Monthly Archives: July 2008

J.R. Lucas on Equality and the Multidimensionality of Status

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How Have I Never Read this Paper? J.R. Lucas, “Against Equality, Again,” Philosophy 52, 1977, pp.255-280:

We can object to strictly hierarchical societies on the grounds that those on the bottom of the hierarchy—the serfs, the villeins, or the prison-camp slaves—are accorded no respect at all. But we should remedy this by having more than one hierarchy, and, in so far as any one ranking system is dominant and generally accepted as constituting the social order, demanding that those who are deferred to should make manifest their respect and consideration for those who render them services.

The argument can, in part, be transposed to a lower key. Two inequalities are better than one. It is better to have a society in which there are a number of different pecking orders, so that a person who comes low according to one order can nevertheless rate highly according to another. One advantage that English society used to have over American was that whereas in America wealth was the only criterion, in England social standing was largely independent of wealth, and could, therefore, act as a corrective. More generally, it is good that there should be an athletic hierarchy besides the academic one, so that boys who are not blessed with brains may nevertheless be, and feel themselves to be, the stars of the football field. A man may not be a great success economically but still can be a big noise in the Boy Scout Association or the pigeon fanciers’ club. So long as we have plenty of different inequalities, nobody need be absolutely inferior. It is only if, in the name of equality, we set about eliminating them all, that we shall succeed in eliminating many of them and thereby make those that remain far more burdensome.

Egalitarians are angered when the argument from Universal Humanity is called in aid of inegalitarian conclusions, and produce vehement counter-arguments against it. They will not accept that the college servant is really better off than the prosperous proletarian, however much happier he may subjectively suppose himself to be, because the mere fact that the society recognises a difference in status between the college servant and, say, the fellows is itself an affront to human dignity. If we differentiate at all between one man and another on account of the social functions they fulfil, then we are no longer regarding them as men but merely as performers of certain roles. The bathroom attendant may think that he is valued for himself alone, but he is wrong; he is valued merely as a cleaner of baths and lavatories, merely as a pair of hands, merely as a useful automaton and not at all as a person, a child of God, a human being, an immortal soul, the bearer of an eternal destiny. This argument has powerful emotional appeal, but it is confused. It confuses the minimal and the maximal respect we may pay to a human being. Whatever a man does, whatever contribution he makes to our well-being, whatever his achievements, he is more than merely a doer, a contributor, an achiever, and I do not respect him properly, if I respect him merely as a doer, a contributor, or an achiever. If I am to respect him fully, I must respect him for himself, rather than merely as someone who satisfies certain specifications, just as a girl feels that she is not really loved unless she is loved for herself alone, and not her yellow hair. But only God can do that. In an imperfect world limited mortals have only limited respect for most other people. The respect which affords a basis for political argument is not a maximal respect we can aspire to but seldom achieve; rather, it is a minimal respect which we all ought to pay to everybody else. It does not exhaust the whole of political argument, but simply provides an incontrovertible starting point. I respect another man’s humanity by observing a certain set of minimum conditions towards him—by not killing him, by not torturing him, by not leaving him to starve by not depriving him of civil rights—and it is important to see these conditions as minimum conditions which must be fulfilled rather than as maximum conditions to which we should aim but which we cannot be blamed if we fail to achieve. If we set our sights too high, we shall secure nothing.

Yup. The multiplication of inequalities through the multiplication of status dimensions is perhaps the chief way in which liberal market societies achieve rough equality of status. It’s counterintuitive but true: more ways of being unequal in status increases the chance of enjoying high status and reduces the chance of being humiliated by inescapably low status. That many egalitarians are so eager to sniff at this is, to my mind, an indication that many of them aren’t so much concerned with the inequalities that matter most to most people. The motivated thinking seems to go something like this: If the best means of bringing everyone up to a minimum of status or a minimum sense of self-respect needn’t involve a lot economic leveling, then pride in being the president of the local PTA must be self-deluded crap. But where’s the respect in that?

Of course, most egalitarians see the minimum equality of respect implied by an equality of rights as too little. I guess I do too. I demand a somewhat more substantive equality in the sense that each has the necessary means to exercise her rights in a worthwhile way. We don’t respect others in this minimal sense if we don’t care whether it seems pointless to them to dream up some relatively long-term plans, because they doubt whether they will be able to act effectively to enact them. But we don’t give people that respect by politically “guaranteeing” them these means, either, because there is nothing in the nature or history of government to cause us to believe it is specially competent to make good on them. We give people their due portion of respect by attempting to maximize the probability that they will have these means. That’s likely to require both private and public assistance, but there’s no way to honestly guarantee that people need it will get it. We can say anything we want. What matters is what people get. The closest we can get to a guarantee is by cultivating a system of institutions that maximizes the production of wealth.

And it happens that this kind of system is one of mind-boggling task specialization and spatial distribution–a system that gives almost everyone a way to make things better for others, a system that implicates almost everyone in the process of wealth-creation that is as close as we come to a guarantee. In a market system, when we do our jobs, we help to provide for others–we help make available to others the means for building a life–in the way that respect requires, and this in turn gives us reason to respect people who do their jobs. Respecting someone as “a doer, a contributor, or an achiever” is no small thing.

In addition to supplying meaningful work that allows each of us to contribute in some real way to the welfare of others, successful market cultures create a climate for proliferating communities of affinity, much like the Great Barrier Reef creates a climate for a teeming proliferation of exotic sea life. On the job and in our “scenes” is where most of us get our quota of status. Our jobs and our standing in our multiple elective communities provide us grounds to respect ourselves and grounds for others to respect us. When we pretend not to see a beggar making an appeal, we do not treat her as an equal in even this small way, perhaps because we suspect she has done too little to merit even a quantum of respect. It is not really so hard to look someone squarely in the eyes, in the way a person acknowledges another’s personhood, but it is easier when we are all part of a joint enterprise of cooperation, improving life infinitesimally but actually for one another. And it is easier to confidently to hold another’s gaze, to feel an equal, when you are in your own small community, in your own small way, somebody. Because it doesn’t seem small to you.

But that’s all sort of beside the point. Because our government’s actual respect for its subject’s “merely formal” political rights is so sorry that it seems that Lucas’ “minimal respect” is fairly demanding after all, and there’s really nothing morally unambitious in aiming at this kind of liberal equality.

New on Free Will: Bruce Caldwell on Hayek

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This week, I talk with Bruce Caldwell, author of Hayek’s Challenge, a wonderfully lucid, comprehensive, and penetrating account of the development of Hayek’s economic and methodological ideas. Hayek is one of my enthusiasms, so I had a great time talking to Bruce, who knows as much about Hayek as anyone.

Also, maybe some of my Austrian-leaning readers can help out the BHTV commenters in their discussion of economic planning.

The World Is Not a Zoo

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This essay by Kenan Malik is so damn right it almost hurts. Choice bits:

Modern multiculturalism seeks self-consciously to yoke people to their identity for their own good, the good of that culture and the good of society. A clear example is the attempt by the Quebecois authorities to protect French culture. The Quebec government has passed laws which forbid French speakers and immigrants to send their children to English-language schools; compel businesses with more than fifty employees to be run in French; and ban English commercial signs. So, if your ancestors were French you, too, must by government fiat speak French whatever your personal wishes may be. Charles Taylor regards this as acceptable because the flourishing and survival of French culture is a good. ‘It is not just a matter of having the French language available for those who might choose it’, he argues. Quebec is ‘making sure that there is a community of people here in the future that will want to avail itself of the opportunity to use the French language.’ Its policies ‘actively seek to create members of the community… assuring that future generations continue to identify as French-speakers.’

An identity has become a bit like a private club. Once you join up, you have to abide by the rules. But unlike the Groucho or the Garrick it’s a private club you must join. Being black or gay, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests, requires one to follow certain ‘life-scripts’ because ‘Demanding respect for people as blacks and gays can go along with notably rigid strictures as to how one is to be an African American or a person with same-sex desires.’ There will be ‘proper modes of being black and gay: there will be demands that are made; expectations to be met; battle lines to be drawn.’ It is at this point, Appiah suggests, that ‘someone who takes autonomy seriously may worry whether we have replaced one kind of tyranny with another.’ An identity is supposed to be an expression of an individual’s authentic self. But it can too often seem like the denial of individual agency in the name of cultural authenticity.

[...]

A century ago intellectuals worried about the degeneration of the race. Today we fear cultural decay. Is the notion of cultural decay any more coherent than that of racial degeneration? Cultures certainly change and develop. But what does it mean for a culture to decay? Or for an identity to be lost? Will Kymlicka draws a distinction between the ‘existence of a culture’ and ‘its “character” at any given moment’… So, in making the distinction between character and existence, Kymlicka seems to be suggesting that Jewish, Navajo or French culture is not defined by what Jewish, Navajo or French people are actually doing. For if Jewish culture is simply that which Jewish people do or French culture is simply that which French people do, then cultures could never decay or perish – they would always exist in the activities of people.

[...]

The logic of the preservationist argument is that every culture has a pristine form, its original state. It decays when it is not longer in that form. Like racial scientists with their idea of racial type, some modern multiculturalists appear to hold a belief in cultural type.

So the multicultural left and the racist right converge. If you get your head straight, you see what matters are certain values and institutions, and those are not trapped in particular essentialized cultures like flies in amber. If these values and institutions are really worthwhile, if they create conditions that are really appealing to human beings in a deep, more-than-accidental way, then it is possible to defend and preserve them as the cultures in which they originated inevitably recombine with others and evolve.

Bundles of Oy

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Newsweek has an excellent feature by Lorraine Ali on kids and happiness.

The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term “bundle of joy” may not be the most accurate way to describe our offspring. “Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers,” says Florida State University’s Robin Simon, a sociology professor who’s conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. “In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.”

This is in fact the best piece of seen on this issue so far, touching on our culture’s intense romantization of parenthood. This is an excellent and accurate observation:

“If you admit that kids and parenthood aren’t making you happy, it’s basically blasphemy,” says Jen Singer, a stay-at-home mother of two from New Jersey who runs the popular parenting blog MommaSaid.net. “From baby-lotion commercials that make motherhood look happy and well rested, to commercials for Disney World where you’re supposed to feel like a kid because you’re there with your kids, we’ve made parenthood out to be one blissful moment after another, and it’s disappointing when you find out it’s not.”

Ali finishes on a hopeful note.

For the childless, all this research must certainly feel redeeming. As for those of us with kids, well, the news isn’t all bad. Parents still report feeling a greater sense of purpose and meaning in their lives than those who’ve never had kids. And there are other rewarding aspects of parenting that are impossible to quantify. For example, I never thought it possible to love someone as deeply as I love my son.

I think here we have the key to the intense resistance to the empirical results. There is no reason whatsoever to doubt the reports of parents like Ali who find that they love their children more than they thought possible. It’s really remarkable how often first time parents, especially men, seem almost startled by the profound depth of their love for and attachment to their child. I’ve heard any number of new parents say that they had heard others talk about this amazing bond, but never really expected to feel it themselves. The almost embarrassed earnestness of this admission is truly moving. And, if they won’t stop talking about it, also pretty annoying. (We are all surprised by the all-consuming intensity of our first teenage crush. But the point is, we all are.)  Anyway, the profundity of the experience of loving a child I think blinds many people to the very real costs of raising them. To accept that we have been made less happy in a real sense by our children threatens our sense of the profundity and the value of that bond. So people get upset when they hear this. But that’s not counter-evidence. Not all values move in one direction and it is a mark of maturity to be able to admit that some of the things we value most comes at a sometimes steep cost. We yearn to love our choices, and our lives, with whole hearts. But to do so is to lie to ourselves about ourselves, to close our eyes and cover our ears like children to the profundity of what we have given up. We cannot have everything. It does not diminish the life one has to face the truth about it. It enlarges it to see it for what it is, to know what it has cost, and to love it anyway.

Non-Discretionary Spending

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Tell me again why Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are labeled as “non-discretionary” spending. As I understand it, Congress could shut them all down tomorrow if they wanted to. Or they could cut benefits massively. Or change eligibility requirements any way they like. Which makes it discretionary, doesn’t it? Isn’t it basically just a lie to make it out like the government might or might not spend money on highways, but just has to fork over checks for knee replacements? This has always confused me. Is there some principled basis for the discretionary/non-discretionary distinction that I’m obtusely missing?

Post inspired by this Perot Chart:

Spending!

There Is Something Called "Behavioral Economics," Can't Tell You What It Is Just Now, but It May Be Important, Just So You Know

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I can’t say what the point of this less than coherent video from Gallup was, other than to mention that Gallup is at the forefront of measuring things in interesting new ways, but I thought some of you might find it interesting anyway:

[Update... Oh, this one is a little better, sort of. They could use a copywriter who doesn't have to guess so much about what the point of all this is.]

You’ll be relieved to see that the guy from Singapore is interested in measuring life satisfaction in order to allow you (the ruling class of a country like, say, Singapore) to “harness the total capacity of your people.” The Australian is interested in “chomping down the policies so we can drive people the right way.” Huh?

The Goatee of the Overeager Left

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From one of The Economist’s New York correspondents:

There seems to be a temptation lately to label anyone who even dares mention supply-side economics, without immediately deeming it the silliest idea born to a napkin, an economic heretic. That’s unfortunate. True, with the exception of very high marginal tax rates, a tax cut will generally not pay for itself. But there exists ample empirical evidence that cutting income taxes does increase growth. Thus, the long-run impact of a permanent tax cut is still up for debate. The effect of lower-income tax rates on labour supply is mixed. But it does seem, at the very least, lower tax rates decrease the amount of tax evasion. Writing off supply-side economics as a blatant fallacy is as much of a 1990s relic as wearing a goatee.

Nice.

Note About Rational Scofflaws

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I wonder how many drivers exceed the speed limit basically whenever they judge that it won’t cause anybody any problems. I’d guess, approximately, all of them. Also, there are very clear laws about, say, using turn signals, or using turn signals when parallel parking (do you do this?), or not taking a right hand turn on red lights when it is marked, not double parking, even if you’re just going to be one minute while you fetch your latte.  And so on. When’s the last time you jaywalked? Lunch? People are more or less rational and tend to respond to incentives, and therefore the roads are a zone of patterned lawlessness. We all know what infractions the cops care about—how much over the speed limit is too much over, etc.— and we tend to respond accordingly. We even tend to internalize and moralize the rules whose expected cost of violation is relatively high. It’s more efficient that way. And thus our huffing indignation is easily riled by those who face different incentives and so flout different rules than the ones we flout without reflection.

This morning on my ride to work I coasted through a stop sign in front of a police cruiser that was approaching from the road to my right. I gave a little embarrassed smile and a little wave. She made a little disapproving face and waved back. It’s anarchy I tell you. Anarchy! I got to work in four minutes.

Special thanks to commenter theomobiud who officially wins the thread with this dramatic illustration of justice:

Sometimes people just get what’s comin’ to ‘em, I guess. Now, that guy on the shoulder’s getting off scott free, but he’s pretty obviously a menace to people with engine trouble who might need to pull over. He’ll get his.

Class War!

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Time interviews Barbara Ehrenreich:

Some argue that today’s basic standards of living surpass anything the nation has enjoyed historically. What’s your response to that?

Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to live in the 18th century myself, or the 19th either, for that matter. I am operating on a slightly smaller time frame here and thinking that there has been a real increase in inequality since the 1970s. In recent years we have seen stagnation in average people’s wages and salaries and a decline in the benefits they get from their employers. So in recent years I don’t think we have been fulfilling that kind of potential that historically we have always felt was America’s.

What do you think are the primary causes of that?

I think it’s class war coming from the wealthy, from the top really squeezing workers, trying to get more and more out of them.

Not from from international competition and globalization?

I think that’s been an easy excuse for a long time. Anything you don’t like about this economy — declining wages and speed-ups at work — it’s because we have to be competitive. Yet I look at the top and see that American CEOs, for example, are paid much more relative to the average worker than CEOs in other countries.

I fear she has no idea what she is talking about.

What does a real increase in inequality mean? A real increase in income inequality? Sure. An increase in real material inequality? Maybe not. The interesting question has to do with the composition of typical consumption baskets at the top and bottom of the distribution. And then the question is how gains in welfare from new products and the improvements in the quality of existing products have been distributed. It’s not clear at all that there is any increase in real consumption inequality.

Also, if there has been a stagnation in wages and a decline in benefits, then total compensation has declined. But surely Ehrenreich has Google:

So total compensation hasn’t been stagnating. But supposed it had been. Why?

CLASS WAR!!! That’s just crazy. What does she mean?

The reason compensation goes up at all is because productivity has gone up. Which is to say, because we are “squeezing more out of workers.” Here’s the relationship between average productivity and average real compensation:

Pretty close! There is a gap opening up between productivity and real compensation, though I suspect “class war” is not the correct explanation.

She’s right that CEO’s in the U.S. get paid more. And they may even get paid too much, for various reasons. (I am agnostic on this.) But say CEO pay is cut in half. Does she think that firms would allocate the savings to wages and benefits? If they did, would it be enough to even make a difference?

And for the purposes of this class war, who are the wealthy. The household income in the Howley-Wilkinson household puts us securely in the top 10 percent. Richer than 9 out of 10 households in a rich country–that’s wealthy, right? Where are my spoils from the class war!? I can tell you, we’re in no position to squeeze any workers. I guess Ehrenreich means the owners of capital who profit from labor. You know, like everyone with a mutual fund. Maybe some of these people should be ticked about the overpaid managers of the companies they own.

Special bonus (just substitute “class” for “race”):

Bikes vs. Cars

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Interesting discussions at Megan’s and Matt’s. I think Matt does an exceptionally good job of illustrating the arbitrariness of subsidies to car owners simply by outlining an alternative scheme. I’ve always been a bit baffled by a lot of libertarian’s generally pro-car-centric view of transportation matters. Now, if cars, highways, roads, big parking lots, etc., really are the most efficient way to do things, all things considered, then sure. But I never get a clear sense from many libertarians that they grasp the extent of the subsidies, or the very significant crowding-out effects of our massively expensive state-supported auto-based transportation infrastucture.

Also, bikes. People complain about bikers breaking traffic laws. Well, I’m guilty, and I’m damn well going to keep doing it. A lot of traffic regulations make sense for cars, but just don’t for bikes. For example, I ride home almost every day the wrong way up a one way street, and nobody coming the other way gives a damn. Why should they? I honestly don’t give a fig about my carbon footprint (and anyway, since I’m not a breeder, I really should get carbon carte blanche). But I like biking because it’s faster than driving — because I blow through stop signs, go the wrong way on one-ways, etc. Were I suddenly to become fastidious about heeding traffic laws intended to regulate cars, one of the main advantages of biking over driving would evaporate. So I think people who do give figs about carbon really ought to encourage bikers to break traffic laws, or at least promote EXTRA traffic laws for drivers, in order to increase the relative benefit of biking. How about intersections where four-way purple means you’ve got to stop unless you’re on a bike? That would be pretty sweet.

Drezner on Alan Wolfe's Incomptence

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Alan Wolfe’s prolix review essay of Bruno Frey and Dan Ariely’s recent books had a few nice insights, but my overwhelming judgment was that he simply doesn’t know enough about the subject to write a competent review. Dan Drezner picks up on a couple of Wolfe’s forehead-slappers. In a nuthsell, Wolfe thinks Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek are “marginal and somewhat bizarre thinkers,” which betrays either stunning ignorance or an appalling lack of judgment. And he seems to think Steve Levitt is a behavioral economist, when in fact Levitt is an old-school Chicago rat choice guy good at fancy statistics who is very skeptical of behavioral economics. Dan’s got it right when he says “Whoever assigns and edits Alan Wolfe at The New Republic should really be taken out to the back of the woodshed today.”

I haven’t read Frey’s book yet, but, setting aside my more critical approach to the data, I expect to like it a great deal. Frey is one of the only social scientists working in the happiness field who fully grasps the great 20th century developments in constitutional political economy and institutional economics. Most of his papers have an agreeable institutionalist view that is keenly aware of the fallacy of thinking about a politics of happiness as a politics of centralized scientific administration. Indeed, decentralization is a theme of Frey’s work, and I’m looking forward to his book.

On the other hand, I found Dan Ariely’s book to be a jocular disaster. Here’s what I said about it on Free Exchange way back in February. I’m glad to see Herb Gintis, one of my favorite thinkers in psychologically-informed economics, had a similar reaction:

Ariely is a creative experimenter with zero capacity to deal with economic theory. By accepting the behavioral paradigm (“people are not logical, they are psychological”), he makes it in principle impossible to explain his experimental results.

What does it tell you when the big-ideas review essays in prestige publications are completely blown away by free Amazon reviews? I wonder what Wolfe’s per-word rate was? Gintis does a hell of a lot better for free. Sooner or later everyone in the know will realize they’re supposed to be paying attention to Herb Gintis’ Amazon reviews (among other things), and that the back of TNR just doesn’t matter all that much.

[Thanks to James Chalmers for the pointer.]

How Obama Will "Save Social Security" (Please!?)

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Yglesias splits hairs:

[A]s the headline writers put it on the front page of The Washington Post “Candidates Diverge on How to Save Social Security”. Because in headlineland, saving a program and destroying a program under pretext of saving it are just two different ways of saving it.

I think Matt should simmer down. And the point of his intransigent thirdrailism just isn’t clear to me. Most Americans think of Social Security as a system that delivers checks in old age. The system as currently constituted can’t keep delivering those checks indefinitely. Now, a system of personal accounts of the kind successfully established by many successful, wealthy, liberal societies much like our own, such as Sweden or Australia, is a demonstrably successful way of keeping the checks coming. For all but those who fixate on the fake redistributive optics of the status quo system, this would amount to “saving Social Security.”

Anyway, I have a dream that President Barack Obama will decide to privatize Social Security, because it’s the sensible and moral thing to do. Democrats will be extremely confused for a couple months, but then will decide that this is in fact the greatest idea ever. Roles will reverse and Republicans will enlist the AARP and Jonathan Chait to kill it in a repeat of 2005, but their hearts aren’t in it, and they lose. Obama’s successful Jason Furman-lead transformation of the Social Security system is incredibly popular with the younger voters who put him into office and and sets him in such a strong centrist position that he completely crushes Romney in 2012. Are you listening Barack?

Anyway, it’s going to happen sooner or later. And we’ll probably keep calling it “Social Security.”

Norberg on Klein on Friedman

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Here’s my colleague Johan Norberg setting the record straight on Milton Friedman’s view on the role of crisis in social change.

I always thought Friedman’s view was plainly true. In a complex system with countervailing interest groups, the status quo is generally a kind of relatively stable equilibrium. So more than super-marginal policy change is exceedingly difficult. However, every now and then, some kind of salient failure or breakdown in the system breaks the stalemate and people around look for new answers. The coalition that wins is going to be one that has some well-thought-out answers prepared and ready for the airwaves. That’s why it’s important to do serious work on possible policy reforms that aren’t politically feasible in the current climate. A brief “policy window” just might open up, and if you’re ready with a good idea, you might be the first one to jump through.

Note that this is a completely ideologically neutral idea. Those who have tried to use the collapse of Enron, say, or the subprime mortgage fiasco, to implement big new regulatory changes are playing precisely this game. And global warming is surely the biggest crisis play in recent memory. It won’t work, and I think the failure of social security reform shows why. You need actual felt need, not the over-hyped prospect of future pain, which, given the myopia of democracy, might as well be after the heat death of the sun.

Johan’s excellent, comprehensive rebuttal to Klein is here.

Tim Lee on Patriotism

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Tim Lee’s response to Tim Sandefur (and therefore to Ilya Shapiro) is spot on. Do read the whole thing.

I especially liked this:

Loving your country because it embodies specific political ideals isn’t patriotism, it’s called having a political philosophy. Patriotism is loving your country because it’s your country, regardless of what political ideals it may or may not embody. Most people would not switch allegiances if they became convinced that another country better embodied their political ideals.

It is not obvious to me that other countries don’t better embody the ideals I most care about. Because I do have a particularist attachment to America, I’m quite glad that its not obvious. I do love America (in much the same way I love Iowa and the Cato Institute). But I love liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing first. If another society does better in securing these things, it’s a better society, and I would indeed switch my allegiances if it came down to it. That is, I have a political philosophy and I seriously.

Tim’s conclusion is especially good:

It’s important to understand the social and psychological processes that lead people to be biased in favor of their own groups in part because it will make us more effective at persuading others to adopt our ideals. Our goal in Iran, for example, should not be to make Iranians patriotic Americans—an impossible task—but to make them (classical) liberals. The way to do that is to convince them that it’s possible—maybe even natural—to view liberalism and Iranian patriotism as compatible. This is one of the reasons I’m a big fan of Tom Palmer’s work to convince people around the world that liberty is not an American invention but the common heritage of mankind. Tom goes out of his way to find home-grown examples of liberty in the various countries where he works—writings of ancient Chinese philosophers in China, Sumerian writings in the Middle East, and so forth. We’re never going to turn Iranians or Chinese into American patriots. But we may be able to help them cultivate a more liberal conception of what it means to be an Iranian or a Chinese patriot.

That’s exactly right. If you really care about liberty, you’ve got to ease up on the Americanism.

Regrettable Prudence

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Yes, you can be too tight-fisted. From  Anat Keinan and Ran Kivetz in the Harvard Business Review:

One of our studies—published in the Journal of Consumer Research—explored the regret felt by college students over their conduct on recent winter breaks and by alumni remembering winter breaks of 40 years ago. Regret about not having spent or traveled more during breaks increased with time, whereas regret about not having worked, studied, or saved money during breaks decreased with time. We saw a similar pattern in a study of how businesspeople perceived past choices between work and pleasure. Over time, those who had indulged felt less and less guilty about their choices, whereas those who had been dutiful experienced a growing sense of having missed out on the pleasures of life.

People who unduly resist self-indulgence suffer from an excessive farsightedness, or hyperopia—the reverse of typical self-control problems. Rather than yielding to temptation, they focus on acquiring necessities and acting responsibly and they see indulgence as wasteful, irresponsible, and even immoral. As a result, these consumers avoid precisely the products and experiences that they most enjoy. Their hyperopia can inhibit consumption in ways that are bad both for their own well-being and for marketers’ bottom lines. We don’t advocate trying to motivate consumers to make ill-considered purchases, of course, but marketers can help customers make appropriately indulgent choices that they’ll appreciate over the long term.

I love the little bit of pro-luxury “libertarian paternalism” in that last sentence. The very existence of hyperopia of course points to the problem in trying to design one-size-fits-all policy designed to save people from excess. Some people drink, gamble, and shop too little. It needs to be easier for them. And some people do too much. It needs to be harder for them. There is no way a planner can design a set of incentives that hits everybody’s sweet spot.

[Thanks to DWAnderson for the pointer in the comments.]