De Jasay, Bastiat, and Smith

Across my desk has just come an interesting essay from Anthony de Jasay entitled "Weeding Out the 'Socially Not Useful'" (available here). As with most of de Jasay's work, it is well worth reading.

I have one small correction to make, however, regarding this claim de Jasay makes: "It is probably fair to credit [French nineteenth-century economist Frederic] Bastiat with the discovery of the concept of opportunity cost." De Jasay is right to call Bastiat "shamefully underrated and neglected," he is right to point out that Bastiat brilliantly demonstrated the concept of opportunity cost (among many other things), and he is also right that this concept is as widely underrated and neglected as Bastiat himself is. Yet Bastiat was not the first person to discover the concept of opportunity cost. It goes back at least to Adam Smith.

In his 1776 Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that "The annual produce of the land and labour of any nation can be increased in its value by no other means, but by increasing either the number of its productive labourers, or the productive powers of those labourers who had before been employed" (WN II.iii.32). By way of illustration, he goes on to discuss several historical examples of nations' wealth being dissipated or decreased, concluding:

In each of those periods, however, there was, not only much private and publick profusion, many expensive and unnecessary wars, great perversion of the annual produce from maintaining productive to maintain unproductive hands; but sometimes, in the confusion of civil discord, such absolute waste and destruction of stock, as might be supposed, not only to retard, as it certainly did, the natural accumulation of riches, but to have left the country, at the end of the period, poorer than at the beginning. (WN II.iii.35)

Note that Smith here is making a claim quite similar to the one Bastiat would make, and with far greater eloquence and rhetorical power, nearly a century later with his example of the "broken window." What is now known as the "broken window fallacy"--the idea, which never seems to go away no matter how many times it is exploded, that destroying goods or property actually leads to an increase in wealth--is usually credited to Bastiat. And Bastiat is the first, so far as I know, to use the striking visual example specifically of a broken window. In the passage quoted from Smith, he addresses another way of destroying wealth, namely war--which many continue to think amounts to a net increase in wealth. War is a net loss; see Robert Higgs's Depression, War, and Cold War: Challenging the Myths of Conflict and Prosperity for a recent demonstration. Smith's unassuming notice of this in 1776 is one underappreciated aspect of the Wealth of Nations.

But Smith elaborates on why distortions of the "natural" flow of capital, like wars, leads to losses, even if those losses are difficult to see:

More houses would have been built, more lands would have been improved, and those which had been improved before would have been better cultivated, more manufactures would have been established, and those which had been established before would have been more extended; and to what height the real wealth and revenue of the country might, by this time, have been raised, it is not perhaps very easy even to imagine. (WN II.iii.35)

This is very close to another of Bastiat's famous contributions to the history of economic thought, namely the distinction between "what is seen" and "what is unseen." Bastiat argues that the good economist notes not only the former but also the latter, because counting all costs, along with all benefits, is necessary to make an accurate reckoning of any economic proposal. Bastiat is justly hailed for having these insights and, especially, for expounding on them in rhetorically powerful ways. And, as I say, de Jasay is right to lament that too few people appreciate or apply these simple but true--and exceedingly timely--insights into politics and economics.

But Smith saw them first.

My Updated Curriculum Vitae

cv Feb 10
[Trying a new software program. Thanks, NG!]

Incentives, Bankers, and Bailouts

One of the most important truths about human nature that one must always keep in mind is: people respond to incentives. If one forgets that, one is bound to be frustrated by all the otherwise inexplicable things people do.

For example, bankers paying themselves large bonuses. People are on their moral high horses about how bad it is that executives from banks that received bailout money are now going to pay themselves big bonuses. It is "shameful," "the height of irresponsibility" says President Obama. The standard story is that these bankers engaged in irresponsibily high-risk investments and then lost their shirts. The federal government then had to come in and bail them out, at taxpayer expense, to stabilize the economy; and now, since the banks have recovered, they're once again being totally irresponsible in paying themselves huge bonuses, even while the rest of America has not yet recovered.

President Obama has made this one of his new causes, suggesting caps on executive compensation, various new taxes or fees, etc. I think all this misses the boat.

In a free country, people should be allowed to take any risk with their money that they want. Who is to say that the risk someone takes is unreasonable? Some people are more risk-averse than others; entrepreneurs, gamblers, and skydivers take greater risks than most others. But there is no objective criterion determining when a risk becomes too risky. It all depends on one's schedule of values, one's available resources, one's obligations to other projects or other people, etc. Even knowing those variables in a given case does not tell one whether another person ought to take a particular risk, because there are no external grounds on which to base that "ought."

So bankers should be able to take any risk with their money that they want. Ah, but there's the rub: it's not their own money, the critics charge, that they're risking--it's ours. But whose fault is that? Put yourself in the bankers' shoes for a moment, and ask yourself how you would behave. If you knew that any losses you incur from your investments would be paid for by someone else, but any profits you incur would go only to you, what would you do? Would you be cautious and conservative in your investments, or would you be aggressive and take high-risk/high-reward shots?

Imagine you were going to spend a week in Las Vegas, and I told you that, although you have to gamble with your own money, I will pay for any losses you suffer, any at all--and yet you get to keep whatever winnings you get. Would that alter your behavior? Would you limit yourself to the low-risk games, or would you play with reckless abandon? Exactly. Now suppose that you did this once, lost a lot of money, and I duly paid for all your losses; but then I said to you that you shouldn't have done that and don't do it again, but if you do, I'll pay for your losses again, though I won't be happy about it. Well, you go to Vegas again; what's your behavior this time?

The federal government bailed out bankers for their risky investments the first time around, and it would do so again--and the bankers know it. To be shocked, shocked that bankers would continue their riskiness, or pay themselves huge bonuses when the big risks pay off, strikes me as either naive or disingenuous. Of course that's what they're going to do.

The only way to make sure that taxpayers are not left holding the bag for bankers' risky investments (or anyone else's bad decisions) is by making sure taxpayers are not required to bail them out when they lose. There is no other way. Say to them, "You're free to do what you want with your money, but if you lose it all, don't come crying to us. It's your responsibility. Now invest wisely." That instantly links decision-makers with the consequences of their decisions, introducing a natural discipline that no rearguard brow-beating or finger-wagging could ever accomplish.

So I say, cut them loose. Give them the freedom to decide how to spend or invest their resources, but also the responsibility of having to live with the results--good or bad. Such a policy would have not only the benefit of not obligating taxpayers to pay for others' foolish decisions, but it also treats everyone concerned with a dignity befitting truly moral agents who are both free and accountable.

Notre Dame and Innsbruck

It is a sad day for study-abroad programs: Notre Dame is shutting down its program in Innsbruck (hat tip: Brad Birzer).

The year I spent in Innsbruck, my sophomore year at Notre Dame, was transformative for me. I learned more there, grew up more there, and forged deeper friendships there, than in perhaps any other single year of my life. I had hopes that my own children would one day go through the program and experience the exhilaration, joy, and adventure that I did.

I understand why they might want instead to hold the program in a big city. And Berlin is a great city. But I'm sure I speak for hundreds of other graduates of the Notre Dame Innsbruck program when I say that the memories I have of that year nestled in the valley of the Nordkette of the Austrian Alps I shall treasure forever.

Smith's TMS and WN

GMU economist Pete Boettke asked recently, "What reasons would you postulate as to why [Adam Smith's] The Theory of Moral Sentiments came to be under-appreciated in ethics and philosophy, and the interpretation of The Wealth of Nations came to be constrained and distorted in economics and political economy?"

This is an interesting question to raise. I responded to his question on his blog, but I thought I would re-post my thoughts here as well. Here is what I wrote:

You're asking a few different questions, Pete. One is why TMS's influence faded and was eclipsed by WN. Another is what the connection between the two books is. A third is why people thought--and some still think--that there is a tension between the books.

Several things combined to explain the phenomenon addressed in the first question. I'll mention two: one philosophical, one psychological.

The philosophical explanation is that philosophers came to see TMS as lacking in a serious way, namely in providing a bona fide source of moral normativity. TMS looks for all the world like an empirical investigation into the mechanisms that give rise to moral judgments and into the factors that account for three phenomena: (1) the fact that all (or almost all) human beings transition during their lives from amoral infants to highly moralized adults; (2) the fact that all (or almost all) human societies generate a rough consensus about wherein morality consists; and (3) there is a significant overlap among the respective moral consensuses various human societies adopt.

The problem is that, irrespective of whether Smith's proposed explanations of these phenomena are correct, it's not clear that Smith provides any way for people to critize moral orders. If our moral judgments arise the way Smith describes, as the unintentional results of people attempting to serve their ends in the company of others, then that seems to reduce moral judgments to the status of mere strategems. It makes them hypothetical, rather than categorical, imperatives. And moral philosophers like their categorical imperatives. (Remember, too, that Kant was about to come onto the scene, and his attempt to ground categorical moral imperatives--partly in response to Smith's (and Hume's) challenges--came to dominate moral thought. Smith's program is very different from Kant's in its aims and methods, and thus Smith's program came to be seen as alien, not really moral philosophy at all. It was thus relegated to other disciplines like psychology or anthropology, or to the dustbin of history.)

The psychological reason, at least for the latter half of the 20th century in the British and American world, is that Smith is associated with a political and economic order that the vast majority of academics find distasteful, even morally repellant. It is psychologically very hard to separate the two. It's like asking people to consider whether Mein Kampf has any redeeming literary virtues. As a result, most people will not even read, let alone seriously consider, anything Smith wrote. Moral philosophers who are interested in the "Smithian" program would rather read Hume than Smith, since Hume is not associated with capitalism. (Humanities scholars who work on Smith must constantly combat the initial "why on earth would you work on HIM?" question, before getting people even to consider any substantive issues.)

A quick thought on why people might think there is a tension between TMS and WN. WN does not mention TMS; it does not discuss the "desire for mutual sympathy of sentiments" or the "impartial spectator"; it does not mention any of the cardinal virtues TMS described; and in the Index Smith prepared for WN, it identifies "self-love" as "the governing principle in the intercourse of human society." Moreover, there is none of the theological language in WN that was present in TMS. It's almost as if two different people wrote the books--a curious fact since Smith was revising them side by side throughout most of his adult life.

In a book of over 1000 pages, one would think there might be some discussion of the connection between Smith's only two books. Indeed, one might expect that there would be a deep and extended "conversation" between the two books. Alas, there is none of that.

That doesn't mean the two books don't go together or can't be reconciled. But it does mean, I think, that it's not simply foolish (as some claim) to suggest there might be an interesting tension here.

--Jim Otteson

Update on the "Great Mind Fallacy"

The Forbes editorial I wrote is based on a paper I just had published in Social Philosophy and Policy entitled "Adam Smith and the Great Mind Fallacy." For those interested in the more detailed argument, the paper is available here.

Most issues of SP&P are very good; this one (vol. 27, issue 1, winter 2010) is as well. It collects several excellent papers from a distinguished group of scholars all addressing the general topic of "ownership and justice." I highly recommend the other papers as well.

[A hat tip and thank-you goes to Mark D. White, who alerted me (and others) to the appearance of the paper and this issue of SP&P on his blog, Economics and Ethics.]

Government Experts and Adam Smith's Great Mind Fallacy

A new editorial by me for Forbes under (approximately) the above title, here. (There should be more to come in the future.) Post your thoughts or comments on the Forbes site!

Review of My Book

I just discovered this brief review of my book Actual Ethics on the blog "Goodness Is Cool." (What a cool name for a blog!)

Thanks to Tom Burnett, the blog's administrator who wrote the review.

How Bad Were the Naughties?

Tyler Cowen argues recently in the NYT that the previous decade was actually not as bad as you might have thought, since the poor in many countries around the world made significant economic gains. And Art Carden argues in Forbes that the "naughties" brought many goods and services that we already take for granted.

I was very glad to hear this, especially since--with a national debt that is over $12 trillion and counting and that is fast approaching 100% of our GDP--the naughties might have been our last good decade for a while.

Worth a Look: Smith as Theologian

Routledge is bringing out a fascinating collection of articles (disclosure: one of them is mine) on the theological underpinnings of Adam Smith's work. Entitled Adam Smith as Theologian, it is edited by Paul Oslington, who is joint chair in economics and theology at Australian Catholic University. The essays were written for an enormously stimulating conference sponsored by the Templeton Foundation that was held in January of 2009 at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

One might be surprised to hear that Smith even had a theology, let alone that a series of penetrating essays could be written on the subject. (Perhaps only a conference on "David Hume as Theologian" could be more surprising!) I found the papers quite interesting, and they brought all sorts of things to light for me--someone who has studied Smith for some time. I highly recommend the collection.

Some Quick Hits

1. The New York Times wonders when too many high school honors societies begins to diminish their value. Some students are apparently in as many as nine honors societies. My favorite line from the article: "But as honor societies have grown, some schools have screened out less serious students. At Florida’s South Miami Senior High School, the math society delays induction of new members until they fulfill a requirement for community service, and withholds honor cords from seniors who skip meetings, said Ileana Rodriguez, the activities director." What does community service have to do with mathematical ability? If your math honors society has too many members, why not screen out those who aren't as good at math?

2. Newark's Liberty Airport is going to get the full-body scanners. The images they give of your body are so precise that they have to be pixelated when shown on television. It would seem a rather invasive procedure, but many interviewed passengers don't mind, because they "have nothing to hide" and they'll put up with just about anything "as long as it keeps us safe." The NYT helpfully gives tips on how to avoid further delay. My favorite line from the article: An airport official recommends parents rehearse with children, so they know what to expect and don't get too scared when they go--alone--into the magnetometer. Yes, it is important to begin the training in obedience to government authority early. And they have to do it, because so many of the terrorists travel with their children.

3. An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal argues that the health care bill that recently passed the senate is unconstitutional. My favorite line: "America's founders intended the federal government to have limited powers and that the states have an independent sovereign place in our system of government." It's a nice effort--no, it really is. But that argument, along with the related claim that "The federal government may exercise only the powers granted to it or denied to the states," has been impotent, and thus irrelevant, to the federal government does for many decades now.

He Said It: Darwin

"It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known; but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." --Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), "Introduction"

Building Up and Tearing Down

This thoughtful blog post (hat tip to an excellent student), which recommends the teaching of "appreciative thinking" at least as much as "critical thinking," reminds me of this passage from Shaftesbury:

It is certain that in matters of learning and philosophy the practice of pulling down is far pleasanter and affords more entertainment than that of building and setting up. Many have succeeded to a miracle in the first who have miserably fallen in the latter of those attempts. We may find a thousand engineers who can sap, undermine and blow up with admirable dexterity for one who can build a fort or lay the platform for a citadel.

And Shaftesbury published that in 1711!

Unequal Protection from the Costs of Medicaid?

According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal that was struck with Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson to get the crucial 60 votes needed to proceed on its health care bill included giving Nebraska's citizens an exemption enjoyed by the citizens of no other states: "Mr. Nelson also won a commitment that the federal government would pick up his home state's share of the cost of expanding Medicaid."

By saying that those costs would be picked up by the federal government, the Journal means that they will be borne by the citizens of other states. The citizens of Nebraska will be exempt from paying for the tremendous expansion of Medicaid, while the citizens of other states will not only pay their own share but also Nebraska's portion as well.

I want the same exemption.

I don't believe for one second the suggestion that the new programs will cost only what the Senate and the CBO currently estimate. It would, first of all, be the first federal government program in history to cost only what its supporters say it would up front. And I find the idea that they will cut $500 billion from Medicare laughable. I promise you, it will never happen.

(This past July, President Obama promised, "That is why I have pledged that I will not sign health insurance reform that adds even one dime to our deficit over the next decade. And I mean it." Do you believe him? I certainly don't. What's he willing to wager on that promise? If he's wrong, will he rescind the bill? Will he pay personally for the difference? If he's so confident that he can speak of even "one dime," why shouldn't he?)

So this will add hundreds of billions of dollars--trillions, even--to the mounting national debt that our children and grandchildren will be forced to pay. These future generations will have to work all their lives to pay for the benefits we demand now for ourselves. I think that is morally wrong. It is akin to forced labor. Paying for the benefits now, through current taxation, is one thing. I would still oppose it, but at least it's closer to having those who benefit from the program also be the ones who pay for it. But financing it through debt makes future people--who had no say in the program, who were not asked, who did not voluntarily join the agreement--nevertheless have to pay for it. How can that be justified?

So, I repeat: I want the same exemption from paying that Nebraska's citizens will enjoy. I will go farther. I want an exemption from paying for the entire thing, not just expanded Medicaid coverage, and I want a permanent exemption (like Nebraska's citizens) for my children and descendants for any and all debt created by the program. In return, I offer never to use or benefit from any government health insurance or health care program.

Mr. President, will you grant me this exemption?

One other question. Wouldn't Nebraska's special exemption violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution?

Why I Watch "Fox News" (And Why You Should Too)

Among the places I get my daily news is Fox News. Given my line of work (academic professor) and where I work (New York), I get a lot of grief for this. When asked, I give three main reasons why I watch it:

1. By viewership, Fox boasts the top 13 news and commentary programs in the country, garnering approximately 20 million viewers per day combined. That is many millions more than any other television news programs. Thus Fox is what Americans are watching, and I think it is important to know what Americans are watching. I also think that people who comment on the American political, economic, or cultural scene--as I sometimes do--have an obligation to pay attention to the central organs that reflect and influence that scene, whether one agrees with what those organs offer or not. Fox is clearly one of them.

(Incidentally, the New York Times used to be one of those central organs, and perhaps it still is; but with a daily readership now below 1 million, its best days are probably behind it.)

2. Fox often presents viewpoints that the other news sources do not. Fox has guests and commentators representing conservative, libertarian, free-market, constitutionalist, Christian, Republican, and other perspectives that often get short shrift, or no voice at all, in other media outlets. Yet Fox also gives the news and perspectives that other media outlets give do give. So on Fox one gets the news and comment that one gets from other news sources, and in addition one also gets news and comment largely absent from the other sources.

3. Finally, I find that Fox has less of the condescension toward Americans that one gets on other news sources. Watching MSNBC or CNN, for example, one gets a lot of frustration and consternation--and condescension--at the beliefs, folkways, mores, and conventions of Americans.

Exhibit A for this is the treatment these outlets have given to the Tea Party protests that swept across America over the summer months this year. These were amazing phenomena, in numbers of participants, in numbers of events, in lack of violence, in--most striking to me--the degree to which leaders and participants actually made substantive arguments about first principles of government (liberty, rights, natural law, competing theories of constitutional interpretation, economics, etc.).

Yet non-Fox coverage of these events tended to be grudging, and, when it was covered, the reporters and commentators were dismissive, superior, smug, rolling their eyes at the benighted "fringe" (despite numbering in the millions) "extremists." They rarely listened to what they had to say, they rarely presented, let alone evaluated, their arguments, and they rarely took the time to ask themselves whether this spectacular grassroots phenomenon might warrant taking seriously. (The Garofalo/Olberman segment--in which protestors are called "tea-bagging rednecks," "racists," "capitalist tools," and "teabag suckers," and in which it is asserted that protesters don't know anything about taxes, don't know when the Boston Tea Party was, don't know what they're protesting or why, etc.--is perhaps the most egregious example of this smug condecension, but there was a lot more of it to be found in smaller, sometimes thinly veiled, doses in other coverage.)

Now of course one gets some dismissiveness on Fox as well. Some Fox commentators and guests are not charitable toward their opponents either, so some of this goes both ways. But there is a lot less of it, which, for me at least, makes it more tolerable to watch.

One final thought. I believe in and subscribe to John Stuart Mill's principle that the truth can be discovered, if at all, only through a crucible of contentious debate. In conversations and discussions, in my teaching, even in my writings (including both published work and blog postings), I have sometimes deliberately adopted and defended views I did not hold, precisely because I thought the consensus (with which I agreed) was too complacent and not sufficiently engaged with alternative views. I think this is part of my job as an academic. And although it has occasionally cost me dearly--when, for example, people mistake my intellectual agitation for a sincere profession of belief in things they dislike--nevertheless I believe the pursuit of truth, which is after all the business I am in, requires it.

Insofar as Fox News adds different perspectives to the national conversations, then, I applaud them for it, whether I agree with those perspectives or not.

[UPDATE 12/9/09: Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, which owns Fox News, wrote an op-ed in the WSJ today under the title, "Journalism and Freedom."]

He Said It: Milton Friedman

"The college professor whose colleague wins a sweepstake will envy him but is unlikely to bear him any malice or to feel unjustly treated. Let the colleague receive a trivial raise that makes his salary higher than the professor's own, and the professor is far more likely to feel aggrieved. After all, the goddess of chance, as of justice, is blind. The salary raise was a deliberate judgment of relative merit." --Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, p. 166

My Brief Review of Raphael

I wrote a brief review of D. D. Raphael's slim volume, The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith's Moral Philosophy (pictured below). The review appeared in the April 2008 volume of the Journal of the History of Philosophy. If you are interested, a PDF of my review is available here.

Capitalism and Morality

Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps, the McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University, has written a fascinating short essay on the connection between justice and capitalism. He shifts the usual focus of such discussions from just or unjust distribution signatures to the aspect of human nature often overlooked: the tireless search for innovation.

I highly recommend it.

[Hat tip: Kruse Kronicle.]

Responding to a Review

I discovered that one Kevin Currie-Knight posted a review of my book Actual Ethics on its amazon.com page. I thank Mr. Currie-Knight for his review. He gave it four out of five stars, which I appreciate; and he says some nice things about the book, which I also appreciate. But his reasons for not giving it a higher review were puzzling to me and I thought warranted some brief responses.

(I am not sure what the protocols for responding to reviews are, so I decided to post them here, rather than somewhere on the Amazon site.)

Currie-Knight misspells my name throughout his review. I wouldn't hold that against him, but it does suggest perhaps that he does not pay attention to details. Perhaps that explains some of Currie-Knight's curious criticisms.

Here is his first objection, pasted exactly as it appears on the amazon.com page (thus without the numerous sic's from me):

I am a bit skeptical of Otterson's central idea that the only just ethic is one which treats all people as ends rather than means. Not that we should not do this, but the very capitalism Otterson defends does not always do this. Employers see employers as means, employees see employers as means, producers see consumers as means (to more revenue) and consumers see producers as means (of getting products and services). The entire process of bargaining (getting the most from the other for as little expenditure as possible) involves seeing the other as a means to get what you want for as little cost as necessary. I could be wrong, but that Otterson did not even entertain this objection floored me.

This would indeed be a serious omission, not least because it seems obviously false that people are allowed morally to treat others only as ends and never also as means. Even Kant himself is careful to make the proper distinction--not just between treating others as ends or as means simpliciter, but also between treating others as ends or also as means.

Thankfully, I did not omit addressing the objection Currie-Knight accuses me of omitting. On p. 6, I write:

Of course persons may be treated as means--when one pays someone else to mow one's lawn, for example--but persons may never be treated merely as means. Respecting the lawnmower's personhood would entail, for example, making him an offer and allowing him either to accept or not as he judges fit; allowing him to choose is a recognition that he has his own 'ends' or goals or purposes--he is a person, in other words, not a thing. (italics in the original)

Apparently Currie-Knight missed that discussion. On to his second objection:

Neither did Otterson consider the idea that "Respecting the individual" (a) may entail more than the negative liberty of leaving her free to make decisions for herself, but (b) may not be a value that overrides all other consdierations in every case. The obvious argument in favor of public education is that we may accept small incursions into taxpayers' liberty over their money in order to enhance each individual's ability to exercise judgment by educating them at public expense. Otterson's argument, at all times, seems to reduce to pointing out that doing this violates individual sovereignty and disrespects the individual (to which the utilitarian replies that they've already admitted that it does, but that the benefits outweigh the costs. (In fact, a plausible argument could be made that as education enhances one's ability to live independently, the state is respecting individuality by helping children cultivate it.) Otterson doesn't show oterwise and, as such, talks past his opponents.)

This is really two objections. The first, that I did not consider the idea that respect for an individual might entail a requirement to do more than simply respect the person's freedom, seems especially puzzling, since the topic comes up repeatedly. Much of the book's chapters 3 and 4 specifically address our obligations to the needy, for example. Having already argued on behalf of "classical liberal" limits on state power, I argue in these chapters that those limits similarly entail limits on what the state should do to address the needy.

But I specifically--and, I thought, emphatically--argue that state obligations do not exhaust our personal moral obligations. I argue that we have personal obligations to help the needy, and that those personal obligations do and rightfully should go well beyond the state's minimal obligations.

Here, for example, is what I claim on pp. 113-114:

Now, opposing the use of political means for this kind of relief does not mean, however, opposing all kinds of relief for those who need it. On the contrary--and this cannot be emphasized enough--it means only that such cases as require the help of others are all matters of social means and social power. So the objection [I raised] is only to the use of political means, not to the provision of help generally. My argument is that when help is required, social means, and social means only, should be employed. People who need help, families that need shelter, infants who need formula, children who need operations, students who need scholarships, adults who need a second chance, laid-off workers who need new job training--in these cases and any others like them, if help is required, then take action! Do not wait for someone else to do it. Do not shift your personal moral responsibilities onto distant agencies or unknown third parties and believe that you have thereby fulfilled your duty. If in any particular situation moral responsibility attaches to the doing of something, then that responsibility can be assumed only by individuals--which means by you and me. So let us roll up our sleeves and get to work. (italics in the original)

I go on to argue that my conception of moral responsibility towards others is in fact far more demanding than my opponents', precisely because it places the responsibility on each of us personally. Now that is a controversial position to take, and one might dispute it on several grounds; several of those objections I raise and address in the text. But I did indeed discuss it, quite extensively.

Perhaps Currie-Knight missed that section of the book as well.

His third objection, noted above, is that I fail to consider utilitarian benefits to certain kinds of intrusions on personhood, in particular with respect to publicly subsidized and regulated education. Perhaps respecting the 'personhood' I defend is a reasonable default position, but, Currie-Knight suggests, that does not mean that there might not be specific occasions on which slight curtailment of absolute respect for 'personhood' is not overbalanced by the good that results. And education is a prime example.

This is another excellent objection to raise, one that any thoughtful defender of my view should take seriously; failure to address it would be a grave omission. Thankfully, however, I do address it, and I do so at quite some length.

Here is the opening paragraph, for example, from chapter 4, "The Demands of Poverty":

I argued in chapters 2 and 3 that only the limited, "classical liberal" state is consistent with respecting people's personhood. In that way I claimed to have made a "principled" case: because respecting personhood is the bedrock moral principle, disrespecting it is wrong regardless of other considerations. At the end of chapter 3, however, I suggested that the argument left one central question as yet unaddressed: What about the poor? I argued that respect for personhood meant allowing only social, not political, power to be employed to help others. But perhaps restricting the state so that it secures and enforces [this negative conception of] 'justice' will benefit those who already have (substantial?) private property. Again, where does it leave the poor? What exactly is our obligation to give to those who have less than we? If the poor suffer unduly under the classical liberal state, perhaps "general welfare" out to supersede or trump the "principled" case made earlier. (p. 129)

This seems to approximate exactly the objection Currie-Knight suggests. But note that that is the first paragraph of this chapter. I go on to devote the rest of the chapter, as well as the subsequent chapter, to addressing precisely this issue. That is quite a lot of the book for Currie-Knight to have missed.

Regarding education, I note that I devote about two-thirds of chapter 6, pp. 208-238, to discussing a range of arguments in favor of and against government involvement in education aside from the "principled" one I had defended earlier. I specifically take up the utilitarian argument by looking in some detail into the empirical results of various educational policies (pp. 229-37).

Again, one might contend that my response to the utilitarian argument is inadequate; perhaps one would argue that I overlook some of the benefits of state-regulated schooling, that I unfairly disparage the results, or perhaps that I overstate the alleged advantages of market provision of education. But to claim that I did not consider the issue is simply false.

As I state in the Preface to Actual Ethics, the book is meant to be a primer--not the final word on any of its topics, but the first (or the first few). Currie-Knight recognizes this and credits me for it; I thank him for that. The book was also written to be provocative, lively, and (I hoped) more entertaining than your typical work of political philosophy. I hoped that it would, in the spirit of John Stuart Mill, constitute a fillip to discussion and perhaps reexamination in the marketplace of ideas.

As the above suggests, I think Currie-Knight's objections miss their mark, and by a lot. But his review is its own fillip in the marketplace of ideas, and it has provoked me, at least, to revisit some of the arguments in my book. For that, I thank him, however unhappy I am with the substance of the objections he raised.

Religion and Capitalism

In a recent Boston Globe article, Michael Fitzgerald reports on a study done by two Harvard researchers into some of the factors affecting economic success. One strongly influential factor the researchers found was religion--specifically, religious belief that includes a robust belief in hell.

Apparently, simple belief in God has little positive or negative correlation with economic growth; belief in heaven correlates positively, and belief in hell correlates with even bigger economic growth. The effect is apparently strongest among developing countries.

Researchers are not quite sure why this is. One speculation is that fear of punishment is a more primal motivation in human beings, and thus a fear of eternal damnation has a strong power to motivate people. So if one believes that one will be punished in the hereafter if one breaks the rules of morality, one tends to break them less often. The connection to economic growth might then consist in the fact that people who break such rules less often tend to cooperate more, work harder, cheat less, and so on--all factors in encouraging economic growth.

I find this plausible, though of course the issue is quite complicated: there are many factors influencing economic growth. Even if a link between religion and capitalism is conceded, however, it would still leave wide open the question of what to do about it. How large-scale shifts in belief or in culture take place is still largely unknown. How one might try to affect such shifts is thus even less well understood.

As an aside, I note that in my Actual Ethics, I made a related claim:

Good judgment develops [...] not only by enjoying the freedom to exercise it, but also by being required to take responsibility for its exercise. [...] Another way of making the same point: if you were going to create your own new religion, one requiring people to sacrifice and change their otherwise everyday behavior, it would help to have a hell. Promises of good things to come if one behaves the way your religion prescribes will take you some distance, more with some people and less with others; but your efforts will be considerably aided if you also have punishment for bad behavior. (pp. 11-12)

Not quite the same claim, and I was talking about the development of human judgment, not economic growth. But both seem to agree that (1) human beings respond to incentives and (2) negative incentives for unwanted behavior are at least as important, if not more, than positive incentives for wanted behavior.

UPDATE 11/27/09: This post generated a bit of discussion at Kruse Kronicle. I find myself siding with Michael Kruse in the exchange. I would add to that discussion only the recommendation of a book I found quite interesting on the subject: The Bottomless Well by Peter Huber and Mark P. Mills.

He Said It: Adam Smith

"A half-starved Highland woman frequently bears more than twenty children, while a pampered fine lady is often incapable of bearing any, and is generally exhausted by two or three. Barrenness, so frequent among women of fashion, is very rare among those of inferior station. Luxury in the fair sex, while it enflames perhaps the passion for enjoyment, seems always to weaken, and frequently to destroy altogether, the powers of generation." --Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)

A New Movie: "2081"

A student alerted me to the new movie entitled 2081, which is based on Kurt Vonnegut's chilling short story, "Harrison Bergeron." Here is a trailer for the movie. If you have not read the short story, you should. It cuts uncomfortably close to the bone. The movie looks--pardon the pun--equally chilling.

The story explores what happens if we take seriously the imperative that people should be equal. Not, it should be noted, what happens if everyone has equal opportunity, since that, after all, will lead inevitably to unequal outcomes; nor what happens if everyone is equal before the law, since that too will allow unequal outcomes. It explores, rather, what the world might look like if the state took it as one of its duties to ensure that no one had any more of anything than anyone else.

Is it unfair that some are smarter, more beautiful, more talented than others? Is it especially unfair that some indeed are extraordinary, far beyond the range of most humans? If so, and if the state's job is to minimize unfairness, then perhaps it should undertake to minimize these differences as well. If you spend a few seconds thinking about that you will be able to imagine the directions Vonnegut's story (and I presume the movies) go.

There was another movie adaptation of Vonnegut's story in 1995, this one under the same title (see here). I haven't seen it, but I will put it on my list. (I am a bit worried, however, about Sean Astin in the title role: Rudy might be plucky, but does he have the power and beauty that Harrison Bergeron does?)

Remembering a Great Day for Humanity

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. That may be the single most important political event in my lifetime. The toll in human life that Russian communism took is hard to imagine and hard to overstate, and its fall--initiated by the destruction the wall, which was its great symbol of its great features of fear, repression, and brutality--was a cause for joy around the world. It gave the world hope, real hope, for the future of humanity.

I will never forget where I was on that day when I heard the news; neither will I forget the images of people climbing the wall, dancing on it, singing out in protest, even while the East German border guards futilely soaked them with fire hoses. The guards knocked some of the revellers down, but it was too late: the wall was coming down now because it could not withstand the determined onslaught of people striving for freedom. It was a great day for humanity. I hope you too will celebrate it.

There are numerous stories, tributes, and memorials available on the internet. (Incredibly, my local newspaper, The Record, has not so much as a mention of the event in its front-page news section or on its editorial page. Shame on you, Record editors.) Professor Bradley Birzer wrote this provocative essay in commemoration of the event, which I highly recommend.

The Nature of the State

Compare:

"The state is a machine for maintaining the rule of one class over another." --Vladimir I. Lenin in a lecture entitled "The State," delivered at Sverdlov University, 11 July 1919.

"It would thus appear that the State, instead of originating according to any of the conjectures made by English and American writers on the subject, originated as a class-weapon of conquest and confiscation, and that its primary function was, and still is, to maintain the stratification of society into the two classes noted [namely, "a relatively small, owning and exploiting class which lives by appropriating without compensation the labour-products of a relatively large, propertyless and dependent class"]." --Albert Jay Nock, "The State," The Freeman, 13 June 1923.

This Just In: The Heartland Institute

The Heartland Institute is non-profit think tank in Chicago that produces first-rate research and policy analysis exploring free-market-oriented solutions to pressing social, economic, and political needs. Its research has been influential in areas as diverse as environmental legislation to health care.

I am pleased to announce that the Institute has invited me to become a member of its Board of Policy Advisors, an invitation I was happy to accept. (Here is the link directly to the page they created for me.)

I look forward to working with the Institute, and I am happy to add their site to my blog roll at right. I also look forward to opportunities to head back to my beloved Chicago now and again.

Pay Cuts for Rich People on the Government Dole?

The Obama Administration's "U.S. Special Master on Compensation" Kenneth Feinberg has decided to slash the pay and benefits of top executives at seven Wall Street companies that have received government bailout funds (here). The justification for that extension of federal power is that if those companies are going to take federal funds, it only stands to reason that the federal government should have some say in how they spend it; besides, we are not exactly talking about "charity cases," as Rep. Barney Frank pointedly put it.

That got me to thinking. Are there other wealthy top executives working for institutions that have received federal money, and who thus should perhaps also be targets of U.S. Special Master on Compensation Kenneth Feinberg's critical eye? Why, yes: American universities.

The top research universities in America receive hundreds of millions of federal, taxpayer-funded dollars every year in the form of research grants. That is a lot of money, and a lot of it goes to very wealthy universities who pay their top administration officials a whole lot of money. Many university presidents, for example, are paid more than $1 million per year (see here or here, for example), and the salary does not include the enormous perquisites--often including housing, expenses, cars, private planes, and so on--that come with the job. Are those administration officials worth it? Are American taxpayers getting their money's worth? Perhaps, but should Mr. Feinberg look into it just to be sure?

But hold on a second! There are even bigger fish to fry: coaches. They routinely make many millions of dollars per year, often more than anyone else at the university. And all the universities take millions in federal research grants, even so-called "private" universities (see here and here, for example).

(Now, don't respond that the coaches are paid out of booster or otherwise voluntarily-contributed or generated funds, not out of the federal monies: exactly the same can be said, and is said, for the Wall Street executives, whose salaries are paid out of the profit they generate, not from the federal funds.)

University presidents and Division-I coaches are not "charity cases" either, and many of the universities for which they work have endowments in the hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars (see here)--so they're not exactly hurting for money. Thus if the populist argument for federal oversight and restriction of pay for top executives at federally-supported institutions holds in one case, why not in these as well?

A Gift for Parents: Stop Worrying So Much!

I am re-reading Judith Rich Harris's indispensable No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality, which seeks to explain not why people are so much alike but, rather, why people can differ so much. Why, for example, can siblings with the same biological parents raised in the same household turn out to have such different personalities? Why can even identical twins raised in the same household be so different--as they commonly are?

Harris's answer is that people's personalities are not simply the result of genes combined with household environment. It turns out that children's peers have far more to do with the personalties they eventually develop than their parents do. If she's right, that is simultaneously relieving--and disconcerting--for parents. It is relieving because it means parents should not worry as much as they do to make sure the home environment is perfect. On the other hand, it is disconcerting because it means that much of the responsibility for how children turn out is outside the parents' control. Once the parents have contributed their genes, for the most part they are cut out of the picture.

There is more to the story, and Harris's full book is well worth reading. But here, to whet your appetite, is a selection of passages from the book:

1. "Differential treatment by parents--the tendency of parents to treat their children differently--accounted for only 2 percent of the total variance [in children's personalities]. Differential sibling interaction also accounted for 2 percent. Family constellation variables such as birth order and age differences between children accounted for only 1 percent" (p. 86).

2. "[...] the results showed sizable differences between siblings that could not be attributed either to genes or to aspects of the home environment they shared" (p. 86).

3. "[...] the results showed that parents were reacting to the genetic differences between their children, rather than causing their children to be different" (p. 87; italics in the original).

4. "Only highly abnormal conditions--conditions of severe deprivation--cause permanent deficits [in brain development]. The environment needs only to provide the bare minimum; beyond that minimum, there is no evidence that variations in quality or quantity make a difference" (p. 127).

5. "[...] interventions designed to improve parents' child-rearing methods might change children's behavior at home but will not affect their behavior at school" (p. 131). [I am not sure whether that makes me, as a parent, feel better or worse.]

6. "Because children discriminate sharply between situations, the way to improve their behavior in school is not by modifying their parents' behavior but by modifying their environment at school" (p. 135).

7. "[...] the assumptions that underlie popular theories of personality development--that learned behaviors transfer readily from one situation to another, that children learn things at home which they automatically carry with them to other settings, that their experiences with their parents will color their subsequent interactions with other social partners--are incorrect" (p. 140; italics mine). [The last, italicized part of that passage I found particularly striking.]

Brief Addendum on Traffic

Since I have been reading and thinking about traffic recently, I thought I might relate this recent experience:

Yesterday, I was driving my son to football practice along a two-lane road. The car in front of me slowed to turn left, and, as I slowed to wait for the car to turn, the car behind me honked at me, apparently because I did not pass the car in front of me on the right. There was no lane on the right, only a narrow shoulder. The car behind me decided not to wait, however, and so passed both of us--half on the shoulder and half on grass--while honking and giving me (and my son) the finger, apparently for delaying him.

Approximately three minutes later, I saw this person again, since it turns out he was the father of another player on my son's team. I would estimate he arrived at the practice field some fifteen seconds before we did. (When he saw me, I think he was embarrassed, since he immediately looked away, pretending not to have seen me, and hurried off.)

Interesting Words: Tom Vanderbilt

I am reading a fascinating book entitled Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt. Here is one intriguing passage:

For those of us who aren't brain surgeons, driving is probably the most complex everyday thing we do. It is a skill that consists of at least fifteen hundred "subskills." At any moment, we are navigating through terrain, scanning our environment for hazards and information, maintaining our position on the road, judging speed, making decisions (about twenty per mile, one study found), evaluating risk, adjusting instruments, anticpating the future actions of others--even as we may be sipping a latte, thinking about last night's episode of American Idol, quieting a toddler, or checking voice mail. A survey of one stretch of road in Maryland found that a piece of information was presented every two feet, which at 30 miles per hour, the study reasoned, meant the driver was exposed to 1,320 "items of information," or roughly 440 words, per minute. This is akin to reading three paragraphs like this one while also looking at lots of pretty pictures, not to mention doing all the other things mentioned above--and then repeating the cycle, every minute you drive. (pp.51-2; emphasis in the original)

This sure puts driving into perspective, doesn't it? Vanderbilt goes on discuss the enormous, and perhaps insurmountable, difficulties researchers are having trying to develop a practicable auto-piloted vehicle. Given the above, it is not surprising.

Adam Smith and the Future of Capitalism

I was pleased to give a presentation last night as part of a panel on the topic of "The Legacy of Adam Smith and the Future of Capitalism" at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. The host and moderator was Professor Daniel Cullen. The other speaker was Professor Peter McNamara of Utah State University.

The discussant, Art Carden, who is a professor of economics at Rhodes, posted a notice of the event here.

I hope to post some comments about the presentations later.

Mercer University Talk on Smith

I gave a talk at Mercer University last week under the title of "The Scottish Enlightenment on the Promise and Perils of Commercial Society." I was invited by the Center for Undergraduate Research in Public Policy and Capitalism and by the Center for the Teaching of America's Western Foundations. (Here is an official notice of the talk; here is an unofficial one.)

It was an honor to speak there, especially as the inaugural speaker for the new CURPPC. Thank you to my gracious hosts, and to the students and faculty who attended the talk and asked such engaging questions.

After I gave my talk, one of my hosts, Scott Beaulier, who is a professor at Mercer and also the director of the CURPPC, posted a series of questions he would have asked me if he had had the opportunity. His questions are excellent (as Gavin Kennedy at Adam Smith's Lost Legacy notes here), and they are worthy of thoughtful replies.

I will post in a separate entry some thoughts about Professor Beaulier's questions.

This Just In: The Fund for American Studies

I am delighted to announce that I have been named the Charles G. Koch Senior Fellow at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, DC.

I retain my position as professor of philosophy and economics at Yeshiva University, and this new association will not interfere with my duties at YU. I will work with the Fund as it seeks to expand its range of activities and as it seeks support to fund them.

If you don't know about the Fund, have a look. It has several excellent programs for students, both during the summer and during the regular academic year, and its Washington internship programs are second-to-none.

Free Books Online

I discovered a site called ReadPrint, which offers the full text of thousands of books online, all for free. It also includes biographical information about authors, though it is not clear to me who writes it or where it comes from. The site seems to focus on classic authors and important works, so it is probably aimed at undergraduates.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information or for the accuracy of the reproduction of the texts, but a few minutes glancing at the Adam Smith page and its reproduction of The Wealth of Nations suggests it is solid.

(I notice, however, that the site does not have my books, so that's clearly a strike against it.)

He Said It: Schumpeter

"Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort. [...] [T]he capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses." --Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy(1942), pp. 67-8

Question for Psychologists

I grew up a Cubs' fan, but having not lived in the Chicago area for many years, I haven't watched many games recently. So it was fun to watch a nationally televised Cubs vs. Mets game today, especially since the Cubs won. The fans in Wrigley Field were happy to clap and cheer the team upon the win.

But here is my question. Why aren't those fans rioting instead? Here is a team that is not only totally out of the race this year, but hasn't won the World Series in over a hundred years. One hundred years! It requires almost deliberate planning not to win in that many years. I don't know how the Cubs do it, but they somehow manage always to lose when they need to.

Why do Cubs fans put up with it? Indeed, not only put up with it, but actually continue to be fans! And when the rare occasion happens that the Cubs win, they cheer. How can anyone cheer for or support a team without any expectation whatsoever that they will win?

This Just In: Kennedy's Death Bringing Out the Worst in Some

I was not a fan of most of Ted Kennedy's political endeavors, and I was even less a fan of the way he used his social and economic privilege to exempt himself from the rigors of life that all of us non-super-rich face. His condecension, combined with what was to me the inexplicable adoration, deference, and exemption from the normal rules of morality and decorum people showed him and his family, soured me on the entire lot.

But I would not say any of that out of respect for his passing, were it not for what I think is the obscene and disgusting things some people are saying upon his death.

Apparently Kennedy would joke--joke!--about what happened at Chappaquiddick, frequently asking whether people had "heard any new jokes" about it. As shockingly repellent as that is, some are treating it with a shrug of the shoulders, indeed as part of Kennedy's "charm." Others have the indecency to wonder aloud whether Mary Jo Kopechne would actually believe that the callous disregard for her life, the cover-up afterwards, and the pass most of the world gave Kennedy for his role in her death was all "worth it," given the great things Kennedy went on to do for the world.

James Tarantino of the Wall Street Journal suggests that this indicates that some people regard "women as expendable." I am not sure about that, but it is hard not to be disgusted by this.


UPDATE: It turns out that Mark Steyn says some similar things in a recent column of his.

Update on Obama at Notre Dame

President Obama's appearance as the commencement speaker and recipient of an honorary degree at the University of Notre Dame last May caused quite a stir. (I myself wrote an invited short opinion about it for National Review Online, here.)

Now Bishop John D'Arcy, whose diocese includes Notre Dame, has written a measured and thoughtful assessment of the controversy. His article, "The Church and the University: A Pastoral Reflection on the Controversy at Notre Dame," appears as the cover article in the new edition of the Jesuit weekly magazine, America.

I think Bishop D'arcy's article is well worth reading for anyone interested in the issues involved, and indeed I find the Bishop's argument compelling.

For further reading: here is a story from Catholic News Agency summarizing the Bishop's article; here is another article in America, this one occasioned by Bishop D'Arcy's, by Archbishop John R. Quinn of San Francisco on the "role bishops should play on the national political scene."

Wise Words: Bastiat

"God has given to men all that is necessary for them to accomplish their destinies. He has provided a social form as well as a human form. And these social organs of persons are so constituted that they will develop themselves harmoniously in the clean air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, chains, hooks, and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations!

And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works." --Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), The Law (1850)

The Recession and Jewish Day Schools

The Jewish newspaper Forward has a recent article describing the difficulties the recession is creating for Jewish day schools. Donors are reducing their gifts and even pulling back on commitments, creating real hardships for many of the schools and their students.

One advantage these schools might have over other schools facing similar difficulties, however, is the relative cohesiveness of the Jewish community. Even across the spectrum of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox, the Jewish community often sees itself as being in a common enterprise, and it will join together to help one another when hardship arises. The Forward article mentions several such efforts. It is a powerful example of the beneficial potential of civil society.

(On a side note, I cannot resist adding a personal anecdote. A little over two years ago, when I was contemplating accepting a position at Yeshiva University (which I subsequently accepted), an Orthodox member of the community told me that, if I were Jewish and given the size of my family and the ages of my children, I would need to make $183,000 per year in order to provide properly for my family. His calculation of 'proper provision' included the considerable cost of sending my children to Jewish day schools. At the time I was astonished, not only at the number but also at its precision--$183,000, not 180 or 185. He assured me that it was not uncommon for Jewish heads of households to calculate things like this with such precision, and he further argued that indeed it was their moral and religious responsibility to do so.)

Language and Thought

In his 1754 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau puzzled over the paradox apparently involved in the inception of human language. In order to have language, Rousseau thought, one must already be in possession of abstract thoughts; yet in order to have abstract thoughts, one must already be in possession of language. Thus we are faced with a dilemma: either language had no beginning, because it was impossible; or it appeared by miraculous intervention. Neither was a particularly appealing option to Rousseau, so he left the paradox's resolution to others.

The relation of language to thought has puzzled us ever since. Interestingly, however, for some time now--certainly through the twentieth century, and now into the twenty-first--political reformers have operated on the assumption that the direction of causality goes from language to thought, not the other way around. Thus controlling language leads to controlling thought. If people can be trained not to say certain things, they will in time, it is thought (hoped, feared), no longer think those things. The prohibitions can become so deeply ingrained that they become second nature, habitual practice that no longer requires deliberation or conscious self-control. And that, of course, is tantamount to controlling people, which is the ultimate goal of most political reformers.

The point was brilliantly made in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it is recently explored again by one of today's great essayists, Theodore Dalrymple. (I have my own brief discussion in chapter 7 of my Actual Ethics.)

Although I am no expert on the matter, I tend to think the political reformers are right: controlling speech is a first, and a significant, step toward controlling behavior. Whether language ultimately determines thought or the other way around, I am not sure. But as the range of taboo speech increases, the realm of free exploration of thought shrinks. It is for that reason that I think it must be resisted. Control one's speech for decency, clarity, penetration, perspicacity, wit: but not for political expediency. Refrain from saying what is unintelligent, unbecoming, or ugly: but not what offends bigotry.

A vigorous citizenry arises only in conditions of robust freedom, and it can be sustained only in a culture that allows, even encourages, a wide scope of liberty to speak, think, and act--and, of course, to take responsibility for one's speech, thought, and action. A citizenry that guards its words (and thoughts) for fear of running afoul of political sensibilities will not be a "civilized" citizenry--which is usually the rationale given for the establishment of speech codes. It will instead be, or become, a servile and dependent citizenry, increasingly unable to exercize one crucial feature of humanity, independent judgment. And that, as Jefferson said, makes them fit tools for the designs of ambition.

This Just In: IBD on Adam Smith

Here is a short article that appeared recently in Investor's Business Daily, entitled "Adam Smith Was on the Money." It cites me briefly toward the end. The article is part of IBD's "Leaders and Success" series.

UPDATE 8/12/09: Gavin Kennedy has an interesting commentary on this IBD editorial at his site, Adam Smith's Lost Legacy, here.

The Digital Age: Expanding the Frontiers of Ignorance

A recent article in More Intelligent Life got off to a good start: instantaneous access to worlds of information is producing not more intelligent humans but, instead, more and more ignoramuses. The knowledge that all knowledge is at one's fingertips licenses one not to keep any knowledge in one's mind. (Reading and remembering are taxing, after all--and, as with almost everything else--why put forth the effort if it's not necessary?)

But the article concludes with a whimper: everything is pretty much okay, so don't worry; putting forth effort to learn isn't necessary for being an intelligent person.

That is a comforting falsehood.

(On this topic, one might read Mark Bauerlein's sobering book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30).)

This Just In: "Intimidator in Chief"?

A report in today's WSJ describes President Obama's alleged attempt to "lean on" "Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the supposedly nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, who last week told Congress that you can’t 'save' money on health care by having government insure everyone."

Elmendorf seems clearly right, at least to me: the Obama administration's claim that universal insurance will save money is hard to take seriously. But that is beside the point. What is more troubling is the apparent attempt to silence dissenting opinion. As I mentioned in a previous post, officials at the EPA, apparently with approval from the Obama administration, recently took actions to quash a report from some of its own scientists that questioned some of the central assumptions behind Obama administration climate initiatives. This second incident now suggests a worrisome pattern.

Politics should not trump the truth, and our political agendas should not be allowed to interfere with the vigorous pursuit of the truth. We often do not know what the truth is, and often people of good faith disagree about important issues. That is an abiding fact of the limitations in human abilities. The only way to make the most of our limited abilities, however, is to allow open discussion and debate, and to encourage unfettered pursuit of the facts, regardless of where that leads.

This Just In: An Excellent New Book on Adam Smith

I just received my advance copy of Ryan Patrick Hanley's excellent new Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue. I know it's excellent because I had an opportunity to read it in manuscript. In fact, the back cover of the dust jacket leads off with a blurb from me, which reads, in part, that Hanley's book is "one of the most important books on Smith in more than a decade."

Believe me, praise like that does not come easily from me. Everyone interested in Smith scholarship should read the book.

This Just In: Climate Change

Here is an interesting discussion of the economics of proposals for "climate change" legislation by economist Robert P. Murphy. It is brief and somewhat technical in a few places, but a good overview.

Free Speech for Me, but Not for Thee

A troubling article in today's WSJ suggests that officials in the EPA are censoring research that might call into question their official position on (alleged) global warming and on its (alleged) man-caused influences. (I say "alleged" because among the claims that the censored research makes are (a) that we are actually in a global cooling trend and (b) that there is little or no reliable evidence that human activities have contributed to (earlier) global warming.)

What is especially galling to the author of the WSJ article is the fact that the Obama administration and the new head of the EPA both have repeatedly derided the previous administration for, as they claimed, putting ideology over science, and have touted their own dedication to science unadulterated by political agenda. Yet here seems a clear case of politics trumping scientific investigation.

I cannot vouch for the facts of this case, of course, but double-standards for allowed speech are rampant in my own field of American higher education. People who dare to stray from the approved circuit of political and moral views--however gingerly, however tentatively, even under cover of anonymity or humor--suffer ad hominem attack, have their characters savaged, are fired from positions of authority, do not get promotions, get passed over for positions for which they are otherwise qualified, are not welcome at the lunch table or in the break room, are ignored in the hallways, are the butt of indecorous jokes, and are otherwise villainized, punished, and pilloried for their independence and impudence.

I do not exaggerate. (See here if you are skeptical.) Political correctness in higher education has become such a cliché that people have become inured to it. Another person persecuted for dissenting from the reigning orthodoxy? Ho-hum, heard that one before. The toll this takes in individuals' careers, and in their personal and family life, is not insignificant, however.

But this is not mere special pleading. The cost to the the academy of driving out or silencing a range of perspectives is a steep one. As Mill argued, it robs us of a clearer and livelier perception of the truth brought about by honest debate and discussion from competing perspectives; moreover, unless we make the unlikely assumption that the current orthodoxy is infallible, silencing or persecuting dissenting views robs us of the opportunity for exchanging error for truth.

That is bad for everyone concerned. Echo chambers are not crucibles of truth. Yet it is even more dangerous when it comes to science. The quality of human life depends in many important ways on the progress of science. Allowing ideology to bend science to its will, rather than the other way around, imperils the scientific enterprise. That is too high a price to pay to flatter our vanities and rationalize our prejudices.

Free Bernie Madoff?

A reader sent me a link to this column, arguing that Bernie Madoff should be freed. Now that is a position not many people, I suspect, are taking. As an employee of Yeshiva University, which, as I've pointed out before, also suffered at the hands of Madoff, I have taken particular interest in the continuing Madoff saga.

I'm not sure I'm convinced by this article, but the author makes a stronger case than I anticipated, so I thought it worth posting. Judge for yourself: here it is.

UPDATE: A reader sent me a link to another take on the Madoff caper, this one also provocative and entertaining. Here it is.

An Opt-Out Option?

Thomas Sowell argued in his book A Conflict of Visions that much contemporary political thought traces to one or another of just two conflicting worldviews. These worldviews he dubbed the "constrained" and "unconstrained" visions (Steven Pinker would later later call them the "tragic" and the "utopian" visions, respectively).

The difference, in brief, centers on what a person believes the limits of human knowledge and goodness are: If you believe humans are inherently flawed and fallen, and that, though they can make marginal improvements, imperfection and evil (even sin) will always be an abiding part of the human experience, then you subscribe to the "constrained" or the "tragic" vision. If, by contrast, you believe that humanity can be indefinitely improved, and that, with the right combination of institutions and leaders in place, most human vice can be eradicated, then you subscribe to the "unconstrained" or "utopian" vision.

I would fall into the "constrained" or "tragic" camp, both on religious and on empirical grounds.

I mention Sowell's argument here, however, because one of its implications is that disagreements between proponents of the two "visions" are intractable. They have different worldviews, and their political and economic positions are implied by those fundamentally different worldviews. That explains both why differences between the two groups can become so acrimonious, and it also predicts, unhappily, that there may be little hope for reconciliation. They will often simply have to agree to disagree.

Which brings me to today. The Obama administration is proposing to nationalize a significant portion of the health care "industry" (as it's called), and many supporters have not hidden their desire eventually to nationalize the whole ball of wax. For many of them this government takeover is required by their conception of justice. Significant numbers of detractors and critics, on the other hand, argue not only that this may increase inefficiencies and costs, but also that it violates their sense of justice to take health care choices out of the hands of individuals.

With President Obama intensifying his pressure for universal health care coverage, the debate is likely to become more heated.

So, drawing on the Sowell argument, here is my proposal for a compromise between the two sides: Pass the legislation, but include in it "opt-out option" for dissenters. Exercizing the opt-out option would mean forsaking any and all right to the care or coverage provided under the government's plan, but it would also mean no requirement to pay into it. Indeed, I would propose allowing an "opt-out option" for other government benefit programs as well, including Social Security, for example. Allow people who wish to be in charge of saving for their own retirement to opt out of the program, giving up any and all benefits, but not paying into the program either.

The biggest worry about my "opt-out option" is that such a number of people would exercise it that the program would not be able to sustain itself--and then the people who are intended to be the primary beneficiaries, the least advantaged among us, would once again be left in the lurch. I recognize and concede that worry. I have two thoughts in response.

First, my own conception of justice, which draws on the British and American liberal tradition, entails giving a tremendous deference to individual consent: if a person does not want to be part of my organization or my program, then I think I need a very strong reason to override his wishes. Imminent danger to national security, for example, might count, but the threshold should be that high.

Second, many people who could monetarily afford to leave the systems would choose not to. I have colleagues, for example, who would prefer to stay in Social Security or a nationalized health care system, if for no other reason than that way they do not have to bother with finding the "best" investment counselor or wading through myriad private health care providers and insurers. I expect many others would be moved by similar considerations.

Many people will also, out of their own sense of justice, wish to be a part of the systems even if they could afford to or would benefit from leaving, just as many people who could send their children to private schools choose for their own reasons to send them to public schools. Hence I think the number of people exercizing the "opt-out option" might not be as great as one might fear.

I confess, however, that even if I am wrong about the number of people who would exercise the option, I find the notion of respecting people's consent to be compelling nonetheless. If someone says "no, thank you, I want no part of your program," we can remonstrate with him, try to convince him otherwise, even beg, plead, or shame him; but if we insists, then I believe we must honor his wishes and let him go.

Obama on Public vs. Private Health Care

A lot of hay was made about ABC News's special on health care reform, "Questions for the President: Prescription for America," which aired last week. Many conservatives and Republicans complained that it seemed more like a partisan "infomercial" than an objective news story, and they claimed it showed ABC News's bias in favor of President Obama (see here, for example).

The contrast between the way the media treated the Bush administration and the way they are treating the Obama administration is certainly stark, but that is not what struck me about this ABC News special. What leapt out at me was the exchange between one Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist at NYU, and the President during the question-and-answer part of the program. According to this account of the exchange, Dr. Devinsky charged that "elites" often propose health care policies that limit the options of the less privileged, while the elites remain comfortable in the knowledge that they will be able to afford to pay for better care if they want or need it.

Dr. Devinsky then asked President Obama if he would be willing to promise that if his wife or children got sick, he would not seek health care outside of whatever is provided by the public health system he is proposing. President Obama would not make that promise. He replied that "if it's my family member, if it's my wife, if it's my children, if it's my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care."

Quite a telling response, it seems. It is akin to wealthy politicians who send their children to private schools (as the Obamas do), while opposing education vouchers, credits, or other plans to enable poorer people to have choices as well. I do not begrudge the President wanting "the very best" for his family; I want the same for my family, as I presume you do. But a policy that allows an expanded set of options for wealthy people while restricting the options of everyone else seems, to me, suspicious on the face of it. And that suspicion is only heightened when the elites admit that it would not be good enough for them but that they think it is good enough for everyone else.

This Just In: Pseudonymous Posting

Well, this is not just in, but a student only just now alerted me to it: John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, was revealed a couple years ago to have been posting on competitors' websites under a pseudonym (see article here).

Mackey is an interesting fellow. He calls himself a "free market libertarian," but he believes a company should, as he says, "try to create value for all of its constituencies"; he claims that as CEO of Whole Foods, he "puts customers ahead of investors" and is interested first and foremost in serving customers, not in turning a pofit (see here).

Apparently, a few years ago, when Whole Foods was considering buying rival Wild Oats Markets, a person calling himself "rahodeb" posted on some of Wild Oats Markets's sites various claims, like that its prices were too high, that it was badly managed, that Whole Foods would not buy it until it went into bankruptcy, etc. It turns out that "rahodeb" was Mackey himself, "rahodeb" being an anagram for "Deborah," his wife's name.

According to the article cited above, when it was later revealed who "rahodeb" was, Mackey dismissed the importance of it all, saying that he was posting only for fun, he never wanted or intended anyone to know it was he who was posting those things, many people post anonymously or under pseudonyms on the internet, and in any case he did not mean everything he said--he was often playing "devil's advocate."

I can relate. So too can many people who have written books, articles, blogs, and postings anonymously or pseudonymously. Sometimes people do this for malicious reasons--they want to attack or discredit others and do not want to take responsibility for their attacks. Other motives are nobler: sometimes people are whistle-blowers who do not want to face retribution; sometimes people work in fields where there is strong pressure for ideological conformity and they wish to express independent views, again without fear of retribution; sometimes people are members of a disfavored sex, race, ethnic group, religion, or political worldview who are not allowed by the "tyranny of the majority" to speak their minds.

As James Taranto recently noted in the WSJ, pseudonymous blogging can be dangerous, even if--as in the case of the modern-day "Publius"--one is serving an important function and engaging in (for the most part) serious commentary. Consider, for example, that many of the Leveller pamphlets that played an important role in bringing about the English Civil Wars were published anonymously, or that John Locke never publicly revealed during his lifetime that he was the author of the Two Treatises of Government published in 1690, or that the Federalist Papers were written not by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay but by "Publius," or that Soren Kierkegaard published under probably dozens of pseudonyms, and on and on. (See this site, which lists scores of pseudonymous authors, some who published under many pseudonyms.)

In all these cases, we should evaluate the writing on the merits, not on the identity of the author or on the fact that it is published anonymously. Who knows what motives an author might have for wishing to keep his identity secret? I think we have a further duty, however: if we somehow discover the true identity of an author writing under a psudonym, unless that author is engaging in clear libel or deliberately malicious attack, we should "play along." That is, we should treat the real person based only on our experiences of the real person; we can, if we like, engage the pseudonymous author as an author, but if the person wants to have separate identities, I think we should respect that.

All of us have many circles in which we turn, many lives, as it were, that we lead. Most of these overlap, but some do not, and some we wish to keep strictly separate from others. If a person has one "life" that he wants to keep strictly separate from another, who are we to judge whether his reasons for doing so are good ones, and who are we to take the liberty of betraying his personal decisions? The issue is one of privacy, and respecting others justified expectations of it. Just because one disagrees with what a pseudonymous author says does not entitle one to indulge the base and indeed wicked instinct of desiring to destroy what one does not like, of "outing" someone who wishes not to be outed.

Back to Mackey: One aspect of his story distinguishes it, perhaps, from the others I have mentioned, namely that he was disparaging a direct competitor in an apparent effort to secure for himself a better financial bargain in the process. If one's pseudonymous writings are designed to profit oneself at the direct expense of others in a way that would not be possible if one's identity were revealed, then that, it seems to me, casts things in a different light. Not to put too fine a point on it, that's pretty low.

Aside from such cases, however (which I believe are pretty rare), I say: Long live the pseudonymous writer! May they continue to agitate, spur, lambaste, discuss openly, investigate, and explore--all without fear of punishment for entertaining heretical ideas.

What I Am Reading

I have just come across a new book entitled Anarchy as Order: The History and Future of Civic Humanity by Mohammed A. Bamyeh. I do not know Bamyeh, but he is a professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. I will read the book with interest.

I am also reviewing two books:

1. Alexander Broadie's new A History of Scottish Philosophy for the Journal of Scottish Philosophy. Broadie is a professor of logic and rhetoric in the department of history at the University of Glasglow, and a distinguished scholar of the Scottish Enlightenment as well as medieval Scottish philosophy. This book looks to be a massive, and impressive, accomplishment.

2. Tony Aspromourgos's The Science of Wealth: Adam Smith and the Framing of Political Economy for the Adam Smith Review. I do not know Professor Aspromourgos, but he is a professor of economics and business at the University of Sydney. Since the topic of this book is very close to much of my own work, I look forward to reading it as well.

As always, I welcome suggestions for things I should read. Either post them as comments or send them to me at jimotteson (at) gmail (dot) com.

Worth a Look: My Next Book

Continuum Press has a webpage dedicated to the works I have already published with them, the 5-volume edited collection The Levellers: Overton, Walwyn and Lilburne (now quite a bargain at only $315 for the whole set!), and the work I am about to publish with them, a monograph entitled simply Adam Smith. The latter is part of the series "Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers," edited by John Meadowcroft of King's College London. I am finishing Adam Smith up now, and it should appear in the Spring of 2010.

Wise Words: Smith on Judging One's Own Character

"Common looking-glasses, it is said, are extremely deceitful, and by the glare which they throw over the face, conceal from the partial eyes of the person many deformities which are obvious to every body besides. But there is not in the world such a smoother of wrinkles as is every man's imagination, with regard to the blemishes of his own character." --Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments III.1.5 (1st ed.)

Update on USC

UPDATE on my previous post: USC's basketball coach, Tim Floyd, has suddenly resigned, allegedly because he has "lost enthusiasm" for his job. I wonder whether this means that trouble is brewing, or perhaps that the NCAA investigation is finally getting up a head of steam.

Is the NCAA a Cartel?

As a college football fan, I have been following--for about three years now--the apparent NCAA investigation into the athletic programs at the University of Southern California. First it was allegations of wrongdoing with the football team; now there are allegations against the basketball team as well. (See here and here for status reports; here is a columnist arguing that USC should be stripped of its recent football national championship.)

As the NCAA's investigation drags on, month after month, one wonders what, exactly, is taking so long. Here is a recent story in the Los Angels Times that discusses the investigation.

One passage in it particularly struck me. A former investigator for the NCAA, now an attorney in Oklahoma, explained the delay thus: "The NCAA is under no real sense of urgency to wrap this up, even though justice delayed is justice denied. The NCAA is a de-facto cartel, and its product is big-time college football. USC is a major component of that. The NCAA doesn't want USC to be off television or ineligible for bowls."

If the NCAA is in fact a cartel, de facto or otherwise, then that would seem to explain its dilatory behavior: it is acting in its own interest, and not in the interest of the game, the fans, the players, etc. (except incidentally). Perhaps true, but sad if so. It would among other things make a mockery of the NCAA's touting of "academics and athletics at its best" and its practice of calling the players "student athletes."

Some Quick Hits

1. I guess I grew up after the Glory Days of General Motors, because I have never had the romantic attachment to the company or, as people are putting it now, "what it stood for." I have also never, as a rule, liked any GM cars, and I have never owned one. Why, then, must I be forced to support the company? By what right does the federal government take my tax money and give it to GM even when I don't want their products?

2. Was it not even six months ago when we heard over and over again that GM was "too big to fail"? So the federal government gave it $30 billion in taxpayer money, with most estimating that it will be much more before all is said and done. And yet now it is being allowed to fail?

3. I heard economist Stephen Moore on the news say that by his estimate the federal government is paying $300,000 per job saved at GM. Is that worth it? Why can't we have a national discussion about whether making others bear that enormous cost is justified?

4. A recent Investor's Business Daily editorial claimed that at the end of 2008 every household in America had a debt, courtesy of the federal government, of $546,648. Half a million dollars! And that's not including the household's house, credit cards, cars, etc. The editorial also claims that in just the past year the federal government has saddled each household with an additional $55,000 in debt. In ten years, the federal government debt will be 82% of GDP. How can we continue to allow this massive debt to be heaped upon our children and grandchildren, all so that we can continue to live the good, gadget-filled life? I think it is tantamount to indentured servitude, and it is a moral crime of a high order.

Finally, on a totally different topic:

5. I am re-reading C. S. Lewis's excellent Mere Christianity, and this passage struck me in light of the recent flap about Sotomayor: "The Moral Law does not give us any grounds for thinking that God is 'good' in the sense of being indulgent, or soft, or sympathetic. There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not Soft."

Wise Words: Mill's On Liberty

This year marks the 150th anniversary of John Stuart Mill's powerful essay On Liberty. Some works do not hold up well after so long a duration; this one does. It is brilliantly argued, and it contains none of the elementary mistakes that people so often attribute to it. It may ultimately still be flawed, as many believe--though, truly, what work of human hands is not flawed?--but if so it errs in sophisticated and compelling ways, with an argument whose depth and freshness (even one hundred and fifty years later) are often underappreciated.

Rereading the essay in preparation for a conference, I was struck by two things in particular: Mill's penetrating insights into human psychology, and a moral injunction the essay makes. I have resolved to write more extensively about both these aspects of the essay in another venue, but I thought I would post a few choice examples of each here.


First, what I call his "moral injunction," beginning in particular with the word "unless" in this passage:

The disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow-citizens, to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others, is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint by anything but want of power; and as the power is not declining, but growing, unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against the mischief, we must expect, in the present circumstances of the world, to see it increase. (from chap. 1, "Introductory")

In responding to the fourth objection (by my count) to his claim that there should be liberty of thought and discussion, Mill extends the injunction by arguing:

Our merely social intolerance kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for their diffusion. With us, heretical opinions do not perceptibly gain, or even lose, ground in each decade or generation; they never blaze out far and wide, but continue to smoulder in the narrow circles of thinking and studious persons among whom they originate, without ever lighting up the general affairs of mankind with either a true or a deceptive light. And thus is kept up a state of things very satisfactory to some minds, because, without the unpleasant process of fining or imprisoning anybody, it maintains all prevailing opinions outwardly undisturbed, while it does not absolutely interdict the exercise of reason by dissentients afflicted with the malady of thought. A convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual world, and keeping all things going on therein very much as they do already. But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind. A state of things in which a large portion of the most active and inquiring intellects find it advisable to keep the general principles and grounds of their convictions within their own breasts, and attempt, in what they address to the public, to fit as much as they can of their own conclusions to premises which they have internally renounced, cannot send forth the open, fearless characters, and logical, consistent intellects who once adorned the thinking world. The sort of men who can be looked for under it, are either mere conformers to commonplace, or time-servers for truth, whose arguments on all great subjects are meant for their hearers, and are not those which have convinced themselves. Those who avoid this alternative, do so by narrowing their thoughts and interest to things which can be spoken of without venturing within the region of principles, that is, to small practical matters, which would come right of themselves, if but the minds of mankind were strengthened and enlarged, and which will never be made effectually right until then: while that which would strengthen and enlarge men’s minds, free and daring speculation on the highest subjects, is abandoned. (from chap. 2, "Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion"; italics supplied)

My heart aches as I read that passage. There are several other passages that supply parts of the argument grounding a moral injunction, but here is one more that applies particularly, I believe, to members of the academy:

So essential is this discipline [of subjecting prevailing views to the criticism of those holding opposing views] to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil’s advocate can conjure up. (also from chap. 2)

This is one important reason to ensure a wide range of thought within academia. But it is also a personal injunction: if you find yourself in a community of people who share a single view of "moral and human subjects," you do them--and yourself--a favor if you take up the cudgels of the opposite side and begin agitation. What you yourself believe is irrelevant. Mill argues, and I agree, that everyone is better off for the exercise, the more genuinely pursued the better. Applying this principle does not always win one friends, as I can personally attest; but, as Mill rightly claims, the price of an artificially pacific consensus is paid in human vigor and dignity and is thus too dear.

As for insights into human psychology, consider these two passages:

The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale. (from chap. 1)

And:

With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion: against the unprevailing they may not only be used without general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation. (from chap. 2)

How many of us can attest to the truth of these observations from our own personal experience? Mill anticipated the objection that thought and discussion should be limited to what is "civil" and does not give offense, and his presentation of the objection as well as his response both could have been written today:

[I]f the test be offence to those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer, appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intemperate opponent.

When you hear someone claiming that another person's position, argument, claim, or proposition is "offensive" and therefore should be punished or silenced, consider these passages.

If I were to draw up a list of, say, ten books that all undergraduate students--and faculty--should be required to read, On Liberty would certainly be among them. Today more than ever.

It Was Only a Matter of Time

I suspected this might come to pass: Some of the victims of Bernard Madoff might have been complicit, according to the Wall Street Journal. These were smart people getting supernatural returns on their investments. How could they not have known what was going on?

Worth a Look: Ferguson on the Financial Crisis

Anti-Dismal pulls out the most striking passages from Niall Ferguson's excellent article in Friday's New York Times on the financial crisis. (Here is Ferguson's entire article.)

The two most central claims: first, the financial crisis is not the result of deregulation, but rather of bad regulation; second, what makes us think that the raft of newly proposed regulations and regulators will be any better than what we already had? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Update on Atlas Foundation Talk

The Atlas Foundation has now put online the text, in addition to the audio, of the keynote talk I gave at its March meeting under its "Teach Freedom Initiative." The title of my talk was "The Spirit of American Liberty: Principles and Practice," available here.

Atlas is a fantastic network of international activities. You can keep up with its many activities here.

Worth a Look: Klein on Smith

A now long-standing discussion among Adam Smith scholars is the importance and significance of Smith's most famous phrase, "invisible hand."

Emma Rothschild has called the phrase an "ironic joke," and many others have argued that its importance is less than many have believed. Smith used the phrase only once in the 1000-page Wealth of Nations (here), after all, and the phrase appears in only two other places in his entire extant corpus of writings (once in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and once in an early essay on the history of astronomy; see here and here, respectively).

I am of the school that believes that the concept of the invisible hand, if not the phrase itself, is of central importance to understanding Smith's enduring contribution to social science.

Now economist (and, for full disclosure, friend of mine) Dan Klein has weighed into this conversation with an interesting piece in Econ Journal Watch. Klein is writing in response to Gavin Kennedy's provocative piece in the same journal. Kennedy (whom I have met but don't know well) is rather skeptical about the importance of the invisible hand metaphor, while Klein's position is closer to mine, though with his own twists. It is an interesting exchange, and well worth reading.

Wise Words

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

--John Dryden, "Happy the Man" (1685)


[Hat tip: Arthur Brooks]

Looking for Suggestions

I am teaching a class this summer for the Fund for American Studies. The class is on the ethics of philanthropy, intended for advanced undergraduate students. What books or articles would you recommend including on the syllabus?

Please put your suggestions in the comments section or e-mail them to me at jimotteson (at) gmail (dot) com. I will list some of the suggestions I receive in a future post.

Worth a Look

NYU development economist William Easterly's blog, "Aid Watch." It has the eminently sensible, but surprisingly little heeded, motto, "Just Asking that Aid Benefit the Poor."

Worth a Look

A new series published by Continuum Press: Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers. The general editor is John Meadowcroft, and the list of authors is, if I do say so myself, impressive.

(Here is the Amazon.com link.)

Wise Words

Reading some of John Adams's work reminded me of this passage from John Locke's 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

"The candle, that is set up in us, shines bright enough for all our purposes. The discoveries we can make with this, ought to satisfy us; and we shall then use our understandings right, when we entertain all objects in that way and proportion that they are suited to our faculties, and upon those grounds they are capable of being proposed to us, and not peremptorily, or intemperately require demonstration, and demand certainty, where probability only is to be had, and which is sufficient to govern all our concernments" (bk. 1, chap. 1, Introduction, sect. 5).

Obama and Socialism

President Obama spoke at Georgetown University yesterday, April 14th. I entered the lottery to get tickets, but unfortunately my number was not selected. Here is the full text of his speech. The Wall Street Journal has not been particularly happy with the President's speeches recently (here is yesterday's reaction, which includes the picture at left), but they've had nothing to say about this speech in particular.

In other news, because today is April 15th, tax day, the various "Tea Party" tax protests around the country are getting a lot of press. Here is one event not getting much press: This weekend the Party for Socialism and Liberation is holding a panel discussion at Georgetown under the title "Capitalism Is Organized Crime!" Here is a link to the event announcement (and the rather dramatic poster, pictured at right). I will not, again unfortunately, be able to attend this event. Whatever its faults or shortcomings, I do not think capitalism is organized crime; but it would have been interesting to hear what they had to say.

Worth a Look

Updating a previous post, the Atlas Foundation has put up a page on its website for the keynote talk I gave at its conference in New Orleans, this past March 27th. The page hosts a podcast of my talk as well, including Atlas President Alex Chafuen's introduction of me. This link takes you to the site and the podcast.

Note: The text of the talk is not yet available, but it will be shortly.

What I Am Reading

Readers have given me lots of good suggestions of books to read. Here are a few.

I have completed reading Theodore Dalrymple's latest excellent collection of essays, Not with a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline. Dalrymple is one of the greatest living essayists; I highly recommend his work.

Dorron Katzin recommends Marci A. Hamilton's Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect its Children.

One of my best students, who hails from Italy, recommends Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples' Organized Crime System.

Several readers have recommended Amity Shlaes's The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. I must add here my own recommendation of William Graham Sumner's excellent essay "The Forgotten Man," from which Shlaes gets her book's title. Sumner's essay is contained in On Liberty, Society, and Politics: The Essential Essays of William Graham Sumner.

I have received many more suggestions, too many to list; but I will give one more: Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel's Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations. With a title like that, it must be good!

As always, I welcome other suggestions. Send them to me at jimotteson (at) gmail (dot) com.

This Just In

A reader alerted me to the existence of what looks like an interesting book by one Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen entitled Signs of Logic: Peircean Themes on the Philosophy of Language, Games, and Communication. To my surprise, I am cited in it.

Charles Peirce is one of the great and least appreciated of American philosophers, so I am happy to be mentioned in connection with him. I will take a look at the book and report my findings.

Worth a Look

Peter Berger's article "Predicting the Past" in the April 1, 2009 edition of Education Week. Berger says the new rage of redesigning the educational curriculum to train students in "21st century skills" and prepare them for "21st century competition" is a recursion to the discredited pedagogical follies from thirty years ago. Berger concludes: "If most students today were mastering a rigorous 20th-century education, the 21st century wouldn’t look as bleak as it does."

[Hat tip: Martin Rochester.]

This Just In

I discovered that the introduction I wrote to my 2004 edited volume Adam Smith: Selected Philosophical Writings is reproduced on the Answers.com site under "Adam Smith." View it here (scroll down to "History 1450-1789: Adam Smith"). I presume they received permission to do so . . . .

Wise Words

"It is the interest of every man to live as much at ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same, whether he does, or does not perform some very laborious duty, it is certainly his interest, at least as it is vulgarly understood, either to neglect it altogether, or, if he is subject to some authority which will not suffer him to do this, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner as that authority will permit. If he is naturally active and a lover of labour, it is his interest to employ that activity in any way, from which he can derive some advantage, rather than in the performance of his duty, from which he can derive none."--Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776; V.i.f.7)

How's That Again?

Last month, Sir David Omand GCB, former Home Office Permanent Secretary, former security adviser to Tony Blair, and now visiting professor in the department of war studies in King's College, London, presented a report to Gordon Brown entitled "National Security Strategy: Implications for the UK Intelligence Community" (available here).

This passage struck me particularly (emphasis supplied):

The realm of intelligence operations is of course a zone to which the ethical rules that we might hope to govern private conduct as individuals in society cannot fully apply. Finding out other people’s secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules. So public trust in the essential reasonableness of UK police, security and intelligence agency activity will continue to be essential. A significant challenge supporting the National Security Strategy will be how the intelligence community can access the full range of data relating to individuals, their movements, activities and associations in a timely, accurate, proportionate and legal way, and one acceptable in a democratic and free society, including appropriate oversight and means of independent investigation and redress in cases of alleged abuse of power.

[Hat tip: John Adams.]

Worth a Look

If you have not yet heard of John Adams (the risk expert, not the American president), then you should investigate. Among his more controversial claims are that mandatory seat-belt laws do not, in fact, reduce accident fatalities, and they might even raise certain risks--from which he concludes they should be repealed.

See here for a recent summary of his work on seat-belt laws; see also his excellent book Risk; and, finally, see his website, "Risk in a Hypermobile World."

Worth a Look

The dissertation of Fabian Wendt has been published by Mentis Verlag. It is entitled Libertaere politische Philosophie, and, as its accompanying description explains, it examines three different grounds for and conceptions of libertarian political philosophy, developing its own account in defense of a libertarianism that the author calls a "pure philosophy of freedom."

I hope to read the book. If and when I do, I will post my thoughts.

This Just In

I posted a brief thought on the flap that's arisen about President Obama having been invited to give the commencement address at Notre Dame on National Review Online's blog, Phi Beta Cons. View my post here.

Wise Words

"Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage on them."--Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking up Arms, 6 July 1775

Poverty and the Right Update

Following up on my previous post, here is another example of a right-of-center author who is genuinely concerned with the poor: Hernando de Soto. His The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else argues that the reason capitalism has failed in third-world countries is not because the poor are not entrpreneurial, have low IQs, or have anti-capitalistic cultures (as others have alleged). Rather, it is because the substantial and underestimated assets they have is in the form of "dead capital," unable to be used or built upon because it is untitled, buried under layers of bureaucracy, and not protected within a framework of property that allows it to be transparent, traded, divided, used as collateral, etc.

De Soto ends his book with these words: "I am not a die-hard capitalist. I do not view capitalism as a cred. Much more important to me are freedom, compassion for the poor, respect for the social contract, and equal opportunity. But for the moment, to achieve those goals, capitalism is the only game in town. It is the only system we know that provides us with the tools required to create massive surplus value" (p. 228).

I would also add that de Soto makes more sense out of the spirit of the Marxian critique of capitalism than many Marxists do.

This Just In: Poverty and the Right

In light of what I said were "frustrations" I had with Peter Singer's argument (below), I was asked (challenged?) by a reader to provide examples of right-of-center political or economic theorists who are genuinely interested in the poor. There are many, but let me mention one classical source and one contemporary source.

The classical source: Adam Smith in his 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith's concern for the poor there is palpable and undeniable. Now some scholars argue that, partly because of that, Smith would not quite qualify as a right-of-center thinker (Samuel Fleischacker,for example, but there are many others), but I think Smith's defense of free trade, markets, and limited government do qualify him. He is not an anarchist or even a libertarian, and he does not subscribe to a theory of natural rights that, as in Locke or Nozick, give principled restrictions on state activity: Smith is too practical and pragmatic for that. But that makes him what is usually called a "classical liberal," not a progressive liberal.

The contemporary source: Deirdre N. McCloskey's The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce. McCloskey's argument is that capitalist institutions are not amoral but are, instead, positively encouraging of virtue. But a large part of her argument in that book is that capitalism has brought substantial and often unappreciated benefits to millions of people, including especially the poor. McCloskey draws explicitly on Smith in making her case.

Worth a Look: Update on Peter Singer

An excellent student alerted me to Peter Singer's recent appearance on the Colbert Report.

This Just In

Reports the Wall Street Journal, "Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty to all 11 charges in one of Wall Street's largest swindles. Prosecutors filed papers Tuesday saying Mr. Madoff's investment company reported a total balance of $64.8 billion in November even though it actually had only a small fraction of that amount."

I fear that this is not the end of this saga, but it is certainly a step in the right direction.

This Just In

Philosopher Peter Singer has a long article in the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "America's Shame" (hat tip: Aeon Skoble). Although this article is new, and written to coincide with the release of his latest book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, the argument the article contains is now nearly four decades old.

I have not read the new book yet, but I have read a lot of Singer's books and articles over the years. What frustrates me about the famine-relief argument he has been making since his famous 1971 article "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" is that, in all that time, he has not given serious consideration to any of the following: (1) what the causes of wealth are, (2) what the causes of poverty are, and (3) what the consequences--both economic and moral--would be if the governments of wealthier nations worldwide actually acted on the recommendations he makes for the redistribution of wealth.

A further frustration is that he does not take seriously the careful and sustained criticisms of his argument that have appeared over the years. Many authors--including, for full disclosure, myself*--have reviewed his arguments, the empirical evidence that bears on the issues, and the economic, political, and moral implications of his position. Singer only occasionally mentions these criticisms, and when he does he typically dismisses them in few sentences or a brief paragraph.

Helping the poor rise out of poverty is a central concern of political and economic thinkers across the political spectrum; the disputes are not over whether it is good to help, but rather over what the best means to help are. It is unfair to consider only those people who end up agreeing with Singer as working in good faith, and it is unproductive to condemn those who disagree as holding a 'shameful' position. Other authors, like Garrett Cullity, do a much better job taking opposing positions seriously and reveiwing them charitably.


*My paper "Limits on Our Obligation to Give" appeared in Public Affairs Quarterly 14, 3 (July 2000): 183-203; the paper is reprinted in Justice: An Anthology edited by Louis Pojman. I also examine Singer's arguments in chapters 4 and 5 of my Actual Ethics.

Worth a Look

A new blog called Front Porch Republic, whose motto is: "Place. Limits. Liberty." (Hat tip: Bradley Birzer.) It has an impressive list of contributing editors and editors-at-large who are interested in exploring "the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing." It also contains interesting lists of books written and recommended by its contributors.

Sign of the Times

Most analysts are not hopeful about the economy in the short- or medium-term. An editorial in today's WSJ is not atypical in claiming that the current administration's "assault on business and investors is delaying a recovery and ensuring that the expansion will be weaker than it should be when it finally does arrive."

So I was pleased to find this article in Forbes, which predicts a "sharp rally in stocks this year." Although this article's authors agree with the Journal that increasing government spending and debt are "negative," nevertheless they argue that are other economic indicators--rising retail sales, stabilizing oil prices and car sales, and rising measures of money--that augur a stock market recovery.

Here's hoping the Forbes guys are right.

This Just In

"Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom," by William P. Ruger and Jason Sorens, published by the Mercatus Center of George Mason University.

(Ruger is an assistant professor of political science at Texas State University-San Marcos, though currently on active duty in Afghanistan; Sorens is an assistant professor of political science at the University at Buffalo. You may know Sorens as the founder and current chairman of the board of the Free State Project.)

"Freedom in the 50 States" aims to provide for the American States approximately what the annual Economic Freedom of the World Index provides for countries around the world. Both are great services to mankind, in addition to being inherently fascinating. If you are interested, as I am, in the economic, political, and cultural institutions that allow or encourage human flourishing, I recommend studying Ruger and Sorens's paper carefully.

P.S. I am saddened to report that I work and live in the worst and in the second-to-worst states in the Union, New York and New Jersey respectively, on the combined ranking of economic and personal freedom. New Hampshire wins on the combined ranking, followed by Colorado, South Dakota, Idaho, and Texas.

Worth a Look

A worthy and timely new project called Philosopher's Digest. Though I can take no credit for the idea for the project, I am pleased to serve on its advisory board. The goal of the Philosopher's Digest is to supply short summaries of a wide range of recent articles in important philosophy journals. Go to its website and look around. And check back often, since it will be updated regularly.

Perhaps you would like to become one of its reviewers? If so, contact one of its founding editors, John Milliken.

Sign of the Times

Holocaust survior and Nobel Prize winner--and, now, one of the victims of Bernard Madoff's fraud--Elie Wiesel has stated publicly that he would not forgive Madoff. Given what Wiesel has undoubtedly seen in his lifetime, for him to call Madoff "one of the greatest scoundrels, thieves, liars, criminals" is quite something.

The article concludes with this comment from Wiesel: "It shows, again, a human being is capable of both very great, good things, and very horrible things." Is that true? Some human beings are certainly capable of very great good things, and some human beings are capable of very horrible things. I hope that it is not true, however, that each human being is capable of horrible things, even if every human being is, as I believe, fallen.

Worth a Look

Victor Claar's new Economics Blog. Professor Claar teaches economics at Hope College in Holland Michigan, and has done a lot of excellent work, including on the connection and compatibility between Christianity and economics. See, for example, his recent book Economics in Christian Perspective.

This Just In

I posted earlier on the dire financial straits in which The New York Times finds itself. Now it appears The San Francisco Chronicle might be headed in the same direction. Some claim that the SFC will survive, but one has to wonder: How long can either paper continue to sustain the massive losses (reportedly $1 million per week for the SFC) and still stay in business?

Wise Words

"English thinkers aspired to know, or dared to doubt, where bigots had been content to wonder and to believe." --Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second (1858; available here)

In the News

The sentencing of the "tobacco spit burglar," here. Way to go, Adair County, Oklahoma DA's office!

Worth a Look

The Atlas Foundation's Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Order. I won one of its Hayek Prizes in 2005, and I will be giving the keynote talk at its upcoming "Teach Freedom Initiative Conference," held on March 27th in New Orleans (register for this conference here).

Sign of the Times

This is a truly shocking revelation about the Bernard Madoff scandal: apparently Madoff never made any investments with the money he received. It is unclear whether Yeshiva University in particular will suffer any more because of this revelation, but this epic fraud seems to get more outrageous by the day.

Worth a Look

The Wall Street Journal asked a number of economists how they think we should spend the $8 per week that the "stimulus package" will put into the average citizen's paycheck. The answers are interesting, as are the comments. Read it here.

What I Am Reading

Theodore Dalrymple's latest book, Not with a Bang but a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline. I am a regular, even faithful, reader of Dalrymple's, believing as I do that he is one of the greatest contemporary essayists in English. Intelligence, wisdom, wit, erudition: they are all on spectacular display in his writings. If you have not had the pleasure of reading his work, I highly recommend it to you. You might start with his book Life at the Bottom. You have a treat in store for you.

On My List: I have heard very good things about Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending's The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.

Sign of the Times

In case you are interested in keeping track, as I am, The Wall Street Journal has published a helpful, interactive map plotting Bernie Madoff and the various ways his fraudulent schemes have affected different people and organizations, here. (The connection to Yeshiva University is in the lower right of the map.)

Wise Words

"Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience." --George Washington, The Rules of Civility (ca. 1748)

Sign of the Times (Update)

UPDATE on a previous post: Here is a link to a Jewish Star article about Yeshiva University's recently announced cuts. The link includes the text of the letter YU President Richard Joel sent to all faculty and staff yesterday.

Sign of the Times

Over last Christmas break, Boston College placed crucifixes in all the classrooms. Some faculty are apparently offended by it, and one presumes at least some students are as well. When I was a student at Notre Dame, I remember crucifixes were in all the classrooms, and at Georgetown University, where I am visiting this year, there are crucifixes in many though not all rooms. At Yeshiva University, my home institution, there are mezuzahs on all of the doorways.

Despite not being raised a Catholic and not being Jewish, I am not and have never been offended by the displays of religious icons at these institutions. Indeed, I am gratified by them, because it means to me that they take their religious identities seriously. I was also required to say Catholic prayers in high school, but that was okay by me too--it was a Catholic high school, after all.

I have no problem with institutions--religious or otherwise--displaying symbols of and signs representing their mission. As long as they are not coercing others, I think they have every right to make public displays of their beliefs. Indeed, if I am offended by anything, it is institutions that do not have the courage of their convictions. If you believe it, then believe it.