Monthly Archives: June 2007

Ross on the Moral Baseline

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I am glad to see Ross explicitly lay out in his gracious rejoinder what he takes the alternative to the liberal moral baseline to be:

I suppose I prefer to think that constitutionalism and Judeo-Christian ethics are the moral baseline where government action is concerned. That is, I believe that the government of the United States should strive to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” and do so without trampling on any of the liberties enumerated in the Constitution; at the same time, I would prefer that America’s leaders pursue policies that are broadly consonant with the Judeo-Christian tradition. (No wars of aggression, for instance.) And I’m pretty sure that “unrestricted voluntary cooperation between human beings” isn’t a liberty that the Constitution protects, since the Congress is explicitly granted the power to regulate both interstate and international commerce.

Fair enough, though I don’t think specifically Judeo-Christian ethics are an acceptable baseline in a pluralistic society with tens of millions of citizens who do not accept the authority of that ethical tradition. That said, observing the principle of equal liberty (i.e., “that every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberty to every other man”) with regard to trade in labor is also perfectly consonant with both the Judeo-Christian tradition and the U.S. Constitution. So Ross’s baseline seems to me largely irrelevant to his restrictionism, other than not obviously ruling it out. And, as a moral matter, it does nothing to establish what I see as his nationalism: the preference for the well-being of co-citizens over non-citizens, or the preference for reductions in inequality among citizens over even larger reductions of inequality between citizens and non-citizens.

The ultimate reason to endorse liberal principles is that adherence to them produces conditions under which human beings are most likely to thrive (according to the broadest variety of different conceptions of thriving). Even from a nationalist point of view, it is necessary to justify deviations from the principles that are most likely to improve the welfare of the nation’s citizens. The argument Ross had offered seemed to be based on the idea that, although de facto not-completely-restricted trade in labor with Mexican workers likely produces net benefits for the nation, these benefits come at the expense of some of the least well-off citizens. The unarticulated argument, I take it, is that certain patterns of material holdings are, for one reason or another, in the interest of the nation, and so that it may be morally legitimate to restrict the liberties of all citizens, and reduce the average national material well-being, so that less well-off citizens may be made better off (or not worse off).

Even if we hold fixed nationalist assumptions, this line of thinking is unconvincing. If we’re worried about patterns of material holdings, then we could, alternatively, not further restrict the freedom of citizens to trade in labor with migrant workers, go ahead and realize the economic surplus, and then reallocate some portion of the surplus to achieve the desired pattern of holdings. This produces a gain all around – even if we don’t take the welfare of migrant workers into account — and without restricting the liberty of citizens to cooperate with others to mutual advantage. So it is hard to see how what I called a “Rawlsian nationalist” worried about the national pattern of income and holdings could rationally use this worry as a lever for restrictions on the inflow of foreign workers.

I appreciate Ross’s meditation on the relationship between Christianity and immigration policy (I think Christianity, which sees all souls as having equal value under the eyes of God, is pretty flatly incompatible with all but the most tepid nationalisms, but nobody’s going to take my heathen word for it) which I think identifies one of the chief issue of contention between us.

There are all sorts of variables that the government of a Christian society should weigh when deciding how many migrants to admit, chief among them the effect of migration on civil peace and political stability, both of which are taken somewhat for granted in contemporary America but which have historically been rather fragile things. How to weigh these variables is a point on which intelligent people, Christian and otherwise, can disagree. 

I would say we are a society containing a large majority of Christians, not a Christian society, but I agree that “civil peace and political stability” are at the heart of the issue. Statist liberals often worry about the destabilizing effects of income inequality. Statist conservatives often worry about the destabilizing effects of cultural change. Ross evidently worries about both, which puts him at odds with cosmopolitan dynamism on two separate fronts. In this sense, I think Ross’s concerns about eroding American national identity and nation-level economic inequality are of a piece. But I think the actual evidence of destabilization, either from national economic inequality or from immigrant-led social change, is very scant. I, for one, think we are in a period of both rapidly evolving American cultural identity and increasing social, political, and economic stability. Ross is right that this is an argument worth having, and I think we’re starting to have it, which is good. Let the data soar!

But, I’ve got to insist, the arguments over (a) whether the existence of political boundaries and co-citizenship is a conversation-stopper when it comes to matters of justice, and (b) over the amount of moral consideration to give to the well-being of non-citizens when it comes to assessing the costs and benefits of trade, are also worth having (i.e., worth not avoiding.)

Reihan has also written a long, meaty rejoinder (and who doesn’t take pleasure in Reihan’s long, meaty rejoinder?). I’ll get to that a bit later when I get a chance.       

Why is the U.S. Falling Behind in Immigration?

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George Borjas writes:

We always tend to think of the U.S. as a “nation of immigrants.” About 12% of the U.S. population today is foreign-born. It is eye-opening to put this number in perspective. Just look at some of the data collected by the U.N.:

Ireland, 14.1% foreign-born
Sweden, 12.4%
United Kingdom, 9.1%
Greece, 8.8%
Spain, 11.1%
Austria, 15.1%
France, 10.7%
Germany, 12.3%
Netherlands, 10.1%
Switzerland, 22.9%

That’s percentage of the population foreign-born. The U.S. is even more of a laggard in inflows of foreign nationals as a percentage of population. Here is a graph from the OECD factbook:

Inflow of Foreign Nationals as a Percentage of Total Population among OECD Countries, 2004

Inflow of Foreign Nationals as a Percentage of Total Population among OECD Countries, 2004

[Click for full graph]

I’ve been poring over national quality of life statistics for the past two years now, and I can tell you for sure that Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada are much better places to live for the average person, in terms of QoL indicators, than the countries at the bottom the list. Part of it is that immigrants know what they’re doing: they go where the opportunity is. Part of it is that high immigrant in-flows are a vital part of a thriving economy and society.

Does Ross Want a Less Mexican America?

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Both Reihan and Daniel Larison seem to think I’m cheaply accusing Ross of some kind of nasty Mexiphobia. No. What I said is that I think Ross  is “appealing to populist class sentiments to help achieve a goal he wants anyway: a less Mexican America.” 

I had thought that Ross does want a less Mexican America. For instance, I read Ross’s review of Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity as buying in to the main thesis that America’s national identity is Anglo-Protestant, that it underpins much of what is good about America, and that Mexican migration threatens it. Ross’s sensible attitude is both less alarmed and more resigned than Huntington’s; he thinks erosion of national identity is too bad, but not that bad, and that there’s not a lot we can do about it. But, yes, a less Mexican America would be good for American national identity, which would be good for America. Things aren’t as bad as Huntington thinks, but, Ross writes, ”What decay there is lies within, in ‘the challenges to America’s national identity’ that Huntington so ably describes.” The challenges Huntington so ably describe have a lot to do with an imagined invasion of Mexicans.

When I googled The American Scene, seeking confirmation of my sense of Ross’s views, I did turn this up, which seems a clearer endorsement of Huntington’s thesis than the review itself:

If we’re concerned about the collapse of a common culture, and the eclipse of our national identity, we need to recognize that this eclipse is as much as result of free trade (and our present free-market approach to immigration) as of declining patriotism and left-wing identity politics.

Now, Ross’s conditional formulation is characteristically circumspect, so if he really doesn’t think Mexican immigration — independent of its effects on patterns of income — is a problem for American national identity, he can say so, and I’ll try to believe him. But I don’t think I’m being unfair.

Kaplan: Morality a Threat to National Security

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Robert D. Kaplan, well, sort of disgusts me:  

Never-say-die faith, accompanied by old-fashioned nationalism, is alive in America. It is a match for the most fanatical suicide bombers anywhere, but with few exceptions, that faith is confined to our finest combat infantry units—and to specific sections of the country and socio-economic strata from which these “warriors” (as they like to call themselves) hail. They are not characteristic of a country in many ways hurtling rapidly in the opposite direction. This is not the 1950s, when Americans felt a certain relief in possessing “the bomb.” Fifty years later, most Americans feel a certain relief in never having to even hear about “the bomb.”

Faith is about struggle, about having confidence precisely when the odds are the worst. Faith is the capacity to believe in what is simultaneously necessary but improbable. That kind of faith is receding in America among a social and economic class increasingly motivated by universal values: caring, for example, about the suffering of famine victims abroad as much as for hurricane victims at home. Universal values are a good in and of themselves, and they are not the opposite of faith. But they should never be confused with it. You may care to the point of tears about suffering humankind without having the will to actually fight (let alone inconvenience yourself) for those concerns. Thus, universal values may pose an existential challenge to national security when accompanied by a loss of faith in one’s own political values and projects.

In other words, if you care about the well-being of poor people in other countries more than restoring ROTC to Princeton, you’re flirting with treason. You would think that if “our political values and projects” are in competition with universal values, then that’s a problem with our political values and projects. Perhaps we may wish to reconsider projects like unjustly invading and occupying foreign lands, since it does not seem that this kind of thing makes us less likely to be a target of foreign aggression. Yet Kaplan genuinely seems to believe that truculent fanatic nationalism makes us safer. I fear this kind of mad emotive commitment to America uber alles, this “faith” of which he speaks, almost certainly makes us worse as a people and a culture, and therefore less worth believing in, and fighting for. And more worth hating. 

Are Robert Kaplan essays an existential threat to national security?      

Douthat's Populist Nationalism

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Grinding his Christian universalism under his nationalist heel, Ross Douthat breezily sets forth a multiply fallacious argument on the premise that there is no intellectual or moral difference between confiscatory redistribution and voluntary exchange when citizens of other countries are involved:

A slightly better way of putting what Matt is driving at, I think, is this: Large-scale immigration from Mexico to the United States is a form of de facto humanitarianism, and since Americans are generally leery of humanitarian spending (primarily because we overestimate the size of our existing foreign aid budget), liberal humanitarians have a vested interest in preserving the existing immigration system. It’s a rare issue where business interests line up on the side of raising the living standards of Third World peasants, and why mess with a good thing? Better, as Matt suggests, to go after the global elite in other arenas – like tax policy, say – where the business class’s preferred policies don’t have humanitarian externalities.

To which one might respond that there’s something slightly perverse about pursuing humanitarian ends through policies that lower the incomes of your poorest citizens and raise the incomes of your richest citizens. If I proposed a new AIDS-in-Africa initiative and advocated funding it through a regressive tax that included a tax credit for families making over $75,000, I doubt that many liberals would line up behind the proposal.

I’ll muster some charity and assume that Ross is simply confused here. But he really is badly confused.

It’s a rather profound error to characterize voluntary trade between American employers and Mexicans workers as equivalent to ”humanitarian spending,” as if money tax revenue had been withdrawn from the Treasury and sent to Mexicans. There is indeed a pecuniary externality of Mexican workers in the American labor market – downward price pressure from competition — and this can indeed have an effect on the pattern of American incomes. But it is a pretty basic and embarrassing mistake to confuse (1) coercive state confiscation and reallocation of income with (2) changing patterns of income from voluntary exchange.

Perhaps Ross really does think that the U.S. government has taken money from the pockets of the producers of Oceans 13 by refusing to ban Pirates of the Carribean, but I think he’s smarter than that. Government tax policy requires justification. Distribution of tax revenue require justification. Exercising our rights doesn’t.

That Ross is liable see the issue in this weird, mistaken way does indicate that he thinks some sort of nationalism is the legitimate moral baseline. The liberal (in the broad sense) presumption of freedom, on the other hand, has it that unrestricted voluntary cooperation between human beings is the moral baseline. Deviations from this require special justification. Given the liberal baseline, labor market restrictions (that’s what we’re talking about here – whether to further restrict American labor markets), besides standing as a violation of the rights of both Americans and Mexicans to freely associate and trade with one another, amount to a transfer of income from Mexican workers and American consumers to some low-skilled American workers. In addition to the basic violation of liberty, this is a monstrously regressive transfer, harming Mexican workers much more than it helps low-skilled American workers.

But Ross seems to understand the situation in a way that, as far as I can tell, completely discounts the welfare gain to Mexicans, and conceives of the effects of millions of people exercising their human rights as requiring some kind of special justification. This makes sense only relative to a nationalist worldview where ”humanitarian spending” is something benighted “liberal humanitarians” want to do and the actual welfare effects of this “spending” on foreigners is simply irrelevant to the moral calculus; all that matters is the effect of the policy on persons with valid U.S. passports. If the policy turns out to (on average) reduce the incomes of low-skilled U.S. workers and raise the incomes of  higher-skilled U.S. workers, then it’s evidently “perverse.” So if we have to placate uppity U.S. humanitarian liberals by throwing money at poor people somewhere, surely this isn’t the way we want to do it.

But what about Mexican workers and their families? Who cares! Wrong passport! What about the lost liberty of Americans to trade with Mexican workers on the labor market? Well, I guess we decide what liberties Americans have based on some undermotivated nation-level idea of just distribution. Why? Who knows!? (And who cares if it keeps Mexicans out?!) I don’t think Ross denies the fact that Mexican immigration on average makes Americans better off. So a merely utilitarian nationalism would have us accept even more immigrants. You could try to dress Ross’s view up as Rawlsian nationalism, demanding that a policy improve the lot of the least well-off Americans. But I think Ross’s argument really amounts to populist nationalism, appealing to populist class sentiments to help achieve a goal he wants anyway: a less Mexican America.  

Well, I understand that a certain kind of nationalism may well be the default baseline for a broad swathe of American public opinion, but that makes it no less repugnant from the perspective of both human liberty and human welfare. Democrats and then Republicans in the American South long succeeded in winning elections by drumming up racist majorities. (Integrating blacks fully into the labor market no doubt put downward pressure on low-skilled white wages, and I don’t doubt successful politicians brought this up.) But I don’t think this speaks well of our democracy.

This whole issue really turns on what we take to be the relevant moral baseline. I would very much like to see Ross defend what I see as his form of nationalism. From where I sit, there’s something more than “slightly perverse” about denying our human rights to freely cooperate and locking very poor people out of our labor markets so that relatively wealthy people whose grandparents got here first don’t have to take a paycut.

Krugman on Trade and Inequality

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Paul Krugman has published an interesting article on trade and inequality at VoxEu that nicely illustrates the morally puzzling nationalist assumptions of standard welfare economics.

After economists looked hard at the numbers, however, the consensus was that the effect of trade on inequality was probably modest. Recently, Ben Bernanke cited these results – but he recognised a problem: “Unfortunately, much of the available empirical research on the influence of trade on earnings inequality dates from the 1980s and 1990s and thus does not address later developments. Whether studies of the more recent period will reveal effects of trade on the distribution of earnings that differ from those observed earlier is to some degree an open question.”

But the question isn’t really that open. It’s clear that applying the same models to current data that, for example, led William Cline of the Peterson Institute to conclude in 1997 that trade was responsible for a 6% widening in the college-high school gap would lead to a much larger estimate today. Furthermore, some of the considerations that once seemed to set limits on the possible inequality-promoting effects of trade now seem much less constraining.

There are really two key points here: the rise of

China, and the growing fragmentation of production.

Conclusion:

What all this comes down to is that it’s no longer safe to assert, as we could a dozen years ago, that the effects of trade on income distribution in wealthy countries are fairly minor. There’s now a good case that they are quite big, and getting bigger.

This doesn’t mean that I’m endorsing protectionism. It does mean that free-traders need better answers to the anxieties of those who are likely to end up on the losing side from globalisation.

I’m just going to assume that Krugman is right about everything. Maybe he is. If a large part of Krugman’s argument is that we increasingly buy stuff from China (and other such countries), since they can produce it more cheaply, then it is a large part of Krugman’s argument that ”the economy” in which Americans participate is increasingly one in which parties to complex forms of exchange work and reside in different nation-states. Krugman, as far as I can tell, thinks the increasingly globalized network of exchange creates a larger overall surplus than would exist in a more highly protectionist world, and Americans on average are better off for it. But, the argument seems to be, the share of that larger surplus going specifically to low-skilled American workers is smaller than it would be in a more heavily protected economy. These folks are on ”the losing side.” The policy upshot, I’m sure, is that “winners” might need to compensate “losers.”

I think there are lots of conceptual problems here that flow from knee-jerk economic nationalism. Let’s imagine just U.S. – Chinese trade, to make things simpler.

First, it is not clear why the scenario of a continued, less-globalized status quo ante, in which low-skilled American workers earn higher wages, counts as the relevant baseline. That is a world in which, I guess, we are supposed to imagine that the Chinese economy has not been liberalized, and so there is less competition from Chinese workers. Implicit in this idea is that unreformed Chinese communism — which keeps its workers off the world labor market – is a subsidy to low-skilled American workers. But now the subsidy has been withdrawn, making low-skilled workers “losers.” There is clearly a kind of perspective relativity going on here. We could just as well say that the prior generation of low-skilled workers were winners, receiving a bonus from Chinese economic illiberalism. I think the normative baseline should be competitive world labor markets — a world in which individuals’ passports have no effect on their freedom to trade with one another. And so the opening of Chinese labor markets is a reversion toward the baseline, and a withdrawal (from other low-skilled workers) of a positive externality of injustice.

Second, it seems to me that American low-skilled workers are suffering from a classic pecuniary externality (that is, the withdrawal of a positive pecuniary externality). If you and I are both in the hot dog biz, and I sell my hot dogs for a lower price, a reduction in your profits may be (to you) a negative external effect of my offering a lower price. But this is not the kind of thing you can claim as a “harm” or a basis for compensation. Pecuniary externalities are essential to competitive markets: we want them. Nobody is doing anything to low-skilled domestic laborers. It is simply that their segment of the labor market has become more competitive, bidding down wages. It’s just as if you had to cut the price of your hot dogs to stay in business, resulting in lower profits. Now imagine that our friend Larry is now buying hot dogs from me rather than you, since my hot dogs are cheaper. There are gains from our trade, which he and I divide. Larry comes to me not you, because he gets a relatively bigger bit of the surplus than he did with you. At the end of the year, Larry has more cash in his pocket than he would have had if he had been trading with you. And you have less in your pocket than you would have had if he had been trading with you. So the inequality between you and Larry has increased, all because I’ve been offering a cheaper hot dog. But I had next to nothing before I was selling cheap hot dogs. So the inequality between me and Larry has decreased.       

That’s what it’s like, isn’t it? Many Americans get a boost in real wages from the relative decline in prices due to cheaper stuff made in China. But that boost isn’t enough to fully compensate workers who would have been doing the work the Chinese are doing (if the ChiComs hadn’t opened their markets.) Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of Chinese edge ever slightly closer to American wages. Which change in inequality matters morally? It simply isn’t obvious that it’s the gap among fellow Americans.    

  Unites States and China GDP per capita 1975-2004

Now, it may be the case that if the class of citizens who suffer a pecuniary externality is large enough, they may drum up effective political demand for restrictions on trade (for reinstating their previous subsidy, by other means), which would make most other citizens worse off in the short term, and everyone worse off in the long term. So we might want to enact direct wage subsidies, or an increase in the EITC, retraining programs, or whatever, to get those on the ”losing side” of globalization from trying to use the political process to make themselves “winners” again. But, if that’s the real argument, we should be clear that the point of this is not to ameliorate the injustice of increasing national income inequality caused by global trade, because there is probably no such injustice. Increasing national inequality may be a side-effect of a straightforward improvement in justice globally.

It may also be that Krugman is not right about everything. 

Furman on Inequality

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Following in my illustrious footsteps as an Economist.com guest blogger, Brookings senior fellow Jason Furman writes thusly of rising income inequality: 

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s income inequality data, the top 1 percent of households have seen their incomes go up by 7 percent and the bottom 80 percent have seen their income shares go down by 7 percent.  In total that is a $664 billion increase in inequality, representing $7,000 for each household in the bottom 80 percent and nearly $600,000 for each household in the top 1 percent.

That number motivates a Hamilton Project tax strategy paper co-authored by Larry Summers, Jason Bordoff and myself that is being released today.

It is far from obvious what has caused the change; in just the last month alone the National Bureau of Economic Research has released three working papers with divergent explanations:  a reduction in the bargaining power of workers, an increased reward for skills and worker productivity, and the destruction of good jobs by trade.

Regardless of the cause of rising inequality, lefties, utilitarians, Rawlsians and anyone with a deep-seated reverence for markets and the capitalist system should all be concerned.  As Alan Greenspan memorably stated, “income inequality is where the capitalist system is most vulnerable.  You can’t have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.”

Well, I consider myself a sort of Rawlsian (a Rawlsekian!) with a deep-seated reverence for markets and the capitalist system. Should I be concerned? I agree with the sainted Greenspan that capitalism cannot survive a widespread conviction that it is unjust. And I agree that income inequality is one of those things that some thinkers like wheel out to try to convince us that capitalism is unjust, at least around the edges, in order to build popular support for such things as more steeply “progressive taxes combined with expanded benefits like health insurance,” like Furman wants. But I’m not so worried by rising income inequality as I am by Furman’s facile slide from income inequality numbers, which are meaningless by themselves, to the possibility of a crisis of legitimacy.

It is worth repeatedly and forcefully emphasizing that income inequality may or may not be symptomatic of injustice. The three hypotheses for rising inequality Furman mentions are perfectly consistent with advances in justice. And if they are generating income inequality, then it may vindicate capitalism. For example, the loss of jobs, a decrease in wages, or a decrease in bargaining power for some workers may be a consequence of lifting coercive restrictions on voluntary exchange across borders — restrictions that are themselves a form of injustice. Furman himself notes that protectionist policies could decrease inequality, though he advises against them, and rightly so, since they are unjust. But if protectionist policies are lifted, and inequality increases, that uptick in inequality is a side-effect of justice, not a symptom of injustice.

Inequality may reflect real injustice in our culture and institutions, and some portion of it probably does. But then our focus ought to be on rooting out those injustices, not papering them over with confiscatory redistribution which, in the absence of a reason to do it other than arbitrarily reducing measured inequality, is straightforwardly immoral.

Let’s set aside the matter of the intelligibility of “shares” of “national income” as a subject of justice for another time.

[Cross-posted from Cato@Liberty.]  

Holbo on Rorty

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John Holbo’s brilliant post explains exactly why I always found Rorty puzzling.

His reformist reach exceeds his justificatory good conscience. He really thinks he’s right, but doesn’t think he can give his opponents rational grounds that they are compelled to accept. The one point he’s got is that, if the sort of change he wants comes, it will come as a sort of ‘conversion’ to a new way of thinking (cultural shift, call it what you will). This is true, but – again – not exactly a reason to convert. But what else can he say? Rorty ends up more or less boxed into a narrow hortatory row: not even straight preaching to the unconverted. Instead, preaching the meta-possibility of conversion to the unconverted.

Which seems to me to be a way of saying that Rorty was a dismally bad pragmatist. If he really cared about reducing cruelty, he would have availed himself of the most muscular and effective modes of persuasion — i.e., empirical argument about and vivid demonstration of what actually reduces suffering – rather than “preaching the meta-possibility of conversion to the unconverted.” Rorty seems to have knee-capped himself with his undermotivated epistemic convictions, which is indeed ironic, since those very convictions say he shouldn’t take them seriously. But he does; he evidently takes them more seriously than his professed moral aims. I was amused reading Achieving Our Country when Rorty says, quite explicitly, there is no fact of the matter about the past, and now I am going to try to convince you of a story about our history that I think it would be good for us all to believe! If you thought it was so important for people to believe it, why would you start out by telling them that you yourself don’t, actually? Here’s one completely conjectural suspicion: Rorty was in love with the idea of social democratic justice, but did not think that he had any warrant for the belief that it actually would make people better off. A child of committed communists, he saw that passionately loved moral ideals can be completely disastrous. But he believed what he believed, damn it. Knowing it might be false, and even harmful, he was ironic about it. And he effectively reduced suffering by arguing for his political ideals in such a painfully narcissistic and completely ineffectual fashion that they never actually affected the world. For this, he deserves our thanks.

By way of contrast, if Lant Pritchett succeeds in even slightly opening up wealthy labor markets to workers who lost the passport lottery, he will have done more to end needless cruelty than a million Rortys. But then, Lant Pritchett believes that the effectiveness of his favored means to that end of reducing suffering is a fact of the external world. And it is. That’s powerful.     

Thoughts on Rorty

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There is no better way to memorialize a philosopher than argue with him. So here’s a bit from one of the only things I ever wrote about Rorty, from a 1999 Institute for Objectivist Studies online seminar. This, I think, would have been my first year in the PhD program at Maryland, so please keep that it mind. 

Richard Rorty’s “Objectivity or Solidarity” is a case study in the use of false alternatives for rhetorical gain. The essay begins by presenting us with an awfully weird and unappealing choice. Rorty claims that there are just two main ways to “give sense” to our lives. Either one can make up a story about oneself in which one’s life figures in the life of a bigger community, or one can think about standing in a certain direct relationship to the mind-independent world. If you go in for the first, then you like solidarity. If you go in for the second, you like objectivity. Now, reader, pick sides!

It really is a weird choice. First, we might not care that much about being embedded in a tradition or community. And so fitting into one might not be central to some people’s sense of meaning in life. But these people don’t thereby have any overriding interest in eyeball to eyeball contact with the world-out-there. I’m sure you can give meaning to your life without questing primarily for either truth-for-its-own-sake or my-place-in-something-bigger-than-me. How about giving meaning to your life by trying to do something that makes you, the individual, happy?

It is important for Rorty to cast his argument against objectivity in terms of the meaningfulness of our lives, because Rorty’s “pragmatism” will forbid him from saying that the ideal of objectivity is objectively unworthy of belief, because false. He will be required to say merely that objectivity is not so good for us to care about, that we’ll be better off if we don’t care about it and care about solidarity instead. His way of setting up the question in terms of what “gives sense” to our lives allows him to plump for solidarity by saying that seeking solidarity (without trying to ground solidarity in objectivity) lends itself better to a meaningful life. As we shall see, he really can’t coherently claim that either. But first things first.

And I think this bit is relevant to the Yglesias/Linker debate:

As it turns out, it does not look like Rorty is articulating the commitments of liberal, western intellectuals, such that when he speaks to that audience, they are bound by those commitments to endorse what Rorty says. Rather, it looks like he is trying to dictate those commitments, to cause us to revise them. It looks as though he is pretending to be a member of our community, but that in reality he is standing outside of it, looking in, and suggesting we change our commitments in rather radical ways to suit his ideals. Rorty himself refuses solidarity with the Western Enlightenment ideals and the community centered in those ideals. So he makes up a story that will disintegrate that community and its ideals by persuading its members that it has been committed to Rorty’s ideals all along.

When Rorty says, “There is, in short, nothing wrong with the hopes of the Enlightenment” he means that there is nothing wrong except for the entire picture of man’s relationship to reality through reason upon which the Enlightenment was based. He is saying that there is nothing wrong with the hopes of the Enlightenment, except for those hopes and ideals at odds with his own. Clearly, some notion of objectivity is essential to the Enlightenment vision. Rorty’s attack on objectivity just is an attack on the Enlightenment ideals based on its conception of objectivity. But he cannot put the debate in those terms, lest he show himself too clearly as a dissenter to our ideals. Rather, he must put the debate in terms that permit him to characterize himself as someone who is articulating Enlightenment ideals and making them coherent from within. But he is, in fact, merely a wolf in Enlightenment clothing.

I have since come some way in Rorty’s direction in seeing the contingency of the Enlightenment ideals of rationality and objectivity. (In my Objectivist period, I would have seen them as something like self-evident, or immanent in the very idea of thinking. I don’t now see it this way at all.) But I’ve hardly come to be ironic about them. Grasping a thing’s contingency can be the same as grasping its rarity and preciousness — can be a reason for treating it very seriously, without irony. The ideals of rationality and objectivity in practice actually are our means of discovering what the world is like, and actually do explain a large part of the enormous moral progress humankind has made in the last few hundred years. Because I now see these ideals as more contingent and fragile than ever, I now think Rorty’s assault on objectivity is even more discreditible than I did before, and even more a violation of solidarity with those who hold fast to the norms of reason, progress, and social hope. 

John Schumaker on Happiness

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Matthew Pianalto has written a useful review of John F. Schumaker’s In Search of Happiness. It looks to me like Shumaker is one of those guys who insists on making happiness coextensive with their conception of a good life, and then argues that we’re can’t be happy, even though we think we are, since our lives don’t measure up to his substantive theory of the good.

Schumaker argues that those who conceive of happiness as “subjective well-being” — comprised of the satisfaction of individual desires and the presence of high levels of positive affect (and minimal negative affect) — have failed to recognize that genuine happiness likely consists of more than satisfaction and pleasure. At the very minimum, we must recognize that the quality of a person’s happiness necessarily depends upon the kinds of values which inform a person’s understanding of happiness and thus set the parameters for how one pursues the happy life. On Schumaker’s view, the values of individualist, materialist cultures are far too shallow, amoral, and non-sustainable for their realization to lead to a genuinely happy life. Because of this, Schumaker declares that, “in reality I believe that a heart-felt happiness is beyond the reach of most people who regard consumer culture to be their psychological home” (287).

This strikes me as just stupid. Why not simply say that if individidualist, materialist cultures lead to happiness in the “subjective well-being” sense, which they do (much more so than poor, collectivist cultures), then some forms of happiness are shallow, amoral, and unsustainable. The book might be more honestly titled Against What Brainwashed People Like You Think Happiness Is. I really can’t see the intellectual virtue of such a tendentiously moralized conception of happiness. From Pianalto’s review, it seems pretty clear Shumaker believes that material and cultural progress is immoral, and wants us to live more like hunter-gatherers. This bit is interesting:

In Schumaker’s reconstruction of the development of modern civilization, happiness emerges as a powerful ideal as people settle down into permanent communities which, surprisingly, leads to distancing of happiness from everyday life. Schumaker suggests that the development of agriculture, which allowed cities of specialized laborers to emerge (leaving farmers in the countryside to provide food), gave rise to the concept of work, as something that one must begrudgingly labor at during the day so that one can be happy (or just eat) at night. Work, for most people most of the time, is not fun, and so the concept of work distances those who must work from the happiness that they are working toward.

Ruut Veenhoven has toyed with similar ideas. But, funnily enough, he has argued this is one of the reasons that individualistic, materialistic cultures have greater measured happiness because they are more like hunter-gatherer societies in important respects than are the very hierarchical, immobile, agricultural societies of yore. That is, the environment-psychology mismatch between traditional agricultural societies and nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, is larger than the mismatch between contemporary consumer cultures and nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s provocative. In any case, as I argued against Veenhoven in our Cato Unbound exchange, I don’t think happiness is exactly a “natural” state, and the environmental mismatch views don’t take human cultural malleability seriously enough. Anyway, I think Shumaker might be right about work. Which is why it is imperative that we maximize rates of economic growth: the wealthier people are, the more discretion they have in how they use their time. The division of labor is the solution to the problems it creates.

[Follwup: Speaking of nomads, by packing their entire moral philosophy into their conception of happiness, thinkers like Shumaker are left having to deal with findings like this as embarassments:

The effect of modernization on the well-being of Bedouin women (n = 150) was investigated. Results show that the more modern the objective circumstances of the women's lives, and/or the more modern the husbands' attitudes (as perceived by their wives), the greater their subjective well-being(SWB). The women's own attitudes affected their SWB only via interaction with their husbands' attitudes and/or life circumstances. If the husbands' attitudes were modern, their wives' attitudes were not significantly related to SWB. However, if the husbands' attitudes were traditional, then the more modern the wives' attitudes, the lower their SWB. These findings repeated themselves, to a lesser degree, with life circumstances. The results fit the latest theoretical developments on SWB, and reflect the changes taking place within Bedouin society.

Are Bedouin women suffering from false consciousness? Is this merely subjective form of happiness too superficial to care about? Do they really know what's good for them? Do they know that modern practices are "unsustainable"?]      

Inequality; Lant Pritchett is Awesome; the Injustice of Labor Market Restrictions

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My new project for Cato is a paper on how to not get confused when you’re trying to think about inequality. In that context, today’s NYT Magazine focusing on inequality is pure catnip. There are, of course, completely infuriating passages, such as this one, in David Leonhardt’s profile of Larry Summers:

Summers’s favorite statistic these days is that, since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. Over the same span, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points. It’s as if every household in that bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent.

WTF!? This had better be Leonhardt’s misinterpretion of something Summers is saying, and not Summers himself, since he certainly knows better. First, nation-states do not have incomes, people do. Second, because nation-states do not have incomes, the income of nation-states is not divided by anyone into “shares” that go to different segments of the population. Third, a change in the ratio of the incomes of wealthier households to the inomes of less wealthy households has a great deal to do with changes in the productivity of various forms of capital; changing inequality in income has something to do with changing inequality in production. Fourth, the “middle and lower deciles writing checks to the rich” analogy implies that there is some counterfactual set of circumstances under which “total national income” is the same, but in which the households in the bottom 80 percent of the distribution get that $7,000 and not the top 1 percent, and that this is the baseline against which we are to judge the current pattern of incomes. Mystifying.

Anyway, what I wanted to point to is the Jason DeParle profile of economist Lant Pritchett. Kerry introduced me to this guy a few months ago, and he has quickly become an intellectual hero. His book, Let Their People Come: Breaking the Deadlock on Global Labor Mobility, (which is FREE in pdf from CGD) ought to be considered required reading for intellectually serious people who care about ameliorating global poverty.  From DeParle’s outstanding profile:

The basics are simple: The rich world has lots of well-paying jobs and an aging population that cannot fill them. The poor world has desperate workers. But while goods and capital can easily cross borders, modern labor cannot. This strikes Pritchett as bad economics and worse social justice. He likens the limits on labor mobility to “apartheid on a global scale.” Think Desmond Tutu with equations.

[...]

Indeed, Pritchett attacks the primacy of nationality itself, treating it as an atavistic prejudice. Modern moral theory rejects discrimination based on other conditions of birth. If we do not bar people from jobs because they were born female, why bar them because they were born in Nepal? The name John Rawls appears on only a single page of “Let Their People Come,” but Pritchett is taking Rawlsian philosophy to new lengths. If a just social order, as Rawls theorized, is one we would embrace behind a “veil of ignorance” — without knowing what traits we possess — a world that uses the trait of nationality to exclude the neediest workers from the richest job markets is deeply unjust. (Rawls himself thought his theory did not apply across national borders.) Pritchett’s Harvard students rallied against all kinds of evils, he writes, but “I never heard the chants, ‘Hey, ho, restrictions on labor mobility have to go.’ ”

It seems to me that Pritchett in fact shows the massive tension between the nationalist assumptions of modern welfare-statist political philosophy (i.e., Rawls) and a theory of justice suitable to a global economy. If our normative framework is broadly contractualist, which I think it ought to be, and we conceive of society as a system of cooperation for mutual benefit, then the scope of the principles of justice is the scope of actual and potential cooperation. Labor market restrictions are rules that exclude persons from participating in certain institutions of market cooperation — institutions that greatly encourage the production of wealth. This kind of exclusion requires justification, not primarily because it generates inequality (which it does), but that it limits mutually beneficial interaction for both those inside and outside the political fence. The fact that citizens of a nation state democratically endorse this kind of exclusion simply establishes that citizen-centered (club membership-centered) democratic choice is unlikely to be a decent proxy for the principles of justice when the scope of cooperation is international. We would not accept a vote among the non-slave citizens of a slave society as settling the issue of  the justice of slavery. Similarly, we shouldn’t accept national democratic demand for labor-market exclusion as even roughly tracking the demands of justice.

Pritchett’s argument for a huge international guest-worker program seems to me massively more compelling than theories of global justice that basically endorse the present system of national entrapment and exclusion, and overlay it with the additional injustice of massive, forced redistribution. A good theory of global justice starts with the recognition that just societies don’t try to limit the scope of voluntary human cooperation.  

Hey, ho, restrictions on labor mobility have to go!   

Interested in Happiness?

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Thanks to Tyler at Marginal Revolution (who sent me the paper in the first place), I see my somewhat cryptic post on the new NBER happiness study has been linked by Brad DeLong and Kevin Drum. In case anyone is stumbling on this blog for the first time, and is interested in this whole “happiness research” business, let me point you to my recent Cato Institute paper, “In Pursuit of Happiness Research: Is It Reliable? What Does it Imply for Policy.”

Or why not try the April Cato Unbound discussion of happiness research featuring Darrin McMahon, Barry Schwartz, Ruut Veenhoven, and me?

Happiness and the Ideological Mediation of Adaptation

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The truly delicious bits of this new NBER working paper by Di Tella, Haisken-De New, and MacCulloch on adaptation to income and status is the stuff on political leanings:

We study “habituation” to income and to status using individual panel data on the happiness of 7,812 people living in Germany from 1984 to 2000. Specifically, we estimate a “happiness equation” defined over several lags of income and status and compare the long run effects. We can (cannot) reject the hypothesis of no adaptation to income (status) during the four years following an income (status) change. In the short-run (current year) a one standard deviation increase in status and 52% of one standard deviation in income are associated with similar increases in happiness. In the long-run (five year average) a one standard deviation increase in status has a similar effect to an increase of 285% of a standard deviation in income. We also present different estimates of habituation across sub-groups. For example, we find that those on the right (left) of the political spectrum adapt to status (income) but not to income (status).

That is (in case you’re confused), folks on the left get used to money, but not status and the reverse for folks on the right. This is funny, since I’ve been reading a bunch of papers on inequality, mostly by political philosophers on the left, and they are positively obsessed specifically with the status effects of material inequality. It’s pretty amusing if this is just a reflection of a particular personality type. More generally, the fact that the happiness-effects of various things seem to be mediated by ideological leanings seems to basically ruin the prospect of using happiness research as a neutral, scientific way of assessing policy. It may just end up sort-of-usefully reminding us that one group may like a certain policy and another group may not simply because it makes one group feel better and another group feel worse. It doesn’t settle the dispute: it explains why we’re having it. Also, ideological mediation is one more nail in the coffin for the introspective method of normative philosophy. If the effects of this or that on people’s sense of well-being is mediated by their ideological cast, then chances are, our intuitions about real and hypothetical cases are probably already deeply infected with our ideological notions–or with the personality traits that lead us to find those notions attractive–and arguments based on these intuitions simply beg all the interesting questions in a subtle way.

Razib!? Not You, Too!

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Razib is uncharacteristically confused:

a nation is not a market, a market is a sector of a nation. There is a large underclass in the United States which we lay off and replace with some industrious Mexicans, but that isn’t going to happen, you don’t lay off citizens, or export them. That’s a reality, so one of the major priorities (in my opinion) should be choking unskilled labor so that wages rise for that sector.

Well, here we go…

(1) Markets are not sectors of nations. I just looked at the tag on my shirt. It says “Made in the Philippines.” How did it get here!? Labor markets are geographically bounded only insofar as the market for services and flows of labor are geographically bounded. But services are increasingly international (call centers, data entry, etc.). And the question at hand is whether we ought to further restrict the free flow of labor across our borders: don’t beg it.  

(2) The largely black, urban American underclass is not an underclass because Mexicans are willing to accept low wages. It just isn’t.

(3) Who doesn’t lay off citizens? I’m not sure what is being said here. (Exporting? Huh?) If there is some claim here about a special obligation to enter into labor contracts with co-nationals, I’d like to hear an argument for it.

(4) As my last post argues, a nation is basically a geographically defined club that offers a number of services to its members, and that generally denies entry and membership to others on a completely morally indefensible basis.

I am glad that Razib (and Yglesias) are clear about their straightforward protectionism when it comes to labor. Of course, the argument for free trade in labor is exactly the same as the argument for free trade in anything else–even given morally backward America First assumptions. (And once we decide to consider the issue like decent human beings, and take into account the welfare of other human beings who just happen to have been born outside our public goods provision jurisdiction, the argument for free labor is so overwhelming you basically have to reject the idea of morality itself to deny its force.) Is there a compelling argument against free trade of which I am not yet aware? Even from the perspective of the U.S. national interest, we ought to abolish wage floors and allow U.S. employers to enter legally into labor contracts with anyone with the good sense to show up here.

In the same post, Razib says we need to batten the hatches to allow us to fully absorb the immigrants we have now. Is there any evidence that we are not successfully doing this already? Is there any evidence that we could not be doing this quite successfully if we doubled or tripled the rate of immigration? We can absorb many many more high wage and more low wage workers, and we should.

The good thing about the guest worker provision in the otherwise awful immigration bill is that it provides a stepping-stone to an EU-like American common labor market.  Here is Princeton’s Douglas Massey in the August 2006 Cato Unbound on Mexican immigration:

Rather than seeking to build a wall between our two countries, we should adopt the stance taken by the European Union when it integrated poor neighbors such as Spain and Portugal in the 1980s and Poland and Hungary today. Rather than seeking to block flows of people that naturally follow from trade and investment within a common market, we should work to make sure these movements occur under circumstances that are beneficial to all concerned, promoting growth in Mexico, minimizing costs to the United States, and protecting the rights of immigrant and native workers.

Right on.