Monthly Archives: September 2008

An Experiment

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On my sidebar to the right, there is a sort of cloud/list thing under “Popular Searches.” I take it that the fact that people who search this blog have been searching for “Naomi Klein” more than anything else, indicates more current interest in what I have to say about Naomi Klein than about other topics. So, here’s an experiment. For the next few weeks, I will write a blog post on the topic of each of my top three “Popular Searches.” I think I’ll put a limit on repeats to three. So if “Mormon” is in the top three for three weeks in a row, I will write a post about “Mormon” three weeks in a row, and then move on to the next most popular topic. Obviously, this gives you the power to vote for a topic by searching over and over for it in order to get it into the top three. This behavior is positively encouraged.

Coming up this week: Naomi Klein; Mormon; my partner.

Disclaimer: I do not guarantee a good-faith effort to interpret topics in accordance with searchers’ intent.

What Books Would You Ban?

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If you were in favor of book-banning, and in a position to ban books, what books would you ban?

“I would never ban books” is not an answer to this question. That’s just counterfactual resistance, a distinctive symptom of the intellectual immaturity of beginning philosophy students. “I cannot honestly answer the question because I would not recognize a person who would ban books as me and would have so little continuity with that person that I cannot be expected to have any insight into that person’s preferences,” is a sound point, but still completely lame.

I’ll get you started: Battlefield Earth.

War (on Poverty) is Over, If You Want It

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Please listen to Christian Broda, from this profile in the American :

We are underestimating the gains from trade…The current statistical interpretation ignores the fact that a poor household today can access goods that, in the 1960s, they could not—microwaves, DVDs—and, more importantly, that the prices of the staples that lower-income households consume have also gone down dramatically.

[...]

In the ’60s, all the talk was about trying to win the war against poverty… The bottom line with our study is that we may have won the war against poverty without even noticing it. Here we have Congress debating why the poor in America haven’t been able to grasp the great economic growth we’ve seen in the last 30 years. ‘It’s been only concentrated in the top 1 percent,’ they say. And, absolutely, that segment has grown a lot. But that doesn’t mean that the poor haven’t been able to access part of that progress.

Will anyone listen? Stagnant real wages and skyrocketing inequality have a kind of  truthiness irresistible to the papers and the partisan wonks. If that story, the premise of a few too many badly argued op-eds and books, turns out to be based on a series of mistakes, I fear there will be no rush to admit to them.

David Brooks' Jihad Against Individualism

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On behalf of America, I am staging an intervention. Country first!

David Brooks is evidently infatuated with the idea that individualism is just downright unscientific. It is more than a bit queer that Brooks uses this alleged Fact of Science to argue that American conservatives ought to purge all remaining vestiges of individualism from its thought since, you know, American conservative ideology is engineered entirely along scientific lines. On one understanding of the words, the opposite of “individualism” is “socialism”. So I think it’s safe to say that David Brooks is on a quest to make the Republican Party safe for scientific socialism. And that’s just the sort of surprise that makes David Brooks such a consistently interesting thinker.

Nevertheless, I cannot say I understand what he is talking about. Brooks appears to believe that the discovery that human beings are hypersocial mammals is some kind of earthshattering gamechanger, but it’s hard to grasp why he thinks this. Brooks’ account of the science is fine, but the remainder of the column is a lavish non-sequitur, a richly embroidered but intellectually vulgar instance of the naturalistic fallacy. Indeed, the fact that he tries to get where he does with the science he cites is evidence that he doesn’t understand it so well. Now, Brooks is entirely correct when he writes that

…we are intensely social creatures, deeply interconnected with one another and the idea of the lone individual rationally and willfully steering his own life course is often an illusion.

And it is also true that we are intensely social creatures, deeply connected to one another, and the idea of the lone individual rationally and willfully steering his own life course is often not an illusion. It is least often an illusion when one inhabits a moral culture in which psychological individuation, autonomy, and independence are cultivated and prized. If we have managed to wring a relatively individualistic culture out of the raw materials of our tribal natures, that is a triumph of deanimalizing civilization. Individualism is indeed unnatural — much like other noted mockeries of the natural order, such as equality under the law, vaccination, and the wheel. Brooks might stop to note that improvements on nature are both possible and desirable. The existence of mirror neurons no more debunks individualism than the existence of retinas debunks telescopes.

Americans individualism is a manifestation of human sociality. In our culture, individualist norms are routinely transmitted from one generation to the next through the unique hypersocial-mammalian capacity for cultural transmission. Brooks apparently wants to interfere with further transmission of individualistic norms because they produce a politics he finds insufficiently authoritarian and illiberal. Which is, of course, precisely why we need to double down on a moral culture of individualism.

Do individualistic cultures cut across the grain of human nature? Sure  — in a good way! It is a well-confirmed finding of happiness research that individualistic cultures are happier than collectivistic ones. Indeed, this discovery grounds a number of hypotheses about why average wealth correlates with average levels of self-reported life satisfaction. For example, here is Aaron Ahuvia in the Journal of Happiness Studies:

Rather [than increasing happiness directly through increased consumption], economic development increases SWB [subjective well-being] by creating a cultural environment where individuals make choices to maximize their happiness rather than meet social obligations (Coleman, 1990; Galbraith, 1992; Triandis, 1989; Triandis et al., 1990; Veenhoven, 1999; Watkins and Liu, 1996). This cultural transformation away from obligation and toward the pursuit of happiness is part of a broader transition away from collectivism and toward individualist cultural values and forms of social organization.

Got that? Wealth, which produces all sorts of hugely desirable human goods, also weakens orientation toward pre-assigned roles and their obligations and strengthens the orientation toward individual fulfillment, resulting in more fulfillment. Collectivist moral cultures do serve an important function in the typical human condition. But we are lucky when that function has become unnecessary  –  when collectivist values become a vestigial organ of the body politic. Ahuvia puts it nicely:

Collectivism revolves around face, honor, and public reputation. Collectivism is associated with poor countries because it is a cultural survival mechanism born of the necessity for group solidarity. Indeed collectivism is a survival mechanism that is positively correlated with well-being if one looks only at a sub-sample of poor countries (Veenhoven, 1999). Survival mechanisms are serious business. It is not surprising, then, that collectivist societies often rely on social coercion via threats and rewards to one’s public reputation to ensure compliance with group norms, since the stakes for the group are so high.

Does Brooks really want to fight so hard for a morality of poverty? It is true that in straitened circumstances we are forced to close ranks and get with the program, but this is and ought to be repulsive to a free people.

Brooks mentions Edmund Burke and Adam Smith as “conservatives” (WTF?) who really understood social embeddeness. They sure did! So they’re not individualists? Well, in Friedrich Hayek’s brilliant essay, “Individualism: True and False,” he says this:

The true individualism which I shall try to defend began its modern development with John Locke, and particularly with Bernard Mandeville and David Hume, and achieved full stature for the first time in the work of Josiah Tucker, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith and in that of their great contemporary, Edmund Burke…

The difference between Brooks and Hayek on this score is that Hayek understands Western political thought, and, more generally, he grasps that sociality is an enabling condition, not the antithesis, of the ethos of individualism that created modern liberty and the wealth of the Western world.

America is reputed to be the world’s most individualistic culture, and has been for a long time. Our individualism is the foundation of the mind-blowing innovation and variety of the American scene. Our individualism is a main source of our world-historical prosperity and high levels of happiness. Yet Brooks, unembarrassed or unaware, wheels out a fallacious appeal to nature specifically to discredit this — the most distinctive and valuable feature of American culture.

It clearly tickles Brooks’ collectivist fancy “when John McCain talks at a forum about national service.” But that is precisely when McCain exposes his martial animosity to the character of his own country. Brooks may wish to join McCain in an effort to efface the separateness of lives, to degrade the dignity of self-creation and self-command by denying its possibility, to cultivate in Americans the docility of subjects ready to kill and die for the state. In Prussia this may have been a “conservative” project. But this is America. And defending American individualism is my one conservative impulse!

So, David Brooks, here’s a line. Paine, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Garrison, Spooner, Tucker, Twain, Mencken, Hayek, Friedman, Rand, and America are over here on this side. And there’s you over there. You are most welcome to step across and attempt to wrest the individualism from our cold dead fingers. Bring McCain! In fairness, I should say that Emerson is a vicious Indian leg wrestler.

No Bailout for Detroit!

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Here’s this morning’s Marketplace commentary.

It comes as no surprise that some people in Michigan didn’t like it much. It bears emphasizing that the failure of the iconic American auto firms would be very very far from the demise of the American auto industry. As I mention in the piece, they make Toyota Camrys in Kentucky. Honda, Nissan, Toyota, and other carmakers have major production lines all around the U.S. “MOPAR or no car” has never been further from the truth, and what’s bad for GM is probably good for carmaking in America.

I think my general point is important, so here it is:

The alternative to creative destruction is not stable prosperity. Propping up yesteryear’s winners leads to stagnation at best, plain old uncreative destruction at worst. The best defense is often no defense.

I believe this year’s season of bailouts is creating conditions that seriously threaten the dynamism of the American economy and the future of American prosperity.  If “too big to fail” comes to dominate our thinking, we will fail big.

More on the CPI: The BLS Responds!

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John Greenlees of the BLS was kind enough to reply by email to my recent post on the CPI, and has agreed to allow me to post his comments:

Thank you for the kind words on your The Fly Bottle blog about my article with Rob McClelland, “Addressing Misconceptions about the Consumer Price Index.”  You also say there that you would be interested in our response to the concern that the CPI is too conservative in accounting for gains to consumers.

In calculating the CPI, the BLS faces a set of well-known but difficult challenges, including dealing with consumer substitution behavior, accounting for product quality change, and handling the introduction of new products like Ipods and new distribution channels like the Internet.  With respect to each of these issues, we attempt to employ the most advanced methods available, subject to the requirement that those methods also be objective and reproducible.  There is no perfect way, however, to measure the welfare gains and losses that consumers experience when prices change and products appear and disappear.  Thus, we know that the CPI is not perfect, but we do not have an estimate of any statistical “bias” in the index; if there was an accurate and reliable method to estimate such a bias, we would use that method to improve the CPI by eliminating the bias.

The most recent summary of the BLS approach to CPI measurement problems is probably the article “Working to Improve the Consumer Price Index” by Commissioner Katharine Abraham and others in the Winter 1998 Journal of Economic Perspectives (at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2646935.pdf).  More recently, at an American Economics Association session in 2006, I reviewed the BLS considerations underlying changes it made during the years surrounding the 1996 Boskin Commission report on the CPI.  That review was subsequently published in the International Productivity Monitor, available at http://www.csls.ca/ipm/12/IPM-12-Greenlees-e.pdf.

I hope these citations are helpful, and thank you again for mentioning our article.

John S. Greenlees, Ph.D.
Research Economist
Division of Price and Index Number Research
US Bureau of Labor Statistics

Thanks, John (and Rob)!

Here’s a few thoughts… I don’t think it’s surprising that there is no statistical estimate of conservative bias, given current modes of measurement. As John says, if there was, they’d use it to correct the measure. But I wonder what kind of measure would be convincing in establishing an overall conservative bias. In particular, I wonder about the possibility of objectively measuring average subjective consumer welfare gains.

I don’t think we can do this with current life satisfaction survey methods. But suppose some future science of the measurement of affective quality could track changes in the levels of the various hormones and the activation of the various neural pathways underpinning the various positive and negative feelings. Then suppose we were able to use statistical analysis to isolate the portion of these changes attributable to changes in consumption. We should then be able to say something more precise about the real hedonic (in the psychological sense) value of quality changes, new products, new outlets, etc. Shouldn’t we?

Of course, subjective states aren’t the only things we care about and don’t exhaust well-being, on plausible accounts of well-being. Longevity, health, and various capabilities are plausible constituents of well-being, too. And it strikes me that we can measure some of these things quite directly. So why not estimate the effects of new products and quality changes on all these aspects of well-being?

Let’s say a “theory of well-being” is a list of plausible candidate constituents of well-being together, where each element is assigned a weight corresponding to its relative importance. We could poll people and do other experiments to reveal the most popular theories. Then we could calculate changes in well-being, relative to the most widely accepted theories of well-being, as typical consumption baskets change in composition and quality over time. Your real income might go up according to an index built on one theory of well-being and down on another. Then, instead of arguing over suspected biases in the CPI, pundits could argue directly about the constituents of welfare. That would be better. That’s what the argument is really about anyway. Could pluralistic indexing be the future?

One last thing that you should skip unless you care:  I find the Austrian subjectivist argument against economic measurement based in the heterogeneity of preferences uninteresting. It’s still useful to know the average effect of a change in the set of consumption options, and preference profiles don’t randomly differ. They cluster in rough types. So heterogeneity is no argument against discovering usefully general truths. Anti-”scientism” is often little more than obscurantism or methodological laziness.

Once again, thanks to the guys from the Division of Price and Index Number Research for so kindly responding!

With Josh Knobe on Empiricism in Philosophy and Social Science

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In this week’s Free Will, I chat with Bloggingheads TV’s resident experimental philosopher, Joshua Knobe, about getting out of the armchair and doing philosophy and economics using more direct empirical methods. Among other things, we talk about people’s intuitions about free will and responsibility, the “reverse experience machine,” and other fascinating subjects.

Up next on Free Will: Saul Smilansky on his incredibly stimulating new book Ten Moral Paradoxes.

Here’s Josh and I talking about the experience machine. Sorry about the bad sound on my end. (First diavlog ever from Marshalltown, and I forgot a decent microphone!)

No Dice, Pickens!

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Last Thursday on public radio’s Marketplace Morning Report, Bob Moon interviewed billionaire T. Boone Pickens about his highly self-publicized energy plan, which centers on using wind power to replace a portion of the natural gas used to create electricity, and then using that replaced natural gas to power cars. As it happens, Pickens has invested in a big way in windmills and is extremely well placed to profit from an increase in the use of natural gas-powered vehicles. But the part that bothers me most isn’t the fact that a billionaire is running a propaganda campaign in an effort to rig the regulatory structure to force consumers to buy what he sells — though that bothers me plenty. The part that bothers me most is the mixture of toxic nationalism and egregious economic illiteracy in the ads Pickens is airing to plump for his plan. Which brings us back to Moon’s interview with Pickens:

Moon: Let me ask you to respond to something that Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute said in a commentary on Marketplace the other day. Here’s some of his criticism of you:

Will Wilkinson clip: He’s leaning hard on our worst nationalist impulses. What he’s really saying is, why buy the things you need from dangerous foreigners when you could be paying more to buy them from rock-ribbed Americans, like T. Boone Pickens.

Pickens: It’s more than me. I mean, this is about America. This isn’t about Boone Pickens and whether Pickens’ wind farm makes money or whatever happens to it. But I mean, here with $700 billion going out of the country, and let’s say that we could cut it in half — $350 billion in the United States, can you imagine how that would multiply for jobs here. I’d much rather that gonna $350 billion was being used here than to give some for foreign oil.

Allow me to point out that Pickens’ reply is nonsense. He continues to insist on characterizing mutually-beneficial exchange across borders as hundreds of billions of American dollars “going out of the country.” But, in a nutshell, the reason Americans bought all this oil from abroad was that they had no way to get more energy bang for their energy buck. Unless the prices of domestic energy sources decline relative to that of foreign oil, shifting domestic consumption to energy from domestically-produced sources will  require Americans to pay more for energy–leaving them less for everything else.

This is not a recipe for multiplying jobs. Rather, it would leave less money in the economy to start new businesses and to expand successful ones. This is a recipe to make ordinary American consumers poorer and energy corporations, like the ones Pickens owns, richer. If Pickens was making sense, the implication would be that Americans would be better off if we “in-sourced” everything. T. Boone Pickens, meet David Ricardo.

Either one of the world’s wealthiest men doesn’t understand elementary economics, which clearly tells us that his plan will make Americans poorer, or his plan is not really “about America.”

Here’s my July 31st Marketplace commentary on Pickens. And here’s Cato’s Jerry Taylor in March debunking “energy independence.”

[Cross-posted from Cato@Liberty]

Cato Book Forum: Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do

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Attention D.C.-area locals!

This Thursday I’ll be moderating a Cato book forum on Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do by Columbia political scientist and stats wizard (and blogger) Andrew Gelman. Andrew and co-authors David Park, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi, and Jeronimo Cortinaare are responsible for the great paper [pdf] that asked “what’s the matter with Connecticut?” and this is the book length treatment of their fascinating findings. If you’re interested in understanding the state of the art in the geography and demographics of American public opinion as we head down the final stretch of the presidential race (and who isn’t!), this is a book, and a book forum, you shouldn’t miss.

Commentators will include public opinion expert Michael P. MacDonald, from Brookings and GMU, and Cato VP for research, Brink Lindsey, author of The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture, and Gelman will be joined by co-author Boris Shor.

Register here.

BONUS: From Red State, Blue State, some myths and facts about the red and the blue:

Myth: The rich vote based on economics, the poor vote “God, guns, and gays.”
Fact: Church attendance predicts Republican voting much more among rich than poor.

Myth: A political divide exists between working-class “red America” and rich “blue America.”
Fact: Within any state, more rich people vote Republican. The real divide is between higher-income voters in red and blue states.

Myth: Rich people vote for the Democrats.
Fact: George W. Bush won more than 60 percent of high-income voters.

Myth: Democrats are the party of the poor, Republicans are the party of the rich.
Fact: Rich people are getting richer in Democratic states. Incomes at the lower end have been increasing faster in Republican states.

Myth: Kansas votes Republican because its low-income voters can’t stand the Democrats’ 1960s-style values.
Fact: Kansas has been a Republican state for over 50 years, and rich Kansans vote much more Republican than middle-income and poor voters in the state.

Myth: Class divisions in voting are less in America than in European countries, which are sharply divided between left and right.
Fact: Rich and poor differ more strongly in their voting pattern in the United States than in most European countries.

Myth: Religion is particularly divisive in American politics.
Fact: Religious and secular voters differ no more in America than in France, Germany, Sweden, and many other European countries.

Register here.

For CPI Geeks

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If you take pleasure in thinking about economic measurement in general and the Consumer Price Index in particular, I urge you to read this lucid short paper [pdf] by Robert McClelland, Chief of the the Division of Price and Index Number Research at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and John S. Greenlees, a research economist in that division. It’s called “Addressing misconceptions about the Consumer Price Index.” The misconceptions come from people like Kevin Phillips and John Williams.

I admire McClelland and Greenlees’ rigor and drive for objectivity. My worry is that their methods fall short of objectivity, in the sense of a bias-free truth-tracking, because those methods can’t fully capture the added value to consumers from the introduction of new products and the improvements in quality. They’re right that Phillips-types clearly don’t know what they’re talking about. But I’d be interested in their response to the opposite worry: that their measures are too conservative in accounting for gains to consumers and so overestimate inflation and thereby underestimate gains in standards of living.

Sex, Culture, and Sarah Palin

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Democratic politics, in the end, is not about rational deliberation. It is about coalitional signaling. It is about expressive solidarity. It is about identity and emotion. That’s why I have a deep mistrust of democratic politics. But I think I’m as attuned to the subrational frequencies of electoral politics as anyone; I just don’t take my gut reactions to provide reasons for endorsement or action. Indeed, I tend to think both rationality and morality require that we often disapprove of, discount, and override our gut reactions. That said, my gut found Sarah Palin enormously appealing.

First, let me just get it out of the way: I think she is a tremendously sexy woman. How this will effect the race, I have no idea, but it’s just got to. It’s not an issue of glamour so much as a kind of Paglian chthonic sexual power. Set in that context, her unabashed embrace of her fecundity and motherhood as a kind of qualification makes a lot of sense. Megan O’Rourke’s post on Palin’s political eros has it right, and I think she may even be on to something when she says we got a “glimpse of a novel problem for a presidential candidate: sexual tension with his VP.”

Palin exudes sexual confidence and maternal authority, which in a relatively conservative culture like ours is the most recognizable and viscerally comprehensible form of female power. It makes a lot of men uncomfortable, but that’s because it’s the kind of female power they are most often subject to, and most often fail to successfully resist. I spent much of my life taking orders from women a lot like Sarah Palin — women like my mother and my Iowa public school teachers. Indeed, it makes a lot more emotional sense for me to feel led by by a woman like that than by some hotshot Air Force pilot. When a guy with a buzzcut says “jump,” I say “screw you.” When a woman like Sarah Palin says “jump,” I am inclined to deferentially inquire into the requirements of this jump.

Palin’s speech, I think, set in stark relief what Hillary was/is lacking. Again, I think O’Rourke gets it right when she says,

Ironically, [Palin] may have an easier time bringing what CNN called “toughness and femininity” together precisely because she never assumed at the outset of her adult life that she’d end up in a role like this.

I have very mixed feelings about this. I do not think politics is noble, and I deplore career politicians like Barack Obama, John McCain, Joe Biden, and, yes, Hillary Clinton. I would in fact rather be ruled by competent small-town mayors than accomplished professional rent-seekers. (Palin, being very smart, made great strides in this regard during her short time as Governor, because opportunistic predation is what politics is.) But I feel that Hillary’s struggle to connect as a strong leadership-worthy woman was part of an attempt to forge a sense of feminine authority not founded an maternality and female sexual power. That she almost succeeded in this is astounding, and I think hugely to her credit.

But we all know that politics is a primate sport. We’re used to marveling over the fact that the taller man usually wins, that a commanding, alpha-male jock toughness is de rigeur for successful presidential candidates. Palin’s gut appeal drives home the perhaps inevitable but nevertheless regrettable fact that female political success is at some level going to be grounded in primate appeal, too. And, as a female primate, Palin is evidently “a force to be reckoned with” — as the pundits kept saying.

But I don’t want to push too hard on the biopsychology of this. Biology is heavily strained through through the filter of contingent culture and identity. That Palin reminded my of my school teachers is a matter of her acquired manner and the assumptions beneath them, a matter of her Upper-Midwest-sounding accent. I’m from a small town. She’s from a small town! And damn straight: people who study at the University of Idaho (which is, in fact, where my sister is currently studying law) are every bit as smart as all you snide elitist Ivy League cosmoplitans!

The overwhelmed Republican delegates interviewed after the speech were at a total loss when asked to pin down specifically what they had liked about Palin’s address. What they liked is that they saw a feminine yet powerful conservative Christian mother — someone they understand, someone they would like to have as a friend, someone they are or would like to be. What they liked was the thrill of such direct cultural identification, of being on that stage and commanding attention and respect. I do not doubt that conservative Christian moms all over the country were brought to tears by the power of this. There are a lot of conservative Christian moms.

Palin made my gut want John McCain to win and then suffer a fatal heart attack. But I am a studied skeptic of my gut, and no wordly force could deliver my vote to him. However, every stars-and-bars stripes backdrop, every picture of the bloodied-but-not-bowed McCain in hospital, every Shephard Fairey icon of Obama, tells me that this skepticism is not broadly shared.

[Photo by Ryan McFarland]

McCloskey on Happiness and Flourishing

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Speaking of McCloskey, I’m enjoying her response to critics [doc] of Bourgeois Virtues. I’m symapthetic to her position on happiness in this passage:

[Graafland and I] do more sharply disagree that “the goal of virtues is just this: to become happy.”  The Greek word that started the discussion, eudaimonia, is indeed sometime translated erroneously as “happiness,” which then slides over to the pot-of-pleasure definition favored by modern utilitarians.  A well-fed cat sitting on the window sill in the afternoon sun would report to a happiness-questionnaire scientist that she was happy, being at 9 on a scale of 10 (reserving 10 for sexual intercourse).  But we are not cats—though I would be the last to deny that a cat-like “happiness” from time to time is an element of a full life.  Baskin-Robbins. 

One would have thought that more economists, though, would be familiar with the Experience-Machine example that Robert Nozick devised in 1974 (I discuss it in The Bourgeois Virtues, pp. 124-125).  “Superduper neuropsychologists,” wrote Nozick, “would stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel” any life you want. Then you would die.  “Would you plug in?”  No, of course not.  You are you.  You have an identity (faith) and projects (hope) and loyalties (love).  Being Queen Elizabeth I would be great fun, the fun we get from a novel or a history about her reign, or a TV series starring Helen Mirren.  But in a novel or TV series we do not have to give up being ourselves, and won’t.  Nozick’s argument devastates any version of utilitarianism that does not have a serious theory of identity (faith, hope, love).  The experiment shows, as Nozick put it elsewhere, that “we are not empty containers or buckets to be stuffed with good things.”

The better translation of Plato’s and Aristotle’s eudaimonia is “fulfilled” or “flourishing” or close to literally (though having then anachronistic Judeo-Christian overtones) “blessed,” since the word literally means “having good spirits attending one.”  Doubtless, if she was lucky enough in 1800 to miss smallpox and starvation, Burns’ impoverished Scottish nut-brown maiden, “Her eye so mildly beaming/ Her look so frank and free,” equaled in “happiness” defined in the pot-of-pleasure sense the average person on the streets of Glasgow nowadays.  That is what recent research on so-called happiness claims, quite plausibly.  Nonetheless the modern Glaswegian has gigantically greater scope.  She can do 100 times more of some things, leading a fuller life-fuller in travel, education, ease of life, ease of listening to “The Nut-Brown Maiden” sung in English and Gaelic on the internet.  “Happiness” viewed as self-reported mood is not the point of a fully human life.  Therefore I think it obvious that modern economic growth has greatly improved modern life, and made people better as much as better off.  Some people don’t get it, true, and watch TV for six hours a day and eat Frittos by the bagful.  Therefore let us preach to them.

I don not believe that recent happiness research in fact implies that the nut-brown maiden would have reported a level of happiness no less than contemporary Glaswegians. But the broader point is bang on.

Nozick is right that we’re not utility pots. But I’m skeptical of superstrong notions of personal continuity, too, (“faith” is the right word for identity) and therefore I’m skeptical of certain kinds of strong conceptions of flourishing as living according to virtue — unless simply we define virtues as “those habits of mind and action that facilitate flourishing” — in which case, we need an independent account of flourishing. I’m not skeptical of the idea that neural deselection and myelination creates deeply persistent skills or excellences that one might want to identify with virtuea. But I doubt that (1) there is a pattern of such brain development that counts as virtue everywhere and always, completely independent of local social structure, and that (2) the internalization of local norms — the kind we tend to identify with virtues — generally goes this deep. Once acquired, it is difficult to lose a well-practiced backswing or the hard-won ability to see through to an argument’s implicit logical structure. But given the right shift in social context, many of our virtues can turn on a dime.