Nuclear Meltdown -- Charlotte Hays, on the new IWF blog, wonders whether killer moms are a consequence of the erosion of family values. Listen:
With regard to Amanda Hamm, the latest mother to drown her children, the network news last night made a lot of the point that mothers who kill their children are more common than we think. But isn’t it really *moms who have boyfriends* who kill their children? In the case of the deaths of Hamm’s three children, aged 23 months to six, boyfriend Maurice Lagrone Jr. has also been charged. They are eligible for the death penalty if convicted. I hate to say it, but: Couldn’t the spate of killer moms have something to do with the dissolution of the two-parent family?
Well, nice. First, is a spate really a spate, or did the press just happen on several provocative stories? And is a spate a trend? Are MORE kids being killed by their moms now than under other family arrangements? Are more kids killed in Western two-parent households than in EVEN MORE TRADITIONAL extended families? (It's always interesting to note when one commences standing athwart history...]
Anyway, WHO CARES! Anything to keep the damn fags from getting hitched!!!
Blogroll -- I've finally updated my blogroll. I've rectified some unconscionable omissions of friends, and removed a few links pointing to nothingmuchville.
Plenitude, Alienation, and Leisure -- I just ran across this great little essay by Don Boudreaux on his Mason homepage. I remember when I first grasped Don's lesson. It was some time in my sophomore year of college. The lesson? That I am unfathomably wealthy, due to no special effort on my part, just in virtue of the economic system I am embedded in. Once this really sinks in--once one really grasps the truth of it--your intuitions about the world are forever rewired.
Recently, the fact of our astonishing wealth has led me to the belief that Americans border on the pathological in our work habits. No doubt many people really find deep satisfaction in their jobs, so they work... a lot. But many if not most people really despise their jobs. So why in a society of plenitude do people insist on working so much? If offered the choice between a 40 hour/week job paying $60,000, and a 20 hour/week job paying $30,000, I would without hesitation choose the latter. I'd much prefer to have an extra thousand hours per year in which to read, write, think, create, or whatever, than an extra 30 grand. Because Don's right, I can live like a king on 30 grand. And the difference in quality of life between 30 and 60 grand is ALMOST NOTHING. I'm even pretty sure I could do fairly princely on 20G, in most of the country.
Now, my preferences are my preferences. But I really do wonder why more people don't share them. My thinking has led me to two main hypotheses, both of fairly leftist provenance.
First is that marketing and advertising induces "false" desires. I think this is fairly plausible. When I say that people can have false desires, I don't mean that people don't REALLY desire a plasma TV, or that they don't actually find satisfaction in having one. I mean a desire the satisfaction of which really doesn't connect in any serious way with one's structure of ends. The time and money could have been better spent actually realizing more fundamental ends--the ones that confer deeper and more satisfying meaning and value on one's life. The $2000 TV gets you almost nothing over and above the $99 version. This is not a complaint against Madison Ave or the Sony corporation. They do what they do, and we mostly benefit from it. But in some ways we don't. It's up to us, though.
Second is that people have unreasonable relative preferences. We don't want our social peers to be or appear "better off" than we are. So if Ralph has a plasma TV, then I need one too. I constantly feel the pull of this. I have a pretty strong desire to buy stylish and expensive clothes in order to send social signals about my taste and means. I would like a nicer, newer car, even though the gross functional difference between Bucephalus, my 1996 Civic, and an Audi TT is almost totally negligible (even though the difference in price is close to a year's wages.) But when I think about it, I can't imagine how cutting a dashing figure in bespoke threads, or creeping down U St in a trick ride would get me any closer to any of the goals I really care about. I would also very much like to be famous. But the benefits of fame are questionable. For some probably evolutionary reason I have a strong urge to send signals of my relative affluence and prestige. But it doesn't get me anywhere, other than satisfying my urge to send signals of my relative affluence and prestige. So shouldn't we resist?
Now, as much as I would like everyone to be happy, I really don't want everyone to immunize themselves against false desire and relative preferences, readjust their baseline of satisfaction, and start working part-time. It's really great to free ride off the crazed industry of others. And it's only going to get better. I like to read blogs. I get a lot out of it. But I sure don't pay a cent for it (other than for the computer and internet connection). And people have been driving themselves nuts trying to figure out how to get paid for it, how to internalize all that value they're just giving away. But I think technology's going to keep making it harder. As things get cheaper and cheaper, the cost of devising mechanisms for charging for everything just won't be worth it. So more and more value just keeps spilling out, free for the taking. And we happy few with a preference for leisure will just mop up. So please, do keep up the fifty hour weeks. I'm counting on you.
The First Amendment Loophole -- Julian sensibly argues for limiting the First Amendment to the protection of porn, and shutting down all that noisome political speech altogether. Funny, cutting piece.
The Hierarchy of Public Goods -- Mainstream economic theory just assumes a market and just assumes a state that can correct market failures and provide for public goods. But the world doesn't work this way, and it's a problem that some economists think it does.
There are always markets of some sort or other. But they're fairly primitive and limited except under pretty special conditions. And there's not always an agency that can provide public goods through a system of public finance. Most places try to set one up, but it often doesn't work because people don't like to pay taxes, and the people who are supposed to collect them end up stealing the money, or the people running the state steal the money and buy themselves palaces, or warehouses of rocket propelled grenades, instead of building a sewage system like they said they would.
If G is a public good, and M is a mechanism for providing G, then M is a sort of public good, too, and so are the conditions for the functioning of M. If M requires tax compliance, and non-predation and non-corruption by agents of the state, then those things are what we might call higher order public goods. And we get these things by getting even higher order goods, like a certain socially prevalent level of trust, a not-too-high discount rate on future value, and the internalization of certain kinds of social norms. If we think of THESE things as higher order, and logically prior, kinds of public goods, then we'll get over thinking of public goods as things that states provide. For in order for states to provide anything other than abuse, these things have to already be in place. We'll also get over thinking of public goods as things that markets can provide better than states, because these are precisely the sorts of things that have to be in place in order for markets to work in anything other than a very limited and atrophied way. In order for markets to do much by way of providing lighthouses, to take a famous example, the market has to be developed enough to coordinate complex enforceable agreements. Getting to that point is itself a big achievement.
We need to get over stipulating ideal markets and ideal states, and work harder at understanding how even partially functional markets and states get to be partially functional, as opposed to fully non-functional, in the first place. How do higher order public goods like prosperity-conducive belief systems and social norms ever get going? How can you ever get a predation-limiting constitution that people don't just ignore?
e-mail: flybottle -at- willwilkinson -dot- net
