Monthly Archives: November 2004

The Achievement Gap

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Andrew Sullivan’s diagnosis of the real problem with the Democrats (TNR Online sub only, I’m afraid) is pretty astute. I think he’s really go it. The Republicans do a better job of tappin into America’s go-get-em-tiger!-ness. Sullivan finds it both in Team America and in Pixars new flick, The Incredibles. This is what Sullivan says it’s about:

The fundamental moral of the movie is that this restraint is wrong and needs to be overcome: Letting the talented earn the proud rewards of their labor, and the fruits of their destiny, harms no one and actually helps those in the greatest need.

Is this a moral for the religious right? Hardly. The Incredibles in some ways portrays normal American life as stultifying. Its brutal parody of family squabbles is by no means an encomium to traditionalism. It’s not anti-family, of course. But it is pro-talent and pro-opportunity. It is in favor of the urge to get out there and achieve things without apology. Within the right-left rubric of American cultural discourse, the movie is therefore rightward-tilting. And that’s why many critics on the left have decried it.

A few paragraphs later, he offers the diagnosis:

This is what the left has lost sight of. Americans tend to believe that talent needs no apology; that action is often better than complaint; that their own country, despite its many faults, is still a force for great good in the world. The left tends to view things a little differently.

This strikes me as basically correct. The Republicans somehow seem more hospitable to simply human efficacy, the desire to stretch out, to accelerate to a good speed without all those damn speed bumps, to just do it, and all that. Twice the achievement, half the whining. Something like that. (And maybe this explains why I seem to keep dating Republicans.)

More on Hayek/Rawls Fusionism

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In a comment below, Julian reminds me of Hayek’s approving mention of Rawls’s method for thinking about principles of justice. This led me to look it up again. It’s in Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice, p. 100:

Before leaving the subject [of 'social' or distributive justice, ideas that Hayek finds muddled and misleading] I want to point out once more that the recognition that in such combinations as ‘social’, ‘economic’, ‘distributive’ or ‘retributive’ justice the term ‘justice’ is wholly empty should not lead us to throw the baby out with the bath water. Not only as the basis of the legal rules of just conduct is the justice which the courts of justice administer exceedingly important; there unquestionably also exists a genuine problem of justice in connection with the deliberate design of political institutions, the problem to which Professor John Rawls has recently devoted an important book. [Vol 2 of LL&L was published in 1976.] The fact that I regret and regard as confusing is merely that in this connection he employs the term ‘social justice’. But I have no basic quarrel with an author who, before he proceeds to that problem, acknowledges that the task of selecting specific systems or distributions of desired things as just must be ‘abandoned as mistaken in principle, and it is, in any case, not capable of a definite answer. Rather the principles of justice define the crucial constraints which institutions and joint activities must satisfy if persons engaging in them are to have no complaints about them. If these constraints are satisfied, the resulting distribution, whatever it is, may be accepted as just (or at least not unjust).’ This is more or less what I have been trying to argue in this chapter.

The Rawls quote is from his essay “Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice” in Nomos IV, Justice, 1963, p. 102. Hayek follows up the citation in his as always illuminating footnotes thus:

. . . where the passage quoted is preceded by the statement that ‘It is the system of institutions which has to be judged and judged from a general point of view.’ I am not aware that Professor Rawls’ later more widely read work A Theory of Justice (Harvard, 1971) contains a comparatively clear statement of the main point, which may explain why this work seems often, but as it appears to me wrongly, top have been interpret support to socialist demands, e.g., by Daniel Bell, ‘On Meritocracy and Equality’, Public Interest, Autumn 1972, p. 72, who describes Rawls’ theory as ‘the most comprehensive effort in modern philosophy to justify a socialistic ethic.’

Hayek is right. Rawls, at least the early Rawls, seems to me to be nowhere near a socialist or even a continental-style social democrat. He strikes me as a fairly traditional classical liberal working to reconcile the contemporary game-theoretic conception of rational choice with traditional contractarian theorizing and Kant.

Hayek somewhat earlier cites another passage from the same Rawls Nomos essay (which I really must read!) that casts Rawls in a similar classical liberal light. Here’s Rawls:

If one assumes that law and government effectively act to keep markets competitive, resources fully employed, property and wealth widely distributed over time, and maintains a reasonable social minimum, then, if there is equality of opportunity, the resulting distribution will be just or at least not unjust. It will have resulted from the workings of a just system . . . a social minimum is simply a form of rational insurance and prudence.

Here, as in other places, Rawls seems to characterize the social minimum, the safety net, as the price the wealthier must prudently pay for the stability of the order from which they benefit. At other times, Rawls makes more of the idea of fairness-as-reciprocity as a core aspect of the sense of justice, and argues that the motivation to pay into the treasury to fund the safety net is not merely prudential, but is rooted in a more distinctively moral motivation. I think this is one of many instances where Rawls’s good, clear rat choice contractarianism comes into tension with his penchant for Kantian moral psychology.

My total baseless conjecture is that Rawls’s students and some colleagues, who were far to Rawls’s left politically, slowly drew him further left toward a more euro-style social democrat point of view. I’m told that Rawls was a model of intellectual openness, not at all dogmatic, which would make him especially prone to reciprocal influence from his interlocutors. Early Rawls’s quasi-positivist naturalism and classical contractarianism was discouraged by his milieu while his Kantianism, and especially his Kantian moral psychology, was encouraged. So he abandons the idea that the theory of justice is a part of the theory of rational choice.

Rawls’s students seem to be far more vehement in their opposition to Humean moral psychology than in their interest in the contractarian conception of a social order. They seem more interested in coming up with an arguments to the effect that we’re obliged to pay taxes even if we don’t want to (the claims of justice are rationally INESCAPABLE, dammit!) than in exploring the general nature of a theory that could justify something like taxation in terms of its role in maintaining a viable social order. They seem to have co-opted a lot of Rawls’s language, and methodological apparatus, but left most of his core contractarian logic behind.

So here’s my unanswerable question–get out your possible world telescopes: What does the late Rawls look like in a world in which he had folks like Nozick, Lomasky, and Schmidtz as his prominent students, rather than folks like, say, Scanlon, Cohen, Estlund, and Korsgaard? Does he look more like the Rawls that Hayek sees and likes?

Anti-Constructivist Constructivism

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I was reading Hayek’s essay “The Errors of Constructivism” today (in New Studies), and I was struck by, well, by just how great Hayek is, and how his thinking is both well and ill suited for integration with contractarian normative theorizing, which is my favorite kind of normative theorizing. Please allow me to waive any implied guarantees of cogency, and to indulge in some musings about Hayekian anti-constructivism . . .

Hayek is clear, and I’m sure right, on the fact that the principles or rules of behavior that account for regularities in individual conduct and macro-level social order are to some degree inscrutable. We are guided by “knowledge how” and not “knowledge that”

What I want to show is that men are in their conduct never guided exclusively by their understanding of the causal connections between particular known means and certain desired ends, but are also by rules of conduct of which they are rarely aware, which they have not consciously invented, and that to discern the function and significance of this is a difficult and only partially achieved task of scientific effort.

Now, Hayek is talking here about the theorist, too. The contractarian theorist, for instance, can’t just kick back in her chair and think about what rules her imaginary rational agents would choose to be governed by, for we, the theorists, are not especially aware of the principles of our own conduct, and can only partially understand how those principle contribute to social order, if they do, and so surely we cannot say what our fictional fully rational proxies would endorse.

So Hayek leaves us properly skeptical of the possibility of churning out principles of just conduct from a constructive procedure, i.e., an elaborate Rawlsian thought experiment.

Nevertheless, Hayek is incredibly strong on what I take to be a primary element in distinctively contractarian reasoning, probably exemplified best in Hobbes and Hume (and in Buchanan, Rawls, and Gauthier in the last century)–the idea that individual actions can combine according to a particular logic (the logic of interpendent expectation and choice–game theory) to create normatively interesting macro-level properties, and that we should evaluate common rules of conduct in terms of their role in supporting or undermining these properties.

Hayek:

The rules we are discussing are those that are not so much useful to the individuals who observe them, as those that (if they are generally observed) make all the members of the group more effective because they give them opportunities to act within a social order.

And later:

It was the great achievement of economic theory that, 200 years before cybernetics, it recognized the nature of self-regulatiing systems in which certain regularities (or, perhaps better, ‘restraints’) of conduct of the elements led to constant adaptation of the comprehensive order to particular facts, affecting in the first instance only the individual elements.

So Hayek endorses the contractarian way of thinking about the relation of rules to order, micro to macro. Rules are justified in terms of their contribution to order. And our reasons to adhere to these rules is not grounded in their immediate benefit to us, but in the benefit we derive from participation in the order they establish. He is, however, skeptical about our ability to know what that relation is in particular cases. And so he counsels that we not mess with them–much. Hayek’s conservativism flows from his ideas about social evolution, which I take to be the weakest part of his social philosophy.

However, Hayek doesn’t think he really helps the conservative too much in the end:

I must at once warn you, however, that the conservatives among you, who up to this point may be rejoicing, will no probably be disappointed. The proper conclusion from the considerations I have advanced is by no means that we may confidently accept all the old and traditional values. Nor even that there are any values or moral principles, which science may not occasionally question. The social scientist who endeavours to understand how society functions, and to discover what may be improved, must claim the right critically
to examine, and even to judge, every single value of our society. The consequence of what I have said is merely that we can never at one and the same time question all all its values

The last is a Neurathian/Quinean “can’t get off the raft” point that I rather like. Hayek stresses it again later:

The only standard by which we can judge particular values of our society is the entire body of values of that same society. More precisely, the factually existing,imperfect order of actions produced by obedience to these values provides the touchstone for evaluation.

And then, immediately afterward, one can catch a whiff of Rawlsian reflective equilibrium (this was a lecture from 1970, by the way):

Because prevailing systems of morals or values do not always give unamibiguous answers to the questions which arise, but often prove to be internally contradictory, we are forced to develop and refine such moral systems continuously. We shall sometimes be constrained to sacrifice some moral value, but always only to other moral values we regard as superior. We cannot escape this choice, because it is part of an indispensible process.

However, given Hayek’s skepticism about our ability to kick back and weigh and work through the relevant trade-offs in our rather limited heads, we need to substitute some external social process that can test and adjudicate conflicting moral principles. (Even Rawls, it is very much worth pointing out, says that reflective equilibrium is only achieved at the ideal limit. I wonder why he doesn’t take this point seriously, as Hayek did.)

So here is a Hayekian argument for political federalism (little experiments in governance) and rights of exit, along with a well-functioning system of evolving common law. These are mechanisms that we might think have a tendency to produce principles in a kind of (not reflective, in the head, but social, enacted) equilibrium with one another.

I take some of the deliberative democrats to have been similarly looking for a procedure, a mechanism, for arriving at principles of just conduct–for a way to get the the method of reflective equilibrium out of the head and into the world. But democratic choice procedures are singularly well-suited for delivering bad answers. (Do deliberative democrats, Kerry voters all, I’m sure, really think the problem is just that there’s not enough deliberation?) The Hayekian post-Rawlsian looks instead to federalism, exit, and the common law. There may not be many of us, but there should be.

Tyler Cowen's Inevitability Argument

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I’m intrigued by Tyler Cowen’s line of argument against social security personal accounts. The argument, as far as I can see goes something like this:

(1) Even if you have a program of personal accounts/forced savings, political reality will still lead to a secondary safety net for the elderly.

(2) A program of forced savings plus a redistributive safety net (welfare program) is worse than just a safety net.

So, (3) Let’s make social security into a welfare program for old people who need it, and just forget about the personal accounts/forced savings.

Tyler’s argument turns on his claim that there is simply no way to get around the fact that we’re going to have some form of redistribution to the poor among the elderly. I am, however, not certain why Tyler is so positive that we’re stuck with some kind of welfare for the old.

It seems to me that the underlying assumption of Tyler’s argument is that it is impossible for the state to credibly commit to a scheme where individuals are responsible for their own long-term welfare. Perhaps if the state could so commit, and people really expected that they would sink if they refused to swim, then they wouldn’t take out huge loans against their personal lockbox accounts, and they wouldn’t upon retirement open their lockbox, burn the money, and expect to get bailed out. But the state can’t so commit, and so we’re going to get a moral hazard problem anyway.

In other words: If people think they’ll get welfare, they’ll act irresponsibly. But if you try to tell them that they won’t get welfare, they won’t believe you, and they’ll still act irresponsibly. Because they’ve acted irresponsibly, they’ll need welfare, and because they need it, they will get it.

I wonder if Tyler would agree that this is the underlying structure of his argument?

Now, I’m not sure what to think of the inevitability argument. I’m pretty sure it’s good rational choice reasoning, but that certainly doesn’t make it true. I have some conjectural thoughts on why it may not be true, which I will share soon.

[Cross-posted on Crescat Sententia.]

Too Hot for AFF?

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The link to my review of Checkpoint mysteriously disappeared from the Brainwash front page. And a bit later, mention of the review disappeared from the graphic at the top. I’m puzzled. What’s going on? I’m trying to find out, but no word yet.

[UPDATE: It's now totally gone. Well, it is an Orwell-themed website.]

[UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Well, upon a few moments reflection, I now feel like I don't really know what's going on. So I'm going to retract what I just said and wait until I get a better sense of what happened.]

More Inside-the-Beltway Baseball

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Jacob Sullum has a good column up at Reason on the DC baseball stadium financing shenanigans. He cites this open letter, which I hadn’t seen, to Mayor Williams from 90 economists on the likely economic impact of a taxpayer -financed stadium.

A vast body of economic research on the impact of baseball stadiums suggests that the proposed $440 million baseball stadium in the District of Columbia will not generate notable economic or fiscal benefits for the city. Most studies find that new sports stadiums do not increase employment or incomes and sometimes have a modest negative effect on local economies. The reason appears to be that sports stadiums do not increase overall entertainment spending but merely shift it from other entertainment venues to the stadium.

Research also suggests that a baseball stadium alone will not revitalize the Anacostia waterfront. Because sports stadiums are not used most of the year, they do not stimulate much development outside the stadium. Most modern stadiums include restaurant and other entertainment offerings, limiting the money that goes to neighboring businesses.

A new stadium cannot be expected to generate a net increase in economic activity in the Washington metropolitan area, but it may shift some entertainment spending from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs into the District. Nevertheless, the economic benefits to the District are not likely to outweigh the large stadium subsidy proposed by the District. At least 80 percent of the costs of the $440 million stadium are expected to be supported with public funds.

In short, it is dubious to justify the use of public funds to subsidize construction of a DC baseball stadium on economic development grounds.

And there is a very impressive list of signatures.

If you’re a resident of DC’s Ward One, as I am, please send a note to Jim Graham asking him to vote against the stadium financing plan. I’m told he’s on the fence, and could swing things either way.

Guesting at Crescat

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I am guest-blogging over at Crescat Sententia this week. When I post novel content to Crescat, I will notify you in this space. I will count notifications as applying toward the Super November quota because you may, after all, follow the link and read what I have written over there.

More Libertarian Paternalism

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I look forward to reading this paper, “Libertarian Paternalism is an Oxymoron,” by Gregory Mitchell of Vanderbilt and FSU.

Abstract:

This essay considers the concept of libertarian paternalism recently advanced by Sunstein and Thaler and argues that, on close inspection, this attempt to reconcile the traditionally opposed concepts of libertarianism and paternalism fails to succeed. Most significantly, Sunstein and Thaler neglect alternative approaches to dealing with irrational choice behavior that are more consistent with libertarian principles and that make choice-framing paternalism evitable, they would subjugate the liberty of irrational individuals to a central planner’s paternalistic welfare judgments, and they fail to deal with the redistributive consequences of libertarian paternalism. Libertarian paternalism, as currently formulated, is not designed to liberate individuals from their irrational tendencies but to capitalize on irrational tendencies to move citizens in directions that the paternalistic planner deems best. Libertarian paternalism does leave rational persons a way out of the central planner’s paternalism, but often the exit will not be costless, as the paternalistic costs of trying to improve the welfare of irrational persons are shifted to the rational persons. While fidelity to libertarian principles leaves little room for the government to regulate irrational behavior, there are some forms of irrationality regulation more congenial to libertarian principles than Sunstein and Thaler’s version of libertarian paternalism, examples of which are discussed here.

Poltiical Liberalism and Reasonable Epistemic Norms

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Matt comments on my post on faith-based mental health:

I wrote my honors thesis about a different aspect of this same issue. There are basically two ways you can go here. One would be to radically circumscribe the egalitarianism and not have the state provide for things like mental health services (Will’s example) or public education (including vouchers, my example). The other way is to try and alter the Rawlsian conception of a “reasonable comprehensive doctrine” to incorporate some epistemic norms along with some ethical ones.

The problem for Matt is that the latter option abuses what Rawls means by “reasonable” and, in any case, pretty much destroys the appeal of his policitial liberalism.

Second point first. . . The mainstream libertarian rap against late Rawls is that he packs so much into the idea of a “reasonable conception” that he saps his liberalism of genuine respect for the fact of pluralism. “Reasonable” here is defined so restrictively that other forms of liberalism, like libertarianism, are excluded by fiat. This isn’t a bad point, but it’s hardly enough to dismiss Rawls. The right thing for a libertarian to do, I think, is to just demand that the notion of a “reasonable conception” be broadened in certain ways, and that once it is so broadened, to argue that libertarianism satisfies the desiderata of political liberalism better than egalitarian or welfare-state liberalism.

Now, to the idea of incorporating certain epistemic norms into the idea of the “reasonable” . . . Clearly, this is going to run a Rawlsian head-on into the argument, mentioned above, that he’s just faking it and doesn’t honestly care about a distinctively political liberalism that can really handle the fact of pluralism. It’s pretty clear that one can’t just make ad hoc additions to the notion of the reasonable until one gets one’s fovored conclusion.

More importantly, however, is that “reasonable” in Rawls is a practical, not an epistemic, notion. A reasonable person is one who has an effective sense of justice, and is therefore disposed to propose, accept, and abide by fair terms of cooperation, and to govern the rational pursuit of their ends by these terms. Reasonable people are able to achieve cooperative outcomes that are unavailable to to purely maximizing (unreasonable) rational folk. The overall stability of a well-ordered society requires adherence to reasonable terms of association. Now, as I understand it, a reasonable comprehensive conception is one that is consistent with reasonable terms of association, that is, terms of association that people recognize to be fair, in their ineterests, and therefore worthy of adherence.

A reasonable conception, in this sense, could be one that is chock full of crazy beliefs. Indeed, a main point of political liberalism is to accomodate people of conflicting metaphysical views, including those derived by faith, authority, or whatever irrational means you like. Even if people have absolutely crazy views about mental health, such as the view that craziness is caused by demonic posession, they still have a reasonable comprehensive conception, in the relevant sense, if this conception is compatible with respect for and compliance with reasonable terms of social cooperation.

So I think we’re left with the first of Matt’s options. You’ve got to “radically cirscumscribe the egalitarianism” and keep the state out of mental health (to use my example), or else choose one: (a) accept state-funding of homosexuality therapy or (b) abandon political liberalism.

The DC White Elephants?

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Be sure to check out Sally Jenkins’s nice WaPo piece on DC Baseball, which prominently features Cato and the Coates/Humphrey’s Briefing Paper. Cato Executive VP Daivd Boaz gets in a few zingers”

“Politicians have an edifice complex,” says David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute. “They like to be seen building big things.”

The Mayor is a whiner:

Williams has peddled the stadium deal under a false pretense. Baseball will be a great spiritual and recreational addition but not a financial one. If you really want to define the mayor through baseball, look at his reaction when the Cato Institute published a briefing paper on the fallacy that stadiums bring big economic benefits to cities. “I can’t imagine why, with all the things happening in the world, the Cato Institute would take the time to analyze the impact of baseball in Washington, D.C.,” Williams said.

The answer is that the Cato Institute is a think tank with a serious interest in efficient municipal policy, and its scholars live and work and pay taxes in the District. The mayor’s irritated dismissal of independent academic research was a truly defining moment. “What struck me is, you’ve spent the last three years trying to get baseball here, with all the things wrong with the city, so where do you get off saying we shouldn’t do one study?” Boaz said. “He’s clearly spent a larger percentage of his time on this than anything else.”

Faith-Based Mental Health

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John Tomasi is right (see “Should Political Liberals be Compassionate Conservatives?: Philosophical Foundations of the Faith-Based Initiative” Social Philosophy & Policy 21/1, January 2004″) and Rawlsian political liberalism requires that if the state is going to provide certain services, then the state should also provide funds to non-secular providers of those services, otherwise, they get crowded out, and the comprehensive worldview common in the adminstrative state is, in effect, illiberally imposed.

So if the state pays for mental health services, they should also pay for alternative treatments, such as Scientology training (Scientology is rabidly anti-psychiatry), and Christian “treatments” for homosexuality. The state must not discriminate against those who do not believe in the secular mental health profession’s definition of our spiritual and behavioral woes, or those who don’t believe in Ritalin, Prozac and grief counseling as the cure for their spiritual ills.

Right?

Puce America

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I once had a girlfriend who, after we parted ways, went through a number of, let us say, transitions in her sexual self-image. She explained it to me like this: “First, I thought I was red. Then, I thought I was blue. Now, I realize that I’m purple.”

We’ve all seen, and have grown weary of, the wide array of red/blue/purple political maps. The purplish tones are supposed to show us, I guess, that even a “red state” is a mix of red and blue people. It’s not binary: all red or all blue. Yes. I guess. But the thing that gets in my craw is the fairly widespread assumption that individual people are either red or blue, which is just silly if you think about it for a millisecond.

Now, I’m a guy with an extremely “blue” sensibility. I choose an urban lifestyle. I have my metrosexual moments (to mention another moribund sociological notion). I am not a man of faith. I like gay people (yes, all of them, on principle) and think they ought to be able to get married if they want. I am, as they say, “pro-choice”. The Ten Commandments should not be posted in courthouses. You should be able to burn a flag. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll? You betcha!

But I have a fairly “reddish” Iowa background, of which I am fond. I do not find it at all difficult to identify with God n’ Guns conservatives, and in many ways admire their ethos of faith, family, work, and responsibility. Their rhetoric comes more naturally to me, stirs me more easily, even if I’m sometimes embarrassed by that fact. I helped a little bit in the Pat Robertson campaign in Iowa in ’88, because my best friend’s family was involved in it, and I liked the idea of it at the time. I find I generally get more viscerally aggravated by liberal moralizing than conservative moralizing, which, for some reason, I tend to find comical or surreal.

I am, like my open-minded former paramour, purple. No, in fact, I reject the spectrum. I’m brown, dammit. (And what can brown do for you?) It’s just very very weird–well not weird, normal, but annoying–that people should suddenly actually integrate into their sense of identity this redness or blueness–colors meant to represent a damnably artificial left/right political spectrum. One of the reasons I dislike politics, and especially our winner-take-all system, is that it creates a pressure to pick sides in a way that does damage to authenticity. I resent being asked implicitly to join my intellectual urban fellows in therapeutic anti-red scorn-heaping excercises, as if “red” and “blue” actually means something interesting. Let’s all just stick to hating the stupid and pompous, qualities that know no hue.