I’m proud to report that rent-seeking entrepreneur Matthew Lesko is sitting on a couch about seven feet behind me. Wearing the question mark suit, as seen on TV!

I see that I’m the Adam Smith Institute blog of the week. Cool. Thanks Alex!

Consider giving to this worthwhile cause. Tim Sandefur has information, and a stirring quote from Allan Kor’s great essay “Can There be an ‘After Socialism’.”

Wednesday’s TCS piece on the desert seems to be getting around and eliciting some useful discussion. Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Betram takes me to task for (1) writing for TCS and (2) misrepresenting Rawls. There’s good debate in the comments.

Let me say that I’m very flattered that Chris thinks I am a mind of sufficient quality to lend what he takes to be undeserved intellectual legitimacy to TCS’s enterprise.

This very fact [that WW has a column up at TCS] is regrettable, since Wilkinson is smarter, saner, and more interesting that the average TCS columnist and hence will serve to cover-up — somewhat — the nakedness of this astroturf operation.

And then again:

One of the functions of columns at TechCentralStation is to pander to the psychological needs of a certain stratum of society — gas-guzzling SUV? No need to feel guilty, global warming is a myth ! — but such pandering would be rather unseemly coming from a political philosopher of Wilkinson’s ability, and I’m sure it wasn’t what he intended.

I’m touched (not joking) by Chris’s charitable estimation of my abilities, but, of course, I’m not thrilled to be pegged as a dupe and a shill. And, as they say, “some of my best friends” write for TCS. Anyway, I’ll leave aside the charge that I’m playing a (unwitting?!) part in reinforcing the false ideological consciousness of the ruling class, and just thank Chris for making me feel as though my productions matter more than I could realistically hope.

As to the substantive objection to my piece, Chris writes:

There are no doubt one or two sentences in A Theory of Justice that encourage such an interpretation. But, as Wilkinson surely knows, the argument in which Rawls asserts that “no one deserves his place in the distribution of natural endowments, any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society” (which Wilkinson cites, selectively, from the first edition of ToJ) concerns the choice of a co-operative scheme for a whole society. In the passage in question Rawls is not addressing the question of whether those who are better-endowed with natural assets or who have “superior character” ought to get more within a co-operative scheme, he’s writing about whether their better endowment ought to be reflected in the choice of scheme under which they co-operate with others. And his answer is, that no, the more talented have no special right to have their interests given greater weight than those others.

First, I want to make clear that I did not intend to write a piece of Rawls exegesis. Whether or not Chris is right in his interpretation of the import of Rawls’s argument about desert in ToJ, it cannot be denied that many people have read Rawls as making a philosophical argument intented to undermine claims of desert generally, have been influenced by this argument, and have made it part of their dialectical arsenal. I was specifically addressing Yglesias’s thoughts on the matter, which I took to be representative of a certain class of philosophically sophisticated welfare liberals. Matt indicates in the comments of Chris’s post that he takes my reading of Rawls to be the “natural” one. So at this level Chris’s claim that I’ve misinterpreted Rawls is irrelevant. If he’s right, then I’m not attacking Rawls, per se, but rather attacking an argument that many people who have misinterpreted Rawls have deployed to undermine claims of desert and to justify redistribution. I do admit, however, that I should have been clearer that my way of reading Rawls in the column is disputed.

I understand and agree with Chris’s claim that Rawls’s argument comes in the context of the choice of the overall principles of association. But I don’t understand Chris’s appeal to Rawls’s “political” turn. First, Rawl’s understands his own argument in ToJ to be rooted on a partially comprehensive theory, which is why he later rejected the argument. It is not unreasonable as a matter to interpret Rawls’s argument about desert as a piece of comprehensive philosophizing on par with his comprehesive-ish claims later in ToJ about the nature of autonomy and personhood. And as Jacob Levy points out in the comments, ToJ is an extremely influential book, which has been far more widely read than the rest of Rawls’s works. It’s not unreasonable to criticize it in isolation from Rawls’s mature view, given that so many people have been influenced by it in isolation from Rawls’s mature view.

OK, I want to draw attention to the fact that Rawls is making a claim about our considered judgments. Now, it’s hard to keep the cast of characters in Rawls straight: the theorist and the rest of us real people, the model conception of the person (the citizen of the well-ordered society), the parties to the original position. The claim about our considered judgments is an emprical claim about us. (Tryst doesn’t have a copy of ToJ, so I have to wing some of this. I’m sitting next to the bookshelf, and do see a copy of the New Testament, but I doubt it’s going to help my case.) The character of the model conceptions, such as the original position, must justified by the method of reflective equilibrium (RE). Once we’ve our CMJs (considered moral judgments) more or less into RE with our model conceptions, we run the thought experiment of choice in the original position (OP). If it turns out the OP delivers principles out of RE with our CMJs, then we just go back and amend some aspect of the model conceptions until we get prinicples out of the OP that is in RE with our CMJs. My point is that given this procedure, it seems to me that Rawls’s argument has a great deal to do with how things work out within the basic structure. It says that principles for distributing cooperative surpluses need not take into account our sense that some people deserve more of the surplus in virtue of contributing more to the creation of the surplus.

I don’t dispute that we don’t deserve our natural endowments or the social position we find ourselves in. Who would, indeed. I dispute what seems to be Rawls’s next step: that we thus don’t deserve our character (some of us do, we worked at it, and some of us don’t). And I vigorously dispute the next step, whether or not Rawls takes it, that we thus aren’t responsible for and don’t deserve what we have worked to achieve. If he does take it, and it seems to me, and many others that he does, then he’s just wrong. If he’s not just wrong, then he has at least (in the argument on desert) abandoned his usual method of working from within our moral conceptions rather than dabbling in metaphysics-tinged metaethics.

My claim in the TCS column is that our CMJ that people ought to be rewarded roughly in proportion to the value of their contribution to cooperative endeavors, and have moral title to such rewards, runs extremely deep. The implication is that principles of justice that fail to respect title to these deserved rewards — that expropriates and redistributes goods acquired according to this kind of principle of desert — will fail to be in RE with our CMJ, and thus are fail as acceptable principles of justice.

Exactly why principles that fail the test of RE fail is another question. I don’t think the method of RE offers a theory of the epistemic justification of moral beliefs. RE has to do with human sense of justice in a way that is more practical than epistemic. The sense of justice is both the source our considered moral judgments and the source of our motivation to act according to fair terms of social cooperation. I think the function of RE is to tie together the cognitive and motivational dimensions of the human sense of justice to create a social structure that we both recognize and affirm as moral, and which we are disposed to sustain through our willing compliance to the principles of justice. The point of RE is to deliver principles of justice that are sufficiently aligned with the sense of justice to produce motivationally effective individual reasons for action that will tend to scale up to macro-level stability.

That said, a principles of justice that run roughshod over our deep-seated intuitions of desert will therefore fail to gain our affirmation and compliance, and will thus fail to frame a stable social order. That’s why a principle of justice out of RE with our CMJs fails.

This looks like an interesting book. It’s hard to get the right balance between maximization and reciprocity to enable broad, complex social cooperation. I think that if more people had a better grasp of the huge benefits of effective social coordination, together with the delicate balance of cognitive and emotive capacities needed to sustain it, then there would be much much less mystification about morality.

I believe this is what happened to 17th St.

Tuesday night I observed a debate on subjectivism and Objectivism (as in Randianism) in ethics. Ed Hudgins of the Objectivist Center defended the party line. Max Borders of the Institute for Humane Studies argued for a sort of anti-realist subjectivist contractarianism. I found a great deal to disagree with in both arguments. But I think I was a little surprised to find myself almost completely exasperated by Hudgins’s fairly orthodox summation of Objectivist ethics. It’s been years now that I’ve felt little affinity to Objectivism. However, that’s where I started out in philosophy, that’s how I was inducted into the tradition of classical liberal thought, and Objectivism provided my first sense of serious intellectual community. I feel an intellectual debt to people like David Kelley, my friends and teachers from TOC seminars, and folks on the Objectivist mailing lists (the ones that didn’t try to kick me off, that is). And I feel a bond with a good number of self-described Objectivists, and I have no desire to have them think of me as, you know, “the other.”

I remember when in the middle nineties how Mike Huemer’s set of essays on “Why I am not an Objectivist” had me up in arms. I don’t intend to write my own version of Huemer’s explanation (which, for what its worth, I still think differs with Objectivism for mostly the wrong reasons.) That said, I do want to set down some of my differences with Objectivism in the hope that it might prove helpful to someone much like me about a decade ago. In fact, I’ll address my arguments to Will Wilkinson circa 1996, taking for granted what I know he knew, and aiming for what I know to be his soft intellectual underbelly. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, then it’s probably because I’m not talking to you. I’ll do one of these every few weeks or so, as the spirit moves me.

So, let’s start with free-will.
Continue reading →

Irfan Khawaja calmly points out the dumbfounding contradictions in the reviews of Michael Moore’s latest tour de sophisme. For example:

Todd Gitlin’s review in Open Democracy calls Fahrenheit 9/11 a “shoddy work”: the film’s “sloppy insinuations, emotional blackmail and all–around demagoguery,” he argues, are an affront to one’s “conscience,” and make it the moral equivalent of a beer commercial. The same conscientious concern induces Gitlin to describe Fahrenheit 9/11 somewhat paradoxically as a moral necessity. Meanwhile, he lionizes Moore himself as a “master demagogue.”

Check out the rest for more smart meta-reviewing.

Thanks to those few who replied to my request for stuff on calculating real wages. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Paul Krugman, “Viagra and the Wealth of Nations,”

Arnold Kling, “How Much Worse Off Are We?,” TCS, July 2004

Amartya Sen, “The Welfare Basis of Real Income Comparisons”, Journal of Economic Literature,1979 (available through JSTOR)

Jack Triplett, “Hedonic Indexes and Statistical Agencies, Revisted,” paper presented to the BLS, June 2000. [PDF]

And a bunch of other possibly relevant stuff from Triplett here.

Bureau of Labor Statistics FAQ about the Consumer Price Index.

Krugman gets very close to what I’m thinking about, but the end of his piece skirts the real issue about the extent to which economics relies on implicit psychological and moral theories. I’m still looking for something that’s more deeply reflective about the philosophical dimensions of this issue. I’ll let you know if I find anything, and please let me know if you know of anything.

[Update: More Citations]

William D. Nordhous, “Do Real Output and Real Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not”

The Boskin Commission Report, “Toward a More Accurate Measure of the Cost of Living,” Report to the Senate Finance Committee, 1996.

Robert Gordon, “The Boskin Commission Report and Its Aftermath,” NBER Working Paper 7759

Thanks so far to Tyler Cowen, Ryan Seals, Erin Shellman and Alex Taborrok.

Over at TCS I try to parry the thrust of this Matt Yglesias blog post. I argue that it is in fact possible to deserve what once has worked for, and that there are in fact self-made men who deserve credit for their achievements. I don’t believe these are controversial propositions, aside from a few sholastic dissenters. But I think this is a case where it’s worthwhile bolstering common sense.

[NB: I have nothing to do whatsoever with the red donkey illustration.]

Three groups are filing an FEC complaint against the folks putting out the SwiftVets ad. I think the ad is extremely effective. I have no way of independently verifying any of the claims therein, but it hits the right buttons and made me pretty willing to believe that Kerry plays with his war record to suit his political aspirations.

So, naturally, the ad, and the “soft” money that paid for it, is being interpreted as an attempt to influence the presidential election. This is, I understand, illegal. However, Mike Rusell from Swift Boat veterans for truth maintains:

The ads are not meant to influence the presidential election. The ads are meant to tell the truth about John Kerry’s service record so people can make their own decisions.

Now, surely this is a lie. The ads ARE meant to influence the election. The point is, Mike Russell shouldn’t have to lie about this, but McCain/Feingold makes him a liar.

No doubt the ads “are meant to tell the truth about John Kerry’s war record.” Suppose you are one of the men making a claim in the ad and you speak truly. The difference between what you know and what Kerry claims may be sufficient ground for thinking Kerry disqualified for office, and, suppose, on this basis, you wish for him to lose the election. You believe that if others had your information, then voters might wish to alter their estimation of Kerry’s fitness for the presidency. The people with whom you have shared your knowledge about Kerry’s record and who have financially supported the ad campaign share your desire that your knowledge of the matter be made available to broader public.

Isn’t it just disturbing that this may in fact be illegal? If I publish a scientific article that cites empirical data in order to refute a competing theory, I also intend this to have some impact on the opinion of the scientifc community. I intend to influence their beliefs about what theory to support. This may in fact be my main motivation for gathering data in the first place: I want to persuade. This is, of course, OK.

But, strangely, in the political arena, which relies on argument and the free play of claims and counter-claims for its proper function, publicly airing what one believes to be true can under certain circumstances be illegal. Doesn’t it seem that if one want to tell what one believes to be true, it shouldn’t matter where the money comes from?

I want to see the counter-ads. I want to see other vets saying that Van O’Dell and Jack Chenoweth are liars, and telling me why. I want to hear eyewitness reports about the time John Kerry saved the life of a dying child with one hand while fending off VC with a machine gun in other, all while shouting brilliantly improvised orders despite the blood running into his eyes. Even if it takes soft money to do it.

Anyway, was it really Kerry’s best idea to push his stint in Viet Nam (or Cambodia, or wherever he was) to the front? Sadly, I think it was.

Let me follow up on the above with a couple thoughts. Isn’t the dim, manipulable nature of the voter a premise of McCain/Feingold-like legislation? It strikes me that it must be. One can only “buy” an election by running a ton of ads if the ads really work. But is this a problem that can really be allayed by banning certain means of manipulation? If people are dim and manipulable, then their opinions already likely reflect their dimness and history as victims of manipulation. How is it, then, that an opinion changed by an advertisement financed by “soft” money is somehow less authentic than an opinion changed because of social pressure or a sophistical argument from the mouth of one’s sister at a family reunion? How do restrictions on well-financed mass speech do anything to change the picture about the legitimacy or democratic character of outcome?

Can someone point me to the state of the art on methods for calculating real wages, especially how changes in technology are accounted for in changes in purchasing power. How, for example, is the availability of a drug or labor-saving appliance or new source of entertainment that was not available 20 years ago included in the estimate of the real wage? I know of several sources of information on this problem, largely in the semi-popular press, but am largely interested in discovering if there is a definitive academic article or book (or several) that deals seriously with this issue, and is recognized as the latest and most definitive word. Thanks.

Grant McCracken’s interesting post on “Cultural Innovation: The Benefits and Costs” reminds me a great deal of this post of mine from a couple years ago. Grant links to the weird and disturbing Memorial List of alumae of Franconia College, an experimental college from the 60s & 70s. But check out Grant’s post first to get the context.

M’Town homegirl Melinda Ammann has a good piece in the Washington Times on the benefits to Africa of ending agricultural subsidies and tariffs.