Quote of the Day - JF re: Ron Paul

Ron Paul advocates a position that represents the curious rebellion against a particular institution by those to whom that institution has returned the greatest benefit. And he's really uncomfortable with black people.

Quote of the Day - Sir Humphrey Appleby

Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

Quote of the Day - Rumsfeld

"We know there are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns: that is to say we know there are things we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know." 

—Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Department briefing, 12 Feb 2002.

What Matters (and it's not crossword puzzles)

Paul Krugman: 

What bothers me, and should bother you, about much of this debate is that it pretty clearly is not in good faith. Too many economists and commentators on economics are clearly playing for a political team; too many others are clearly playing professional reputation games. Their off-the-cuff reactions to policy issues were wrong and foolish, and I think they know in their hearts that they messed up; but instead of trying to remedy the fault, they’re trying to defend the property values of their intellectual capital.

And that really is a sin. This is not an academic game, where tempers run high because the stakes are so small. This really matters to millions of people, and refusing to think clearly because you don’t want any negative thoughts about the papers you and your friends have been writing the past few decades is unforgivable. [emphasis added]

"This is not an academic game."
"This really matters to millions of people."

The point that Dr Krugman makes here is invaluable. If only students were required to handwrite these two sentences a thousand times as a condition of their admission to an economics program, and were then required to repeat this exercise at the start of each academic year, maybe we'd all have a lot less semi-informed quasi-academic econ-speak with which to contend.

Besides the dilettantes who approach the subject with the same gravity that they'd bring to a crossword puzzle, we also mustn't forget the corporate water-carriers whose noise Dr Krugman and others so often lament.

Unfortunately, this battle is not new. Yann Giraud:

Yet, the same Paul Samuelson had written to his friend Alvin Hansen a couple of years before, in the midst of the Phillips curve controversy, the following sentence: "Milton F. is a bloody nuisance. In the end he is not right in his provocative stands, but it takes valuable time rebutting his arguments." He even added: "Having just returned from UCLA where (as in Virginia and Washington) the place is jumping with energetic libertarian nuts, I realize that so much of one's scientific life has to be occupied in sterile debate." [emphasis added]

Hidden Subsidies

A common issue in international trade is the deleterious effects of discriminatory health and safety standards. The idea is that one government can specify a standard that cannot be met by those outside the borders. The classic example is that of northeast butchers seeking to prevent the import of beef from western states made possible by the advent of refrigeration. Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, for example, required that meat sold within their borders be inspected by local authorities. The Commerce Clause of the US Constitution prevents such policies when they obstruct interstate trade. Another example is that of Thailand, which forbid the sale of American cigarettes on the grounds of health and safety, when domestically produced cigarettes, which were no safer, were permitted. 

This has Ricardian implications, it seems. The potential elements of comparative advantage are myriad, but one argument is that these elements include labor force preferences.  Specifically, that different working-condition standards provide opportunities for some nations to gain comparative advantage over other nations. 

It could be argued that a nation, by allowing poor working conditions, is providing an implicit subsidy, especially to labor-intensive industries.

The Rotten Eggs of the Ostrich

There's an old economists' joke about three people, a physicist, a chemist, and an economist, marooned on a deserted island. They've got three cans of food and have set themselves to getting them open. The physicist says that they could try to drop rocks onto the cans from a tree and hope to break open the cans. The chemist wonders if they could light a fire and burst open the cans with the heat. The economist, however, knows the true solution. 'Assume a can opener,' he says...

The can opener cited by the ostriches of libertarianism is the even distribution of power between the parties to trade. In their magical worldview, every transaction is entered into with complete knowledge by two rational parties operating on a level playing field. From this fantasy flows the article of faith that all transactions are to the equal benefit of all parties, and that all parties of interest are directly represented in the transaction. The only friction possible is the result of evil coercion or bumbling inefficiency by the dreaded government.

That this is not true is hardly the point. Frictions are everywhere. Coercion can be committed by private parties. There is indeed a commons. All of these simple truths are outside the libertarian's model. Indeed, they are sacrificed on the holy altar of property rights and individual liberty, during the libertarians' mass, immediately before the blessed incantation, 'You're on your own, pal.'

That which is tidily dressed up as liberty and freedom is, at the end of the day, simply a desperate grip on the status quo, the maintenance of which is the only firm belief of this species of ostrich. What is left to inference is that liberty and freedom, to the libertarian, are commodities like any other, the just allocation of which can be only be to the highest bidder.

There consists a slight variant on the 'level playing field' canard. Some libertarians welded to a particularly acute manifestation of the fantasy argue that those who wield mighty economic power over their fellows, and are thus able to transact in a manner which is spectacularly self-advantageous, can only do so because society, in its only true libertarian expression, the market, has deemed them to be of greater value than their fellows. Such is the moral bankruptcy endemic to this worldview.

The libertarian ostrich is a hearty beast, however. It attaches itself like a barnacle to economic power, and is staggeringly resilient in the face of such natural predators as downturns, empiricism, and moral reasoning. It's found the can opener, it's sure to tell you. If you can't see it, your head must be above the sand.

The Shallow End of the Charles

It seems the sort of people who whine about overpaid government employees are the same sort of people who claim executive compensation is driven by market forces.

A better explanation of how all of this tricky business works can be found here.

Quote of the day - Bailliol

"The quad at Balliol is the scene of the well-known limerick that parodies the immaterialist philosophy of Bishop Berkeley:

There was a young man who said, God

Must think it exceedingly odd

If he finds that this tree

Continues to be

When there's no one about in the Quad

and also of the response, by the Balliol-educated Catholic theologian and Bible translator Ronald Knox, which more accurately reflects Berkeley's own beliefs:

Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd:

I am always about in the Quad.

And that's why the tree

Will continue to be,

Since observed by, Yours faithfully, GOD.

via

[Full Disclosure Announcement]

I took part in a seminar on deficits and debt this last Friday at NC State. The seminar was made possible by a grant from the Koch Foundation. As a participant, I received a modest stipend. In accordance with previously stated policy, I am disclosing that fact.

Quote of the day - Mackay

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

-Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

MLK Day Every Day

Today, our nation honors its single greatest citizen, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr King seized upon the ideals of the founders and sought to bring intellectual honesty to the precept, "Justice for all." Like so many people of beneficent conscience, he sought to remake the world in the image of what it could be. Unlike so many before or since, he succeeded, at least in moving our society toward that goal, chiefly through the relentless courage of his convictions.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, black Americans who'd served overseas began to agitate for the sort of equality to which they'd been exposed in Europe. They came to realize that, if they were to fight and die for the American cause, perhaps that cause ought to include their interests. From this burgeoning movement emerged Martin Luther King. A young minister with a degree in divinity, he was radicalized by the rampant culture of abuse inflicted upon American blacks, particularly in the south. His expansive philosophical interest led him to, among others, Henry Thoreau, whose views on the tyranny of the majority were the intellectual foundation of Dr King's interpretation of the problem faced by black Americans, and Mohandas Gandhi, whose philosophy of non-violence was the inspiration for Dr King's solution.

The importance of the cultural shift under way in the 1950s to the effectiveness of Dr King's message cannot be overstated. In the years after the Second World War, Americans collectively enjoyed a growth in prosperity previously unseen. As more and more white Americans escaped poverty and enjoyed President Roosevelt's "freedom from want," it became increasingly clear to non-whites that they were not to be included. The expansion of radio and the advent of television hammered home the point that economic security and middle class luxury in 1950s America were monochromatic. Radio and television also provided the viscerally powerful orator an audience wider than that enjoyed by earlier prophets.

In 1965, Dr King's focus on social improvement expanded to include the economically disadvantaged, regardless of race. The escalation of the war in Vietnam struck at the heart of Dr King's fervent belief in non-violence. He also came to see conscription, as practiced in 1960s America, as an unfair burden upon the less fortunate, and blacks in particular. His inclusion of poor whites in the pantheon of the dispossessed whose lot he sought to improve posed a particular threat to the political and economic establishment because then, as is still so sadly the case now, this establishment relies upon poor whites as their agents of oppression, forming a bulwark against the political and economic gains of poor minorities.

That Dr King was killed before his job was done is not to be mourned. It is not appropriate, either, to draw primary inspiration from his tragedy. It is a disservice to his legacy to focus our attention too greatly on any aspect of his story beyond his message. Dr King was no utopian; he lived in, and was of, our time. He did not advocate equality of result, merely equality of opportunity. Much of the last forty years has seen the rise of philosophies committed to the maintenance of the status quo, such as free-market fundamentalism. While this would surely sadden Dr King, it is important to take a long view, as Dr King acknowledged when he observed that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." To recognize that our society has come so far in furtherance of the betterment Dr King envisioned is not to blindly settle for what progress has been made, but rather to understand how much more is possible.

The holiday in honor of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr comes once a year, in January. Every day that we consider the plight of the poor and of the disadvantaged and work toward improving our shared prosperity, however, is Martin Luther King Day.


"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

Quote of the day - Krugman on fantasy

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." 


-Paul Krugman