Category Archives: links to my essays

Creating a new index

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Tyler Cowen proposes several.

Indexes are informative, easy to digest, and remarkably well-suited for social-media sharing. At their best, they can actually be fun. Creating more of them is one way social scientists can satisfy the growing public hunger for knowledge and accountability.

In a blog post, he asks,

Which indices do you wish for?

I already have an answer.

I propose that, instead of using GDP or overall subjective happiness, we should use occupational satisfaction as the broad indicator of economic performance. Occupational satisfaction is the core economic component of happiness. Unlike GDP, which is rooted in a materialistic understanding of value, occupational satisfaction reflects the understanding that value is subjective.

That is from two years ago.

Falling back on consequentialism

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In a review of a book by Dan Moller, I write,

In appealing to our moral intuition against committing armed robbery, has Moller found a philosophical trump card that libertarians can play against their opponents? I am doubtful. In fact, in the game of intellectual bridge, I would suggest that moral intuition is the wrong suit for libertarians to bid.

I find the consequentialist case for libertarianism more solid than the moral intuitionist case. And in the review I point out that Moller has to fall back on consequentialist arguments.

FYI: an event to watch

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Jonathan Rauch, Yuval Levin, and I will be speaking at the AEI Thursday morning, December 12. The topic is “healing our political culture.”

Usually I am pretty modest about these things, but in this case I am going to guarantee that this event will be worth your attention. Make a note to watch it, or at least to check out the archive video.

For some background, you can read recent essays by me and by Jonathan. But the discussion will build from there.

Contestable beliefs vs. sacred beliefs

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In what way is polarization worse now than it was in the 1960s? I think that the answer has to do with contestable beliefs.

Most beliefs about human affairs should be treated as contestable. For example, would reducing the role of government in American health care result in a more cost-effective or less cost-effective system? I have my own opinion, and I hold it fairly strongly, but I see the issue as contestable.

1. A big reason that I prefer “beliefs about human affairs” to “social science” is that the term “science” sometimes suggests a process for arriving at certainty about issues that I suspect will remain unsettled, such as the issue about the role of government in American health care.

2. Note that my opinion that “most beliefs about human affairs should be treated as contestable” is itself a contestable belief. But I hold that opinion very strongly–more strongly than I hold my opinions about the health care system.

3. I might use the term “sacred beliefs” to describe strong opinions about human affairs that you don’t treat as contestable. For example, suppose that you believe that all adverse outcomes for African-Americans must be ascribed to discrimination and racism. Moreover, you see any questioning of that belief as racist. Then for you that belief is not contestable, and I would call it a sacred belief or quasi-religious conviction.

4. Suppose that you don’t believe that the Holocaust took place. I strongly disagree, and I question your reasonableness, but my belief that the Holocaust took place is in the contestable column, not in the sacred belief column.

5. When you move your opinions out of the contestable beliefs column and into the sacred beliefs column, a number of dangerous things happen. Because your beliefs are not contestable, your discourse no longer takes place in what I call Persuasion Mode. Instead, you turn to Demonization Mode. (See my Cato Unbound essay, Can We Improve Political Discourse?.) You become intolerant. You see disagreement as heresy, and you want to punish heretics.

6. As I remember it, the radicalism of the 1960s did not involve moving beliefs into the sacred beliefs column. In fact, it was more the opposite. There was a sacred belief that really horrible things would happen to us if we another country go Communist, and the anti-war movement challenged that regarding Vietnam, making the belief contestable. There was a sacred belief that if you were homosexual there was something wrong with you (the secular version of this was psychoanalytic), but that belief became contestable. Eventually, a lot of people changed their minds.

More from the Cato Unbound symposium

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I write,

Unfortunately, we are seeing on campus a form of reductionist progressivism that actually does take the oppressor-oppressed axis as the sole basis for framing issues. The campus justice activists are not only subject to the psychology that inclines us away from Persuasion Mode and toward Demonization Mode. Their very ideology justifies Demonization of dead (and living) white males while treating the values of free speech and open inquiry as tools of oppression.

Jonathan Rauch writes,

Pace Kling, I don’t think “centralized curation of content” and content restrictions are most of what will happen as digital media grapple with antisocial behavior, though we’ll certainly see some of those (and have, and should). More important, and more successful, will be human-machine partnerships and platform redesigns which identify toxic behavior and content and help users avoid them.

There is more at both links. But again, I don’t think that bad actors and factually incorrect posts are the core problem. The core problem is the way otherwise good people behave on social media.

A conversation about political conversation

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At Cato Unbound. I contributed the lead essay.

New analyses of polarization keep appearing, and new signs of the severity our political fault lines keep emerging. As a result, I sense that the latest edition of The Three Languages manages to be both timely and out of date. This essay will sketch some of the book’s key points, and then I will offer my current thinking, particularly concerning cultural forces that I think are behind the surge in polarization, and what we might do to try to counter those forces.

Read the whole essay before commenting. Note that some distinguished folks will be contributing essays in response. You can check out the overview page over this week and next (I’ll probably post reminders).

Skilled workers + democracy = good government?

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My latest essay is on a book by Torben Iversen and David Soskice that makes such a case.

With both labor and capital committed to specific locations in order to take advantage of skill clusters, there is a significant share of the population that has an interest in electing a government effective at providing public goods. In A.O. Hirschman’s terms, these citizens cannot exit their jurisdictions. They therefore have an incentive to use “voice” in a democratic system. They make up a constituency that will demand education and other public goods and that will reward politicians who enact economic policies that foster competition and growth.

I find this too much of a Pollyanna story, and so my conclusion raises doubts.

The math of the UBI

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In a podcast with Erik Torenberg, Bryan Caplan trashes the universal basic income. He gives the following arithmetic example:

UBI for a family of four of $48,000.
Tax rate of 25 percent.

That means that the “breakeven” family income (where you net zero from the government) is $192,000. That is ridiculously high. Ergo, he says, we need targeted welfare policies.

But. . .

What is the target? If your target is to ensure that no family falls below $48,000 a year, then you give a family earning $40,000 a year $8000 and you give a family earning $48,000 a year nothing. Essentially, you have a 100 percent marginal tax rate on any earnings until the family hits $48,000.

Our current welfare system provides nearly this level of disincentive, with tax rates for low income people around 80 percent.

I assume Bryan would agree that these high marginal tax rates are unwise. But he does not articulate his preferred approach.

If you go to my essay on the UBI, you will see that my preferred approach is a smaller UBI, say $10,000 for a family of four, with local governments and charities providing additional targeted support based on family circumstances other than willingness to work. A family with a disabled child would get more local support, for example. So would a family where the parents are unable to work. The low overall UBI would make the breakeven point lower. The targeted support based on family circumstances would keep marginal tax rates low for people who are able to work.

If it will help, you can think of the UBI as a negative income tax. A UBI of $10,000 with a 25 percent tax rate is arithmetically equal to a negative income tax rate of 25 percent for a family with an income of $40,000 or less.

Persuasion vs. Demonization

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My latest essay begins,

I will describe two modes of political discourse, which I call persuasion mode and demonization mode. In persuasion mode, we treat people on the other side with respect, we listen to their logical and factual presentations, and we respond with logical and factual presentations of our own. In demonization mode, we tell anyone who will listen that people on the other side are awful human beings.

Although I don’t cite Eric Weinstein’s podcast with Timur Kuran, I think that listening to that podcast influenced what I wrote. I have some comments about that podcast scheduled to go up on this blog next week.