Monthly Archives: March 2008

Positive-Sum Within, Zero-Sum Without

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I was pretty impressed with Barack Obama’s speech. It struck me as unusually direct, realistic, intellectual, and mature. I’m not sure that will keep Fox News from showing Jeremiah Wright 24/7, as Obama himself more or less worried aloud, or that this won’t kill him in the general. (I’m inclined to think McCain would beat him in any case.) But it does make me think a bit more highly of him. I am extremely cynical about politics, but I do think rare, exemplary leadership can matter a great deal culturally. So, despite my cynicism, I think Obama did do something today to make the American discussion of race more frank and intelligent, which is pretty important, whether or not he goes on to the White House.

I was especially struck by Obama’s explicit use of the the idea of zero-sum games, and the way themes of positive- and zero-sumness were woven throughout the speech, always serving Obama’s rhetorical aim, but often undercutting his underlying moral message.

… in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

This could have come straight out of Benjamin Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. And Obama’s right. The key to social amity is the sense that neither individuals nor groups succeed at the expense of others. What I have always liked about Obama (and what Paul Krugman appears to hate) is that he sees the America not as a system of antagonisms defined along race or class lines, but as a fundamentally cooperative venture for mutual advantage. What I have never liked about Obama is his apparent failure to grasp how certain kinds of market institutions promote precisely the kind of positive-sumness he is rightly looking for — a point I articulated here nearly three years ago. And I have always been struck by his rhetorically resourceful but intellectually bankrupt failure to apply the same logic of mutuality beyond our borders. So it is that he ends up saying, after denouncing the politics of superficial divisiveness (i.e., playing clips of a ranting Jeremiah Wright on TV):

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag.

This is a tactic as old as time. Unify factions against a common threat. But it stinks.

Obama says the real problem is not that an American of a different ethnic background might take your job (that was the context), but that a non-American might. But let’s not dwell on that Mexican, Canadian, or Chinese guy who gets that job. Who cares about them? Well, if you think it for a second, you might care. So let’s try to remove from our thoughts the very real, yet non-American people who often gain immensely from outsourcing and pin it on all corporations. Well, Obama can’t have it both ways. It matters not to the individual American whether she has lost her job to someone in South Dakota, where it is cheaper to do business, or to someone in a whole different country. It matters not to the individual American whether he has lost his job to father of four in India or a new robot arm in North Carolina. In attacking offshore outsourcing Obama encourages in one breathe the zero-sum mentality he condemns in another. It may be possible to induce a spell of internal cooperation by framing it as part an external conflict, but it can’t last. By threatening growth, protectionism encourages internal conflict over the division of a smaller pie. As Obama evidently knows, that’s when racial lines are the most salient, when divisive zero-sum thinking prevails.

I’m convinced that Obama holds himself to a higher moral standard than the typical politician, and think that this speech was proof of that. But he guts his own aspirations when he stops short and preaches conflict at the point where preaching unity is no longer expedient.

The Solidarity of Ethnic Homogeneity: Not Liberal, Other Things Work Better

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Reihan Salam makes an excellent point:

As Ed Glaeser and Alberto Alesina have argued, it seems that ethnoracial fragmentation cuts against redistribution — taxpayers are reluctant to subsidize members of outgroups, a gut instinct that is easily characterized as racist. But perhaps this impulse is a useful corrective, and one of the virtues of diversity — i.e., perhaps greater homogeneity leads taxpayers to overinterpret a kind of nationalist sameness, thus leading to higher levels of redistribution than are in fact desirable. Now, I don’t think this is obviously true, but it’s no less plausible than the other story, namely that the interrelationship between extreme homogeneity and social democracy is an unambiguously good thing.

My take is that the kind of homogeneity and conformity necessary to generate the sense of solidarity that leads to popular, high levels of redistribution ought to be unattractive to liberals, who are either cosmopolitan pluralists or not really liberals at all. Add the fact that that there are superior feasible policy alternatives to lavish state-provided social services — deregulated labor markets, actual markets in insurance and health services, higher rates of growth, etc. — and American liberals really ought to stop trying to wish Nordic levels of solidarity and redistribution into existence, and instead just get with the program of promoting actually feasible market-based reforms.

Let Me Serve You Up!

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“Customer” by Raheem DeVaughn may be the greatest song ever written as it is the first to fully grasp, and to deploy for the purposes of seduction, the immense romance of being catered to … like a customer (at an idealized, perfected, phantasmagorical Burger King, one is lead to imagine). The luxury of the commercial relationship lies in the simplicity of its mode of reciprocity. “You can have it your way; you’re the customer,” DeVaughn croons. Which is to say, commercial exchange allows for customization and undivided satiation, as it requires but a simple payment and not constant emotional negotiation and renegotiation to arrive at an only partially satisfying compromise. To be treated like a “customer” is to be treated precisely the way you want, not the way someone else wants to treat you. Though the “payment” implied in the song is nothing more or less than acquiescence to DeVaughns’ attentive, indulgent , and no doubt skillful ministrations, “Customer” works astonishingly well as an anthem for the legalization of sexual services.

How to Be Grotesquely Reductionist and Utilitarian about Human Love and Life

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This post by one “Deep Thought” is a brilliant example:

This isn’t rocket science; men with easy access to prostitution or to promiscuous women have little incentive to marry. Suddenly there is nothing to offset their legal and financial obligations as a husband – so why take on the obligation? Women who are promiscuous face disease, pregnancy, and emotional trauma – all of them reduce their ability to be a valuable wife.

This probably helps explain what’s going on with prostitution bans, but is it supposed to be a moral reason to endorse them? Dramatic reconstruction:

Sweetheart… Since I have no easy access to women who sell sex, will you share my life so I can use you for sex? I mean, even if there were a few more easy women around here, I’d have no use for you. Definitely no reason to make a commitment to you. But there aren’t. Oh well. So… I love you? And Oh! Here’s a diamond.

Maybe this tells us something about the great romance of being the mother of Deep Thought’s four children, but for my part, I share my life with Kerry because she is brilliant and exciting and we mesh in so many ways and I love her. As far as I can tell, the existence of Craiglist’s Casual Encounters has no bearing on this, my greatest source of happiness.

It gets even more obsessively biological. This is, sensibly enough I suppose, written by a Catholic guy with a theology degree who attends Latin mass and thinks “the Patriarchy, when controlled by Judeo-Christian morality, is a protector of and advocate for women.” [!!!]:

the future belongs to those who show up. If you don’t have kids, you have no stake in the future. If you have kids, you not only have a stake in the future, you can influence it in ways almost impossible to duplicate without kids.

[...]

bans on prostitution exist not just to avoid the exploitation of sex workers; they are in place not just because the majority of world religions declare them immoral; they were passed not solely to fight the spread of disease; they were written with more than the goal of reducing the numbers of poor, fatherless children. No, they are there to protect the future.

Again, I can see the explanatory power here. But to think that this has justificatory power is simply grotesque. This is to reduce individual human beings to tokens of a biological type, to reduce the purpose of an individual human life to a link in a biological chain there is no moral value in forging. Yes, the future belongs to those who show up. But the present belongs to each individual human being. We have lives because a lineage has been perpetuated. But our lives are not for perpetuating lineages. Our lives are for our living. Our duty is to treat one another as free and equal persons, as ends in themselves, which means we are duty-bound not to use people and their lives for purposes not their own. We treat people with the respect they deserve. Whoever shows up, shows up. If you’re interested in that, then breed away. But do leave the rest of us alone.

How Sex Is (and Isn't) Different, Part II

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Everything is what it is. Sex work is different from carpentry and it is different from surgery. It is like carpentry and surgery in that it is a way of renting one’s body. It is like surgery in requiring some hardening and compartmentalization. It is not like surgery in that it involves a different set of skills and different emotional preparation. A distinctive thing about sex is that it involves taking pleasure in ourselves and others as physical things, as objects. Very often we enjoy being objectified. We like to feel sexy, to arouse others, to be wanted qua object. But the danger of objectification is de-subjectification: losing track of the fact that the other person is not only an object, to be used as a means to one’s sexual ends, but is a person — an end in themselves. Sex workers, like models, are paid to be de-subjectified to some degree, to be used as means, and this can come as a blow to dignity unless one has braced oneself against it.

I find it a bit insulting to feel pushed to have to say that children are not prepared to brace themselves in this way. Or to feel pushed to say that parents have deep, special obligations to attend to and protect their childrens’ subjectivity, to cultivate and protect their personhood as it develops, to cultivate and protect their burgeoning sense of dignity. For a parent, of all people, to de-subjectify a child, and to use him or her as an object — as a means for sexual gratification — is a special kind of betrayal and violence. I’m sure we can all agree to that. And from here on out, I’m sure we can all agree that we are not talking about children, but the activities of consenting adults. We are talking about whether paternalistic prohibition of these activities may be justified.

A large part of my point is that adults are not children. Laws that insist on treating women (in particular) as children do not benefit them. Again, it is important to point out the circularity in this perennial form of conservative reasoning. We cannot infantilize a class of people by denying them their full autonomy and then turn around and appeal to the fact that we have done so as justification for paternalism. (Read mid-19th century debates against the abolition of slavery to see the most egregious examples of this form.) We’ve come a long way (baby!) from when women were treated by the law like large children for almost all purposes, but we still have some way to go.

There is nothing unique about work that requires those who do it to cultivate distinctive emotional strategies that make it possible to do things that might otherwise be off-putting while leading a completely healthy, normal, happy life. Some people find cultivating certain attitudes easy, and others don’t, which is why not everybody is cut out for every kind of work. Personally, I think I would probably find it easier psychologically to sell sexual services (in a world in which this was legal and not despised) than to sell cars, since I find the kind of subtle manipulation one must practice in order to be a successful salesman completely intolerable, but I don’t particularly mind being treated as a piece of meat. I’m sure there are a lot of sex workers who aren’t particularly well cut out for it, and who find it really taxing, but who do it anyway because they don’t have better options. I feel terrible for those people, but I certainly don’t think we would be hurting them by making their profession legal and less despised.

Ouch

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Tyler Cowen’s take on Jeffrey Sachs’ new book:

Imagine a smart and diligent but not insightful or self-reflective person doing a “color by numbers” version of what a Jeffrey Sachs book should read like.

Shorter: Sachs has become a cartoon of himself.

How Sex Is Different, Part I

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I’ve got time to kill while waiting in LAX, so I might as well try to clarify my position on prostitution by saying how I think sex is different from other kinds of human activity. Obviously, sex is central to reproduction, and reproduction is central to natural selection, and natural selection is central to why we have the kind of minds and the kinds of sentiments we have. In particular, it looks like sex has an important attachment function for humans, helping to cement pair-bond relationships. Partly because of this function, sex turns out to be a lot of fun for humans, and we do it recreationally in a way that most primates don’t.

People fixated on discreditably vulgar versions of evolutionary psychology (in addition to making the naturalistic fallacy as if making the naturalistic fallacy is a path to riches) tend to miss the cultural variety in sexual norms within the uniformity of evolutionary logic. You don’t need Margaret Mead blank slate-ism to show that there is a fair amount of play in human sexual norms and sexual psychology. Even incest taboos are more variable than most are inclined to think. That said, it is true that there are regularities in male and female sexual psychology. Men will generally tend to be more indiscriminate in partner choice and women will tend be more concerned with screening. And it is also true that lack of paternity confidence will tend to make men extremely jealous and disposed to coordinate to control the sexual behavior of women. Concerted slut-shaming is a classic male strategy to raise the cost of female extra-pair coupling. Shaming norms and even articulate ideologies that reinforce the shared belief that women’s sexual liberty is hugely dangerous to the social order, and to women themselves, are very common and I think are largely explained by a mix of paternity confidence issues and male dominance of social and cultural institutions, which may also have a partly biological explanation.

To reify or essentialize this pattern, and to unthinkingly endorse it, is to compound mistake upon mistake. These kinds of patriarchal sexual mores have relaxed immensely in the West in the last half century and the result is that people–especially women–are doing much better, not worse, in the places where sexual liberalization has occurred. The specialness of sexual psychology mostly helps us to understand the panic about and strenuous resistance to liberalizing norms of female sexual autonomy. And the history of moral panic contrasted with the good results of actual recent sexual liberalization  gives us reason to be especially skeptical about the special damage that will come of deregulating women’s sexual behavior.

I want to say something more about what’s special about sexual experience itself, but I have to catch a plane.  

Selling Sex Is OK and Child Abuse Isn't

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I wanted to reply to Ross’s post on the so-called Wilkinson-Howley worldview, but I had to go to L.A. for a little political theory conference at UCLA, where I am now. Let’s see if I can clarify a few things. Ross writes:

Given the premises of the pro-prostitution worldview, what’s so abusive and damaging about incest and molestation in the first place? If there’s no moral distinction between giving a handjob in exchange for twenty dollars and getting paid twenty bucks to wash dishes or mow lawns, then why is there a moral distinction between a father who teaches his daughter how to pound nails and one who teaches his daughter to do something more intimate and (to go all wisdom-of-repugnance on you) disgusting? I understand that the kids involved aren’t “consenting adults,” but if selling sex is just like selling labor, and adults force kids to perform all kinds of menial tasks as part of their education, why can’t adults force kids to have intercourse too – especially if they’re safe about it? If selling sex is no big deal because sex itself is no big deal, what’s the big deal about incest?

I found this comment … vexing, to say the least. I think Andrew’s reply to Ross’s previous post suggests the obvious response Simply reformulate Ross’s question to see how immensely tendentious and confused it is:

If there’s no moral distinction between one man giving a handjob to another man and a woman giving a handjob to a man, then why is there a moral distinction between a man giving a handjob to small boy?

I think we can all grasp that it possible to reject some moral distinctions and accept others. In this case, it would seem that Ross understands the answer perfectly well. Children are not consenting adults. So there you have it.

Since he had the answer, I do wonder why he asked the question. Ross’s subsequent chain of reasoning is a disaster that does very little to help him out. I think it is fair to reconstruct the argument like this.

(1) Selling sex is a form of work. (By stipulation)
(2) It is permissible for parents to make their children labor as part of their education. (By convention)

Therefore, (3) It is permissible for parents to make their children do sex work as part of there education. (By fallacious inference)

But (4) Obviously (3) is repulsively absurd.

So, (5) What?… Selling sex is not a form of work? (Reductio!)

Forgive me if I do not understand this argument. In order to derive (3), Ross would need (2) to say that parents may make their kids do any kind of work as part of their education, which is obviously false. We all know that there are many things it is not OK for kids to do, or for adults to do to kids, that it is OK for adults to do, and to do to each other. Sex is one of those things. This needn’t be difficult. And, since no one was previously talking about children, again I have to wonder why Ross brought it up. I mean, I don’t think he’d stoop so low as to insinuate that people who think adults are capable of making rational decisions about their own welfare, and should not be subject to paternalistic interference, cannot see what’s wrong with fucking their own children. So what was that about?

Sex work is work. It is not always pleasant work. It is very emotionally complicated and requires some degree of emotional compartmentalization and the selective hardening of certain natural human sentimental dispositions. Surgeons, hospice workers, police officers, lots of people, must learn how to cabin off certain sentiments and to develop a bit of a callous in order to do their jobs. This takes some degree of emotional maturity, which is one reason why we encourage kids to sell lemonade, but not to perform surgery on people gushing blood from a gunshot wound, or practice their sexual technique with Uncle Ralph.

Justifying the Prohibition of Markets in Sexual Services

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I liked Ross Douthat’s first post on prostitution. He identifies the real question at issue, which is the truth or falsity of this claim:

[R]enting out your body to satisfy another person’s sexual needs is a form of self-inflicted violence serious enough to merit legal sanction …

The whole case for banning trade in sexual services stands or falls on the defense of this claim and the assumption behind it. Even granting the assumption that paternalistic efforts to protect adults from the consequences of their own choices are justified, which I certainly don’t, the claim that prostitution is, by its nature, a kind of self-harm is pretty clearly false.

Again, it bears emphasizing that absolutely every form of labor involves renting out your body. The language of “selling your body” is generally intended to elicit a “wisdom of repugnance” disgust response, but it just doesn’t when you consider that folks like Ross and me get paid for things we do with our bodies — thinking, typing. Surgeons rent out their brains, and steady hands, to meet people’s health needs. Construction workers rent out their arms, legs, backs, brains. Etc. I sell my body for a living. So do you.

I think the real claim is not about bodies, but about vaginas and penises in particular. These should not be rentable. (Do note, however, that it is legal to rent a uterus and vagina for the purposes of surrogate gestation and childbirth, but no one really enjoys that and a lot of conservatives don’t like it anyway. And there is always porn, which is nothing without genital rental.) But bracket your intuitions about the commercial use of genitalia for a moment and consider that a good volume of trade in sexual services involves renting an expert hand. Could using your hand to give another person an orgasm possibly be a form of self-inflicted violence? Delivering manual relief is a great kindness, a sweet thing to do … unless you do it for money! At this level, Ross’s claim is evidently ludicrous. Sweet charity cannot be transformed into self-inflicted violence by a twenty dollar bill.

Does Ross think that loaning out your body, for free, to satisfy another person’s sexual needs is a form of self-inflicted violence? Should all sex outside of marriage, or outside a serious relationship, be subject to legal sanctions? If not, then using your body to satisfy another person sexually is not the problem. It is renting it. Again, bringing sex inside the cash nexus is thought to work some kind of profound psychological alchemy, which is plain nonsense.

There is a huge amount of question-begging going on in this debate. The degree to which sex work may be reasonably seen as self-inflicted violence is mainly due to the immense legal and social stigma attached to it. An honest inquirer cannot take the humiliation and loss of esteem connected to the status quo legal and social sanctions as evidence of the necessity of those sanctions. That is the purest logical shenanigans.

Moreover, the effects of this paternalism, enacted specifically to protect women from making the “wrong” choices about how they will use their bodies, inevitably bleed into broader cultural attitudes toward women and women’s sexuality. I can’t possible do better than Kerry when she says:

Just as the drug war contributes to the broadly held assumption that young black men are inherently violent and must be restrained, the criminalization of sex work reinforces the idea that sexually active women are damaged and deranged. In both cases, the activities themselves are surrounded by all manner of tragedy, abuse, and violence. In neither case is the liberal humanitarian policy response: Ban it harder, further reinforcing our worst assumptions about entire classes of people.

Get Your Laws Off My Body!

If You Own It, You Can Sell It

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Kerry’s brilliant take on the post-Client 9 discussion of prostitution is spot on. Apparently a number of people think the basic libertarian view of prostitution is facile. Well, the view that the basic libertarian view is facile is facile. The idea of self-ownership is profound. Every form of labor involves “selling your body,” one way or another. I see no interesting intrinsic moral distinction between brick- and other forms of laying. There is simply nothing wrong with selling or buying sexual services. There is no bright moral line between a good massage and a really good massage. The entire issue is generated by backward prudishness, a precious, misogynistic attitude toward female sexuality, and run-of-the-mill patriarchal paternalism. (Do we ever see handwringing about the degradation of male prostitution? Why not?)

Yes, some women turn to the sale of sexual services out of a lack of better alternatives. Indeed, some women turn to the sale of lettuce-picking services out of a lack of better alternatives. And bricklayers shouldn’t be permitted to individually negotiate labor contracts because they will be exploited by capital. Show me the difference. Whether orgasm delivery, lettuce picking, or bricklaying is degrading depends on the attitude of the worker toward that kind of work and her ability to sell her services with dignity on her own terms. More importantly, it depends on the attitude of people at large toward that kind of work. Honest work that we legally and culturally marginalize is degrading. But that’s because we marginalize it. Time was that champions of the moral order claimed that money smelled like shit and you could smell it on loanshark Shylocks. Very degrading. But now everybody charges interest all the time, and look what happened to us!

Happiness and Personality: Indviduality Matters

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A recent study by psychologists at the University of Edinburgh tracking 973 pairs of twins shows that the heritable differences in self-reported happiness are entirely accounted for by the genes that determine the Big Five personality traits. That is to say, differences of personality account for all the heritable difference in happiness. In particular, low neuroticism and high extraversion are strongly correlated with higher levels of happiness, high conscientiousness is a bit less strongly correlated, and high agreeableness and openness to experience are positive but not so important. Non-neurotic, conscientious extraverts are the winners in the genetic happiness lottery.

This is important stuff. It tells us that individual variability matters. Individual-level strategies for improving happiness depend a great deal on the art of self-management given the constraints of personality. For example, I am very low in neuroticism and mildly extraverted, which bodes very well for my baseline level of happiness, but I am also extremely low in conscientiousness (not unlike a lot of homeless people and inmates), which ends up creating a lot of internal struggle and anxiety. For me, the key to higher levels of happiness is the conscious development of the habits of self-discipline and time management that don’t come naturally. The highly introverted or neurotic face challenges unique to their types. I look forward to future work that pushes deeper into happiness strategies for various combinations of personality traits.

And at a more general theoretical level, it is crucial to understand there are differences in the degree to which people revert to their baseline levels of happiness after good or bad changes in circumstances, and in difference in the rate of reversion. That will prevent us from making silly, sweeping generalizations about the insignificance of new cars or a lost limbs. When there is a lot of non-random variation, averages can lie. Regarding my previous post, I think it is important to recognize that not everyone compares themselves strongly to other people. Much of Robert Frank’s body of work is based, I think, on assuming a false uniformity in people’s disposition to compare themselves to others. We can avoid that kind of mistake if we attend more closely to the way individual happiness is mediated by personality.

Robert Frank on Happiness and GDP

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The fussy, hedged, inconclusive complexity of Robert Frank’s latest NYT column about income and happiness shows just how hard it is for an intellectually honest guy to make a strong case against the income-happiness link, given the complexion of the evidence. In order to get as far as he does, which is not very far, Frank seems to me to nonetheless rely on a tendentious and, one would think, outdated interpretation of the happiness data:

This assumption ["that absolute income levels are the primary determinant of individual well-being"] is contradicted by consistent survey findings that when everyone’s income grows at about the same rate, average levels of happiness remain the same. Yet at any given moment, the pattern is that wealthy people are happier, on average, than poor people. Together, these findings suggest that relative income is a much better predictor of well-being than absolute income.

The first finding, the flat trend, is contested. Veenhoven and Hagerty argue it is not flat at all. In any case, there is plenty of reason to think that (1) the subjective criterion people use to report how happy they are changes somewhat as their expectations change, and so objective gains in real welfare are likely to be underestimated by survey methods. That is to say, the phrase “pretty happy” may not tracking the exact same feeling over five decades; “pretty happy” may refer to something a bit happier than it did 50 years ago, just like “pretty tall” refers to something a bit taller than it did 50 years ago. And there is plenty of reason to think that (2) comparing the bounded life satisfaction survey scale against the unbounded income scale likely leads objective gains in real welfare to be underestimated by survey methods. So, scale renorming plus a kind of methodological error leaves us with the conclusion that the extent of the absolute gains are likely concealed by the measurement method.

The second finding, that wealthier people tend to say they are happier than poorer people, on its face suggests that it feels better to be rich than to be poor. Part of this is surely absolute. Having a bit more money increases your sense of control and decreases your sense of anxiety. Have you ever had bill collectors calling you constantly? I have. It helps a lot to have enough money to pay your bills. And it’s not just about avoiding poverty. If you’ve ever had the good fortune to move up one quintile from the middle, the reduction in economic anxiety is palpable. That’s the effect of an absolute gain. Which is not to say that relative concerns are unimportant. It’s nice to be doing better than the people you compare yourself to. But there is no evidence that people are uniformly comparative. That is, some people have a weaker or stronger “social comparison orientation” than others. And there is no evidence that, when people do compare, the relevant comparison class is the set of U.S. residents. The claim that the very strong within-society relationship between income and happiness is due primarily to a preference for higher relative income (within the U.S. distribution) is mainly bluff. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.

So how is it that these two finding taken together suggest relative income is a better predictor of well-being than absolute income? They don’t.

Maybe Frank would like to explain the Deaton result. All the evidence for strong comparative effects are very local. It matters how I’m doing relative to friends, neighbors, and co-workers. As far as I know there is no evidence that the comparison class is global. I suppose you could try to take the fact that average national income is a strong predictor of average national happiness as evidence that the relevant comparison class is global, but that would just beg the question in the worst way while showing a weird determination to avoid the obvious importance of absolute income. Why not say something along the lines of happiness guru Ruut Veenhoven:

Another reason to doubt the Easterlin Paradox is the theory behind it, which assumes that happiness is “calculated” cognitively by comparing one’s condition with local standards of the good life. According to this theory, one can be happy in Hell if one does not know any better — or if one’s companions are in an even hotter spot. The available data fit better with the theory that happiness is “inferred” from the quality of affective experience, which reflects the gratification of basic needs. This “needs theory” of happiness fits a wider functional perspective on affective guidance in higher animals, and predicts that we will live happily in conditions that suit human nature well.

Now, I don’t think this has to be an either/or thing (and I criticized Veenhoven for assuming happiness is necessarily evidence of “natural” environmental fit). But Frank here is overselling the evidence for the unimportance of absolute wealth, even though he knows too much not to hedge lot.

I was going to say something about GDP, but this blog post is long enough.

George Kateb vs. Patriotism

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I’ve recently become a big fan of the eminent political theorist George Kateb (I’m actually pretty baffled about how it could be that I didn’t know of him until late last year), so I’m pretty thrilled he agreed to write the lead essay for this month’s Cato Unbound on the value of patriotism. A thoroughgoing individualist, he doesn’t find much value in it. Here is an especially fine passage:

The brute fact of patriotism is made brute by the inveterate inclination in men to associate virility with the exertion involved in killing and risking death. No theory can ever defeat or discredit this inclination, which helps to engender the fantasy that the competition of political units is the highest kind of team sports. Men love teams, love to live in a world where they are called on to back or play for their team against other teams, even though the sport of war is soaked in blood. Socratic notions of gratitude or Jamesian notions of infinite indebtedness are not necessary for this love. In the sport, where aristocrats used to play their games, elites now mobilize groups or masses to slaughter each other. Men can become peace-loving for a while, but not forever. The women who love them encourage their inclination to see team sports as the essence of their masculinity, and to call patriotic this inclination when it is projected into politics. The pity is that men lend their energies to a state that sooner or later embarks on an inherently unjust imperialist career and thus gets constantly engaged in policies that are deliberated in secrecy, and sustained by secrecy and propaganda, and removed from meaningful public deliberation. Patriotism is indispensable for sustaining this career of anti-democracy.

Now, I know a lot of folks think there is a kind of benign patriotism that is centered on the celebration of the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution and the culture that values them. Maybe. But go to GOPAC and tell me that the patriotism of liberal principles, and not the vulgar “highest kind of team sports” eagles and bunting and wiretaps version, is the most salient incarnation of patriotism in America.