
  
• The distinction between the policies of Hitler, Lenin, and Mussolini are hard to find, with the distinction that Hitler was the most anti-Jew, and he killed more of them by sorting ethnically, and Mussolini was the least.  The Russian Communists didn't sort by religion as clearly.  Economically, the policies had (at best) paper differences.  Socially, as well, the differences were in the terminology...loyalty to the volk versus loyalty to the proletariat are not much difference.  
• Heck, the US and British Governments had both expressed sympathy for both socialism and fascism in that time frame, and the policies of FDR were in the same direction as those of Lenin or Mussolini.
• Libertarianism (then liberalism -- the defense of the individual against encroachments) is the only position that consistently opposed on principle all of the activities done by any one of the socialist-leaning leaders.
  

You might care to read the long interview.  Or the book.

UPDATE:

Hilarious unintentional point from a negative review of the book:

They were, or are in the case of Castro, certainly authoritarian, but to call them fascist it to miss the clear differences in their economic policies from people like Hitler or Mussolini who were economic centrists--a Third Way between capitalism and socialism. 

So...you're saying that modern liberals, trying to find a third way between Capitalism and Socialism are what?

What about folks trying to find a third way between the old third way and Modern Corporatism (Tony Blair, Bill Clinton).  What about folks trying to preserve the heavily government subsidized big-business-favoring regime of today?  Some libertarians might suggest that what we are being given is a choice between 80% government control of the economy and 75%...with the main differences being in whether we favor big business and big labor over everyone else, or whether we favor big labor then big business.  Those libertarians might call all the choices corporatist, and too close to fascist to spit between.  And they might also call the whole darn thing about 80% of the way to socialist, and about 10% of the way to free-markets.

My new line:
If it's not computer industry and/or small business, it ain't actually free market

RE-UPDATE:
HA!  The very next negative review says:

I commend Goldberg when he describes contemporary America as involved in a false discussion between the left and the right regarding the economic structure of the country. For example under both Reagan and Clinton, there was a great erosion of the difference between government and the corporate interest. Those interests eventually merged with hardly a notice. Goldberg is quite correct in ascribing little difference between the parties, during this era. In fact, it is perfectly true that both parties have become supporters of big government, which operationally, has largely supported the interests of big business...rhetoric notwithstanding.

The resulting diminution of the so called "free market" is so advanced that no one but a delusionist can now believe that the interest of the corporation is in the continuation free markets...for the profit drive of the corporation has been to eliminate the "free market", wherever and whenever possible.

 And if you think Reagan was close to Clinton, you should see Shrub.

Comic oTD

Dirty Harry meets Rain Man

Question oTD

Arnold Kling asks it:

Fact: Our current government trajectory is unsustainable. 
Question: Is it a problem that politicians are lying to all the social security/medicare/public pensioners and saying we will take care of you in way X, when it is IMPOSSIBLE that we do so?
Question: Isn't this particularly a problem for progressives?



Answer: From Arnold Kling some years ago: It's the Great Race


Summary: The big issue is whether productivity growth keep ahead of entitlement spending?  If it can, we don't actually have a problem. 

Aretae: The real problem is choking off of growth, which is the only way to handle the entitlements we have.  I'd rather cut back on the entitlements too, but in the absence of that, GTFO of the way, and let some productive businesses grow, so as to handle the entitlements.

QoTD

Schmidtz has the best seemingly-but-not-self-contradictory statement ever.  He says it's a folk theorem.

Any theory simple enough to be useful has counterexamples.  (This is a simple theory.  Therefore, if correct, it has counterexamples).

Theories and Maps

I suppose it isn't shocking that an expert professional philosopher can sum up 90% of my thinking on epistemology in so few words...but he nonetheless has.

Again, from The Elements of Justice:

Theories are maps

This, in essence, is the philosophical core of  an awful lot of my epistemology.  If one believes this (and I have a hard time understanding how one could not, without improperly narrowing the definition of theory to be the Science definition like "Theory of Gravity"), then a lot of consequences follow.

1. Theories necessarily leave out details (else they're not useful)
   
2. Two theories sometimes conflict
3. If two theories conflict, that doesn't mean one of them is wrong.
   
4. You should choose to use different theories for different purposes.
5. A theory's aretae depends on whether it can be used for its intended purpose
6. A theory that doesn't predict (accurately) is usually a useless theory.

UPDATE:

7. Most of the time, we don't have a hyperlinked, various levels of detail, various
   types of information GoogleMaps app.  So we get to guess which map to use, hopefully based on prior experience.
   

Haiti

The Onion has the best article on Haiti yet printed. (HT: Tyler Cowen)

Evolution

Slashdot links to an article on horizontal evolution.  It is a very interesting article, except for the bit about this being about "Darwinian" evolution, and the journalist's basic misunderstanding of the neo-darwinian synthesis.

Article: Lots of evolution, and even more back in the day, was about transfer of genes between species.  This is different than Darwin.

Darwin: Species appear to change because of natural selection, and I have no darn clue how they change except that natural selection does all the heavy lifting.

Mendel: Species inherit traits from mothers and fathers with frequencies that are statisitically predictable.

Watson and Crick:  The mechanism of inheritance is the DNA.

Article doesn't correct Darwin or Watson and Crick at all.  The mechanism of DNA and the overwhelming primacy of natural selection in the evolutionary process are untouched.  However, the new line is that in some cases, especially early single-cellular (and before) life, Mendel's parent-based inheritance is the wrong model. It is nonetheless interesting.  Waiting to see if GNXP has anything to say.

Charity

Isegoria comments on some politically incorrect stuff.

On the way in to work this morning, I was reading David Schmidtz, my still favorite living philosopher, who wrote in a much less offensive fashion about the same thing:

Suppose you visit Thailand.  You want to give to children begging on the street, but your guide says the children were kidnapped from Cambodia and brought to Bangkok to beg.  Every evening their captor feeds them if they've collected enough money, and cuts off a finger if they have not.  (The threat of torture makes the children desperate, amputations make them look more pathetic, and it's all good for business.)  It's as plain as a moral fact can be that these children desperately need your spare change.  Yet if your guide is right, then if you distribute your money on the basis of need, you are financing an industry that manufactures need.  So, there you are, needing to decide whether to give money to the child in front of you.  What does justice have to do with need in that case?  Why?

From The Elements of Justice

Do you give to the child?  Some person giving to the child will be the person who give enough to cause the captor to go get more kids from Cambodia.  Will you be that person?  Not sure. 
Does giving cause problems?  Call it a 5% chance that your gift pushes the captor over the threshold to getting another kid.
Does not giving cause problems?  Call it a 5% chance that your lack of giving means the kid doesn't collect enough for the day, and loses another finger.  

What is the right thing to do, given you can't actually fix the root problem?

Does the same problem apply to beggars on the street?  Every single reasonable economic analysis says it does.  More giving creates more beggars, through simple supply and demand.  Less social opprobrium also creates more beggars, through the same mechanism.  So what should you do?

Those who prefer to solve a problem now, and create larger problems for the future give.  Those who prefer to allow suffering now, in order to decrease problems for the future do not give.  I am in the second camp, and although it is actually painful for me, I do not give.  I prefer a great future, and do not wish to be complicit in the creation of a worse one...even as I hate the suffering of people in the present.  On the other hand, I cannot bring myself to be aggressive in my anti-begging positions.  And so my policy for the last year or so has been to lie.  Were my situation only slightly different, I would follow through on my lies, but as it is...If asked for change, I say I don't carry cash.  Does not help them.  Does not punish them either.  Does not reward their elaborate, practiced lie*, nor their effort spent begging instead of seeking work. And decreases the conflict between them and me, as they stop begging me once they believe I have no money.

* I have been in a position to observe this in Chicago a few times.  I used to, when consulting in Chicago, take the "EL" (elevated train, which is, for some lines, and some distance a subway).  There was this kid (16-25) who was dressed like a student, who had a habit of being in the red line train stop at Randolph and State.  He would stand in front of the ticket machines, searching his pockets for change.  And when you came up, he abashedly asked for 65 cents, because he couldn't get his ticket home.  On the third day I saw him there (I'm slow),  I became convinced that it was a scam...and I'm a softy, so I got actually scammed the first time. 

What's new in libertarian theory?

I've just finished, sequentially, The Constitution of Liberty, Capitalism and Freedom.  The question now arises, what is new in peoples thinking around libertarianism?  I have a hard time finding topics that weren't covered by either Hayek or Friedman around the middle of last century.  Now, the fact that no one outside the libertarianosphere has actually listened to any of the arguments in the 50-80 years they've been in the public view is a different topic.  But inside libertarianism what's new?

Public choice is clearly among the new libertarian tools.  From public choice has arisen the competing jurisdictions model, pushed by Friedman grand-fils and Romer, as well as the public choice predictioneering of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.  What else has been done?

There's the left-libertarian direction, but my inclination is to say that most of that is simply reversion.  Hayek and Friedman were very aggressively non-conservative, and each spent significant time explaining why the only proper label for themselves was liberal.   Similarly, modernist left-libertarians tweak only mildly the radical libertarianism of  Rothbard (who is also on my reading list), and the 19th century liberals. What have we got that is new?

Corporatism, the integration of business and government (which was once called Fascism), is the enemy.  The only danger to us larger than the threat of corporatists is the threat of do-gooders hoping to protect the children or the future or the environment, and using government power to do so.  But these things have been agreed upon by good-thinking people for at least a half-century. 

Milton on licensure

As I near finishing the book, I get a claim that in retrospect should have been obvious but wasn't. 

Milton Friedman argues that not only has, as everyone knows, medical licensing rather significantly increased the price of medicine in this country by means of restricting access....but rather it has also decreased quality.  The mechanism is that licensure prevents external independent quality analyses from forming, which decreases quality.

The AMA: Worse AND More Expensive.

Follow the Money

For those who prefer to explain things in terms of financial motivations....

John Tierney comments on a London Times story:

The head of the IPCC was lying in order to get money for alarmist Global Warming Predictions.  I guess we have to take most of the researchers taking money for alarmist climate change science of the reliable witnesses list.  

Minimum Wage

David Henderson takes Q&A on the minimum wage, and proceeds to link to another entry in the concise encyclopedia. 

Summary:  Swedish economist with maybe biggest academic study on policy impacts on Races in America says: Minimum Wage, parts of the New Deal, and Labor Unions were massively, directly, and quickly bad for blacks...and at least some of that was why they exist.  My understanding is that minimum wages are still bad for blacks, and especially for low education/experience blacks. 

QoTD2

I get 2, because it's 2sday:

Isegoria links to David Brooks:

Ever since I started covering politics, the Democratic ruling class has been driven by one fantasy: that voters will get so furious at people with M.B.A.’s that they will hand power to people with Ph.D.’s.

Also, Robin Hanson, tongue-in-cheek-tasting-earwax asks:

Why are all those folks, so very concerned that firms with free speech might manipulate shallow voters, so uninterested in these options?

And Megan McArdle on Matt Yglesias's exposition of Green Lantern Theory: 

This is a lesson that Republicans would do well to absorb now, by the way.  If they ever get into office again, it would be nice if they arrived already appreciating that a steely gaze is not a good substitute for a workable policy platform.

QoTD

Paul Rubin, heard by Don Boudreaux:

whenever there’s a corporate scandal, it’s typically blamed on an increase in greed, but when there’s a sex scandal, it’s never blamed on an increase in lust.

 Runner up: Glenn Reynolds, referring to a book, quips:

 If I recall correctly, Dominic Flandry lives in a decadent society where a once-dominant civilization is gradually collapsing as its ruling class shows a lack of cultural self-confidence and a focus on short-term personal gain as opposed to the long-term interests of society. It’s nice to read this sort of escapist fiction. . . .

Channelling Friedman the Eldest

As per my sidebar, I'm reading Capitalism and Freedom.  In that book, the topic of discrimination comes up.  Unsurprisingly, Friedman's line mirrors that of Jane Jacobs.  I'll summarize, but in a Jacobs-ite approach:

The primary Jacobs thesis:
There are 2 basic approaches for ethical systems:
1.  Trader approaches
2.  Protector approaches

Friedman argues that trader approaches (market systems) are the thing that leads best to the disintegration of class/race barriers and discrimination.  Essentially, to the extent that we have systems organized around protector-style systems, they foment ingroup-outgroup behavior.  To the extent that we have systems organized around trades, they create inclusiveness. 

Friedman brings up the fact that you don't even know who grew the wheat that was used in the bread you ate yesterday.  Nor do you know who ground it, or baked it, or drove it to your grocer.  How much more non-discriminatory can you get.  Also...it was only in the markets of Europe that the Jews survived midieval Europe.  In the market, folks care about your prices and quality, not your skin color and religion.  In politics, and other guardian activities, people care a lot about all your personal characteristics. 

Verdict:  If you want non-discrimination...get the government out of more activities.  Pursue free enterprise, eschew government activity and crony capitalism.

Evidence on education

Evidence is beginning to leak in that the original Aretae position that practice (in a feedback/response cycle) is everything may be correct.

Isegoria links to an article which suggests that practicing IQ-related activities that give feedback (games) naturally increases IQ.  Interestingly, working memory games increased working memory, response speed games increased response speed, and likewise with reasoning ability (3 well established factors in IQ).  The article is Newsweek, and not particularly technically/scientifically/IQ literate, but the topic is fascinating.

Alternate explanation: Like all other early-school programs, this is nice, but we have yet to see a early education program whose effects do not fade back to base IQ over short time frames (1-2 years after folks leave the program).

Alternate explanation 2: working memory, reasoning ability, and response speed are simply 3 factors correlated with IQ, not components of IQ.  The fact that we were able to improve specific skills doesn't increase IQ.

Concern:  Most evidence suggests that people are very good at improving narrow skills, but that broad skills are hard to improve.  I worry that this is

I like the primary explanation best: 

• activity, not instruction matters.  
• the activities that work are high feedback activities
  
• skills are almost all practice
• most of practice is motivation and engagement (games are fun)

Of course, this is just my spin on the data...but the above has been my position since I started the blog, with some evidence leading me down a more IQ-focused path.  This at least moderates my unpleasant IQ-ward drift.

QoTD

As often happens, Isegoria finds it in a review of  The Abolition of Britain.

The older cruelty, which took the ugly form of workhouses, shame and stigma, was hard to bear because it required active harshness from the state and from individuals. The new cruelty, which leaves hundreds of thousands of children without a proper family, is imposed through many acts of generosity by the state and by the taxpayers, and through the broad-minded tolerance of individuals and opinion-formers. It is therefore easier to bear in a society which has nationalized its conscience.

The topic is how today's world is not necessarily better than yesterday's along some important dimensions...and is often worse, regardless our feeling better about ourselves.  Clearly a conservative position, but when you get data like this:

The Home Office had just revealed that 20,000 London homes had been broken into in 1964, compared with 5,500 in 1938. (The current total is something like 165,000 a year.)

You have to pause and take stock.  I hear it's a depressing book, and good for conservatives.  I am also sure that it's overstated.  So, it is most likely at least partially fair (accurate to the facts), and I'd like to get a handle on how fair is it.  Are there massive portions of life that are now worse than they once were, but which are whitewashed?  We can safely say that crime has skyrocketed, broken families are much more prevalent, and education sucks much more than it used to.  Poverty is lower, but that's 100% economic growth, not successful poverty programs.  Worth thinking about.

Public Choice

Wow.  It's amazing to me that having read much of Buchanan and Tullock as I have, as well as the other Masonomists, and assorted public-choice types, that I can learn as much as I have from this concise summary.

Favorite line:

Reversing 1964 presidential hopeful Barry Goldwater’s catchphrase, majority-rule elections will present voters with an echo, not a choice.

Argument that Big Government is Bad:

Such “pork barrel” projects are especially likely to gain a representative’s endorsement when they are financed by the taxpayers in general, most of whom reside, and vote, in other districts or states.

This may be the best summary of the way governments really operate, as opposed to the way they ought to operate.  And citing Don Boudreaux:

Public-choice economics [...] uncovers overwhelming evidence that politics, in fact, almost exclusively is about achieving election and re-election.  So to insist that politics should be about something other than what it is really about makes as much sense as insisting, say, that snow should be hot or that donkeys should be bipedal.

Two final thoughts.  First, from the article:

One key conclusion of public choice is that changing the identities of the people who hold public office will not produce major changes in policy outcomes.

 Second...why isn't basic public choice econ part of Moldbug's basic royalist diet?  Seems a much stronger anti-democratic argument than his basic one.

Links

1.  Alex Tabarrok on the left-libertarianosphere's antipathy to the word "Capitalism".  

Summary: what we've had of capitalism since the dawn of the industrial era has been what libertarians like to call Crony Capitalism, Corporatism, or Fascism...all technically correct.  Only in rare cases (the internet) have we seen real good unfettered free markets.  So...let's call capitalism (what we've got) by it's right name, and try to find a new name for what we actually want...the strange, crazy, radical, never before tried idea of free markets. 

2.  Isegoria links and comments on Assistant Village Idiot writing about how academics don't understand, don't appreciate, don't recognize, and don't value business skill.  Quite impressive.  Important bits:
From the AVI:

Really successful business executives are rarely, if ever, one trick ponies. They must not only be successful in whatever their entry level occupation is, otherwise they could never be promoted, but eventually, they must shed whatever self styled profession they had and embrace ‘business”. In many cases, the person we promoted was not the “best” in their group, but probably in the top 5. What they had was an ability to not only learn a new skill, but to fully embrace it.

And:

The last point is that they don’t value experience and the judgment that comes with it.  So, who would you follow into battle, the 30 year veteran or the smartest guy who just graduated from West Point? Where’s the test in that? I would say survival, but they prefer SAT scores.

Long, but Read the whole thing.

How to do vouchers

Education vouchers is a big topic, somewhat debated in the libertarian community, which occasionally crosses over to the conservative community as well.

Rather than discussing pros and cons for vouchers (cons: state in private education), let me address one issue in vouchers.

The proponents of vouchers like them because it lets schools experiment.  In reality, vouchers require that you provide some sort of educational quality...which in real life means standardized testing.  Or at least, I thought it did. 

I suggest that vouchers, if adopted, should be attached only to the requirement that two standardized tests must each be taken on entrance and exit for a school to qualify for the voucher.  One standardized test is by school choice, but it must be used by at least 1000 students, and at least 3 distinct non-affiliated schools.  The other standarized test must be the one specified by the local authorities, and must be common to all public-funds receiving children of a certain age/grade. 

This allows both for a comparison across local districts in terms of both student quality, and instructional quality (exit test score minus entrance test score, with cheating detection via last year's tests).  Students who do not take the tests are not paid for.  There shall furthermore be no requirement that students do well on the tests...just that tests be taken, and the results submitted to whichever agency is providing the vouchers...and the results, searchable by school, demographics, and such are easily accessible.

The problem with schooling is fourfold. 
1. no exit -- vouchers would solve this
2. no innovation -- vouchers would solve this
3. no measurement standards -- my proposal solves this too, but in a market-friendly fashion.
4. measurement standards, such as they exist aren't corrected for IQ, personality, environment.

Other problem:
5. Vouchers create incentives for the state to meddle in private education.  The required publishing of test information is partially meant to forestall this.
6. Most testing regimes test a specific set of skills/attributes, which are NOT what all parents wish their children to learn.  -- Dual tests are meant to solve this.  Waldorf schools can test for expressiveness, for instance, but must also take the standard tests, which show that they are indeed not teaching reading at too young an age.

The publishing of the information should be sufficient, along with vouchers, to allow educated parent choice with measurement.  And that's the kind of market discipline that people like. 

Of course...the often preferred alternative to vouchers is transferable tax credits, thus allowing Google to save on its taxes by sending a thousand kids to private school. 

Robin Hanson again

Unsurprisingly excellent on Citizens United. 

Summary: Look, modern media makes the anti-corporate point silly.  If you want to argue in the modern media context about too much corporate $ making their point of view overly influential, you really ought to be talking about restricting sufferage, because it takes an awful stupid person to be captured by what you're claiming.

Read the whole thing for the complete story.  Well put.

Kling on Huemer on Rand

Arnold Kling says, much better than I ever have, something I've been saying for years and years.  Rand is addictive like heroin for people who are all of:

• a lot smarter than the average bear
  
• non-conforming (even/especially to the non-conformist crowd)
• Low Agreeableness is the Big 5 personality trait
• Geek might be a less nice word.
  
• less social than most

Triangular positives

Rather than extensive comments, let me argue the points for each of my factors.

Libertarianism:

Growth
All the liberal concerns: environmentalism, care for the poor, diversity anti-war,  are a consequence of our being rich. People who are rich have more expansive ethics.  They care more for everything else once they have few material needs.  And the ONLY way you get growth is through market-based innovation.  Heck, even China figured that out.  Government planning and regulation not only limit growth, but they destroy the fundamental human dignity that the liberal program is centered around.  If you want better ethics, more concern for the poor...get richer.  If you want a better life for the poor, get richer.  If you want to get richer, get the state out of  business. 

Freedom
How did the American nation evolve?  Bunch of malcontents left the countries where someone wanted to make rules, and came here to make their own rules.  Rules suck.  The history of the country was very nearly lawless, as HUGE portions of our history were frontiers-based, with no law to speak of.  Things got along awfully well, and from that we built a great country.  Additional rules, piling on by the second are destroying not only our growth, but our human spirit.  The individual, trying his own thing, against the community's better judgement, and risking his self for a better life is a (the?) core value for Americans.

Conservativism:
Carefulness
We got here somehow.  Here, now is better than anywhere else, anywhen else, ever in human history.  Don't do stupid shit and mess it up.  I don't know exactly what got us here, and what was unnecessary, and what would have made it worse.  Your pointy head doesn't know either.  So work really hard to not break shit, and not only will we stay good, we'll keep getting better.  Stupid recent stuff seems to have made it worse.  Let's go back a bit to before that stupid stuff. 

Tradition
People are not basically good.  Human beings are only a step away from the animals, and it is very hard to stay away from the animals.  Only tradition, and a few specific Protestant/Jewish/Confucian traditions have been shown to successfully and over time keep people well away from their animalisms.  It is very important not to lose the human distinctiveness...and the only way we know to keep this is by following tradition.


Progressivism:
concern for the weak
This is what make us human.  Without that, we are less than human. Humans are fundamentally social animals, and care for other people is central to the human experience.  Not just Kin, either, but those who are at least semi-strangers.  It is deeply unfair to allow those human beings who happen to have been born without those sets of attributes that are valued in a modern economy to suffer and starve.  Rather, we all should join together and take care of them.

diversity matters. 
Without diversity, we end up with a much narrower world.  Usually, we are unable to see our own cultural blinders, and so it is worthwhile, for anyone pushing for the good, to include folks from different backgrounds.  And which backgrounds will help to understand a problem best are not obvious.  While intelligence matters some, experiences matter as well, and the Sotomayer-ish claim about Wise Latinas is not entirely out of line.  A Puerto-Rican from New York City may well have relevantly different experiences than a black man from Chicago, a poor Chinese dude from Houston, or a whilte lesbian from Portland.  We don't know which differences will help a group solve a problem...and so we ought to be intentionally inclusive.  When we are without Javanese or Slavs, we should try to include them when feasible.   Also, Darius's experiment, reported in Herodotus, wherein the Greeks are asked to eat their dead fathers, should remind us that much tradition is ONLY custom...and that one approach is no better than the other.  (yes, yes,  Kuru, I know).

Am I fair?

Again, against Moldbug

Moldbug cites, and I think they are core to his philosophy, 2 points in his followup to the Hanson debate.

1. Rather characteristically, he quotes Carlyle, cribbed from here: 

'If of ten men, nine are recognizable as fools, which is a common calculation,' says our Intermittent Friend, 'how in the name of wonder will you ever get a ballotbox to grind you out a wisdom from the votes of these ten men? Never by any conceivable ballotbox, nor by all the machinery in Bromwicham or out of it, it will you attain such a result. Not by any method under Heaven, except by suppressing, and in some good way reducing to zero, nine of those votes, can wisdom ever issue from your ten.'

2.  He also asserts: 

It's unclear, however, that anyone in the 21st century knows how to govern well. 

The first issue is the classic smart-person failure.  Except in some cases (see Bryan Caplan), errors cancel out.  Because real problems are hard, and because no one can hold enough in their head to solve them, aggregation in many cases produces better results than any single person's calculations.   Yes, I read the rest of the post, where he talks about selection pressure on the voters.  Regardless the fact that it doesn't work terribly well in software/engineering...in less well understood fields (psychology, social dynamics, business), it is a well-established principle that garnering addition input (even from folks not normally thought to be the brightest bulbs in the chandelier) improves decision quality.  The best manufacturing company on the planet has a "suggestion box" as a MAJOR component of it's 40-years and running quality initiative.  Getting input from all sources, and using the input even from the dumb grunt on the line is a major factor in business and engineering improvement at this point.  As such...the Carlyle quote runs into reality and comes up false.

The second issue, knowing how to govern well...and against which he stacks further results:

"...the European writers of the Victorian era, whose aristocratic governments worked much better than ours..."

I will have to take exception here for simply the notion...of course the governments made fewer large mistakes.  So too does the kitten crush fewer trees than the Elephant.  When a government siphons off 25%+ of a $15 Trillion Economy, you can (and necessarily will) get a lot bigger problems than you get with a 5% siphoning of a $10 Billion economy.

But back to the issue:

1. We know that Micro-econ works.
2. We know that we have poor incentives to know what works.
3. We know, as per Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, that both large selectorates and small selectorates suffer from governmental self-enrichment at the expense of the populace, but that the specific modes of failure are different.
4. We know that a huge portion of any human activity is a monkey dance, and that seemingly the only way out is to invoke the god that is Bayes, and remove the human decision-making apparatus, though not the human knowledge.
5. We know that Moldbug wishes to use (necessarily) biased historians to denigrate a system that pushes in the correct direction on all 4 of the above points. 

Vitamin D

Is causing problems (HT: Instapundit)

Too much time inside, on computers, not out in the sun is causing problems.  And worse, the darker your skin. 

QoTD

After much admonishment over my multiple recent Quotes of The Day plural, I looked it up.  Apparently acronym plurals have a lot of variety, and Qs oTD is legitimate, while QoTDs is as well.  The difficulty comes primarily when you mentally expand the acronym.

Regardless that, for today, there's just one:

"If you're like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people" -- Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

Cited in my latest read, by Stanovich.

Did I talk about Hubris?

I'm now going to criticize a Nobel-prize winning economist on simple economics....

Robert Solow, in TNR, agrees somewhat with  John Cassidy's new pro-regulation anti-market-evangelist book

Serious evaluation of the capacities and the failures of idealized market economies, and of the circumstances that tend to lead them in one direction or the other, is useful work, given that market economies of one kind or another are all that we are likely to experience. Nor is that kind of work necessarily auto-intoxicating: it does not automatically infect those who do it with some blind infatuation with “free markets.” In fact, the most profound inquirers into the properties of market systems have not been free marketeers, not in this sloganeering sense. One of them remarked to me that his goal in pursuing this trail has been to show just how special and stringent the assumptions are that are required to make the Invisible Hand work well.

The market evangelists, who tend to claim more for unregulated markets than solid theory can justify, are ideologically motivated. They dislike and distrust governments so much that they overlook the exceptions and the implausible assumptions, and simply propose the blanket principle that the market knows best. What is improper in this manner of argument is the frequent casual hint that it is authorized by economic theory. Nothing so general is ever authorized by economic theory.

Here he paints a straw man, that has recently been painted in the comments on this blog.  In order to justify government regulation, one needs 4 steps, not just the 1 that he insists on above.

1.  Identify market failure
2.  Hopefully, identify that the market failure was caused by too little regulation rather than too much (not likely, but possible, I suppose -- how much of the crisis was driven by sub-prime loans tranches?  Why didn't sub-prime loan tranches exist, for instance, before Congress started aggressively pushing low-income, zero down, credit-questionable house-ownership [especially low-income minorities] , backed by a litigoius ACORN.)
3.  Identify a clear course of action that would correct market failure (hard to impossible)
4.  Demonstrate that the legislation required could be passed by the congress we have, without causing more problems than it solves (Good luck -- see health care bill monstrosities.).

Treating market evangelists as the narrow thinking ones is so 1980s.  Now it's the government-evangelists who think that 1 of 4 logically necessary steps justifies regulation.

Also, earlier in the article, Solow says:

The informational requirements for the validity of the Invisible Hand Theorem are considerable. All buyers and sellers must have access to the same information, preferably complete information, and they must be able to process the relevant information, and they must be willing and able to behave rationally in the light of it.

This also is at least 10 years out of date.  Vernon Smith, a more recently Nobel Prize winning economist, won his prize primarily for experimental economics which has basically demolished the complete identical information requirements.  Markets work really well with incomplete, unevenly distributed information.

Apart from the two under-informed or intentionally mis-emphasized points, though, the article is pretty good, for a review of a book blaming significant government failures on unrestricted capitalism.

UPDATE:
I forgot to thank Tyler Cowen for the link

How do Democrats win Presidencies

Quick run backwards to the war.

Obama
Bush II
Clinton I
Bush I
Reagan
Carter
Nixon->Ford
JFK->LBJ
Eisenhower
Truman

FDR

Last effective left-leaning democrat was LBJ (?) and that spawned a republican backlash that lasted years.  heck...the backlash lasted longer than the Nixon backlash.

Kennedy succeeded on tax cuts and national greatness programs, and anti-Communist combativeness.
Carter succeeded on not much, but on deregulation.
Clinton succeeded on welfare reform, balanced budgets, and air-striking small non-threatening countries.

Effectively...the Democrats have done well ONLY when pushing conservative-ish positions.  Obama needs Clintonian triangulation or Carter-ish obsolescence.

Incidentally, excepting Reagan, I think this is also true of Republicans.  The more successful Republican presidents were Democrat-light on most topics (Nixon, Bush I & II ). 

On racists (again)

So why the focus on cognitive differences between races, genders, etc.

My current guess is that a lot of people are talking about how things need to be changed to make things more fair for people not like me.  That is a net cost to me (and many of my friends).  In particular, with myself being (kinda) in the corporate education field, I am especially sensitive to pro-affirmative action stuff...even though it will benefit my family massively ( all my kids are nominally black, and my business is black-woman-owned :) ).

So when people say we need to make strides to equalize women's pay (79cents on the dollar)...I get annoyed.  If you correct for hours of lifetime employment and specific career  (neurosurgeon vs. pediatrician), the difference disappears altogether.

If people say black people get paid less...I get annoyed.  Once you correct for IQ, there's parity, with high-IQ and college-degreed blacks making MORE than the equivalent whites.

If people say we need more women as Math/Physics/Engineering professors at Harvard and CEOs, I go look up numbers on IQ standard deviations and show that, correcting for both aptitude and interest, there's something like a NATURAL 14:1 ratio favoring the men in top tier Math departments.  Then I look up numbers on how many hours per week are worked, and discover (shockingly) that men are overwhelmingly more likely to put in the 100 hour weeks that constitute good CEO behavior (some study basically said ... forgot which one ... best predictor of CEO success is the boring, dilligence of an workaholic accountant)

Is there discrimination in the country?  Absolutely.  In particular, it's horrible in Chicago, and wonderfully missing in Houston.  Is there sexism and misogyny all over?  Yes.  Roissy's is a good place to look for that stuff.  Is there anti-Muslim hatred in the country?  For sure. However, anti-white, anti-Christian and anti-Semitic, and anti-male are acceptable public positions, while the public discourse STRONGLY condemns racist, anti-islamic, or misogynist discourse, unless it's spoken by a Democratic Senator.

Hipocracy of that sort is rather jarring to me.  While I recognize the right/obligation of any civilized society to poke fun especially at it's elites, this society is not caste-based.  Low-income whites are MORE hurt by policies because low-income blacks are LESS hurt (either you treat them equally, or you don't).  Low income men (generally the lowest income bracket, as men dominate both the low and the high ends of the IQ scale) are discriminated against as men, in favor of women, who on the low end are relatively better off.

I hate a deal that favors a white guy over a black girl for a job they are both equally qualified to do (Same relevant aptitudes [IQ, conscientiousness esp.], same years of experience, same amount of hours worked both in general and at this type of job).  I hate, as much, a deal that favors the black girl. 

Campaign Finance

Normal libertarians should tend to like today's Supreme Court ruling:

Political speech is constitutionally protected speech...at least in more cases than current law allows.  For corporations in particular today.  Given that this was something like HALF the purpose of the 1st amendment, this is basically a good thing.  Also, it further disintermediates politics.  While once the purview of the official, 95% Democrat media, there is now a much smaller advantage to being a Democrat-ic TV-station owner or actor or reporter, at least in terms of the legality of airing political views near an election. 

Other more radical persons (myself and Robert Reich) might prefer to disallow corporations as "persons" under the law, but that wasn't up for review.

QoTDs

From Stanovich's book:

In effect, all animals are under stringent selection pressure to be as stupid as they can get away with -- Richardson & Boyd, Not By Genes Alone, 2005

And:

The rule that human beings seem to follow is to engage the brain only when all else fails -- and usually not even then. -- David Hull, Science and Selection, 2001

The first quote suggests strongly that my obsession with error is required of someone who takes evolution seriously.

Visions of Capitalism

Roderick Long's Cato/Rand response, already linked once, reminds me that I haven't posted on the topic of conflicting visions of Capitalism yet.

According to the clerisy (Deirdre McCloskey's word for the wordsmiths of the bourgeoisie...I love it), Capitalism is best exemplified by Rockefeller, Carnegie, Worldcom, Enron, Union Carbide India, and Bernie Madoff.  Rich people screwing the rest of us to get even richer. 

According to one branch of libertarians and conservatives, Rockefeller and Carnegie were heroes, and/or inaccurately portrayed and the others were fraudulent criminals who might ought to be shot.

According to other libertarians, Rockefeller and Carnegie were corporatists (now that we aren't supposed to call them the literally correct term fascist), who wanted a government that supported it's favorite businesses, and squelched competition.  The big 3 automakers are massive beneficiaries of corporatist policies as well, even well before the bailouts...and now 2/3 are socialist enterprises. Capitalists are those such as WalMart, Microsoft, and Home Depot, and IBM and Boeing...companies who have taken over the world by means of doing something better.

According to a third set of libertarians...Walmart and Microsoft and such are MASSIVE beneficiaries of government action supporting their pseudo-monopolies.  Walmart and Home Depot from massive transportation subsidies, and tax-breaks.  Microsoft from IP laws hugely favoring big IT firms.  Both of which are firm government actions.  IBM and Boeing are significant for the amount of government business it gets.   Capitalism is best exemplified by companies such as Google, Apple, REI, and Whole Foods, each of whom delivers products that is MUCH in demand, and which were not delivered well before the advent of the respective large company.

Still others point at the difficulty of scaling operations, and think (perhaps fairly) that the only way even the above companies succeed is through implicit government cheating.  How does a 5-person Mom-n-Pop shop live through the regulatory nightmare that is US auto-making, even if they can find a customer base.  Hell, how do they handle the software business without a platoon of lawyers.  Also...they might drift marxist in the dehumanizing conditions of wage-work.

When libertarians say capitalism...they almost universally think they're talking about the 3rd or 4th version of capitalism...where the legal system, and government are not massively favoring companies through various shenanigans.  In reality, as Dr. Long pointed out, the 4 versions of capitalism get mixed up a lot.

IMO, careful libertarians defend small businesses, and perhaps Google/Apple/REI.  To us...capitalism is about voluntary trades between someone who made something and someone who wanted it...or someone who needed additional hands and someone who needed money. 

The big difference between the libertarian and the progressive is that the progressive sees Microsoft's semi-monopoly, or Walmart's eternal expansion and says..."government should fix it," while the libertarian might suggest that the government just stop propping up the monopoly, or giving special favors. 

So...when talking capitalism to people, especially in the libertarian-sphere it might be useful to talk about what vision of capitalism each is using.  And perhaps to pick different words to facilitate communication. 

Another Link

David Henderson points out the difference between what the politicians want and what the people want" 

...Mitch McConnell, the minority leader in the U.S. Senate, had made it easier for Harry Reid to pass the ugly Senate health care bill

I would NEVER have gotten these specifics without help.  Thanks, David.

QoTD

From Kevin Carson (HT: Roderick Long):

And more often than not, you find the judgment of the people making the rules is inferior to that of the people in direct contact with the situation.

And 

No matter how smart the people in charge are, they are systematically stupid in their organizational roles, because of the dynamics of information flow in hierarchies (as described by Robert Anton Wilson, for example).

And

Organizations are pyramids, and the people at the tops of the pyramids tend to communicate much more effectively with each other than they do with those at the bottoms of their own respective pyramids.  That means that most organizations are riddled with “best practices” based almost entirely on feedback about how well they worked from people at the tops of the other pyramids.  And those latter people have almost no valid knowledge of how the policies actually worked in their own organizations.

  Dang...I can't summarize Kevin.  Go read the whole thing.  It's worth it.

Links

Robin Hanson and Scott Sumner have important things to say today.

1.  USA economy is suffering from too-big-ness. 
2.  You think about your opinions too much and the rest of the world's opinions not enough.

You guess who said what.

Consequences

Recent posts, such as these ones, have put forth a pretty stable, simple view of the world:

1. We make lots of mistakes because we have monkey-brains and systems evolve (static pictures exist only in the short term.
   
2. Experience, Trial + Error, and Economic Growth are the only decent ways forward.

The more I think in terms of my principles...the more I find myself drifting into a profoundly conservative/engineering point of view.  Given high enough likelihood of mistake...go with stable, tested solutions that are known to work...and run small experiments to see if you can improve things.  NEVER run large-scale experiments.  Also...when you don't know...use a model you know works.

The only things saving me from going all conservative-intellectual on y'all is a reasonable picture of history ( Gonick, Moldbug, Gatto, Hayek, and Nock), and the fact that we have seen massive successes for Billions of people since somewhere near 1800. 

On the other hand, I'm reading Hayek now, and that's keeping me centered a bit.

And I'm reading McCloskey, which is pulling me towards the liberal vision.

And I read the intro to Kling+Schultz, which pulled me back hard libertarian.

Very very interesting to watch such strong arguments on each side of the spectrum all pulling.  And my response is to become more passionate about all 3 positions. 

The libertarian vision of decentralized markets being THE force for growth is the most important idea in politics.  Growth wins, innovation gives growth, governments destroy innovation by regulations and war.

The conservative vision of humans as deeply flawed creatures, with lots of safeguards and traditions existing to prevent us from being atrociously stupid is tremendously compelling.  Don't fix it, even if it's a little bit broke is an awfully strong position. 

The liberal vision of human progress and care for the poor is also magnificent.  Diversity is a REAL value.  Care for other people/the weak may well be our best argument for society at all.

The modern world is fundamentally a blend of all 3 of these forces.
We couldn't have gotten here without (a) the traditions that kept life stable, (b) the market-created growth, and (c) the concern for the poor and weak and against unjust power that drove the initial unions, the abolitionists, the civil rights movement, and the anti-war movements of the 60's and 00's.  Hell, Lee Kuan Yew began as a full-on socialist, and Deng Xiaoping started as a Communist. 

I think the partisans of all 3 sides fail to see that all three paths were essential to our current situation...and that all 3 paths are essential moving forward. 

QoTD

The SF Chronicle (HT: Instapundit) has a fabulous quote in an article on the Massachussettes  :-)  race:

For Boxer, a favorite Republican target, a GOP win in Massachusetts would be a particularly dark sign representing "not just the canary in the coal mine," said Wade Randlett, a leading Silicon Valley fundraiser for Obama. "It's the flock of dead ravens landing on the lawn."

Evolutionary rapidity

This bit on silver foxes calls out the necessary timeframes for evolution to occur (how long it ACTUALLY took).  30 generations to move from normal skittish aggressive foxes to fully domesticated.  Of course, given the source, there's some HBD content at the bottom....but think about it.  In the Evolutionarily Stable Environment, the human generation-length is about 15-20 years.  450 years, then, to massively impact a pyschological/emotional trait.  This even puts Gregory Clark in his Englander evolution from 1200 to 1800 in highly credible territory.  Perhaps we didn't get 5-sigma differences in time-preference, IQ and merchant behaviors like they did with the foxes in 30 generations (100% eugenics), but even a 2-sigma shift due to a substantial advantage in rich-folks breeding would be substantial.

Haitiblogging

Rather than his normal quippery, Tyler Cowen dives in for real on Haiti.  His formidable intellect is as on display in the first post as I've seen it in a while.

More near Jacobs

Since I'm writing about Jane Jacobs...

I think it's important to note that folks who believe in the guardian ethic, but who are revolutionaries (against the current guardians) should think of business-folks as having taken their money from others.  That's all guardians can do. 

Rand and Jacobs

I just read, courtesy of Dr. Long, a piece at Cato Unbound by Douglas Rasmussen, who was one of the earliest academic philosophers to promote the Randian view (I read his academic Randist stuff in the early 90s). 

In it, he looks at why the resurgence of Rand-interest in the Obama era.

He poses 6 questions, but they're each multipart questions and each part can (and has) served as fertile ground for MANY doctoral theses and other academic papers.  So, unlike with Scott's questions, I will not pretend to be able to answer them. 

ON the other hand...I think I can give an explanation of Randian popularity.  My flow:

1. Ethics are (contra Rand) ground-rules for social interaction based on fear of ostracism.  Prudence alone (and game theory) buys you Randian non-coercive self-interest.  "By my life and my love of it" and all that.
   
2. Jacobs is basically correct about ethics.  There are 2 foundations: guardian ethics, and trader ethics.  
3. People are not convinced by arguments, but by importance-shifting, which is mostly emotional.
4. Rand wrote the books that emotionally support the importance of trader ethics.  Her intelligence and background as a screenwriter made her uniquely suited for this role.  No one else has come close.  Among her strongest points are her female view of romance, which pulls in the female reader, and her great-smart non-conformist view which pulls the newly emancipated geek.
   
5. Rand is, very importantly, not an apologist for corporatist policy.  Businesspersons that lose their principles (or are in bed with the government) are among her worst villains.  Jim Taggart and Peter Keating may not be Toohey, Mouch or Stadler, but they're awful bad.
6. The Obama-Reid-Pelosi axis seems awfully tone-deaf to appearances of government privilege and favoritism.  This makes Rand's (I think correct) characterization of most government as about privilege and pull hard to ignore. 
   

8 Questions from Scott

Scott Sumner offhandedly asks "8 unanswerable questions" along the way to his normal excellence on Macro.
Given my recent post on  humility, I really ought to stay away, but I can't.

1. Is the EMH true? 
• That whole truth thing.  Given nearly equal players, doesn't this come close to necessarily true?  I'm personally closer to strong Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH) than non-EMH.
  
2. Free will or determinism?
• Compatibilism.  Only sane answer.
  
3. Poor countries; is it bad policies or bad culture?
• More fundamentally, nature or nurture?  Both, with a complex relationship.
  
4. Do we know the Truth about reality, or do we merely regard things as true? 
• Bad question.  The terms reality and truth only confuse folks.  We have statistical capabilities to predict what happens next in our sensory frame.    Talking about "reality" or "truth" only gives room for mystics to stick a toe in the door.  Talk about predictive capacity, and the question poofs, like Descartes in that joke: "I think not".
  
5. Would economic problem X have been prevented by better regulation?
• Misleading question.  Could we, given political realities, gotten regulations that led to results that were overall (after inevitable tradeoffs + political horse-trading) better than what we got.  Public choice question #1.  
  
6. Are murder, rape and slavery objectively evil, or do we regard them as evil?
• This comes from thinking we know what we're talking about when we say "evil".  If you do know (can reduce to something you can touch),  the question is easy.  If you don't know (real life), the question is hard. Easier to ask...WTF is ethics anyhow?  As per a recent post, I'm leaning towards "fear of community disapproval".  David Schmitdz is awfully good here as a foundationalist (my 2nd favorite position).  I don't buy the standard atheist-libertarian ethical intuitionism. 
  
7. Can improved foreign aid significantly affect long run economic growth?
• Good question.  I don't know.  BBdM says that in cases where the selectorate is small, the answer is basically no.  Actually...the answer is that it doesn't have a positive impact.  Negative is certainly possible.  Public choice question #2    
8. The universe’s deepest structure:  pure mathematics, or  . . .  turtles all the way down?
•  Assumes that I'm wrong on topic #4.  Much simpler to ignore truth silliness.  So long as you buy my (and the logical positivists) answer to #4...Math is the best predictive framework we have.  "Ding an sich" is inherently unknowable.
  

Go realist-empiricist-evolutionist, and almost all of this falls out.

Does Caplan read Bujold?

Bryan discusses technology before seen only in science fiction.  Life is getting interesting.

The Political Triangle again

Kling's triangle, not talked about recently on this blog, is back in focus due to my reading of Hayek and McCloskey.

I am back to attempting to understand what the positions are. 

I have previously argued that the Klingian triangle is best understood by: 3 words:
Tradition, Equality, and Freedom.  I don't really like the word tradition here...but I don't have something better.  Stability, The Current Good, ... something like that, along with tradition.  I'll use "stability" for now.

The libertarian believes in violating equality and stability in order to improve freedom.
The conservative believes in violating equality and freedom in order to improve stability.
The progressive believes in violating stability and freedom in order to improve equality.

I also once argued that the 3 positions might best be understood by their respective views on evil:

The libertarian believes that EVIL is mostly about some people using force on other people.
The conservative believes that EVIL is mostly about breaking the current working social compact.
The progressive believes that EVIL is mostly about unfairness to the weak (poor, disabled, minority).

Policy implications for the 3 views are rather stark, but I also believe that they are massively distorted by the need that politicians have to make themselves central to the discussion.

On the other hand...I am starting to become convinced that Arnold was right, and I wrong.  It seems as if there really is a strong elitist trend in progressivism.  Rather than just being about unfairness to the weak, I am starting to conclude that progressivism is actually diametrically opposed to libertarianism in that the worldview not only claims that equality is good, and unfairness is evil, but also insists that experts are part of the solution.

Is this a logically necessary consequence of the notion of good and evil they have?
Is this a psychologically necessary consequence (if things are bad, and unchangeable, that sucks)?
Is this a consequence of liberalism's love affair with large-government solutions, and politicians...and therefore separable?

I still wish to think that the progressive position is not ignorant of the skeptics.  Hume is the font from which modern philosophy flows.  Plato's vision of Socrates is the core of the liberal ideal.  And yet, the Socratic line: I know only that I know nothing...and the Humean universal solvent of doubt seem to do nothing to the certainty felt by progressives as to their being right, and their solutions being workable. 

Or is there an even better way to understand this?

Is the progressive yearning to right unfairness combined with the very human tendency to over-rate oneself, and the fact that in the real world, Ivy tower thinkers are poorly respected? 

If I am correct...the tendency to believe experts result simply from

1. The world is apparently run by people unqualified to be running the world (Bankers, Merchants, Gates-like Computer Programmers, but mostly uncouth businessfolks)?
2. The fact that those people SHOULD be lower-status than the thinkers ( esp. the progressive doing this thought process)
3. Therefore, Experts (like me) should be in charge of running the world?
4. Furthermore, we could certainly do better than what we've got?
   

This set of beliefs is certainly present in most of the liberals I know personally....and that would leave the core of liberalism as desire to protect the oppressed.  However, in this case, good economic education would cure most of their policy problems. 

QoTD

Will Wilkinson is admirably elitist as usual:

Indeed, it is the pantswetting public’s “Do something! Anything!” attitude to which we owe our political ill fortune.

State's rights

I suppose I can't say that I don't understand it...but it seems to me that it's just a good idea.

The single best thing we could (semi-logically possible) do with the US System of government is to move back towards a state's rights model.

I like that the citizens of Texas have an approach to public safety that involves many people being armed all the time.  I like that California has an approach to personal expression that makes discrimination by color of hair (pink) and number of piercings highly frowned upon.  I like that Massachussets tried a public health plan (though it appears to have failed badly).  I like that Nevada has open gambling.  I just wish we had more of that.

People are wrong a lot.  About just about everything.  As such, in order to get better, we need more experiments going.  One of the most fascinating arguments in the first tenth of Deirdre McCloskey's new book is her line that Europe conquered the world for 1 reason....the state was constrained by other nearby states, that dissidents and merchants could escape to , and therefore the state could not successfully choke off growth like it did everywhere else in human history.  Yeah, it's the Romer/Friedman/Moldbug argument, but it's good.

Why isn't there then more promotion of state's rights?  Certainly the Californians are going to be tremendously unhappy with Obamacare if it prohibits federal funding of abortion.  Certainly the Texans are going to be tremendously unhappy with Obamacare if it requires them to have insurance.  Why don't we let California build it's own plan, and Texas build its own plan (or lack thereof).  Heck, why don't we let California have social services at a level that is 2000% of Texas's level, and let them run their own tax regimes (while pruning the Fed's regime).  Indeed, on almost every issue, I find very little reason to be doing things at a national level...except if what you want is to concentrate power where corporate / elite interests can grab it easily.

California could get gay marriage, and Texas could not care.  Texas could mandate firearm ownership, and the Californians could not care.  Vermont could mandate gay marriage and firearms ownership, and no one else would mind.  Seems win win for everyone...except the busibodies who want to tell everyone else what to do.  And anyone who's invested in not seeing the differences between things working well and not.

Come on...there has to be some non-cynical reason to not do this.

Hayek, the whole triangle

A while back, there was a big hullabaloo about Bryan's off-hand quip that everything Hayek had to say that was new and original could go in 5 blog posts.

That may or may not be true.  I am nowhere near the idea-historian that Caplan is.  However, I've been reading The Constitution of Liberty recently, and my impression of Hayek is rather different than Bryan's.

I read Hayek as being a pre-modern brilliant thinker.  As I read his book, I notice that basically every chapter in his book has been expanded into multiple book-length treatises in the time since he wrote it.  Perhaps as an idea-historian, all these chapters are simply ideas presented elsewhere, but to see them all in one place is rather eye-opening, and validates the number of other thinkers who reference Hayek as a major factor behind their thinking.

However, I find in Hayek a strange blend of different positions that is almost unheard of today, except in odd folks like McCloskey, Cowen, Kling, Wilkinson, and myself.  Hayek, like many 19th century "liberals", held a position that was between Kling's 3 major political positions of today.  He was libertarian insofar as he was an economist, and recognized that the state did lots of bad things.  He was a conservative insofar as he saw unintended consequences, and he wished to be very circumspect in adopting new approaches.  And he was a liberal insofar as his concern for the poor and weak led him to wish for interventions (government even) to improve their lives. 

This position appears to have no place in modern politics.  But it is nonetheless the clear position of Hayek, and the position of the other thinkers I mentioned.  Progressive concern for the weak, Conservative expectation of bad unintended consequences, and libertarian analysis of the evils of the state.  Does it lead to an easy solution?  No.  Does it lead to a place where very few people like your position?  Certainly.