Monthly Archives: February 2008

Climate Debate Daily

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My one climate post in forever reminds me that I should link to Climate Debate Daily, the new-ish site edited by Denis Dutton (overseer of the famed Arts & Letter’s Daily) and Douglas Campbell.

Here’s the site’s statement of what Denis is up to:

At the University of Canterbury he has recently introduced a new course on the distinction between science and pseudoscience. Dr. Dutton is skeptical about the degree to which human activity has contributed to the general warming trend that began in the 1880s. He adds, however: “Working at the university where Karl Popper taught in the 1930s and 40s, I am more than a little aware of the way that good scientific hypotheses must always be open to falsification. The best way for science and public policy to proceed is to keep assessing evidence pro and con for anthropogenic global warming. That is the idea behind Climate Debate Daily.”

Good idea. Campbell looks to be a bit more convinced of AGW and thinks action is warranted. But he wants to hash it out. Good man.

Prizes for Amelioration

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Has anyone seen an extended argument for doing nothing at all about global warming other than offering huge prizes for technological fixes?

Update:

Also… from Warren Meyer I see this: “[Some climate scientists] claim now that man-made sulfate aerosols and black carbon are cooling the earth, and when some day these pollutants are reduced, we will see huge catch-up warming.”

Has anyone in the Pigou Club advanced the argument for subsidizing sulfate aerosols and black carbon (and whatever else has cooling effects)?

I’m sincerely asking. Such subsidies are only logical, right?

Seriously, Why Are You Freaking Out?

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My comments are teeming with racists good people who believe in the racial and cultural superiority of Americans of European descent clearly terrified by the prospect of the breakdown of Anglo-European cultural hegemony in America. The worry seems to be that with a slightly liberalized immigration regime the U.S. will swiftly devolve into some kind of squalid hell.

Like California?

Califonia Population by Ethnicity

[Click for bigger image.]

Presently, whites are well less than half the Calfornian population. Hispanics make up just more than a third. Asians at 12 percent are nearly double the black population. I’d guess it won’t be long before Hispanics pass whites to become a plurality.

Now, if my fearful commenters aren’t simply making things up in their paranoid dreams, wouldn’t California be a complete disaster already? Of course, we all know that, were it a country, California would be the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world. The median household income in California, $54,385, ranks 11th in the U.S., and would put California right near the top of the world rankings.

No doubt the browning of California has become unpleasant for some white natives. But according to the 2007 United Van Lines internal migration study, California just had another year of decline in out-bound intra-U.S. migration rates, leaving net migration about a wash. And the out-migration that exists is probably more a result of price pressure than white flight, given that California is the most expensive state in the country in which to live. Indeed, the fact that more people don’t leave due to such high costs is an indication of how desirable life in California must be. Arizona, a border state whose population is almost a third Hispanic (and that percentage is swiftly growing), is one of the favorite destinations for internal American migration, and in some recent years has been the favorite. So Arizona, which boasts a median family income right around the national median, is either doing just fine or the many thousands of Americans who move there each year are stupid.

So what gives my xenophobic friends? If the idea is that the U.S. will inevitably slide toward second-world status if the whole place comes to look a lot more like California and Arizona demographically, wouldn’t you expect California and Arizona to be much poorer and much less popular? I mean, given the claims I’m getting from some of you, these places ought to be nightmares. But instead they are … really nice places to live!

Anyway, I can’t say I’m looking forward to the explanation of how it is that, if suddenly cut loose from the Union, an independent California and its half-wit citizens would swiftly vote its way into conditions resembling the slums of Calcutta. But I’m pretty sure it’s coming…

Is Limited Government Possible?

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Hey, political theory geeks! This month’s Cato Unbound should be pretty sweet. Here’s the editorial summary of Anthony de Jasay‘s lead essay, “Government, Bound or Unbound?“:

Reprising the topic of his 1989 essay, “Is Limited Government Possible?” political theorist Anthony de Jasay continues to express limited skepticism. According to de Jasay, the incentive of political actors is to gain power by putting together winning coalitions, and to stay in power by rewarding their supporters at the expense of their opponents. If constitutional limits stand in their way, they will eventually be reinterpreted, undermined, or otherwise worked around. Governments are more delayed than limited by constitutional rules, like a lady with the key to her own chastity belt. If governments are effectively limited, de Jasay argues, then it is by means of the structure of campaign finance, the practical limits on tax rates, and public panic at the prospect of economic ruin. De Jasay admits conventional cultural and moral norms may limit government, but doubts these are strong enough to fully check the interests that drive politics.

It’s long, but very worthwhile. Stay tuned for University of Arizona political philosopher Gerald Gaus, author of On Philosophy, Politics and Economics; Michael Munger, chair of the Duke University political science department; and Randy Barnett, professor of law at Georgetown University and author of Restoring the Lost Constitution.

Talking about Happiness

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This week on Free Will, I chat with Eric Weiner, author of NewYork Times bestseller, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World. I didn’t always agree with Eric’s interpretation of some of the happiness data, but I found this a really fun, though-provoking hybrid of travel and science writing. As it happens, I met Eric when he called to interview me for this article on why Republicans are happier than Democrats, which appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post. Here’s my appearance:

Nowadays, politicians are hesitant to explicitly utter the H-word, choosing instead to dance around the subject. It’s only a matter of time, though, before Republicans begin to crow about their happiness. “They can say, ‘Look, I’m not being a stuffy, old-fashioned conservative,’ ” says Will Wilkinson, a policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute. “There is real science that shows that if you go to church, if you don’t get divorced, you’ll be happier. That’s tempting to any politician.”

Eric had asked whether using happiness research for political purposes was mostly just a left-wing thing, or if it might appeal to conservatives too. I said that if there are findings congenial to conservatives, and there are, then you can bet it won’t go unmentioned, especially if it gives a scientific patina to what they believed in anyway. David Cameron was first out of the blocks on this, but I bet we’ll see plenty of conservative references to happiness findings in the future.

Nationalist Moral Chauvinism

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The argument between the moral chauvinist and the moral universalist is an argument over the standard for moral justification. For the chauvinist, if a rule or policy benefits the group to which the chauvinist happens to be a member, then it is justified. One of the chauvinist’s many problems, besides getting morality fundamentally wrong, is that she is a member of many groups. She may be a Catholic, of Chinese origin, and an American citizen. She may be a loyal Michigander, a stalwart of the local community, and a member in good standing of clubs and associations. The chauvinist who prioritizes the nation needs to provide some justification for choosing this membership as especially salient.

I don’t find communitarian conservatives confusing, but I do find communitarian nationalist conservatives confusing, especially when the nation in question is something so sprawling, diverse, and abstract as the United States of America. The USA is already more like, say, a North American Union than it is like the kind of tightly-knit gemeinschaft traditionalists crave. The massive, pluralistic, modern state is already so far down the anti-communitarian slippery slope that communitarian moral chauvinism asserted at the level of the state seems patently ridiculous, like a steam-powered laptop.

What I really think nationalist, anti-immigration conservatives would like is to establish some kind of strong right of cultural preservation without at the same time getting caught in a morass of relativistic identity politics. Well, good luck. At bottom of that desire, I think, is the conviction that cultural and moral chauvinism are necessary conditions for a rich and deeply meaningful life. But if you, like me, have actually been persuaded by the great thinkers of the Enlightenment about the universal nature of morality and rights, then this basically amounts to the claim that meaning in life requires immorality. Of course, it won’t do to baldly assert that the good life requires systematically harming outsiders and violating their rights as human beings, so the chauvinist generally answers the “Why be moral?” question be redefining morality as group partiality, or denying that it is even intelligible to recognize moral obligations simply in virtue of our shared humanity rather than in our shared sectarian identities.

I think low-brow, right-wing pop ideologues are rather more up front than most would-be right-wing intellectuals. They see the world as a place of irreconcilable conflict. Our culture is the best one. Our people are the best people. We are at war to preserve our culture and people against the interlopers, which requires keeping them away. The very presence of people speaking other languages in public threatens our culture, the best culture. And mixture of cultures and genes threatens to lead our people, the best people, to extinction. We may impose almost any cost on outsiders to preserve our culture and our people, because our culture and people are best, and those people are not us. Liberty, free association, dynamism, cosmopolitanism: these are code words for our destruction and those moralizers who rely on them are traitors.

The Moral Claims of Non-Citizens

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So…, James Poulos had said:

The big problem with Gerson’s ‘moral internationalism’ is not that it has a big heart or a goofy smile. The big problem is that it’s inimical to citizenship. Gerson and his ilk long for the day that Americans don’t get a better shake in life just because they’re Americans.

I was a bit confused by the possibility of a decent person denying the fundamental moral equality of human beings, so I asked in comments:

Just to be clear, you think Americans ought to get a better shake in life just because they’re Americans?

In the comments, James ends up endorsing this view, from J.A.:

Whether you subscribe to the notion that America’s prosperity and stability are undeserved accidents of a less-than-honorable history, or, alternatively, happy results of the Constitution and better than average leadership — or, in fact, if you believe neither or a combination of these — do other peoples, less fortunate in their circumstances, have legitimate moral claims on us for access to them? If you take as a given that America is, comparatively speaking, a really good place to live, work, and raise a family — which I think is obviously a true statement — then the question is not whether Americans should get a better shake in life; they do get a better shake in life by virtue of being citizens in a “really good place to live, work and raise a family.” The question isn’t even one of just deserts. The question is, what moral claims can non-citizens make on American citizens given the fact of American prosperity and stability?

Yes, Americans get a better shake in life than most people in the world in virtue of having had the good sense to get born in the United States, which does have relatively excellent institutions. Yes, those institutions are a main reason so many people come to live and work here. But I cannot make sense of the concluding question. Does J.A. think that the fact Americans are so rich weakens the obligations of Americans to non-citizens? I guess that would be an… interesting thing to think.

There is no need for confusion about the question at hand, which is clear enough: What justifies state-imposed limits on the human rights to movement and free association?

A country is not a big plot of land owned by its citizens. It is a jurisdiction of government within which there are many free people and many pieces of privately-owned property — at least if the government is decent. But suppose one is simple and thinks citizens own countries in much the way a family can own a farm. What then?

First, back up to the question of the justification of a system of private property. The division of the commons into parcels, and the use of government coercion to enforce private claims over these parcels — which include the right to exclude — requires a justification. Dave Schmidtz provides that justification here [doc]. In short, dividing the commons leaves each with more than had it remained open. The right to exclude enables general prosperity.

So, think of the Earth as a big commons, and imagine borders as fences. Can we justify the system of nation-states and its migration controls in the same way? Evidently not. The welfare gains that would come from even a mild decrease in coercive limits on travel and free association are awesomely huge, which of course implies that the status quo system of limits does not leave most people better off than they would be in a feasible alternative system. And this suggests that the global-level system of division and exclusion lacks moral justification.

Citizens may have stronger claims on one another than they have on non-citizens. And they may have stronger claims one another than non-citizens have on them, because they share the burdens and benefits of a set of common institutions. But everyone, no matter who printed their passport, has equal claim to the respect of their basic rights. Citizens are under a strict obligation not to harm or violate the rights of non-citizens. The status quo system, which limits the freedom to travel and cooperation without benefiting most of those whose freedom is limited, amounts to both a substantive and moral harm; it denies some basic conditions for human flourishing and a thereby constitutes a violation of basic rights. What non-citizens have coming to them, is the recognition of their rights, moral respect as persons.

Limiting basic rights to travel and associate may be justified if it is necessary to maintain the integrity and stability of instutitions that tend to make people better off overall. The United States economy and its supporting institutions are hugely beneficial not only to those who live and work within them, but more broadly. I am open to serious, empirically-minded arguments about the location of the point at which additional openness to migration leads to diminishing benefits. But, I’m afraid, one sees very little of this.

Communitarian Aestheticism

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I am not alone:

… I know and do not regret the major role that aesthetic considerations play in human life, even apart from erotic desire, and even though in an often unrecognized manner, it is certainly possible to distinguish between kinds of aestheticism. As Emerson suggests in “The Poet,” bad poetry (so to speak) is part of the fabric of ordinary—that is unreflective—life. In every society, ordinary life is full of bad displacements and condensations, of unintentional metaphorization and shadowy symbolism. Worse, some kinds of socially exaggerated aestheticism are hideous in their perverse beauty. I find that communitarianism is often an encouragement to bad poetry, to a heightened conventional aestheticism that in modern circumstances can be satisfied only with mischievous or even pernicious results.

– George Kateb, “Individualism, Communitarianism, and Docility” in The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture

This is a great essay. Speaking of which, here is Emerson:

The inwardness, and mystery, of this attachment, drive men of every class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets, and philosophers, are not more intoxicated with their symbols, than the populace with theirs. In our political parties, compute the power of badges and emblems. See the huge wooden ball rolled by successive ardent crowds from Baltimore to Bunker hill! In the political processions, Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship.’ Witness the cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all the cognizances of party. See the power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure, which came into credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest, or the most conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics!

I do not trust that tingle. And I would like to know more about this “huge wooden ball”!

The Wave of the Future : Not Not Very Good!

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Megan says, “everyone I know thinks the Kindle is not very good, but is nonetheless the wave of the future…” False! Megan knows me. I actually have a Kindle, thanks to Kerry’s warm yuletide generosity, and I love it!

Here are my complaints:

(1) Not enough books yet available for the Kindle.

(2) It seems a bit fragile, and I’ve had to hard-reset a couple times after mild jostling.

I am inundated in books. I have way too many. I have no place to put them. I often can’t find them when I want them. I often don’t know what I want to read on a trip, so I carry six heavy books with me, which sucks. I now have something like 20 books in this one little package, and I love it. The e-ink display may be slightly grayer than I’d prefer, but it’s very comfortable too read. I suffer from computer screen-related eyestrain, and I find reading off the Kindle no worse for my eyes than reading a book, and sometimes better, since I can increase the type size. It formats pdfs better than advertised, and I’ve got now got a few free pdf-ed books aboard. You can carry about all of Project Gutenberg, if you like. I can imagine lots of marginal improvements, but I’m extremely impressed with my Kindle so far and my main complaint is that because everything is not available for the Kindle, I have to keep buying physical books, most of which I don’t really want qua objects. I get lots of publisher’s review copies and I don’t want most of these either. I would be more likely to actually browse these books if the publishers sent the Kindle version. I have actually become emotionally attached to my Kindle. You should probably buy one.

Living for Something Bigger Than Myself: Hating John McCain

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In this week’s episode of Free Will over at Bloggingheads TV, Reason chief Matt Welch and I discuss his rollicking, revealing book, McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, and the real man behind the myth. Sadly McCain’s looking like a GOP lock coming into Super Tuesday, and he polls strong nationally against both Clinton and Obama. The man could well become our next president, to the joy of arms manufacturers and the dismay of those of us who do not think a life not devoted to the service of the American state is devoid of purpose. Is that a triple negative? I guess that  goes to show how sour I am on John Sidney McCain III!